Articles by Robert Jensen
All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice
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My book All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice (Soft Skull Press, 2009) offers a radical approach to Christian theology. Because the book is currently not in stock, the publisher has given me permission to make available a free PDF of the book.
Real Hope: Facing Difficult Truths About an Uncertain Future
Dissident Voice ·
Expressions of hope are only as truly hopeful as the honesty of the assessment of reality from which they emerge. Conjuring up hope rooted in a denial of reality can only deepen despair in the long run.
Still riding the Second Wave: Reflections on feminist struggles
ZNet ·
Interview with Ruth Anne Koenick.
I met Ruth Anne Koenick at a dinner before my talk on the feminist critique of pornography at Rutgers University in 1997. I had been doing public presentations on that issue for several years, but that was the first time an institution had paid my plane fare to give a lecture. As a young professor, I was a bit nervous but also was feeling pretty self-important.
Arrogance, Ignorance, and Cowardice: Lessons from 9/11
Monthly Review Zine ·
Given the disastrous decisions made by U.S. officials in the seven long years since September 11, 2001, it would be easy tonight simply to catalog those many mistakes and condemn the bipartisan depravity of the Republican and Democratic politicians who — starting almost immediately after the towers fell — manipulated people’s anger and fear to build support for illegal and immoral wars of aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Universal Patterns within Cultural Diversity: Patriarchy Makes Men Crazy and Stupid
Monthly Review Zine ·
Islamabad, Pakistan — Some lessons learned while spending time in a different culture come from paying attention to the wide diversity in how we humans arrange ourselves socially. Equally crucial lessons come from seeing patterns in how people behave similarly in similar situations, even in very different cultural contexts.
Masculine, Feminine or Human?
Counterpunch ·
In a guest lecture about masculinity to a college class, I ask the students to generate two lists that might help clarify the concept.
For the first, I tell them to imagine themselves as parents whose 12-year-old son asks, “Mommy/daddy, what does is mean to be a man?” The list I write on the board as they respond is not hard to predict: To be a man is to be strong, responsible, loving. Men provide for those around them and care for others. A man weathers tough times and doesn’t give up.
The Selling and Shaping of Our Souls
Counterpunch ·
This is an edited version of a sermon delivered May 4, 2008, at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas.
The last time I was in this pulpit to deliver a guest sermon, I spoke of the need for each of us to take up the role of prophet, to not be afraid of speaking in the prophetic voice, even when doing so involves risk.
Today I want to talk about the other kind of profit, the allure of which can so often quiet the prophetic voice within us.
The sorrows of race and gender in the 2008 presidential election
Counterpunch ·
It may seem odd to talk of sorrows around race and gender in politics when we are a few months away from being able to vote for a white woman or a black man for president of the United States. When I was born in 1958, any suggestion that such an election was on the horizon would have been laughed off as crazy. In the first presidential campaign I paid attention to as an eighth-grader in 1972, Shirley Chisholm — who four years earlier had become the first black woman to win a seat in Congress — was to most Americans a curiosity not a serious contender. Today, things are different.
The End of Osheroff’s Dance: Lessons from a Life of Resistance and Love
Monthly Review Zine ·
As Abe Osheroff’s body slowly began to betray him in his 80s and 90s, one of his favorite lines was, “I have one foot in the grave but the other keeps dancing.”
That dance ended on Sunday, April 6, when the 92-year-old Osheroff died of a heart attack at his Seattle home.
Osheroff is remembered most for his rich life of political activism. From the battlefields of the Spanish Civil War to streets all across the United States, he was a master strategist, energetic organizer, and courageous fighter.
Beyond Peace
Dissident Voice ·
It has long been a staple of the antiwar movement that there can be no meaningful peace without justice on a global scale. Those of us living in the First World, especially in the United States, cannot pretend to be working for peace unless we also are working for a more just and equitable distribution of the world’s resources.
Investigative Journalism Project Reveals Problem at Core of Mainstream Journalism
Message: internationale Fachzeitschrift für Journalismus (Germany); and Common Dreams ·
Pro Publica, an initiative launched last month in the United States to help revitalize investigative journalism, is a great idea trapped by the worst aspects of the best instincts in contemporary corporate commercial journalism. The project reminds us of important values at the core of the craft of journalism, but also exposes the common political confusions of mainstream journalists that so often undermine their best efforts.
Raining on the Thanksgiving Day parade: “Redefining” the holiday is a failed project
Dissident Voice ·
After years of being constantly annoyed and often angry about the historical denial built into Thanksgiving Day, I published an essay in November 2005 suggesting we replace the feasting with fasting and create a National Day of Atonement to acknowledge the genocide of indigenous people that is central to the creation of the United States.
The Quagmire of Masculinity
Counterpunch ·
I am having dinner on a Thursday night in a restaurant in New York’s Greenwich Village with two friends I’m working with on a documentary on pornography. We’ve had a long day and are happy to unwind. Near the end of our meal, I’m increasingly aware of the rising volume from a nearby table, where three college-age men and a woman are talking and laughing just a bit too loudly. As it becomes harder to shut out their conversation, it becomes clear that much of the talk is about sex. The alpha male of the group (who is the boyfriend of the woman) is holding forth to the other two men about how to maneuver women into bed, including tips on the use of alcohol and a little bit of force when necessary.
We Are All Prophets Now: Responsibilities and Risks in the Prophetic Voice
Monthly Review Online ·
The Empire and the War for Muslim Minds: The Process of Empire Building
Policy Perspectives (Institute of Policy Studies, Islamabad) ·
The Masjid & the mindset of despair
The Hindu (India); also posted on Common Dreams ·
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — For my first three days in Pakistan, no conversation could go more than a few minutes without a reference to the crisis at the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) compound. I had landed in Islamabad on July 8, and by then it seemed clear that government forces would eventually storm the mosque and the attached women’s seminary to end the confrontation with fundamentalist clerics and their supporters.
Weinberg’s Claim of Moral High Ground Rings Hollow in Face of Bigoted Remark
Dissident Voice ·
When I read Steven Weinberg’s assertion that those supporting a boycott of Israel suffer from a “moral blindness” that could only be explained by anti-Semitism, I wondered how he squared that claim to the moral high ground with a comment he once made to me that smacked of anti-Palestinian bigotry.
What the Finkelstein Tenure Fight Tells Us About the State of Academia
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs; and Counterpunch ·
For two years I have served at the University of Texas at Austin on the faculty committee on “academic freedom and responsibility,” a pairing of concepts that is common in higher education. While there is a fairly broad consensus on what “freedom” means, competing conceptions of “responsibility” lead to two very different ideas about the appropriate role for professors in public life.
Moving Beyond Anti-War Politics
Counterpunch ·
As Congress sends its bill requiring partial troop withdrawals from Iraq to the White House for a certain veto, it has never been clearer that mobilizing against this war is necessary, but not enough.
Impeachment: Why stop at Bush?
Common Dreams ·
Whether one believes the impeachment of George W. Bush is a realistic possibility or is simply a vehicle for expressing outrage and educating the public about the crimes of the powerful, any such talk starts with the U.S. Constitution and Article II, Section 4, which speaks of “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”