A Contemporary in Dissent

A Contemporary in Dissent PDF

Author: Oswald Bayer

Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

Published: 2012-01-31

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0802866700

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In this biography -- translated for the first time into English -- German theologian Oswald Bayer describes the life and work of journalist-theologian Johann Georg Hamann (1730 1788). At a time when it seemed that the forces of secularization were attempting to claim the future, Hamann churned out small publications aimed at undermining the Enlightenment zeitgeist, turning its assumptions upside down and skewering its pretensions. Although largely forgotten until recent times, Hamann as radical dissenter -- whom Goethe called the "brightest man of his age" -- remains relevant today, as Bayer shows in this book.

Satire and Dissent

Satire and Dissent PDF

Author: Amber Day

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2011-02-16

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0253005140

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In an age when Jon Stewart frequently tops lists of most-trusted newscasters, the films of Michael Moore become a dominant topic of political campaign analysis, and activists adopt ironic, fake personas to attract attention—the satiric register has attained renewed and urgent prominence in political discourse. Amber Day focuses on the parodist news show, the satiric documentary, and ironic activism to examine the techniques of performance across media, highlighting their shared objective of bypassing standard media outlets and the highly choreographed nature of current political debate.

Loyal Dissent

Loyal Dissent PDF

Author: Charles E. Curran

Publisher: Georgetown University Press

Published: 2006-05-01

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9781589013636

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Loyal Dissent is the candid and inspiring story of a Catholic priest and theologian who, despite being stripped of his right to teach as a Catholic theologian by the Vatican, remains committed to the Catholic Church. Over a nearly fifty-year career, Charles E. Curran has distinguished himself as the most well-known and the most controversial Catholic moral theologian in the United States. On occasion, he has disagreed with official church teachings on subjects such as contraception, homosexuality, divorce, abortion, moral norms, and the role played by the hierarchical teaching office in moral matters. Throughout, however, Curran has remained a committed Catholic, a priest working for the reform of a pilgrim church. His positions, he insists, are always in accord with the best understanding of Catholic theology and always dedicated to the good of the church. In 1986, years of clashes with church authorities finally culminated in a decision by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, headed by then-Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, that Curran was neither suitable nor eligible to be a professor of Catholic theology. As a result of that Vatican condemnation, he was fired from his teaching position at Catholic University of America and, since then, no Catholic university has been willing to hire him. Yet Curran continues to defend the possibility of legitimate dissent from those teachings of the Catholic faith—not core or central to it—that are outside the realm of infallibility. In word and deed, he has worked in support of more academic freedom in Catholic higher education and for a structural change in the church that would increase the role of the Catholic community—from local churches and parishes to all the baptized people of God. In this poignant and passionate memoir, Curran recounts his remarkable story from his early years as a compliant, pre-Vatican II Catholic through decades of teaching and writing and a transformation that has brought him today to be recognized as a leader of progressive Catholicism throughout the world.

Dissent

Dissent PDF

Author: Ralph Young

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2015-04-24

Total Pages: 698

ISBN-13: 1479814520

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Finalist, 2016 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award One of Bustle's Books For Your Civil Disobedience Reading List Examines the key role dissent has played in shaping the United States, emphasizing the way Americans responded to injustices Dissent: The History of an American Idea examines the key role dissent has played in shaping the United States. It focuses on those who, from colonial days to the present, dissented against the ruling paradigm of their time: from the Puritan Anne Hutchinson and Native American chief Powhatan in the seventeenth century, to the Occupy and Tea Party movements in the twenty-first century. The emphasis is on the way Americans, celebrated figures and anonymous ordinary citizens, responded to what they saw as the injustices that prevented them from fully experiencing their vision of America. At its founding the United States committed itself to lofty ideals. When the promise of those ideals was not fully realized by all Americans, many protested and demanded that the United States live up to its promise. Women fought for equal rights; abolitionists sought to destroy slavery; workers organized unions; Indians resisted white encroachment on their land; radicals angrily demanded an end to the dominance of the moneyed interests; civil rights protestors marched to end segregation; antiwar activists took to the streets to protest the nation’s wars; and reactionaries, conservatives, and traditionalists in each decade struggled to turn back the clock to a simpler, more secure time. Some dissenters are celebrated heroes of American history, while others are ordinary people: frequently overlooked, but whose stories show that change is often accomplished through grassroots activism. The United States is a nation founded on the promise and power of dissent. In this stunningly comprehensive volume, Ralph Young shows us its history.

