Crashing the Idols

Crashing the Idols

Author: Will D. Campbell

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2010-04-01

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 1606081276

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If prophets are called to unveil and expose the illegitimacy of those principalities masquerading as the right and purportedly using their powers for the good, then Will D. Campbell is one of the foremost prophets in American religious history. Like Clarence Jordan and Dorothy Day, Campbell incarnates the radical iconoclastic vocation of standing in contraposition to society, naming and smashing the racial, economic, and political idols that seduce and delude. Despite an action-packed life, Campbell is no activist seeking to control events and guarantee history's right outcomes. Rather, Campbell has committed his life to the proposition that Christ has already set things right. Irrespective of who one is, or what one has done, each human being is reconciled to God and one another, now and forever. History's most scandalous message is, therefore, Be reconciled! because once that imperative is taken seriously, social constructs like race, ethnicity, gender, and nationality are at best irrelevant and at worst idolatrous. Proclaiming that far too many disciples miss the genius of Christianity's good news (the kerygma) of reconciliation, this Ivy League-educated preacher boldly and joyfully affirms society's so-called least one, cultivating community with everyone from civil rights leaders and Ku Klux Klan militants, to the American literati and exiled convicts. Except for maybe the self-righteous, none is excluded from the beloved community. For the first time in nearly fifty years, Campbell's provocative Race and Renewal of the Church is here made available. Gayraud Wilmore called Campbell's foundational work an unsettling reading experience, but one that articulates an unwavering confidence in the victory which God can bring out of the weakness of the church.


Rhetoric, Religion and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1965

Rhetoric, Religion and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1965

Author: Davis W. Houck

Publisher: Baylor University Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 1013

ISBN-13: 1932792546

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V.2: Building upon their critically acclaimed first volume, Davis W. Houck and David E. Dixon's new Rhetoric, Religion, and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1965 is a recovery project of enormous proportions. Houck and Dixon have again combed church archives, government documents, university libraries, and private collections in pursuit of the civil rights movement's long-buried eloquence. Their new work presents fifty new speeches and sermons delivered by both famed leaders and little-known civil rights activists on national stages and in quiet shacks. The speeches carry novel insights into the ways in which individuals and communities utilized religious rhetoric to upset the racial status quo in divided America during the civil rights era. Houck and Dixon's work illustrates again how a movement so prominent in historical scholarship still has much to teach us. (Publisher).


Will Campbell

Will Campbell

Author: Merrill M. Hawkins

Publisher: Mercer University Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 9780865545625

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"These endeavors involved an expanded interest beyond civil rights for African Americans in an effort to have a comprehensive approach to all human suffering. This broadened awareness included concern for the poor whites of the South, as well as other victims, including such different groups as prisoners and women as discriminated minorities."--BOOK JACKET. "Campbell is also known for his writings, both fiction and non-fiction."--BOOK JACKET.


Communion of Radicals

Communion of Radicals

Author: Jonathan McGregor

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2021-11-03

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 0807176508

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Popular perceptions of American writers as either godless radicals or God-fearing reactionaries overlook a vital tradition of Christian leftist thought and creative work. In Communion of Radicals, Jonathan McGregor offers the first literary history of theologically conservative writers who embraced political radicalism, as their reverence for tradition impelled them to work for social justice. Challenging recent accounts that examine twentieth-century American literature against the backdrop of the rising Religious Right, Communion of Radicals uncovers a different literary lineage in which allegiance to religious tradition fostered dedication to a more just future. From the Gilded Age to the Great Depression to the civil rights movement, traditional faith empowered the rebellious writing of socialists, anarchists, and Catholic personalists such as Vida Scudder, Dorothy Day, Claude McKay, F. O. Matthiessen, and W. H. Auden. By recovering their strain of traditioned radicalism, McGregor shows how strong faith in the past can fuel the struggle for an equitable future. As Christian socialists, Scudder and Ralph Adams Cram envisioned their movement for beloved community as a modern version of medieval monasticism. Day and the Catholic Workers followed the fourteenth-century example of St. Francis when they lived and wrote among the disaffected souls on the Bowery during the Great Depression. Tennessee’s Fellowship of Southern Churchmen argued for a socialist and antiracist understanding of the notion of “the South and the Agrarian tradition” popularized by James McBride Dabbs, Walker Percy, and Wendell Berry. Agrarian roots flowered into creative expressions encompassing the queer and Black medievalist poetry of Auden and McKay, respectively; Matthiessen’s Catholic socialist interpretation of the American Renaissance; and the genteel anarchism of Percy’s southern comic novels. Imaginative writing enabled these Christian leftists to commune with the past and with each other, driving their radical efforts in the present. Communion of Radicals chronicles a literary Christian left that unites deeply traditional faith with radicalism, and offers a usable past that disrupts perceived alignments of religion and politics.


