Plenty Good Room : Co-creating an Economy of Enough for All

a book launch with Rev. Andrew Wilkes, Ph.D. 

We are excited for the return to of Rev. Andrew Wilkes, Ph.D. to The Word Is Change and look forward to celebrating his new book.

Pastor, activist, and political scientist Rev. Andrew Wilkes, Ph.D. offers this primer on democratic socialism, using the frame of the Black social gospel to give readers examples of communities working for the common good of all and to offer a vision for what an equitable future built for everyone might look like.

Economic inequality yawns as wide as ever. Capitalism is working as it was designed: replicating an uneven balance of power, constraining life chances, and limiting imaginations. Those of us concerned about injustice often confine ourselves to issue-by-issue activism. The end result? Owners, investors, and a politics of inequality win.

But what if there's another way to organize our common life--and what if it's as homegrown as sweet potato pie? What if we could become moral engineers who co-create the world we all deserve?

Plenty Good Room helps readers understand Black Christian socialism, a stream of the Black radical tradition, from the perspective of a Brooklyn pastor and political scientist's civic awakening. As the former director of the Drum Major Institute, founded by America's most famous democratic socialist, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rev. Andrew Wilkes mounts a challenge to the endless greed, inequality, and profiteering of racial capitalism.

Tugging on the threads of history and scripture and pointing to the work of Black radicals like W. E. B. Du Bois, Rev. Addie Wyatt, and Fannie Lou Hamer, Wilkes weaves a narrative of "plenty good room moments": times in which communities and individuals had sufficient resources, human rights, and beauty. He invites us to join a movement that a day-laboring Christ initiated as he organized the dispossessed, the disinherited, and those pushed to the edges of society. Wilkes also introduces contemporary efforts pushing for reparations, community ownership, participatory democracy, and solidarity economies. These stories show us that we can create a world of care and reciprocity by envisioning an economy of enough for all--one rooted in justice, equity, and the God whose spirit falls on all flesh.

"Plenty Good Room lays out in clear terms the hope of democratic socialism for a country ravaged by intensifying capitalism. This exciting read is written with such grace, wisdom, and passion, from beginning to end. My generation often wonders what will happen to the world we helped create. Plenty Good Room gives an entrée into the future." --Andrew J. Young, former US ambassador to the United Nations and chair of the Andrew J. Young Foundation

Rev. Andrew Wilkes, Ph.D., is co-pastor of the Double Love Experience Church in Brooklyn and the former executive director of the Drum Major Institute. He is the coauthor, with spouse Rev. Dr. Gabby Cudjoe-Wilkes, of Psalms for Black Lives and the author of Freedom Notes. His work and voice have appeared in the Washington Post, New York Times, and Sojourners, among other outlets. He serves on boards for the Labor-Religion Coalition of New York and the Institute for Christian Socialism. Dr. Wilkes is a graduate of Hampton University, Princeton Theological Seminary, the Coro Foundation's Fellowship in Public Affairs, and the CUNY Graduate Center.

"These are apocalyptic times defined by the unrelenting, unsustainable, and unjust reality of growing inequality. In Andrew Wilkes's brilliant new book, Plenty Good Room, he lovingly invites us to imagine and co-create new economies grounded in abundance, in which everyone can thrive. May we all be bold enough to join the movement." --Rev. Jen Bailey, founder of Faith Matters Network and author of To My Beloveds

"In Plenty Good Room, Andrew Wilkes offers the biblical and theological foundations for economic democracy. Rooting his arguments in Black prophetic religion and principles of democratic socialism, Wilkes demonstrates that there is no distance between Jesus and justice. Plenty Good Room preaches the good news that ending poverty is possible. In fact, it's what God requires and what all people of conscience must make real." --Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, executive director of the Kairos Center and co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival

"In an era of diminished expectations and political disenchantment, Rev. Andrew Wilkes has produced a call for a socialism that is both moral and democratic. It's the type of work that can reach far beyond the confines of the existing left to a silent majority that yearns for egalitarian solutions in an era of extreme inequality." --Bhaskar Sunkara, president of The Nation magazine and founding editor of Jacobin

"Plenty Good Room is a call to action, a call to the altar, a call to return to a 'Black social Christianity,' as he calls it, that convicts us and compels us to fight against empire and capitalism. Scripture asks us to 'write the vision, make it plain.' Pastor Wilkes does just that: welcoming community organizers and clergy alike into a politics of abundance, combining a grounded socialist vision with a divine spiritual mission for us all. Plenty Good Room is essential reading in these times. The anecdotes, the stories, the teachings from both past and present will leave your cup running over." --Phillip Agnew, co-director of Black Man Build

"With a 'sanctified stubbornness,' holy hope, and fierce faith, pastor and political scientist Andrew Wilkes puts forth an expansive, imaginative, inclusive, and inspiring vision for the possibility of an economic democracy within a beloved community. In resistance to the myth of scarcity, he inscribes the truth about God's abundance in the world through a hospitable spirit in which there is always plenty good room for all flesh. Take and read, and you will be filled with prophetic hope." --Rev. Dr. Luke A. Powery, dean of the Duke University Chapel and professor of homiletics and African and African American Studies at Duke Divinity School