bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Selected Reports of the NAACP Secretary to the Board of Directors, 1932-1954
Authors: Wilson Sondra Kathryn
Published: November 2023

Walter White stopped in at the NAACP offices on the afternoon of March 21, 1955. He had just returned from a one-month vacation in the Caribbean where he had been recovering from a second heart attack. Appearing to be in top form and delighted to be back in the thick of things, he decided to return to work before the planned date of April r. Unfortunately, this would be his last day at the NAACP. Three hours after he left his office, he died of a heart attack at home in New York City. Roy Wilkins wrote that it was so typical of him to stop by the office before going home to die. Only an act of God could stop White, the relentless civil rights crusader.1 When White joined the staff of the NAACP in 1918 as assistant secretary, he volunteered to undertake a dangerous assignment. He used his deceptive appearance to pass for white in order to gain information for the NAACP in its quest to publicize the facts of the reprehensible crime of lynching. As NAACP investigator, White often mingled with the perpetrators of the crime. Talking with them as a white man, he often cheered their heinous acts to appear sincere. Hearing these executioners boasting about riddling “nigger wenches” with bullets until they stopped moaning, or witnessing the charred body parts of lynching victims passed around for souvenirs, he would become nauseated.
Report of the Secretary for the Board Meeting of September 1945
Authors: Wilson Sondra Kathryn
Published: November 2023

The Full Employment Act The National Office and the Washington Bureau have watched carefully the Full Employment Bill which was introduced on January 22 by Senators Robert F. Wagner, James E. Murray, Elbert Thomas, and Joseph C. O’Mahoney. On June IO the National Office sent to each of these senators the resolution adopted by the N.A.A.C.P. Board of Directors at the June meeting. The resolution gave the Association’s endorsement to the bill and urged its immediate enactment by the Congress. In his acknowledgement Senator Murray wrote: “It is exceedingly encouraging to know that your group is so actively aware of the necessity for affirmative federal action to assure sustained employment opportunities after the war for all who are willing and able to work.” Senator Wagner wrote: ‘J\s sponsor of this legislation I will do my best to have the bill enacted in the near future.” Upon invitation from Senator Murray the Administrative Assistant of the Washington Bureau, on July 26, met with 103 House Co-Sponsors of the Bill to work out plans for nation-wide support of the measure.
Report of the Secretary for the Board Meeting of November 1947
Authors: Wilson Sondra Kathryn
Published: November 2023

The President’s Committee on Civil Rights presented its report to the President on October 29. This Committee was appointed by the President as a result of the conference arranged at the White House by the N.A.A.C.P. and participated in by the Secretary, who acted as spokesman for the delegation: Dr. Frederick E. Ressig representing the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, James Carey of the C.I.O., Boris Shishkin of the A.F.L., and Dr. Channing H. Tobias. After reading copy of the report, the Secretary wired President Truman as follows: May I on behalf of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People express to you our profound admiration for the report of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights. It is beyond all question the most forthright governmental pronouncement of a practical pro gram for assurance of civil rights not only to minorities but to all Americans which has yet been drafted. The Committee has charted a course for the executive and legislative branches of government, both national and state, and for the people which if followed will make real our principles of human freedom. A wire was also sent to Charles E. Wilson, Chairman of the Committee and a letter to each member of the Committee expressing our thanks and appreciation for the magnificent job which they did.
Discrimination in Federal Control Construction
Authors: Wilson Sondra Kathryn
Published: November 2023

In 1931 the American Federation of Labor discovered that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was paying black workers on the Mississippi Flood Control Project an average of ten cents an hour and was working these laborers twelve-hour days. The NAACP sent Helen Boardman, a researcher, to Missing attention the situation in Mississippi where the only way in which federal moneys are to be expended is through the state highway projects, upon which no Negroes are employed, according to statements being published in the newspapers of Mississippi. Senator Wagner promised not only to follow up the Mississippi Flood Control project but all other instances which we might bring to his attention of discrimination against Negroes in employment on projects financed wholly or in part by government funds.
Negro Citizenship
Authors: Wilson Sondra Kathryn
Published: November 2023

