Good News For Common Goods

What is the relationship between evangelical Christianity and democracy in America? In Good News for Common Goods, sociologist Wes Markofski explores how multicultural evangelicals across the United States are addressing race, poverty, inequality, politics, and religious and cultural difference in America's increasingly plural and polarized public arena. Based on extensive original research on multicultural evangelicals active in faith-based community organizing, community development, political advocacy, and public service organizations across the country-including over 90 in-depth interviews with racially diverse evangelical and non-evangelical activists, community leaders, and neighborhood residents-Markofski shows how the varieties of public religion practiced by evangelical Christians are not always bad news for non-evangelicals, people of color, and those advancing ethical democracy in the United States. Markofski argues that multicultural evangelicals can and do work with others across race, class, religious, and political lines to achieve common good solutions to public problems, and that they can do so without abandoning their own distinctive convictions and identities or demanding that others do so. Just as ethical democracy calls for a more reflexive evangelicalism, it also calls for a more reflexive secularism and progressivism.

Offers a systematic analysis of institutional solutions for providing common goods, showing how hierarchies, established over centuries of nation-state rule, are obsolete, while negotiation and self- regulation have grown in importance. Contributors include international scholars in the fields of sociology, economics, political science, and other fields. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

In the face of globalized ecological and economic crises, how do religion, the postsecular, and political theology reconfigure political theory and practice? As the planet warms and the chasm widens between the 1 percent and the global 99, what thinking may yet energize new alliances between religious and irreligious constituencies? This book brings together political theorists, philosophers, theologians, and scholars of religion to open discursive and material spaces in which to shape a vibrant planetary commons. Attentive to the universalizing tendencies of “the common,” the contributors seek to reappropriate the term in response to the corporate logic that asserts itself as a universal solvent. In the resulting conversation, the common returns as an interlinked manifold, under the ethos of its multitudes and the ecology of its multiplicity. Beginning from what William Connolly calls the palpable “fragility of things,” Common Goods assembles a transdisciplinary political theology of the Earth. With a nuance missing from both atheist and orthodox religious approaches, the contributors engage in a multivocal conversation about sovereignty, capital, ecology, and civil society. The result is an unprecedented thematic assemblage of cosmopolitics and religious diversity; of utopian space and the time of insurrection; of Christian socialism, radical democracy, and disability theory; of quantum entanglement and planetarity; of theology fleshly and political.

The book provides an up-to date account to global crime governance, containing in-depth case studies on money laundering, corruption, and human trafficking. It explains why the form of global governance - the institutional design - related to these cases differs widely.

Rethinking politics in the light of God When we think about politics we often think about the privileged vying for power. Alternatively, we might think about gridlock, about frustration, or about how little our voices seem to matter. Our obsession with statecraft can both paralyze us and lead us to duplicate the tactics of this exasperating form of politics when we lead our church communities. Ross Kane has good news for us: church politics doesn’t have to work this way! In fact, it can even become a spiritual practice. Drawing on his work as a pastor in the DC area, Kane shows how localized action by churches can make a real difference in their neighborhoods. Kane combines Scripture, political theology, and personal experience to reframe politics around shaping our common life. From community service to advocacy, congregations can practice politics in ways that embrace our loving interdependence as members of the body of Christ. Church leaders, whether lay or clerical, will find The Good News of Church Politics an uplifting guide to modeling God’s reign in our world by loving our neighbors.

How does the proclamation of good news to the poor in Luke's Gospel relate to wealth and poverty? What does Luke-Acts mean to affluent Christians and churches in our time? In a fresh, systematic way, Professor Pilgrim surveys Old Testament tradition on the poor and describes the Jesus movement as background for understanding Luke-Acts.

Writings that explore current affairs from the vision put forward by Catholic Social Teaching.