Engaging in Activism Across Religious Boundaries" (original) (raw)
Related papers
Prophetic Activism in an Age of Empire,
The paper explores the emergence of prophetic activism as a counter-narrative to the dominance of conservative Christianity in national politics. It is based on the premise that the use of religion in American politics remains highly contested. While portions of American Christianity support an imperial project, alternative visions of a more humane future are simultaneously gaining strength. These new forms of prophetic activism are emerging in two distinct yet overlapping social locations: the borderlands and among cosmopolitans. Given the marginality of the borderlands context, prophetic activism has become firmly grounded in liberative religious paradigms that empower people to identify the commonalities between contemporary forms of exploitation and those against which the ancient biblical prophets once raged. An embrace of these same liberative paradigms also enable cosmopolitans to enter into solidarity with the struggles of others for justice.
Prophets Beyond Activism: Rethinking the Prophetic Roots of Social Justice (WJK 2024)
Prophets Beyond Activism: Rethinking the Prophetic Roots of Social Justice, 2024
The assumption that the prophets of ancient Israel were primarily concerned with social justice so permeates the thinking and the discourse of progressive Christianity that it might be considered an interpretive orthodoxy. For example, progressives characterize prophets as those who speak truth to power and “prophetic preaching” as social critique. Yet, they often do so without explanation or consideration of alternative views. This volume challenges the notion that the prophets were solely concerned with the same issues as contemporary social justice movements. Reading prophetic texts with an eye to their historical dimensions—when they were written, how they were edited—complicates any definitive statement about the role of prophets in the past. Reading alongside readers from diverse racial, gender, and other social locations in the present raises hard questions about whose justice these books actually promote. Despite its self-presentation as a scholarly and scientific viewpoint, the “prophets as social activists” orthodoxy was constructed in a particular time and place and in its usage today perpetuates many of the problematic ideologies of its origins. In response to these concerns, O’Brien offers alternative readings of the prophets for the sake of justice. Chapters explore the value of Amos and Micah for contemporary economic ethics; the dynamics of inclusivity and exclusivity in Isaiah; opportunities for reading Jeremiah as the voice of a community rather than a solitary figure; and the limits of Second Isaiah’s creation theology for addressing the climate crisis. This is a wide-ranging volume, interweaving careful readings of biblical texts within their literary and historical contexts, the history of prophetic interpretation, and attentiveness to feminist, womanist, and postcolonial voices, including engagement with contemporary thought such as trauma theory and intersectional analysis of the climate crisis. Prophets beyond Activism calls readers to a more honest and humbler activism, speaking in their own voices about the demands and possibilities of justice.
This paper explores the sharp differences in the understanding of the Hebrew prophets by theologians, Jewish and Protestant, in Germany and the United States, with a particular focus on their invocation of prophetic teachings in relation to social and political movements. The sharp denigrations of the prophetsdescribed as ecstatics (Gunkel) or rural naifs (Troeltsch) rendered the prophets useless as figures of inspiration in Germany in relation to racism, colonialism, and WWI. By contrast, the prophets have played a crucial role in American civil thought, especially in the Civil Rights Movement. The distinctive and influential interpretation of prophetic consciousness developed by the German-American Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel is examined for its parallels with the prophetic theology of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the political ramifications of Heschel's link between prophetic revelation and political leadership.
Introduction to "Prophetic Politics" (Political Theology)
Political Theology 21:1-2, 2020
"Prophetic politics" is the proclamation of a radical change expressed in religious language at a time of deep existential and political crisis. The term brings together two distinct fields: The first is the prophetic, a medium in all religions, usually represented by an individual who is said to be the mouthpiece of the divine. Whether pagan or monotheistic, male or female, ancient or modern, the prophet is always the teacher and the critic, instructing and scolding, never afraid to express his or her opinion, even when it puts her life at risk. The second field is that of politics. Based on the idea of the polis and the politea, it has stood, since Thomas Hobbes, for the relationship between the people and the sovereign within the body politic. Held together by unifying obligatory relationship, politics overcome the primal state of fear and war of "all against all" in "the state of nature." This special issue concludes a series of workshops funded by the DFG (Deutsche For-schung Gemeinschaft). The three workshops, which took place in Berlin and New York from 2018 to 2019, gathered an international group of researchers interested in the intersection of history, religious studies, and literature and straddling the three traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The group focused on clear states of crisis in history and in politics: the biblical clashes between prophets, kings, and people, Medieval confrontations between the prophetic and the legal traditions, and modern confrontations between the prophetic tradition and the rise of authoritarian secularist regimes, which can be seen as forerunners of more contemporary clashes between political systems and reformatory prophetic rhetoric. Such rhetoric is clearly evident in the twentieth century, for example in Weimar Germany, the American Civil Rights movement, and in the recent confrontation between democracy and its rivals. A sober estimate of the field cannot be achieved by engaging only with biblical, Jewish, Christian and Muslim prophets, nor by limiting their political and public contexts. Rather, our claim in this issue is that prophetic politics serves as a better trope to examine the complexity of the historical, political , and rhetorical circumstances within the field recognized as political theology. The emphasis of prophetic politics on counter-institutional rhetoric and sentiment lets a new form of theorization to emerge. As contributors to this issue demonstrate, prophetic politics means speaking truth to power. It does so by drawing legitimacy from a higher principle of power-be it truth or divine authority. In times of crisis, prophets are the ones who dare to call attention to societal ills and to declare a new path, as radical as it may be. Even in its outmoded form, prophetic politics has not lost its revolutionary potential: from Jeremiah's symbolic breaking of the vessels-that is, the breaking of the alliance between God and the people-to Muhammad's open critique of the elites in Mecca, from the prophetic tone adopted by
The problematique of how Islam is to be situated in the context of a secular public space is an urgent question. It is central to resolving what the future of Islam and Muslims in Britain and across the West might hold, and in particular what Muslim diasporas in the West should aspire to be. How, indeed, should Islam and Muslims approach the secular public space? Is there an inherent incompatibility between Islam and the secular public space? And depending on how one answers this question, how should Muslim communities and individuals best navigate this space? Can this even be done in a way consistent with Islamic traditions and values, or do those values necessarily implicate the inevitability of mutual tension between Western and Islamic values? The central argument of this paper will be that Islamic traditions and values are not only compatible with a modern secular public space, but that some of the most progressive dynamics of this space were in fact integral to the Prophetic model of community governance established by Muhammad in Medina. This does not, however, indicate the basis for a simple equivalence between modern Western and pre-modern Islamic political ‘systems’, but rather establishes the basis for a progressive, radical yet flexible Islamic politics which works precisely to enhance the political, cultural and economic institutions of the contemporary secular public space.
Political Liberalism, Religion, and the Prophetic Tradition
2007
Does the prophetic tradition value the core values of citizenship (reciprocity, tolerance and mutual respect) and accept that religious people should not hold or act on the view that those who hold other convictions are unworthy of fair treatment or equal rights as citizens?.