Occupy Wall Street Is Doing the Church’s Work: Hel­mut Goll­witzer and Eco­nomic Jus­tice

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Press release: Unbound (you might remember them for publishing my earlier piece on #OWS) has today published a version of the paper that I gave last November at the American Academy of Religion national meeting in Chicago. Here is the essay's title with the necessary link:

Occupy Wall Street Is Doing the Church’s Work: Hel­mut Goll­witzer and Eco­nomic Jus­tice.

While I'm at it, I might as well give you the abstract as well:
Hel­mut Gollwitzer’s legacy as a polit­i­cally con­cerned pas­tor and the­olo­gian is instruc­tive for those today who want to take seri­ously both what Chris­t­ian faith means for socio-economic jus­tice and what that con­cern for socio-economic jus­tice like­wise means for the the­o­log­i­cal task. I treat three aspects of Gollwitzer’s work in order to high­light his sig­nif­i­cance for the con­tem­po­rary sit­u­a­tion: (1) his inter­est­ing appli­ca­tion of the tra­di­tional idea of suum cuique, espe­cially vis-à-vis Bon­ho­ef­fer; (2) the con­nec­tion he draws between the Chris­t­ian gospel and the neces­sity of com­bat­ing economic-political priv­i­lege; and (3) his con­clu­sions con­cern­ing Chris­t­ian faith and theology’s fail­ings in the face of athe­ist crit­i­cism of reli­gion and what this means for con­tin­u­ing to do the­ol­ogy in the con­tem­po­rary sit­u­a­tion. One eye is kept on the Occupy Wall Street move­ment through­out the dis­cus­sion in order to high­light how Gollwitzer’s thought illu­mi­nates mat­ters in our own day.


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Comments

Bobby Grow said…
What kind of response did you receive when you presented the fuller version of this at AAR?
January 16, 2013 9:22 PM
W. Travis McMaken said…
The session was very lively and the audience engaged well during the concluding discussion. I'd like to think it was well received.
January 16, 2013 9:30 PM
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