“We are to remake society,” Amanda Udis-Kessler urges, “so that every single person has a real chance to flourish….” She’s even more forthright and challenging in her book’s next paragraph: “We are to be Jesus in the world today.”
Fellow boundary-pushing writers acclaim Abundant Lives: it’s “a true contribution to progressive Christian thinking” [Tom Sella]; it “offers one of the best introductions to progressive Christian living I have ever seen” [Brian McLaren]; it’s “a gracious wooing to a transformational journey” [Dwight Friesen].
What it is, really, is Udis-Kessler, black on white: as progressivechristianity.org observes, she “provokes rich conversations so we might understand, and enact, the Kingdom of God as a realm of human and planetary flourishing.” As she affirms, “My ethic of flourishing has been in development for over a decade,” and her book is the result of her discerning.
A sociologist, social ethicist, and theologian by training, Udis-Kessler—who’s also, in her words, a “queer, feminist, leftist, androgynous woman”—roamed in her spiritual journey from secular Judaism to Unitarian Universalism to, most recently, the progressive wing of the United Church of Christ: “I enter into the Christian story as a non-doctrinal universalist besotted by Jesus’ vision of human wellbeing….”
Abundant Lives: A Progressive Christian Ethic of Flourishing
By Amanda Udis-Kessler
The Pilgrim Press, 2024
