Striving for Justice

The article presents the latest proposal by the Church of England and Methodist Church Faith and Order bodies to restore Anglican–Methodist unity in Great Britain. If mutually adopted, the document titled Mission and Ministry in Covenant would enable the introduction of episcopacy in the British Methodist Church, the presbyteral ordination of Methodist ministers by a bishop, and—as a result—the mutual recognition and interchangeability of presbyteral ministry in both Churches. The proposal concerning the introduction of episcopal ordination in the Methodist Church recommends ordination to the episcopacy of each elected President of Methodist Conference. Thus ordained, the President-bishop would then ordain Methodist presbyters. As regards the Methodist presbyters who were not episcopally ordained, the document proposes the recognition of their ministry by the Church of England in the terms of “bearable anomaly.” Yet, such a solution poses many questions and gives rise to theological doubts.

Several literatures including those focusing on settler colonialism, critical antiracism as well as ethnic studies and sociology more broadly often position racial injustice and genocide as a struggle against whiteness and white supremacy. Here I use my own positionality to illustrate what might be unseen in the current thinking about the meaning of what whiteness entails. Then I propose the preliminary workings of a nonbinary approach to thinking about racial justice and reconciliation that still centers the specific experiences of oppression but that does not also entail blaming a particular group as oppressor. While I focus on Canada and responsibility for Indigenous genocide and, to some extent, anti-Black racism, my hope is that the theoretical logic will also be of utility for thinking about moving forward on issues of racial justice and genocide in other contexts.

