The latest news from our planet is threatening: climate change, pollution, forest loss, species extinctions. All these words are frightening and there is no sign of improvement. Simple logic leads to the conclusion that humanity has to react, for its own survival. But at the scale of a human being, it is less obvious. Organizing one’s daily life in order to preserve the environment implies self-questioning, changing habits, sacrificing some comfort. In one word, it is an effort. Then, what justifies (...) such an effort? The personal choice to act in order to preserve our environment is often made by simple altruism. This choice is based on our love for other human beings: our love for the others grounds our effort. Our moral values, our ethical reflections and our religious beliefs are the deep core of these choices. “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” (John 15.12 NRSV). This Charter shows the moral and religious values that can help us react regarding the current environmental crisis and it should empower us to transcend the ideas of effort and sacrifice in order to consider the respect of the shared house, in a prophetic fulfillment of the being. (shrink)

The Protestant ethic — a moral code stressing hard work, rigorous self-discipline, and the organization of one's life in the service of God — was made famous by sociologist and political economist Max Weber. In this brilliant study (his best-known and most controversial), he opposes the Marxist concept of dialectical materialism and its view that change takes place through "the struggle of opposites." Instead, he relates the rise of a capitalist economy to the Puritan determination to work out anxiety over (...) salvation or damnation by performing good deeds — an effort that ultimately discouraged belief in predestination and encouraged capitalism. Weber's classic study has long been required reading in college and advanced high school social studies classrooms. (shrink)

Universities must transmit technically exploitable knowledge. That is, they must meet an industrial society's need for qualified new generations and at the same time be concerned with the expanded reproduction of education itself. In addition, universities must not only transmit technically exploitable knowledge, but also produce it. This includes both information flowing from research into the channels of industrial utilization, armament, and social welfare, and advisory knowledge that enters into strategies of administration, government, and other decision-making powers, such as private (...) enterprises. Thus, through instruction and research the university is immediately connected with functions of the economic process. (shrink)

This book examines the dialogue between Roman Stoic ethics and the work of Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards. Elizabeth Agnew Cochran illuminates key theological convictions that provide a foundation for constructing a contemporary Protestant virtue ethic consistent with a number of theological beliefs characteristic of the historical Reformed tradition. Building on this conversation, this book develops the claims that faith holds a unique value among possible moral goods; virtue has a unity that coincides with a soteriology that conceives (...) justification as radically transforming a Christian from a sinner to one who is righteous before God; and moral responsibility is realized through a dispositional consent to God's loving providence. (shrink)

This research analyses media and online discourses produced by the Indigenous People of Biafra, a Nigerian separatist/secessionist group that seeks a referendum for the independence of the Igbo ethnic group of Nigeria. The research examines discourse structures, such as language use that clearly or implicitly produces propositions of conflict and war, tribalism and hate-speech. Discursive strategies such as labelling, exaggeration, metaphor and contradiction applied by the group to produce ideological discourses of outrage are also analysed. Moreover, conflicting discourses produced by (...) the Igbo politicians and factions of IPOB and other Biafra campaign groups are analysed in terms of their political implications to the overall self-determination efforts of the Biafra nation. The study concludes that the pragmatic implications of discourses that reflect opposing views, as well as varied ideological perspectives by group members, suggest that Biafra is a nation divided against itself and are a people incapable of the separate nation that they seek. (shrink)

Based on a dataset of more than 5,000 contentious collective actions from 1700-2000, this paper examines the relation between popular protest and democratization of the Danish political system. The first wave of protests began in the 1830s and culminated in 1848 with the fall of absolutism and the transition to constitutional monarchy. The next protest wave from 1885 to 1887 arose from the so-called ‘constitutional struggle’ and mobilized hundreds of thousands of ordinary Danes, and contributed to the parliamentarization (...) and nationalization of the political system. The third wave unfolded around the end of World War II, while the hitherto last wave of popular struggle erupted in 1968 with the youth rebellion. The analysis show that ‘democracy’ was the central issue of contention in all four of these protest waves, and support the main thesis that periods of intense interaction between popular protest and the state have had a decisive formative influence on the genesis and further development of Danish democracy. (shrink)

This paper may be read as a reclamation project. It argues, with Simone de Beauvoir, that patriarchal marriage is both a perversion of the meaning of the couple and an institution in transition. Parting from those who have given up on marriage, I identify marriage as existing at the intersection of the ethical and the political and argue that whether or not one chooses marriage, feminists ought not abandon marriage as an institution.

