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

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?
The session was very lively and the audience engaged well during the concluding discussion. I'd like to think it was well received.

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