Word: manifestoes
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HARVEY COX'S Seduction of the Spirit is properly not a book at all but a manifesto and a scattering of blueprints. Its thrust: Marx was only half-right. Religion is not always and everywhere or merely an opiate of the masses. Though it often serves as a "sedative administered without consent," religion is also sometimes the only way a defeated culture can preserve its history. An oppressed people's religion becomes a way to stave off extinction and absorption. Through ritual and symbol, collective remembrance and testimony, it endures as a sanctuary for the impulse and energies of liberation...
Again, maybe "call" or manifesto is closer to the mark than a full-fledged "attempt." But stammering and piecemeal as it is in comparison to the works of Hobsbawm or Thompson, Cox's book still manages to point out ways and directions for the creation of a new discipline. The phrase Cox uses is a "Theology of Liberation...
...Congressman of the title story is an honorable man. He makes a sound political decision, refusing to endorse an antiwar manifesto, on grounds that it won't do any good and will only irritate his constituents. Then he discovers, when a colleague with surer instincts successfully champions the antiwar cause, that he has put a lid on his career...
...FINDS SOMETIMES with young people, those who have read the Communist Manifesto, or those who have merely carried it under their arms for a long time, they think that they have assimilated it and then they lecture us and demand from us what they call a pure Marxist attitude and are quick to criticize. And to be young and not to be a revolutionary is a contradiction--but to go forward as your life changes and to stay a revolutionary in a bourgeois society--it is difficult...
...personal example: I was the college leader of a group called Forward; it was the most vigorous group on the Left. One day it was proposed that the group Forward sign a manifesto--I am speaking of the year 1931--calling for the creation in Chile of soviets of workers, peasants, soldiers and students. I said then it was madness, that there was not any possibility, that this was a great mistake and that I didn't want, as a student, to sign something that tomorrow, as a professional, I could not accept...