Christianity and Politics: A Brief Guide to the History (Cascade Companions)

I read this book after reading a review for it by Dr. Peter Leithart. It is a history of the Eucharist and the mystical body of Christ and how this has been misapplied and migrated from the Christian people universally to ethnicity and nation states. We now call ourselves Irish, or American, or Texan before we would identify ourselves as Christian. Nationalism is a modern day attempt to see an ethno culture as a mystical body using Christian ideas, and that we need to deconstruct our enlightenment ideas to return to a Christian community centered around Word and Sacrament.The water of baptism should be thicker than blood. Definitely will have to visit some of the bibliography.

Written by the brilliant Dr. Chad Pecknold, this excellent book is accessible and provides a great introduction for those who want to build a solid foundation of understanding of the history of “Christianity and Politics.”

Pecknold provides a helpful introduction to the complicated history of Christianity and politics. As a Baptist, I came to different conclusions than the author at various points. But all along the way, I found Pecknold’s book to be helpful and thought-provoking. I would commend this work to anyone interested in the subject.

Professor Pecknold presents an easy to read and understand overview of Chistian political theology. He provides clear references to more in depth reading on the topic. A must read for those who have intuited that under every political position is an idea of the good.

This book cherry picks from the life of the reformers to build strawman arguments and construct fallacious conclusions. The author repeatedly notes the historic complexity of Christianity and politics, but offers a hopelessly simplistic argument for his own point of view.

The content of the book is great. It's a bit brief in places, but that't to be expected from a 170 page summary of 2000 years of political theology. The one issue I had was the actual editing of this edition. Throughout the entire book, there were missing words, split words at the ends of lines which had no hyphenation, misspelling, and various other blatant mistakes which really detracted from the overall readability of the book.

It is difficult to understand our situation without understanding the history that creates it. This is an excellent guide to that history.

Well worth your time.

concise and thorough