Faith, Class, and Labor
Faith, Class, and Labor

Author: Jin Young Choi

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2020-12-16

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 1725257165

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Despite the fact that 99 percent of us work for a living and although work shapes us to the core, class and labor are topics that are underrepresented in the work of scholars of religion, theology, and the Bible. With this volume, an international group of scholars and activists from nine different countries is bringing issues of religion, class, and labor back into conversation. Historians and theologians investigate how new images of God and the world emerge, and what difference they can make. Biblical critics develop new takes on ancient texts that lead to the reversal of readings that had been seemingly stable, settled, and taken for granted. Activists and organizers identify neglected sources of power and energy returning in new force and point to transformations happening. Asking how labor and religion mutually shape each other and how the agency of working people operates in their lives, the contributors also employ intersectional approaches that engage race, gender, sexuality, and colonialism. This volume presents transdisciplinary, transtextual, transactional, transnational, and transgressive work in progress, much needed in our time.

Unified We Are a Force
Unified We Are a Force

Author: Joerg Rieger

Publisher: Chalice Press

Published: 2016-05-10

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 0827238606

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The American dream of "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" is no longer possible, if it ever was. Most of us live paycheck-to-paycheck, and inequality has become one of the greatest problems facing our country. Working people and people of faith have the power to change this-but only when we get unified! In this practical and theological handbook for justice, renowned theologian Joerg Rieger and his wife, community and labor activist Rosemarie Henkel-Rieger, help the working majority (the 99% of us) understand what is happening and how we can make a difference. Discover how our faith is deeply connected with our work. Find out how to organize people and build power and what our different faith traditions can contribute. Learn from case studies where these principles have been used successfully-and how we can use them. Develop "deep solidarity" as a way to forge unity while employing our differences for the common good.

Reverend Addie Wyatt
Reverend Addie Wyatt

Author: Marcia Walker-McWilliams

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2016-09-30

Total Pages: 431

ISBN-13: 025209896X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Labor leader, civil rights activist, outspoken feminist, African American clergywoman--Reverend Addie Wyatt stood at the confluence of many rivers of change in twentieth century America. The first female president of a local chapter of the United Packinghouse Workers of America, Wyatt worked alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and Eleanor Roosevelt and appeared as one of Time magazine's Women of the Year in 1975. Marcia Walker-McWilliams tells the incredible story of Addie Wyatt and her times. What began for Wyatt as a journey to overcome poverty became a lifetime commitment to social justice and the collective struggle against economic, racial, and gender inequalities. Walker-McWilliams illuminates how Wyatt's own experiences with hardship and many forms of discrimination drove her work as an activist and leader. A parallel journey led her to develop an abiding spiritual faith, one that denied defeatism by refusing to accept such circumstances as immutable social forces.

The Gospel of the Working Class
The Gospel of the Working Class

Author: Erik S. Gellman

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2011-07-15

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 025209333X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In this exceptional dual biography and cultural history, Erik S. Gellman and Jarod Roll trace the influence of two southern activist preachers, one black and one white, who used their ministry to organize the working class in the 1930s and 1940s across lines of gender, race, and geography. Owen Whitfield and Claude Williams, along with their wives Zella Whitfield and Joyce Williams, drew on their bedrock religious beliefs to stir ordinary men and women to demand social and economic justice in the eras of the Great Depression, New Deal, and Second World War. Williams and Whitfield preached a working-class gospel rooted in the American creed that hard, productive work entitled people to a decent standard of living. Gellman and Roll detail how the two preachers galvanized thousands of farm and industrial workers for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. They also link the activism of the 1930s and 1940s to that of the 1960s and emphasize the central role of the ministers' wives, with whom they established the People's Institute for Applied Religion. This detailed narrative illuminates a cast of characters who became the two couples' closest allies in coordinating a complex network of activists that transcended Jim Crow racial divisions, blurring conventional categories and boundaries to help black and white workers make better lives. In chronicling the shifting contexts of the actions of Whitfield and Williams, The Gospel of the Working Class situates Christian theology within the struggles of some of America's most downtrodden workers, transforming the dominant narratives of the era and offering a fresh view of the promise and instability of religion and civil rights unionism.

