La Fe en Acción: Faith-Based Activism, Immigration Reform, and Structural Vulnerability

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 56-60
Author(s):  
Ryan I. Logan

Abstract Religious conviction has played a prominent role in many activist movements throughout the United States. In this article, I detail one social justice organization’s enactment of activism called la fe en acción (faith in action). This approach was nuanced from being simply “activism” but one that, according to participants, was more strategic and longer lasting. La fe en acción served as the central strategy utilized by this organization in order to garner public and political support for comprehensive immigration reform. A crucial component within this approach included the sharing of testimonios (testimonials) of participants. While this form of activism was intended to garner the participation of all people—including undocumented immigrants—for some, structural vulnerability hindered their ability to participate. Overall, I explore the positive and negative aspects of this approach as elaborated from data gathered during attempts to garner support for comprehensive immigration reform in 2013.

Author(s):  
Ramón J. Guerra

This chapter examines the development of Latino literature in the United States during the time when realism emerged as a dominant aesthetic representation. Beginning with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) and including the migrations resulting from the Spanish-American War (1898) and the Mexican Revolution (1910), Latinos in the United States began to realistically craft an identity served by a sense of displacement. Latinos living in the United States as a result of migration or exile were concerned with similar issues, including but not limited to their predominant status as working-class, loss of homeland and culture, social justice, and racial/ethnic profiling or discrimination. The literature produced during the latter part of the nineteenth century by some Latinos began to merge the influence of romantic style with a more socially conscious manner to reproduce the lives of ordinary men and women, draw out the specifics of their existence, characterize their dialects, and connect larger issues to the concerns of the common man, among other realist techniques.


2021 ◽  
Vol 118 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-107
Author(s):  
Richard Francis Wilson

This article is a theological-ethical Lenten sermon that attempts to discern the transcendent themes in the narrative of Luke 9-19 with an especial focus upon “setting the face toward Jerusalem” and the subsequent weeping over Jerusalem. The sermon moves from a passage from William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying through a series of hermeneutical turns that rely upon insights from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Jr., Will Campbell, Augustine, and Paul Tillich with the hope of illuminating what setting of the face on Jerusalem might mean. Tillich’s “eternal now” theme elaborates Augustine’s insight that memory and time reduce the present as, to paraphrase the Saint, that all we have is a present: a present remembered, a present experienced, and a present anticipated. The Gospel is a timeless message applicable to every moment in time and history. The sermon seeks to connect with recent events in the United States and the world that focus upon challenges to the ideals of social justice and political tyranny.


2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 478-529 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick R. Grzanka ◽  
Kirsten A. Gonzalez ◽  
Lisa B. Spanierman

The mainstreaming of White nationalism in the United States and worldwide suggests an urgent need for counseling psychologists to take stock of what tools they have (and do not have) to combat White supremacy. We review the rise of social justice issues in the field of counseling psychology and allied helping professions and point to the limits of existing paradigms to address the challenge of White supremacy. We introduce transnationalism as an important theoretical perspective with which to conceptualize global racisms, and identify White racial affect, intersectionality, and allyship as three key domains of antiracist action research. Finally, we suggest three steps for sharpening counseling psychologists’ approaches to social justice: rejecting racial progress narratives, engaging in social justice-oriented practice with White clients, and centering White supremacy as a key problem for the field of counseling psychology and allied helping professions.


2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Baburhan Uzum ◽  
Bedrettin Yazan ◽  
Netta Avineri ◽  
Sedat Akayoglu

The study reports on a telecollaboration exchange between two teacher education classes in the United States and Turkey. In synchronous and asynchronous conversations, preservice teachers (PTs) engaged in social justice issues and made discourse choices that captured culture(s) and communities as diverse or essentialized. These choices were affected by PTs’ positionings and impacted how PTs connected to individuals only and/or to broader society.  PTs asked questions that created space for critical discussions and facilitated awareness of diversity, yet sometimes led to overgeneralizations. The study has implications for designing telecollaborations that promote language and practices to unpack the issues of social justice.


Author(s):  
Kemi Fuentes-George

Although the terms “environmental justice” and “environmental racism” emerged due to race-based mobilization in the United States, justice is a constant feature of environmental struggles around the world. Pursuing social justice in environmental advocacy can be difficult, but case studies of activism in places including New Zealand, Mexico, Jamaica, Brazil, and the United States show that it is possible. Environmental injustice emerges when populations that are already politically and socioeconomically marginalized disproportionately bear the costs of environmental consumption, and they are often systematically excluded from the benefits of this consumption. Although different political systems vary in how they structure marginalization, this close association of social injustice with environmental injustice characterizes cases like fossil fuel extraction in industrialized countries and agricultural development in the Global South alike. While skeptics have argued that promoting environmentalism is counterproductive to social justice, because environmental regulations often constrain economic growth, combining the two can lead to more sustainable environmental practices.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-22
Author(s):  
DARRICK SMITH

A national dialogue on school discipline has now reemerged in the United States as many educators struggle with how to maintain a balance of cultural responsiveness and high expectations when addressing student transgressions on their campuses. While the field of child development, counseling psychology, and communications pose theoretical responses to such dilemmas, this article aims specifically to address the procedural challenges of dealing with verbal abuse from students and adults. Through the lens of a social justice educator, the author offers practical, humanizing steps that are intended to help secondary school educators engage with students in a way that emphasizes boundaries, respect, and reflection for students and adults alike.


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