One of the things we realized as we read the contributions to this symposium is that if you try to shine a bright light on a factor that has been ignored or slighted by previous scholarship in the field, it ends up distorting some of what you are trying to say. In Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie, we hope that we did not give the impression that we blamed Protestant evangelicalism for Operation Dixie’s failure or that we intended to privilege that factor above all others. We believe that a powerful mix of racism, anticommunism, employer intransigence, and repressive state and local governments was the major impediment to the CIO’s campaign. What we discovered, however, was that aspects of the region’s dominant religious culture at that particular moment made the CIO’s overtures less appealing to white workers than labor activists and liberal reformers had hoped. The sacred sphere of southern white evangelicals was not static but rather the product of fears as well as hopes, of nightmares as well as dreams, and influenced by the notion that the world was a contest between good and evil in which God and Satan intervened directly into their lives and battled for their souls. This colored the way they saw employers, unions, and communists. Their religious views were also shaped by a rising level of material comfort and the prospect for even greater economic security for their siblings and their children. It is little wonder, then, that a worker like Lucille Hall would look askance at unions’ sending “outsiders in here to tell you how bad you were treated. You’d know better” (quoted on 81).The symposium’s participants have given us a tall order in terms of responding to things we might have done better. We are grateful for their attention to the book—its strengths as well as its weaknesses. It seems as if the best way to proceed is sequential. Let us begin with Christopher D. Cantwell. He is correct in reminding us that Protestant evangelicalism put an emphasis on communalism as well as individualism and that white workers often looked for the “approving nods” of their fellow worshippers. Indeed, we agree that this communal feeling could be a boon to organizing, particularly in places like the coalfields. However, it seems worthwhile to consider what sorts of communities evangelicalism was creating. Most were voluntary communities of believers that could fracture easily over either sacred or secular disputes. They emphasized independent choice among their members and a fierce local autonomy. Do these sound like values that the CIO would welcome? Communities of saints could also be quite exclusionary; the passage constantly drummed into the minds of evangelicals cautioned against “being yoked to unbelievers.” Our friend Steve Rosswurm pushed us some time ago to think about the concept of elective affinities. To us, the worldview of many of these communities of believers jarred against that of the bureaucratic discipline expected by the CIO.To Cantwell, whose grandfather worked for both spiritual and material rewards, it seems probable that the CIO might have had more success focusing on its own economic and political program rather than religion, particularly since few in the movement understood the sacred world they were entering. Perhaps. But CIO organizers found themselves confronted by employers and preachers who warned against caring too much about worldly things. At church, they learned the Biblical lesson of being satisfied with their wages, which, as noted above, were better than they had ever been. Under the circumstances, if the CIO was going to succeed in keeping the South from becoming a low-wage haven for industry, it had to give its crusade a moral imperative. The AFL, to which Cantwell points as an example for its focus on wages and working conditions, benefited from employers who feared the CIO and from organizing more craft-oriented workers; the AFL did not have to win the hearts and minds of its workers to the same degree as the CIO did.We are delighted that Julie Saville stepped outside her normal areas of expertise to give us valuable insights. She draws an interesting parallel between the first and second reconstruction eras and the paradoxical relationship between religious experiences and political modernization. It is interesting, she notes, that white CIO organizers still routinely cast black popular religion as primitive (and not political). We would add, however, that these organizers cast all ecstatic religious expression (white or black) as primitive and mostly counterproductive. In many respects, this speaks to Cantwell’s argument that if the CIO did not comprehend the religious cultures of the South, its organizers might have done better to just leave them alone. Still, we might have done more to draw out this dynamic.Saville also raises the question about how the trajectories of considering black churches as well as white ones might have altered the frame we used to explore Operation Dixie. This was the most difficult decision for us when we got into this project. We knew that attention to the prophetic radical traditions of African American churches and their importance in the long civil rights movement would be an important counterweight to what we found for the most part in the sources illuminating white preachers, white employers, white organizers, and white workers. However, as she points out, we already were juggling three variants of evangelicalism, to say nothing of multiple denominational and fellowship groupings and the splits therein, regional and industrial variations, and the messiness of contested meanings of the sacred among a population noted for its devotion to popular religiosity. In the end, we made the choice to focus on white evangelicals because they were the ones scholars had tagged as the main culprits of the CIO’s failure. Indeed, both at the time and in the decades since, the general assumptions have been that black workers—religious or otherwise—are more likely to join unions, and black ministers are more likely to lend support. Could the CIO have learned important lessons from the black organizing model linking workplace ethics and democratic community participation? Undoubtedly. Would it have translated well in the overwhelmingly white mill villages? That is a tougher proposition.Like Saville, Robert Rodgers Korstad knows that there are inspiring instances of workers uniting around prophetic radicalism. The best examples, highlighted in the work of Michael K. Honey, Toni Gilpin, William P. Jones, and, of course, Korstad’s own prize-winning Civil Rights Unionism, testify to the possibilities inherent in a path that the CIO might have taken in 1946.1 He wonders if a broad-based campaign attempting to build biracial alliances might have resulted in a different outcome. By focusing on the overwhelmingly white textile industry in an effort to avoid race-baiting, he notes, the CIO actually “made race a central issue of the campaign.” We agree, along with all of the participants, that race was the inevitable undertow of any campaign to alter the social and political realities of the postwar South. But for the CIO to tackle that issue directly would have required a very different organization. Moreover, such a campaign would have required a very different milieu. As Jane Dailey points out in her contribution, the white churches of the South fell victim to powerful propositional fallacies effectively used by postwar evangelicals: “Since communists believed in racial equality, anyone who believed in racial equality was a communist,” she writes. “Furthermore, since communists rejected organized religion, to embrace communism via opposition to segregation was to reject God as well.” The difficulties of sustaining biracial unions in Memphis, Louisville, Winston-Salem, and the lumber camps of North Carolina and Louisiana testify to the limits of efforts in such a climate.While it is easy to scoff at such simplistic mental constructions, we are reminded of Findlay Donaldson, the Harlan County miner/Pentecostal preacher who rose to leadership of his National Miners Union (NMU) local until he attended the union’s convention and learned that the NMU was atheistic (71). He then preached against the NMU despite its work in the coalfields. However, it was never our intention to suggest that religion made southern workers docile or necessarily antiunion. In fact, the initial chapters of the book tried to demonstrate that during the Depression, workers—even those who were religious—could be quite militant. The Depression emboldened a range of popular theologies for responding to issues of social and economic justice. We argue, however, that there were important changes in southern churches and the thinking of evangelicals that dampened the progressive sentiments that the Depression had stoked. Even more recently, Alison Collis Greene’s new book, No Depression in Heaven, charts the emergence of a prophetic radicalism in the Mississippi Delta during the 1930s. Similar to us, she also asserts that churches eventually turned against the New Deal and social movements for trying to preempt the work of sacred communities.2 We hope that people reading our book do not include us in the “long tradition of looking to the culture of white workers” to explain the South’s lack of unions. We do, however, stand by our argument that during the most ambitious campaign to organize the South (1946–53), the variant of evangelical Protestantism that had the greatest sway over southern white workers put many of them at odds with the CIO’s model of unionism.Dailey reminds us of just how complicated southern Protestantism was at the end of World War II. She is attentive to the context that confounded the organizations that expounded a “theology of brotherhood, of universalist, ecumenical Protestantism.” Of course, they could not have known just how much the terrain had shifted beneath their feet. It was a tragedy that the CIO could not take advantage of the international human rights discourse associated with the United Nations. But the UN was nearly on par with communism in most southern churches; the Methodist Bishop, G. Bromley Oxnam, who also happened to be head of the FCC, learned this when he gave support to the UN. He was vilified in the South and eventually called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. To fiery radio evangelicals such as J. Harold Smith, Oxnam was doing the work of the Antichrist, promoting modernistic theologies and the expansion of the state—sure signs that the end-times were near.Dailey’s example of Benjamin E. Mays is also a reminder of how much there is to learn from following the leads suggested by her and Saville. It is interesting to us that while there has been a great deal of work on black churches and the civil rights movement, there is very little on people like William Holmes Borders, who embraced the labor movement in the 1940s and 1950s and tried to carve out a position of strength for black workers in the CIO. We hope to make this our next project. We feel that there is much worth exploring in the intersection of black churches, the popular religion of black workers, and the southern campaigns for unions and economic justice in those decades before Brown v. Board of Education.Responding to our current book, however, Dailey notes that the “Christian turn in southern politics boxed people in,” although in ways that were not formulaic or predictable. We agree. We saw it at its starkest when we examined the dilemmas facing preachers. Cleveland Bradner, John Isom, Sam Howie, Arthur Hyde, William Marmion, and a host of others, whose stories are rarely recounted in history books, tried to bridge the chasm separating those Christians who supported labor, civil rights, and modernism from those believers who associated those movements with signs of the coming apocalypse. Many of them, because of the local autonomy claimed by congregations in the South, paid with their careers or had to uproot their families. Of course, African American preachers who acted upon the idea that their Christianity meant pursuing a human rights agenda of economic and racial justice typically faced far worse. It is vital that we take that eventuality into consideration when we examine the roles that churches and congregations played in the postwar struggle for the soul of the South.For too long, there has been little in the labor history literature on how working people’s religious beliefs influenced their secular decisions. That is rapidly changing. We tried to show, in contrast to some of the earlier work on Operation Dixie, that the expression of beliefs was not limited to the reactionary rantings of Militant Truth or the prophetic radicalism of Claude Williams and Don West. The world of the southern working class was in upheaval in 1946. It was probably changing too rapidly for employers and many white workers and preachers who looked for some solid ground in evangelicalism; it was changing all too slowly for black workers, for the CIO, and for many modernist Christians. We hope that our book has contributed to a better understanding of that dynamic, not so much for the past but for the future.Let us begin by thanking the Newberry Library, the Dr. William M. Scholl Center for American History and Culture, and the distinguished contributors to this symposium for the opportunity to share and discuss our book. We should add special thanks to Leon Fink, who took an early interest in the project, and to Erik S. Gellman, who chaired the session and gave a very thorough and insightful overview of the book. Erik is one of that new generation of scholars whose work on religion and labor inspires us. Indeed, it was so much easier for us to push forward with this book surrounded by young people like Erik, Chris Cantwell, Heath Carter, Janine Giordano Drake, Jarod Roll, Bethany Moreton, Darren Dochuk, and Richard Callahan.

