Chris Brauns. Bound Together: How We Are Tied to Others in Good and Bad Choices. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2013. 208 pp. $16.99.
Chris Brauns’s Bound Together: How We Are Tied to Others in Good and Bad Choices is an excellent little book that speaks directly and powerfully to one of the most critical needs of the church today. In clear and accessible prose, Brauns, pastor of Red Brick Church in Stillman Valley, Illinois, describes an amazing spiritual truth—that human beings are social as well as individual creatures—and explains the radical implications for individual piety, church life, family life, and civic life. Christian theologians and social thinkers already widely agree that this issue will be one of our key challenges in the coming generation, and Brauns’s book invites ordinary Christians into this critical conversation.
The modern world has greatly expanded the scope of individual freedom and choice, and on the whole this has been an enormous blessing. Before modern times you were required to worship in the state church, do the job your father did, marry the person your parents picked, and obey whatever rulers came to the throne. The modern world has thrown off these dehumanizing constraints, choosing instead to honor the dignity of the human person by allowing us to attend the churches we really believe in, do the jobs we’re called to do, marry the person right for us, and vote for rulers who will be accountable to us.
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