Sin, Spirituality, and Primitivism: The Theologies of the American Social Gospel, 1885–1917

2007 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Bowman
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Social Gospel ◽  
Christian Life ◽  
Personal Morality ◽  
The Social ◽  
Spiritual Conversion ◽  
Born Again ◽  
Christian Society ◽  
The Ideal

AbstractThis article seeks to draw attention to an often overlooked aspect of the social gospel. Rather than explaining social gospelers as theological liberals who took an interest in social problems, as many historians have done, this essay argues that they were possessed of a unique theology, one which welded evangelical ideas of conversion and experiential Christianity with liberal postmillennial hopes. Their devotion to combating social ills should be understood, therefore, not solely as a secular commitment to social justice or a nebulous allegiance to Christian charity but also as a theological obligation tied to evangelical conversion and a repudiation of social sin, a crime as offensive to God as murder or theft. The social gospelers modeled the ideal Christian society upon that of the biblical patriarchs, one in which no distinction between the secular and sacred existed and sanctification guided the Christian's actions in the economy as well as in personal morality. That society, that postmillennial Zion, would come again when all humanity experienced a spiritual conversion and were truly born again as Christians—a transformation not limited to individual salvation but which brought with it a new understanding of the nature of Christian life.

Prophetic Suffering and Black Internationalism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Dorrien
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Gospel ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Black Internationalism ◽  
Liberal Theology ◽  
Howard University ◽  
The Social ◽  
Christian Socialism ◽  
Long Time

The generation of black social gospel leaders who began their careers in the 1920s assumed the social justice politics and liberal theology of the social gospel from the beginning of their careers. Mordecai Johnson became the leading example by espousing racial justice militancy, Christian socialism, Gandhian revolutionary internationalism, and anti-anti-Communism as the long-time (and long embattled) president of Howard University

scholarly journals Sensemaking the ‘social’ in social entrepreneurship

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (8) ◽  
pp. 859-886 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Kimmitt ◽  
Pablo Muñoz
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Entrepreneurship ◽  
Social Problem ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Problem Solution ◽  
Justice Theory ◽  
Social Entrepreneurs ◽  
The Social ◽  
Collective Imagination ◽  
Social Justice Theory

In the collective imagination, the practices and outcomes of social entrepreneurship seem to hold hope for a better future. So far, these practices have been largely assumed as idealised types with the ‘social’ in social entrepreneurship underexplored. Such assumed neutrality, we argue, is hampering the development of a more robust theoretical corpus for understanding the phenomenon and inspiring practices that are more effective. In this article, we analyse the sensemaking of the social in social entrepreneurship by exploring the ways in which social entrepreneurs make sense of social problems and develop solutions for addressing them. Our empirical analyses of the stories of 15 social entrepreneurs indicate two distinct types of sensemaking and sensegiving practices, aligned with Amartya Sen’s notions of social justice. Drawing on these findings, sensemaking and social justice theory, we elaborate a two-type social sensemaking model pertaining to the appreciation and assessment of circumstances and the differing problem/solution combinations emerging from alternative ontological views of what constitutes a social problem.

scholarly journals Motive of Hope in Works by Mykola Bazhan

2019 ◽  
pp. 26-32
Author(s):  
Roman Tkachenko
Keyword(s):  
Social Problems ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Human Being ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Ideal

The paper off ers an attempt to read the works of M. Bazhan focusing on the evolving motive of hope. It is stated that this motive has its cultural and historical scope and practical content. Presently the experience of hope becomes energy of progress and cultural creation. Hope is energized by active work and nourishes work, art, science, creativity. The methods of overcoming despair in Bazhan’s poetry have been updated over the course of decades in connection with the changes in perception of the social role of poetry. Although initially the comprehension of integrity was seen in the stream of the class struggle, later the poet preferred healing the soul with art. The philosophy of the author of the “Hoff man’s Night” was not contemplative; it was focused on existential and social problems and directed by humanistic values. It is no coincidence that the poet chose the least irrational of the three main Christian virtues, the most earthly and human one – the hope. Instead, most poets at all times cultivated predominantly faith and love. This fact might explain why Bazhan’s poetry never gained vast popularity but constantly attracted attention of critics and scholars. The author’s path from despair and fear to hope is the path from the local, psychological, individual to the universal, social, and philosophical. The continual motive of hope gives some unexpected coloring to a seemingly trivial Enlightenment-like picture of the future. The concepts of progress are being filled with drama and dynamics. Existential problems proved to be much more important than the ideal future projects. The sources and plan of the progress are contained not in the objective laws of the history, but exclusively in a human being, permanently fighting in the darkness and chaos. From this point of view, Bazhan is not a representative of the Soviet-style Marxism. In fact, his worldview is rather in tune with E. Bloch’s neo-Marxism or J.-P. Sartre’s existentialism.

