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In this paper, I offer a comparative analysis of the political thoughts of twentieth century Iranian revolutionary thinker and sociologist Ali Shari’ati (1933–1977) and German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940). Despite their conspicuously independent historical-theoretical trajectories, both Shari’ati and Benjamin engaged with theology and Marxism to create theological–political conceptions of the revolution of the oppressed. Shari’ati re-interpreted and re-animated Shia history from the angle of contemporary concerns to theorize a revolution against all forms of domination. In comparison, Benjamin fused Marxism with Jewish theology in his call to seize the possibilities of past failed revolutions in the present. Both Shari’ati and Benjamin conceptualized an active messianism led by each generation, eliminating the wait for the return of a messiah. As a result, each present moment takes on a messianic potential; the present plays an essential role to both thinkers. Past was also essential to both, because theology (through remembrance) had made the past sufferings incomplete to them. Both thinkers viewed past sufferings as an integral part of present struggles for justice in the form of remembrance (or yād or zekr for Shari’ati, and Zekher for Benjamin). I explore the ways Shari’ati and Benjamin theorized the role of the past in the present, remembrance, and messianism to create a dialectical relation between theology and Marxism to reciprocally transform and compliment both of them.

Using an intellectual-history lens, this article offers insights into the spread of phenomenology across Central Europe and its social–political significance in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly its impact on the formation of the Eastern European dissident movement and furnishing it with ideas. Specifically, the article explores the role that phenomenology played in defining one of the core concepts underlying Central European dissidence: the idea of hope. Tracing the story of three public intellectuals—Leszek Kołakowski, Józef Tischner, and Václav Havel—it suggests why the school founded by Edmund Husserl had been embraced by some and rejected by others, and how their particular interpretations of hope had been indebted to phenomenology.

This article examines the works of three iconic Iranian intellectuals of the 1960s—the Muslim thinker Jalál Ál-i-Aḥmad, the Islamist ideologue ‘Alí Sharí‘atí, and the Marxist theorist Iḥsán Ṭabarí—and argues that their shared underlying assumption is the claim that the Bahá’í religion has foreign roots and that its leaders maintain clandestine ties with foreign powers. By uncritically accepting the master narrative of Bahá’í espionage—shaped in large part by The Confessions of Dalgurúkí in the 1940s—these intellectuals, contrary to their role as agents of change and critics of authority, helped further consolidate and perpetuate this narrative. In doing so, and given their significant influence, they contributed to the distancing of their readers from their Bahá’í compatriots.

This article explores the integration of Marxism into the Gospel narratives of the Christian Bible in Zhu Weizhi’s Jesus the Proletarian (1950). It argues that Zhu in this Chinese Life of Jesus refashioned a Gospel according to Marxism, with a proletarian Jesus at its center, by creatively appropriating a wealth of global sources regarding historical Jesus and primitive Christianity. Zhu’s rewriting of Jesus can be appreciated as a precursor to the later Latin American liberation Christology.

Before the Russian revolution of 1917 and subsequently in exile, the leading figures of the Russian religious renaissance were deeply engaged in social and political questions. Vladimir Soloviev, Sergius Bulgakov and Nicolas Berdyaev in particular presented Christian philosophies and theologies as alternatives to secular philosophies which captivated the Russian intelligentsia in late imperial Russia. Their thinking was consistent with evangelical precepts and the social thinking and actions of the early Fathers of the Church, even if not always couched in explicitly Christian terms. Major Christian theological and spiritual principles inspiring their theologies include the equality of all human beings, the evangelical imperative of love of neighbour as a reflection of love of God, the uniqueness of the human person, and freedom. Social and political thinking during the Russian religious renaissance provided a solid, if inadequately recognized, basis for the development of later Orthodox social and political theology.

Pius XII condemned atheism's \"most ignoble corruptions\" in his 1956 encyclical Haurietis Aquas, along with its \"lethal tenets\" in 1958's Meminisse luvat. Only six years later, however, in 1964, Vatican IFs Lumen Gentium affirmed the possibility of salvation for \"those who, without any fault of theirs, have not yet arrived at an explicit knowledge of God\" (article 16). Furthermore, the following year's Gaudium et Spes 19-21, drafted by Paul VI's newly-founded Secretariat for Non-believers, offers, among much else, a sympathetic overview of contemporary atheisms, and invites their contemporary adherents to \"a dialogue that is sincere and prudent\". These paragraphs, according to Ratzinger, \"may be counted among the most important pronouncements of Vatican II\". Evidently, comparing Pius XII's \"lethal tenets\" to Vatican IFs salvific optimism, profound developments are manifest in the Catholic engagement with atheism. Primarily responsible for this are, I argue, two episodes in French Catholic history in the decades preceding Vatican II: a) the unprecedented dialogue of Catholic intellectuals with modern atheism, following the French Communist Party's main tendue (\"outstretched hand\") during the period of the Popular Front (1934-38); and b) the 'priest-worker' experiment, initiated by Henri Godin and Yvan Daniel's 1943 publication of La France — Pays de Mission?