BackgroundExtreme risk protection order (ERPO) laws give municipal police officers new authority, through a civil restraining order, to remove firearms from people who are deemed to pose an imminent risk of causing serious harm to others or themselves. Despite the expected public safety benefit of ERPOs, it is possible that implicit racial bias could infect ERPO petitions, the court processes that authorize and extend the gun removal orders, or the behavior of the police in serving and enforcing them. How might potential racial disparities in ERPO implementation qualify the evidence that this intervention saves lives? What should gun violence prevention researchers and stakeholders do to promote racial justice?Main textThis commentary reflects upon an innovative and promising legal tool for gun violence prevention through the lens of racial justice concerns. Emerging research, guided by a public health paradigm, asks whether ERPOs save lives. But now is the time to pose other important questions as well. Preventing gun violence and mitigating the disproportionate impact of arrests and incarceration in communities of color are two important goals that may collide. The origin story of many U.S. firearm restrictions, and the continuing disparities in their enforcement and implementation, are intertwined with the legacy of systemic racial discrimination in policing and criminal justice in the United States. The public policy challenge of balancing risk and rights is increasingly fraught, especially as constituencies with a different interest in one or the other concern find themselves standing on opposite sides of a privilege chasm.ConclusionSaving lives from gun violence matters, but ensuring that the lives saved are also respected--free from racial oppression, afforded equal justice--also matters. This commentary is a call to include racial disparities impact as an essential outcome of interest for ERPO studies specifically, but more broadly for all public health law research studies at the intersection of firearm injury prevention, law enforcement, and criminal justice.

“Should I require, not just encourage, my students to engage questions about racial injustice?” Karen Teel asks in the first article in this issue. She answers in the affirmative by carefully staking out her pedagogical commitments. But she finds a dearth of theoretically informed practical teaching strategies in the pedagogical literature to help her with the specific challenge of constructing antiracist pedagogies across her introductory theology survey course (which is a far more subtle challenge then simply designing a unit or a course in which racial injustice is the explicit topic). For this, the second article in this issue may offer some help. Anna Floerke Scheid and Elisabeth T. Vasko describe and analyze several pedagogical strategies that emerge from their multiyear study examining college students' resistance, dissonance, and other emotional responses in classrooms in which injustice and white privilege are the topic of learning. These two essays were unsolicited and submitted separately. It was simple coincidence that they emerged at the end of our editorial review process at the same time. But the happenstance struck us as fortuitous and we decided to solicit brief responses from each of the authors to the other's essay. The four-manuscript set comprises the entire Article section of this journal issue. Stanley Fish, in his polemical book Save The World On Your Own Time (Oxford, 2008), famously answered “No!” to Karen Teel's question about engaging questions about racial injustice. Our training, he argues, is in our academic disciplines – not in politics or social justice movements. We ought to be arrested for malpractice if we seek to transform our students' character or their ethical and stances. The issue gets more complicated if you consider that this topic is indeed the academic discipline for these authors, teaching the liberal arts – in a Catholic University context. The opposition crudely posed between confessional and academic approaches in our field takes on a somewhat different cast when packaged alongside of the question of whether there are normative academic positions on racial and social justice issues that liberal art students might rightfully be required to learn. Both of the manuscripts in the Article section clearly answer this question in the affirmative. But it is worth noting that the subject was not even broached during the nearly four-hour interview we conducted with Jonathan Z. Smith, and publish in this issue. Our first question in that interview – whether there are any defining characteristics to religious studies pedagogy – quickly raised the specter of students' religious commitments in the classroom. But none of us ventured into Stanley Fish's broader Gen Ed version of this question about the role of normative ethical and political stances in the university. Jonathan Smith has not been known for political advocacy, but he is among the few most important theoreticians in our field who has also written compellingly about teaching – chiefly about the place of the introductory religion course (and the religious studies curriculum more generally) within the liberal arts. In the interview published here we draw him out on specific strategies he has used in the classroom, and he opens up a broad critique of the devaluing of teaching as reflected in the preparation of doctoral students in the field. Thus, considerable attention is given to specific classroom teaching techniques in this issue of the journal. This attention is augmented by three Teaching Tactics: Mara Brecht describes how she teaches her students to engage in discussion; David B. Howell explains the advantages of having students disclose their prior learning on the topic of the course during the first day of class; and Mark S. M. Scott analyzes how to teach students to read difficult texts carefully. These are three perennial and vexing challenges facing teachers of religion and theology in higher education. Sherry Jordan's “Note” in the Classroom section culminates this triumvirate of classroom practices with an extended description and analysis of how she uses short, frequent, low stakes “writing to learn” assignments in her Reformation class. She explains the theory behind assignments such as these, using writing as a process for critical thinking and learning the content of the course. This continuum demonstrates how abstract ethical questions about normative stances in the classroom eventually become manifest in concrete teaching practices focused on reading, writing, and critical thinking – and this constitutes an abiding concern and mission of this journal. As always, we have included a dozen or so book reviews. In this case there are reviews of important books on student spirituality, teaching biblical literature in undergraduate contexts, an extended meditation on the mentors and disciples depicted in Rabbinic tales and what they can tell us about our teaching vocation, and several books about teaching online, a subject which continues to concern our generation.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsRobin Richardson∗ ∗ Robin Richardson is Director of the Runnymede Trust, an independent charity concerned with issues of racial equality and justice. One of the Trust's current projects in education is entitled ‘Equality Assurance'; it focuses on citizenship education within Britain's new national curriculum. ∗ Robin Richardson is Director of the Runnymede Trust, an independent charity concerned with issues of racial equality and justice. One of the Trust's current projects in education is entitled ‘Equality Assurance'; it focuses on citizenship education within Britain's new national curriculum.

