Books by Robert Benne

For believers who are thrashing about for some substantial instruction on Christian living in our age, and for those who seek reinforcement or explanation for the instinctual habits of their faith, Benne's book will be of great help. It encourages pastors and laity alike to critically examine the way we live in this age. Robert Kolb, The Lutheran Quarterly

In this book, Benne describes and analyzes the wrong ways to relate religion and politics and offers a better way. Benne calls the two main bad ways of relating religion and politics "separationism" and "fusionism." Secular separationists decry all involvement of religion in politics; religious separationists, on the other hand, advocate abstaining from politics in the name of religious purity. Fusionism comes in many types, but the type that most concerns Benne is the use of religion--in this case Christianity--for political ends, which turns religion into an instrument for purposes other than its own main reason for being. Rejecting these bad ways of relating religion and politics, Benne offers a better way that he calls critical engagement which derives from the Lutheran tradition, with a few tweaks to adapt the tradition to deal well with the new challenges of our present situation. As Benne points out, "The question is not so much whether American religion will have political effects. It most definitely will. The more serious questions are: Should it? How should it?" In this book, Benne offers a clear and useful guide to a subject too often characterized by confusion and loud rhetoric.

Seeing is Believing demonstrates that serious dramatic films usually express deeply-running visions of life, designated as Christian, Greek, American or skeptical. The author provides a narrative analysis that investigates these "deep structures," the mythic elements embedded in the films, while paying close attention to the comprehensive meaning of the whole film, not just the themes or implications that may be identified in the film's discrete parts.