Can I Get a Witness? Thirteen Peacemakers, Community Builders, and Agitators for Faith and Justice ed. by Charles Marsh, Shea Tuttle, and Daniel P. Rhodes (review)

With the support and guidance of the University of Virginia's Project on Lived Theology, Can I Get a Witness gathers together thirteen diverse authors to tell the stories of thirteen American Christians whose quite different lives illustrate the tradition of Christian social activism in the United States. Some of these "pioneers for social justice," such as Cesar Chavez or Daniel Berrigan, will be familiar to most of us (2). Others may be less familiar to many of us: for example, Yuri Kochiyama or Mary Stella Simpson. But these stories are not intended to be biographies in the formal sense of presenting factual accounts of lives lived. Rather, these stories are written in the authors' belief that stories have the power to move and inspire. They are written in the belief that our lives, in all their dailiness and complexity, are a witness to our faith. The lives described here are offered as witnesses to the possibility of living in "the freedom of Christ" (2). To the question, "Can I get a witness?" the authors offer these lives as a resounding "yes." We hear Cesar and Helen Chavez wrestling with the real consequences for their family and marriage of their commitment to farm worker justice. We witness personal spiritual transformations such as that which led Howard Kester to abandon the scholarly debates of Princeton in search of God in the lives of ordinary women and men and to find God in a life of radical Christian activism. All of the stories in this collection focus on lives lived in resistance to specific social inequalities of twentieth-century America. A number of chapters also unearth the deeper challenge Christian social activism makes to Christianity itself: the charge of heresy against a white American Christianity rooted in the ideology of white supremacy. The collection's diversity of voices, authors and subjects, enriches and strengthens this book's account of the tradition of Christian social activism. It clarifies and justifies its call for a witnessing response today from those who share the vision of a radical Christianity able to challenge the principalities and powers of these challenging times.

Given these goals, it is not surprising to find that both editors and authors have written an extremely accessible book. Readers will be drawn to the descriptions of lives that are in so many ways remarkable, yet in so many ways ordinary. Congregations can use this for adult education. A seminary ethics class will find an abundance of material for discussing specific issues of justice in their historical context as well as motivation to engage these issues today. Is capitalism compatible with Christianity? How do Christians know which of their strongly held convictions are truly God's will? Theology classes may debate the editors' views on what it means to be a Christian activist in twenty-first-century America. Is it possible, as they propose, to live "in the world but not of the world" (3)? Today, humanitarian workers on the southwest border are charged with felonies for giving water to migrants. Any purchase one makes may cause one to be complicit in the exploitation of workers. Do the editors intend to define Christian activism as the acts of "peculiar people, dissidents, misfits, and malcontents" (3)? Can I Get a Witness? offers a rich source of important questions. The dialogues that follow could play an important role in forming a community of moral discourse and a people ready to challenge the emperor.