Advocating Worker Justice

Catholic moral theology possesses a number of tools that can be employed to promote worker justice. Some of these tools, such as Catholic social teaching on solidarity and workers’ rights, have been used to this end before. However, advocates of workers’ rights have seldom utilized other concepts, such as cooperation in evil, scandal, and evangelization. This essay provides a theoretical introduction to several tools in the “toolkit” of Catholic ethicists, engaging contemporary scholarship on them. It then applies the concepts to two cases in order to demonstrate their usefulness in the struggle for worker justice. Both cases involve Catholic universities, which means the ethical concepts introduced from the Catholic moral tradition should have normative status for these institutions. The first case entails a divestment campaign at the University of Notre Dame. The second case confronts the unjust treatment of adjunct faculty members at Catholic colleges and universities.     

Arise for It Is Day:

No abstract available for this article.     

The strings on David’s Harp: religious ritual as a container for spirituality

ABSTRACT

Religion and spirituality have often been defined over against each other. The spontaneous, emotional and experiential nature of the spirit has been seen as preferential to the structured, fixed, and predictable nature of religious ritual. Religion education for children has moved away from the performance of ritual behaviour toward creating an environment to nurture the innate spiritual nature of children. This paper questions whether the pendulum has swung too far, neglecting rituals that have sustained religious and communal life for generations, and considers ways of reimagining traditional ritual as a way to encounter the spirit and build community.     

Teacher pilgrims at World Youth Day: a preliminary examination

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the experiences of six teachers from a regional, Australian diocese who attended World Youth Day (WYD). It also reports on aspects of their worldview and their experience working in Catholic schools. Overall participants were very positive about working in Catholic schools, and though not connected in an ongoing way with parish communities, they were happy to support the religious dimension of Catholic schools and were often involved in parish-based programmes when there was a connection with school activities. Their worldview could be characterised as having much in common with dominant cultural paradigms that sees religion in moral terms along with a deistic sense of God. Established social networks supported them in these views. Teacher pilgrims reported that WYD gave them the opportunity to experience a broader, more diverse Catholicism as well as the experience of going overseas and being part of a large gathering. Participation in WYD may open up opportunities for reflective discernment on the part of teacher pilgrims and a result has implications for the formation of teachers working in Catholic schools.     

Feed the Church,starve the party? Church-state relations and religious political mobilisation in 21 Catholic-majority countries

ABSTRACT

This contribution examines the effects of state religion policy on religious political mobilisation, focusing on the case of the Catholic Church in the post-Cold War era. Catholicism remains politically salient in most Catholic-majority societies, but the presence and success of parties that explicitly mobilise Catholicism in the electoral arena varies enormously. In addition, Catholic-majority countries display a wide variety of institutional arrangements governing the relationship between religion and state. This contribution presents a theoretical framework for analysing the effect of these institutions on the performance of political parties that seek to mobilise religion. Relying on a dataset that covers 137 elections in 21 Catholic-majority countries as well as key measures from the Religion and State (RAS) dataset, this contribution shows that countries with higher levels of state regulation of religion and friendlier religion-state relations are more likely to host parties that mobilise religion; it also suggests that funding for the Catholic Church may constrain such parties.     

The Bicameral Brain and Theological Ethics: An Initial Exploration

Pope John Paul II called for an intense dialogue between science and theology, “a common interactive relationship,” in which each discipline is “open to the discoveries and insights of the other” while retaining its own integrity. This essay seeks to be responsive to that call and is an initial exploration of relationships between contemporary neuroscience and Catholic theological ethics. It examines neuroscientific data on the bicameral brain and theological ethical data on marital ethics, including divorce and remarriage, and asks what insight the former might provide into both the latter and the different ethical methods that respond to marital ethics. The analysis is undertaken in the hope of illuminating a pathway that opens the insights of one way of doing theological ethics to the insights of another way, thereby eliminating the unnecessary, unhelpful, and sometimes un-Christian polarizations that presently separate them.     

Holiness in the Making

In this essay, I will argue that a political theology of human work can provide the sacramental principle underlying the theology of labor. This principle could complement the foundations of Catholic social teaching, since the sacramental aspects of work have not been made very explicit in the ethical framework of the Church's theology of work. The view of labor as the active participation in God's future is an important aspect of such a theology. In order to serve as a foundation for faith‐based labor organizing, I will claim that it needs to be complemented by a sacramental view of labor as art, a labor‐aesthetic that undergirds a labor‐ethic, in which labor itself becomes a sign and instrument of the way the Church becomes God's work in the world. First, I will sketch an outline of some of the major positions on labor in modern Catholic theology. Then, I will draw on the writings of the British poet and painter David Jones to explore a sacramental view of human work, arguing that a sacramental view of work could support the Church's social criticism of laborer's circumstances.     

Still Opting for the Poor: The Brazilian Catholic Church and the National Movement of the Street Population

Have rumors of the demise of liberation theology been greatly exaggerated? There is a prevailing belief among scholars and other observers that the Latin American Catholic Church has withdrawn from the preferential option for the poor, which had encouraged a combination of faith and activism for social justice. This article challenges that belief by means of qualitative data gathered during 8 months in Brazil that provide evidence of close connections between the Pastoral of the Street, a church program that mobilizes homeless people, and the National Movement of the Street Population (MNPR). The principal data came from 42 interviews with homeless or formerly homeless people, movement leaders, and religious sisters and lay workers in the pastoral program. Participant observation and documentary research supplemented the interviews. The findings demonstrate that the Pastoral of the Street helped to create the MNPR and continues to provide it with material and ideological support.     

Solidarity in a Technocratic Age

Do free markets teach us how to construct humane social relations or do they impede us from doing so? We discuss social scientific evidence on the nature of commercialization and its consequences for moral formation. From a virtue ethics perspective, people face a need to learn and practice the good. When interactions transition into the market sphere, we argue commercialization can fundamentally alter the nature of relationships, particularly for those relations formerly based on gift, sacrifice, and obligation. While modern social scientists accurately identify problems resulting from commercialization, we argue for the importance of theological social ethics, which can offer a penetrating analysis of the habits of gift and communal responsibility. Catholic social teaching in particular outlines the set of principles and institutions which foster sacrificial gift‐giving among individuals and organizations within society, providing a bulwark against the threat commercialization poses to many social relations.     

Where Have All the Proportionalists Gone?

Interest in proportionalism as an important trend in Catholic moral theology seems to have faded in the recent decade. This has led some to view it as a movement that was somehow defeated. I suggest that proportionalism's influence can still be seen in contemporary Catholic ethics, most noticeably in the current interest in virtue ethics, casuistry, and feminist ethics. I argue that proportionalism encouraged a reappraisal of the methodology for evaluating moral action in a direction that was more hospitable to concerns about the particularity and context of the agent.