Search Results

Progressives have always been animated by the myth of equality and community and therefore see history as an ongoing struggle to realize these ideals. The key word in the progressive lexicon is justice. The biblical tradition that Christian progressives appeal to is the prophetic tradition in its condemnation of the wealthy for their abuse of the poor, the weak, and the marginalized. However, in its commitment to social change through politics and politically oriented social movements, in its conflation of the public with the political, in its own selective use of Scripture to justify political interests, and in its confusion of theology with national interests and identity, the Christian Left imitates the Christian Right.

Chapter 6 treats Niebuhr’s mixed reception among Protestant Christians during his lifetime and today, in popular as well as academic circles. The “positive thinking” and naïve optimism of Norman Vincent Peale and his contemporary followers are anathema to Niebuhr. Treated with indifference in the “Sojourners movement” around Jim Wallis, Niebuhr’s perspective is honored in the publication First Things. Niebuhr’s most vociferous academic critic, Duke Divinity School’s theological ethicist, Stanley Hauerwas, writes from the perspective of pacifism. This chapter responds to Hauerwas’s critique that Niebuhr’s theology is more pragmatic and naturalistic than theistic, lacks a proper sense of the church, and compromises the radicality of Jesus’s self-giving love. Chapter 6 maintains that Niebuhr is fully within the trajectory of mainstream Christian thinking and argues that Hauerwas, and similar critics, could benefit from Niebuhr’s teaching on sin, humility, and self-awareness of the Christian life. Far from capitulating to a political agenda, Niebuhr’s stress on a radically transcendent deity challenges fundamentalism and the politicized use of religion in our day.

The term ‘expansion’ is used here to describe the processes by which the British became involved in areas outside of Europe. This chapter analyzes three main forms of expansion: trade through the importing of commodities produced overseas and the export of British goods; the migration of British people, either as more or less permanent settlers or as ‘sojourners’ who sought their fortunes overseas before returning home; and the diffusion of metropolitan British values, beliefs, and tastes, both among people of British origin and among others who came in contact with them. Those processes had roots far back in the seventeenth century, but volumes of trade and migration, and the spread of British values – sometimes called ‘Anglicisation’ – were all increasing at a high rate by the mid-eighteenth century.

This chapter lays out the rationale for this volume, noting that the British themselves were largely excluded from the Oxford History of the British Empire, but have now become a prime focus for research exploring a number of themes (British world identities, imperial networks). It presents three case studies of cross‐empire lives which raise many of the issues that are explored by subsequent essays: domicile, identity, belonging, alienation, the role of the press, the evolution of a self‐consciously ‘colonial’ or empire British caste or community. The porosity of categories is clear, sojourners became settlers, settlers found themselves sojourning as their luck or world politics changed. Britons might be in turn settler then sojourner, or serially both or either. The roots of British migration today lie in the propensity to emigration that the era of British imperial and global dominance demanded.

This introductory chapter begins with a reading of “The Right to Privacy,” an 1890 legal essay by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis in response to the perceived threats of gossip journalism and the degraded public culture it promoted. Considered the first attempt at codifying privacy as a U.S. legal category, the essay has since come to stand as a point of origin for the ambiguous and contested status of “privacy” in U.S. political culture. Here, it also introduces the figure of “imperiled privacy,” whose emergence subsequent chapters trace from the 1840s onward: an endangered space of individual and national wholeness, aligned with whiteness and femininity, and incessantly reproduced through panic narratives such as that devised by Warren and Brandeis. The chapter outlines the historical contexts of 19^th-century privacy discourse, giving special emphasis to its formation with and against conceptions of property, its gendered and racialized logic, and its connections to an emerging life writing print culture.

This chapter examines mid-19^th-century U.S. privacy discourse in its dystopian aspect, where privacy is a force that threatens to invade the public sphere and destroy free democratic association. The argument focuses on Harriet Beecher Stowe's portrayals of Sojourner Truth in her 1856 novel Dred and her 1863 Atlantic Monthly essay “Sojourner Truth: The Libyan Sibyl.” It shows how Stowe operates within a pattern of representation that poses blacks as figures of privation—that is, as subjects enslaved by their own bodies, incapable of self-containing self-government—through which white Americans deflected the problem of their own surplus embodiment and the failures of free labor and market idealism that produced it. The chapter demonstrates that Stowe uses Truth to engage this national crisis of uncontained bodies and, in so doing, to negotiate the embodied limits of her own female authorship.

This chapter steps back from the pin-light focus on Hong Kong movement and identity, scrutinizing the sojourner transition cycle through the lenses of social science theory, novelistic narratives, and artistic endeavors, each of which adds clarity to our understanding of the psychological responses to population shifts. It notes that humans are a peripatetic species, traveling widely for food and territory. Recent biological anthropology research indicates that 3,500 years ago, residents of coastal China migrated eastward across the Pacific Ocean, populating hundreds of island that make up Micronesia and Polynesia. It learns from early documents the struggle to assimilate into other societies, while in other situations the admonitions by community leaders were to avoid such integration. It observes that individual internal struggles to blend cultural identities introduced through proximity and enculturation, political change and geographic transition have been revealed in art, both visual and textual, as well as through social scientific analysis.

This chapter describes the remigrant experience through an examination of the global identity profile. The global identity commences from a novel point of departure and individuals with this profile are multiple sojourners prior to their immigration; that is, over time they have moved in and out of their home countries, primarily for work assignments, and consequently have a keen sense of themselves as cultural beings. Thus, they begin their migration journey with an awareness of how their values, beliefs, customs, and preferences are shaped by their home culture. It reports that the CIM predicts few migrants will experience a global identity, and the Hong Kong Remigration Project confirms the prediction.