The term ‘Bakhtin Circle’ is used to refer to a group of Russian thinkers centred around Mikhail Bakhtin in the years following the 1917 Revolution. The group's prime concern was with the importance of questions of language-use in social life, and with the way in which language-use registered conflicts between social groups and classes. Prominent members, as well as Bakhtin himself, included P.N. Medvedev and V.N. Voloshinov. Between 1929, when a number of members were arrested, and his death in 1975, (...) Bakhtin continued to work on the issues which had occupied the group. (shrink)

Stakeholder management is an important method for reducing business risk. Recent decades have seen the growth of a new type of stakeholder: social protest stakeholders, individuals engaging in protest action which is directed at other unrelated parties, often the government. However, the actions of social protest stakeholders may negatively affect companies located nearby. This stakeholder category has not received any formal attention in the literature, and this article addresses the knowledge gap by exploring the effects of community-driven (...) protest action in South Africa and the strategies that firms adopt to mitigate the negative consequences of such protests. A multiple case study analysis was used to describe this type of stakeholder group and the management of the consequences of social protest action. Eight manufacturing companies in the Gauteng province participated in the study, the companies varied in size and industry. Among the key findings are that companies need to be highly adaptable if they are to mitigate the impact of protest action. We make practical suggestions about how companies may manage these risks, including the recommendation that companies engage more directly with social protestors to manage risks. The study makes an important contribution to the literature by identifying an additional key category of stakeholder and proposing a risk management approach to avert or minimize loss and damage. (shrink)

Irena Backus offers the first study in over four hundred years that characterizes Leibniz as both scholar and theologian. She explores his treatment of the key theological issues of his time-predestination, sacred history, the Eucharist, efforts for a union between Lutherans and members of other Christian traditions-illuminating his unique integration of theology into philosophy.Drawing on a wide range of Leibniz's writings, Backus carefully examines the philosophical points and counterpoints of his positions. She shows how Leibniz's Lutheran theology was reconciled with (...) his philosophy, and demonstrates that the solutions he sought to the problems of confessional division were more philosophical than theological. Despite his attempts to merge the two fields, Backus reveals, many of Leibniz's ideas were met with resistance by both theologians and philosophers of his time. Using a wealth of previously unexplored material, Backus also includes the first-ever English translation of the Unvorgreiffliches Bedencken. This study will be an important contribution to the history of ideas, and to understanding Leibniz's place in the mainstream Protestant theology of his time. (shrink)

This study focuses on two main arguments about the secularization of Protestant work ethic and the uniqueness of Islamic work ethic. By adopting a linguistic point of view, this study aims to grasp a common understanding of PWE and IWE in the field of work ethic research. For this purpose, 109 articles using the keywords PWE and IWE in their titles were analyzed using content analysis. The findings support the argument that emphasizes universally shared values of PWE. In addition, the (...) findings reveal that IWE provides a unique perspective on how to improve organizational performance, but at the same time differs in work orientation and commitment across cultures. (shrink)

New Breeding Techniques such as CRISPR-Cas9 are revolutionizing plant breeding and food production. Experts believe that the social debate about these technologies could be similar to those on green genetic engineering: emotional and highly controversial. Future debate about Genome Editing could benefit from a better understanding of the GMO (genetically modified organism) controversy. Against this background, this paper (a) presents results of a content analysis of position papers criticizing green genetic engineering in Germany. In particular, (b) it focuses on the (...) controversy as a place where normative concepts of nature are debated and become visible. Hence, the study complements existing interpretations by showing that the emerging concepts are more diverse than the familiar reductionist breakdown of the debate into anthropocentric vs. non-anthropocentric conceptions suggests. (shrink)

The essay focuses on the impact of Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization in Germany in 1968. First, the essay discusses how Freud’s theory was used in the late twenties at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. Then, it focuses on how certain of Adorno and Horkheimer’s ideas were developed in Eros and Civilization . Finally, it shows how Marcuse’s work became relevant for the intellectual development of the student movement in Germany.