The Massachusetts legislature passed An Act Modernizing Tobacco Control in November 2019 to restrict retail sales of flavored commercially manufactured tobacco products including menthol products, increase penalties for violating the law's provisions, and provide health insurance coverage for tobacco treatment. This study explores key informants' perceptions of intended and unintended impacts of implementation of the 2019 Massachusetts statewide law through a health equity and racial justice lens. We conducted in-depth interviews with 25 key informants from three key informant groups (public health officials and advocates, clinicians, and school staff) between March 2021 and April 2022. Using deductive codes on unintended impacts of the implementation of the law's policies, we conducted a focused analysis to identify impacts that were perceived and observed by informants from different key informant groups. Perceived or observed impacts of the law were identified across multiple levels by key informants and included concerns related to three broad themes: 1) intended impacts on health equity and racial justice, 2) ongoing availability of restricted products undermining the intended impact of the law, and 3) inequitable targeting by the policies and enforcement among communities of color. Future evaluation is needed to assess the intended and unintended impacts of implementation of the Massachusetts law to maximize the potential of the policies to reduce tobacco-related health disparities. We discuss implications and recommendations for achieving a national policy and equitable enforcement of flavored tobacco sales restrictions. This qualitative study among 25 key informants including public health and tobacco control advocates, clinicians, and school staff obtained perspectives of intended and unintended health equity and racial justice impacts of the 2019 Massachusetts An Act Modernizing Tobacco Control. Findings and recommendations from this study can inform monitoring efforts to assess the law's impacts in Massachusetts and the adoption of similar flavored tobacco sales restrictions and other tobacco control policies in other states to maximize the health equity benefits and minimize unintended impacts.

