scholarly journals Interfaith Community Organizing Emerging Theological and Organizational Challenges

2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 398-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brad Fulton ◽  
Richard L. Wood
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Community Organizing ◽  
The United States ◽  
Organizational Challenges ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
Faith Based ◽  
Local Institution ◽  
American Society ◽  
Interfaith Community ◽  
Work Done

Abstract Interfaith work in the United States takes diverse forms: from grass-roots collaboration on projects such as feeding the homeless, to locally-sponsored interfaith dialogues, collaborations sponsored by national denominational bodies and shared work on federal ‘faith-based initiatives’. This article profiles the characteristics and dynamics of a particular type of interfaith work, done under the rubric of ‘broad-based’, ‘faith-based’ or ‘congregation-based’ community organizing. For reasons detailed below, we term this form of interfaith and religious-secular collaboration ‘institution-based community organizing’. By drawing on results from a national survey of all local institution-based community organizations active in the United States in 2011, this article documents the significance of the field, its broadly interfaith profile, how it incorporates religious practices into organizing, and the opportunities and challenges that religious diversity presents to its practitioners and to North American society.1

scholarly journals Taming Prophetic Religion? Faith-Based Activism and Welfare Provision

2009 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-95
Author(s):  
Richard Wood
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Service ◽  
Community Organizing ◽  
Service Provision ◽  
The United States ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Faith Based ◽  
The Us ◽  
Faith Based Institutions ◽  
Prophetic Religion

AbstractThis article examines the current debate in the United States (primarily) and Britain regarding government-funded social service provision via faith-based institutions. By highlighting the tension between the 'priestly' and 'prophetic' roles of public religion, it argues for the critical importance of protecting religion's prophetic role even as society moves toward more extensive public financing of priestly social service provision. The article first outlines contemporary prophetic religion in the United States, especially faith-based community organizing (also known as broad-based community organizing) efforts, emphasizing three facets of the field: its scale, its role in building social capital, the issues it has addressed. Secondly, the article argues that, despite the narrow partisan tenor of recent faith-based social service provision in the US, it may have redeeming features that new leaders will want to preserve. However, H. R. Niebuhr's (1951) analysis of the relationship between religion and culture is invoked to characterize four key tensions between priestly and prophetic religion that may be exacerbated by governmental funding. The conclusion outlines several approaches through which practitioners, policymakers, the press, and scholars can help society maximize the benefits and minimize the risks of such funding.

Grass-Roots Activism in the United States: Global Implications?

1983 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 447-474 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chadwick F. Alger ◽  
Saul Mendlovitz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Community Organizing ◽  
Life Style ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
Political Left ◽  
Global Affairs ◽  
Significant Discovery ◽  
Vague Identity

Interviews/dialogues with some 35 grassroots activists in the United States sought answers to these questions: (1) Why do globalists and localists who are active on similar issues work in isolation from each other? (2) Do they have common concerns? (3) Would they have more influence on centers of economic and political power if they worked together? (4) If they wished to work together, how might this be done? The authors, specialists on international/global affairs, conducted the interviews/dialogues to learn about the perspectives and activities of local activists. Five main approaches to social transformation were encountered: the ideological and political left; community-organizing, neighborhood empowerment groups; life-style change; interpersonal transformation, including feminism, relations with children and sexual preferences; and spiritual transformation. Among the findings are the following: (1) A strong emphasis on decentralization; (2) A possible basis for collaboration between localists and globalists in their shared antistatism; (3) Networks created by local activists tend not to extend beyond the state (“nation”) boundary, although many have a vague identity with and concern for humankind; (4) Local activists tend not to be activating, or even informing, local people about suffering on a global basis; (5) The more “spiritual” and life-style elements of local activism contrast with the more technocratic globalists; (6) The localists rarely have visions of the future, compared to the global future tradition of the globalists; (7) The highly significant discovery of a small number of local/global activists who incorporate in an integrated fashion the five approaches of social transformation. They should be further studied for insights on how the local-global gap can be bridged.

Funding and Teaching Challenges Facing Faith-Based Organizing

2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 479-486
Author(s):  
Sheila Greeve Davaney ◽  
John Bowlin ◽  
Jarrett Kerbel ◽  
Elizabeth Valdez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Ford Foundation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Theological Seminary ◽  
Next Generation ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Classroom Experience ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
Faith Based ◽  
Princeton Theological Seminary

Abstract Faith-based organizing in the United States faces two major practical challenges: funding its work and teaching its approach to the next generation of pastors. With these challenges in mind, the editors asked Sheila Greeve Davaney, until recently a programme officer with the Ford Foundation, to reflect on her experience of funding the work of faith-based organizing networks. John Bowlin, a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and Jarrett Kerbel, a pastor in Philadelphia, recently team taught a course on theology and organizing at the seminary; the editors asked them to reflect on their classroom experience. Their experience was enriched by the presence of Elizabeth Valdez, an organizing network leader from Texas, who was on sabbatical in Princeton at the time, and was invited by Bowlin, while she audited his class, to share her grass-roots experience with the students. It is fitting that Valdez has the last word in this special issue, as an organizer who is committed to the goal of fostering dialogue between theologians and researchers in the academy and citizens and leaders in the community.

