Spiritual Socialists

"[I]n her thought-provoking new book . . . Cook finds in the past ample evidence that the intersection of Christianity and radicalism in the modern United States has been quite bustling . . . Cook has done . . . a tremendous service . . . in lifting up a spiritual-socialist tradition that has languished too long in obscurity."—Christianity Today

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Spiritual Socialists should fundamentally change the way we tell the story of the twentieth-century Left.. In [Cook's] careful retelling, the 1930s–1950s were generative years for radicalism in the United States....The book, which is an intellectual history of the major figures of the religious left, makes a number of important contributions.

"—Journal of Church and State

"In this bold, incisive book, Vaneesa Cook makes an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship on the American ‘Religious Left.’ She argues that the most effective movements of the political left in the twentieth-century United States were thoroughly suffused with religious values… Cook’s study makes a compelling argument that religion has profoundly shaped American society, not merely guiding radical politics but being inextricably embedded in them."—American Religion

"Writing gracefully and powerfully, Vaneesa Cook draws on her understanding of history to speak to today's concerns without jargon or cant. Spiritual Socialists is a sweeping and refreshingly independent contribution to the study of the religious left in the modern United States."—Doug Rossinow, author of Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America

"This is a courageous book. At a time when elected officials in the highest public offices refer to one another by offensive nicknames and attribute to each other the most self-seeking motives, and groups on the Left often attack each other in rigidly ideological invective, Vaneesa Cook seeks to recover 'the moral core of socialist belief.' She does so by examining the work of a group of figures, among them Dorothy Day, Sherwood Eddy, A. J. Muste, Myles Horton, Henry Wallace, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Pauli Murray. Her work exhibits diligence and empathy."—Staughton Lynd, author of Doing History from the Bottom Up: On E.P. Thompson, Howard Zinn, and Rebuilding the Labor Movement from Below