Download or read book Religion as Resistance written by Eileen Ryan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book examines debates over the best methods for colonial rule in Italian Libya as a self-reflexive process that tell us more about the contentious connection between religious and political authority in Italy than about Muslim North Africa"--

Download or read book Rituals of Resistance written by Jason R. Young and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2011-02-11 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Rituals of Resistance Jason R. Young explores the religious and ritual practices that linked West-Central Africa with the Lowcountry region of Georgia and South Carolina during the era of slavery. The choice of these two sites mirrors the historical trajectory of the transatlantic slave trade which, for centuries, transplanted Kongolese captives to the Lowcountry through the ports of Charleston and Savannah. Analyzing the historical exigencies of slavery and the slave trade that sent not only men and women but also cultural meanings, signs, symbols, and patterns across the Atlantic, Young argues that religion operated as a central form of resistance against slavery and the ideological underpinnings that supported it. Through a series of comparative chapters on Christianity, ritual medicine, burial practices, and transmigration, Young details the manner in which Kongolese people, along with their contemporaries and their progeny who were enslaved in the Americas, utilized religious practices to resist the savagery of the slave trade and slavery itself. When slaves acted outside accepted parameters—in transmigration, spirit possession, ritual internment, and conjure—Young explains, they attacked not only the condition of being a slave, but also the systems of modernity and scientific rationalism that supported slavery. In effect, he argues, slave spirituality played a crucial role in the resocialization of the slave body and behavior away from the oppressions and brutalities of the master class. Young's work expands traditional scholarship on slavery to include both the extensive work done by African historians and current interdisciplinary debates in cultural studies, anthropology, and literature. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources from both American and African archives, including slave autobiography, folktales, and material culture, Rituals of Resistance offers readers a nuanced understanding of the cultural and religious connections that linked blacks in Africa with their enslaved contemporaries in the Americas. Moreover, Young's groundbreaking work gestures toward broader themes and connections, using the case of the Kongo and the Lowcountry to articulate the development of a much larger African Atlantic space that connected peoples, cultures, languages, and lives on and across the ocean's waters.

Download or read book Religious Resistance to Neoliberalism written by Keri Day and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-29 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious Resistance to Neoliberalism offers compelling and intersectional religious critiques of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is the normative rationality of contemporary global capitalism that orders people to live by the generalized principle of competition in all social spheres of life. Keri Day asserts that neoliberalism and its moral orientations consequently breed radical distrust, lovelessness, disconnection, and alienation within society. She argues that engaging black feminist and womanist religious perspectives with Jewish and Christian discourses offers more robust critiques of a neoliberal economy. Employing womanist and black feminist religious perspectives, this book provides six theoretical, theologically constructive arguments to challenge the moral fragmentation associated with global markets. It strives to envision a pragmatic politics of hope.

Download or read book Resisting Empire The Book of Revelation as Resistance written by C. Wess Daniels and published by Barclay Press. This book was released on 2019-10-07 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revelation speaks to the reality that we are caught in the fray of cosmic conflict. We are guilty. We've already been contaminated. But it's not too late for us to exit empire and enter the kingdom. We are yet both victim and victimizer. We have healing work to do, and we must take responsibility for the ways in which we have benefited from and been complicit with the religion of empire. This is the truth of Revelation. God wants to liberate us in body, heart, soul, and mind.Revelation reveals how scapegoating functions within empire to define its own boundaries and contours as being over and against wicked others.Revelation critiques wealth and shows that even in the first century there was prophetic critique against an economic system that was based on abundance for some, while exploiting the rest.Revelation demonstrates the importance of liturgy as something that forms people into the likeness of either empire or the lamb.Revelation reveals an alternative social order which becomes the center of resistance rooted in a vision of what the book describes as "the multitude."

