SEAGULLS! ON MARTIN HÄGGLUND'S THIS LIFE: SECULAR FAITH AND SPIRITUAL FREEDOM

In this review essay, I examine Martin Hägglund's This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, a book that argues on behalf of democratic socialism on the basis of an atheistic confrontation with the fact of our mortality. Hägglund's book includes readings of Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Karl Marx, and Martin Luther King Jr. and is best assessed as a literary and philosophical, rather than historical, study of the relation between mortality and social action. Simply put, Hägglund believes that, from the standpoint of an atheistic confrontation with our mortality, our time itself should be our ultimate measure of value. He furthermore believes that democratic socialism is the political and economic form that most naturally follows from this, allowing us to honor, defend, and enhance one another's mortal time and freedom to make choices—and that, by comparison with atheism, religion offers only the false coin of otherworldly salvation. Although sympathizing with Hägglund's existential and political orientations, I criticize his account of religion, which I find to be historically weak. But I also criticize his approach to the problem of valuation, or the issue of how we make choices in relation to our limited time. Whereas Hägglund believes that mortal creatures like ourselves must make choices in a spirit of commitment—the “secular faith” of his subtitle—I observe that, despite our mortality, we humans make our choices in a variety of psychological states, and that asking us to occupy only one such state—one of zealous resolve—actually undermines our “spiritual freedom,” another one of Hägglund's key terms.     

Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church and the Transformation of America

C.L. (Clarence LaVaughn) Franklin was probably one of the mostinfluential black preachers of the civil rights era and undoubtedlyone of the most famous black preachers of his generation. Asthe pastor of New Bethel Church in Detroit from 1946 to 1979,he was a key figure in the northern freedom struggle, an advisorto a young Martin Luther King, Jr., and a mentor to Jesse Jackson.He was an immensely popular gospel singer on par with the legendaryMahalia Jackson and Clara Ward, with whom he     

Martin Luther King,Jr, and the Possibilities of Democratic Politics

Abstract

This essay moves beyond the limits of the post-September 11 debate over national security versus civil liberties to consider again the possibilities of democratic politics. It briefly surveys three Protestant interpretations of American democracy that have dominated recent debates. These interpretations leave us with the dilemma of having to choose between democratic dissent and the political pursuit of the good. Such a dilemma begs for other interpretations. Martin Luther King, Jr, stands as an obvious but neglected resource. His interpretation of democracy reconciles the pursuit of the good, a substantive politics, with diversity and dissent. This argument requires the retrieval or reconstruction of King's interpretation, which involves an examination of King's religious convictions as well as his engagement in and reflection on the political arena. The essay concludes by suggesting how King's interpretation informs contemporary debates and shapes Christian practice.     

“A Different Kind of Theo-Politics: Abraham Joshua Heschel,the Prophets and the Civil Rights Movement”

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the sharp differences in the understanding of the Hebrew prophets by theologians, Jewish and Protestant, in Germany and the United States, with a particular focus on their invocation of prophetic teachings in relation to social and political movements. The sharp denigrations of the prophets – described as ecstatics (Gunkel) or rural naifs (Troeltsch) rendered the prophets useless as figures of inspiration in Germany in relation to racism, colonialism, and WWI. By contrast, the prophets have played a crucial role in American civil thought, especially in the Civil Rights Movement. The distinctive and influential interpretation of prophetic consciousness developed by the German-American Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel is examined for its parallels with the prophetic theology of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the political ramifications of Heschel's link between prophetic revelation and political leadership.     

Radical (Evangelical) Democracy: The Dreams and Nightmares of Martin Luther King,Jr. and Antonio Negri

Abstract

This essay critically examines the theories of radical democracy offered by Martin Luther King, Jr.'s vision of the beloved community and Antonio Negri's vision of the multitude. The radical democratic visions of King and Negri continue to critically inform progressive reflections on democratic theory and propel new dreams of democracy. Despite their similarities, the differences between Negri and King are substantial. I argue that Negri's dream of the multitude and King's dream of beloved community have been shaped by different conceptions of radical democracy. While Negri works out of a tradition of Italian Marxism, King works within a critical tradition of prophetic evangelicalism. Thus, the political task, according to King, is to translate Jesus' teaching of the Kingdom of God into a beloved community on earth. King's creative negotiation of transcendence and history provides the requisite theological and political resources to develop a truly transcendent and immanent vision of a radical democratic society that is attentive to the demands and dignity of "all God's children."     

