Author: Joerg Rieger; Gilda Haas; Jessica Gordon-Nembhard; Nathan Schneider; Aaron Stauffer

Date Published: 2020

Institution: Wendland-Cook

Resource Type: Interventions Forum

Overview: In recent decades a wide range of scholars have begun to investigate something that activists and social movements have long implicitly embraced in their organizing: religion and economics do not exist in isolation from each other but instead inform and shape their respective social, political, and cultural manifestations.

This forum takes up this recent turn in scholarship in light of the history of labor and social movements and their deep ties to religion. Broadly, panelists will explore how economic fights also take place in politics and religion, and vice versa. Does greater economic democracy lend itself to greater democracy within political and religious communities, and even more democratic religious concepts? What can movements fighting for economic democracy today learn from past and present labor and social movements in history? Specifically, this forum takes up the dialectic between economy and religion explored through the legacy and position of worker cooperatives in calls for economic democracy by progressive religious voices.

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