Freedom Dreaming through Faith: Kolvenbach and King

Freedom Dreaming through Faith: Kolvenbach and King 

February 2nd, 2022

An underlying conversation of both Martin Luther King Jr.'s, "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," and Peter-Hans Kolvenbach's, "The Service of Faith and the Promotion of Justice in American Jesuit Higher Education," was the aspect of brining faith into justice and the workings of God and his followers into the problems we see in equality. 

As the title implies, Kolvenbach breaks down what it means to have service within your faith and defines the usage of "promotion" in terms of justice. He explains, this is not to mean service through justice, rather the two should be kept separate and then the two individual entities can be brought together. He says that within service we find, "theological and ethical dimensions of Christ’s mission of service," and it is the initiative of His laborer that leads us to salvation for all peoples, (Kolvenbach, 26). As for the promotion of justice, he says the GC32 sees it as, "promotion of justice as a concrete, radical but proportionate response to an unjustly suffering world," and not just a sales pitch of recruitment, (Kolvenbach, 27).

If "injustice is rooted in a spiritual problem," then the solution, Kolvenback suggests, is to rectify the spiritual problem, and from that correction we will see a shift from injustice to justice. Although separate, the conversations between hearts and minds will enact a more visceral feeling.

If Kolvenbach is defining the instructions to achieve justice, the King's account seeks to recall the process of fulfilling this direction. 

In this text, King is writing from a Birmingham jail in his efforts, in part with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, to which he is president of, to help brothers and sisters in their time of need. He compares his descent into Birmingham as a call to injustice and says, "Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid," (King, 1). 

Although not as direct in his statements as Kolvenbach was, it is evident that their is a religious and spiritual explanation in his writing. He refers to "our God-given and constitutional rights," the idea of moral law in tandem with "the law of God," and even references Elijah Muhammad's Muslim movement, taking this familiar idea of divine power and including all facets of human belief with it in a conversation of inequality, (King, 1-4). 

This referral to God and religious belief stood out in both readings in terms of freedom dreaming. If freedom dreaming can be defined as liberating the trauma of the past into the progress of the future, then we see both authors utilize the same subject in their freedom. 

As seen in Alice Walker's, The Color Purple, Celie puts her thoughts, her feelings, her emotions, her unstated hope in the silent protector of God and uses him as a way to manifest, in some sense of the word, a better life than the one she receives. Although she cannot vocalize her experience and understand the extremity of what she has been through, she knows, in at least some convoluted way that their is hope in overcoming and she maintains this through addressing God. 

It seems as if King and Kolvenbach are doing the same. Each, in summary, are discussing justice and what it entails, yet neither can convey their points with a reliance of God. The strength of their belief leads them to find hope in it and, thus, God becomes a focal point of their paths to liberation.

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