Justice Not Benevolence

Abstract

Although there are many migration theories that purport to explain why people migrate, many theologies and ethics of migration rely on neoclassical migration theory, which views migration solely as the result of poverty and unemployment in sending countries. This paper reviews various migration theories in order to argue that Catholic social teaching on migration has primarily relied on neoclassical theories of migration. This over-reliance on neoclassical migration theory has led to flawed policy recommendations and ethical analyses.

Christian ethics must respond to the reality of migration as described by migration systems theory, which suggests that migration systems are actually initiated by the policies of receiving countries, primarily colonial and organized guest worker recruitment. The ethical principles required to respond to migration are not only benevolence and hospitality. Christian ethics must begin by seeing migration as a problem of exploitative relationships between citizens and migrants.     

Solidarity as Spiritual Exercise: Accompanying Migrants at the US/Mexico Border

Abstract

This essay seeks to articulate a practical understanding of Christian solidarity as spiritual exercise that is based on Jon Sobrino's theological insights, uniquely grounded in his formation in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola and his particular witness to the martyrs of El Salvador. We then turn to an exploration of the Kino Border Initiative, a binational ministry of sociopastoral accompaniment, educational outreach, research and advocacy as an institutional attempt to pursue a praxis of solidarity.     

Resistance,Charity, and Rebirth in Roberto Rossellini's Rome,Open City

Abstract

With its use of contemporary events, location shots, and a plot that mixes comedy, tragedy, and passion play, Roberto Rossellini's 1945 film Rome, Open City founded the movement known as “Italian Neo-Realism.” The film vividly presents the Christian teaching on the relation between religion and politics. Rossellini asserts that a Christian Europe can be reconstructed only on a foundation of charity rather than hate, vengeance, or even justified punishment for Nazi crimes. It is not on the basis of tales of resistance that Italians and Europeans can be reborn, Rossellini argues, but on the basis of the Christian command to “love your enemies.” European rebirth means the installation of a moral order that makes parenthood feasible and respectable. By reflecting on Rossellini's masterpiece, I examine the triumph and the tragedy of the Christian Democratic Europe that Rome, Open City foretold and helped to found.     

A Note on Henry Timberlake's Route from Gaza to Beersheba to Hebron in 1601

Abstract

The proper identification of the town that Christian travellers described as biblical Beersheba during the Crusader, Medieval, and Early Modern periods is key to understanding many pilgrim accounts, and none more so than that of Henry Timberlake. During these periods Christian pilgrim viewed Bayt Jibrīn as biblical Beersheba, not Bi'r al-Sab' as most scholars do today. Once this identification is clear it is possible to trace the likely route Timberlake followed from Gaza to Bayt Jibrīn and on to the Hebron area. Timberlake's caravan had the choice of two roads as they left Bayt Jibrīn and, in part because of the social conditions of 1601, I argue the caravan took the more northerly road to reach the Hebron area as opposed to the better known and southerly Roman Road.     

The Use of the Bible by the Christian Human Rights Organizations Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) and International Justice Mission (IJM)

Abstract

This paper explores the use made of the Bible by two Christian human rights organizations: Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) and International Justice Mission (IJM), identifying the particular parts of Scripture appealed to, the hermeneutic adopted, and asks whether there are other resources in the Bible which they could use to inspire and inform their work. CSW with its focus on the persecuted Church most naturally draws its inspiration from the New Testament, especially the Epistles; whilst IJM whose work principally addresses other forms of injustice, makes greater appeal to the Old Testament. The biblical framework for IJM's work could be strengthened by a more sustained attention to Jesus' ministry as a model of human rights intervention and advocacy, by reflection on the significance of the Exodus as indicative of God's purposes for those who are oppressed, and by consideration of the book of James. CSW needs to integrate its commendable emphasis on Jesus' mission as exemplary for Christian human rights action with a holistic reading of the Bible and a greater exploration of the importance of the Church as the Body of Christ.     

A city of sanctuary: the relational re-imagining of Sheffield's asylum politics

In June 2007, the city of Sheffield officially declared itself to be the UK's first 'City of Sanctuary', a gesture that sought to instil a spirit of 'welcome and hospitality towards asylum seekers and refugees'. Drawing on a series of interviews and ethnographic work, this paper critically examines this gesture by considering how City of Sanctuary sought to enact a relational account of place through which the responsibilities of Sheffield towards both proximate and distant strangers were highlighted. The paper argues that while the City of Sanctuary movement integrates both relational and territorial political practices, it also actively pursues a relational imaginary through presenting the city as a space of political connections and responsibilities. This is achieved through a twin focus upon the role asylum seekers and refugees play in constituting the city and the role that Sheffield might come to play in national discussions of asylum. Following this discussion, the paper looks to the implications of City of Sanctuary's work for a relational account of spatial politics, arguing that a dual orientation of spatial responsibilities 'within' and 'beyond' place may be more easily articulated in reference to some networks and flows than others. The experiences of City of Sanctuary therefore suggest that relational accounts must present a space of negotiation between territorial practices, political networks, spatial responsibilities and geographical imaginations. The development of City of Sanctuary into a national network of towns and cities promoting hospitality indicates the importance of such negotiations for developing a culture of refuge across British cities.     

A Communist Party in New Caledonia (1941–1948)

During and immediately after the Second World War, in common with all French colonies, New Caledonia experienced intense political upheaval. It is little known that both the political awakening of the native people and the successful questioning of colonial authority by immigrant Asian workers had their origins in a political movement with communist sympathies. Led by strong and colour personalities - Jeanne Tunica y Casas, Florindo Paladini, Vincent Bouquet, Henri Naisseline, Henri Lemonnier - the Caledonian Communist Party, which had regular contacts with its Australian and French counterparts, knew how to present the first Kanak political claims and to set up an embryonic political organisation by and for Kanaks. The present article recounts this forgotten page of New Caledonian history: forgotton because the Christian missions, allied with the colonial administration, were quick to nip in the bud what appeared to be too radical a questioning of the established order.     

Richard Tawney: Moral Theology and the Social Order

Abstract

After noting the impressive scope of Tawney's contribution as an economic historian, labour theoretician and Christian moralist, attention is given to his three classic socialist texts: The Acquisitive Society, Equality, and Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. Tawney's critique of capitalism is rooted in his Christian convictions concerning the worth of each human person and also informed by his historical analysis of the evolution of capitalist social relations. His telling exposure of the transitory historical nature of so much of capitalism's vaunted absolutes has lent an authority to his contribution. Wealth, property and the mechanisms of the market are not sacrosanct, and must be subject to measures that will ensure more equitable social objectives. As a social theorist he straddled the Christian and secular humanism that formed the lifeblood of the labour movement, and this remains relevant to our more pluralist society, where agreement upon basic moral norms can help construct a social consensus that will promote a greater justice and human flourishing.     

A man for the people

Abstract

This study focuses on hospitality in Tanzania, as a topic of historical importance. Although there are many references to hospitality within both primary and secondary sources and anecdotal accounts, hospitality is effectively unexplored in the historical scholarship for any part of sub-Saharan Africa. Looking at southwestern Tanzania between 1600 and 1900 as a case study, this work aims to make hospitality, for the first time, primary focus of historical study rather than a peripheral and passing allusion. Towards that end, I examine why and when some societies chose to extend hospitality to outsiders and strangers. In southwestern Tanzania between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, extending hospitality to guests, strangers, and ‘foreign residents’ was a paramount value and social expectation, which could result in inclusion of outsiders. Hospitality towards newcomers became a cultural norm. I contend that direct, immediate, and personal gain was far less important than a circulation of hospitality. In the long term social and political institutions were buoyed by this moral expectation. In order to demonstrate these claims, I employ proverbs, oral traditions, and explorers’ accounts as historical evidence for hospitality's enduring salience in shifting contexts in southwestern Tanzania from precolonial times into the twentieth century.     

William T. Cavanaugh and René Girard

Abstract

This article examines the argument of William T. Cavanaugh’s The Myth of Religious Violence in the light of the mimetic theory of the French-American cultural theorist Rene Girard. Though the two projects are significantly different I argue for their mutual compatibility. Each author is “apologetic” for the Christian revelation, though the presence of theology in “The Myth . . .” is muted or implicit, as in Walter Benjamin’s parable of the puppet and the dwarf. I argue for four areas of specific convergence between Cavanaugh and Girard, arising from a shared Augustinian, “two Cities” suspicion of the state, and their resistance to the secularising marginalisation of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The notion of martyrdom as a “dramatic” performance is a further shared dimension. Finally, I argue that the apparent divergence of their approaches, between an anthropological thesis (Girard’s) and a historical one (Cavanaugh’s) is narrowed when we consider the later work of Girard and its examination of nineteenth century dynamics of escalation in warfare in his last book Battling to the End.     

“The producers on the one side,and the capitalists on the other”: Labor Reform,Slavery, and the Career of a Transatlantic Radical

Abstract

Through exploring the neglected career of John Campbell, an Irish-born Chartist refugee who ascended to a leadership role in the antebellum American labor movement, this article seeks to shed light on how revolutionary upheaval in Europe, debates over immigration, and sectional conflict affected working-class politics. Focusing on the period 1848 to 1851, and tracing Campbell's rapid evolution from a radical opponent of slavery to an ardent supporter of black subjugation, I argue that labor historians need to pay closer attention to shifting local and national contexts to understand the racial politics of labor agitators. Yet even as Campbell's views changed, his commitment to a producerist vision remained constant; by 1851 he had simply added people of African descent to a list of “idle” nonproducers who lived off the labor of workingmen. His proslavery twist on producer ideology suggests historians of antebellum social relations may need to go beyond interrogating the racial dimensions of artisan republicanism to gain a fuller understanding of the variety of working-class attitudes to race.     

Building Community Self-Esteem: Advocating for Culture

Abstract

This published version of the 2019 David Buchan Lecture draws on personal lived experiences and public folklore work to explore the folklorist’s role in creating the conditions for cultures to thrive. Understanding those conditions to include community self-esteem nurtured by a sense of belonging, I ask what is our responsibility when we witness disruptions and inequities? Can we create change when we amplify the voices of a community? Reflecting on my work with refugee and immigrant women over four decades, this article offers a glimpse into the collaborative work of a folklorist who found her bearings in the opportunity, even the responsibility, to advocate for cultural equity in her community.     

In the Shade of the Oaks of Mamre: Hospitality as a Framework for Political Engagement between Christians and Muslims

Abstract

This essay is the initial sketch of a theological framework for political dialogue based on traditions of hospitality. This essay is intended to further a normative commitment to pluralism by creating a space for Christians and Muslims to engage in political dialogue on issues of governance. Using the story of Abraham and the three strangers, the essay analyzes hospitality as a possible model for interreligious political dialogue. The essay follows the narrative of the story recounted in Genesis 18 and Surah 51 of the Qur'an focusing on Abraham's greeting of the strangers as expressing a "duty of hospitality"; the "sharing of a meal" as an act of mutual vulnerability; and the gift of Isaac as exemplary of hospitality's possibility for grace and transformation. The goal is to show that a shared theological tradition could be the basis for political dialogue.     

Telling it Like it is? Constructing accounts of settlement with immigrant and refugee women in Canada

This article reflects on the methodology of a study of immigrant and refugee women's settlement experiences in Vancouver, Canada. It specifically takes up the ways in which the women's accounts were co‐constructed through social and political processes and relations operating at different geographical scales, but were experienced at the local scales of body, home and neighbourhood. The study consisted of in‐depth interviews with 16 immigrant and one refugee woman and their teenaged daughters. Here we focus on the mother's accounts showing how their story‐telling of life since coming to Canada was framed by multiple discourses and local material conditions. We use two case examples from the study to raise substantive issues in the research, focusing particularly on the women's talk of work and health and how these framed their understanding of ‘womanhood’ in Canada, routes to a desired ‘integration’ and their daily practices. Their quotidian life embodied their multiple identities as women, mothers, wives, workers and immigrants and the interviews were used by them to express the frustrations and hardships which were in direct contradiction to their expectations as ‘desirable’ immigrants or refugees under protection. We argue that methodological reflection is not simply an important dimension of rigour in feminist qualitative research, but is also critical to the opening up of taken‐for‐granted categories brought to the politically charged study/construction of ‘the other’. In this research the identities of study participants and researchers, in the specific space of the interview, were intricately involved in ‘telling it like it is’ for these immigrant and refugee women settling in an outer suburb of one of the three major destination cities for immigrants to Canada.     

John Milton and the Beard-Hater: encounters with Julian the Apostate

ABSTRACT

This is a study of John Milton and Julian the Apostate, last of the pagan emperors. It follows two trajectories. The first takes as its subject Julian’s “School Edict” of 362 AD, which barred Christians from traditional classical education; while the second concerns a literary text by Julian himself, the Misopogon or “Beard-Hater,” in which he ironically attacked his own aversion to Antiochene Christianity, including the performance of plays. These discussions offer an opportunity to re-examine Milton’s comments on early Christian views of drama, as well as his own drafts for sacred dramas. All these discussions turn on the question of how the Christian is to approach pagan literature, one of the oldest intellectual debates within Christianity. I argue that Milton’s attitude to Greek literature as an entire process was shaped by his attitude to this specific debate, and that this can be seen afresh by viewing it through the eyes of its most powerful critic in antiquity, Julian the Apostate. I also furnish an account of the early-modern editorial tradition of Julian.     

The Limits of Bonhoefferian Responsibility: On Jean Bethke Elshtain's (Mis)Use of Bonhoeffer

ABSTRACT

Jean Elshtain claims that her defense of torture draws from the Christian tradition. To defend this claim, she makes direct appeal to Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Her defense of torture has taken on greater political significance today. This article will refute Elshtain's claim to Bonhoeffer. To do so, this article will first point to Bonhoeffer's explicit rejection of torture in Ethics, then argue that Bonhoeffer's rejection of torture draws from themes initiated in Creation and Fall. Placing Bonhoeffer in conversation with David Decosimo will show that Bonhoeffer holds a distinction between relation-ending and relation-perverting acts. Responsible actors may be called to perform the former class of actions, like tyrannicide, in extraordinary situations. However, the latter class of actions, like torture or rape, constitutes a limit to responsible action that we find no evidence Bonhoeffer is willing to cross. Elshtain, and others who wish to provide “Christian” defenses of torture, must look elsewhere.     

The Christian Peace of Erasmus

The aim of this essay is to show that Erasmus’s concept of peace should be understood as a form of irenicism rather than pacifism. I argue that Erasmus’s basic claims on war and peace do not qualify him as a pacifist, first of all because his concept of peace is non-universal: it is exclusively Christian since it does not include Muslims and Jews unless they have converted to Christianity. Secondly, Erasmus’s willingness to fight the Turks and his call for a Christian war against them suggests that he was not a pacifist. Since the peace Erasmus preached for was exclusively Christian, it cannot be identified as pacifism in its accepted universal sense, but rather as a commitment to the peace of Christendom, and therefore his concept of peace should more precisely be described as irenic. By shedding new light on Erasmus’s notion of war and peace, this essay suggests that his alleged religious tolerance should be considered anew.     

Contingent meanings,shifting practices: grandmother to grandmother solidarity as transnational feminist praxis

Abstract

While ‘solidarity’ is frequently evoked in transnational feminisms, it is less clear how this concept is understood and practiced among different actors in different contexts. This article addresses this limitation by investigating a movement of some 10,000 older Canadian women who, drawing on longstanding commitments to feminist advocacy, have mobilized over the past decade in solidarity with ‘grandmothers’ impacted by AIDS in southern Africa. The article investigates one pivotal development within this movement as an entry point to consider the productive friction surrounding transnational feminist practice more broadly: the splintering of the campaign in 2011 into separate advocacy and fundraising networks. Drawing on archival materials and interviews, the analysis depicts how changing perspectives on advocacy within the movement, which became most evident in this splintering, provide critical insights into thinking about the complexities of ‘solidarity’ as transnational feminist praxis. In particular, it extends existing scholarship on solidarity-building, suggesting that theorizing ‘solidarity’ in this context requires an understanding of its contingent practices. It also draws on older Canadian women’s reflections to challenge notions that ‘Second Wavers’ do not adequately grapple with how differences in power and privilege shape and inform their movements.     

Keeping to oneself: Hospitality and the magical hoard in the Balga of Jordan

ABSTRACT

Anthropologists have given copious attention to problems of exchange, of giving and receiving. Yet problems of taking, unequal accumulation, secret storage, predation, and refusal to share are no less central to social life. This is certainly the case among Jordanian Bedouin, whose notions of hospitality are a complex blend of reciprocity, protection, and coercive extraction. The families of dominant tribal shaykhs are often known for their ability to take, to store away wealth, and to protect hoards of found and inherited treasure, both magical and mundane. By reading the oral historical traditions of the Balga tribes against familiar Maussian ideas and the models of parasitism suggested by Michel Serres, I argue that hospitality, as Bedouin know it, is constructed in ways that resist the romanticism that besets anthropological portraits of ‘pre-capitalist' and ‘premodern' gift economies.     

The Politics of Moral Patience

Abstract

Pluralistic societies perpetually seek for ways to get along, given the reality of that pluralism. That search generates pluralistic responses which include forbearance, concord, tolerance, radical democracy, among many others. This paper begins to explore the putatively rich notion of moral patience as a way of being in the world as Christians; moral patience as a way of living with the ‘‘other’’ without reducing the importance of the Christian faith and practice; moral patience as a way of setting the stage for living with long-term difference but without terminal division; moral patience not just as a way of taking a long time to make decisions, but as the finding of a way forward and getting on with life without first coming to some form of unified resolution. Specifically, my purpose is to argue that moral patience creates time and space for the Christian community to develop an ethic of discipleship; i.e. a politics that finds its source in the patience of God, in the imitation of Jesus Christ, and in the power of the Spirit. Such moral patience acts as a sort of political and ethical capacity, and encourages us to believe that because God has time, we also have time — to listen, to be vulnerable, to engage in important conflicts without becoming violent, to refuse to be driven by the speed that society seeks to impose on us, and to resist the notion that the world and other people are directly in our control — indeed to resist the notion that we are radically autonomous individual entities. The paper concludes with a brief glance at how the Christian practice of moral patience might shape work in a number of fields of moral inquiry.