Imperial Designs Dorrien, Gary
2013, 2004, 20130111, 2004-11-01
eBook
This work argues that the influence of neoconservatives has been none too small and all too important in the shaping of this monumental doctrine and historic moment in American foreign policy. ...Through a fascinating account of the central figures in the neoconservative movement and their push for war with Iraq, he reveals the imperial designs that have guided them in their quest for the establishment of a global Pax Americana.
An expansive and ambitious intellectual history of democratic socialism from one of the world's leading intellectual historians and social ethicists
The fallout from twenty years of neoliberal ...economic globalism has sparked a surge of interest in the old idea of democratic socialism-a democracy in which the people control the economy and government, no group dominates any other, and every citizen is free, equal, and included. With a focus on the intertwined legacies of Christian socialism and Social Democratic politics in Britain and Germany, this book traces the story of democratic socialism from its birth in the nineteenth century through the mid†'1960s.
Examining the tenets on which the movement was founded and how it adapted to different cultural, religious, and economic contexts from its beginnings through the social and political traumas of the twentieth century, Gary Dorrien reminds us that Christian socialism paved the way for all liberation theologies that make the struggles of oppressed peoples the subject of redemption. He argues for a decentralized economic democracy and anti-imperial internationalism.
Gary Dorrien expounds in this book the religious philosophy underlying his many magisterial books on modern theology, social ethics, and political philosophy. His constructive position is ...liberal-liberationist and post-Hegelian, reflecting his many years of social justice activism and what he calls my dance with Hegel. Hegel, he argues, broke open the deadliest assumptions of Western thought by conceiving being as becoming and consciousness as the social-subjective relation of spirit to itself; yet his white Eurocentric conceits were grotesquely inflated even by the standards of his time. Dorrien emphasizes both sides of this Hegelian legacy, contending that it takes a great deal of digging and refuting to recover the parts of Hegel that still matter for religious thought. By distilling his signature argument about the role of post-Kantian idealism in modern Christian thought, Dorrien fashions a liberationist form of religious idealism: a religious philosophy that is simultaneously both Hegelian—as it expounds a fluid, holistic, open, intersubjective, ambiguous, tragic, and reconciliatory idea of revelation—and post-Hegelian, as it rejects the deep-seated flaws in Hegel’s thought. Dorrien mines Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel as the foundation of his argument about intellectual intuition and the creative power of subjectivity. After analyzing critiques of Hegel by Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, Karl Barth, and Emmanuel Levinas, Dorrien contends that though these monumental figures were penetrating in their assessments, they appear one-sided compared to Hegel. In a Post-Hegelian Spirit further engages with the personal idealist tradition founded by Borden Parker Bowne, the process tradition founded by Alfred North Whitehead, and the daring cultural contributions of Paul Tillich, W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosemary Radford Ruether, David Tracy, Peter Hodgson, Edward Farley, Catherine Keller, and Monica Coleman. Dispelling common interpretations that Hegel’s theology simply fashioned a closed system, Dorrien argues instead that Hegel can be interpreted legitimately in six different ways and is best interpreted as a philosopher of love who developed a Christian theodicy of love divine. Hegel expounded a process theodicy of God salvaging what can be salvaged from history, even as his tragic sense of the carnage of history cuts deep, lingering at Calvary.
The black social gospel leaders that came of age in the 1920s and '30s were long on graduate degrees, simmering anger, racial justice ambition, and lecture circuit eloquence. Most of them already ...assumed the social gospel when they began their careers. They came through the doors of educational achievement and ecumenical conferences, and a few became prominent by compelling the respect of audiences on both sides of the color line. Howard Thurman, also teaching under Johnson at Howard, for a time worked the social gospel lecture circuit even harder than Johnson and Mays. Thurman was a product of the Southern black church, the Student Christian Movement, Morehouse College, and Colgate Rochester Seminary. In his early life, he cultivated a nature-mystic spirituality and an ethical critique of authoritarian religion. In his early career, he became a pastor, professor, social gospel leader, and Quaker-influenced mystic and pacifist.
The entire tradition of liberal theology is naturalistic in the sense of accommodating naturalistic explanation. Some traditions of liberal theology are not historicist or pragmatic; some disparage ...metaphysics; some are not biblical or churchy; some subordinate naturalism to idealism, or mystery, or value, or a doctrine; and some are not radically empiricist. But every tradition of liberal theology negotiates some kind of peace with scientific naturalism, and some liberal theologies are fully naturalistic in the sense of the term variously adopted by Robert Corrington, Robert Neville, Jerry Stone, Charley Hardwick, Nancy Frankenberry, and Wesley Wildman: Nature is all there is; it requires no sufficient reason beyond itself to account for its origin or ontological ground; and all causation is natural. Here, Dorrien examines the idea of naturalism in liberal theology.
White social gospel theologians took for granted their access to the general public. Black social gospel theologians could barely imagine what it felt like to address the general public. They had ...to create a counter-public sphere merely to have a public. Here the belief in a divine ground of human selfhood powered struggles for black self-determination and campaigns of resistance to white oppression. Black social Christianity, like any tradition, can be defined broadly or narrowly. Here, Dorrien discusses the Black social gospel as new abolitionism.
Sourcing the major traditions of progressive Christian social ethics-social gospel liberalism, Niebuhrian realism, and liberation theology-Gary Dorrien argues for the social-ethical necessity of ...social justice politics. In carefully reasoned essays, he focuses on three subjects: the ethics and politics of economic justice, racial and gender justice, and antimilitarism, making a constructive case for economic democracy, along with a liberationist understanding of racial and gender justice and an anti-imperial form of liberal internationalism.
In Dorrien's view, the three major discourse traditions of progressive Christian social ethics share a fundamental commitment to transform the structures of society in the direction of social justice. His reflections on these topics feature innovative analyses of major figures, such as Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr, James Burnham, Norman Thomas, and Michael Harrington, and an extensive engagement with contemporary intellectuals, such as Rosemary R. Ruether, Katie Cannon, Gregory Baum, and Cornel West. Dorrien also weaves his personal experiences into his narrative, especially his involvement in social justice movements. He includes a special chapter on the 2008 presidential campaign and the historic candidacy of Barack Obama.
The social gospel movement that founded the field of social ethics in the USA made a defining claim that Christians must support movements for social justice. Usually it also claimed that Jesus is ...best interpreted through a social-ethical lens, as a prophet of justice. Social ethics, for decades, had no other basis in the USA, and even the major alternative to it that arose in the work of Reinhold Niebuhr took for granted the essential point of departure of the social gospel.
