Tragic Soul-Life: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Moral Crisis Facing American Democracy

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Oxford University Press, USA, Jul 11, 2012 - Biography & Autobiography - 190 pages
Contemporary debates on the role of religion in American public life ignore the overlap between religion and race in the formation of American democratic traditions and more often than not imagine democracy within the terrain of John Rawls's political liberalism. This kind of political liberalism, which focuses on political commitments at the expense of our religious beliefs, fosters the necessary conditions to open historically closed doors to black bodies, allows blacks to sit at the King's table and creates the necessary safeguards for black protest against discrimination within a constitutional democracy. By implication of its emphasis on rights and inclusion, political liberalism assumes that the presence of black bodies signifies the materialization of a robust American democracy. However, political liberalism discounts the historical role of religion in forming and fashioning the nation's construction of race. Tragic Soul-Life argues that the collision between religion and politics during U.S. slavery and segregation created the fragments from which emerged a firm but shifting moral disdain for blackness within the nation's collective moral imagination. The very problem political liberals want to avoid, our comprehensive philosophy, is central to solving the political and economic problems facing blacks.
 

Contents

Introduction
3
Chapter 1 Spiritual Isolation
11
Tragic SoulLife and the Souls of Our Ancestors
29
Chapter 3 Spirit of Freedom
43
Chapter 4 The Dead Death and Dying
68
SoulBeauty and Human Strivings
97
Chapter 6 Ethics in a World of Bad Faith
113
Conclusion Religion and the American Tragedy
142
Notes
149
Index
169
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About the author (2012)

Johnson is an Assistant Professor or Religion at Haverford College.