Associate Professor Rosemary Carbine, a scholar of feminist theology who focuses on religion and political engagement, has joined distinguished colleagues around the country in the Workgroup on Constructive Theology in a call for courage in public discourse. This call to action comes at a pivotal moment in the U.S. especially surrounding the upcoming political party conventions leading up to the presidential election later this year, and in Europe as Great Britain has voted to leave the European Union.
As part of this call to action, the Workgroup has produced a video titled Fear Not!, which encourages Christians to respond in faith to dangerous trends in public discourse of the current U.S. political season, which has featured prominent public figures who endorse racism, Islamophobia, anti-immigration policies against refugees, and LGBTQI discrimination on religious grounds. The video and the signatories on it forefront many feminist, womanist, and Latina voices in Christian theology from Boston College, Duke University, Fordham University, Vanderbilt University, among others – including Whittier College’s Carbine – who are concerned about pressing pubic issues related to religion in this U.S. presidential election season. Through the video, the Workgroup intends to inject an alternative voice into U.S. public discourse about religion as a basis for social-justice making politics rather than a politics of fear and hate.
Established in 1976, the Workgroup, consists of an intentionally diverse –invitation only – membership of Ph.D. theologians from leading U.S. colleges, universities, and seminaries who meet annually at Vanderbilt University Divinity School and whose work focuses on Christian theology and practice in relation to contemporary social justice issues.
Over the past forty years, generations of Workgroup members have published a dozen books together. The latest publication, Awake to the Moment (Westminster John Knox Press, 2016), will be released in September. Carbine along with nine colleagues co-authored two chapters in the book about Christian theology as a practice of world-making politics for this latest book, which will be used in undergraduate and master’s theology programs.
The video and transcript (available at goo.gl/cmVCli) can be used as both a pedagogical and/or liturgical resource to consider the roles of religion in current public discourse. The video can be viewed in its entirety at youtu.be/8xW2gbLr-lQ. It was produced by Rev. Landon Whitsitt who serves as Executive of the Synod of Mid-America of the Presbyterian Church.
