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Book Reviews
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Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries,
and Other Christians in Disguise
by Robert Inchausti
(Brazos Press; 219pp; 2005; $19.99)
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While the fundamentalists and Christo-fascists are usurping the Christian tradition and attempting to take over society, an international contemplative counter-culture seethes in the underbelly of our crudely global society. Throw out all you believe Christianity is and can ever be; dismiss with an imperious wave of the hand all of the Pat Robertsons and Jerry Falwells who falsely claim the name of Christ for their authoritarian projects. Here, in Dr. Inchausti’s book, are the real Christians, revolutionaries and outlaws who eat away at the structures of political and psychic oppression and shake the halls of power in Church and State, Big Media and Academe. Inchausti unveils with a sort of quiet but passionate and even lightening-like splendor the women and men who lived a bohemian Christianity. But though their personal vocations made them lonely figures — outcasts and rebels, pariahs to all, something eerie transcended them, a tradition of revolutionary Christianity going back to the enigmatic figure of Christ.
This tradition embraced them in spite of their differences. There are figures in the book who represent a conservative radicalism (such as Solzhenitsyn) and there are others who are left-wing anarcho communitarians (such as Dorothy Day, the most important Catholic personality of the twentieth century). This means that this orthodox avant-garde — as Inchausti calls it — is truly transcendent, both embracing, yet rejecting the grotesque dichotomies in religion, art, and politics that are killing our world dead. I am going to give the book five stars because it is an absolutely necessary book that all would-be rebels — Christian and non-Christian — should read. Within its covers is an energy and light that destroys whole worlds of assumptions and discourses. But I am tempted to give it only four stars because it unjustly neglects some very important figures. Patrick McGoohan was and remains a Roman Catholic. He was the creator and star of the greatest television series ever made: “The Prisoner.” The series attacked some of the most vital issues of the day and its relevance grows daily after the Cold War and the emergence among the family of nations of a global empire, a ruthless media elite, the dominance of multi-national corporations, the continuing managerial revolution, and a war on terror being waged for elite purposes. Besides that, “The Prisoner” is the Christian Kabala, full of all sorts of odd interpretations of the Christian Gospel.
“Subversive Orthodoxy” is absolutely non-sectarian and non- dogmatic in its appeal to religious and non-religious people. Read it and behold your old world disappear and a new one full of terror and promise come into being.
Reviewed by sergeantnemo at tulkaz@capital.net
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