Abstract
Near the end of the fourth century, Evagrius of Pontus, a widely respected monk and spiritual guide in Egypt, received a letter from the leader of a local monastic community, Loukios. The letter pleaded with Evagrius to compose a treatise that would train the monks to wrestle with demons tempting them with evil thoughts and leading them into vicious behavior that put at risk the vitality of the community. Evagrius accepted the assignment and prepared a handbook entitled Talking Back (Antirrhêtikos) in which he identifies the evil thoughts through which demons worked and develops a strategy for combating these demonic powers.
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Notes
Evagrius of Pontus, Talking Back (Antirhêtikos): A Monastic Handbook for Combating Demons, trans. and intro. David Brakke (Trappist, Kentucky: Cistercian Publications, 2009); David Brakke, Demons and the Making of the Monks: Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).
Sorensen concludes that “the New Testament inherited its demonology from the Hellenistic Jewish environment familiar to Jesus and the first generation of his followers. Although demonic possession appears throughout the New Testament literature, exorcism of demonic spirits appears explicitly only in the writings of the synoptic gospels.” Eric Sorensen, Possession and Exorcism in the New Testament and Early Christianity (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 2002), 166.
Ibid., 130n76. References: Samson Eitrem, Some Notes on Demonology in the New Testament (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1966); Hans Dieter Betz, “Legion,” in PGM 22.b.35 and 35.15;
Richard A Horsley, Jesus and the Spiral of Violence: Popular Jewish Resistance in Roman Palestine (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 184–90;
also see Horsley, Jesus and the Powers: Conflict, Covenant, and the Hope of the Poor (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2011);
and Chad Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1988).
For a theological and pastoral proposal for heeding lamentations in the church, see Bradford E. Hinze, “Ecclesial Impasse: What Can We Learn From Our Laments?” Theological Studies 72 (2011): 470–95.
In 2001 Mark R. Warren and Richard L. Wood, reported on data they compiled about different religious and non-religious groups in the U.S. involved in Faith-Based Community Organizing: The State of the Field. http://comm-org.wisc.edu/papers2001/faith/faith.htm (accessed August 8, 2012). On Black Pentecostals involved in community organizing in Boston, see Omar M. McRoberts, Streets of Glory: Church and Community in a Black Urban Neighborhood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
For a brief sketch of John L. Lewis see Sanford D. Worwitt, Let Them Call Me Rebel: Saul Alinsky, His Life and Legacy (New York: Random House, 1989; Vintage Edition, 1992), 41–45.
Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946; New York: Vintage, 1989), and Rules for Radicals (New York: Random House, 1971; Vintage Edition, 1989);
see also Nicholas von Hoffman, Radical: A Portrait of Saul Alinsky (New York: Nation Books, 2010).
On the Industrial Area Foundation, see Edward T. Chambers, Roots for Radicals: Organizing for Power, Action, and Justice (New York: Continuum, 2003);
on Ernesto Cortes, IAF, and COPS, see Mary Beth Rogers, Cold Anger: A Story of Faith and Power Politics (Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 1999),
and Mark R. Warren, Dry Bones Rattling: Community Building to Revitalize American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001);
on the Gamaliel Foundation, see Dennis A. Jackobsen, Doing Justice: Congregations and Community Organizing (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001);
on Pacific Institute for Community Organization (PICO), see Richard L. Wood, Faith in Action: Religion, Race, and Democratic Organizing in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002);
Luke Bretherton emphasizes Alinsky’s friendship with Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain and the compatibility of his views with Augustine’s theology of the secular, in his Christianity and Contemporary Politics: The Conditions and Possibilities of Faithful Witness (Malden, MA, and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 71–125.
Edward T. Chambers with Michael A Cowan, Roots for Radicals: Organizing for Power, Action, and Justice (New York: Continuum, 2003), 28.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 200.
Bernard Loomer, “Two Conceptions of Power,” Process Studies 6 (Spring 1976): 5–32.
Jeffrey Stout, Blessed Are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 55. This ethnographic study of post-Katrina New Orleans illustrates theoretical arguments advanced in his book Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
Foucault maintains that this Stoic asceticism was distinct from Christian asceticism, but Faith-Based Community Organizing, I wish to suggest, cultivates this Stoiclike approach to social struggle as a spiritual mode of asceticism. Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2005), 322.
Amos Yong introduces this topic in his book Discerning the Spirit(s): A Pentecostal-Charismatic Contribution to Christian Theology of Religions, Journal of Pentecostal Studies, Supplemental Series 20 (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 127–32.
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© 2013 Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, Kirsteen Kim, and Amos Yong
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Hinze, B. (2013). Talking Back, Acting Up: Wrestling with Spirits in Social Bodies. In: Kärkkäinen, VM., Kim, K., Yong, A. (eds) Interdisciplinary and Religio-Cultural Discourses on a Spirit-Filled World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137268990_12
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