Max Weber’s sociological theories of secularization have vastly influenced the study of Protestant belief. _Protestant Modernity_ offers a multifaceted understanding of secularization within the broader context of nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism. Anthony J. Carroll reconstructs Weber’s original writings to highlight Protestant motifs, reviews current secularization theories, and settles debates about contested meanings of secularization in this volume that will be essential reading for students and scholars of theology and the sociology of religion.

In India, domestic workers' movements advocated for their own and other workers’ rights both before and during the pandemic. Over the course of the pandemic, however, the political landscape and de...

In a world filled with “ambient violence”, public protest is a vital signal of shared discontent. The essential compulsion at the heart of protest, however, is conventionally not recognised for what it is: solidarity with those suffering injustices. Amid authorities’ often-fierce efforts to curtail gatherings of people whose experiences of injustice propel them into the streets, a sharp rise in public protests has been perceived since the early 2000s. Thousands of column inches dedicated to reporting on protests are (...) rivalled in volume only by the reams of academic theories produced around causes. Despite this overabundance of discourses, it often remains unclear what protest, at heart, constitutes. That is, what are we talking about when we talk about protest, and why does this question matter? In this paper I consider the constituent parts of protest formation in the abstract, including grievances, gestures, and tactics, among other. Developing these constituent parts reveals protest to be, first and foremost, a manifestation of a nonhegemonic ethical commitment to justice, requiring courage and coordination, and whose outcome is always contingent, that is, an act of love. I also reflect on the nature of protest as a direct political action that sits on a continuum that ranges from opposition politics to civil war. This continuum offers a graded view ranking expressions of discontent by severity of outcome. (shrink)

This paper proposes the concept of digital mirroring to explore and contextualise post-Arab Spring digital feminism in the Levant within a critical discourse framework. Digital mirroring illustrates the way in which contemporary Arab feminist groups articulate their digital presence orienting toward the vertical dimension of their sociopolitical contexts and toward the horizontal dimension characterised by the digital practices of other feminist movements in the region. We observed this phenomenon through the analysis of a multimodal corpus of Facebook and Instagram posts (...) published by thirty-two institutionalised and non-institutionalised feminist groups in Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria between 2011 and 2019. The analysis of the linguistic and the visual strategies of MENA feminist groups is grounded in contemporary sociolinguistic studies on Arabic diglossia and multimodality. Findings reveal the complex interplay of digital self-representation, local resistance, and transregional networking of Levantine women. We argue that a simultaneous analysis of the vertical and the horizontal contextual dimensions of digital mirroring is necessary to comprehend social media discursive strategies and their transregional breadth as a central component of contemporary Arab feminism and emancipatory discourses at large. (shrink)

In the United States, Protestant Christian identity is the dominant religious identity. Protestant Christian identity confers status privileges, yet also creates objectionable status inequalities. Historical and contemporary evidence includes the unfair treatment of Mormons, Native Americans, Muslims, and other religious minorities. Protestant Christian supremacy also plays a significant role in bolstering anti LGBTQ prejudice, xenophobia, and white supremacy. Ways that Protestant Christian identity correlates with objectionable status inequalities are often neglected in contemporary political philosophy. This paper aims to make a (...) modest contribution towards filling that gap. Some forms of inequality linked to Protestant Christian supremacy can be characterized as domination and oppression. Other instances include barriers to fair equality of opportunity for self-determination. Adapting ideas from egalitarian political philosophy I propose an analysis of objectionable status inequality rooted in Protestant Christian supremacy. Alan Patten’s defense of an egalitarian principle for assessing the effects of law and policy is helpful for this task. (shrink)