Download or read book Resistance to Tyrants Obedience to God written by Dustin A. Gish and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2013-08-28 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Both reason and religion have been acknowledged by scholars to have had a profound impact on the foundation and formation of the American regime. But the significance, pervasiveness, and depth of that impact have also been disputed. While many have approached the American founding period with an interest in the influence of Enlightenment reason or Biblical religion, they have often assumed such influences to be exclusive, irreconcilable, or contradictory. Few scholarly works have sought to study the mutual influence of reason and religion as intertwined strands shaping the American historical and political experience at its founding. The purpose of the chapters in this volume, authored by a distinguished group of scholars in political science, intellectual history, literature, and philosophy, is to examine how this mutual influence was made manifest in the American Founding—especially in the writings, speeches, and thought of critical figures (Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Charles Carroll), and in later works by key interpreters of the American Founding (Alexis de Tocqueville and Abraham Lincoln). Taken as a whole, then, this volume does not attempt to explain away the potential opposition between religion and reason in the American mind of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries, but instead argues that there is a uniquely American perspective and political thought that emerges from this tension. The chapters gathered here, individually and collectively, seek to illuminate the animating affect of this tension on the political rhetoric, thought, and history of the early American period. By taking seriously and exploring the mutual influence of these two themes in creative tension, rather than seeing them as diametrically opposed or as mutually exclusive, this volume thus reveals how the pervasiveness and resonance of Biblical narratives and religion supported and infused Enlightened political discourse and action at the Founding, thereby articulating the complementarity of reason and religion during this critical period.

Download or read book Art Religion and Resistance in Post Communist Romania written by Maria Alina Asavei and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-10-22 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book illuminates the interconnections between politics and religion through the lens of artistic production, exploring how art inspired by religion functioned as a form of resistance, directed against both Romanian national communism (1960-1989) and, latterly, consumerist society and its global market. It investigates the critical, tactical and subversive employments of religious motifs and themes in contemporary art pieces that confront the religious ‘affair’ in post-communist Romania. In doing so, it addresses a key gap in previous scholarship, which has paid little attention to the relationship between religious art and political resistance in communist Central and South-East Europe.

Download or read book Slave Religion written by Albert J. Raboteau and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-10-07 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty-five years after its original publication, Slave Religion remains a classic in the study of African American history and religion. In a new chapter in this anniversary edition, author Albert J. Raboteau reflects upon the origins of the book, the reactions to it over the past twenty-five years, and how he would write it differently today. Using a variety of first and second-hand sources-- some objective, some personal, all riveting-- Raboteau analyzes the transformation of the African religions into evangelical Christianity. He presents the narratives of the slaves themselves, as well as missionary reports, travel accounts, folklore, black autobiographies, and the journals of white observers to describe the day-to-day religious life in the slave communities. Slave Religion is a must-read for anyone wanting a full picture of this "invisible institution."

Download or read book Unconditional Equality written by Ajay Skaria and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2016-02-08 with total page 547 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unconditional Equality examines Mahatma Gandhi’s critique of liberal ideas of freedom and equality and his own practice of a freedom and equality organized around religion. It reconceives satyagraha (passive resistance) as a politics that strives for the absolute equality of all beings. Liberal traditions usually affirm an abstract equality centered on some form of autonomy, the Kantian term for the everyday sovereignty that rational beings exercise by granting themselves universal law. But for Gandhi, such equality is an “equality of sword”—profoundly violent not only because it excludes those presumed to lack reason (such as animals or the colonized) but also because those included lose the power to love (which requires the surrender of autonomy or, more broadly, sovereignty). Gandhi professes instead a politics organized around dharma, or religion. For him, there can be “no politics without religion.” This religion involves self-surrender, a freely offered surrender of autonomy and everyday sovereignty. For Gandhi, the “religion that stays in all religions” is satyagraha—the agraha (insistence) on or of satya (being or truth). Ajay Skaria argues that, conceptually, satyagraha insists on equality without exception of all humans, animals, and things. This cannot be understood in terms of sovereignty: it must be an equality of the minor.

Download or read book Faith and Resistance in the Age of Trump written by De La Torre, Miguel A. and published by Orbis Books. This book was released on 2017-09-14 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many people of faith have identified the election of Donald Trump as a confessional crisis--a moment that calls into question the deepest meaning of our religious claims and values. This book gathers reflections by a range of scholars and activists from numerous religious and denominational perspectives to address that crisis. Among the themes treated are disability issues, the LGBT community, gender and race, immigration, the environment, peace, and poverty.