The Political is Political

The Political is Political PDF

Author: Lorna Finlayson

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2015-05-26

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 1783482885

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Nobody should really have to point out that political philosophy is political. Yet in this highly original and provocative book Lorna Finlayson argues that in fact it is necessary to do so. Offering a critique of mainstream liberal political philosophy through close, critical engagement with a series of specific debates and arguments, Finlayson analyzes the way in which apparently neutral methodological devices such as “charitable interpretation” and “constructive criticism” function so as to protect against challenges to the status quo. At each stage, Finlayson demonstrates that political philosophy is suffering from a complex process of “de-politicization.” Even in cases where it appears that the dominant framework of liberal political philosophy is being strongly challenged—as, for example, in the case of the ‘realist’ critique of “ideal theory”—this book argues that the debate is set up in such a way as to impose strict limits on the kind of dissent that is possible. Only by dragging these hidden presuppositions into the foreground can we arrive at a clear-eyed appreciation of such debates, and perhaps look beyond the artificially constricted landscape in which they seek to confine us.

Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent

Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent PDF

Author: Nancy Abelmann

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1996-11-14

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9780520917484

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Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent, the story of a South Korean social movement, offers a window to a decade of tumultuous social protest in a postcolonial, divided nation. Abelmann brings a dramatic chapter of modern Korean history to life—a period in which farmers, student activists, and organizers joined to protest the corporate ownership of tenant plots never distributed in the 1949 Land Reform. From public sites of protest to backstage meetings and negotiations, from farming villages to university campuses, Abelmann's highly original study explores this movement as a complex process always in the making. Her discussion moves fluently between past and present, local and national, elites and dominated, and urban and rural. Touching on major historical issues, this ethnography of dissent explores contemporary popular nationalism and historical consciousness.

Contemporary Protest and the Legacy of Dissent

Contemporary Protest and the Legacy of Dissent PDF

Author: Stuart Price

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2014-12-12

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 1783481773

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Contemporary protest, often presented in media forms as a dramatic ritual played out in an iconic public space has provided a potent symbol of the widespread economic and social discontent that is a feature of European life under the rule of “austerity.” Yet, beneath this surface activity, which provides the headlines and images familiar from mainstream news coverage, lies a whole array of deeper structures, modes of behavior, and forms of human affiliation. Contemporary Protest and the Legacy of Dissent offers a vibrant and insightful overview of modern protest movements, ideologies, and events. Written by academics and activists familiar with the strategies, values, and arguments of those groups and individuals responsible for shaping the modern landscape of protest, it reveals the inside story of a number of campaigns and events. It analyzes the various manifestations of dissent—on and offline, visible and obscure, progressive and reactionary—through the work of a number of commentators and dedicated “academic activists,” while reassessing the standard explanatory frameworks supplied by contemporary theorists. In doing so, it offers a coherent account of the range of academic and theoretical approaches to the study of protest and social movements. Contributions by: David Bates, Mark Bergfeld, Vincent Campbell,Claire English, Ingrid M. Hoofd, Soeren Keil, Matthew Ogilvie, Stuart Price, Anandi Ramamurthy, Ruth Sanz Sabido, Lee Salter, Cassian Sparkes-Vian, and Thomas Swann.