Walter White delivered a radio address in New York City at the invitation of the Catholic Interracial Hour. In the following speech, given on December 26, 1932, he discusses the inequities African Americans face particularly in the area of labor. Of all the racial groups in America, none has been more directly affected than the Negro during this period of skepticism and doubt of physical, mental, and spiritual suffering. This trying period has caused the twelve million American Negroes, in common with other individuals and groups, to examine and re examine with critical eye the life about him, the protestations as well as the acts of the Negro’s fellow-citizens, and to delve more deeply than ever before into the causes-religious, economic, political, and social-of the present world distress. I am grateful to my very good friend Father LaFarge for extending to me the invitation to speak on Negro citizenship on this Catholic Interracial Hour. The very word “Catholic” evokes for me memories and associations, most of which are warming and inspiring. It recalls to me the rare experience I had some years ago of talking for some hours with the late James Cardinal Gibbons. It recalls many pleasant and profitable conversations with my friend, Father LaFarge. It recalls the great humanitarian services to the Negro and to the American Indian of Mother Katharine and her associates, particularly Mother Mercedes, whom I have had the opportunity of meeting and knowing. And, finally, it evokes memories of my child hood in the deep South where, in Atlanta, Georgia, I never failed to marvel as a child that the only Christian church into which Negroes could enter for worship, other than exclusively Negro churches, was in the Catholic church there. When a few years back the infamous Ku Klux Klan was sweeping like a prairie fire throughout America, battening upon race and religious prejudice, it is not to be wondered that Negroes should have turned from some of the evangelical Protestant denominations in which the Klan had its greatest strength to the Catholic church, where race prejudice existed to a far lesser degree than in the Protestant denominations.
Abolition of Racial Segregation at Truman’s Inaugural Praised
Authors: Wilson Sondra Kathryn
Published: November 2023

When Harry Truman became President in 1945, there was a great deal of uncertainty about him. A haberdasher from Klan country (Independence, Missouri), he had been a judge back in Kansas City, and one of the favorable things he did was to save a black boys’ school that whites believed was too good for black youth. As a U.S. senator in 1935, he had backed the Costigan Wagner Anti-Lynching Bill. His civil rights record was indeed viewed as moderate. As time passed, Walter White found Truman an ally on many issues concerning race. In the following New York Herald Tribune article, White writes that Truman has set a precedent by inviting blacks to every event of his inauguration. This article was published in 1949. Although only a few commentators mentioned it a miracle occurred in Washing ton on January 20 almost as incredible as the spectacular re-election of President Truman. The miracle was that of total abolition of racial segregation.
Voluntary Segregation-A Disaster
Authors: Wilson Sondra Kathryn
Published: November 2023

In the following article, written in March 1969, Roy Wilkins argues against the theory that “a little voluntary racial segregation might not be a disaster.” He proclaims that racial separation is the principal tool for white supremacy. San Bernardino, Calif.-In California one gets the impression from spokesmen and apologists for militant elements that a little voluntary racial segregation might not be a disaster. The so-called settlement of the four and one-half months of strife at San Fran cisco State College is spurring discussion. It leaves the students with less than they sought and much less public support than they had in the beginning. Once the door to the policy of official, imposed racial separation is opened, the darkness begins to descend. Particularly is this true in nations where the non whites are a small numerical minority and a still more vulnerable economic and political minority. Also, where the whites have control of the government machinery and can enact legislation and execute policies that can rivet tactical inferiority upon a whole people.
Ralph J. Bunche
Authors: Wilson Sondra Kathryn
Published: November 2023

Ralph Johnson Bunche (1904-1971), born in Detroit, became one of the most successful men of his time. In 1948 he led the peace-seeking Palestine Commission that brought temporary peace to the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1949. As a result of his efforts in the Middle East, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1950. In the following article, Roy Wilkins pays tribute to Ralph Bunche after his death on December 9, 1971. Ralph J. Bunche was truly concerned with mankind, no matter what its location on the earth, its nationality or color. He did not forget his domestic racial difficulties or his unhappy experiences with them (how could he?), but he sensed early and knew later that war and hunger and hatred were the enemies of man. His life was devoted to efforts to bring about peace. It is possible that his encounters with prejudice against his race-the refusal, for example, of the honor society at Jefferson High School in Los Angeles to elect to membership the Ralph J. Bunche who was class valedictorian-gave him that extra quality of understanding and compassion in his later dealings between nations on the world stage.
Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.
Authors: Wilson Sondra Kathryn
Published: November 2023

Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., was born in 1908 in New Haven, Connecticut, and raised in New York City. In 1931 he succeeded his father as senior pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. In 1944 he was elected to Congress as a represented from Harlem. Powell became chairman of the powerful House Committee on Labor, a post that afforded him the chance to exercise or not) that evoked reluctant admiration. So, he went off on racial and personal tangents? What matter, even if his barbs made one wince? He showed to a superb degree how the American electoral and legislative processes can be made to work for an abused citizenry. For this alone, disregarding his flamboyance and his puckish sallies, white America, plagued on the race problem with a horde of raucous imitators who lack his skills, should say a prayer for Adam Clayton Powell.
The Task Ahead
Authors: Wilson Sondra Kathryn
Published: November 2023

Roy Wilkins believed that many of the youth who took part in the civil rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s were deficient in their history and motivated strongly by impatience and anger. In the following address to the NAACP Sixty-fourth Annual Convention on July 3, 1973, he discusses some of the historical highlights of African Americans in this nation, the progress made by the race, the obstacles to full equality, and the tasks that remain ahead. Any history of Negro Americans in this country since 1619, even if casually worded, must record their persistent efforts to be included as a part of the nation, equal with other parts. Not to separate themselves from other Americans, but to be included among them. Not to set up a land of their own, but to win and hold a portion of this land, in the same manner that others have won a foothold, running the same risks-but no greater-as others have run.
Imagining Death
Authors: Heinz Donald
Published: November 2023