Conservative Social Christianity, the Law, and Personal Morality: Wilbur F. Crafts in Washington

2002 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 799-819 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gaines M. Foster
Keyword(s):  
Social Gospel ◽  
American Religion ◽  
Quarter Century ◽  
Social Christianity ◽  
Personal Morality ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Law

In 1895, Wilbur F. Crafts opened on office in Washington, D.C. and proclaimed himself a Christian lobbyist. Over the next quarter century, until his death in 1922, he mobilized churches and individual Christians to pressure Congress on behalf of bills, some he had written, to limit divorce, to control sexuality, and to restrict or prohibit the use of narcotics and alcohol. He also led an unsuccessful campaign for federal censorship of the movies. Crafts deserves more attention than historians of American religion have paid him. His legislative accomplishments render his career important in itself, but an analysis of his theology and lobbying efforts also helps historians better conceptualize social Christianity and the social gospel.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Kimberley Brownlee
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Social Deprivation ◽  
Social Needs ◽  
Social Rights ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Personal Morality ◽  
The Social

For social creatures like us, enjoying lasting, stable, and secure relationships is neither a luxury nor a triviality: it is quintessential to leading a minimally good life. Our sociability is both intrinsically valuable and indispensable to the fulfilment of other important interests. This introduction briefly describes the nature of our core social needs and the social human rights to which they give rise. It maintains that human rights should be minimalistic, but such minimalism must prioritize social rights such as the human right against social deprivation. The duties that such rights generate apply to both governments and individuals, making the ethics of sociability a matter of both social justice and personal morality.

NATIONAL AND SOCIAL IMPERATIVES OF IVAN FRANKO IN THE INTERPRETATION OF LUKA LUTSIV

2019 ◽  
pp. 161-166
Author(s):  
Petro Ivanyshyn
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
Creative Work ◽  
Regulative Idea ◽  
The Social ◽  
Classical Philosophy ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Social Imperative ◽  
The Ideal

The article is about the frankoznavchyi experience of one of the most productive researchers of the Ukrainian diaspora, the well-known Ukrainian scientist, journalist and editor Luka Lutsiv (1895-1984). First of all, about his monograph “Ivan Franko is a fighter for national and social justice” (1967). The importance of L. Lutsiv’s work provides not only for a complex illustration of I. Franko’s life and creative work, taking into account various com- plex moments, not only for a simple, lively presentation of the leading ideas, not only for the argumentative refutation of the valuations of the Soviet Franco studies, but also for the use of classical methods of research. The methodological base of his work was biographism (closely related to the cultural-historical approach) and hermeneutics. In the mono- graph we have not only the desire of the researcher to go deep into the artist’s biography and the cultural-historical context of the epoch, but also to protect Franko from the Soviet falsifications and to get to the essence of his creative work – the “truth” (in the terminology of classical philosophy). A literary scholar through the going out of the funda- mental hermeneutic layers understands this “truth”: the deep meanings, values, ideals and imperatives of the writer’s creative work, however, without more concrete terminological definitions. The work is also about the interpretation valuations of L. Lutsiv through the prism of main imperatives, which he identified in Ivan Franko, that is, categorical orders that appear at the same time as the main regulative idea of thinking and the system-forming element of the ideological base of the individual. The first leading imperative for the researcher is the national imperative (the “ideal of independence”), which re- veals the national-centered (natsiosofskyi, natsionalistychnyi or natsiolohichnyi) component of I. Franko’s worldview. Another central imperative of I. Franko’s life and creative work is the social imperative associated with the problem of social justice. One can state that L. Lutsiv’s monograph, despite all the possible defects, today thanks to the classical methodological base can be positioned not only as a document of the epoch but also as a valuable scientific source, though probably not as academic but as a popular science genre. This study helps to understand I. Franko’s worldview and thinking as a definite integrity, as a complex system and gives significant impulses for the continuation of episte- mological studies of this kind.

