{"id":14981,"date":"2015-03-12T20:19:00","date_gmt":"2015-03-13T00:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=14981"},"modified":"2015-03-12T20:19:00","modified_gmt":"2015-03-13T00:19:00","slug":"community-organizing-athens-jerusalem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=14981","title":{"rendered":"community organizing between Athens and Jerusalem"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Mark Readhead weaves the more philosophical arguments of my book <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Are-Ones-Have-Been-Waiting\/dp\/019993942X\/ref=la_B001JS0XWW_1_7?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1369513662&amp;sr=1-7\">We are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For<\/a> into his recent <em>Polity<\/em> article entitled &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.palgrave-journals.com\/polity\/journal\/v47\/n1\/full\/pol201429a.html\">Reasoning between Athens and Jerusalem<\/a>.&#8221; I won&#8217;t do justice to Readhead&#8217;s complex and subtle position here, but a quick\u00a0<em>pr\u00e9cis<\/em> would go something like this: Habermas advocates &#8220;post-secular public reasoning,&#8221; in which both religious believers and non-theists (liberals, scientific naturalists, Kantians, Marxists) open themselves up to real mutual learning. &#8220;Secular and religious citizens must meet in their public use of reason at eye level. For a democratic process the contributions of one side are no less important than those of the other side.&#8221; But Habermas develops this ideal in ways that actually require the religious to &#8220;translate&#8221; their views into secular terms while not troubling the secular very much. Furthermore, the philosophical dialogues that Habermas envisions can&#8217;t build real solidarity among people who disagree about foundational matters. In accounts of faith-based community organizing by Jeffrey Stout and others, Readhead finds more genuine and promising examples of dialogue that is connected to work and relationships:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Contra Habermas, the actors whom Stout describes promote not an impersonal democratic process, but very personal democratic experiences fuelled by passion. Organizers plan intimate \u201cone-on-one conversations, neighborhood walks, and house meetings,\u201d as well as broader assemblies of diverse constituencies. All of these activities illustrate an under-resourced and under-appreciated genre of politics that Levine has called open-ended politics. Open-ended politics have no predetermined goals. Instead, citizens decide what to do as they work together.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mark Readhead weaves the more philosophical arguments of my book We are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For into his recent Polity article entitled &#8220;Reasoning between Athens and Jerusalem.&#8221; I won&#8217;t do justice to Readhead&#8217;s complex and subtle position here, but a quick\u00a0pr\u00e9cis would go something like this: Habermas advocates &#8220;post-secular public reasoning,&#8221; in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14981"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14981\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15001,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14981\/revisions\/15001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}