President Obama,the Bible,and Political Rhetoric

Abstract

How has President Obama made use of the Bible in his political rhetoric, especially as it relates to public policy debates? This article addresses Obama's religious origins, his work as a community organizer in Chicago, his coming to Christian faith under the leadership of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and the development of his understanding regarding the relationship between faith and politics. In particular President Obama has emphasized the notion that we are all our brothers' and sisters' keepers. He also stresses the present generation of black Americans as "the Joshua Generation." The article considers President Obama's hermeneutics, as well as the important context of the black church for his own use of Scripture. The lenses of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Reinhold Niebuhr are also addressed as they relate to Obama's use of Scripture in political rhetoric.     

Street naming and the politics of belonging: spatial injustices in the toponymic commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr

Although the critical turn in place name study recognizes the central and contested place that toponyms hold in people's lives and identity struggles, little work has explicitly analyzed place naming rights in terms of social justice, citizenship, and belonging. We introduce readers to the naming of streets for slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr and use two brief case studies from the southeastern USA (Statesboro, Georgia and Greenville, North Carolina) to discuss the barriers that hinder the creation of a landscape that truly reflects the teachings of King. Naming opponents, sometimes with the (un)witting cooperation of black activists, impose spatial, scalar limits on the rights of African Americans to participate in the street naming process and to appropriate the identity of streets outside of their neighborhoods, even though challenging historically entrenched patterns of racial segregation and marginalization is exactly the purpose of many street naming campaigns. The case of King streets prompts us to think about place naming as a mechanism of spatial (in)justice, demonstrating the fundamental role that geography plays in constituting and structuring the processes of discrimination or equality.     

Democratic Civility and the Dangers of Niceness

Contemporary debates about the virtue of civility oscillate between anxious calls for more of it in contemporary politics, as a panacea for all manner of religious-political conflict, and wholesale debunkings of civility talk, as an ideological fog intended to induce conformity to the terms of unjust social arrangements. I argue that this oscillation should come as no surprise, given the term's fraught theological and political associations in the history of modern ethical thought. This history left civility with an ambivalent legacy, one associated with democratic respect on the one hand, and hypocrisy and deception, on the other. Through a reading of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” I try to rescue civility from this oscillation, by explicating it as an ancillary virtue: the part of justice that disposes citizens to confront unjust relationships in ways that leave open the possibility of relational repair. When explicated with due care and set in an interactive context of other virtues – including courage, prudence and toleration – civility can be distinguished from its semblance, niceness. This distinction helps us understand civility, properly understood, as neither a cure-all for democratic conflict nor an ideological device of conflict suppression, but rather as an ancillary, but important, excellence of character helping to sustain democratic relationships of mutual recognition.     

The Dark Tree: Jazz and the Community Arts in Los Angeles

In her 2005 article, "The Long Civil Rights Movement and thePolitical Uses of the Past," Jacquelyn Dowd Hall called on scholarsto complicate the story of civil rights by looking beyond atraditional narrative that begins in 1954, ends in 1965, focuseson the South, and features Martin Luther King, Jr. as the leaderof a single-voiced chorus of interracial activists who overcameracial barriers nonviolently. The recent wave of histories aboutarts movements in African-American communities (e.g., Pointfrom Which Creation Begins: The Black Artists’ Group ofSt. Louis, by Benjamin Looker, 2004,     

In Praise of Heresy: Hus,Luther, and the Ethos of Reformation

Reformation is confined neither chronologically nor geographically but is best understood as a series of efforts to recover particular visions of Christian faith and practice. These endeavours always have potential for religious and social change. The martyred Bohemian priest Jan Hus (1372–1415) has often been characterised as a forerunner of the European Reformations and Martin Luther frequently referred to him. Past scholarship has evaluated the relation between Hussite history and the Reformation, Hus and Luther, in a variety of ways arguing either for organic connections or dismissing the possibility of causal connections. I argue that what Hus and Luther shared was not theology, common principles of reform, or visions of religious practice as much as a particular ethos. That ethos can best be understood within the idea of heresy. This article examines what Hus and Luther were striving to achieve, assesses the assumptions about Hus current in the sixteenth century, evaluates the Hus myth, and argues for a reconsideration and rehabilitation of heresy, a concept that epitomises the shared ethos that made Hus relevant to sixteenth‐century reformers.     

Response to Langdon Gilkey's Inaugural Address at the Niebuhr Society, 22 November 2003 in Atlanta

Abstract

After applauding Professor Gilkey for focusing attention on Reinhold Niebuhr's book, Moral Man and Immoral Society, I framed my response by setting forth seven salient elements of Niebuhr's political theory. After affirming Gilkey's portrayal of the differences between our contemporary situation and that which Niebuhr addressed in the 1930s, I focused on a third characteristic of Niebuhr's thought that Gilkey neglected to mention, namely, the impact of his thought on African-American activists in their struggle for racial justice in the United States. That impact mainly pertained to his perceptive analysis of power conflicts among social groups and especially the societal power of racism. Niebuhr's sensitivity to that problem was heightened during his ministry in Detroit and thereafter. Thus, Martin Luther King, Jr, his protégé, Jesse Jackson and many others came to view Niebuhr as a major source of inspiration for their struggle. But, in spite of Niebuhr's appreciation of Gandhi and his support of King's non-violent resistance approach, they disagreed about the moral value of pacifism. Most importantly, I join with another African-American scholar in pointing out Niebuhr's uncritical paternalistic assumptions about African Americans and their struggle.     

