May 3
Good News for Common Goods - Book Talk by Wes Markofski
Wes Markofsky, Associate Professor of Sociology, discusses his new book Good News for Common Goods: Multicultural Evangelicalism and Ethical Democracy in America followed by a question and answer session.
“What is the relationship between evangelical Christianity and
democracy in America? In Good News for Common Goods, sociologist Wes Markofski explores how multicultural evangelicals across the United States are addressing race, poverty, inequality, politics,
and religious and cultural difference in America’s increasingly plural and polarized public arena. Based on original ethnographic research on multicultural evangelicals active in faith-based community organizing, community development, political advocacy, and
public service organizations across the country—including over 90 in-depth interviews with racially diverse evangelical and non-evangelical activists, community leaders, and neighborhood residents in Portland, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Boston—Markofski shows how multicultural evangelicals can and do work with others across race, class, religious, and political lines to achieve common good solutions to public problems, and that they can do so without abandoning their own distinctive convictions and identities or demanding that others do so. Just as ethical democracy calls for a more reflexive evangelicalism, so too does it call for a more reflexive secularism and progressivism.”
Co-sponsored by the Humanities Center and Department of Sociology and Anthropology
from Humanities Center