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Robert Owen said in 1816, "Society may be formed so as to exist without crime, without poverty, with health greatly improved, with little, if any misery, and with intelligence and happiness increased a hundredfold; and no obstacle whatsoever intervenes at this moment except ignorance." 200 years later, however, no such system exists. A society in which every need is met, every resource fully available, every talent fully utilized for good, may be considered the ideological pinnacle of human civilization, but the question of how to create such a utopia remains unanswered. Many modern intellectuals favor socialism or its more extreme descendant; communism, in their search for perfect government. Likewise, many Christian young people and scholars have a fascination with the concept of Christian Socialism, synthesizing the ideals of communism with Biblical statements about the ideal Christian life found in the gospels. Some scholars assert that the socialist ideal is the ultimate fulfillment of Jesus' command to love and serve one another – the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth. So such a society should promote the provision for all that a loving God would logically offer to the creation made in His image. Yet the socialist and communist worldviews rest on flawed assumptions regarding the nature of man and thus consistently leave the masses unsatisfied and deprived. 'Christian Socialism,' has experienced a dramatic revival in recent years, resurrecting the 'social gospel' of Walter Rauschenbusch, through the writings of Jim Wallis among others, however the Biblical portrait of mankind is diametrically opposed to the theories upon which Socialism stands. While the surface of this movement may appear consistent with the precepts taught by Christ, deeper examination of its theological, philosophical, and historical inconsistencies quickly reveals a pit of fallacy - a flawed foundation upon which adherents would build an unstable future. Half a decade ago, the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade and other scholars codified many of the objections to Christian Socialism, but this research has since faded into obscurity as they were discounted as reactionary. However given the cultural atmosphere and resurgence of the movement today, these writings deserve significant reexamination.

Appendices: A. [Authors of unsigned articles in "Politics for the people" and the "Christian Socialist"] (p. 371-377)--B. List of the Council of the Society for promoting working men's associations, 1852.--C. [Notes as to the character of the various bibliographical materials] (p. 380-384) ; "This book is founded upon the Donnellan lectures delivered . at Trinity College, Dublin, in May 1919."--Pref. ; Bibliographical foot-notes. ; Mode of access: Internet.

Sex, populism, and the search for universal religious freedom were the overwhelming preoccupations of Russia's Silver Age, and no churchman did more to engage with them than Archimandrite Mikhail (Semenov). Having spearheaded the Russian Orthodox church's mission to the intelligentsia in the years before 1905, he fell from grace when Russian social Christianity was irrevocably politicized by revolution. Sacked from his chair at the St Petersburg theological academy when he declared himself a Christian socialist, he was unfrocked for converting to the Old Belief, and imprisoned for fomenting sedition. Yet even as he lurched from the established church, via the schism, to a revolutionary form of Golgothan Christianity, obsessed with suffering, Mikhail never abandoned his burning desire to build the kingdom of heaven on earth. His career, which has so far escaped detailed historical investigation, encapsulates most of the ecclesiastical tensions of his time, and reveals in particularly acute form the difficulties experienced by the Russian church when it attempted to respond to modernist intellectuals and to popular spiritual need.