Just to keep up with the times - and since I enjoyed Shane Claiborne's "Jesus for President," David Swanson has part two of his review posted over at Out of Ur. (Part one is located here)

If there's only one graf to take away from it, I'll recommend this one:

The authors point out that these earliest Christians fully expected to be persecuted by the empire. "The powers would drag them before governors and courts, beat them and insult them, feed them to beasts, and hang them on crosses. And hate his followers is what the world did- at least for the first couple of hundred years." Claiborne and Haw think American Christians have avoided persecution not because we live in a Christian nation, but because the church is content with the government's Christian veneer.

I've felt for some time that the biggest challenge we face as a church today isn't persecution - some real, some hyped for fundraising purposes. Instead, the biggest challenge is the deception that we've won and we should take over and dominate by a means other than that which we profess to live by ... the teachings of Jesus Christ.