1.1. Introduction to the ProblemThe present essay is a phenomenological analysis of a fundamental human characteristic. The phenomenon, which serves as the focus of our investigation, is man’s openness and what is, in the final analysis, man’s God-directedness. There have been many philosophers who dealt with this phenomenon in the history of philosophy after Max Scheler who was the first to introduce the term “world-openness” (Weltoffenheit). We are tempted to identify the somewhat wider concept of man’s openness with world-openness. At least what Scheler’s concept of man’s world-openness seems more or less to cover what we generally mean by the phenomenon of man’s openness. In this sense, by saying that man is open to the world (weltoffen), we do not imply merely one single form or interpretation of man’s openness (that is, we don’t single out one specific object such as the ‘world’ and describe man’s openness toward it), but we refer to the whole of the phenomenon of man’s (general) openness. In my view and understanding of the term, man’s openness to the world and his God-openness are not two separate phenomena. I shall argue in this essay that God-directedness (God-openness) is the ultimate and full understanding of world-openness. World-openness is a many-faceted term: it entails a structural metaphysical essential trait of man as a finite person, which has no proper opposite except the absence of it in animals and in other non-personal beings; it has a contradictory opposite but lacks any contrary opposite. Every human person is characterized by this structural world-openness regardless of his acts and attitudes. In other words, worldopenness in this sense constitutes man’s ontological structure. World-openness can also mean, however, something else that indeed requires human intellectual and volitional or affective conscious acts and culminates in the attitude of world-openness,an attitude which is free and which not every human person possesses actually and which is opposed to many forms of 5 closedness. With this in mind, we will analyze different acts, attitudes, etc., in which man can be open or closed.My analysis aims at being a classical analysis in the sense that the character of its argumentation is of a classical phenomenological nature. By this I mean the method of the early phenomenological movement (Munich-Göttingen-circle or Münchener Phänomenologie) and its later development. One of its main characteristics is that which Max Scheler emphasized in his seminal essay “Phenomenology and the Theory of Cognition”as “radical empiricism”. By the term radical empiricism he understands an immediate contact with different phenomena as they are given to us, and their detailed analysis, that is, a radical differentiation of one phenomenon from the other. The main difference between the phenomenological empiricism and the so-called classical empiricism is that, for classical empiricism, experience means sense experience and modes of consciousness that result from the stimulation of the five senses. As a final result of this, classical empiricisms generally end up in materialism or sensualism. For Scheler and for the majority of the thinkers of the early phenomenological movement “lived experience” (taken again in a fundamentally empirical sense) is exceptionally important.

Second only to theology taken en bloc, Marxist theory has informed the quest for social change and social justice among the peoples of the world. Young discusses Marxism and social movements.

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Class, Power, and Inequality Class and Political Economy Worship as a Mode of Production, Distribution, and Consumption Class, Corporatism, and Covenant Classlessness and the Peace of the Earthly City References

This dissertation examines the use of economic theory in contemporary Christian social and economic ethics, arguing that the dominant stress on either neoclassical or Marxian economic theory within economic ethics is problematic due to inherent difficulties with religious ethics with each paradigm. I propose two alternative sources of dialogue. The first is social (or humanitarian) economics, a tradition within economics opposed to the religiously suspicious anthropologies of “economic man” in neoclassical economic, yet not tied the Marxian reliance on dialectical materialism or class conflict. The second is the thought of Bernard Lonergan, whose recently published Macroeconomic Dynamics: An Essay in Circulation Analysis, written originally from 1930–1944, offers an alternative paradigm to neo-classical and Marxian paradigms, and one more in keeping with Christian anthropology. In Part One I critically analyze important selected uses of economic theory in contemporary religious ethics, especially in modern Catholic social thought, examining how incoherencies and conflicts between economic and religious ethical descriptions and evaluations of human behavior and social processes mar the effectiveness of Christian moral argumentation concerning economic matters. Part Two examines the normative or ethical dimensions and commitments of current economic approaches (neo-classical, liberal and Marxian). I also investigate how social economics seeks to integrate views of the human person alternative to economic man and social economics' openness to explicit normative dimensions. However, social economics has not yet provided a powerful enough macroeconomic explanatory paradigm to replace the dominant approaches. In Part Three, I also examine Lonergan's view of the human person and economic agent as an alternative to the economic anthropology in existing economic theory. Furthermore, I propose his critical science of economics as found in Essay in Circulation Analysis as an alternative and more scientifically explanatory macroeconomic paradigm than currently found in any type of economics. In conclusion, in conversation with Catholic social thought, social economics and Lonergan's economic thought, I begin to describe the lineaments of a Christian economic ethics that overcomes these incoherencies and reflects an effective and mutual partnership between economics and religious ethics.