By David Bentley Hart

This week’s post is a snippet and link to a powerful “Three Cheers for Socialism” article by the noted religion scholar and DSA member David Bentley Hart. The article ran in Commonweal in February, and we’ve long planned to share a snippet and link to it on our blog. (You may have noticed a few events have occurred in the intervening months . . . )

We are glad to have the opportunity to lift up now this article, available by linking to Commonweal here. The article includes:

“I honestly cannot imagine how anyone who takes the teachings of Christ seriously, and who is willing to listen to those teachings with a good will and an open mind, can fail to see that in the late modern world something like such socialism is the only possible way of embodying Christian love in concrete political practices. I have heard American Christians claim (based on a distinction unknown in the New Testament) that Christ calls his followers only to acts of private largesse, not to support for public policies that provide for the common welfare. What they imagine Christ was doing in publicly denouncing the unjust economic and social practice of his day I cannot guess.”