Activism in the Name of God

Activism in the Name of God

Author: Jami L. Carlacio

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2023-08-16

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 1496845692

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Contributions by Janet Allured, Lisa Pertillar Brevard, Jami L. Carlacio, Cheryl J. Fish, Angela Hornsby-Gutting, Jennifer McFarlane-Harris, Neely McLaughlin, Darcy Metcalfe, Phillip Luke Sinitiere, P. Jane Splawn, Laura L. Sullivan, and Hettie V. Williams Activism in the Name of God: Religion and Black Feminist Public Intellectuals from the Nineteenth Century to the Present recognizes and celebrates twelve Black feminists who have made an indelible mark not just on Black women’s intellectual history but on American intellectual history in general. The volume includes essays on Jarena Lee, Theressa Hoover, Pauli Murray, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, to name a few. These women’s commitment to the social, political, and economic well-being of oppressed people in the United States shaped their work in the public sphere, which took the form of preaching, writing, singing, marching, presiding over religious institutions, teaching, assuming leadership roles in the civil rights movement, and creating politically subversive print and digital art. This anthology offers readers exemplars with whose minds and spirits we can engage, from whose ideas we can learn, and upon whose social justice work we can build. The volume joins a burgeoning chorus of texts that calls attention to the creativity of Black women who galvanized their readers, listeners, and fellow activists to seek justice for the oppressed. Pushing back on centuries of institutionalized injustices that have relegated Black women to the sidelines, the work of these Black feminist public intellectuals reflects both Christian gospel ethics and non-Christian religious traditions that celebrate the wholeness of Black people.


If God Were a Human Rights Activist

If God Were a Human Rights Activist

Author: Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2015-04-29

Total Pages: 153

ISBN-13: 0804795037

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We live in a time when the most appalling social injustices and unjust human sufferings no longer seem to generate the moral indignation and the political will needed both to combat them effectively and to create a more just and fair society. If God Were a Human Rights Activist aims to strengthen the organization and the determination of all those who have not given up the struggle for a better society, and specifically those that have done so under the banner of human rights. It discusses the challenges to human rights arising from religious movements and political theologies that claim the presence of religion in the public sphere. Increasingly globalized, such movements and the theologies sustaining them promote discourses of human dignity that rival, and often contradict, the one underlying secular human rights. Conventional or hegemonic human rights thinking lacks the necessary theoretical and analytical tools to position itself in relation to such movements and theologies; even worse, it does not understand the importance of doing so. It applies the same abstract recipe across the board, hoping that thereby the nature of alternative discourses and ideologies will be reduced to local specificities with no impact on the universal canon of human rights. As this strategy proves increasingly lacking, this book aims to demonstrate that only a counter-hegemonic conception of human rights can adequately face such challenges.


Sacred Pathways

Sacred Pathways

Author: Gary Thomas

Publisher: Zondervan

Published: 2020-09-08

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0310361184

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Sacred Pathways reveals nine distinct spiritual temperaments--and their strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies--to help you improve your spiritual life and deepen your personal walk with God. It's time to strip away the frustration of a one-size-fits-all spirituality and discover a path of worship that frees you to be you. Experienced spiritual directors, pastors, and church leaders recognize that all of us engage with God differently, and it's about time we do too. In this updated and expanded edition of Sacred Pathways, Gary Thomas details nine spiritual temperaments and--like the Enneagram and other tools do with personality--encourages you to investigate the ways you most naturally express yourself in your relationship with God. He encourages you to dig into the traits, strengths, and pitfalls in your devotional approach so you can eliminate the barriers that keep you locked into rigid methods of worship and praise. Plus, as you begin to identify and understand your own temperament, you'll soon learn about the temperaments that aren't necessarily "you" but that may help you understand the spiritual tendencies of friends, family, and others around you. Whatever temperament or blend of temperaments best describes you, rest assured it's not by accident. It's by the design of a Creator who knew what he was doing when he made you according to his own unique intentions. If your spiritual walk is not what you'd like it to be, you can change that, starting here. Sacred Pathways will show you the route you were made to travel, marked by growth and filled with the riches of a close walk with God. A Sacred Pathways video Bible study is also available for group or individual use, sold separately.


Christians Against Christianity

Christians Against Christianity

Author: Obery M. Hendricks, Jr.

Publisher: Beacon Press

Published: 2021-07-06

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 0807057401

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A timely and galvanizing work that examines how right-wing evangelical Christians have veered from an admirable faith to a pernicious, destructive ideology. Today’s right-wing Evangelical Christianity stands as the very antithesis of the message of Jesus Christ. In his new book, Christians Against Christianity, best-selling author and religious scholar Obery M. Hendricks Jr. challenges right-wing evangelicals on the terrain of their own religious claims, exposing the falsehoods, contradictions, and misuses of the Bible that are embedded in their rabid homophobia, their poorly veiled racism and demonizing of immigrants and Muslims, and their ungodly alliance with big business against the interests of American workers. He scathingly indicts the religious leaders who helped facilitate the rise of the notoriously unchristian Donald Trump, likening them to the “court jesters” and hypocritical priestly sycophants of bygone eras who unquestioningly supported their sovereigns’ every act, no matter how hateful or destructive to those they were supposed to serve. In the wake of the deadly insurrectionist attack on the US Capitol, Christians Against Christianity is a clarion call to stand up to the hypocrisy of the evangelical Right, as well as a guide for Christians to return their faith to the life-affirming message that Jesus brought and died for. What Hendricks offers is a provocative diagnosis, an urgent warning that right-wing evangelicals’ aspirations for Christian nationalist supremacy are a looming threat, not only to Christian decency but to democracy itself. What they offer to America is anything but good news.


