Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 279-283
Author(s):  
John W. Compton
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Foreign Aid ◽  
Political Behavior ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Free Market ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Institutional Resources ◽  
White Evangelicals

Many present-day Protestant congregations are deeply involved in humanitarian projects—from feeding the homeless to promoting interracial and interfaith understanding. Yet when it comes to political behavior, white evangelicals remain overwhelmingly opposed to programs that benefit the less fortunate, or that run counter to the free market ethos of the modern Republican party. During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, a trio of failed reform campaigns by evangliecal elites—targeting climate change, foreign aid, and immigration, respectively—underscored the fragile nature of evangelical religious authority. In contrast to their postwar predecessors in the Protestant mainline, evangelical elites possess neither the intrinsic religious authority nor the institutional resources necessary to shape the political convictions of their followers. Instead, they serve at the pleasure of the rank and file.

Foreign Aid

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Blodgett Bermeo
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Optimal Design ◽  
Foreign Aid ◽  
Aid Effectiveness ◽  
Future Research ◽  
The Political ◽  
Global Challenges ◽  
Development Institutions ◽  
Micro Level ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter reviews scholarship on the political economy of foreign aid, identifies key gaps in the current literature, and offers suggestions for bridging across dividing lines to advance future research agendas. It highlights potential synergies between the study of foreign aid allocation and aid effectiveness. The analysis draws attention to the need to synthesize across studies of micro-level and macro-level outcomes to understand the full political and economic impacts of aid. Reviewing the literature on differences across types of aid donors shows the need to better understand the relationship between democratic and non-democratic donors and to further study optimal design of development institutions to help meet global challenges addressed through foreign aid, such as climate change and pandemic disease.

Why the Prophetic Torch Wasn’t Passed

2020 ◽  
pp. 249-278
Author(s):  
John W. Compton
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Political Behavior ◽  
The Political ◽  
Limited Ability ◽  
The Face ◽  
Conservative Evangelical ◽  
White Evangelicals ◽  
Political Right

This chapter examines the fate of liberal and moderate evangelicals from the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s. It argues that moderate evangelicals—an ascendant force in the 1970s—were marginalized less by the rise of so-called “values” issues than by economic anxieties and a broader white reaction against federal civil rights initiatives. That white evangelicals drifted to the political Right for essentially secular reasons—and often in the face of counterpressures from prominent evangelical leaders and institutions—provides further confirmation of religion’s limited ability to shape political behavior in an age of religious autonomy. In short, it is the weakness of evangelical institutions, not their strength, that best explains why the term “conservative evangelical” has come to seem redundant.

Black Elephants in the Room

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corey D. Fields
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Political Behavior ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Black Identity ◽  
The Political ◽  
Dynamic Relationship ◽  
Black Person ◽  
Racial Context ◽  
The Everyday

What do people think of when they hear about an African American Republican? Are they heroes fighting against the expectation that all blacks must vote democratic? Are they Uncle Toms or sellouts, serving as traitors to their race? What is it really like to be a black person in the Republican Party? This book considers how race structures the political behavior of African American Republicans and discusses the dynamic relationship between race and political behavior in the purported “post-racial” context of US politics. Drawing on vivid first-person accounts, the book sheds light on the different ways black identity structures African Americans' membership in the Republican Party. Moving past rhetoric and politics, the everyday people working to reconcile their commitment to black identity with their belief in Republican principles can be seen. And at the end, the importance of understanding both the meanings African Americans attach to racial identity and the political contexts in which those meanings are developed and expressed is illuminated.

The Problem of Dualistic Worldviews in a Season of Climate Change

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 216-234
Author(s):  
Sungho Choi ◽  
Ji Young Jung
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
United States ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Free Market ◽  
The United States ◽  
Critical Discussion ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Free Market Economy ◽  
Political Bias ◽  
Political Ideologies

Abstract This article addresses the dualistic worldview surrounding climate change to be found among evangelicals in the United States. Since the majority of the traditionalist American evangelicals identify themselves with the Republican party, their views towards climate change tends to be highly skeptical: they tend to favour policies that protect the free-market economy. The Cornwall Alliance and its evangelical constituency, in particular, has provided a ground for a critical discussion concerning an association of Christian faith with conservative political ideologies from a particular biblical viewpoint. The key framework in the Alliance’s theological claims against environmentalism in general is an assumed dualism. This interpretive lens increases political bias/prejudice thereby impeding constructive discussion and a much needed co-operation between parties in the era of climate change.

