Our own Dan Barber has a piece up at The Other Journal on the relationship between Marxism and Christianity, entitled “The Actuality of Liberation’s Problem.” It is part of his ongoing work on conversion. Here’s the first paragraph:
There is a tendency, when approaching the relation between Christianity and Marxism, to try to identify some element that would be common to both. This element becomes a third thing that allows us to give sense to the relation between the two initially given things of Christianity and Marxism. Such an approach, naming an element common to both Christianity and Marxism—liberation, for instance—allows us to adjudicate their relation. In fact, this third thing provides a site of adjudication to which each side is already implicitly committed. After all, if both Christianity and Marxism avow liberation, how could either object to being evaluated in terms of its capacity to bring about such liberation?
I think we all realize it’s not going to be that simple, though — and so we should read the whole thing.
Fascinating