Representing God

Representing God

Author: Méadhbh McIvor

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-10-06

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 0691211612

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How evangelical activism in England contributes to the secularizing forces it seeks to challenge Over the past two decades, a growing number of Christians in England have gone to court to enforce their right to religious liberty. Funded by conservative lobby groups and influenced by the legal strategies of their American peers, these claimants—registrars who conscientiously object to performing the marriages of same-sex couples, say, or employees asking for exceptions to uniform policies that forbid visible crucifixes—highlight the uneasy truce between law and religion in a country that maintains an established Church but is wary of public displays of religious conviction. Representing God charts the changing place of public Christianity in England through the rise of Christian political activism and litigation. Based on two years of fieldwork split between a conservative Christian lobby group and a conservative evangelical church, Méadhbh McIvor explores the ideas and contested reception of this ostensibly American-inspired legal rhetoric. She argues that legal challenges aimed at protecting “Christian values” ultimately jeopardize those values, as moralities woven into the fabric of English national life are filtered from their quotidian context and rebranded as the niche interests of a cultural minority. By framing certain moral practices as specifically Christian, these activists present their religious convictions as something increasingly set apart from broader English culture, thereby hastening the secularization they seek to counter. Representing God offers a unique look at how Christian politico-legal activism in England simultaneously responds to and constitutes the religious life of a nation.


Saints in the Struggle

Saints in the Struggle

Author: Jonathan Chism

Publisher: Religion and Race

Published: 2019-01-14

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 9781498553087

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This book uncovers and examines the contributions made by black Pentecostals in the Church of God in Christ (COGIC) to civil rights struggles in Memphis during the 1950s and 1960s. This book provides detailed description of prominent Memphis COGIC activists' engagements with local civil rights organizations.


A Children's Bible: A Novel

A Children's Bible: A Novel

Author: Lydia Millet

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2020-05-12

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1324005041

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Finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction One of the New York Times' Ten Best Books of the Year Named one of the best novels of the year by Time, Washington Post, NPR, Chicago Tribune, Esquire, BBC, and many others National Bestseller "A blistering little classic." —Ron Charles, Washington Post A Children’s Bible follows a group of twelve eerily mature children on a forced vacation with their families at a sprawling lakeside mansion. Contemptuous of their parents, the children decide to run away when a destructive storm descends on the summer estate, embarking on a dangerous foray into the apocalyptic chaos outside. Lydia Millet’s prophetic and heartbreaking story of generational divide offers a haunting vision of what awaits us on the far side of Revelation.


God's Long Summer

God's Long Summer

Author: Charles Marsh

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9780691029405

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Through five intensely personal and emotional stories, Marsh asks us to consider the civil rights movement anew and to view religion as a powerful yet protean force driving social action.


The Spiritual Lives of Young African Americans

The Spiritual Lives of Young African Americans

Author: Almeda Wright

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-07-03

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0190664754

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How do young African Americans approach their faith in God when continued violence and police brutality batters the news each day? In The Spiritual Lives of Young African Americans, Almeda M. Wright argues that African American youth separate their everyday lives and their spirituality into mutually exclusive categories. This results in a noticeable division between their experiences of systemic injustices and their religious beliefs and practices. Yet Wright suggests that youth can and do teach the church and society myriad lessons through their theological reflections and actions. Giving special attention to the resources of African American religious and theological traditions, Wright creates a critical pedagogy for integrating spirituality into the lives of African American youth, as well as confronting and navigating spiritual fragmentation and systemic injustice.


One Nation Under God

One Nation Under God

Author: Kevin M. Kruse

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2015-04-14

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0465040640

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The provocative and authoritative history of the origins of Christian America in the New Deal era We're often told that the United States is, was, and always has been a Christian nation. But in One Nation Under God, historian Kevin M. Kruse reveals that the belief that America is fundamentally and formally Christian originated in the 1930s. To fight the "slavery" of FDR's New Deal, businessmen enlisted religious activists in a campaign for "freedom under God" that culminated in the election of their ally Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. The new president revolutionized the role of religion in American politics. He inaugurated new traditions like the National Prayer Breakfast, as Congress added the phrase "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance and made "In God We Trust" the country's first official motto. Church membership soon soared to an all-time high of 69 percent. Americans across the religious and political spectrum agreed that their country was "one nation under God." Provocative and authoritative, One Nation Under God reveals how an unholy alliance of money, religion, and politics created a false origin story that continues to define and divide American politics to this day.