Download or read book Faith in Black Power written by Kerry Pimblott and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2017-01-20 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1969, nineteen-year-old Robert Hunt was found dead in the Cairo, Illinois, police station. The white authorities ruled the death a suicide, but many members of the African American community believed that Hunt had been murdered -- a sentiment that sparked rebellions and protests across the city. Cairo suddenly emerged as an important battleground for black survival in America and became a focus for many civil rights groups, including the NAACP. The United Front, a black power organization founded and led by Reverend Charles Koen, also mobilized -- thanks in large part to the support of local Christian congregations. In this vital reassessment of the impact of religion on the black power movement , Kerry Pimblott presents a nuanced discussion of the ways in which black churches supported and shaped the United Front. She deftly challenges conventional narratives of the de-Christianization of the movement, revealing that Cairoites embraced both old-time religion and revolutionary thought. Not only did the faithful fund the mass direct-action strategies of the United Front, but activists also engaged the literature on black theology, invited theologians to speak at their rallies, and sent potential leaders to train at seminaries. Pimblott also investigates the impact of female leaders on the organization and their influence on young activists, offering new perspectives on the hypermasculine image of black power. Based on extensive primary research, this groundbreaking book contributes to and complicates the history of the black freedom struggle in America. It not only adds a new element to the study of African American religion but also illuminates the relationship between black churches and black politics during this tumultuous era.

Download or read book Kenyan Christian Queer written by Adriaan van Klinken and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2019-11-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Popular narratives cite religion as the driving force behind homophobia in Africa, portraying Christianity and LGBT expression as incompatible. Without denying Christianity’s contribution to the stigma, discrimination, and exclusion of same-sex-attracted and gender-variant people on the continent, Adriaan van Klinken presents an alternative narrative, foregrounding the ways in which religion also appears as a critical site of LGBT activism. Taking up the notion of “arts of resistance,” Kenyan, Christian, Queer presents four case studies of grassroots LGBT activism through artistic and creative expressions—including the literary and cultural work of Binyavanga Wainaina, the “Same Love” music video produced by gay gospel musician George Barasa, the Stories of Our Lives anthology project, and the LGBT-affirming Cosmopolitan Affirming Church. Through these case studies, Van Klinken demonstrates how Kenyan traditions, black African identities, and Christian beliefs and practices are being navigated, appropriated, and transformed in order to allow for queer Kenyan Christian imaginations. Transdisciplinary in scope and poignantly intimate in tone, Kenyan, Christian, Queer opens up critical avenues for rethinking the nature and future of the relationship between Christianity and queer activism in Kenya and elsewhere in Africa.

Download or read book Mystical Resistance written by Ellen Davina Haskell and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mystical Resistance reveals the kabbalistic masterpiece Sefer ha-Zohar, commonly known as the Zohar, as a rich source for understanding Jewish resistance to Christian authority. Composed against a backdrop of rising religious intolerance, the Zohar's subversive mystical narratives critique the changing relationship between Western Europe's Christian majority and its Jewish minority.

Download or read book Relation and Resistance written by Sailaja Krishnamurti and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2021-09-30 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Canada, women’s bodies are often at the centre of debates about religious pluralism, multiculturalism, and secularism. Women have long played a critical role in building and maintaining diasporic religious communities and networks, and they have also been catalysts for change and transformation within religious groups and the wider community. Relation and Resistance explores the stories and lives of racialized women connected with religious diaspora communities in Canada. Contributors from across disciplines show how women are conceptualizing traditions in transformative ways, challenging prevailing assumptions about diasporic religion as nostalgically entrenched in the past. The collected essays include chapters on feminist and queer women thinking critically about Hindu and Muslim identities and beliefs and challenging anti-Black racism and settler colonialism; Afro-Caribbean and Métis writers using literature to explore religion and belonging; the impact of women’s participation in Japanese, Chinese, and Pakistani transnational religious organizations; and marriage, migration, and gender equality in the Punjabi Sikh and Malayali Christian communities. The volume closes with a chapter exploring Métis diasporic experience and inviting readers to think critically about diasporic religion on Indigenous land. An innovative and timely volume, Relation and Resistance reveals that a deeper understanding of women’s experiences of displacement, migration, race, and gender is critical to the study of religion in Canada.

Download or read book Sacred Resistance written by Ginger Gaines-Cirelli and published by Abingdon Press. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the midst of polarized communities and nations, religious leaders across the theological spectrum are seeking help with how to respond and lead in troubled times. The need for courage to speak out and act is ever-present, because every generation faces a new set of fears and troubles. Author Ginger Gaines-Cirelli pastors a church in the heart of Washington DC, adjacent to the White House, which actively works to bring justice and help for marginalized communities, refugees and immigrants, and the endangered earth. She inspires and leads this work through preaching and by organizing and developing strong leaders, deeply rooted in a well-developed theological understanding. Pastoral warmth and compassion characterize the recommended practices. Sacred Resistance addresses these questions, among others: • When Christians see that something is wrong in our nation or community, how and when should we respond? • When we see multiple instances of 'wrong', how do we choose which ones to address? • How can pastors and other leaders faithfully take risks without violating relationships with the congregation or denomination? • What historical, biblical, and theological safety nets can be relied on? • How can we take care of ourselves and one another, so that our ministries and lives are sustained?