The memento mori theme haunts every graveyard. Lest we forget, tombstones of more obsessive epochs trail such epitaphs as the above into our conscious ness. I am sitting in a small, not well kept park in the London borough of Camden. A handwritten plea on the gate requests community volunteers see to the welfare of the premises. Gradually, this somewhat seedy park gives evidence that it once was a cemetery.
Along the Ritual Way
Authors: Heinz Donald
Published: November 2023

Petrarch wrote: “A good death does honor to a whole life.” The argument of this book is that good deaths honor the human condition-and also God. These concluding Chapters are about the ritual way of participating in such a death. So far, I have argued that a resurgent death awareness in the final third of the twentieth century, sparked by the threat of mass death in nuclear war and then by AIDS, or coaxed along by the death education and patients’ rights movements, has not gone nearly far enough in addressing the mystery of death and the adequacy of our responses to it.
Ritual Quarrying: Bodies in Motion
Authors: Heinz Donald
Published: November 2023

Rituals may recall us to other times and other places, or even to some totally other time (in illo tempore), but they take place in real time and space, with physical bodies and within flesh-and-blood communities, using human words and actions and symbols, drawing often on the ingredients of material culture, appealing to all the senses from smell to sound, and setting material bodies in motion through a vocabulary of gesture, movement, and dance.
Ritual Quarrying: The Arts and Letters of Hope
Authors: Heinz Donald
Published: November 2023

Music is a language in which meaning has been encoded that is not communicable in any other way. It takes its name from the Greek muses, who preside over all the arts. Music has always been connected to ceremony, narrative, religion, ecstasy, dance, ritual, theater. Confucius thought music could portray six emotions-sorrow, satisfaction, joy, anger, piety, and love-in ways that brought individuals and communities into harmony with the universe, thus restoring order.
Introduction
Authors: Wong Sau-ling Cynthia
Published: November 2023

Editing A Casebook On Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood amon3 Ghosts is a daunting task. As one of the most widely circulated and frequently taught literary texts by a living American author,1 The Woman Warrior has generated a vast scholarship.2 This critical output, furthermore, represents a range of often antagonistic views on the book’s meaning and significance: as with its counterparts in other American “ethnic canons,” The Woman Warrior has been steeped in controversy, enthusiastically claimed, ingeniously deployed, and at times bitterly denounced by contesting interpretive communities. Anyone attempting to profile its complex reception history must therefore be prepared to give a reasonably intelligible account of how she got from hundreds of titles to a handful of article-length studies.
Autobiography as Guided Chinatown Tour? Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and the Chinese American Autobiographical Controversy
Authors: Wong Sau-Ling Cynthia
Published: November 2023

Maxine hong kingston ‘ s autobiography, The Woman Warrior, may be the best-known contemporary work of Asian-American literature. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for the best book of nonfiction published in 1976, The Woman Warrior remains healthily in print and on the reading lists of numerous college courses; excerpts from it are routinely featured in anthologies with a multicultural slant. It is safe to say that many readers who otherwise do not concern themselves with Asian-American literature have read Kingston’s book.
No Lost Paradise Social Gender and Symbolic Gender in the Writings of Maxine Hong Kingston
Authors: Rabine Leslie W
Published: November 2023

The question of Gender , of what it is, how it works, and how it determines our lives as men and women, receives divergent answers in contemporary feminist history. The notion that gender is a social construct rather than an innate essence1 has been complicated in recent years by theories of feminists influenced by French critical theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis for whom gender is a symbolic construct. Whether French or Americans schooled in French theory, these feminists see gender as produced in and through language systems.
An Approach to Calvin: On Overcoming Modern Accommodations
Authors: Muller Richard A
Published: November 2023

The life and thought of John Calvin (1509±1564), the great Reformer of Geneva and one of the principal founders of the Reformed tradition, have been presented on so many pages in such a wide variety of books that, at ®rst glance, one might well wonder whether anything new can be said. Reams of pages have been written on Calvin’s Institutes alone. Nonetheless, even cursory examination of works written in the second half of the twentieth century reveals less than a consensus. One can read, for instance, that Calvin’s Institutes is not a theological system but a theology of piety or a theology of rhetoric or a rhetoric of piety or a pastoral theology—or that it is indeed a theological system. Or that Calvin was a humanist rhetor who opposed scholastic theology in all its forms—or that Calvin stands in continuity with several of the scholastic theological currents of the later Middle Ages. Or that Calvin was a rigid logician; on the contrary, Calvin was a theologian or, better, not a theologian, but a rhetor of piety. Calvin’s theology rested on the divine decrees as a central principle; Calvin’s theology rested on the principle of the sovereignty of God; Calvin’s theology centered on the doctrine of the Trinity; Calvin’s thought was christocentric. Calvin’s thought was a gathering and juxtaposition of opposites or perspectives, having no central principle. So, too, we can read that Calvin was not a “covenant theologian” and that he taught only a unilateral concept of covenant in contrast to Bullinger’s bilateral concept—or that Calvin held the doctrine of covenant in high esteem and did teach a bilateral view of covenant.
Of Prefaces, “Arguments,” and Letters to the Reader: Calvin’s Testimonies to His Intention and Method
Authors: Muller Richard A
Published: November 2023

