Paula Cooey serves as the Margaret Weyerhaeuser Harmon Professor Emerita of Religion at Macalester College. Her latest book is Willing the Good: Jesus, Dissent, and Desire, published by Augsburg…
Sean O’Neil is a Visiting Research Fellow in the Centre for the Study of Sport and Health at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia and he holds a PhD in Religion (Religion in the Americas…
Now that the curtain’s been pulled back on the false wizardry of a deregulated financial system, and Americans have been left holding a bag full of bank bailouts, home foreclosures, historic levels of unemployment and poverty, and wage stagnation for those with jobs, “loser” is a label most of us can, in one way or another, wear easily in the current economy. So goes the American Dream these days.
Many liberal religious activists, Rev. Merritt said, remain stuck in the 1960s in how they frame and address economic issues, yet have abandoned protest strategies in favor of the model of maintaining a Washington office whose purpose is to lobby members of Congress. Other religious activists are too focused on “events-oriented things” like staged arrests, “where they’ve pre-negotiated the thing, which is not to me civil disobedience.”
Just two years ago the man who delivered the sermon at Anderson’s re-ordination was leading the charge against the ordination of gay and lesbian ministers.
