It’s unfortunate that the author of this remarkable book, Raoul Vaneigem, did not take the time to write a concise and easily understandable “Foreword.” Instead, as the reader will see, he dashed off something that only a few people – those who had already had the good fortune to read The Movement of the Free Spirit (first published in French in 1986) – would be able to fully understand. Furthermore, his “Foreword” to Resistance to Christianity discusses the events and possibilities of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, while the book itself covers a period that, with the exception of the last section of the last chapter, ends with the Eighteenth Century (1793, to be exact). As a result, it is possible that some readers would not move beyond this “Foreword” and try to read the many chapters that follow it. And, of course, that would be a great shame.

The Islamist party of the Jihad Organization and Jama'a al-Islamiya has said the ways of dealing with banditry specified in the Quran must be applied to Black Bloc members, which means they must be killed. “God orders us to kill, crucify or cut off the hands and feet of those who spread mischief on earth,” said Jama'a al-Islamiya Mufti Abdel Akhar Hammad, citing a verse from the Quran. “The president must give that order.”

One week after the presidential election, the Catholic bishops of the United States unanimously endorsed a female anarchist for sainthood. That news is not quite as shocking as it seems. Dorothy Day’s anarchism was of a decidedly pious kind. In 1927, at the age of thirty, she turned away from the secular leftism of her youth and was baptized in the Church, a moment she later confessed she had been waiting for all her life.

Dorothy Day is a hero of the Catholic left, a fiery 20th-century social activist who protested war, supported labor strikes and lived voluntarily in poverty as she cared for the needy. But Day has found a seemingly unlikely champion in New York’s conservative archbishop, Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, who has breathed new life into an effort to declare the Brooklyn native a saint.

As I explain in the book just before I introduce the main sources relied on in the book, the only criterion which I used to decide on who to include was whether an author had “something to contribute to the perspective that Christianity logically implies a form of anarchism”. I was very aware that some of those included would not be welcomed by all, and I never claimed to agree with every thought any of these authors expressed (I don’t). The aim of the project was (again as stated in the book) to weave together the different threads of Christian anarchist thinking so as to present as coherent and exhaustive as possible a case for this political interpretation of the gospels.