Synopses & Reviews
While the links between conservative Christians and politics have been drawn strongly in recent years, coming to embody what many think of as religious activism, the profoundly religious nature of community organizing and other more left-leaning justice work has been largely overlooked.
Prophetic Activism is the first broad comparative examination of progressive religious activism in the United States. Set up as a counter-narrative to religious conservatism, the book offers readers a deeper understanding of the richness and diversity of contemporary religious activism.
Helene Slessarev-Jamir offers five case studies of major progressive religious justice movements that have their roots in liberative interpretations of Scripture: congregational community organizing; worker justice; immigrant rights work; peace-making and reconciliation; and global anti-poverty and debt relief. Drawing on intensive interviews with activists at all levels of this work—from pastors and congregational leaders to local organizers and the executive directors of the national networks—she uncovers the ways in which they construct an ethical framework for their work. In addition to looking at predominantly Christian organizations, the book also highlights the growth of progressive activism among Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists who are engaged in reinterpreting their religious texts to support new forms of activism.
Religion and Social Transformation series
Review
"Hamby's poems are tsunamis carrying you far out to sea and then back to shore giddy and glad to be alive. She roars around the parabola of the time-space continuum, leaping between the past, both ancient and within memory, and the present, then circles the globe all within a single high-octane couplet. Hamby strings words and worlds together with the gravity-defying momentum of a high-flying dancer or a whirling dervish, traveling to Italy, India, St. Louis, the Amazon, Sante Fe, and Hawaii in long zestful exhalations. She rumbas and stomps and shakes her finger in your face as she writes of war and sex, love and hunger, insomnia, drunkenness, the movies, family, the soul, art, and the devil. Her commentary is hilarious. The sudden moments of stillness found unexpectedly within the rush of her rants are radiant and spellbinding, and the clash between her velocity and her specificity creates a sizzling current of electricity that runs through every dashing, piquant, and diva-sung line." -Donna Seaman,Booklist
Review
“Prophetic Activism provides an informative portrait of left-leaning religious activism. Those who want to better understand what that activism looks like—its major organizations, its strategies and tactics, its similarities to and differences from secular activism, and, most importantly, its potential and limits—will learn much by reading this book.”-Mark Chaves,author of Congregations in America
Review
“Prophetic Activism could be called ‘Groups That Make a Difference, like Sider and Unruh's Churches That Make a Difference. It stands out because it analyzes change-groups with goals ranging from worker justice to immigrant rights, peacemaking, and global justice, identifying strategies that bring healing to a nation whose soul badly needs healing. Enormously instructive for people who know we need change for human rights in a big way, one victory at a time. This work shows that Evangelicals, too, have become increasingly active, with crucial biblical interpretation.”-Glen Stassen,Fuller Theological Seminary
Synopsis
In this sublime and imposing book of poetry, Barbara Hamby races through the circuitous regions of Heaven and Hell, desire and love, giving shape and significance to the strange and the familiar. Her book ignites with a proclamation, "In the beginning was the word, fanning out into syllables, like a deck of cards on a table in Vegas, lovely leafy parts fluttering into atoms and cells, genus and phylum, nouns and verbs;" an easy metaphor for her intoxicating linguistic machinations.
Hamby's roaming, inquisitive mind reels in the reader, "I'm persuaded the day will come when I'll lie static as a falcon in a hunter's sack, fragments of iron studding my reckless breast." Not limited to the self-referential, Hamby playfully references historic and literary personae, taking stabs at Shakespeare, Jane Austen, the Bible and Casanova. "Who wouldn't," she challenges us, "give anything for the voice of an angel and wings to fly above the rough dirt of birth?"
About the Author
Barbara Hamby has been published in many literary magazines and is the editor of Apalachee Quarterly and director of Apalachee Press. Her first published collection, Delirium, won the 1994 Vassar Miller Prize, the 1996 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award.