Dear Books and Culture editor,
I continue to deeply enjoy your magazine for its in-depth treatment of intellectual trends as they relate to the Christian faith. A continuing special interest of mine has been how our Christian faith is related to liberty, especially the American tradition of limited government and free-market economics. I feel that many (most?) of my fellow Christians have an insufficient appreciation not only of the Christian roots of freedom, but of the secular/atheistic roots of socialism, including American welfare-statism. In support of this libertarian Christian vision, I set out to write two articles, one to libertarians explaining their (often denied or resisted) dependence on the Judeo-Christian tradition and the other to fellow Christians explaining why they need to be more sympathetic to libertarian ideas. I submitted the first of these to Liberty magazine last summer, but so far they haven't published it (although they did publish a letter I wrote to their editor in their June 2000 issue). I've been told they're disorganized, sometimes causing long delays between submission and publication, so I haven't lost hope yet. :-)
I'm structuring the second article addressed to Christians in the form of a book review of The Libertarian Theology of Freedom by Rev. Edmund Opitz, a retired Congregational minister who has been a spokesman for libertarian Christians for more than 50 years. This book is a collection of his writings taken from three of his earlier books. I've finished the first draft of this summary/review of his book. It is currently 11,400 words, which I'm pretty sure is much longer than what you'd be looking for, but I'm sure I can edit that down significantly to capture the main thoughts.
I hope you'll be interested in considering this review for publication in B&C. If so, I'm not sure if you'd rather have me edit it down to a certain length, or if I should just send it as is for your editors to look over? I thought about submitting it to your sister publication CT, but since its primarilly about ideas and their consequences, it may fit better with B&C and I decided I'd check with you first.
You may be interested in a little background information on me. I accepted Christ as a child, grew up in a Baptist church and currently attend a large Bible Church in Arizona. My educational background is a (BA) Philosophy degree from Calvin College (1981) and a BSEE (Electrical Engineering) from the University of Michigan (1983). After spending 15 years working in engineering with GTE, Siemens and Motorola, I decided to take some time off and pursue my interest in writing, primarily nonfiction on the topic of this article, but also some science fiction.
I appreciate your consideration and keep up the great work.
Steven P. Sawyer