Thanks to the nouveau magic of e-books, it’s never too late, or too early, to weigh in at mini-book length on this week’s headlines. No stranger to controversy, progressive evangelical author and former pastor Brian McLaren has penned three e-books that address this election year’s raucous collision of religion and politics. Word of the Lord To Democrats e-pubbed mid-March; comparable titles aimed at evangelicals and Republicans are due April 2 and April 16, respectively. They’re prophetic, satiric, and short.
Word of the Lord is told through the fictive perspective of corporate attorney Ruth Schwartz, who receives the “word of the Lord” through her ear buds while on a business flight. God uses the voice of Bono to castigate the political party. Media figures are also targets, including one Ash Lembruck, a right-wing radio personality concocted before radio host Rush Limbaugh recently made news when he called a Georgetown University law student a “slut” for her congressional testimony supporting health insurance coverage of contraceptives.
McLaren, the author of more than a dozen books, tells RBL he was interested in experimenting with the e-book form; he got help from his agent Kathy Helmers of Creative Trust in bringing the project to fruition. “A whole lot of us who are writers are experimenting, and we want to see what sticks and learn if we can hone our craft to work in some of these shorter forms,” he says.
The prophetic voice--“the word of the Lord” is the verbal formula found in the beginning of the prophetic books of the Bible--comes easily to McLaren, who pastored a church for 24 years. His series of e-books strives for humor, a quality in short supply in both religion and politics, to counter what he calls rhetorical apocalyptic earnestness on both sides of today’s partisan canyon. “When language reaches a point of excessive seriousness, you can only move forward by de-escalating, which is what (comedians) Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert know so well,” McLaren says.
McLaren’s not alone. Also entering the religion and politics arena via e-book is Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput. A Heart on Fire: Catholic Witness and the Next America (Image, Mar. 27) is an original e-book in which the Catholic prelate makes the case for “the disappearance of a Christian critical mass in American life” as part of his argument for present-day threats to religious liberty in America. The American Catholic hierarchy has framed as a matter of religious liberty its opposition to the Obama administration’s directives to provide contraception as part of health insurance.