Although the broad contours and even the day-to-day activities of Calvin’s life are well documented, and although we know a great deal, from his vast correspondence, about the issues and individuals, the debates and personal trials that concerned Calvin throughout his life, even to the extent of identifying personal likes and dislikes, tribulations of career, and digestive problems, we know little from his writings of the inward or “existential” life of the Reformer. Calvin was not a man to tell much about himself. The autobiographical comments that we have from him are few and sometimes difficult to interpret. References to contemporary events found in his sermons are rare, and, when they can be identified, they tend to be oblique.
Introduction
Authors: Lane Belden C
Published: November 2023

I write these words at dusk far up the Chama River Canyon, surrounded by red sandstone cliffs in a landscape that bleeds. The Spanish named the mountains nearby the Sangre de Christo range, and on evenings when a wine-dark sun shines through dust-laden sky, the blood of Christ seems smeared over every rock. From the Mexican Penitentes to Georgia O’Keeffe, people have recognized this beautiful, haunting land as a place of death that is able also to heal. Like the red rocks of Sedona, Arizona or Ayers Rock in central Australia, the lifeblood of mother earth seems to have risen to the surface here.
Desert Catechesis
Authors: Lane Belden C
Published: November 2023

A monk out of the desert, said Anthony of Egypt, is like a fish out of water. Early Christian monasticism was so inextricably tied to a particular geographic terrain that the connection between the monk and the desert was never questioned. The choice of vocation and the choice of landscape were almost always one. Jerome accepted this as a given when he described the habitat of the desert fathers and mothers at Wadi Natrun on the borders of the Libyan Desert in Egypt.
Attentiveness, Indifference, and Love
Authors: Lane Belden C
Published: November 2023

In December 1935 Antoine de Saint-Exupery, on a mail flight between Paris and Saigon, crashed in the Libyan Desert west of the Nile. It was in the same place the desert fathers and mothers of the fourth century had withdrawn to seek the face of God in a landscape of emptiness. Saint-Exupery’s story of survival, in his now classic book Wind, Sand and Stars, evokes the same desert discipline practiced by those who had preceded him there centuries earlier. No one lives for long in the desert without acquiring its crusty virtues of attentiveness and indifference. It was only because of these that Saint-Exupery survived.
Between the Yes and the No: Ibn al-c ‘Arabī on Wujūd and the Innate Capacity
Authors: Chittick William C
Published: November 2023

In general, Sufis differ from ordinary Muslims by stressing inwardness and spirituality rather than activity and Law. Sufis have tried to intensify and perfect their knowledge of God, and one of the natural results of these efforts has been the direct experience of the object of faith. Descriptions of such experiences are always expressed in terminology that is recognizably Islamic, but those who speak of it unanimously assert that they have witnessed the single and unique Reality that underlies all appearances and all experience.
Introduction: Methods and Metaphors
Authors: Kitchen John
Published: November 2023

Although Merton’s comment appeared in 1954, its note of admonishing caution recalls the earliest known reservation expressed by a modern thinker contemplating the legitimacy of hagiographic studies. The renowned Counter-Reformation theologian Robert Bellarmine (1542—1621) discouraged such research in a letter to his Jesuit colleague Heribert Rosweyde (1569-1629), the Belgian professor of philosophy who first proposed a hagiographic project that was to proceed according to techniques characteristic of modern scholarship.1 Despite Bellarmine’s reservation that publishing the colorful,“original histories” of the saints would too easily evoke the ridicule of contemporary readers, Rosweyde proceeded with his plan.
The Prose Hagiography Of Venantius Fortunatus.
Authors: Kitchen John
Published: November 2023

To establish the main features that characterize the male saints portrayed by Fortunatus, we shall first concentrate on the depiction of the holy men in the earliest phase of life. In the description of the young man, we find the profile of the whole saint. If such an assertion seems to place undue importance on one aspect of what is presumably a more comprehensive literary representation, that is because we generally expect biographical narrative to mirror the course of human life as it progresses not only physically, which is obvious, but also psychologically through several distinct stages marking the passages from birth to death. The literature we are about to examine, however, shows little correspondence to our modern scheme or even our experience of human development. With respect to that gradual psychological formation of a child into what we commonly call a “self-actualized” adult, the writing of Fortunatus is a case in which art does not reflect life. The gray-haired holy man de­ scribed on his deathbed is fundamentally the same in character as the saintly youth depicted in the early portions of a Vita. Even in death, the saint continues to perform from the tomb virtually the same functions that he did while alive.
Mary Ward’s “Jesuitresses” and the Construction of a Typological Community
Authors: Gallagher Lowell
Published: November 2023

