To some it looks like a giant spaceship, to others a living creature. Many used to think of it as flat. Some believe it is only several thousand years old. For others, and they are right, it is millions of millions of years old. Some think it will go down in ice, others in fire—who knows? The history and space that we know as the planet earth, though the common abode of all human life, is described, interpreted, explained, and valued in spite the various analyses of our planetary home, the discourse of globalization brings to view, as sociologist Roland Robertson suggests, the image of the earth as a “single space,” or as described by the title of the television show my parents and I watched when I was much younger, a “big blue marble.”
I. Overview
Though there is, has been, and will continue to be variety in our understandings of the world and our accounts of globalization, not every perspective is equally accurate or morally adequate. There is a great deal at stake in the way we describe and value the Earth, this giant blue-green marbled globe. And there is a great deal at stake in the way we describe and appreciate the human social interactions that take place within it. The way the world and human life are envisioned, described, and talked about impacts the manner in which we as individuals and communities take up with it and one another, concerns that are fundamentally moral and ultimately theological.
Thus analysis and evaluation of globalization, a multidimensional set of interconnected and interpenetrating processes that are rapidly changing the conditions of life on planet earth, are central tasks of contemporary theological inquiry and of spiritually, morally, and politically responsible religious leadership. This is so for many reasons. Globalization is simultaneously an unfolding of new material-objective conditions for social life (i.e. ecological, economic, technological) as well as a network of subjective-cultural processes transforming human consciousness (political, moral, religious). These material-objective and subjective-cultural aspects of globalization dialectically impact one another and cannot be adequately analyzed or evaluated in isolation. Insofar as liberal religion aims to exert a prophetic influence on the world, and the contexts in which we undertake this prophetic endeavor have been shaped and are continuing to be reshaped by the multiple interpenetrating material and cultural flows that characterize globalization, then a prominent theological task of liberal religion includes the effort to analyze and evaluate the processes and theories of globalization.
While a prominent task, however, and despite the saturation of public discourse with this concept, the nature and character of “globalization” remains highly contested. Is it a new phenomenon, a distinctly late- or post-modern process, or is it as ancient as human history? Is it materially driven and culturally effective, the reverse, or a material-cultural dialectic? Does it enrich cultures or degrade them? Will it materially benefit many or merely a few? Is it a unifying or a divisive phenomenon? The theoretical and descriptive ambiguity surrounding “globalization,” reflected in these and other questions, reinforces the importance of being clear about the methodological framework from which we will engage our subject.
II. Methodology
Several methodological positions drive the design of this class:
*First, as indicated above, globalization includes not only material but also cultural dimensions. Not every interpreter of globalization acknowledges this, and even for those who do, the role of religions in culture is often downplayed. For many scholars, and even more so for the broader public, globalization is usually described as a principally economic-material process. This course constitutes an effort to understand globalization as more than the global interconnection and interdependence of markets and finance and to understand the material dimensions of globalization as part of a much broader set of patterns.
*Second, globalization is an uneven process, and thus a social justice concern. Though impacting the material and cultural conditions of the whole world, the infrastructure of globalization is concentrated in the global North. There are numerous power differentials within the phenomenon of globalization and these require critical examination. This methodological position is reflected, in part, by the variety of analyses and the pairing of distinct evaluative perspectives that we will consider in our course.
*Third, while many characteristics of globalization have historical roots, such as cultural hybridization, in recent times these characteristics have become magnified. This is partly due to what one of our authors, Manfred Steger, discusses as the creation, expansion, and intensification of the interconnectedness and interdependency of social interaction. Thus globalization designates a historically recent and yet unfolding set of processes.
*Fourth, analysis and evaluation of globalization are impoverished if they neglect theological perspectives. This is so for at least two reasons.
*Both the appreciative and critical theories of globalization implicitly contain theological underpinnings or commitments that are theological analogues. They imply, but rarely explicitly theorize, normative accounts of the way things ultimately are and ought to be, about the nature, value, and purpose of earth, of life, and of human beings. One of the tasks of this course will be to raise these implicit normative commitments to visibility, in order better to make judgments among the theories in which they are embedded.
*Theological traditions—historical and emerging—bring their own analytic and evaluative resources to the discourse of globalization. It is not only that theological perspectives exist within theories of globalization, but also that theological perspectives can provide interpretive leverage for critical understanding of the phenomenon. And thus another task of this course will be to examine and assess select paradigmatic theological-ethical interpretations of our topic, inquiring into their possibilities as resources for liberal theology and liberal religious leadership in an era of globalization.
III. Structure
In light of these methodological commitments, shaped by an appreciation for both the contested nature of “globalization” and its moral significance, our course will be structured in two parts— analytical and constructive.
*Our first sessions will be analytical. The aim here will be to make the opacity of “globalization” a little more transparent, attempting to gain a clearer picture of the reality to which the term applies. Toward this aim we will study some of the principal spheres of globalization (economic, ecological, political, and cultural) as well as some of the dominant theories of globalization (neoliberalism, social equity liberalism, eco-localism and neocolonialism).
*With the leverage gained through our analyses, the second part of our course will attempt to carve some constructive conceptual space for evaluating “globalization.” With this in mind, we will engage four distinct theological and ethical assessments of globalization. We will give our attention first to the perspectives of two ecofeminist theologians, one from the global North and one from the South, and then we will move to an interpretation of two expressions of theological humanism, a Reformed Jewish and a Christian perspective.
IV. Bibliography
*Manfred Steger, Globalization: A Very Short Introduction
*Rebecca Todd Peters, In Search of the Good Life: The Ethics of Globalization
*Rosemary Radford Ruether, Integrating Ecofeminism, Globalization and World Religions
*Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations
*Ivone Gebara, Longing for Running Water: Ecofeminism and Liberation
*William Schweiker, Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics: In a Time of Many Worlds (selections)
V. Calendar
*Week 1: Getting Oriented: Spheres of Globalization, (prior to class!! Read Manfred Steger’s book, Globalization)
*Week 2 I. The Need for a Normative Approach to Globalization; II. Dominant Theories of Globalization, (Read Rebecca Todd Peters’ book, In Search of the Good Life, 1-100)
*Week 3: Resistance Theories and a Normative Proposal, (Peters, 101-208)
*Week 4: Corporate Globalization and World Religions, (Rosemary Radford Ruether, Integrating Ecofeminism, Globalization, and World Religions, 1-89), Mid-term paper due!!
*Week 5: Varieties of Ecofeminist Theology, (Ruether, 91-125 and Ivone Gebara, Longing for Running Water, 1-100)
*Week 6: A Latin-American Ecofeminist Theology, (Gebara, 101-217) *May 12: A Jewish Humanism, (Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference, entire)
*Week 7: Jewish and Christian Theological Humanisms (William Schweiker, Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics, 1-128) *Week 8: A Christian Theological Humanism, (Schweiker, 129-220)
*Week 9: Wrapping Up, Final paper due!!
This syllabus pertains to when the course was offered in 2006