The Making of Working-Class Religion
The Making of Working-Class Religion

Author: Matthew Pehl

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2016-09-08

Total Pages: 375

ISBN-13: 0252098846

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Religion has played a protean role in the lives of America's workers. In this innovative volume, Matthew Pehl focuses on Detroit to examine the religious consciousness constructed by the city's working-class Catholics, African American Protestants, and southern-born white evangelicals and Pentecostals between 1910 and 1969. Pehl embarks on an integrative view of working-class faith that ranges across boundaries of class, race, denomination, and time. As he shows, workers in the 1910s and 1920s practiced beliefs characterized by emotional expressiveness, alliance with supernatural forces, and incorporation of mass culture's secular diversions into the sacred. That gave way to the more pragmatic class-conscious religion cultures of the New Deal era and, from the late Thirties on, a quilt of secular working-class cultures that coexisted in competitive, though creative, tension. Finally, Pehl shows how the ideology of race eclipsed class in the 1950s and 1960s, and in so doing replaced the class-conscious with the race-conscious in religious cultures throughout the city. An ambitiously inclusive contribution to a burgeoning field, The Making of Working-Class Religion breaks new ground in the study of solidarity and the sacred in the American heartland.

Labor Evangelicals
Labor Evangelicals

Author: Ken Estey

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 2024-10-29

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783031712357

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Labor Evangelicals studies theologically conservative working class evangelicals in the United States who resist the common preconception that they eagerly embrace deregulation, unfettered markets, and globalized capital. Methodologically, this book studies evangelical workers at the grassroots level to discern the complexity of their perspectives about work, unions, class, and power. This book shows how white and African American evangelicals think about labor in working-class communities in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and Moncure, North Carolina.

Blue Collar Jesus
Blue Collar Jesus

Author: Darren Cushman Wood

Publisher:

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Blue Collar Jesus: How Christianity supports workers' rights offers the most thorough analysis to date of workers rights from a religious perspective. The book reveals biblical and ethical principles for justice in the work place, and explores the vast and diverse tradition of labor activism among the major Christian factions. From the Roman Catholic Church to the Southern Baptists Convention, Cushman analyzes the history and beliefs that support labor unions. With rich historical and theological insights, Cushman argues persuasively that labor unions are legitimate instruments of God's will for creating a just society. Never before published interviews and archival information makes Blue Collar Jesus a fascinating study of the relationship between labor and religion.

The Labor of Faith
The Labor of Faith

Author: Judith Casselberry

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2017-04-27

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0822372975

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In The Labor of Faith Judith Casselberry examines the material and spiritual labor of the women of the Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ of the Apostolic Faith, Inc., which is based in Harlem and one of the oldest and largest historically Black Pentecostal denominations in the United States. This male-headed church only functions through the work of the church's women, who, despite making up three-quarters of its adult membership, hold no formal positions of power. Casselberry shows how the women negotiate this contradiction by using their work to produce and claim a spiritual authority that provides them with a particular form of power. She also emphasizes how their work in the church is as significant, labor intensive, and critical to their personhood, family, and community as their careers, home and family work, and community service are. Focusing on the circumstances of producing a holy black female personhood, Casselberry reveals the ways twenty-first-century women's spiritual power operates and resonates with meaning in Pentecostal, female-majority, male-led churches.

Upon the Altar of Work
Upon the Altar of Work

Author: Betsy Wood

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2020-09-14

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 0252052323

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Rooted in the crisis over slavery, disagreements about child labor broke down along sectional lines between the North and South. For decades after emancipation, the child labor issue shaped how Northerners and Southerners defined fundamental concepts of American life such as work, freedom, the market, and the state. Betsy Wood examines the evolution of ideas about child labor and the on-the-ground politics of the issue against the backdrop of broad developments related to slavery and emancipation, industrial capitalism, moral and social reform, and American politics and religion. Wood explains how the decades-long battle over child labor created enduring political and ideological divisions within capitalist society that divided the gatekeepers of modernity from the cultural warriors who opposed them. Tracing the ideological origins and the politics of the child labor battle over the course of eighty years, this book tells the story of how child labor debates bequeathed an enduring legacy of sectionalist conflict to modern American capitalist society.

Beyond $15
Beyond $15

Author: Jonathan Rosenblum

Publisher: Beacon Press

Published: 2017-03-14

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 0807098124

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The inside story of the first successful $15 minimum wage campaign that renewed a national labor movement With captivating narrative and insightful commentary, labor organizer Jonathan Rosenblum reveals the inside story of the first successful fight for a $15 minimum wage, which renewed a national labor movement through bold strategy and broad inclusiveness. Just outside Seattle, an unlikely alliance of Sea-Tac Airport workers, union and community activists, and clergy staged face-to-face confrontations with corporate leaders to unite a diverse, largely immigrant workforce in a struggle over power between airport workers and business and political elites. Digging deep into the root causes of poverty wages, Rosenblum gives a blunt assessment of the daunting problems facing unions today. Beyond $15 provides an inspirational blueprint for a powerful, all-inclusive labor movement and is a call for workers to reclaim their power in the new economy.