One of The Fewecclesiastical topics on which both Protestant and Catholic authorities in early seventeenth-century England might agree was the career of Mary Ward (1585-1645). Daughter of a prominent Yorkshire family, Ward had gained notoriety by the age of thirty as the founder of a religious community of women, the Schola Beatae Mariae (School of Blessed Mary), which dedicated itself to the education of girls and to the propagation of the Catholic religion on the Continent as well as in England.1 It was Ward whom George Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury, had in mind when he made the following comment in 1617= “That woman does more harm to the English Church than many priests. Gladly would I exchange six or seven Jesuits for her” (Hicks 2, p. 323).
Alliance and Exile: Aphra Behn’s Racial Identity
Authors: Hendricks Margo
Published: November 2023

Passing is hazardous business ... this breaking away from all that was familiar and friendly to take one’s chance in another environment, not entirely strange, perhaps, but certainly not entirely friendly. What, for example, one does about background, how one accounted for oneself. In May 1660, Charles II ended a decade-long period of exile, and with him returned a group of courtiers whose patronage would enable Aphra Behn not only to embark on a career as a professional writer but also to sustain that endeavor. Yet this return did not end the psychological effects that exile had on the returning royalists. In spite of a concerted effort to resume life as if the “rebellion” had never occurred, Charles and his court were never entirely able to put this moment of alienation and displacement to rest. In much of the writing produced during the Restoration, exile was a recurring theme or trope. This theme persisted despite the cynicism, secularism, and hedonism that came to be trademarks of Charles’s reign.
Introduction Koan Tradition: Self-Narrative And Contemporary Perspectives
Authors: Heine Steven , Wright Dale S
Published: November 2023

The term kōan (C. kung-an, literally “public cases”) refers to enigmatic and often shocking spiritual expressions based on dialogical encounters between masters and disciples that were used as pedagogical tools for religious training in the Zen (C. Ch’an) Buddhist tradition. This innovative practice is one of the best-known and most distinctive elements of Zen Buddhism. Originating in Tang/Sung China, the use of koans spread to Vietnam, Korea, and Japan and now attracts international attention. What is unique about the koan is the way in which it is thought to embody the enlightenment experience of the Buddha and Zen masters through an unbroken line of succession. The koan was conceived as both the tool by which enlightenment is brought about and an expression of the enlightened mind itself. Koans are generally appreciated today as pithy, epigrammatic, elusive utterances that seem to have a psychotherapeutic effect in liberating practitioners from bondage to ignorance, as well as for the way they are contained in the complex, multileveled literary form of koan collection commentaries. Perhaps no dimension of Asian religions has attracted so much interest and attention in the West, from psychological interpretations and comparative mystical theology to appropriations in beat poetry and deconstructive literary criticism.
“Before the Empty Eon” versus “A Dog Has No Buddha-Nature" Kung-an Use in the Ts’ao-tung Tradition and Ta-hui’s Kung-an Introspection Ch’an
Authors: Schlutter Morten
Published: November 2023

A common view of the kung-an, implied in much of the literature on Ch’an available in English, is that its use is the special domain of the Lin-chi (J. Rinzai) tradition, in which kung-an were, and still are, used in the active pursuit of enlightenment. Along with this view is the depiction of the Ts’ao-tung (J. Soto) tradition as being rather passive while neglecting, or at least putting less emphasis on, the study of kung-an, instead pursuing a gradual approach enlightenment through long hours of meditation. These distinctions are furthermore understood to characterize the Lin-chi and Ts’ao-tung traditions from their very inceptions in China.
Transmission Of Kirigami (Secret Initiation Documents) A Soto Practice In Medieval Japan
Authors: Rikizan Ishikawa
Published: November 2023

This chapter is Ishikawa’s earliest attempt to explore the complex nature of a genre of medieval Soto Zen literature dealing with interpretations of koans known as kirigami. It should be stressed that the field of kirigami studies was hardly explored at the time the essay was written in the early 1980s, and therefore it was nothing but Ishikawa’s courage, passion, and painstaking efforts that opened up the field of studying these esoteric materials. Subsequent to this publication, Ishikawa produced dozens of important articles elaborating on this pioneering work.
Grand Expectations About the World
Authors: Patterson James T
Published: November 2023

