Here, There, and Everywhere
White Christians and White Supremacy: The Less Familiar Story View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mary Marcel
Christian denominations in the Americas were marked from the beginning by racialized hierarchies which continue to underpinned political and economic decisions made in the public sphere. The often explicitly Christian African American Civil Rights movement sought to re-articulate, on and in their own terms, the basis of their full citizenship and their ambitions and place within Christ’s kingdom and US society. This is the familiar story. The less familiar story: To sustain race-based categories, which clearly delineated who would be eligible for full protection of the law and the widest access to opportunities and power, some white Americans were prepared to respond to any attempts at racial equality with Biblical arguments for their own racially superior status in the hierarchy of God’s kingdom as well as on earth. This paper explores the less familiar story in two eras when religious arguments by White Americans have been used to reinforce the inferior status of Black Americans in the public sphere. The first section explores antebellum arguments between Whites who wanted to convert enslaved Africans on US soil to Christianity and those who opposed them doing so. These arguments had distinct implications for the public sphere, where the legal, economic, social and educational status of enslaved people would be determined. The second section explores White religious responses to the African American Civil Rights movement into the present day. Current scholarship has identified numerous paths through which White Christian religionists in the US have sought to reinforce White supremacy and suppress Black Americans.
Paul the Apostle's Rhetoric on Injustice and Its Bearing on Community Cohesion
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Christos Karakolis
The paper explores Paul’s idea of accepting injustice for oneself while rejecting injustice in general, with a focus on the role of God in promoting this moral stance. The goal is to promote social cohesion by suppressing self-centered aspirations and mitigating conflicts, with unity as the ultimate aim despite differences. Today, this aim of unity still holds relevance, with many similarities to the era of Paul. The Christian religion can help by encouraging an ethical stance similar to that of the apostle: preferring to be wronged rather than wronging others. At the same time, however, there should be no tolerance for injustice towards others. This requires an active stance against injustice as a communal effort, rather than in the form of individual retribution. Such communal effort can contribute decisively to social cohesion.
Religion and Spirituality in a Spacefaring Society: Interdisciplinary Explorations View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Demetrios Alexopoulos
This paper briefly discusses, through the lens of astrobioethics, key religious and spiritual aspects of humanity’s current spacefaring societies. On the face of planet Earth, humans as religious and/or spiritual beings have evolved to become the ruling species. Likewise, religious and/or spiritual movements have risen through the millennia to become a recognized and respectable, when not decisive, element of human societies and civilisations. The Space Age, however, had apparently quite different tags in store for these earthly power-players. In the cosmic web of vastness and alterity untold that constitutes the observable universe, humans and religions seem to fall among the rarest and strangest occurrences. They seem to demonstrate every sign of not belonging, of not fitting in well with the larger cosmos, not in the long-term the very least. At the same time, outer space brings forth new dimensions in religious and/or spiritual expression and growth that are fast becoming part and parcel of the public sphere, especially in the social context of the space powers. Astrobioethics of religions, an emerging discipline of the space sciences family, could provide us, it is argued, with a theoretical framework and interdisciplinary roadmaps that work towards an meaningful understanding and beneficial management of the religious and/or spiritual sphere in mankind’s present, or future, celestial adobes.
