All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice

Robert Jensen, a longtime activist fighting for women's rights, racial equality, and global justice, reveals with this book the emotional journey that brought him back to the church after an entire adulthood of religious indifference.


Our world is perched on the verge of chaos, he warns. As political, economic, cultural, and ecological crises peak, the decisions we make are likely to have permanent consequences for our future and for the fate of our planet. In our nation, what underlies this chaos is a spiritual unrest, a stubborn conflict that has gotten in the way of understanding and slowed theological progress to a glacial crawl.

It Goes against our nature; but the left has to start asserting its own values.

The progressive attempt to appeal to self-interest has been a catastrophe. Empathy, not expediency, must drive our campaigns

So here we are, forming an orderly queue at the slaughterhouse gate. The punishment of the poor for the errors of the rich, the abandonment of universalism, the dismantling of the shelter the state provides: apart from a few small protests, none of this has yet brought us out fighting.

The acceptance of policies that counteract our interests is the pervasive mystery of the 21st century. In the US blue-collar workers angrily demand that they be left without healthcare, and insist that millionaires pay less tax. In the UK we appear ready to abandon the social progress for which our ancestors risked their lives with barely a mutter of protest. What has happened to us?

The answer, I think, is provided by the most interesting report I have read this year. Common Cause, written by Tom Crompton of the environment group WWF, examines a series of fascinating recent advances in the field of psychology. It offers, I believe, a remedy to the blight that now afflicts every good cause from welfare to climate change.

Corporations Are Beautiful People - Derrick Jensen

Violence is Everywhere