about the book

Tom Wilkens and Kim Wilkens are publishing a book titled Un-American Activities: Countercultural Themes in Christianity (Lima, Ohio: Fairway Press, 2009). A brief excerpt from the Preface gives an idea of the book’s tone and direction:

There are some countercultural motifs in Christianity that imply – indeed oblige – resistance to certain ideas, values, and practices widely approved in our society. Our list of conflicts with culture, you will discover, differs markedly from lists utilized by many American Christians in recent decades.

The book’s subtitle, A modern father and a postmodern daughter reflect on their pilgrimages of life and faith, highlights an important dimension of the work. Again, from the Preface:

At another level, this book documents some exterior and interior aspects of two different pilgrimages. We offer this record of our pilgrimages both as a foil for those who are taking and reflecting on their own journeys and as an encouragement for others to begin or, in many cases, to become more fully aware of pilgrimages they are already on.

The book is built around thirty brief homilies and papers that Dr. Wilkens delivered over the past twenty-five years, many of them at Texas Lutheran University and some from the ten international volunteer service missions in which he has participated during the past dozen years. He introduces those homilies and papers with back-ground essays, detailing the personal and public contexts out of which each arose. His daughter Kim then responds to his work with essays written from her postmodern perspective and her experience as an active proponent of the Emerging Church in her congregation.

Tom and Kim have both clergy and laity in mind for their readership. One more excerpt from the Preface underscores this inclusive orientation of the book:

We offer it to pastors, teachers, and seminarians and other students as an encouragement for practical self-awareness. Socrates once observed that the unexamined life is not worth living. This pertains as well to faith, to the tasks of faithful proclamation and pedagogy, and to the ways of expressing love and justice in the world: they should be subject to recurring scrutiny. We also offer the book to those who neither teach nor preach, as an opportunity to catch a glimpse of the challenging work of articulating the Word in the contemporary world.