God and Community Organizing: A Covenantal Approach Hardcover – October 1, 2020 by Hak Joon Lee

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[288 pages]

PUB: October 01, 2020

$49.99

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Description

Author: Lee Hak Joon

Brand: Baylor University Press

Package Dimensions: 29x235x576

Number Of Pages: 288

Release Date: 15-09-2020

Details: Product Description
For decades, the multiple, interlocking forces of technological advances, neoliberal capitalism, and globalization have been transforming the very moral fabric and institutional underpinnings of global society. The effects of these challenges include soaring economic inequality, a widely experienced social fragmentation, and increasing disenchantment with liberal democracy and its social arrangements. This unraveling can be seen in the rise of illiberal democracy, a deepening ecological crisis, and failures of governance in coping with natural disasters and social tumults alike.
In response to this crisis of democracy and eroding community, a growing number of people have been attracted to Saul D. Alinsky’s grassroots method of community organizing.
God and Community Organizing: A Covenantal Approach is written in this cultural milieu; it brings Alinsky’s community organizing into conversation with the biblical vision of of covenant. Hak Joon Lee argues that, theologically, covenant reflects the life of the triune God who eternally organizes Godself as the Father, Son, and Spirit, while politically, covenant captures the inherent passion for justice that underlies Jewish and Christian faith. At its heart is the attempt to structure a wholesome, close-knit community of love, justice, and power. He points out that not only is covenant instrumental in the formation of God’s people as a community, but the concept has also played an important role in the rise of modern Western ideasof democracy, constitutionalism, and human rights.
To demonstrate the political plausibility of covenantal organizing, Lee incorporates four examples of covenantal organizing in different historical and social contexts: Exodus, Jesus, Puritans, and Martin Luther King Jr. Critically engaging with Saul Alinsky’s method, Lee seeks to highlight how thetwo different streams of political praxis―covenantal organizing and Alinsky’s community organizing―can complement each other to develop a more vigorous and effective method of faith-based community organizing.
Finally, Lee explores the political and moral meanings and implications of his study for the current struggle against the neoliberal corporate oligarchy by presenting covenantal organizing as an alternative political philosophy and practice to secular liberal philosophy, postmodernism, identity politics, and communitarianism.
Review
Hak Joon Lee has written a fresh and compelling study of the practice of political power which deserves our close attention. Lee claims that covenant as expressed in the Bible constitutes a valuable map and guideline for the contemporary practice of community organizing. He shows the way in which the covenant of ancient Israel becomes a model for the exercise of social power in organizing a new moral community today. In this narrative account the pay-out of exposition is the singular work of Saul Alinsky who wisely acted out the ancient impulses of covenant. In the midst of this covenant-to-Alinsky exposition is Jesus who knowingly ?trained his disciples into kingdom organizers.? Serious faith can no longer be a passive head-trip. It is rather transformative action in the world. Lee exposits the biblical resources for just such a faith. — Walter Brueggemann, Professor Emeritus, Columbia Theological Seminary

The pièce de résistance in Hak Joon Lee’s oeuvre,  God and Community Organizing restores America?s broken covenant through faith-rooted organizing for a better tomorrow. Lee lucidly reveals that Christian Ethicists worth their salt are courageous watcher-warriors who ?watch and pray? for a restoration of revolutionary love! — Peter Goodwin Heltzel, Associate Professor of Theology, New York Theological Seminary

God and Community Organizing: A Covenantal Approach is located in this very  kairotic moment of history of multiple and interlocking crises that threaten the health and future of the human community. Lee argues convincing

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