Comments on Re-Imagining Accompaniment

It appears that the Re-Imagining Accompaniment event at Notre Dame this week was a huge success. Dr. Paul Farmer and Rev. Gustavo Gutierrez shared their insights about working with the poor, global health, and the role of theology in all of this work. The video should be posted on the Kellogg Institute website shortly for those who want to check it. But I wanted to share some points that I find particularly poignant.

First, Dr. Farmer made three key points that are all closely related to the goals of our blog:

(1) Real service to the poor involved understanding global poverty, and this requires multiple disciplines as well as listening to those most affected.

(2) Understanding poverty must be linked to efforts to end it

(3) As science and technology advance, our structural sin deepens; as effectiveness of medicine and science increases, our failure to use such interventions compounds the inequality/the gap/ the problem.

Gustavo Gutierrez made some interesting points about the nature of poverty. He first explained how liberation theology was born out of a conundrum in Latin America: how to say to the poor person “God loves you” when their experience is that they are neglected, forgotten, and have no rights.

For Gustavo, then, poverty is a human issue. It’s not just about economics. Of course, the economics is important. But economists and everyone working in development must realize that poverty also means to be socially insignificant, forgotten, and to not have rights. He also stated that without compassion, one cannot really be committed to these people. This goes for theorists and practitioners working in development.

Paul Farmer concluded his remarks with a critique of only using cost-benefit analysis in economic models. For him, there is a danger in reducing every problem to a question of “cost-effectiveness,” when we don’t really understand what is “cost” nor what is “effective.” This is where interdisciplinary work is critical, so that these issues can be understood best as possible.

In conclusion, it was a very nice conversation and really a wonderful and unique event, to have a theologian and a physician finding so much common ground in their seemingly unrelated work. Unfortunately, events such as this one are incredibly rare on university campuses across the country. Hopefully, students and teachers and researchers can continue these conversations and Re-Imagine Academia as we move forward.

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Re-imagining Accompaniment

Next week, the University of Notre Dame will host a public dialogue with Partners In Health founder Dr. Paul Farmer and Rev. Gustavo Gutierrez, the founder of liberation theology. This is truly a unique opportunity that brings together a physician who has accomplished pathbreaking work in global health, and a theologian whose innovative work in theology led to the notion of the “preferential option for the poor” in Catholic Social Teaching. What is amazing to me is that these two prominent figures in such seemingly unrelated fields can inspire each other and come together to have a truly fruitful dialogue.

This interdisciplinary discussion simply does not happen often enough, and its benefits cannot be overstated. And I must give deep credit to Notre Dame for creating an environment in which such a dialogue can occur – certainly there are not many other places where such a discussion could happen.

For those on campus, the dialogue will take place on Monday, October 24 at 7:00 pm in 101 Debartolo Hall. For those away, live streaming will be available here, and video uploaded within a couple weeks of the event. Also, expect reactions on this blog sometime next week.

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Render unto Caesar…

Sam Wells contributes once more to our picture of what a “Christian economics” would look like – this time with some excellent insights regarding taxation. While the entire passage is a worthwhile read, he concludes with four key points regarding taxation:

(1) Taxation is not in principle a monstrous extortion. It is the price we pay for society.

(2) Taxation is the entry ticket into a civilized politics – one based on compromise and the understanding that no one will ever get exactly what they want.

(3) Christians have another currency: mercy, forgiveness, and compassion. Maybe we’ve been using the denarius so long that we’ve forgotten that we have an alternative currency.

(4) If you’re obsessed with how much tax Caesar’s taking away from you, you’re giving Caesar too much power over you.

The point is that true freedom does not equal freedom from taxation. True freedom is a freedom to flourish as human beings in society. But importantly, this type of economic theorizing is an attempt to build another type of economics, one that takes into account ethics and values and envisions what type of economy we can build so that it might coincide with these values. For example, a Christian economy is not fundamentally based on “Caesar’s” or “Washington’s” currency. Drawing from Catholic Social Teaching, we can add that an economy that reflections a Christian ethics will be in the service of human beings, the members of society, rather than having the workers be in service to the economy or economic growth.

