From the introduction to Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus.
This is a fat book. I have no illusions about its becoming a best-seller. But I hold to what I call the fat book theory of social transformation. Most of the major turning points in Western history have had fat books at their center. The Bible is certainly a fat book. Augustine's City of God is a fat book, and by adhering to the biblical worldview, it restructured Western civilization's concept of history. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica is a fat book, and it gave the medieval West the crucial synthesis of scholastic philosophy, an in- tellectual tradition still defended by a handful of Roman Catholic conservatives and (implicitly, at least) by most contemporary Protestant fundamentalist philosophers. John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion is a fat book, and it structured a large segment of Reformation theology.
Christians have not been the only social transformationists who have w