Tex Sample (’60) Releases a New Publication, “Challenging the Power Order for the Common Good”
Alumnus Tex Sample (Robert B. And Kathleen Rogers Professor Emeritus of Church and Society at The Saint Paul School of Theology) has published his latest work titled, “Challenging the Power Order for the Common Good,” being his 16th publication. This scholarly work is an x-ray on the way power oder has been working. The following is an excerpt of the book by the publisher:
Power is everywhere. It shapes our institutions, our communities, our relationships—and even our understanding of ourselves. Yet power is not simply something possessed by political leaders, wealthy elites, or powerful organizations. It operates through structures, traditions, accepted knowledge, cultural expectations, personal desires, and the stories societies tell about what is normal, possible, and true.
In Challenging the Power Order for the Common Good, distinguished scholar, teacher, and community organizer Tex Sample offers a searching examination of how power works—and how ordinary people can confront its destructive forms. Drawing upon decades of study, teaching, ministry, and firsthand experience in broad-based community organizing, Sample moves beyond conventional discussions of “power structures” to introduce the more expansive concept of the “power order.”
The power order is not merely a hierarchy in which those at the top control those beneath them. It is a complex web of institutions, relationships, ideas, customs, identities, and desires. It can marginalize and exclude, but it can also convince those who are harmed by it to accept injustice as natural or inevitable. Through compelling personal stories and rigorous social analysis, Sample explores the ways race, class, gender, sexuality, culture, and economic position intersect to create patterns of privilege, vulnerability, complicity, and resistance.
Along the way, Sample engages the insights of influential thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Hannah Arendt, Nancy Fraser, John Gaventa, Emilie Townes, and others. Yet this is far more than a theoretical study. Sample continually brings the discussion back to lived experience: families, workplaces, schools, churches, neighborhoods, civic institutions, and the public square.
At the heart of the book is Sample’s conviction that justice cannot be imposed from a distance. It must be discovered through disciplined listening, honest relationships, careful social analysis, and action rooted in the experiences of those who have been ignored or harmed. Broad-based community organizing becomes not simply a method for winning public battles but a way of building trust, developing leaders, challenging domination, and discerning the common good.
Sample does not offer easy answers or promise final victories. He offers something more enduring: a vision of hope as a practice. Power need not be understood only as control, coercion, or domination. It can also be relational, creative, mutual, and life-giving—the capacity of people acting together to change their communities.
Challenging the Power Order for the Common Good is an invitation to see power more clearly, resist indifference, recover our collective agency, and join the demanding work of justice. With an extensive study guide for personal reflection and group discussion, this book equips readers not merely to understand the power order, but to begin transforming it.