World War II did more than usher in unparalleled prosperity for the United States. It transformed America’s foreign relations. The war devastated the Axis nations, which took years to recover. It also savaged America’s allies, including the Soviet Union, which lost an estimated 2 5 million people during six years of fighting. Alone of the world’s great powers the United States emerged immeasurably stronger, both absolutely and relatively, from the carnage. In a new balance of power it was a colossus on the international stage.
Red Scares Abroad and at Home
Authors: Patterson James T
Published: November 2023

The radical social activist Michael Harrington once commented that “1948 was the last year of the thirties.” He meant specifically that labor unrest and class-consciousness abated amid rising prosperity after 1948. So did chances for substantial extension of the New Deal. The political Left, already weak, reeled under sustained assaults. In place of reform activity, Cold War fears rose to the center of American society, politics, and foreign policy in 1949 and early 1950, generating a Red Scare that soured a little the otherwise optimistic, “can-do” mood of American life until 1954.
JFK and the World
Authors: Patterson James T
Published: November 2023

In September 1960, Kennedy gave one of his most anti-Communist campaign speeches, in Salt Lake City. It captured well the incendiary Cold War rhetoric of the era and summarized a widely held American view of the world. “The enemy,” he said, “is the Communist system itself- implacable, insatiable, increasing in its drive for world domination. . . .This is not a struggle for supremacy of arms alone. It is also a struggle for supremacy between two conflicting ideologies: freedom under God versus ruthless, godless tyranny.”
A Great Society and the Rise of Rights-Consciousness
Authors: Patterson James T
Published: November 2023

As Johnson departed from his inaugural ball in January 1965, he warned his aides, “Don’t stay up late. There’s work to be done. We’re on our way to the Great Society. ” Both the phrase “Great Society” and the planning for it dated to May 1964, when Johnson addressed the graduating class of the University of Michigan. “We have the opportunity,” he proclaimed, “to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society. ” That was “where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community. ... It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.”
Escalation in Vietnam
Authors: Patterson James T
Published: November 2023

Like many Texans of his generation, Lyndon Johnson was brought up on the story of the Alamo, where brave men had fought to the death to resist attack. As President he told people that his great-great-grandfather had died there, although there was no substance to his claim. Vietnam, he exclaimed to advisers on the National Security Council, “is just like the Alamo.” This is one of many anecdotes that critics of LBJ relate about his approach to foreign policy. They portray him as ignorant about the world, imperious, devious in the extreme, and quick on the trigger. His handling of the war in Vietnam, they emphasize, demonstrated all these traits. When he sat down with Ambassador Lodge in the immediate aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination, he personalized the war. “I am not going to lose Vietnam,” he said. “I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.” For many Americans then and later the struggle in Vietnam was simply “Johnson’s War.”
The Most Turbulent Year: 1968
Authors: Patterson James T
Published: November 2023

January 30, 1968, was the first day of Tet, a festive holiday in Vietnam that marked the beginning of the lunar year. Americans in Vietnam hoped for some respite from the fighting. But at 2=45 that morning a team of NLF sappers blasted a hole in the wall that surrounded the American embassy in Saigon. Racing into the compound, they tried but failed to smash through the heavy door at the entrance to the embassy. They then took cover behind large concrete flowerpots and assailed the building with rockets. Military police fired back at them in a fight that lasted until 9:1 5 in the morning. All nineteen of the enemy were either killed or badly wounded. Five Americans and a South Vietnamese civilian employee lost their lives. A reporter described the scene as “a butcher shop in Eden.”1 The attack on the embassy formed part of a much broader military plan, elements of which had already been launched outside of Saigon, that came to be known as the Tet offensive. Starting in late 1967 Hanoi had intensified pressure on towns and bases in the central highlands of South Vietnam and along the demilitarized zone, and especially on the marine garrison at Khe Sanh near the border with Laos.
The Design 1. The Foundational Framework: Time and Space
Authors: Brodie Thomas L
Published: November 2023

Discussion of the gospel’s design (plan/structure) has centered on a variety of elements, particularly geography, chronology, liturgy, symbolism, symbolic numbers, symmetric concentric structures, chiasms, drama, journeys, and, of course theology, especially revelation (Mlakuzhyil, 1987, 17-85). These elements are not mutually exclusive. It is frequently suggested that the gospel is structured around not just one element but around several. Giblin (1990), for instance, has compared John’s interweaving structures with the way in which the water on the oceanfront sometimes reflects diverse patterns, one caused, say, by a passing ship and another by the prevailing wind.
Book One □The Years of Jesus’ Life
Authors: Brodie Thomas L
Published: November 2023

In the beginning was the Word [logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not made anything that/what was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of humans. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome/grasped it.
The Arrest and Trial
Authors: Brodie Thomas L
Published: November 2023