Denying Climate Change Is Denying Health

Pained ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 25-28
Author(s):  
Michael D. Stein ◽  
Sandro Galea
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
American Culture ◽  
The Political ◽  
Address Climate Change ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
The Future

This chapter explores the politics of climate change and how politics can affect people’s health. In recent years, global environmental climate change has become a third rail in American culture, dividing people along political lines. The Republican Party espouses a range of positions, from the denial of climate change to denial of people’s role in causing the problem. The Democratic Party falls more in line with the science on this issue, which is largely settled. There is little disagreement among scientists that the earth is getting warmer. Hence, the political argument is not really about the science as much as it is about priorities. The Republican Party prioritizes deregulation and corporate interests over the potential disruption of these interests caused by the structural changes necessary to address climate change. The Democratic Party, for its part, has increasingly chosen to prioritize the future of the planet over the unfettered primacy of markets. Ultimately, climate change threatens health. When people recognize that climate change matters for health, they open the door for health to become an organizing principle in addressing this issue. Indeed, if people do not act on climate change, they are compromising their health.

Piketty and the Gilded Age

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 230-234
Author(s):  
Monica Prasad
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Free Market ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Progressive Movement ◽  
Current Period ◽  
Twenty First Century

After Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, comparing our era to the Gilded Age is no longer just a metaphor: Piketty argues that we never actually left the Gilded Age. The mid-twentieth-century period of lower inequality was a massive and perhaps unrepeatable exception to what Piketty sees as the natural tendencies toward inequality inherent in capitalist societies. But comparing our current period of relentless cuts in taxes and rising inequality to the Gilded Age shows why our period cannot be a repeat of the Gilded Age: the Gilded Age itself led to so many transformations to capitalism that inequality no longer leads to the political outrage that could anchor a broad-based progressive movement. The Gilded Age led to policies that made capitalism bearable, and that is precisely what is leading now to a situation in which Americans identify their success with the free market, and resist policies to lower inequality.

The Political and Aesthetic Power of the Everyday in Beckett's Happy Days

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-66
Author(s):  
Julie Bates
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
First Century ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Algerian War ◽  
Material Resources ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Last Man ◽  
Second World

Happy Days is contemporaneous with a number of seminal contributions to the concept of the everyday in postwar France. This essay suggests that the increasingly constrained verbal and physical routines performed by its protagonist Winnie constitute a portrait of the everyday, and goes on to trace the affinities between Beckett's portrait and several formulations of the concept, with particular emphasis on the pronounced gendering of the everyday in many of these theories. The essay suggests the aerial bombings of the Second World War and methods of torture during the Algerian War as potential influences for Beckett's play, and draws a comparison with Marlen Haushofer's 1963 novel The Wall, which reimagines the Romantic myth of The Last Man as The Last Woman. It is significant, however, that the cataclysmic event that precedes the events of Happy Days remains unnamed. This lack of specificity, I suggest, is constitutive of the menace of the play, and has ensured that the political as well as aesthetic power of Happy Days has not dated. Indeed, the everyday of its sentinel figure posted in a blighted landscape continues to articulate the fears of audiences, for whom the play may resonate today as a staging of twenty-first century anxiety about environmental crisis. The essay concludes that in Happy Days we encounter an isolated female protagonist who contrives from scant material resources and habitual bodily rhythms a shelter within a hostile environment, who generates, in other words, an everyday despite the shattering of the social and temporal framework that conventionally underpin its formation. Beckett's play in this way demonstrates the political as well as aesthetic power of the everyday in a time of crisis.

Speaking for Islam

2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 110-127
Author(s):  
Abdoulaye Sounaye
Keyword(s):  
Common Good ◽  
The State ◽  
Institutional Transformation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
The Common ◽  
Religion And State ◽  
Islamic Values ◽  
French Model

Unexpectedly, one of the marking features of democratization in Niger has been the rise of a variety of Islamic discourses. They focus on the separation between religion and the state and, more precisely, the way it is manifested through the French model of laïcité, which democratization has adopted in Niger. For many Muslim actors, laïcité amounts to a marginalization of Islamic values and a negation of Islam. This article present three voices: the Collaborators, the Moderates, and the Despisers. Each represents a trend that seeks to influence the state’s political and ideological makeup. Although the ulama in general remain critical vis-à-vis the state’s political and institutional transformation, not all of them reject the principle of the separation between religion and state. The Collaborators suggest cooperation between the religious authority and the political one, the Moderates insist on the necessity for governance to accommodate the people’s will and visions, and the Despisers reject the underpinning liberalism that voids religious authority and demand a total re-Islamization. I argue that what is at stake here is less the separation between state and religion than the modality of this separation and its impact on religious authority. The targets, tones, and justifications of the discourses I explore are evidence of the limitations of a democratization project grounded in laïcité. Thus in place of a secular democratization, they propose a conservative democracy based on Islam and its demands for the realization of the common good.

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