Download or read book How to Think written by Alan Jacobs and published by Currency. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Absolutely splendid . . . essential for understanding why there is so much bad thinking in political life right now." —David Brooks, New York Times How to Think is a contrarian treatise on why we’re not as good at thinking as we assume—but how recovering this lost art can rescue our inner lives from the chaos of modern life. As a celebrated cultural critic and a writer for national publications like The Atlantic and Harper’s, Alan Jacobs has spent his adult life belonging to communities that often clash in America’s culture wars. And in his years of confronting the big issues that divide us—political, social, religious—Jacobs has learned that many of our fiercest disputes occur not because we’re doomed to be divided, but because the people involved simply aren’t thinking. Most of us don’t want to think. Thinking is trouble. Thinking can force us out of familiar, comforting habits, and it can complicate our relationships with like-minded friends. Finally, thinking is slow, and that’s a problem when our habits of consuming information (mostly online) leave us lost in the spin cycle of social media, partisan bickering, and confirmation bias. In this smart, endlessly entertaining book, Jacobs diagnoses the many forces that act on us to prevent thinking—forces that have only worsened in the age of Twitter, “alternative facts,” and information overload—and he also dispels the many myths we hold about what it means to think well. (For example: It’s impossible to “think for yourself.”) Drawing on sources as far-flung as novelist Marilynne Robinson, basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain, British philosopher John Stuart Mill, and Christian theologian C.S. Lewis, Jacobs digs into the nuts and bolts of the cognitive process, offering hope that each of us can reclaim our mental lives from the impediments that plague us all. Because if we can learn to think together, maybe we can learn to live together, too.

Download or read book Survival and Resistance in Evangelical America written by Crawford Gribben and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-23 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last thirty years, conservative evangelicals have been moving to the Northwest of the United States, where they hope to resist the impact of secular modernity and to survive the breakdown of society that they anticipate. These believers have often given up on the politics of the Christian Right, adopting strategies of hibernation while developing the communities and institutions from which a new America might one day emerge. Their activity coincides with the promotion by prominent survivalist authors of a program of migration to the "American Redoubt," a region encompassing Idaho, Montana, parts of eastern Washington and Oregon, and Wyoming, as a haven in which to endure hostile social change or natural disaster and in which to build a new social order. These migration movements have independent origins, but they overlap in their influences and aspirations, working in tandem to offer a vision of the present in which Christian values must be defended as American society is rebuilt according to biblical law. This book examines the origins, evolution, and cultural reach of this little-noted migration and considers what it might tell us about the future of American evangelicalism. Drawing on Calvinist theology, the social theory of Christian Reconstruction, and libertarian politics, these believers are projecting significant soft power. Their books are promoted by leading mainstream publishers and listed as New York Times bestsellers. Their strategy is gaining momentum, making an impact in local political and economic life, while being repackaged for a wider audience in publications by a broader coalition of conservative commentators and in American mass culture. This survivalist evangelical subculture recognizes that they have lost the culture war - but another kind of conflict is beginning.

Download or read book Hamlet s Choice written by Peter Lake and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-02 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An illuminating account of how Shakespeare worked through the tensions of Queen Elizabeth's England in two canon-defining plays Conspiracies and revolts simmered beneath the surface of Queen Elizabeth's reign. England was riven with tensions created by religious conflict and the prospect of dynastic crisis and regime change. In this rich, incisive account, Peter Lake reveals how in Titus Andronicus and Hamlet Shakespeare worked through a range of Tudor anxieties, including concerns about the nature of justice, resistance, and salvation. In both Hamlet and Titus the princes are faced with successions forged under questionable circumstances and they each have a choice: whether or not to resort to political violence. The unfolding action, Lake argues, is best understood in terms of contemporary debates about the legitimacy of resistance and the relation between religion and politics. Relating the plays to their broader political and polemical contexts, Lake sheds light on the nature of revenge, resistance, and religion in post-Reformation England.