This chapter examines the simultaneous rejection and endorsement of natural theology within Protestantism, focusing on two contentious issues representing the tensions within Protestant perspectives on natural theology. Firstly, it considers the historical theological question of the attitude to natural theology amongst the Reformers and the post-Reformation Protestant Orthodoxy. The chapter engages with the established consensus that the increasingly positive evaluation of the possibility and value of natural theology within Protestant Orthodoxy represents a regrettable discontinuity with the ‘original’ rejection of natural (...) theology by the early Reformers. Secondly, it explores the place of natural theology within contemporary Protestant philosophical theology, looking in particular at Alvin Plantinga's ‘Reformed objection to natural theology’. The chapter disputes Plantinga's argument that the Reformers' rejection of classical foundationalism, in favour of a Reformed epistemology in which belief in God can be properly basic, entails a Reformed objection to natural theology. Rather, it suggests the possibility of an alternative Reformed natural theology consistent with the epistemological framework characteristic of Reformed dogmatic theology. (shrink)

This volume of Social Philosophy Today contains a selection of papers presented at the 31st International Social Philosophy Conference (2014), an annual event sponsored by the North American Society for Social Philosophy. The theme of the conference was "Power, Protest, and the Future of Democracy". This volume invites wider discussion of the issues explored at the conference.

In this paper, I examine the ethics of nonviolent protest when a violent response is either foreseen or intended. One central concern is whether protesters, who foresee a violent response but persist, are provoking the violence and whether they are culpable for any eventual harms. A second concern is whether it is permissible to publicize the violent response for political advantage. I begin by distinguishing between two senses of the term provoke: a normative sense where a provocateur knowingly imposes (...) an unjustified risk of a violent response, and a descriptive sense where the respondent feels provoked. I argue that, when the risk of a violent response is justified, the protesters are not provocateurs but akin to nonculpable, entrapping agents who create an opportunity for the regime to respond with disproportionate violence. The regime’s response can disclose its brutality or criminality and this can be fairly publicized for political advantage. When nonviolent protesters create an unjustified risk of violence either because the injustice they oppose is insufficient to justify the risk of a violent response or because the risked harms are disproportionate with the likely political advantages derived from the protest, they are partially culpable provocateurs. However, I argue these partially culpable provocateurs can still permissibly publicize the disproportionate violence of the regime so as to shape public opinion. (shrink)

Protestant anthropology: between secularity and postsecularity. In this article the analysis of main problems of the Protestant anthropology late XX – early XXІ centuries. It is shown that the theological discourse on the merits of the man and his life unfolded within the paradigm of secular and post-secular.

Xi Chen explores the question of why there has been a dramatic rise in and routinization of social protests in China since the early 1990s. Drawing on case studies, in-depth interviews and a unique data set of about 1,000 government records of collective petitions, this book examines how the political structure in Reform China has encouraged Chinese farmers, workers, pensioners, disabled people and demobilized soldiers to pursue their interests and claim their rights by staging collective protests. Chen suggests that routinized (...) contentious bargaining between the government and ordinary people has remedied the weaknesses of the Chinese political system and contributed to the regime's resilience. Social Protest and Contentious Authoritarianism in China challenges the conventional wisdom that authoritarian regimes always repress popular collective protest and that popular collective action tends to destabilize authoritarian regimes. (shrink)

Karl Barth and Martin Heidegger are doubtless two of the most important and influential thinkers of the 20th century. In this groundbreaking book Timothy Stanley investigates how the question of being developed through their respective accounts of protestant theology. Whereas Heidegger suggested a post-onto-theological pathway, Barth inverted the question of being in a thoroughgoing theological ontology. In the end, both reconfigured the relationship between philosophy and theology in ways that continue to shape contemporary debate.