Reform and Resistance: A Consideration of Space,Scale and Strategy in Legal Challenges to Welfare Reform

This paper examines the law as a mechanism for resisting neoliberal policy change through a consideration of legal challenges to welfare reform in the United States. The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 marked a sea change in both the content and scale of the American social welfare system. It has entailed a downward shift in policy creation and administration from the national to the state and local level, and conveys a heavy emphasis on the “responsibility” of single mothers to engage in waged labor. In addition to changing the scale at which the social welfare system operates, welfare reform has changed how the more oppressive aspects of this policy might be resisted. While some legal advocates are challenging welfare reform by working within the “policy scale”, others are invoking national level protections by appealing to Civil Rights legislation. By working against the scale imposed by neoliberal social policy, Civil Rights legislation presents the possibility for advocates to “re‐scale responsibility” from that of single mothers to submit to wage labor in order to survive, to the government’s responsibility to protect its citizens against identity‐based discrimination. Herein, I argue both that the law can serve as an important mechanism for re‐focusing the scale of resistance in efforts to challenge oppressive social policy; and that even in the face of policy that imposes a local scale, the national level holds potential as an important terrain of resistance.     

Crisis,Continuity and Change: Neoliberalism,the Left and the Future of Capitalism

Abstract: This essay's point of departure is the coincident economic and environmental “crises” of our time. I locate both in the dynamics of capital accumulation on a world‐scale, drawing on the ideas of Marx, Karl Polanyi and James O’Connor. I ask whether the recent profusion of “crisis talk” in the public domain presents an opportunity for progressive new ideas to take hold now that “neoliberalism” has seemingly been de‐legitimated. My answer is that a “post‐neoliberal” future is probably a long way off. I make my case in two stages and at two geographical scales. First, I examine the British social formation as currently constituted and explain why even a leading neoliberal state is failing to reform its ways. Second, I then scale‐up from the domestic level to international affairs. I examine cross‐border emissions trading—arguably the policy tool for mitigating the very real prospects of significant climate change this century. The overall conclusion is this: even though the “first” and “second” contradictions of capital have manifested themselves together and at a global level, there are currently few prospects for systemic reform (never mind revolution) led by a new, twenty‐first century “red‐green” Left.     

Globalisation Lived Locally: A Labour Geography Perspective on Control,Conflict and Response among Workers in Kerala

Abstract: Supported by the labour geography framework, I analyse how spatial practices of labour shape the economic geography of capitalism, by looking into a model not at a global but at a very local scale of organisation and showing its effectiveness while confronting social actors organised at global or extra‐local scales. Questioning global stereotypes on economic responses to globalisation, I argue that labour becomes actively involved in the very process of globalisation and the expansion of capital, empirically demonstrating the relevance of this in the globalisation literature. I deal with one region—Kerala—and processes in its labour markets, taking the case of apparel workers in an export‐promoting industrial park.     

Territorializing Armenians: geo‐texts,and political imaginaries in French‐occupied Cilicia, 1919–1922

This article examines the petitions, letters, opinion pieces and scholarly works that Armenian intellectuals generated to convince French decision‐makers to carve an Armenian nation‐state out of Cilicia (present‐day southern Turkey). This colonial encounter took place within the process by which European powers dismembered the defeated Ottoman state following the First World War. These “geo‐texts”—textual representations of territory and population—were strategic attempts at adjusting the parameters of French imperialism, and thus tapped into French notions of history and ethnology to make a case for an Armenian state. First, I show how Armenians adopted and inflected French epistemologies to depict their ancient homeland. Then, I trace the shift from a representation based on historical commonalities between the Armenians and French to one that stressed the ethnological specificities of Armenian nation and territory. Finally, I argue that the static notions of territory, text and population that lobbyists produced continue to fuel scholarly debate over the confessional and ethnic make‐up of Cilicia. This study on “geo‐texts” provides insights into how, at a certain historical moment, differences and similarities among people, both within a society and between societies, are established in text.     

