The Handmaid’s Tale as a Call to Compassion

June 20, 2017 By Jeannine Pitas

The Hulu television series The Handmaid’s Tale, based on Canadian writer Margaret Atwood’s famous dystopian novel, has made quite a splash this spring. I am one of many who hopped on the bandwagon, buying the book last April (which was so suspenseful that I couldn’t stop myself from dropping everything to read it in one day) and then borrowing a friend’s Hulu account to binge-watch the series. Both the book and TV series are set in a dystopian, near-future reality where, after a brutal muclear war that is still going on, the United States of America has been replaced by a totalitarian, fundamentalist Christian nation called Gilead.

Due to extreme environmental degradation, the vast majority of the North American population has been rendered unable to conceive and bear children. As a result, the new government has rounded up women who are known to be fertile to serve as ¨handmaids¨ in the homes of the ruling class. Their role is to be raped once a month by the ¨Commander¨ of their household in the presence of his wife, with the hope of conceiving and bearing a child which the wife will then raise. In this world, all women are forbidden to read and write; public executions of both men and women are the norm; and, from the looks of it, nearly all the people – including those at the top of the social pyramid – are profoundly unhappy.

There is a lot to be said about both the book (which has indeed made its way into the canon of twentieth century literature) and the TV series (which has been produced with Atwood’s input and adds several details and subplots to the book). For me, however, the most moving moment occurs in the final episode. Moira, an old friend of the main character, has been forced to work in an illicit, black market brothel for the powerful men of Gilead.

When the main character is taken there by her Commander and encounters her friend, she is dismayed to see that Moira – once an extremely spunky woman who tried to resist the regime – has grown weary and resigned herself to her plight. However, seeing her friend helps her find the will to resist again. She manages to escape the brothel after killing a client, dressing up in his clothes and stealing his car. She drives north to Canada and ultimately finds her way to Toronto, where she is taken in by a refugee settlement office, offered food, shelter and money, and assigned a permanent caseworker.

The look on Moira’s face in that moment is, for me, the most poignant part of the whole series. After several years of abuse and total bondage, she experiences freedom, compassion, and humane treatment. We see her shock, her trauma, her confusion, and a faint glimmer of hope.

Perhaps the expression on the face of Samira Wiley, the actor playing Moira, resonated with me so much because I have seen it before – not the exact face, but others like it. I saw it on the face of Amir, an Iraqi refugee I befriended while living in Toronto who finally made it to Canada after living through countless wars (including eight years in Syria). I saw it in the face of Meshal, one of the Saudi Arabian students I currently teach in Dubuque, IA. A religious minority in his country, he has faced much persecution while also being affected by the violence of its ongoing war in Yemen. I also have seen it in the faces of more than one young Guatemalan I’ve volunteered as a legal interpreter for in my home community.

For a long time, the word ¨refugee¨ conjured in my mind vague images of masses of people fleeing their homelands on boats or in trucks. It was hard to see them as more than statistics, to understand that each and every one of them is a unique individual with her or his own joys, sorrows, and dreams. Atwood’s novel and the Hulu adaptation of it serve as stark reminders that a day may come when the United States of America becomes a site of war and extreme oppression, when we complacent Americans join the millions who are forced to flee. In this way, the story urges us to increase our own capacity for empathy, to place ourselves in the shoes of the many people who are escaping situations all-too-similar to the one portrayed in Atwood’s Gilead.

Today, June 20, has been designated by the United Nations as World Refugee Day. According to the UN, a refugee can be defined as someone who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war, or violence. A refugee has a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. Most likely, they cannot return home or are afraid to do so. War and ethnic, tribal and religious violence are leading causes of refugees fleeing their countries.

On this day, we are asked to remember our brothers and sisters who have been forced to flee their homes, to welcome them into our communities, and to stand in solidarity with them. As much as we may want to think that we can control our lives and destinies, The Handmaid’s Tale serves as a bitter reminder of how fragile our social structures really are and how quickly our circumstances can change. It is possible that one day we, too, may lose everything we hold dear, that we may be forced to flee, that our very survival may depend on the kindness of strangers, that we too are the poor.

