Spiritual Socialists

In this book, Vaneesa Cook sets out to complicate the customary declension narrative of the religious Left in modern U.S. history by investigating a select group of politically engaged people of faith from the early 1920s to the present. These “spiritual socialists,” as she calls them, include A. J. Muste, Sherwood Eddy, Dorothy Day, Myles Horton, Staughton Lynd, and Pauli Murray. These individuals cannot be accommodated by the customary analytical categories in histories of religion and the Left, Cook maintains. She argues is that during World War I some of them began a process of renewal on the left that yielded fruit in the civil rights movement and the New Left, and that continues today. They were people of faith, radicalized by the wartime implosion of the Social Gospel movement, who chose to renounce politics and state coercion as well as Marxian dogmatics. Instead, they opted for “simple acts of

Art · Coercion (linguistics · Faith · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Spirituality · Theology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society · Religion and Society Interactions · Religious studies