These are worthwhile considerations for those who wish to build a more just economy, as well as those involved with Occupy Wall St. who are frustrated with the current global economy. This type of theorizing is important to enable us to articulate clearly what alternative it is that we hope to build.

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Happy Columbus Day

[ht:cr] In honor of Columbus Day, here’s a great quotation from the explorer:

They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane…. They would make fine servants…. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.

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Occupy Wall St. Quiz

With increased media attention, everyone is offering up their opinions about the Occupy Wall St. movement. Find out who said what at the New York Times [ht:cr]

1. “I for one am increasingly concerned about the growing mobs occupying Wall Street and the other cities across the country.”

2. “I think it expresses the frustration the American people feel.”

3. “They blame, with some justification, the problems in the financial sector for getting us into this mess, and they’re dissatisfied with the policy response here in Washington. And at some level, I can’t blame them.”

4. “Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks, if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself!”

5. “We are the 1 percent.”

6. “God bless them for their spontaneity. It’s young, it’s spontaneous, it’s focused and it’s going to be effective.”

7. “This is like the Tea Party — only it’s real. By the time this is over, it will make the Tea Party look like … a tea party.”

8. “I think it’s dangerous, this class warfare.”

9. “What they’re trying to do is take away the jobs of people working in the city, take away the tax base that we have.”

10. “I’m very, very understanding of where they’re coming from.”

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Service to Society

Universities face a real dilemma with regards to their mission in the world. Most research universities proclaim in a mission statement that they strive to use knowledge in the service of society. However, the academic structures and reward systems currently in place largely dismiss interdisciplinary, real-world relevant research projects – exactly the type of research necessary for the betterment of society. This is all too true in economics, where “policy relevance” seems to be used synonymously for “easy” and “uninteresting.”  But academics in other disciplines as well are taking a real risk with their career when they spend too much time working on interdisciplinary and policy-relevant work.

It’s no secret that academics from various disciplines struggle to collaborate on projects. This is often correctly attributed to that fact that academia has become so specialized, that people working in different fields do not have a common language with which they can communicate. Even within one department, the labor economists may very well have little idea what the growth theorists are up to. But there is another factor at work, and that is the lack of credit and prestige that comes from working on such projects. Specialized academics gain little in the way of reputation and useful citations when publishing this sort of interesting, interdisciplinary work, and so there is little incentive for them to try to learn another discipline’s language even if they might want to do so.

The next time I hear a university Provost speak, I  want to ask them how their university is dealing with an academic structure that impedes creative and  collaborative research done in the service of society. In addition, this highlights once again the importance for both students and faculty to play a meaningful role in the decision making process of the university, which has been increasingly relinquished to the Board of Trustees and the business side of private American universities. Reclaiming that power would go a long way towards shifting the American university back to its role as an institution of service to society.

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The Food & Drink Issue

The New York Times Magazine “Food & Drink Issue” has arrived! [ht:av].

The entire magazine is dedicated to food (even the travel section!). It features many interesting sections, such a Food Policy section that deals with eating sustainable fish (try Bristol Bay Alaskan Salmon), prospects for eating algae, and the adequateness of food stamps. Michael Pollan answers reader’s questions, and in doing so gives his thoughtful views on food innovations, the role of government, and how to create a healthy and sustainable food economy.

Importantly, this issue of the magazine grapples with the ethical, philosophical, technological, economic, political, and cultural aspects of food production and consumption. Only through this type of conversation will our society succeed in building a healthy, sustainable, and just food system.

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From The Guardian:

We might do well to consider the collapse of the European colonial empires. It certainly did not lead to the rich successfully grabbing all the cookies, but to the creation of the modern welfare state. We don’t know precisely what will come out of this round. But if the occupiers finally manage to break the 30-year stranglehold that has been placed on the human imagination, as in those first weeks after September 2008, everything will once again be on the table – and the occupiers of Wall Street and other cities around the US will have done us the greatest favour anyone possibly can.

This movement is, above all, a call for a renewed imagination that another world is possible. People are frustrated and bewildered with the world that we have created, and The Left has thus far been unable to mobilize an effective response.

If interested, you can find an “Occupy Wall St.” solidarity event near you [ht:cr]

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