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Zusatztext 72105496 Informationen zum Autor Dan McKanan is the Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Senior Lecturer at Harvard Divinity School and the author of Identifying the Image of God , Touching the World , and The Catholic Worker after Dorothy . His writing has appeared in Sojourners , America , and many other journals. Klappentext A broad, definitive history of the profound relationship between religion and movements for social change in America The United States has always had an active, vibrant, and influential religious Left. In every period of our history, people of faith have envisioned a society of peace and justice, and their tireless efforts have powered the social movements that have defined America's progress: the abolition of slavery, feminism, the New Deal, civil rights, and others. In this groundbreaking, definitive work, McKanan treats the histories of religion and of the Left as a single history, showing that American radicalism is a continuous tradition rather than a collection of disparate movements. Emphasizing the power of encounter-between whites and former slaves, between the middle classes and the immigrant masses, and among activists themselves-McKanan shows that the coming together of people of different perspectives and beliefs has been transformative for centuries, uniting those whose faith is a source of activist commitment with those whose activism is a source of faith. Offering a history of the diverse religious dimensions of radical movements from the American Revolution to the present day, Prophetic Encounters invites contemporary activists to stand proudly in a tradition of prophetic power. From the Introduction Everyone needs a history, especially those who seek to change the future. When radical activists confront the entrenched legacy of racism and sexism in both our institutions and our textbooks, we are tempted to imagine that all history supports the status quo. In an era in which prominent representatives of American Christianity are outspoken in their support of reactionary politics, it is easy to imagine that the history of religion is doubly conservative. But there have always been American radicals—and those radicals have always drawn strength from their diverse faiths, Christian and Jewish, pagan and Buddhist, orthodox and humanist. To forget our predecessors’ work is not only to risk repeating their mistakes, it is to lose their wisdom and inspiration. And so, as we organize our neighborhoods or march on Washington, we must tell the stories of the cloud of witnesses who came before us. To encounter them is to discover the human sources of radical faith. On August 11, 1841, Frederick Douglass made his first public speech at a convention in Nantucket. The prospect of addressing white people, Douglass would later recall, was “a severe cross” because he still “felt myself a slave.” Yet the act of speaking proved to be liberating for Doug-lass and revelatory for his audience. “I spoke but a few moments,” Douglass wrote in his autobiography, “when I felt a degree of freedom.” The antislavery editor William Lloyd Garrison, for his part, reported that “I think I never hated slavery so intensely as at that moment. Certainly, my perception of the enormous outrage which is inflicted by it, on the godlike nature of its victims, was rendered far more clear than ever.” For both men, their meeting was an encounter with the divine, and they retained a sense of its religious power long after their personal paths diverged. Thirty years later, Douglass mused that it was only through his encounters with other radicals that he could “get any glimpses of God anywhere.”1 Echoes of this sentiment can be heard in every American movement for social transformation. A century after Garrison met Douglass, a radical journalist named Dorothy Day found her...
