Anthropology has enjoyed an extended engagement with what the historian Michel Foucault termed “biopower,” or the right of sovereignty to take life or to let live (Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 2003, 241). While a thick literature has developed around the former, detailing the active and passive politics through which harm is inflicted and life taken, Living Faithfully in an Unjust World turns attention to the less well-documented logic and practices that enable a politics of letting live. This book is an ethnography about how faith-based organizations create the conditions of possibility to make interventions in support of precarious modes of life. At the center of this book is the development of a novel understanding of faith, not as an expression of a particular religious belief, but as a civic and political project. This secular sense of faith, the book argues, makes compassion and social justice not just possible but actionable.

Set in post-Soviet Russia, where political and economic transformation spiked rates of unemployment, homelessness, and addiction, Living Faithfully brings into focus the quiet efforts of volunteers and aid workers to make the world a slightly better place through their efforts at doing good. Drawing upon a twenty-year ethnographic engagement with faith-based organizations in Moscow, the book rethinks what the gloss “faith-based” means by detailing how and what these organizations do. While affiliated with religious communities, Melissa Caldwell shows Moscow's faith-based organizations to be providing logistical and ethical frameworks for doing good that are secular and civic-minded. These organizations are open to all and motivated by a sense of social justice instead of religious doctrine. It is an ethnographic observation out of which Caldwell develops in the introductory chapter a powerful theory of faith as a secular political project that “produces and shapes an entire political economy grounded in ideals of kindness, compassion, and justice” (19).

Chapter 2 details the mechanics through which faith-based organizations separate their “religious” and “secular” activities. Caldwell then traces the development of what she terms a “secular theology of compassion” that focuses on assistance and justice rather than doctrine or religious identity (42). Chapter 3 turns towards the social and affective dimensions of faith. It details how faith-based organizations provide a social system that make individual acts of empathy, compassion, and charity possible. Chapter 4 describes the distinctiveness of the faith-based service model, detailing its commitment to smaller-scale efforts that encourage interpersonal connections between volunteers and beneficiaries. By structuring an opportunity for volunteers to make a good-faith effort to do good, Caldwell shows faith-based organizations to be promoting the human connections that are integral to civic life. Chapter 5 examines the religious and secular moral imperative to help that brings a diverse set of individuals to work and volunteer at faith-based organizations, entangling notions of the secular and the religious. Chapter 6 turns towards efforts at corporatizing social-welfare provisions. As donors and regulatory demands compel faith-based organizations to operate more like businesses, the chapter explores how the compassion of “compassion work” suffers. Chapter 7 explores the limits of generosity. It details moments in which faith-based organizations refuse to accept donations or to offer assistance to reflect upon the uncertainties and potentialities of acts of compassion and social justice projects. Chapter 8 then concludes with a reflection on the precariousness of faith. It examines how the uncertainness and tensions that converge within faith-based organizations open up opportunities for civic engagement.

Theoretically sophisticated and advancing a novel vision of actionable social justice, Living Faithfully makes a powerful contribution to the study of post-socialism, poverty, and the aid workers, volunteers, and organizations seeking to make positive change. Beyond detailing the social harms of neoliberal reforms, Living Faithfully structures in exciting ways a discussion about the timeless question underlying moments of great turmoil: What is to be done?