Awakening Islam

Awakening Islam PDF

Author: Stéphane Lacroix

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2011-04-15

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 0674265254

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Amidst the roil of war and instability across the Middle East, the West is still searching for ways to understand the Islamic world. Stéphane Lacroix has now given us a penetrating look at the political dynamics of Saudi Arabia, one of the most opaque of Muslim countries and the place that gave birth to Osama bin Laden. The result is a history that has never been told before. Lacroix shows how thousands of Islamist militants from Egypt, Syria, and other Middle Eastern countries, starting in the 1950s, escaped persecution and found refuge in Saudi Arabia, where they were integrated into the core of key state institutions and society. The transformative result was the Sahwa, or “Islamic Awakening,” an indigenous social movement that blended political activism with local religious ideas. Awakening Islam offers a pioneering analysis of how the movement became an essential element of Saudi society, and why, in the late 1980s, it turned against the very state that had nurtured it. Though the “Sahwa Insurrection” failed, it has bequeathed the world two very different, and very determined, heirs: the Islamo-liberals, who seek an Islamic constitutional monarchy through peaceful activism, and the neo-jihadis, supporters of bin Laden's violent campaign. Awakening Islam is built upon seldom-seen documents in Arabic, numerous travels through the country, and interviews with an unprecedented number of Saudi Islamists across the ranks of today’s movement. The result affords unique insight into a closed culture and its potent brand of Islam, which has been exported across the world and which remains dangerously misunderstood.

Worlds of Dissent

Worlds of Dissent PDF

Author: Jonathan Bolton

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2012-04-13

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 0674064836

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Worlds of Dissent analyzes the myths of Central European resistance popularized by Western journalists and historians, and replaces them with a picture of the struggle against state repression as the dissidents themselves understood, debated, and lived it. In the late 1970s, when Czech intellectuals, writers, and artists drafted Charter 77 and called on their government to respect human rights, they hesitated to name themselves "dissidents." Their personal and political experiences--diverse, uncertain, nameless--have been obscured by victory narratives that portray them as larger-than-life heroes who defeated Communism in Czechoslovakia. Jonathan Bolton draws on diaries, letters, personal essays, and other first-person texts to analyze Czech dissent less as a political philosophy than as an everyday experience. Bolton considers not only Václav Havel but also a range of men and women writers who have received less attention in the West--including Ludvík Vaculík, whose 1980 diary The Czech Dream Book is a compelling portrait of dissident life. Bolton recovers the stories that dissidents told about themselves, and brings their dilemmas and decisions to life for contemporary readers. Dissidents often debated, and even doubted, their own influence as they confronted incommensurable choices and the messiness of real life. Portraying dissent as a human, imperfect phenomenon, Bolton frees the dissidents from the suffocating confines of moral absolutes. Worlds of Dissent offers a rare opportunity tounderstand the texture of dissent in a closed society.

Resisting Dialogue

Resisting Dialogue PDF

Author: Juan Meneses

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2019-12-24

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 1452959811

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A bold new critique of dialogue as a method of eliminating dissent Is dialogue always the productive political and communicative tool it is widely conceived to be? Resisting Dialogue reassesses our assumptions about dialogue and, in so doing, about what a politically healthy society should look like. Juan Meneses argues that, far from an unalloyed good, dialogue often serves as a subtle tool of domination, perpetuating the underlying inequalities it is intended to address. Meneses investigates how “illusory dialogue” (a particular dialogic encounter designed to secure consensus) is employed as an instrument that forestalls—instead of fostering—articulations of dissent that lead to political change. He does so through close readings of novels from the English-speaking world written in the past hundred years—from E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion to Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People and more. Resisting Dialogue demonstrates how these novels are rhetorical exercises with real political clout capable of restoring the radical potential of dialogue in today’s globalized world. Expanding the boundaries of postpolitical theory, Meneses reveals how these works offer ways to practice disagreement against this regulatory use of dialogue and expose the pitfalls of certain other dialogic interventions in relation to some of the most prominent questions of modern history: cosmopolitanism at the end of empire, the dangers of rewriting the historical record, the affective dimension of neoliberalism, the racial and nationalist underpinnings of the “war on terror,” and the visibility of environmental violence in the Anthropocene. Ultimately, Resisting Dialogue is a complex, provocative critique that, melding political and literary theory, reveals how fiction can help confront the deployment of dialogue to preempt the emergence of dissent and, thus, revitalize the practice of emancipatory politics.