The participation of Scots in the commercial and territorial empire of the English East India Company over the course of the long eighteenth century remains one of the most understudied aspects of the wider Scottish role in the British Empire. This chapter surveys the latest research on the numbers, social origins and identities of Scots in Asia, while reflecting on the benefits and limitations of adopting a particular Scottish perspective on British expansion in Asia. It emphasises the central role of London-based patronage and local networks in securing places for a regionally and socially diverse range of Scots, who in turn maintained discernibly Scottish identities while in Asia. It concludes that a closer engagement between Scottish evidence and more general debates on the nature of pre-1815 British imperialism can be mutually beneficial for both Scottish History and British Imperial Studies.

This chapter examines peacemaking as a representation of the progressive evangelicals' comprehensive dedication to social justice. It considers the progressive evangelicals' opposition to American nationalism and militarism. Aside from the absence of war, many writers believe that peace also means just economic relationships with other people, fair division of economic resources, and limitations of extreme wealth and poverty. The leadership of Sojourners, Evangelicals for Social Action (ESA), and The Other Side also recommended that biblical teachings on nonviolence and love for enemies should guide public engagement of Christians. As a result, pacifist progressive evangelicals protested the lethal nature of militaristic policies and warfare, and united in their commitment to the public task of active peacemaking.

A final chapter, entitled “The Demise and Legacy of the Pinkster Festival,” analyzes the circumstances leading to the prohibition of Pinkster celebrations in Albany in 1811. It explains how the Pinkster festival in New York and New Jersey came to an end and explores its continuous legacy in North American religion, parade culture, music and literature. It pays particular attention to black fraternities, African American evangelicalism, minstrelsy and the long-lasting impact of James Fenimore Cooper’s interpretation of Pinkster in the novel Satanstoe (1845). The chapter ends by showing how it was this change in perspective that led to a revival of Pinkster celebrations in the late twentieth century and ultimately to a repeal of the 1811 Pinkster ban in the year 2011.

This chapter discusses how evangelical progressives viewed racism as an institutionalized injustice that needed remedial public programs and policies. It considers inequalities faced by the African American people which led to the early activism of the evangelical movement. Indignation at minorities' consistent lack of socioeconomic resources became a recurrent theme in Sojourners, The Other Side, and the publications of Evangelicals for Social Action (ESA), and leaders condemned fiscal policies that exacerbated their already disproportionate poverty. In the 1970s, progressive evangelicals participated in the growing international opposition to separation in South Africa. Evangelical leaders hoped that their movement towards racism would revolutionize how the white evangelicals interpreted racial issues.

This chapter discusses the views of Jim Wallis and Sojourners regarding the full inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Christians within churches. It also examines gay liberation and the different Christian responses to it. For Wallis, every Christian has the obligation to defend the lives, dignity, and civil rights of gay and lesbian people. On the other hand, Sojourners considered same-sex sexuality as immoral. During the 1960s, gays and lesbians pushed movements to end legal and social discrimination against them. As a result, in 1973, the American Psychiatric Association overturned its classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder and removed therapies to “cure” gays. Most Protestant and Catholic leaders strove to support civil rights of gays while maintaining their stand that a same-sex relationship is immoral. The responses of evangelicals to same-sex marriage demonstrates the conflict in their positions to both the political left and the Religious Right.

This chapter presents an overview of the progressive evangelical movement as an alternative to both the Religious Right and the political left from the 1970s into the twenty-first century. It examines the contributions of the three most prominent progressive evangelical voices over the past four decades: Sojourners, Evangelicals for Social Action (ESA), and The Other Side. As evangelicals, the leaders of Sojourners, ESA, and The Other Side affirmed a core set of definingtheological principles—the primacy of biblical authority, the need for personal conversion and faith in Jesus's atoning work, and a dedication to evangelistic and humanitarian efforts. Throughout their movement's history, progressive leaders' consistent appeals to biblical interpretations as the foundation for their political activism reflected evangelicals' hallmark commitment to the primary authority of the Bible.

Besides speaking prophetically, the book’s subjects thought as prophets and viewed their roles as prophetic. Ideas about prophecy influenced their readings of history and shaped their works, which include large-scale texts adapting and varying biblical forms. Finally, they were substantively prophetic in unfolding visions of the future with meaning today.

This chapter examines the contention by women's rights activists that every individual should be given an equal opportunity to navigate his or her own voyage of life. It considers the temporal idea of maturation and womanhood that challenged the spatial metaphors of separate spheres for the sexes and segregation for the races, as well as the use of chronological age to define the rights and duties of older Americans. More specifically, it analyzes the argument that age twenty-one must become a transition to full citizenship for all Americans. Finally, it discusses the views of Frances Harper and Sojourner Truth regarding the moral maturity of black women.

The chapter explores the important yet neglected theoretical contributions of Sojourner Truth. Because she was illiterate, Truth left behind no writings in her own hand. Yet fragmentary evidence remains from those who saw and wrote about her, including Frederick Douglass. Applying the analytical framework that emerges from previous chapters reveals that Truth’s most frequently deployed rhetorical tactic is ridicule, the weapon of choice of her contemporary Elizabeth Cady Stanton as well. Like Frances Wright and Lucretia Mott, Truth leads her audience through speech and deed to confront the persistent injustices against women and freed slaves that are deeply rooted in the American project itself. Like Mott and the Grimkés, Truth’s egalitarian political views were deeply influenced by her religious faith, which also relied on an inner voice. As a freed black woman of modest means, unhindered by race, gender, and class privilege, Truth embodies the very concept of intersectionality about which other reformers could only write and speak.