The final section of Jesus for President ties up all the loose ends that Claiborne and Haw have formed with their ideas and tries to flesh out some of the implications of living as ordinary radicals in a world (and a church) that don't like ordinary radicals too much.

The theme of the final section, titled "A Peculiar Party," is that we are to be set apart.  The chapters get very short in this section, as Claiborne and Haw touch on issues as diverse as Alternative Economics and Relational Tithe along side a very enlightening discussion of excommunication.

In a nutshell, this section is about putting social justice, pacifism, and a prophetic life into praxis.  If you are trying to figure out how to live a radical Christian life in our world, this is a great source to pull meaningful and practical ideas out of.

At this point I think it is best to consider the behind-the-scenes discussion that a figure like Claiborne brings to a book with his name on it.  Claiborne is often associated with two things: Emergent and New Monasticism. While the latter is fairly self explanatory (a new way to be monastics) the former presents some trickiness.  What does this book have to add to the Emergent conversation, and what does this mean about an Emergent outlook? 

I think that this book presents a very conservative strand of Emergent thought.  Unlike the anti-emergent voices that condemn emergent thinkers with preachers from the 19th and 20th centuries, Claiborne (and Haw) delve into the church fathers and the thinking of very conservative people: Quakers (the old school kind), Mennonites, and the Amish.  For all the talk about how emergent-type people are a bunch of liberal wackos, I haven't read a thought-provoking discussion (or any discussion for that matter) on excommunication in "conservative" evangelical theologians, especially those that are critical of Emergent.  The only time they ever bring up excommunication is to act it out upon liberals and emergents, ironically.  It needs to be stressed that this is not radical in a left-wing lunatic sense, this is radical because it desires to give your life "roots" (radical finds its meaning in the term "root"; it has since been given mouth-watering nuances by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity).  This is what is scary to so many "conservative" evangelicals and fundamentalists, who want life to turn back to the morality of the 1700s.  Claiborne and Haw, and many in the Emergent conversation, would like to see the life of the Christian and his/her community turn back to the early church before Constantine.  This is unsettling and scary to many people, but it is in no way heretical.

Finally, Claiborne and Haw see the necessity of liturgy for the furthering of their ideas.  They created a litany that prayerfully considers the ideas they outlined in their book, and they issue a call for new heroes, new feast days, new holy days, and a new way of viewing our time here on earth.  We need to stop letting the forces of the world control our coming and going, and re-establish ourselves as the prophetic other in our world.  Liturgy is the best way to do this, for we actualize new rituals and counter-rituals that seem foreign to our world.  We are a peculiar political party who votes not for Obama or McCain but for Jesus with everything---everything!---we do, not just with our Sundays.

Grace and Peace to the Peculiar Party through our Lord Jesus Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit and the benevolence of the Father.

Long live the slaughtered Lamb!