Solidarity And Suffering

Developing a concept of justice as solidarity, this work addresses a range of urgent social issues--from the meaning of human rights and the character of corporate governance to the resolution of social conflict and the moral status of the environment.

Developing a concept of justice as solidarity, this work addresses a range of urgent social issues--from the meaning of human rights and the character of corporate governance to the resolution of social conflict and the moral status of the environment.

How do Christians respond to the urgent needs and issues facing the globe while avoiding a kind of 'poverty tourism' or 'slacktivism' in our response to suffering, particularly far from home? How do we respond authentically and effectively in our strategies for solidarity with the poor and the underprivileged? Using personal anecdotes as well as philosophical and theological reflection, Donald and James Dunson offer their personal experience and insights from philosophy, theology and social science in a text perfect for use with high school and college classrooms, immersion groups, parish study groups, and service-learning programs.

This study of the nature of our moral obligations to alleviate suffering on a global level addresses many of the vexing questions that face practitioners of Christian compassion: how do we avoid a kind of "poverty tourism" or "slacktivism" in our response to suffering, particularly far from home? How do we respond authentically and effectively in our strategies for solidarity with the poor and the underprivileged? Using personal anecdotes as well as philosophical and theological reflection, Donald and James Dunson emphasize the power of moral argument as well as personal experience in addressing what can seem an insurmountable catalog of evils and suffering in the world. Approaching these issues from a number of backgrounds academic philosophy, pastoral counseling, theology, social science, and narrative approaches Dunson and Dunson have created a text perfect for use with high school and college classrooms, immersion groups, parish study groups, and service-learning programs.

Jesus in Solidarity with His People: A Theologian Looks at Mark works from two premises. The first is that the Gospel of Mark is, from beginning to end, an Easter story. And the second is that the category of solidarity provides a contemporary key for understanding Mark's message about Jesus' life and mission. The book argues that the spiritual effectiveness of Mark's story will be determined largely by how much the reader is willing to live, like Jesus, in solidarity with God's people. The opening chapter surveys the range of theological matters that the text invites us to think about. Subsequent chapters return to those issues as they appear in the Gospel text.

Planetary Solidarity brings together leading Latina, womanist, Asian American, Anglican American, South American, Asian, European, and African woman theologians on the issues of doctrine, women, and climate justice. Because women make up the majority of the world's poor and tend to be more dependent on natural resources for their livelihoods and survival, they are more vulnerable when it comes to climate-related changes and catastrophes. Representing a subfield of feminist theology that uses doctrine as interlocutor, this book ask how Christian doctrine might address the interconnected suffering of women and the earth in an age of climate change. While doctrine has often stifled change, it also forms the thread that weaves Christian communities together. Drawing on postcolonial ecofeminist/womanist analysis and representing different ecclesial and denominational traditions, contributors use doctrine to envision possibilities for a deep solidarity with the earth and one another while addressing the intersection of gender, race, class, and ethnicity. The book is organized around the following doctrines: creation, the triune God, anthropology, sin, incarnation, redemption, the Holy Spirit, ecclesiology, and eschatology.

WINNER of the 2015 ICA Outstanding Book Award This path-breaking book explores how solidarity towards vulnerable others is performed in our media environment. It argues that stories where famine is described through our own experience of dieting or or where solidarity with Africa translates into wearing a cool armband tell us about much more than the cause that they attempt to communicate. They tell us something about the ways in which we imagine the world outside ourselves. By showing historical change in Amnesty International and Oxfam appeals, in the Live Aid and Live 8 concerts, in the advocacy of Audrey Hepburn and Angelina Jolie as well as in earthquake news on the BBC, this far-reaching book shows how solidarity has today come to be not about conviction but choice, not vision but lifestyle, not others but ourselves – turning us into the ironic spectators of other people’s suffering.

Elizabeth Faue traces the transformation of the American labor movement from community forms of solidarity to bureaucratic unionism. Arguing that gender is central to understanding this shift, Faue explores women's involvement in labor and political organizations and the role of gender and family ideology in shaping unionism in the twentieth century. Her study of Minneapolis, the site of the important 1934 trucking strike, has broad implications for labor history as a whole. Initially the labor movement rooted itself in community organizations and networks in which women were active, both as members and as leaders. This community orientation reclaimed family, relief, and education as political ground for a labor movement seeking to re-establish itself after the losses of the 1920s. But as the depression deepened, women -- perceived as threats to men seeking work -- lost their places in union leadership, in working-class culture, and on labor's political agenda. When unions exchanged a community orientation for a focus on the workplace and on national politics, they lost the power to recruit and involve women members, even after World War II prompted large numbers of women to enter the work force. In a pathbreaking analysis, Faue explores how the iconography and language of labor reflected ideas about gender. The depiction of work and the worker as male; the reliance on sport, military, and familial metaphors for solidarity; and the ideas of women's place -- these all reinforced the representation of labor solidarity as masculine during a time of increasing female participation in the labor force. Although the language of labor as male was not new in the depression, the crisis of wage-earning -- as a crisis of masculinity -- helped to give psychological power to male dominance in the labor culture. By the end of the war, women no longer occupied a central position in organized labor but a peripheral one.

The author of this book challenges the contemporary view of God and suffering. Calling upon scripture, and the philosophical and theological tradition of the Fathers and Aquinas, he advocates the incarnational truth that the Son of God actually does experience human living, including suffering.