Addressing International Social Problems: Combining Indigenous Practice, the Developmental Model, and Empowerment

2005 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-29
Author(s):  
Stephen C. Anderson ◽  
Robert G. Blair ◽  
Martha K. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Work ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
International Community ◽  
Developmental Model ◽  
Social Work Educators ◽  
The Social ◽  
International Social

Social work educators need a framework for understanding and addressing the social justice needs of the international community. This article proposes a framework that combines the concepts of indigenous practice, the developmental model, and empowerment into a structure for addressing international problems. Examples and suggestions are also given as to how social work educators might use this framework in addressing current international problems comprehensively.

Gli epigrammi di Papa Damaso e Roma Christiana

Augustinianum ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-67
Author(s):  
Juri Leoni ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Hierarchical Organization ◽  
Ideal Society ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Church ◽  
Christian Society ◽  
The Ideal

This article aims through a study of the epigraphy of Pope Damasus (366-384), to reconstruct the ideal society that was shown to the pilgrim who went to the loca sanctorum in the Urbs. Taking into account the pastoral, political and ideological elements of Damasian epigraphy, it shows that the choice of martyrs and subjects which were celebrated responded to the increasing numbers of nobles within Roman Christian society after the peace of Constantine. Damasus tried to accommodated himself to the sensibilities of the minor aristocracy of Rome and the emerging clergy, without renouncing its hierarchical organization of the Church in line with the social and ecclesial tendencies of the second half of the fourth century, when Roma christiana came into being.

The Image of the Protestant Minister in the Christian Social Novel

1968 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 319-334
Author(s):  
Grier Nicholl
Keyword(s):  
Social Problems ◽  
Social Gospel ◽  
Traditional View ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Urban America ◽  
The Social ◽  
American Protestantism ◽  
Social Novel ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Social Novels

The image of the American Protestant minister in the American novel of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was, according to many scholars, predominantly a negative one. Conservative, steeped in outdated creeds, aloof from modern realities, and materialistic—these were some of the kinder descriptions of the much maligned Protestant clergyman which they find in the American novel of this period. But my own study of over one hundred Christian social novels, which reflect the rise of the social gospel in American Protestantism, leads me to urge a reassessment of this traditional view of the literary image of the Protestant minister. As propaganda for the emerging social gospel, the Christian social novel portrays not only the stereotyped picture of the clergyman, but more prominently a new kind of minister—physically rugged, intelligent, deeply religious, compassionate and above all a man concerned with the application of the gospel to economic and social problems. He was, in sum, an idealized image of the kind of heroic minister needed to take the gospel out of the sanctuary and into the slums and factories of modern urban America.

Francis Greenwood Peabody: Harvard's Theologian of the Social Gospel

1961 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jurgen Herbst
Keyword(s):  
Social Problems ◽  
Social Ethics ◽  
Social Gospel ◽  
Professional School ◽  
Harvard College ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
The Social ◽  
Divinity School ◽  
Theological Thought ◽  
Academic Teacher

Francis Greenwood Peabody, lecturer in ethics and professor of theology at Harvard University from 1880 to 1912, introduced the teaching of social ethics at Harvard and ranks as one of the foremost interpreters of German theological thought in America. As academic teacher he brought about the abolition of compulsory worship at Harvard College, helped transform the Harvard Divinity School from a denominational seminary into a non-denominational professional school of theology, and introduced studies in contemporary social problems at the Divinity School and at Harvard College. His pioneering work on social problems secured for him a leading rôle in the Social Gospel movement of his time.

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