The text describes two dramas-first the arrest and Jewish interrogation (18:1- 27), then the trial before Pilate (18:28-19:16a). One occurs at night and lasts until cockcrow. The other begins in the early morning and lasts until noon (“the sixth hour”). The division between night and morning acts as an initial indication of the division and complementarity of the two dramas. John’s account is quite different from that of the other gospels. He does not tell of a full meeting of the Jewish Sanhedrin (though such a meeting is reported as part of the Lazarus story, 11:45-53), and his picture of the trial before Pilate is much more elaborate.
The Imamite Theory of Political Authority
Authors: Sachedina Abdulaziz Abdulhussein
Published: November 2023

The cornerstone of the Imamite theory of political authority is the existence of an Imam from among the progeny of Muhammad, clearly designated by the latter to assume the leadership of the Muslim community. Acknowledgment of the lawfully established authority of the Imam falls within the category of the religious obligations (al-takiilff al-shar’iyya) imposed on the adherents of the Imam. Among the ShI’I Imams, it was during the lmamate of Ja’far al-Sadiq (d. A.D. 765) and his successors that the idea that the ‘Alid Imam was the sole legitimate authority-by virtue of his being an infallible leader and authoritative interpreter of Islamic revelation, and therefore qualified to establish the Islamic state-became a distinctive feature of ImamI ShI’Ism. The Imamites invariably regarded the historical caliphate, with the exception of the period when ‘AH was acclaimed as the caliph, as usurpatory and illegitimate.1 As a matter of fact, even non-Shi’ite Muslims, who were not actively engaged in resisting the caliphal authority as such, opposed the khulafii’ al-jawr or al-zalama (tyrannical or unjust caliphs) and regarded obedience to them as disobedience to God.
Introduction: Contemporary Jewish Perspectives on Homosexuality
Authors: Saul M Olyan
Published: November 2023

As in the case of many other major religious groups in the United States, the last fifteen years have witnessed a great deal of conflict and change in the American Jewish community with respect to issues of sexual orientation. Gays, lesbians, and bisexuals, invisible a generation ago in the major institutions of Jewish life, have come out in number in recent years, many demanding a place for themselves in the Jewish mainstream, often with the implicit or explicit support of heterosexual family members, friends, and other community members. Few walks of American Jewish life have been immune to these developments; in certain contexts, divisive struggles and often revolutionary transformations have occurred. Conflict and change can be seen in individual congregations, the national synagogue organizations, and the rabbinate of the major non-Orthodox branches of American Judaism; it is evident in Jewish Centers, youth organizations, Zionist groups, and summer camps. Some Jewish institutions have made radical changes in their positions on homosexuality and homosexuals; others, many with Orthodox affiliations or a strong Orthodox presence, have resisted any such change. Conflict among Jews over how to view homosexuality, and the place of gays and lesbians in the Jewish community, mirrors in many respects the struggles over these issues that currently divide other American religious communities, and American society as a whole.
Sexual Orientation And Human Society, And Rights: A Progressive Jewish Perspective
Authors: Plaskow Judith
Published: November 2023

This essay begins from the premise that the religious and public policy dimensions of sexual orientation are so thoroughly intertwined that it is almost impossible to disentangle them. Religious injunctions against homosexuality have shaped negative public attitudes toward bisexuals, gays, and lesbians and have been used to justify repressive civil legislation. The contemporary gay rights movement emerged in reaction to the pervasive homophobia of American culture, a homophobia formed and fueled by religion.1 As the movement encouraged the visibility and activism of lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals, including those religiously involved, many religious denominations have found themselves deep in debate about both the legitimacy of homosexuality and gay religious participation and leadership. The parallel civil debate about gay and lesbian rights has been charged with religious emotion, and similar types of arguments have been advanced in secular and religious contexts. The question, then, is not so much whether religious arguments should have a bearing on public discussion as what the content of those arguments should be. For progressives, serious discussion
Response To Max Stackhouse And Eugene Rogers
Authors: Tanner Kathryn
Published: November 2023

The essays by Stackhouse and Rogers exemplify the distinctive character of reasoning on moral matters in the mainline Protestant churches.1 Moral reasoning is fully embedded in a theological context. Theological claims with a bearing on the character of human moral agency—claims, for example, about the order of human affairs that God created, the nature of covenant, the character of sanctification, and the relation between nature and grace—are the primary focus of the two essays. These theological interests set the terms for evaluating the moral status of homosexual relationships, for determining, more specifically, whether the moral standing of homosexual relations warrants their official sanction by marriage rites in Protestant churches.
Introduction: Three Perspective On Gays In African-American Ecclesiology And Religious Thought
Authors: Gordon Lewis R
Published: November 2023

