"Prophets Beyond Activism: Rethinking the Prophetic Roots of Social Justice" - "" ("O'Brien Julia M.")(Paperback)

Prophets beyond Activism insightfully challenges the common progressive narrative that the prophets of ancient Israel were primarily concerned with social justice. Instead it daringly offers more life-giving ways of engaging the prophetic books for the causes of justice.The assumption that the prophets of ancient Israel were primarily concerned with social justice so permeates the thinking and the discourse of progressive Christianity that it might be considered an interpretive orthodoxy. For example, progressives characterize prophets as those who speak truth to power and “prophetic preaching” as social critique. Yet, they often do so without explanation or consideration of alternative views.In this volume, Julia O’Brien challenges the notion that the prophets were solely concerned with the same issues as contemporary social justice movements. Reading prophetic texts with an eye to their historical dimensions—when they were written, how they were edited—complicates any definitive statement about the role of prophets in the past. Reading alongside readers from diverse racial, gender, and other social locations in the present raises hard questions about whose justice these books actually promote. Despite its self-presentation as a scholarly and scientific viewpoint, the “prophets as social activists” orthodoxy was constructed in a particular time and place and in its usage today perpetuates many of the problematic ideologies of its
více informací