Cornell University

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Alexander Livingston is associate professor in Department of Government, College of Arts & Sciences. 

Lecture Abstract:

Martin Luther King, Jr. has been a persistent source of fascination and discomfort for political theorists. King is celebrated as an icon of civil disobedience for elevating the claims of conscience above law but the religious terms of his vision of obligation have proven a challenge to the discipline’s secularist conceits. This talks sheds new light on the ways King’s public philosophy exceeds the familiar discourses of civil disobedience it has become associated with by reconsidering his political ethics as a practice of worship. Reconceiving conscientious citizenship in this way offers a new approach for making sense of King’s writings on racism, capitalism, militarism as the faces of American idolatry; i.e. false worship. Taking the religious King seriously means to challenge not just how political theorists read him but what King we read. I argue that his hundreds of sermons offer the fullest and most important archive of King’s thinking on the meaning of conscience, obligation, and citizenship. Across this canon, King returned again and again to series of parables as the medium for articulating his political thought. This paper focuses on King’s retelling of one such parable, the parable of the Good Samaritan, as a means of unsettling Americans’ idolatrous attachments to injustice and reeducating proper civic worship.

Sponsored by: Religious Studies Program

Co-sponsors: Department of Government, American Studies Program, Society for the Humanities

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