In Pursuit of Justice: Christian-Democratic Explorations

by James W. Skillen
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. and Center for Public Justice (2004)
Paperback, 192 pages

For too long, the advancement of democracy has been misunderstood as requiring the abandonment or privatization of Christianity and other religions. Working within an American context, James Skillen, president of the Center for Public Justice, explores the implications of a Christian-democratic approach for the meaning of civil society.

In chapter one of In Pursuit of Justice, Skillen answers the question, "What Distinguishes a Christian-Democratic Point of View?" In the following seven chapters he goes on to explore the meaning of the phrase, "civil society", what it means to be human, and some of the most critical public issues of our day, including welfare, education, racial justice, the environment, and the relations between citizenship and representative government.

In Pursuit of Justice builds on several of Skillen’s earlier books, particularly his 1994 volume, Recharging the American Experiment: Principled Pluralism for Genuine Civic Community (Baker Books). In that book he developed the argument that government bears the responsibility to uphold "structural" and "confessional" pluralism in society. His aim was to set the question of religious freedom and other civil rights in the larger context of the complex social order in which human beings bear diverse kinds of responsibility.