Richard Beck – författare

A combination of psychology and theology exploring the tensions between the exclusivity of a holiness based on notions of purity and the inclusivity of mercy.“I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”Echoing Hosea, Jesus defends his embrace of the “unclean” in the Gospel of Matthew, seeming to privilege the prophetic call to justice over the Levitical pursuit of purity. And yet, as missional faith communities are well aware, the tensions and conflicts between holiness and mercy are not so easily resolved. At every turn, it seems that the psychological pull of purity and holiness tempts the church into practices of social exclusion and a Gnostic flight from the world into a “too spiritual” spirituality. In an unprecedented fusion of psychological science and theological scholarship, Richard Beck describes the pernicious (and largely unnoticed) effects of the psychology of purity upon the life and mission of the church.

A Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2015 A Boston Globe Best Book of 2015 A brilliant, disturbing portrait of the dawn of the culture wars, when America started to tear itself apart with doubts, wild allegations, and an unfounded fear for the safety of children.During the 1980s in California, New Jersey, New York, Michigan, Massachusetts, Florida, Tennessee, Texas, Ohio, and elsewhere, day care workers were arrested, charged, tried, and convicted of committing horrible sexual crimes against the children they cared for. These crimes, social workers and prosecutors said, had gone undetected for years, and they consisted of a brutality and sadism that defied all imagining. The dangers of babysitting services and day care centres became a national news media fixation. Of the many hundreds of people who were investigated in connection with day care and ritual abuse cases around the country, some 190 were formally charged with crimes, leading to more than 80 convictions.It would take years for people to realize what the defendants had said all along,that these prosecutions were the product of a decade-long outbreak of collective hysteria on par with the Salem witch trials. Social workers and detectives employed coercive interviewing techniques that led children to tell them what they wanted to hear. Local and national journalists fanned the flames by promoting the stories'salacious aspects, while aggressive prosecutors sought to make their careers by unearthing an unspeakable evil where parents feared it most.Using extensive archival research and drawing on dozens of interviews conducted with the hysteria's major figures, n+1 editor Richard Beck shows how a group of legislators, doctors, lawyers, and parents,most working with the best of intentions,set the stage for a cultural disaster. The climate of fear that surrounded these cases influenced a whole series of arguments about women, children, and sex. It also drove a right-wing cultural resurgence that, in many respects, continues to this day.

I desire mercy, not sacrifice. Echoing Hosea, Jesus defends his embrace of the unclean in the Gospel of Matthew, seeming to privilege the prophetic call to justice over the Levitical pursuit of purity. And yet, as missional faith communities are well aware, the tensions and conflicts between holiness and mercy are not so easily resolved. At every turn, it seems that the psychological pull of purity and holiness tempts the church into practices of social exclusion and a Gnostic flight from the world into a too spiritual spirituality. Moreover, the psychology of purity often lures the church into what psychologists call The Macbeth Effect, the psychological trap that tempts us into believing that ritual acts of cleansing can replace moral and missional engagement. Finally, time after time, wherever we see churches regulating their common life with the idiom of dirt, disgust, and defilement, we find a predictable wake of dysfunction: ruined self-images, social stigma, and communal conflict. In an unprecedented fusion of psychological science and theological scholarship, Richard Beck describes the pernicious (and largely unnoticed) effects of the psychology of purity upon the life and mission of the church.

According to Hebrews, the Son of God appeared to break the power of him who holds the power of death--that is, the devil--and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. What does it mean to be enslaved, all our lives, to the fear of death? And why is this fear described as the power of the devil? And most importantly, how are we--as individuals and as faith communities--to be set free from this slavery to death?In another creative interdisciplinary fusion, Richard Beck blends Eastern Orthodox perspectives, biblical text, existential psychology, and contemporary theology to describe our slavery to the fear of death, a slavery rooted in the basic anxieties of self-preservation and the neurotic anxieties at the root of our self-esteem. Driven by anxiety--enslaved to the fear of death--we are revealed to be morally and spiritually vulnerable as the sting of death is sin. Beck argues that in the face of this predicament, resurrection is experienced as liberation from the slavery of death in the martyrological, eccentric, cruciform, and communal capacity to overcome fear in living fully and sacrificially for others.

For twenty years after September 11, the war on terror was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. With all of the military violence occurring overseas, Americans found themselves living in two worlds at the same time. In one of them, soldiers fought abroad so that nothing at home would have to change at all. In the other, life in the United States took on all kinds of unfamiliar shapes, altering people's sense of themselves, their neighbours, and the strangers they sat next to on aeroplanes.In a fascinating and exhaustive account of the meaning of twenty-first-century America, Richard Beck delivers a gripping exploration of the transformation of American life wrought by the war. He describes sports stadiums fortified to look like military bases. The surging sales of guns, SUVs, and pickup trucks. The racism and xeno-phobia, the erosion of free speech, and the normalisation of mass surveillance. Beck searchingly asks why those Americans who excused the worst abuses of the war on terror also had the easiest time understanding themselves as patriots. The war fuelled an impunity culture, he argues, that came to a head with Trump's rise to power. To see America through the lens of Homeland is to understand the country like never before.

For twenty years after September 11, the war on terror was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. With all of the military violence occurring overseas, Americans found themselves living in two worlds at the same time. In one of them, soldiers fought abroad so that nothing at home would have to change at all. In the other, life in the United States took on all kinds of unfamiliar shapes, altering people''s sense of themselves, their neighbours, and the strangers they sat next to on aeroplanes.In a fascinating and exhaustive account of the meaning of twenty-first-century America, Richard Beck delivers a gripping exploration of the transformation of American life wrought by the war. He describes sports stadiums fortified to look like military bases. The surging sales of guns, SUVs, and pickup trucks. The racism and xeno-phobia, the erosion of free speech, and the normalisation of mass surveillance. Beck searchingly asks why those Americans who excused the worst abuses of the war on terror also had the easiest time understanding themselves as patriots. The war fuelled an impunity culture, he argues, that came to a head with Trump''s rise to power. To see America through the lens of Homeland is to understand the country like never before.