She opened by saying that Jeff Sharlet's afterword said "essentially" what she intended to say about the book:

It's not working.

But it could.

The "it" in those two short sentences -- diagnosis and prognosis -- is the Religious Left that's at the heart of this book, the movement-that-is-not-(yet)-a-movement. Too many of the recent books about the Religious Left declare easy victory, the triumph of modest faith and mild-mannered reason over vulgar fundamentalism. This one predicts a hard and uncertain fight, against not just a Religious Right more vital and sophisticated than commonly imagined but also the limited imagination of the Religious Left, as currently constituted. The essays gathered here draw on memory -- most powerfully that of Martin Luther King, Jr. -- and hint at a new vision even as they proceed from the unavoidable conclusion that American religious leftists lack one. This book isn't the vision; that's still to come. Rather, it's something more exciting, more kinetic, more democratic: a collection of clues, leads, lessons learned, successful experiments, potential tactics, glimmers of -- there's no other word for it -- that much-abused, worn-thin, still-sparkling notion, "hope."