Evangelical college professors and public action organizations like Bread for the World (BFW) and Evangelicals for Social Action (ESA) have developed sophisticated arguments as well as direct servicess to address poverty. David Beckman and Art Simon articulate BFW's vision in Grace at the Table. Ron Sider adds breadth and depth in Just Generosity: A New Vision for Overcoming Poverty in America. And David Gushee presents more than a dozen essays from keen evangelical minds in Toward a Just and Caring Society.

Running throughout this issue is talk about religion and politics, about faith-based worldviews that shape public life. Faith and politics concern more than a candidate's personal feelings and private convictions. Faith, says the editor, oreients all of life for all people, publicly as well as privately.

A top domestic priority is to clarify government's relation to the most basic social institutions. The editors call for reforms to recognize the institutional independence and religious freedom of families, schools, and other institutions in the social service sector. By contrast, current efforts to redefine homosexual partnerships as marriage should be resisted because they would reduce not expand pluralism by confusing friendship with marriage.

John Witte's study, Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment, explains why the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment religion clauses--"free exercise" and "no establishment"--had a richer meaning for the founders than they do for the Supreme Court today. We need to broaden and deepen current understanding, he argues. William Stevenson's Sovereign Grace explores the idea of freedom in John Calvin's political thought and highlights the thin, weak, and almost empty meaning of the term "freedom" today.

A new book by Peter Berger says religions are on the rise throughout the world, not dying away as secularizers expected. A second, much less noted error of judgment, says James Skillen, is to assume that belief in secularization is a non-religious belief. It is better, then, to speak of different religious views of life, including secularism, rather than to contrast "relgious" with "secular."

Joseph Viteritti argues in Choosing Equality that public education "no longer needs to be defined soley in terms of schools run and operated by government." School choice is a hot topic today but not yet a coherent movement, according to Hubert Morken and Jo Renee Fumicola's nationwide assessment of The Politics of School Choice.