If you are interested in learning more about what you can do to help refugees, please consider supporting the following organizations. Many of them can be followed on social media; you can also sign up online to receive legislative action alerts:

UNHCR

http://www.unhcr.org/

Church World Service

https://cwsglobal.org/

Refugee Council USA

http://www.rcusa.org/

Jesuit Refugee Service

http://en.jrs.net/index

US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants

http://refugees.org/

Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services

http://lirs.org/

Good News, Everyone!

June 11, 2017 By voxnovablog

Vox Nova is pleased to present the following guest post by Ben Johnson.

When I joined the Catholic Worker movement it was very easy to believe initially that my task was to aid people in finding the stability offered by the governmental and economic systems we currently have. Find a job. Get a car. Get an apartment. These are the things that many expect the Catholic Workers to be encouraging our guests to acquire.

I have found in my time here, that this goal is entirely misplaced. For one, Catholic Workers have solid criticisms of the current economic/governmental system; so, it would seem odd to try to fit more people into it. The Aims and Means of the Catholic Worker mention nothing about helping others find economic stability under our current structure. Also, the last thing we want others to believe is that their value lies in how useful they are to that structure. That view has blinded its believers to the world inhabited by those in poverty. In this world, to those who have the eyes to see it, we find that what the wealthy consider charity, the impoverished consider normal everyday caring for others.

There is so much talk about “poverty culture” including the violence, the scarcity, the drug abuse, and the danger. Those aspects do exist and should be given careful honest attention; however, we do not see the other side of this culture. Within it, many are acting as conflict mediators. Many are giving food to and protecting others. Also, it is a very normal thing in this world to offer your home to a friend (or even a person with whom you are only somewhat familiar) for an indefinite length of time.

Every time I have seen these acts of loving kindness play out, I believe I have seen the world Dorothy and Peter saw. It is the world they hoped to make easier to see through the Catholic Worker movement. It is the world promised us by Jesus. It truly is the kingdom of God.

In my time at Hope House, a Catholic Worker house in Dubuque, I have made many friends. I have seen my friends go to extraordinary lengths to help each other. It seems to be an unwritten expectation amongst these friends that if you have a place, and someone gets thrown out on the street, you offer them your home. It doesn’t matter that this act is illegal to do if one receives government assistance, nor does it matter how small the space may be. In one instance I watched a friend, without a second thought, offer to house a three person family (along with another buddy who had already been staying there) in his one-bedroom apartment. In another instance, my friend offered his home to so many people that he ended up spending most of his time at his mother’s.

In addition to offering support through housing, I have seen people show each other basic human respect. This is not something that happens all the time when you have less worldly wealth. Since wealth is perceived as an indication of power, those with less of it are generally shown less respect. So, there is a fulfilled need in which a person is respected without the prerequisite of power. I have seen a table of people stand up and tell one of the workers, here at Hope House, not to kick out a young woman who was being disruptive. These are the friendships we can rely on. These friends will show respect and stick up for each other when no one else will. This is the loving kindness which is the primary motivating factor in the kingdom of God.

It should be no surprise that those who have acquired less wealth have arrived at the kingdom first. This is how Jesus said it would be.

“Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you.” (Matthew 21:31)

“Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” (Matthew 19:24)

Wealth blinds us. When we have it we can pretend to have power over other people and over nature itself. In so pretending, we believe the farce and forget the truth of the situation we are in. We do not have the power to transcend nature and no human being has ultimate power over another. Wealth covers up the kingdom of God and replaces it with the idea that the works of humanity will bring control, stability, and ultimately salvation.

We do not need to build the “new society within the shell of the old”. We need to recognize it and encourage its growth. So, rather than “show people the way” I have found that I must learn the ways of those with less. When we have less, we are better at sharing, we are better at helping, and through this we become better at loving. The experience of this love opens our eyes to the truth that the kingdom of God is already among us… and has always been.

A native of Minneapolis, MN, Ben Johnson currently lives and works at Hope House, a catholic worker house of hospitality in Dubuque, IA.

A Bomb Is Not a Mother

May 14, 2017 By Julia Smucker

Pope Francis has a penchant for using maternal imagery in reference to the Church, and true to his gift for holding up the beauties of the Church’s tradition to let them speak for themselves, he does so in ways that transcend any pietistic stereotypes. Recently, he used this type of language to turn the language of military hard power on its head. We may be accustomed to the stock phrase “mother of all X” to convey magnitude, but the pope’s simple statement pointed out that the use of such a phrase for a deadly weapon is deeply ironic to the point of obscenity.

“A mother gives life and this one gives death, and we call this device a mother. What is happening?”

The history of Mother’s Day, particularly in the US, makes his point all the more fitting. Before it was a Hallmark holiday, it was a reaction to the horrors of war, as felt especially keenly by women. This is most clearly expressed in Julia Ward Howe’s “Mother’s Day Proclamation,” or as she titled it, “Appeal to womanhood throughout the world,” which reads in part:

Again, in the sight of the Christian world, have the skill and power of two great nations exhausted themselves in mutual murder. Again have the sacred questions of international justice been committed to the fatal mediation of military weapons. In this day of progress, in this century of light, the ambition of rulers has been allowed to barter the dear interests of domestic life for the bloody exchanges of the battle field. Thus men have done. Thus men will do. But women need no longer be made a party to proceedings which fill the globe with grief and horror. Despite the assumptions of physical force, the mother has a sacred and commanding word to say to the sons who owe their life to her suffering. That word should now be heard, and answered to as never before.

Arise, then, Christian women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly: We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country, to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.

The changed nature of how wars are now fought can make Howe’s approach seem somewhat antiquated, but in a way that highlights how some of those changes have obscured the true human costs. Her language can make one almost nostalgic for a time when wars had clear beginnings and ends, and enemy combatants were inescapably visible and inescapably human. Nostalgic, when a bomb called “Mother” now brings death from a distance, without anybody having to see the people she killed.

But what really makes Howe sound antiquated is her gender-based appeal, now that daughters and wives and, yes, mothers are routinely trained to injure and kill alongside sons and husbands and fathers. It’s jolting to be reminded of a time when women being left to bear the emotional toll of war from the home front was simply taken for granted. But perhaps the particular moral authority Howe derives from this experience, as a woman and even as a feminist, can jolt us out of the assumption that it has only been a positive advance for women that we too are now trained to unlearn our human sensitivities to the depth and breadth of suffering caused by violence.

It’s no wonder that Pope Francis, with his calls for a “revolution of tenderness” and his signature emphasis on mercy, would hold the name of “Mother” so dearly as a favored image for the Church – nor that he would not miss the perverse irony of bestowing the same name on an inanimate bearer of destruction.

We are the body of the risen Christ

April 29, 2017 By Jeannine Pitas

During last week’s Masses we heard the story of the apostle Thomas, whom we might recall as an early religious skeptic. When the other apostles joyfully inform him that they have seen the risen Jesus, he shakes his head, obstinately affirming that until he can touch Jesus’ wounds, he will not believe. When Jesus reappears, he grants Thomas his wish, but nevertheless responds with a certain amount of reproach: ¨Because you have seen Me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have believed¨ (John 20:29).

Since that time, many have echoed that reproach, seeing Thomas as lacking a deep faith. Others, however, have defended him. His doubt is based on a deep desire to know the truth. The testimonies of others, even his closest friends, are not enough for him. He needs to experience reality for himself, to place his fingers in Jesus’ hands and side. Thomas, in his stubborn insistence on empiricism, sets the stage for what would become central to Catholic Christian dogma: that we should be led to God not by faith, but by reason as well.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, faith is a constant struggle for me, and it is often clashes with reason. One reason for this conflict may have to do with the social environment I inhabit. As Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has astutely observed, those of us who live in those countries usually termed ¨The West¨ now live in a ¨secular age,¨ whose genesis he discusses in a nearly thousand-page tome of the same title. In the book (which is beautifully written and definitely worth reading), Taylor seeks to answer a question: why is it that in the year 1500, it was virtually impossible for most Europeans not to believe in God in Western societies, while in 2000 there are many options for belief, with unbelief often forming the default? What exactly happened in those five hundred years? The answer is complicated, by Taylor locates much of it in the growing tendency toward individualism which began with the Protestant Reformation and has intensified ever since, culminating in a postmodern era where the very concept of truth is itself often called into question.

