Religion, Race, and Justice in a Changing America

Jan 12, 2000

Authors: admin

Publisher(s): The Century Foundation

For Release Thursday, January 13, 2000

Religion, Race, and Justice in a Changing America
A New Book From The Century Foundation and the Harvard Civil Rights Project Examine the Changing Role of Religion in the Civil Rights Movement .

Religious leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr. formed the core of leadership for a civil rights movement that fundamentally changed America. But the movement lost momentum in the late 1960s, and organized religious involvement in civil justice issues rapidly receded.

Why did so many of the religious institutions that were so central to the movement for racial justice in the 1950s and 1960s pull back from difficult social justice issues in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s? What do religious organizations see as their current role in civil rights efforts?

Religion, Race, and Justice in a Changing America, a new Century Foundation book, explores the changing nature of civil rights initiatives, which have led to more complex relationships between religion and civil rights. This volume of essays was developed in conjunction with the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, which has as its co-directors Christopher Edley (title) and Gary Orfield, professor education and social policy at Harvard. Orfield serves as co-editor, with journalist Holly Lebowitz, for the volume, which takes stock of the ways in which different religions, their leaders, and their followers now see their role in promoting civil rights.

Today, the quest for improving the lives of racial minorities and pursuing justice is less a "movement" and more a collection of diffuse efforts to fend off a retrenchment from affirmative action and nondiscrimination laws, improve economic prospects for residents of low-income urban neighborhoods, and organize grass-roots political activities. In that context, the relationships between religion and civil rights have become less obvious.

Through the series of essays, the authors look back at the civil rights tradition, offer new insights from diverse religious communities, and look ahead to the role of religion in a new movement. These essays examine civil rights efforts of protestant denominations, Jewish groups, evangelical organizations, and Islamic and Buddhist groups, among others. The book does not make specific policy recommendations for future action, but begins the process by setting forth the larger contexts in which the various traditions and understandings are placed, with the hope that these will raise some other, fresh questions and issues.

"This book is not an effort to find a single world view or ideology, and the authors are not official spokesmen for their religions," said Gary Orfield. "Our intent is to generate serious consideration of the implications of religion for racial justice and contemporary civil rights policy. It is not to prescribe an answer, to suggest that everyone within a given religion has the same view, or to assume that the answer to the social question is a uniform one."

Contributors to the volume include Robert Franklin, president of the Interdenominational Theological Center; Robin Lovin, dean of the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University; David Hollenback, S.J., the Margaret O'Brien Flatley Professor of Theology at Boston College; David W. Chappell, a Buddhist scholar at the University of Hawaii; Amina Waddud, an Islam expert at Virginia Commonwealth University; Reuven Kimmel, a professor of Talmud and Midrash at Brandeis University; Allan Figueroa Deck, director of the Loyola Institute for Spirituality; Charles Marsh, director, Project on Lived Theology at University of Virginia; Ann Chih Lin, assistant professor in the School of Public Policy and the department of Political Science at the University of Michigan.

The book was released today at a forum at the New York Society for Ethical Culture Society. It featured Christopher Edley, Jr., Gary Orfield, Charles Marsh, and Washington Post journalist and author, Juan Williams. Richard C. Leone, President of The Century Foundation, was moderator for the forum, which was attended by more than one hundred members of the city's religious, civil rights, advocacy, and academic communities.

The Century Foundation is a research foundation that undertakes timely, critical and analytical studies of major economic, political, and social institutions and issues. The Harvard Civil Rights Project was founded to stimulate serious scholarly examination of the civil rights realities and the issues of a generation transformed by rapid changes that have turned America into a multiracial society of extraordinary racial and ethnic diversity and profound economic and racial stratification. One of its central missions it to learn what scholars and thinkers in various disciplines can contribute to understanding the nature and possibilities of society's racial dilemma. This book is the first in a series of collaborative efforts between the Civil Rights Project and The Century Foundation.

Please contact Christy Hicks at The Century Foundation (212- 452-7723) for more information or to receive a review copy of Religion, Race, and Justice in a Changing America.

Religion, Race, and Justice in a Changing America
Gary Orfield and Holly J. Lebowitz, Editors
A Century Foundation Book, 272 pages
Cloth 0-8708-433-1 $24.95
Paper 0-8708-435-8 $12.95

To order, call 1-800-275-1447 (in Washington, DC call 202-797-6258)

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