Browsing by Subject "Civil Disobedience"

In response to Nassir Ghaemi, an academic psychiatrist who presumes a mental illness and genetic abnormality in Martin Luther King, Jr., this project contends that King was a decidedly maladjusted prophet who dramatized his resistance to the evil triumvirate of racism, materialism, and militarism pervasive in American public life. Using the sermonic trope, “Creative Maladjustment,” a theological reconstruction of King’s prophetic meliorism is sustained in order to reclaim his legacy from the facile memory of the nation. The essential writings, speeches, and sermons of the revered Baptist clergyman source the work, giving insight into his personal thoughts about the method he chose specifically for the purpose of pricking the conscience of the America during the Civil Rights Movement. Relevant commentary and critical analyses of scholars and historians also support the claim of this thesis, pointing to King’s well-reasoned moral stance against social iniquity. The project traces the roots of King’s resistance in the biblical witness of the Old Testament prophets, the religion of the black church in America, and his early humiliations borne of racial segregation. Attention is also given to his intellectual assent to the theory of civil disobedience and philosophy of nonviolence, with critical examination of his conversion to the same. Finally, the project delves into the maturing path of King’s resistance vis-à-vis the widening economic inequities observed across the national landscape and spreading global strife, which formed the basis of his “world house” doctrine. The implications of King’s legacy upon contemporary moral leaders are offered as concluding thoughts.

The suspicion that the advent of the internet marks some sort of qualitative change in the development of the human affairs motivates much diagnosis but less instruction about the contemporary political moment. Are there normative implications to recent advances in information technology? This dissertation examines three political conflicts over the use of the internet in a liberal democratic society. Each controversy reflects a basic disagreement about the appropriate domain of the public sphere: whether to accommodate electronic forms of civil disobedience, to treat digital information as intellectual property, or to sanction the act of leaking. Each chapter of the dissertation uses the work and writings of a political activist for insight into competing claims over what should count as a use or abuse or new technology. Electronic methods of political protest clarify an important feature of the justification of civil disobedience that scholars should take into consideration even in the more traditional circumstances in which it is practiced. Current and historical controversies surrounding the ethics of leaking call into question who should have the authority to decide what the public has the right to know. And the free software movement challenges long-standing assumptions about the justification of intellectual property and the public interest bargain at the heart of it. Together, these cases illustrates the normative implications to recent advances in information technology.