We now live in an age where, across many countries, religious belief and practice appear to be in decline. ¨None¨ is the fastest-growing religious affiliation in the US; in most churches I visit, people in my age group (20s and 30s) are a marked minority. However, we are also secular in the sense that for most of us, religion is a private rather than a public matter. Outdoor religious processions, common in places like Nicaragua, are rare in the US and Canada. If you meet someone at a cocktail party, it is considered perfectly normal to ask them about their method of earning an income (perhaps as a way of gauging their social status) but not to ask them about their religious beliefs (considered too personal, too private to disclose to a stranger).

With this reality in mind, I am constantly asking myself how we who still identify as believers in God, should respond to the complex, rapidly changing world. After all, taken at the literal level, we believe in some pretty wacky things. That a man could die and miraculously rise from the dead…that his incarnate body is present in the host we consume at Mass…that he will return at the end of time to judge the living and the dead…it’s a pretty strange belief system.

I’ve read some atheists who predict that advanced in technology – which could drastically prolong human life and improve human health – will make the miracles that lie at the basis of many religions irrelevant. Meanwhile, others question the lack of fulfillment of Jesus’ promise. He told his disciples that he would be returning soon. Two thousand years have gone by, and he still hasn’t shown up.

Or has he? Indeed, during these two thousand years, many people have come forward claiming to be the returned Christ. Some of them were burned as witches; today, most of them are be quickly shuttled to the psychiatric ward and injected with a heavy dose of Risperidone. Could it be that Christ has actually come into the world many times, only to be persecuted or dismissed as he was when he first preached his good news in Galilee two thousand years ago? Could it be that, again and again, he has been condemned for his beliefs, labeled a dangerous revolutionary and executed by the state? I sometimes think so.

On Good Friday I had the opportunity to participate in an outdoor Way of the Cross in my hometown. Written by local members of the Catholic Worker movement, the stations involved stops at various sites of oppression and injustice: a gun shop, where we prayed for those affected by gun violence; a pornography shop, where we remembered all those degraded by the sex industry, including victims of human trafficking; the railroad tracks, where we recalled ecological degradation, particularly in the form of fracking. However, we also stopped at sites of mercy and justice: a crisis pregnancy center, where women facing unplanned pregnancies are given resources to prepare for their future; a parish rectory where undocumented migrants receive legal aid, and the local Catholic Worker house, where food, fellowship and shelter are offered to those who need it most.

At the end of the Stations, I truly felt that, like Thomas, I had put my hands in Jesus’ wounds. The Crucifixion seemed not like a distant event many years ago, but an ongoing reality that continues to this day. However, the Resurrection seemed just as real, embodied in those fighting for the dignity of all life and the stewardship of the earth. And perhaps this is why, when I completed the Triduum journey on Easter Sunday, the presence of the risen Jesus seemed truly real. Even now, in this era of mass extinctions, constant war, and widespread hatred. Especially now.

The Paschal Mystery is just that: a conundrum beyond our understanding. There is so much we cannot grasp. We cannot know with certainty when Christ will return, or how we will recognize him, or (as I would argue) if he has indeed returned many times, without us recognizing him. However, there is a lot that we can indeed understand. In many ways, the message of Jesus is quite simple. We are called to work for justice, to love one another, to show mercy. In an atomized world where loneliness is rampant, the Eucharist reminds us that we are indeed profoundly united. And though we wait for a future coming in glory, for now, our role in the world is clear. We ourselves are the body of Christ. For me, this is truly a reason for Easter rejoicing.

Take Heart, It’s Worse Than You Think

April 25, 2017 By Julia Smucker

Following last November’s election, I wrote a piece at Christian Democracy in which I tried to step back and look at the U.S. political situation in a global context.

An excerpt:

To try to retrace the steps of these phenomena, in admittedly broad strokes: a noticeable number of opportunistic individuals are being propelled to power by sociopolitical groundswells of what would have previously been seen as fringe movements. Behind the mainstreaming of these movements are widespread indignities felt by increasing numbers of people suffering from the negative effects of globalization and technocracy, such as the displacement of many industrial jobs by increased automation and international trade policies that have gravely hurt the western working classes (not to mention people working for unjust wages under unsafe conditions on the other end of the outsourcing, who remain largely unheard and unseen except when those unsafe conditions result in disaster). This strain is exacerbated by desperate waves of refugees seeking entry faster than their would-be host countries can hope to accommodate them, who themselves are fleeing unlivable situations caused by terrorism and civil wars, gang wars, and drug wars.

