Moral Politics
I'm reading George Lakoff's Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. Also his compression of that work in this year's Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate.
It's fertile ground for thinking about the polarization of the culture and the way that's reflected in politics and in the church.
In a nutshell, Lakoff's looking at the conceptual worlds of liberal & conservative folks, as illustrated in our language, the systems of metaphors we use to order our approach to the world. The divide -- if I read it right -- is between folks with a "Strict Father" model and folks with a "Nurturant Parent" model. (I think we can all guess which parties and factions go with which models.)
Lakoff's work can be found online at the Rockridge Institute: http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/. While a lot of the articles available there are interesting, I think http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/projects/strategic/nationasfamily/nationasfamily/view (and its links) provides a good intro to his ideas on the Strict Father and Nurturant Parent models. The article, http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/research/rockridge/swingvoters gives me some hopes for how all this can be useful in reshaping the conversation within the church or in politics.
I'm having a hard time not skipping ahead in Moral Politics to chapter 14, "Two Models of Christianity." And I can't help thinking that Jesus is one whose gospel was news of God as Nurturant Parent in a world where Strict Father was the dominant worldview.