Borderline Justice: Choosing Juries in the Two Niagaras

1997 ◽  
Vol 31 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 120-158
Author(s):  
Martin L. Friedland ◽  
Kent Roach
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
The United States ◽  
Basic Question ◽  
Criminal Cases ◽  
Complex Interplay ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
American Society ◽  
Select Trial

This paper examines the use of juries in criminal cases in Canada and the United States. It is part of a larger study of the administration of criminal justice in Niagara County, Ontario and Niagara County, New York. The basic question examined is why persons accused of serious crimes in the United States usually select a jury, whereas persons in similar circumstances in Canada normally select trial by a judge alone. An investigation of this question will enable us to see some significant differences between the administration of criminal justice in the United States and Canada. It will also show how changes in specific procedural rules may affect other practices. There is a complex interplay between procedural rules. The paper concludes by showing that the widespread use of juries in the United States is consistent with the more populist grass-roots approach in American society which tends to distrust government, compared with the traditional respect for authority, including the authority of judges, in Canada.

The Social Gospel as a Grassroots Movement

2015 ◽  
Vol 84 (1) ◽  
pp. 203-206
Author(s):  
Wendy J. Deichmann
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Gospel ◽  
Social Instability ◽  
Faith Based ◽  
The Social ◽  
American Society

The social gospel movement in the United States began as a faith-based, grassroots movement of laity and clergy in the aftermath of the Civil War. During this era, American society faced extreme levels of social instability resulting not only from wartime trauma and loss, but also relocation of massive numbers of those emancipated from slavery, a rapidly accelerated pace of both industrialization and urbanization and unprecedented waves of immigration.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Valls
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Color Blind ◽  
American Society ◽  
Liberal Political Theory

The persistence of racial inequality in the United States raises deep and complex questions of racial justice. Some observers argue that public policy must be “color-blind,” while others argue that policies that take race into account should be defended on grounds of diversity or integration. This chapter begins to sketch an alternative to both of these, one that supports strong efforts to address racial inequality but that focuses on the conditions necessary for the liberty and equality of all. It argues that while race is a social construction, it remains deeply embedded in American society. A conception of racial justice is needed, one that is grounded on the premises provided by liberal political theory.

Maternalist and Community Politics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Reese ◽  
Ian Breckenridge-Jackson ◽  
Julisa McCoy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Community Organizing ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
Community Politics ◽  
Intersectionality Theory ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Self Help Groups

This chapter explores the history of maternalist mobilization and women’s community politics in the United States. It argues that both “maternalism” and “community” have proved to be highly flexible mobilizing frames for women. Building on the insights of intersectionality theory, the authors suggest that women’s maternal and community politics is shaped by their social locations within multiple, intersecting relations of domination and subordination, as well as their political ideologies and historical context. The chapter begins by discussing the politically contradictory history of maternalist mobilization within the United States from the Progressive era to the present. It then explores other forms of women’s community politics, focusing on women’s community volunteerism, self-help groups, and community organizing. It discusses how these frames have been used both to build alliances among women and to divide or exclude women based on perceived differences and social inequalities based on race, nativity, class, or sexual orientation.

Bali 1928 Music Recordings and 1930s Films

2018 ◽  
pp. 348-372
Author(s):  
Edward Herbst
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
Emerging Media ◽  
Dominate Discourse ◽  
Music Recordings

Bali 1928 is a restoration and repatriation project involving the first published recordings of music in Bali and related film footage and photographs from the 1930s, and a collaboration with Indonesians in all facets of vision, planning, and implementation. Dialogic research among centenarian and younger performers, composers and indigenous scholars has repatriated their knowledge and memories, rekindled by long-lost aural and visual resources. The project has published a series of five CD and DVD volumes in Indonesia by STIKOM Bali and CDs in the United States by Arbiter Records, with dissemination through emerging media and the Internet, and grass-roots repatriation to the genealogical and cultural descendants of the 1928 and 1930s artists and organizations. Extensive research has overcome anonymity, so common with archival materials, which deprives descendants of their unique identities, local epistemologies, and techniques, marginalizing and homogenizing a diverse heritage so that entrenched hegemonies prevail and dominate discourse, authority, and power.

Japanese Reinvention of Self through Hawai‘i’s Japanese Americans

2012 ◽  
Vol 83 (2) ◽  
pp. 333-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yujin Yaguchi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese History ◽  
Postwar Japan ◽  
Postwar Reconstruction ◽  
American Hegemony ◽  
Modern Japanese History ◽  
American Society

This article investigates the relationship between Asian American and modern Japanese history by analyzing the image of Japanese Americans in postwar Japan. Based on a book of photographs featuring Japanese immigrants in Hawai‘i published in 1956, it analyzes how their image was appropriated and redefined in Japan to promote as well as reinforce the nation’s political and cultural alliance with the United States. The photographs showed the successful acculturation of Japanese in Hawai‘i to the larger American society and urged the Japanese audience to see that their nation’s postwar reconstruction would come through the power and protection of the United States. Japanese Americans in Hawai‘i served as a lens through which the Japanese in Japan could imagine their position under American hegemony in the age of Cold War.

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