Starting a new book

I just received God's Federal Republic by William J. Everett. Bill is a noted professor and scholar of theology and ethics. He and his wife Sylvia, herself a noted liturgical artist, retired here to our small town west of Asheville a few years ago.

According to the summary on Amazon:

Biblical religion is driven by a longing for God's ultimate order of justice and peace. Most of this longing is steeped in the patriarchal symbols of kingship, monarchs, lords, fathers, and princes. This symbolism came to bind European churches to the legitimation of monarchies and empires for over a millennium. The American and now global experiment separated the churches, with their kingdom language, from government dedicated to democratic, republican, and federal constitutional order. Religious efforts to guide and critique government have subsequently suffered from political irrelevance or theocratic nationalism. Everett lifts up the biblical and classical origins of our present republican experiment to construct a theological position and religious symbolism that can imaginatively engage our present public life with a contemporary language permeated with a transcendent vision.

I look forward to Bill's insights into how our language around the Kingdom of God can somehow fit into our 21st-century Constitutional democratic republic, with its First Amendment freedoms.