In 1983, the British police adopted their first public order policing manual, laying the foundations of a secretive archive. The manuals and training materials produced in the intervening years provide an untapped repository of affective thought. This article reads the 1983 and 2016 training materials for their atmospheric insights. It develops the term police ‘atmotechnics’ to describe interventions that are specifically designed to affect the crowded atmosphere of protest or other disorder. The manuals reveal a gradual shift from interventions (...) designed to evince fear and awe, to ones that seek to calm crowds. But more importantly, they underline a shift from a linear understanding of atmotechnics (as a prelude to ‘the use of force’), to an affective feedback loop where specialised officers are deployed to ‘sense’ mood changes among crowds, allowing senior strategic and tactical decisions to take account of atmospheric conditions. (shrink)

This chapter explores how the study of material culture brings new perspectives to protest and activism in the contemporary world. Its focus is the peace and environmental protests in Britain during the last thirty years, although the chapter also draws upon examples from other times and places. The chapter is organized into five themes: the use of the body in the performance of protest; the creation of novel networks of humans and things through activism; demonstrations as acts of (...) bearing witness to power; the histories and technologies that provide the foundations and legitimacy for protest; and finally the politics of researching activism. Archaeologies of protest can force established authorities to recognize repressed voices, they can challenge the myths and ideologies of activism, and above all they can be a process of revealing power as it was, is, and can be. (shrink)

ABSTRACT‘Sports and politics don’t mix’. This platitude has been a pervasive part of U.S. professional sport culture, but it is vague and most of the versions are untrue since politics have been, and must be, a part of professional sports. Its only plausible meaning is that professional players should not make political statements while they are on-the-job. Players have a constitutional right to make political statements outside the workplace, but this right does not apply in privately owned sport associations. I (...) argue that player political protest has ultimately been moral, not political, in nature and that players’ on-the-job political expression can be justified based on the priority of the moral-legal concept of personhood. I propose player political expression policies that U.S. professional associations should adopt. (shrink)

The article considers the history of bioethics formation as a human rights movement aimed at establishing patient autonomy and limiting the practice of uncontrolled medical manipulation of human body, biomedical experimentation on people in the name of science, “public good” and other values. It is shown that the forms of expression and content of the statements of the protesting bioethical expert and the content turned out to be extremely diverse and based on conflicting ethical principles, actually demonstrating total rejection and (...) confrontation of various conceptual arguments and often not contributing to the development of a universal, acceptable to all stakeholders ethical position. The article considers the peculiarities of bioethical protest and philosophical reasoning in connection with the emergence in the field of modern medicine of the diagnosis of brain death and gives a general idea of the intense public perception of this diagnosis. (shrink)

The technological revolution and appropriation of internet tools began to reshape the material basis of society and the urban space in collaborative, grassroots, leaderless, and participatory actions. The protest squares’ representation on Television screens and mainstream media has been broad. Various health, governmental, societal, and urban challenges have marked the advent of the Covid-19 virus. Inequalities have become more salient as poor people and minorities are more affected by the virus. Social distancing makes the typical forms of protest (...) impossible to carry out. Under social distancing, some state-led policies took advantage of social media to focus on the Covid-19 pandemic to silence social and political activities, censor criticism, and control the press. However, during the pandemic era, the movements for social justice have been particularly active, focusing on defending workers’ rights, mutual aid and solidarity, monitoring policymakers, and popular education. These progressive movements combined concrete practices and experiences to confront the reactionary, capitalist, and governmental actors that sought to shape and envision the world. Through different case studies of protest movements during the pandemic in Europe, the UK, and Asia, this paper argues that at the time of rising racial, social, and economic inequalities, the social activities adapted to the circumstances determined by the social distancing and the impossibility of people gathering in physical spaces. Subsequently, the people in different countries had various individual and collective responses to the support of health workers, systemic inequalities, loss of jobs, and other societal and financial challenges imposed by the governments. It means that, rather than disappearing, the social movements have adapted to the unexpected situations during the pandemic outbreak. The pandemic broke the new digital global wave of protests in this sense. (shrink)