Abstract

Listening to the neglected voices of Christians marginalized by race and gender produces an enlarged understanding of the degree to which the prophetic commitments characteristic of social Christianity penetrated the Christian community. The writings and the social activism of Vida Scudder, Reverdy Ransom, and Nannie Helen Burroughs display the consistency with which Christians in dramatically contrasting social contexts invoked the imperatives and vision of the Christian gospel in their struggle against social and structural sin. Examination of the dialectic of the spiritual and the ethical in these three lives also sharpens our understanding of Christian praxis as living faith.