EDWARD MARCINIAK (1917-2004) was a major force in Catholic and civic affairs in Chicago. For some he was and has remained an enigma. Msgr. John Egan, a leader in justice issues, said of Marciniak, Ed never followed the parade. If there's a voice of conscience in this town, it's Mar- ciniak____He never trims his sails. Mayor Richard J. Daley noted: can always believe his answers____His social conscience, his concern for others, is as deep as his knowledge of the city and its people. But there were others who adamantly disagreed. Elinor Richey Soderberg, an African American free-lance writer, was so angered by Marciniak in 1963 that she wrote him the following postcard: Sometimes when you are in your bed at night doesn't your soul ache for the lies you concocted for the sake of ameliorating a vicious democracy-crushing political machine? A year after Marciniak's death, Alderman Leon Depres of the Fifth Ward, who once supported him, portrayed Marciniak as an obstacle to racial justice, claiming in his autobiography that he provided for Daley an essentially political cover-up.1Was Marciniak a pawn or a misguided do-gooder who got in over his head when Richard J. Daley tapped him to be Director of the Chicago Commission on Human Relations in i960 as the Civil Rights Movement built momentum? Or was he consistent in the mission he set out for himself as a young man to make Chicago a better and more just place for all? Why would an idealist such as Marciniak work for Richard J. Daley, who according to historian Roger Biles, held atavistic racial views?2 At first glance there seemed to be an irresolvable conflict between this progressive social idealist and his service in Mayor Daley's cabinet. Pubic service working for a political and public leader required Marciniak to moderate his clarion voice for racial justice in order to be an advisor and mediator. This role change caused consternation on the part of some in the Civil Rights Movement.Edward Marciniak was a man to be reckoned with in the Chicago Catholic community and in the affairs of the city. His life, religion, and work were one. He often said that it was a pity if a person was unemployed, but it was tragic if someone did not have a vocation in life. He had a vocation and it compelled his engagement in the issues of his time from union organizing to fighting economic and social injustice. The years he served as the Director of the Chicago Commission on Human Relations (CCHR) under Richard J. Daley between i960 and 1967 were defining for Chicago and for Marciniak. His unique religious and socio-political perspective informed his work and his role working to end Chicago's segregated housing market. In i960 civil rights change was inevitable, the nature and pace of that change was not.Edward Marciniak's Social ConscienceMarciniak was the first of three children born to a Polish immigrant steel worker a-nd the daughter of Polish immigrants. The family moved frequently around the South Side of Chicago during the Great Depression and eventually settled in Brighton Park, a working-class neighborhood within smelling distance of the city's Union Stock Yards, where they opened a small grocery store. He grew up working in the store along with his parents and brother and sister. Marciniak spent his high school years at the archdiocesan preparatory seminary but did not to go on to prepare for the priesthood. He experienced a vertigo of indecision, he wrote a friend. became certain that my job as an instrument of God's will was to be accomplished in the world I was going to be a lay agitator-God willing, he wrote. wanted to give my body, my mind, my heart, my life to whatever cause Christ's revolution demanded. I made no definite plans. How could I? My job was to do whatever came along.3Marciniak (Figure 1) was profoundly influenced by his religious training both at home and at school. Marciniak believed that all people were called to perfect the kingdom of God on earth. …

This book examines the relationship between sport, the media, and national identities in Great Britain. It draws upon case studies of different sporting events and stories, looking at the ways in which the media (re)present different narratives of the nation(s). It focuses on the intersections between different parts of Great Britain, such as matches between two British nations within international football competitions. It also explores contested claims for national sporting glory through the achievements of individual athletes and teams. From Andy Murray’s success in tennis, to the portrayal of Team GB athletes born outside of the United Kingdom, the book shines new light on ongoing debates about the perceived fragility of the United Kingdom and the place of Great Britain and its constituent parts within a post-Brexit Europe. In looking at the prestigious Sports Personality of the Year award, it considers how and where discourses of the nation intersect and what this can tell us about the significance of social issues such as gender and racial equality in sport and in wider society. This is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in the sociology of sport, sport media, the politics of sport, cultural identities, nationalism, or media studies.

Akan-speaking Methodists in London make sense of their diasporic experience by claiming ‘virtuous’ citizenship. Regardless of their legal and formal status, they feel themselves to be citizens of Britain as Methodists, workers and law-abiding subjects. Active membership in the British Methodist church, conceived as an English transnational polity extending to Ghana, allows for this alternative construction, rooted in Methodist Christian ideology of universal and selfless love, and the Akan concept of tema ‐ empathy for the pain of others, expressed in moral and material obligations to humanity at large, and family or fellowship members. Encapsulation in ethnically exclusive fellowships has become, however, highly problematic for the British Methodist Church whose internal conversation mirrors wider debates in Britain on multiculturalism and immigrant citizenship. Ghanaians themselves are increasingly aware of this critique, but for them ethnic fellowships do not imply exclusion or exclusiveness: they are the loci where people’s agency is experienced, and where they gain recognition and distinction.

This volume tells the story of the interaction between Christianity and law—historically and today, in the traditional heartlands of Christianity and around the globe. Sixty new chapters by leading scholars provide authoritative but accessible accounts of foundational Christian teachings on law and legal thought over the past two millennia as well as the current interaction and contestation of law and Christianity on all continents. Several chapters explore the ways in which Christianity shaped and was shaped by core public, private, penal, and procedural laws. Other chapters analyze various old and new forms of Christian canon law, natural law theory, and religious freedom norms as well as Christian teachings on fundamental principles of law, politics, and legal order. A final cluster of chapters probe Christian contributions to controversial and cutting legal issues of migration, biotechnology, environmentalism, and racial justice. Together, the chapters make clear that Christianity and law have had a perennial and permanent influence on each other over time and across cultures, albeit with varying levels of intensity and effectiveness.

