Faith, Politics and Belonging
A reflection on Identity, Simplicity and Obsession
Faith, Politics and Belonging is the title and over-arching thematic scheme of this essay collection. Each part unpacks one of these themes, yet exploring each of them in correspondence with other themes and subject matter. Faith should lead to engagement in the wider world and engagement in the wider world should inform our faith and cause us to lean on it for strength and inspiration.
This essay collection, compiles a number of essays, Written from personal experience, via praxis in British political life and informed by my understanding of theology. They are rooted in and correspondence with my personal understanding of Christian faith. They concern faith, politics and in particular the politics of the common good and in the main how this applies to Labour Party politics in the United Kingdom. They have a strong theme of identity and place. They are written in the hope that Christians engaged in politics will find them helpful, but I hope they reach a wider audience. I venture to say that politics—despite its critics—is a necessary and good thing. After each section I include questions for discussion and some suggestions for further reading to stimulate further reflection and I trust this is useful.
I offer these essays of my lived experience. My name is Ian Geary, this is my story: it is a story of faith, politics and belonging
Michael Wear, Founder, President and CEO of The Center for Christianity and Public Life -
“Here, you’ll find political vision honest enough to express doubt, and political commitment clear-eyed enough to hold tension. Geary leaves behind the tribal fandom of his football team and advances a view of politics, but not as an arena in that we must pick a team and then work up certainty about the rightness of that team—no matter what it does.
Instead, Geary finds his political interest and involvement rooted in his Christian faith and oriented toward the common good. Geary’s politics is occupied with the well-being of persons, particularly as they find themselves in relationship with one another.”
John Milbank -
‘If we don’t have souls and love isn’t the ultimate reality, why should we bother with a politics of justice and compassion? In a comprehensive series of short essays, Ian Geary updates the crucial traditions of religious socialism for our time. His personal and accessible approach to postliberalism or ‘left conservatism’ means that, for the first time in print, this politics is being *performed* and not just discussed, without being in any way theoretically diluted. Such an approach is crucial, because at the core of postliberalism lies a desire to replace the technocratic with the interpersonal. If this core is not communicated to a large audience, it cannot ever become a mass movement. Geary has inaugurated that process.'