scholarly journals Agama Sipil di Amerika Serikat: Telaah Terhadap Gagasan dan Peran Robert N. Bellah

Simulacra ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 5
Author(s):  
Ahmad Sahidah

<p><em>This article will unravel the emergence of civil religion in the United States that cannot be separated from America’s long history, since the civil war, the declaration of independence and the influence of enlightenment and Christian values (especially Protestantism) that are deeply embedded in the American people. He was born as a recognition of the highest values, not one of the denominations of Christianity itself. At the same time, as a criticism of the use of religious symbols in official state practice. With the hermeneutic reading of Bellah’s works, it can be concluded that civil religion is inevitable, because each group has a religious dimension. To say that there is no civil religion, is to say that the civitas, the civil order itself does not exist, it should not appear. Each group produces communal symbols and rituals that give instructions and tie them together. Thus, civil religion does not only belong to America, it can belong to other nations in the world.</em></p>

Author(s):  
Edward Lamberti

Chapter 2 considers the Dardennes’ 2002 film Le Fils, a dramatic story of Levinasian responsibility for the Other based around a teacher and his pupil and a key exemplification of the Dardennes’ film style. It assesses the film in the light of Jacques Derrida’s notion of ‘originary performativity’, as seen, for example, in his 1976 analysis of the American Declaration of Independence. Derrida argues that originary performativity occurs when a work performs its own creation – such as happened when the founding fathers of the United States signed a document that already spoke of an American people, a people who were brought into being by the very document that spoke of them. It is the power of an artwork to create a rupture in the order of the world, to originate a new type of world. This chapter reads the Dardennes’ use of style in Le Fils as a filmic type of originary performativity, both presenting the world as it is and showing a world as it could be. Through this, the film powerfully evokes a Levinasian responsibility for the Other as embodied in its protagonist, Olivier (Olivier Gourmet).


2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 524-529 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leigh Patel

In the summer months of 2018, the world watched as thousands of young children were separated from their families and detained by immigration officials at the border between the United States and Mexico. On television screens and smartphone updates, it seemed the world collectively gasped at this cruel familial trauma and asked, “what can we do? How can we be in solidarity?” In this essay, I situate this state practice in a long-standing tradition of governance of who has rights and who does not. I also provide specific challenges for material solidarity that reaches beyond media soundbites.


Author(s):  
William H. McNeill

IN THE LATTER part of the nineteenth century, east coast city dwellers in the United States had difficulty repressing a sense of their own persistent cultural inferiority vis-à-vis London and Paris. At the same time a great many old-stock Americans were dismayed by the stream of immigrants coming to these shores whose diversity called the future cohesion of the Republic into question almost as seriously as the issue of slavery had done in the decades before the Civil War. In such a climate of opinion, the unabashed provinciality of Frederick Jackson Turner's (1861-1932) paper "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," delivered at a meeting of the newly founded American Historical Association in connection with the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1892), began within less than a decade to resound like a trumpet call, though whether it signalled advance or retreat remained profoundly ambiguous....


Author(s):  
Malcolm Magee

The United States has been uniquely God-centered among Western nations, and that includes its foreign policy. From George Washington to the present, all presidents and policymakers have had to consider God in varying degrees either for their domestic audience or because they believed in a version of Providential mission in the world. In the beginning, the new United States was filled with religious people whom the founders had to consider in crafting the founding documents. In time, the very idea of the United States became so entwined with the sense of the Divine that American civil religion dominated even the most secular acts of policymakers.


Author(s):  
Graham Cross

Franklin D. Roosevelt was US president in extraordinarily challenging times. The impact of both the Great Depression and World War II make discussion of his approach to foreign relations by historians highly contested and controversial. He was one of the most experienced people to hold office, having served in the Wilson administration as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, completed two terms as Governor of New York, and held a raft of political offices. At heart, he was an internationalist who believed in an engaged and active role for the United States in world. During his first two terms as president, Roosevelt had to temper his international engagement in response to public opinion and politicians wanting to focus on domestic problems and wary of the risks of involvement in conflict. As the world crisis deepened in the 1930s, his engagement revived. He adopted a gradualist approach to educating the American people in the dangers facing their country and led them to eventual participation in war and a greater role in world affairs. There were clearly mistakes in his diplomacy along the way and his leadership often appeared flawed, with an ambiguous legacy founded on political expediency, expanded executive power, vague idealism, and a chronic lack of clarity to prepare Americans for postwar challenges. Nevertheless, his policies to prepare the United States for the coming war saw his country emerge from years of depression to become an economic superpower. Likewise, his mobilization of his country’s enormous resources, support of key allies, and the holding together of a “Grand Alliance” in World War II not only brought victory but saw the United States become a dominant force in the world. Ultimately, Roosevelt’s idealistic vision, tempered with a sound appreciation of national power, would transform the global position of the United States and inaugurate what Henry Luce described as “the American Century.”


1977 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugh Brogan

Before he took over the management of the Economist in 1860, Walter Bagehot had not had much occasion to notice the United States, at any rate in his published writings. During the 1850s he had been too taken up with banking, and literary criticism, and expounding the value of stupidity in politics. To be sure, in 1859 he decided that the time had come to discredit the American example. The English were becoming disquietingly interested in democracy, a system as to which he had all the usual mid-Victorian doubts and a few extra. So he told the world, through the National Review (which struggling Unitarian quarterly he edited) that the vulgar American voters sent only vulgar men to Congress: “ men of refinement shrink from the House of Representatives as from a parish vestry ”; and that America was too unlike England to be a safe model. Then, just as he became editor of the Economist, the secession crisis and the Civil War erupted. It was incumbent on him to pronounce on these events, and it would have been most uncharacteristic of this sunny, self-confident man to shirk such a responsibility.


1956 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 534-559
Author(s):  
Herbert B. Woolley

EVENTS intimately linked to our foreign relations have profoundly affected the level of economic activity in the United States and the character of our economic progress and stability. They cannot be disregarded by those concerned with the level of economic activity in this country. Furthermore, those concerned with the economic policies of the United States must also be concerned with the impact of those policies upon the rest of the world because of the great importance of the United States in the world economy, and because of the link between economic, political, and military events at home and abroad. Since the United States cannot ignore the far-reaching and indirect effect of its policies and decisions, the American people and their government require a detailed and systematic understanding of the economic interrelationships among all countries of the world. Even more, to exercise the international leadership which our great size and resources impose upon us, we must be in a position to assess the effect of developments and actions everywhere upon the political and economic strength of the free world. This article considers a few of the salient features of world economic relations which should always be kept in mind in assessing economic policy alternatives.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  

Most of us feel that our democratic lives have eroded. We are less civil to one another than at any other time in our history, perhaps short of the Civil War—certainly any period in my lifetime. At the 2020 Democratic National Convention, former President Barack Obama described the nation’s current situation in this way: “Our worst impulses unleashed, our proud reputation around the world badly diminished, and our democratic institutions threatened like never before.” Speakers at both parties’ conventions claimed that the 2020 election is a struggle for the soul of the United States.


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