JUSTICE-MAKING AND THE BELOVED COMMUNITY: MAPPING EMANCIPATORY LANDSCAPES AND THE PUBLIC ROLE OF THEOLOGIANS AND RELIGIOUS SCHOLARS
Abstract
This article focuses on the religious world view and organizing strategies of United States activist, Joan Southgate who, at the age of 72, mapped out and completed a three-stage, 519 mile walk to North American Underground Railroad sites. Following this 2002 walk, Southgate founded Restore Cleveland Hope (RCH) in Cleveland, Ohio, to combat racism and other social ills. In their organizing efforts, Southgate and other community members envision and work to establish a "Beloved Community" of radical inclusivity that fuses Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of the Beloved Community with notions of community found in Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved. In this article, I draw upon Southgate’s mapping strategies to establish a framework in which to discuss the public role religious scholars can play in giving voice to local religious activists and practitioners by mapping, analysing, and interpreting their emancipatory efforts.Downloads
Authors retain copyright and grant the Journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this Journal.
This is an open access journal, and the authors and journal should be properly acknowledged, when works are cited.
Authors may use the publishers version for teaching purposes, in books, theses, dissertations, conferences and conference papers.
A copy of the authors’ publishers version may also be hosted on the following websites:
- Non-commercial personal webpage or blog.
- Institutional webpage.
- Authors Institutional Repository.
The following notice should accompany such a posting on the website: “This is an electronic version of an article published in Scriptura, Volume XXX, number XXX, pages XXX–XXX”, DOI. Authors should also supply a hyperlink to the original paper or indicate where the original paper (http://scriptura.journals.ac.za/pub) may be found.
Authors publishers version, affiliated with the Stellenbosch University will be automatically deposited in the University’s’ Institutional Repository SUNScholar.
Articles as a whole, may not be re-published with another journal.
The following license applies:
