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.     

UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and Global Childhoods: Transdisciplinary Reflections from Nepal

Abstract

Globally, humans face innumerable socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental problems while being threatened by ever more interconnected and complex geopolitical concerns. In this planetary context, unidisciplinary research and related teaching approaches often work to constrain our ability to move beyond institutional and bureaucratic mind-sets to become agents of social change within local systems impacting children. During its 40-year evolution from a sub-discipline of psychology, the international field of child and youth studies has sought common ground for interpreting these pedagogical and professional issues. Many authors now argue for transdisciplinary approaches to address and overcome these tensions in the effort to re-integrate epistemologies of the global South within more dominant global North knowledge production systems. Such approaches have been posited to add new analytical and methodological tools to achieve praxis—the Greek word for translating theory into practice. Transdisciplinary research transcends the usual gap between academia and the broader public by acknowledging the value of knowledge obtained from diverse, nonacademic stakeholders in the community, government, and business. In addition, these approaches in child and youth studies offer us new possibilities for translating and understanding the local and global implications of implementing the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Child, and the vast differences in the experiences of childhood amongst and between various socioeconomic, cultural, and political contexts in recognizing their own rights in situ. Moving beyond adult-focused and Eurocentric understanding of the childhood literature (and of children’s human rights), this paper reflects our experiences working with young people affiliated with the Lalitpur Metropolitan City Child Clubs in Nepal, and observing their participatory planning processes for annual budgets. In response to increasing complexity throughout all regions of the world, we consider historical, political, and cultural experiences in Nepal through this transdisciplinary approach to child-centered research and activism. Our paper details key learning and transitions from being “academic researchers” and “observers” of a participatory, child- and youth-focused budgeting process to “collaborators” and “co-constructors of knowledge” with key stakeholders—the young people of Lalitpur, Nepal.     

Quasi‐Experimental Single‐Subject Design: Comparing Seeking Safety and Canine‐Assisted Therapy Interventions Among Mentally Ill Female Inmates

This repeated measures quasi‐experimental study evaluated the effectiveness of 2 interventions, Seeking Safety and canine‐assisted therapy, with female prisoners with trauma histories on a mental health unit. Results indicate both are effective at reducing anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress disorder.     

Exploring Gender in South-Asian Cultural Memory Through Artistic Process

Abstract

My artistic inquiries draw from gender and sexuality in public space and use performance as process. In inspiration, the works emerge as aesthetic responses to post-colonial, gendered public identities and as negotiations with the cultural politics of modernity. Dwelling on the interaction of Indian modernity with cultural memory through myth, ritual, traditions and colonial histories, I hope to touch upon multiple influences of the Indian public sphere. Through a fragmented contemplation on guiding impulses, this discussion propositions the production of works as potentials to re-eroticise the public sphere.     

READING HAUERWAS IN THE CORNBELT: The Demise of the American Dream and the Return of Liturgical Politics

In this paper I examine criticism of Hauerwas's critique of American democracy and liberalism, and of American violence and war, as sectarian and politically irrelevant. This twin account has the merit of engaging his critics from left and right. I show that his critique of American Christians, and their support of America's ways of promoting justice and freedom at home and in the world, has analogies with Foucault's genealogical project in France, and represents a more powerful critique of American imperialism and militarism, and of a compliant church, than efforts to sustain the purchase of rights talk or liberal justice in contemporary theological ethics.     

What the State Owes ‘Bastards’: A Modest Critique of Modest One-Child Policies

This essay criticises ‘modest’ one-child policies, which would impose sanctions upon parents who create multiple children. Specifically, this article considers what the state owes individuals who would be born (illegally) beneath restrictive procreative policies and argues that such policies would fail to show due respect to second- or third-born individuals created beneath them. First, I argue that modest procreative restrictions (like sanctions) are likely to generate only modest compliance. I then suggest it is reasonable to think a one-child policy fails to demonstrate due respect to existing second and third children. I argue that such a policy generates an undue burden on any second or third children who would be born beneath them, before concluding by considering whether the state might be able to avoid effectively reinscribing ‘bastardy’ into its law by locating responsibility for the effects of such a policy entirely on the parents, rather than on children.     

TWO CONCEPTIONS OF LIBERALISM: Theology,Creation, and Politics in the Thought of Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke1

Constitutional liberal practices are capable of being normatively grounded by a number of different metaphysical positions. Kant provides one such grounding, in terms of the autonomously derived moral law. I argue that the work of Edmund Burke provides a resource for an alternative construal of constitutional liberalism, compatible with, and illumined by, a broadly Thomistic natural law worldview. I contrast Burke's treatment of the relationship between truth and cognition, prudence and rights, with that of his contemporary, Kant. We find that in each case where Kant's system is constructed from the first principle of autonomy, Burke's thought is oriented toward an end that is not of our making. Readings of Burke as a natural law thinker are currently out of fashion among Burke commentators; without relying, for the main thesis, on historical claims about Burke's “Thomism,” I nonetheless explore and challenge some of the assumptions that underlie the current orthodoxy.     

GOD'S VELVETEEN RABBIT

This article lays out a central argument of Wolterstorff's book, which I call the Argument from Under-Respect . That argument, I contend, is central to Wolterstorff's thought about wrongs and human rights. Close attention to the argument raises questions about whether Wolterstorff's account of rights can explain what a theory of rights must include: why violating rights wrongs the rights-bearer.