W: E. B. Du Bois, the dean of African-American scholarship, made a valuable contribution to the study of humankind in 1903, when he counseled his fellow researchers and curious-minded folk to be wary of problematizing the people they study instead of studying the people’s problems.1 We need not here rehearse the many violations of this counsel throughout our century. Du Bois also reminded us in the same text, with perhaps an eye for irony, that the trope through which this admonition was conditioned—the infamous problem of the color line—would be fortified and take on new dimensions in spite of his warning’s signaling his hope to be contradicted. The color line has received many commentaries, and it continues to transform and meet the challenge of each generation as it increasingly becomes clear that the color line stands also as a metaphor for our age. Our age is marked, after all, by two dominating motifs that, at the century’s end, seem to gain more relevance as their significance continues to be denied by many of us who, perhaps, find responsibility for effecting social transformation too daunting a demand on any age. These motifs are identity and liberation—in other words, questions of who we are and what we should be doing to realize a world in which our identities need not be our liabilities. The color line addresses the identity question, and in that regard, it extends into the realm of excluded humanity. It cries out for social transformation, making liberation its intimate ally: liberation from forces that militate against identity recognition; liberation toward a world in which difference is not a problem but a celebration, where the problem becomes the failure to appreciate such possibilities.
Introduction “The Best Argument for Christianity?”
Authors: Rubin Julius H
Published: November 2023

The best argument for Christianity is Christians: their joy, their certainty, their completeness. But the strongest argument AGAINST Christianity is also Christians when they are somber and joyless, when they are self righteous and smug in complacent consecration, when they are narrow and repressive, then Christianity dies a thousand deaths.
The Thrall of Utopian Illusions
Authors: Rubin Julius H
Published: November 2023

The utopian ideals of creating a Christian primordium, of building the Kingdom of God, and implementing an absolute ethic of brotherliness within a harmonious, organic Gemeinde served as the foundation of the Bruderhof movement. In this chapter, we retrace the decisive turning points in the formation of Eberhard Arnold’s utopianism.
Introduction
Authors: Janz Denis R
Published: November 2023

The Christian religion, from the time of its birth in the ancient world until today, has repeatedly struggled through monumental encounters with alien worlds of thought and action. In every case, the final outcome has been a significantly transformed Christianity. One thinks, for instance, of the earliest Christians’ encounter with rabbinic Judaism-a process in which the very self-definition of this religion was hammered out. Then, too, Christianity’s engagement with the Hellenistic worldview made it in important ways what it had not been before. In the thirteenth century, the strange world of Aristotelian thought challenged and eventually deepened the Christian self-understanding.
The Marxist Assault on Religion: Intellectual Foundations
Authors: Janz Denis R
Published: November 2023

If we ask of the Marxist tradition why this is the case, we will be immediately deluged with literally hundreds of answers. The fact is, there are many Marxist critiques of religion, and some of them differ from one another in important ways. Different factions, schools, parties, and so on have come to various positions on how religion is to be understood and handled (and some of these will be examined in subsequent chapters). In the end, however, what unifies all Marxists is at least some sort of allegiance to the thought of the founder. All types of Marxism and all Marxist critiques of religion are ultimately interpretations of Marx and attempts to apply Marx’s ideas to different contexts. All owe something to Marx: this is what in the end provides unity amid a confusing pluralism. If we inquire, therefore, into the foundation of the Marxist critique of religion, we do well to turn to Marx himself.
Nicaragua
Authors: Janz Denis R
Published: November 2023

When one thinks of the worldwide encounter between Christianity and Marxism in our century, the first image that generally comes to mind is that of a collision. The case of Nicaragua, however, is different. Here the meeting can more accurately be described as an embrace that gave birth to a distinctly new, though perhaps short-lived, social reality. Here significant numbers of people came to understand themselves as “Christian Marxists” and helped to bring about a revolution that marked a turning point in Nicaragua’s history.
Albania
Authors: Janz Denis R
Published: November 2023

Albania’s importance for our subject is not immediately obvious. With a population of3.3 million people, it is one of Europe’s tiniest nations, squeezed between Yugoslavia and Greece on the Adriatic coast. It is also one of the least-known. From 1944 till 1991 it was among the most isolated societies in the world. Very few Western visitors were allowed in. Only a handful of experts and escapees had an inkling of what was happening here. Since the country opened itself to the West in 1991, the full picture is gradually becoming clearer. And it is, historically speaking, an astonishing one.
Theory, Method, Tools
Authors: Hendel Ronald S
Published: November 2023

The textual critic of the Hebrew Bible is helped immensely by the recent production of comprehensive introductions to the field, particularly the works by Tov (1981 and 1992a) and McCarter (1986). Most of the theoretical and methodological issues relevant to the task are handled splendidly by these scholars. In a time of rebirth for textual criticism in the post-Qumran era (see GoshenGottstein 1983), a number of issues require further thought and refinement. None is more important than clarifying the theoretical and practical necessity of textual criticism. Many biblical scholars currently eschew the practice of textual criticism, for the most part because of a misconception of the grounds for the task. Careful reflection on the nature of the biblical text will clarify the necessity of the task. To recall Housman’s barb on the text-critical obtuseness of his time: “Three minutes’ thought would suffice to find it out; but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time” (1961a: 56). A few minutes may not be too much to ask for the possibility of textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible.