Angelic Troublemakers

A. Terrance Wiley is an Assistant Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Carleton College, USA.

In Angelic Troublemakers, A. Terrance Wiley reveals the anarchistic heart of American articulations of faith. In looking at the work of Henry David Thoreau, Dorothy Day and Bayard Rustin in anarchist terms, Wiley has succeeded in radicalizing a narrative that often fits quite comfortably into liberal America. By highlighting these writers and activists' tenets of noncooperation and resistance, Wiley shows that the possibility for such iconoclasm comes from religious conviction, from a sense of external sources of power and authority that are not the province of the state. In looking at this range of anarchisms, some explicit (with Day), some implicit (with Thoreau) and some ambiguous but critical (as with Rustin), Wiley shows us one source of how the sense of inevitability and absolute power that comes from state systems of politics can be interrupted, ruptured and successfully struggled with. This book serves as a vital rearticulation of some of our most basic assumptions both about the role of religion and the possibility of political alternatives in the United States today.

• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSIntroductionChapter 1: The Conscience on Fire: Thoreau’s Anarchist EthicChapter 2: Love in Action: Dorothy Day’s Christian AnarchismChapter 3: The Dilemma of the Black Radical: Bayard Rustin’s Ambivalent AnarchismConclusion: The Awakening to ComeBibliographyIndex