Unfettered Hope: A Call to Faithful Living in an Affluent Society

I first Read Unfettered Hope in 2005, during the midst of our consumer driven economic boom. I was unsettled by the rampant materialsim but was not sure why. I found it harder and harder to avoid "the spend, spend, look at what I have" culture that surrounded me. Reading Unfettered Hope liberated me. Marva Dawn articulated everything I was feeling. Now, after the collapse of the world economy, Unfettered Hope is even more relevant and powerful. It offers a plan for a creating happier, more fulfilling future.

It's a challenging book to read, i.e. it can be somewhat difficult at times to follow the author's trains of thought, but it is in the long run well worth the work and time necessary to read it.

This book kicks you in the face, and then picks you back up, showing you how to clean the mud off your face (mud that you didn't even know was there).If you're serious about living for Christ, delve into this work.

This is a book which excites and stirs. It animates and illuminates my hearts desire to become both authentically human and faithfully Christian, my yearning to have a faith which truly transforms my life and the community I'm part of, my craving for a faith which integrates a world fragmented by injustice and division.Eugene Peterson writes that Marva Dawn's new book contains, " clarifying, energizing, necessary words for Christian understanding and obedience." Walter Brueggemann describes Dawn as, "one of our most acute social critics and articulate theologians, who moves quickly past the puzzling issues of method to the real stuff of faith." The real stuff of faith and life is what I deal with everyday. So does this book in any way help me as a priest and pastor to make sense of the world around me? Does it equip and encourage the church in being better at being Jesus in the world today? I believe it does!This book is not just another post 9/11 commentary on modern life. It certainly does contain a reflective and accessible synthesis of social commentary, philosophy and theology which itself affords a piercing critique of the world as it is. But it's much much more. "Unfettered hope" is both prophetic statement and Christian apologetic, manifesto for practical engagement and pastoral handbook for faithful living. Dawn seeks to understand more cogently the forces which bind (fetter) people's lives thus preventing them from becoming truly human and truly Christian. These "fetterings" bind us and blind us by obscuring true priorities and values. In exchange people are given false hopes which result in them being distracted from what should be core values, priorities and practices, what are called our "focal concerns". The book begins by looking at how life is fettered. It looks at the nature and character of a culture defined by consumerism and technological advancement. It does so not only in terms of its impact upon the wealthy west but also the affect on the struggling two thirds world. This is not another romantic post industrial response to modernity. The problem is not seen as technology per se but how its particular paradigm shapes our thoughts, values and ideals. The great triumph of this paradigm is seen in its "Technical bluffs"how it always promises more than it can deliver. Our optimistically grand expectations and claims concerning the future are debunked as bluff or in the words of fictional character Holden Caulfield mere phonyism. Dawn looks at the nature and extent of this paradigm. This critique is not new. It could be argued that the Wachowski brothers use similar metaphors in the movie "The Matrix" ( Warner Brothers 1999 ). But unlike the Matrix, I cannot escape fully from its grip. We live in two worlds simultaneously, the world of God's emerging kingdom and the world as it is. The challenge becomes to how "resist, restrict and reform" the all pervading value system of this post modern early 21st century culture ? Thi