Apocalypse and the Spirit of Revolution

Abstract

The article identifies some typical traits of apocalyptical thinking by analysing the approach of Martin Luther and Thomas Müntzer to apocalyptical texts. They both applied apocalyptical perspectives on historical events but they had conflicting views concerning its social and political consequences. The author asks whether the Reformation may be called an apocalypti-cal movement and why the Reformers are split on the question of political revolt. After studying the conflict between Müntzer and Luther in some detail, he proceeds to Engels’ analysis of Müntzer in the aftermath of the revolution in 1848, seeking an answer to the following question: How and to what extent have the biblical apocalypse and apocalyptical movements contributed to the formation of Marxist theory of revolutions?     

Bureaucracies of Blood and Belonging: Documents,HIV‐positive Youth and the State in South Africa

In response to its constitutional commitments and social welfare provisions in the era of democracy, the post‐apartheid South African state is increasingly called upon to provide for the lives and livelihoods of its citizens. These demands have intensified amid escalating joblessness and the highest numbers of people living with HIV worldwide. Over the past decade, antiretroviral treatment (ART) has been incorporated into an ever‐expanding welfare bureaucracy, in which access to state assistance is mediated by the collection and monitoring of biometric, bureaucratic data. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic research in the Eastern Cape, this article explores how state documents bring young people on ART into an ambiguous relationship with the state — one that is at once subordinating and enabling. While social research on ART addresses both the empowering and coercive aspects of treatment taking, less attention has been given to how these modes of participation might be mutually constitutive. In this article, the authors examine how the same technologies that discipline youth on ART might also support and protect them; how welfare dependencies entail paradoxical forms of agency; and how the state's ability to control and to ‘care for’ citizens might be reciprocally dependent.     

Disaster Capitalism and the Quick,Quick, Slow Unravelling of Animal Life

Sea otters have barely survived centuries of colonial and capitalist development. To understand why, I examine how they have been oriented in capitalist social relations in Alaska, and with what effects. I follow sea otters through three overlapping political economic episodes, each of which shapes the next: colonial expansion and the fur trade; petro‐capitalism and the negligent neoliberal state, culminating in the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill; and finally, spill cleanup and “green” capitalism, when sea otters are produced as data points and spectacle. In each episode, I describe (1) sea otters’ orientation in relation to capitalism and the state, and (2) the nature and temporality of violence and ecological loss that attends their orientation. In conversation with theorisations of extinction as a “slow unravelling”, I suggest animal life can unravel less slowly than haltingly—quick, quick, slow—and that the unravelling and animals’ orientation in capitalism are co‐constituted.     

Martin Luther in Nineteenth‐Century France

French‐language readers had little available about Martin Luther before the French Revolution. A few Catholic authors had written about him from a confessional perspective. At the beginning of the nineteenth century interest was aroused by an essay competition, but the topic had to do with political influence rather than with Luther's life. In 1835 there began a series of publications which addressed the life of the reformer, and included vast amounts of quoted material from the letters and table talk. One of these early works, by Michelet, was from a Romantic but nonsectarian perspective, that by Merle was Romantic and providential, while another by Audin was from an arch‐Catholic point of view. Over the course of the century both Catholics and Protestants continued to write essays about Luther, from confessional points of view, but there was a growth of works which achieved a greater degree of non‐partisanship, even if appreciative of his contributions. Toward the end of the century there was a treatment of Luther which recognised explicitly that he belonged to a bygone era which was increasingly inaccessible to contemporary French readers.     

Eine handgreifliche Geschichtslüge. Wie Martin Luther zum Gegner des copernicanischen Weltsystems gemacht wurde.

Martin Luther has been severely criticized for an offhand remark about Copernicus. In the most frequently cited version of this statement, Luther is alledged to have branded Copernicus as a fool who will turn the whole science of astronomy upside down. This disparaging judgment on Luther prevails in many publications by respected historians of science of the 20th century, although since the early thirties, it has been convincingly demonstrated that the famous citation from Luther's table talk is next to worthless as an historical source, that Luther never referred to Copernicus or to the heliocentric world system in all of his voluminous writings, and that there is no indication that Luther ever suppressed the Copernican viewpoint. His attitude towards Copernicus was indifference or ignorance, but not hostility. In this paper, it is shown that the story of Luther's anti‐Copernicanism emerged in the second half of the 19th century. It was invented by Franz Beckmann and Franz Hipler, two Prussian Catholic historians who were engaged in the conflict between the German government under Bismarck and the Catholic Church (Kulturkampf), and it was disseminated by influential German and American historians like Leopold Prowe, Ernst Zinner, and Andrew D. White. In the second half of the 20th century, many historians of science relied on the authority of these authors, rather than studying the sources or the secondary literature in which it has been proved that Luther's anti‐Copernicanism is an outright falsification of history.