Review of Michael Kinnamon, The Witness of Religion in an Age of Fear, Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2017 (original) (raw)
Related papers
CONSTRUCTING THE ROOTS OF FEAR IN UNITED STATES
Int. J. Human Rights and Constitutional Studies, Vol. 1, No. 4, 2013
Building on the work of social analysts who have identified the emerging culture of fear in the USA, this article argues that the current fears about terrorism derive from deliberate campaigns by the world capitalism’s elites. It traces the history of political scares since the late 19th century to show an evolution from red scares to terrorism. While acknowledging the complexities of cultural constructions, the obsession with terrorism is shown as an outgrowth and offspring of earlier, anti-communist hysterias in the USA. Keywords: terrorism; fear; red scare; McCarthyism; capitalism; racism; communism; USA.
PSC 422.006 - The Politics of Fear (Spring, 2015)
Fear has always been a part of human life. One hope, widely expressed among the philosophers and social theorists of the 18th and 19th centuries, was that progress in science and philosophy would eventually banish it from our lives: diseases would be vanquished with improvements in medical science; hunger through improvements to agriculture; superstition and prejudice through reason and education; want and oppression through mass production and enlightened administration. Yet our lives -and our politics -remain persistently saturated with it. How has fear evolved over the past century and a half? Do contemporary fears differ from those of earlier eras, and if so, how? How do those new (or not-so-new) fears structure both our selfunderstandings, and our political engagements? Note: this is an advanced research seminar based on the instructor's ongoing research. While there are no prerequisites, students will be expected to read carefully, and to prepare for and participate in class consistently. Readings will be extensive, and students should expect to write -and to revise -a great deal.
Religion, Democracy, and the Politics of Fright
This is an editorial introduction for a special issue of the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory on "The Politics of Fright." Drawing on the Tillichian distinction between fear and anxiety, this paper makes a distinction between the politics of fear and the politics of fright, showing how the latter weds a neo-conservative political agenda with a fundamentalist religiosity.
Fearing the stranger? Homiletical explorations in a fear-filled world. HTS, 2019.
Hervormde Teologiese Studies, 2019
The large number of xenophobic attacks that broke out in different places in South Africa during 2008 was still continuing unabated 10 years later. We were stressed to come to terms with the reality that this occurred in a country that is globally considered to be an example of reconciliation. It is clear that we were confronted by the politics of fear, which were manifested in xenophobia and all the other -isms. In this article, the primary causes of these xenophobic outbreaks were scrutinized and placed within the wider framework of a culture of fear. The central research question is: Why are we still struggling with this phenomenon more than a decade after it first appeared on South African soil? An in-depth analysis will be performed at what is lying behind the culture of fear underlying these acts of violence. After exploring some of the factors related to a culture of fear by making use of a sociological frame, the author moved on to answer a second question: How do we, as preachers, researchers and practical theologians, respond in a theological way to the challenges posed by a xenophobic culture in our preaching activities? Finally, the impact of violence and fear on the practice of preaching within a Christian context was discussed.
This chapter argues that by the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century mass, public fear came from social control efforts on behalf of global capital. Beginning about 1970 the system of capital became globalized and faced a long term crisis of over accumulation and concentration with a parallel falling rate of profit. The need to control increasingly impoverished working classes throughout the world required concerted campaigns using forceful repression by intelligence-military-police apparatuses and ideological manipulations using propaganda and public relations. Technological developments made possible increasingly tighter control over public narratives, especially in the form of so-called social media. Fears were manufactured and public attention and consciousness were diverted so that the liberation and de-colonial movements of the post Second World War period were blunted to assure continued hegemony of a global ruling class. In short, this chapter argues for constructed public fears as part of the increasingly critical class war during a long term crisis of world capitalism.
New Perspectives Quarterly, 2006
london-Global terrorism and the global war against terrorism both fuel, in equal and pernicious ways, the global ideology of fear. When we examine the countries of the West or those of the South, particularly where the population is primarily Muslim, we can only conclude that fear is omnipresent and deeply ingrained. It is having an unmistakable impact on the way human beings perceive the world.We can observe at street level three principal effects: First, fear, naturally and often unconsciously, breeds mistrust and potential conflict with the "Other." A binary vision of reality begins to impose the outlines of a protective "us" and of a threatening "them." The second effect derives from the absolute domination of emotions in our relationships with the Other and of emotional responses to events.When fear rules, emotions undermine rational analysis. In such a state, we condemn the consequences of some action and reject the individuals who commit it, but we don't seek to understand what led to such action. Our "good reasons" and our "just causes" are praised by the general public without critical examination, while at the same time their "bad reasons" and their "evil intentions" are indiscriminately condemned. Fear authorizes us to forgo all explanations, all understanding, all analysis that might allow us to understand the Other, his world, his hopes. In the new regime of fear and suspicion, to understand the Other is to justify him; to seek out his reasons is to agree with him. A curious-and dangerousreductionism transforms reality into a series of discreet, disconnected facts, and the Other into a series of acts without cause, without history or historic depth, without reason and rationality. Emotion does not understand but rather appreciates or condemns; one's "feelings" determine everything. The third consequence is as paradoxical as it is startling:We may well live in the communication age, but human beings seem to be increasingly less informed. We have witnessed the multiplication of "communication superhighways" that diffuse a dizzying excess of information in real time, saturating the intelligence and making it impossible to place facts in perspective. The communication age is an age of noninformation. We are passive receptors of reality and of facts; it is as if we have no grasp on how they come to be. Swept away by our emotions; trapped in binary, The communication age is an age of non-information. WINTER 2006