In this chapter, the authors outline how they approach Freirean culture circles as a strategy for cultivating critical literacies of racial injustice with teachers and communities. Using culture circles in our formal and informal teacher education contexts pushed us to identify the need of a critical pedagogy of teacher education. And while the authors recognize that culture circles will have to be recreated and reinvented across contexts rather than simply imported, they propose that Freirean culture circles can serve as a framework for envisioning a critical pedagogy that moves teacher education beyond ivory towers by including community members and by centering on community issues of equity and racial justice. Despite the stressful and physical demands of teaching, an overwhelming number of educators from across the New York City area willingly woke up early on Saturday mornings, navigated the intricacies of the subway system, and made the trek to Harlem for monthly culture circles.

David Imbroscio’s argument about exclusionary zoning contains several salient arguments that deserve the attention of those working on issues of housing justice, racial justice, and urban equity. Attention to Imbroscio’s concerns can strengthen efforts to produce greater regional equity in American metropolitan areas. I find two main elements of his argument, however, unconvincing. First, his assertion that the anti-exclusionary zoning movement “is underlain by a deep commitment to neoliberalism” is a misreading of the greater history and aims of anti-exclusionist advocacy and scholarship. Second, his claim that anti-exclusionism is anti-democratic suffers from an overly narrow and process-focused concept of democracy that ignores historical and enduring power dynamics of local land-use politics as they are and have been expressed within a system of White racial domination.

South has come North. Mass immigration from the Caribbean to Britain began in 1952, followed by immigration from Africa in the 1960s. Ever since, there has been a steadily growing influx also from sub‐Saharan Africa to the European continent, swelled in the 1980s and 90s by the flow of refugees and asylum‐seekers from troubled countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Nigeria, Togo and Eritrea, into diverse regions. In Britain, the Caribbean community originally consisted of ex‐servicemen and laborers, and the African community of male students and seamen; but over five decades, as families arrived and children were born, there has been a major shift to long‐term migrants or settlers. Societies and churches are faced with a “staying power” (Fryer) with people who will, voluntarily and involuntarily, remain: the old, who more easily relate back to their original cultural and spiritual traditions, and the young who search for a new “African European,” “African British,” “African German,” “African French,” or “African Dutch” identity without being yet fully accepted as co‐citizens by the indigenous populations. Over years, the position of all these has become even more precarious under governments who have cut back aid, introduced restrictive regulations on immigration, employment, and education, and made “multiculturalism” and the entry of refugees and asylum‐seekers electoral issues. Additional predicaments are economic imbalance, unemployment, new poverty, cultural exclusion, and endemic racism in Europe, political instability and deprivation in Africa, and an overall lack of preparation and recognition by European institutions (including the churches) that the historical relationship between the “first” and the “third” worlds has changed profoundly. In the third millennium, with the expansion of the European Union, the debate about the Reform Treaty, and disagreements about Europe's self‐image as a federation of nation states, a super‐state, or rather a union of most diverse cultural, linguistic, and religious identities, the issues of human rights, religious freedom, racial equality, and social justice play a decisive role. In this, the position of the African Diaspora from both sides of the Atlantic, especially the legal status of youths, women, and refugees, is crucial, as the relationship of “whites” to people of color and the east/south connection are put to the test. As religion “forms the foundation and the all‐governing principles of life for Africans” (O. U. Abiola), the commitment of Christian churches, white and black, western and eastern, is highly significant for determining the relevance of Christianity. The black‐majority churches in Britain, and African communities in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Scandinavia, Ireland, and other regions, contribute greatly to the revival, growth, social life, and consolidation of Christian congregations in the inner cities. Indeed, many have bought and refurbished redundant church buildings and re‐dedicated them to their original purpose. In some places they begin, in number and enthusiasm, to outgrow the indigenous church‐goers.

Born of Conviction: White Methodists and Mississippi's Closed Society and One Mississippi, Two Mississippi: Methodists, Murder, and the Struggle for Racial Justice in Neshoba County