Download or read book Faith Class and Labor written by Jin Young Choi and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2020-12-16 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Labor of Faith written by Judith Casselberry and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-14 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Unified We Are a Force written by Joerg Rieger and published by Chalice Press. This book was released on 2016-05-10 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Gospel of the Working Class written by Erik S. Gellman and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2011-07-15 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Reverend Addie Wyatt written by Marcia Walker-McWilliams and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2016-09-30 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Unified We Are a Force written by Joerg Rieger and published by Chalice Press. This book was released on 2016-05-10 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Beyond 15 written by Jonathan Rosenblum and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2017-03-14 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Making of Working Class Religion written by Matthew Pehl and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2016-09-08 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Upon the Altar of Work written by Betsy Wood and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2020-09-14 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Blue Collar Jesus written by Darren Cushman Wood and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Staley written by Steven K. Ashby and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2009-03-13 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This on-the-ground labor history focuses on the bitterly contested labor conflict in the early 1990s at the A. E. Staley corn processing plant in Decatur, Illinois, where workers waged one of the most hard-fought struggles in recent labor history. Originally family-owned, A. E. Staley was bought out by the multinational conglomerate Tate & Lyle, which immediately launched a full-scale assault on its union workforce. Allied Industrial Workers Local 837 responded by educating and mobilizing its members, organizing strong support from the religious and black communities, building a national and international solidarity movement, and engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the plant gates. Drawing on seventy-five interviews, videotapes of every union meeting, and their own active involvement organizing with the Staley workers, Steven K. Ashby and C. J. Hawking bring the workers' voices to the fore and reveal their innovative tactics, such as work-to-rule and solidarity committees, that inform and strengthen today's labor movement.

Download or read book Can the Working Class Change the World written by Michael D. Yates and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the horrors of the capitalist system is that slave labor, which was central to the formation and growth of capitalism itself, is still fully able to coexist alongside wage labor. But, as Karl Marx points out, it is the fact of being paid for one's work that validates capitalism as a viable socio-economic structure. Beneath this veil of “free commerce” – where workers are paid only for a portion of their workday, and buyers and sellers in the marketplace face each other as “equals” – lies a foundation of immense inequality. Yet workers have always rebelled. They've organized unions, struck, picketed, boycotted, formed political organizations and parties – sometimes they have actually won and improved their lives. But, Marx argued, because capitalism is the apotheosis of class society, it must be the last class society: it must, therefore, be destroyed. And only the working class, said Marx, is capable of creating that change. In his timely and innovative book, Michael D. Yates asks if the working class can, indeed, change the world. Deftly factoring in such contemporary elements as sharp changes in the rise of identity politics and the nature of work, itself, Yates asks if there can, in fact, be a thing called the working class? If so, how might it overcome inherent divisions of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, location – to become a cohesive and radical force for change? Forcefully and without illusions, Yates supports his arguments with relevant, clearly explained data, historical examples, and his own personal experiences. This book is a sophisticated and prescient understanding of the working class, and what all of us might do to change the world.

Download or read book This Life written by Martin Hägglund and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the René Wellek Prize Named a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian, The Millions, and The Sydney Morning Herald This Life offers a profoundly inspiring basis for transforming our lives, demonstrating that our commitment to freedom and democracy should lead us beyond both religion and capitalism. Philosopher Martin Hägglund argues that we need to cultivate not a religious faith in eternity but a secular faith devoted to our finite life together. He shows that all spiritual questions of freedom are inseparable from economic and material conditions: what matters is how we treat one another in this life and what we do with our time. Engaging with great philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel and Marx, literary writers from Dante to Proust and Knausgaard, political economists from Mill to Keynes and Hayek, and religious thinkers from Augustine to Kierkegaard and Martin Luther King, Jr., Hägglund points the way to an emancipated life.

Download or read book Markets of Sorrow Labors of Faith written by Vincanne Adams and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-04 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ethnographic account of long-term recovery in post-Katrina New Orleans provides a sobering look at the fallout from the privatization of vital social services under neoliberal, or market-driven, governance.

Download or read book Union Made written by Heath W. Carter and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-03 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Gilded Age America, rampant inequality gave rise to a new form of Christianity, one that sought to ease the sufferings of the poor not simply by saving their souls, but by transforming society. In Union Made, Heath W. Carter advances a bold new interpretation of the origins of American Social Christianity. While historians have often attributed the rise of the Social Gospel to middle-class ministers, seminary professors, and social reformers, this book places working people at the very center of the story. The major characters--blacksmiths, glove makers, teamsters, printers, and the like--have been mostly forgotten, but as Carter convincingly argues, their collective contribution to American Social Christianity was no less significant than that of Walter Rauschenbusch or Jane Addams. Leading readers into the thick of late-19th-century Chicago's tumultuous history, Carter shows that countless working-class believers participated in the heated debates over the implications of Christianity for industrializing society, often with as much fervor as they did in other contests over wages and the length of the workday. The city's trade unionists, socialists, and anarchists advanced theological critiques of laissez faire capitalism and protested "scab ministers" who cozied up to the business elite. Their criticisms compounded church leaders' anxieties about losing the poor, such that by the turn-of-the-century many leading Christians were arguing that the only way to salvage hopes of a Christian America was for the churches to soften their position on "the labor question." As denomination after denomination did just that, it became apparent that the Social Gospel was, indeed, ascendant--from below. At a time when the fate of the labor movement and rising economic inequality are once more pressing social concerns, Union Made opens the door for a new way forward--by changing the way we think about the past.

Download or read book Religion and Class in America written by Sean McCloud and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Class has always played a role in American religion. Class differences in religious life are inevitably felt by both those in the pews and those on the outside looking in. This volume starts a long overdue discussion about how class continues to matter - and perhaps even ways in which it does not - in American religion. Class is indeed important, whether one examines it through analysis of events and documents, surveys and interviews, or participant observation of religious groups. The chapters herein examine class as a reality that is both material and symbolic, individual and corporate. "Religion and Class in America" examines the myriad ways in which class continues to interact with the theologies, practices, beliefs, and group affiliations of American religion.

Download or read book Religion in American History written by Amanda Porterfield and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 2010-04-29 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This student-friendly introduction combines both thematic and chronological approaches in exploring the pivotal role religion played in American history - and of its impact across a range of issues, from identity formation and politics, to race, gender, and class. A comprehensive introduction to American religious history that successfully combines thematic and chronological approaches, aiding both teaching and learning Brings together a stellar cast of experts to trace the development of theology, the political order, practice, and race, ethnicity, gender and class throughout America's history Accessibly structured in to four key eras: Exploration and Encounter (1492-1676); The Atlantic World (1676-1802); American Empire (1803-1898); and Global Reach (1898-present). Investigates the role of religion in forming people's identities, emotional experiences, social conflict, politics, and patriotism