Figures in the Carpet

Figures in the Carpet

Author: Wilfred M. McClay

Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

Published: 2007-01-02

Total Pages: 517

ISBN-13: 0802863116

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Figures in the Carpet presents a stellar roster of first-rate historians dealing seriously with a perennially important subject. The case studies and more theoretical accounts in this book amount to an unusually perceptive assessment of how "the person' has been viewed in American history.


Ambassadors of Reconciliation: New Testament reflections on restorative justice and peacemaking

Ambassadors of Reconciliation: New Testament reflections on restorative justice and peacemaking

Author: Ched Myers

Publisher: Orbis Books

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 1608331350

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Both Ched Myers and Elaine Enns work for Bartimaeus Ministries in California. Myers, the author of Binding the Strong Man and Who Will Roll Away the Stone?, focuses on building biblical literary, church renewal, and faith-based witness for justice. Enns has worked for twenty years in the field of restorative justice and conflict transformation. Book jacket.


Hope in a Scattering Time

Hope in a Scattering Time

Author: Eric Miller

Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

Published: 2010-04-16

Total Pages: 415

ISBN-13: 0802817696

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This is the first biography of the best-selling author of The culture of narcissism and other modern American classics. His brand of historically and psychologically informed social criticism was uncommonly prescient and remains surprisingly relevant to our cultural dilemmas. So does his example, as Eric Miller shows in this vivid and engaging book. Lasch's uncompromising independence cast him as Socrates in an age of sophists, and the sweeping range, critical intensity, high seriousness, and rigorous honesty of his writings won him warm admirers, many fierce critics, and a circle of brilliant and devoted students. Miller's biography offers lasch's life as a ringing case for the dignity of the intellectual's calling.


Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South

Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South

Author: Steven P. Miller

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2011-08-23

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 0812206142

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While spreading the gospel around the world through his signature crusades, internationally renowned evangelist Billy Graham maintained a visible and controversial presence in his native South, a region that underwent substantial political and economic change in the latter half of the twentieth century. In this period Graham was alternately a desegregating crusader in Alabama, Sunbelt booster in Atlanta, regional apologist in the national press, and southern strategist in the Nixon administration. Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South considers the critical but underappreciated role of the noted evangelist in the creation of the modern American South. The region experienced two significant related shifts away from its status as what observers and critics called the "Solid South": the end of legalized Jim Crow and the end of Democratic Party dominance. Author Steven P. Miller treats Graham as a serious actor and a powerful symbol in this transition—an evangelist first and foremost, but also a profoundly political figure. In his roles as the nation's most visible evangelist, adviser to political leaders, and a regional spokesperson, Graham influenced many of the developments that drove celebrants and detractors alike to place the South at the vanguard of political, religious, and cultural trends. He forged a path on which white southern moderates could retreat from Jim Crow, while his evangelical critique of white supremacy portended the emergence of "color blind" rhetoric within mainstream conservatism. Through his involvement in the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations, as well as his deep social ties in the South, the evangelist influenced the decades-long process of political realignment. Graham's public life sheds new light on recent southern history in all of its ambiguities, and his social and political ethics complicate conventional understandings of evangelical Christianity in postwar America. Miller's book seeks to reintroduce a familiar figure to the narrative of southern history and, in the process, examine the political and social transitions constitutive of the modern South.


Up To Our Steeples in Politics

Up To Our Steeples in Politics

Author: Will D. Campbell

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2004-09-30

Total Pages: 154

ISBN-13: 1592449085

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In this book we are trying to confess that the goals of the contemporary Church - that is to say, the church of St. John's by the Gas Station, the Christian college, the denominational and interdenominational seminary - the 'goals' of these Christian communities are blasphemous. The reconciliation the Church is seeking to accomplish today by these subterfuges has already been wrought. The brotherhood - the one blood of Acts 17, 26 - that the Church makes its goal today is already a 'fact'. And because this is so, that very fact judges our goals and our efforts to achieve brotherhood by social action as blasphemous, as trying to 'be' God. Instead of witnessing to Christ, the social action of the Church lends support to the totalitarianism of wars and political systems of the 20th century. By its social action, the Church permits and encourages the State and culture to define all issues and rules and fields of battle. The Church then tries to do what the State, without the Church's support, had already decided to do to solve all human problems by politics. And this is specifically the political messianism of contemporary totalitarianism and of Revelation 13. Politics by definition can only adjust and rearrange. It cannot - as politics - solve anything. But the Church's social action encourages the very movements in the contemporary political processes which are moving us straightaway into 20th-century totalitarianism. from the Foreword