Joining Hands: Politics And Religion Together For Social Change

by Roger S. Gottlieb

Overview

Did Martin Luther King's spiritual understanding of political struggle truly help the Civil Rights movement? Can breast cancer victims incorporate both spiritual wisdom and political action in their fight for life? Confronting questions that challenge the foundations of both politics and spirituality, Roger S. Gottlieb presents a brave new account

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780367316440
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	08/19/2019
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Roger S. Gottlieb is a professor of philosophy in the department of humanities and arts at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He is the author or editor of twelve books on politics, religion, the Holocaust, and ecology; and has contributed to numerous publications including Tikkun, the Boston Globe, Orion Afield, and Ethics. He lives in Boston.

Table of Contents

PART I, 1 Two Ways of World Making, 2 The Time Is Ripe, 3 Politics Teaching Religion, 4 Religion Teaching Politics, PART II, 5 Redemptive Suffering and the Civil Rights Movement, 6 After Patriarchy: Feminist Politics and the Transformation of Religion, 7 Saving the World: Religion and Politics in the Environmental Movement, 8 Beyond Our Private Sorrows: Spirituality and Politics as Responses to Breast Cancer and Disability, 9 Toward Hope, Together

What People are Saying About This

Joel Kovel

Joel Kovel, Bard College
It is hard to imagine a more timely work than Joining Hands. In a world increasingly subjected to the catastrophic polarity of violent fundamentalism and spiritless secularism, Roger Gottlieb offers a 'Middle Way,' generous, humane, and authentically hopeful.

Harvey Cox

Harvey Cox, Harvard Divinity School0
Gottlieb's book introduces a fresh voice and a refreshing perspective on a subject that has suffered too long from fixed ideas and static positions. It is a hopeful book at a time when much of the talk about religion and politics is glum. An important contribution.

John B. Cobb Jr.

John B. Cobb, Jr., Claremont School of Theology
Most who write on politics and religion do so from one side or the other. Gottlieb is deeply immersed in both. As a result this is the richest, most accurate and most balanced account to date of an issue that is, or should be, of central importance to all who care about the world's future.

David Barnhill

David Barnhill, Guilford College
An exceptionally important book. It shows how politics and spirituality need each other, and how we need both to create a better world.

Bill McKibben

This book is both extraordinarily smart and extraordinarily moving. If we are to solve the massive challenges we face, then the involvement of faith communities is mandatory - and as this novel argument makes clear, that involvement will benefit not only politics but also religion. This is a foundational document for anyone trying to figure out where activism will come from, and what it will look like, in the decades ahead.
—(Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature)

Editorial Reviews

Roger Gottlieb has produced a profound and significant integration of spiritual and political concerns. Highlighting the spiritual strengths and weaknesses of the civil rights, anti-war, and feminist movements, Gottlieb shows that world-making politics and religion can be partners as they inform and deepen each other. As he ponders his role as a father of a physically challenged child, eschewing a perpetually optimistic version of spirituality, Gottlieb forces us to rethinking our commitment to "rational autonomy" as central to human identity. Rather than the dogmatic confidence of the true believer, Gottlieb offers faith and hope that leads to individual and collective political action even in the face of sorrow and loss, and without the surety of success.

Tikkun

Makes refreshing contributions to the fields of social activism, and political science and will probably spark interesting discussion among readers.

MultiCultural Review

An absorbing look at the merger of religion and politics.

Booklist

Gottlieb writes well and with passion.

Choice

"If I am successful," Roger Gottlieb writes in the introduction to Joining Hands: Politics and Religion Together for Social Change, "people will think twice... before presuming that religious life and progressive political movements have different goals." Gottlieb, who came of age in the 1960s, presents this book as a rapprochement between religion and politics two fields that, he says, should have more interaction with one another than they currently do. Gottlieb examines the civil rights movement, feminism, environmentalism and disability activism to increase "the full openness of religion and politics to each other's insights." In a presidential era marked by much discussion of faith-based social services, this thoughtful book offers a timely perspective, even though its worldview may be more left-leaning than "Dubya" would likely embrace. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly