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This expansive volume traces the rhetoric of reform across American history, examining such pivotal periods as the American Revolution, slavery, McCarthyism, and today's gay liberation movement. At a time when social movements led by religious leaders, from Louis Farrakhan to Pat Buchanan, are playing a central role in American politics, James Darsey connects this radical tradition with its prophetic roots. Public discourse in the West is derived from the Greek principles of civility, diplomacy, compromise, and negotiation. On this model, radical speech is often taken to be a sympton of social disorder. Not so, contends Darsey, who argues that the rhetoric of reform in America represents the continuation of a tradition separate from the commonly accepted principles of the Greeks. Though the links have gone unrecognized, the American radical tradition stems not from Aristotle, he maintains, but from the prophets of the Hebrew Bible.
The Forgotten Prophet: Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and the African American Prophetic Tradition, by Andre E. Johnson, is a study of the prophetic rhetoric of nineteenth century African Methodist Episcopal Church bishop Henry McNeal Turner. By locating Turner within the African American prophetic tradition, Johnson examines how Bishop Turner adopted a prophetic persona. As one of America's earliest black activists and social reformers, Bishop Turner made an indelible mark in American history and left behind an enduring social influence through his speeches, writings, and prophetic addresses. This text offers a definition of prophetic rhetoric and examines the existing genres of prophetic discourse, suggesting that there are other types of prophetic rhetorics, especially within the African American prophetic tradition. In examining these modes of discourses from 1866-1895, this study further examines how Turner's rhetoric shifted over time. It examines how Turner found a voice to article not only his views and positions, but also in the prophetic tradition, the views of people he claimed to represent. The Forgotten Prophet is a significant contribution to the study of Bishop Turner and the African American prophetic tradition.
Drawing on speeches, essays, sermons, reminiscences, and works of theological speculation from 1800 to 1950, Christopher Z. Hobson offers an in-depth study of prophetic traditions in African American religion. He shows how African American prophets shared a belief in a "God of the oppressed:" a God who tested the nation's ability to move toward justice and who showed favor toward struggles for equality. Hobson also provides insight into the conflict between the African American prophets who believed that the nation could one day be redeemed through struggle, and those who felt that its hypocrisy and malevolence lay too deep for redemption. Contrary to the prevalent view that black nationalism is the strongest African American justice tradition, Hobson argues that the reformative tradition in prophecy has been most important and constant in the struggle for equality, and has sparked a politics of prophetic integrationism spanning most of two centuries. Hobson shows too the special role of millennial teaching in sustaining hope for oppressed people and cross-fertilizing other prophecy traditions. The Mount of Vision concludes with an examination of the meaning of African American prohecy today, in the time of the first African American presidency, the semicentenary of the civil rights movement, and the sesquicentennial of the American Civil War: paradoxical moments in which our "post-racial" society is still pervaded by injustice, and prophecy is not fulfilled but endures as a challenge.
This book explores the status of religion in the Post-Prophetic Age, especially as seen through the eyes of the French Islamic scholar Henry Corbin. In lucid and simple prose, Cheetham explores the creative role of the imagination in the formative ground of the three great Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. For Corbin, engaging the soul of the world through the mediating power of the Imaginal is an act of love, a theme Cheetham expands through his analysis of such concepts as mystical poverty, contemplative knowledge, the luminosity of the earth, the theophanic vision, the Christ Angel, Incarnation, the divine sensorium, alchemical transformation, the spiritual humanism of Ivan Illich, Western iconoclasm, and the centrality of gnosis. This book offers a visionary alternative to the confusions of contemporary life. It speaks to believers and non-believers alike.
This work is concerned with the influence of biblical and prophetic traditions on the author of the book of Revelation, and in particular his use of the prophecies of Isaiah. First, John's own prophetic consciousness and expression is compared with previous Israelite-Jewish and early Christian prophetic conventions. This is followed by an evaluation of John's use of the OT in general, including a discussion of methodology for isolating allusions, the question of the validity of the terms quotation and allusion in Revelation, and the presence of thematic patterns in the author's choice of Scripture. All this is foundational to the main portion of the work (Ch. III), where a detailed analysis is undertaken to determine the validity of all proposed allusions to Isaiah in the book of Revelation. Of the 72 suggested allusions treated, 40 were judged as certain or virtually certain, 24 were considered as unlikely or doubtful, and 8 were appraised as probable or possible. Those allusions which were accepted received further evaluation to see how and why they were used by John, with special attention given to the tradition-history of the passage used, and the possible interpretative techniques employed. A variety of exegetical and literary devices were uncovered, including the use of catchwords, inclusio, repetition of texts, exploitation of Hebrew parallelism, and the collection of texts around a central theme. Furthermore, John's use of Isaiah is concentrated in basic areas, with clusters of Isaiah texts appearing in specific sections of Revelation. The principal Isaian themes with which he is interested are holy war and the Day of the Lord, oracles against the nations, and salvation prophecies relating to the community of faith and the restored and glorified Jerusalem. It was concluded that on the whole, John's use of Isaiah is not random, and he does not use the OT texts merely as a visionary resource for language, phrases, structural patterns etc. But he consciously carries on the prophecies of his biblical predecessors and invokes their authority. The remnants and results of John's interpretation of Isaiah presuppose exegetical activity and application prior to the vision experience and it is likely that at least some of his intended readers were familiar not only with his theological concerns, but also with his methodological approach.
The first part of this study explores the extent to which Dante’s Divine Comedy contributed to Christopher Columbus’s perception of the cosmos and the eschatological meaning of his journey to what he called an ‘other world.’ The second considers how Italian writers and artists of the late Renaissance and Counter Reformation received the news of the ‘discovery’ and the extent to which they used the figure of Dante and the pseudo-prophecy of the Commedia to interpret its significance.
The Prophetic Tradition: The Challenge of Islam is an enlightening set of lectures given by Norman O. Brown during the 1980s, exploring a wide-ranging array of topics concerning Islam. Brown reveals the overlooked relationship between Islam and early Christianity, exploring Islam’s relation to, and revision of, the Christian tradition, the literary innovation of the Qu’ran, the nature of revolutionary and political Islam, and the vision of a world civilization. Throughout these lectures, which are remarkably pertinent today, Brown seeks to educate the reader on misunderstood areas of Islam, including the split between the Sunni and Shi’ite sects and Islam’s exemplification of the broad themes of art and imagination in human life. The author’s world-historical perspective of religion and tradition gives readers a crucial alternative to the divisive “clash of civilizations” view that paints Islam as at odds with the West. He exposes the unifying strands between Islam and early Judeo-Christian doctrine, showing that Islam is in fact a genuine part of “Western” tradition, and more importantly, part of a global tradition that embraces us all.
This successful volume of essays by distinguished scholars not only makes a contribution to the study of Old Testament prophets but also summarizes scholarship in a way particularly appropriate to students, giving access to material available otherwise only in other languages or in journals difficult to obtain.
An unflinching look at nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American leaders and their visionary legacies. In an accessible, conversational format, Cornel West, with distinguished scholar Christa Buschendorf, provides a fresh perspective on six revolutionary African American leaders: Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Baker, Malcolm X, and Ida B. Wells. In dialogue with Buschendorf, West examines the impact of these men and women on their own eras and across the decades. He not only rediscovers the integrity and commitment within these passionate advocates but also their fault lines. West, in these illuminating conversations with the German scholar and thinker Christa Buschendorf, describes Douglass as a complex man who is both “the towering Black freedom fighter of the nineteenth century” and a product of his time who lost sight of the fight for civil rights after the emancipation. He calls Du Bois “undeniably the most important Black intellectual of the twentieth century” and explores the more radical aspects of his thinking in order to understand his uncompromising critique of the United States, which has been omitted from the American collective memory. West argues that our selective memory has sanitized and even “Santaclausified” Martin Luther King Jr., rendering him less radical, and has marginalized Ella Baker, who embodies the grassroots organizing of the civil rights movement. The controversial Malcolm X, who is often seen as a proponent of reverse racism, hatred, and violence, has been demonized in a false opposition with King, while the appeal of his rhetoric and sincerity to students has been sidelined. Ida B. Wells, West argues, shares Malcolm X’s radical spirit and fearless speech, but has “often become the victim of public amnesia.” By providing new insights that humanize all of these well-known figures, in the engrossing dialogue with Buschendorf, and in his insightful introduction and powerful closing essay, Cornel West takes an important step in rekindling the Black prophetic fire.
Dr. Willem VanGemeren explains and interprets the prophetic voices of the Old Testament, concluding with an explanation of the relevance of the prophetic word today.