I would really love to hear more Black Episcopalian/Roman Catholic/Methodist perspectives on aftermath of MLK within their respective denominations because the fragility of any progress made by white American Christianity is surely a tell?

(Although I can imagine what will probs happen is a bias towards trends in US Roman Catholicism potentially due to noise from numeric decline of mainline denominations outweighing anything else?)

For context, I am listening to https://audioboom.com/posts/7692162-tom-holland-on-the-great-awokening and am just livetweeting in response.

So far I mostly think it'd only be polite for a scholar of Classical history (with some early Medieval kudos) to quote modern historians, given how annoying it is when moderns go wild with late antiquity/Medieval history. But he's under no obligation to the Golden rule I guess

You know, I think the framing of current civil rights debates - even if involving non-Christians* - as yet another cycle of Christian in-fighting is actually quite helpful not least because (as with best critiques of humanism), it highlights a nature of Christian hegemony.

Oh boom, actually the reference to 'wokeness' as neo-Pelagian heresy comes quite early, which is nice.

Mmm. More confusing than anything? a) I think the lumping of 60's 'wokeness' and the contemporary is off and needs a bit more teasing (maybe this happens later in the podcast)

I say it's off because it is precisely the more individualistic and historically untethered notions of social virtue common to 60s counter cultural movements which are most critiqued by the contemporary 'woke' (also jfc this term should never have become mainstreamed... )

b) I think I'm hearing the usual association between ones reaction to tenor with a reaction to the substance (this is why I love lurking on academic discussions. I've learned a lot about how easy it is to do this). I don't think it's for nothing that there's a type of avowedly +

+ secular classical liberal who critiques contemporary 'wokeness' as a rehash of 'original sin' (although where everyone seems to get confused is the imputation of inherited guilt *because people don't read the original sources they're ostensibly referencing...* )

But anyway, not that these analogies really make any sense but I'd argue the better comparison with Pelagian vs Augustinian theology would be with discursive threads *within* the 'wokeness' than 'wokeness' vs some external... un'woke'?

So, if 'woke' refers to the online social justice phenomenon, those who are biased towards a structural formation of social oppression tend to naturally disqualify any idea that somehow ones individual efforts can 'save' one from inflicting/internalising kyriarchal dynamics.

No 'woke' isn't necessarily slanderous but it's really sad and kind of sickening that a term used to describe oppressed people's, well, joy at putting together their experience and research into a connective framework has been reduced to this...