Struggles for global justice are being fought by civil society groups across the globe, addressing global inequalities, challenging neoliberal, market driven globalization, and demanding to remedy its negative implications. The contributions to the special issue "Faith in Justice" of the journal "Globalizations", guest-edited by Claudia Baumgart-Ochse, Katharina Glaab, Peter J. Smith, and Elizabeth Smythe, examine the roles religious communities and organizations in particular play in the struggles for global justice, roles too often ignored by scholars of the Global Justice Movement (GJM). The special issue features articles which, for example, examine how different conceptions of justice have fuelled religious activism in Africa (Cecelia Lynch), explore faith-based advocacy on Climate Change (Katharina Glaab) and the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) Campaign against Israel (Baumgart-Ochse), or analyze the Papacy’s approach to social justice as an alternative to visions of limitless progress (Barbato).
The articles transcend simplistic either/or binaries as often used in the religion-politics literature, highlighting the difficulties of clearly distinguishing between religious and secular, progressive and conservative, or rational and irrational motives and norms in struggles for justice. Challenging the secularization paradigm that marginalizes the role religious actors play in public life, the contributions show how these actors engage with a broad range of justice issues, how deeply contested justice is, and how its meaning may vary and change among religious actors as a result of the social or political context within which an injustice is encountered.
The Special Issue "Faith in Justice" will be published in December at Taylor & Francis.