Saturday, November 28, 2009

Dr. Jackson on The Challenge for the Third Resurrection


I love Dr. Jackson. His voice for me really does bring 'clarity amidst confusion.'

Few committed practitioners of revealed religion would argue with Stephen Carter that, at its best, "religion resists." The challenge to religion, however, is to make sure that resistance remains a means rather than an end in itself and that is exercised in consideration of goals that lie beyond self-serving quotidian interests. Otherwise, there is little that separates religion from secular movements and utopias. And in this confusion lies the ultimate impoverishment and potential abuse of religion. For it is here that religion is subject to being reduced to a thinly veiled form of eudaimonism that substitutes the whims and wishes of men and women for the will and pleasure of God. (171)

If Islam is to retain concrete meaning in the everyday lives of Blackamerican Muslims, it will have to continue to show its ability to address the concrete circumstances that inform and circumscribe their lives. At the same time, if Islam is to remain true to its constitution as a religion and avoid degenerating into what W. E. B. Du Bois once described as "a complaint and a curse...a sneer rather than a faith," it will have to remain God-centered and committed to matters of personal piety and eschatological success, even where these evince no direct relevance to the worldly plight of Blackamericans. (172)


At stake in all of this is not whether Blackamerican Muslims choose between piety and protest, activism and spirituality, or secular interest and eschatological success. The issue is, rather, whether these competing interests can be reconciled through an understanding of Islam that avoids both fideistic obscurantism and self-serving eudaemonism, while resonating with deeply-felt meaning in the concentric contexts of black and white America. Without doubt, this is the greatest challenge confronting Blackamerican Muslims as they enter the Third Resurrection. And it is this challenge that I shall seek to address in this final chapter. (172)


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