It’s hard to draw straight lines among all these bleak factors, and this still isn’t to get to the root of the thing: aside from having only scratched the surface of the complicated ramifications of globalization, there is plenty of room to step back further, looking for the causes of the violence driving people in droves to risk their lives to reach places where they are likely to be made unwelcome, and on and on. And this may be getting to the point where I can’t even make the simplest attempt at an answer. But one thing seems clear to me on a systemic scale: something has been happening far too rapidly and unrestrainedly and is leaving more and more people behind, with devastating effect.

Since I wrote these words, I’ve continued to give a good deal of thought to the multifaceted global phenomenon I had faintly begun to grasp in the process of connecting a few of those dots, trying to bring a bigger picture into focus. I even did eventually try to draw some straight lines among them, adding more as I saw them, which thus far has come out looking something like this:

Now, I thought, I really get what Pope Francis meant when he wrote in chapter three of Laudato Si about what he called “the technocratic paradigm.” This is the beast that emerges when the dots are connected: an idol of “infinite or unlimited growth” (LS 106), of “progress” with no moral compass, but with power as its driving motive; a breezily narcissistic faith in our own mastery over everything, in the power of human innovation to save us from the very problems it has created. This is the beast, the Pandora’s box containing so many modern ills and evils, and I suddenly started seeing it everywhere.

I thought of a conversation from a few years back, in which someone mentioned “substance abuse” as a candidate for the most pressing social problem. I wasn’t too convinced, thinking it sounded more like a surface level problem overlying the myriad voids people try to fill. And in many ways I suspect it is exactly that, but as I noticed news story after news story after news story of far-reaching drug-related crises in the U.S. and elsewhere all connected to multiple other crises, I began to wonder if that was a more central factor than I ever would have guessed.

I thought of a recent NPR story in which a coal miner dying of black lung said through labored breaths that he would do everything over again if it meant being able to provide for his family to the extent that he has. I was struck by the morbid irony that for people in his situation, their very livelihood is literally killing them. And they have willingly paid such a steep cost for the dignity of providing that livelihood, a profound human need and a theme of Catholic Social Teaching going back to Rerum Novarum.

One could mention any number of such things, all of which feed into the grotesque dichotomy that’s been playing out repeatedly on international political stages, between a globalized technocratic elitism that condescendingly dismisses those who have been most badly hurt by its economic and technological dogmas, and a series of populist nationalisms that have brought the ugly evils of racism and xenophobia into the sociopolitical mainstream through fear and anger. True to the nature of dichotomies, these things are usually presented in a way that pushes everyone to take a side. Even where this effect is unintended, it always makes me profoundly uncomfortable, since I find them both so abhorrent that to align with either is unthinkable.

One might take a perverse comfort in observing that it’s not just U.S. politics being poisoned by this polemic. For that matter, it’s not even just politics. There’s a perhaps undefinable global problem going on here that’s bigger than Donald Trump, bigger than Marine Le Pen, bigger than Rodrigo Duterte, bigger than Alexander Gauland or whoever else may yet surge to notoriety. For all their capacity to inspire equal measures of messianic hope and apocalyptic fear, none of these individuals, nor even all of them combined, is the source of the problem; that would be giving them far more credit than they deserve. They are merely opportunists riding waves of popular sentiment to their own advantage. The good news is that we may have less to fear than we think from any such professional provocateurs. The bad news is that we may have a lot more to fear from the broader situation they’re exploiting.

Unless, that is, we can find some alternative to a world of unbridled growth and “delusions of grandeur” (LS 114) or one of fear-driven retreat into insularity and vigilantism – both of which at best ignore, or at worst are openly hostile to, the needs of the most vulnerable.

The American Empire and Personal Christian Responsibility

April 20, 2017 By voxnovablog

Vox Nova is pleased to share the following guest post by Tom Johnson, a Catholic Worker from Dubuque, Iowa, USA.

I have been torn during this presidential election year. As a Catholic Worker, I agree in principle with the movement’s aims and means that the vast size of the U.S. Federal Government makes it “government by nobody”ⁱ and, its function as “an effective political forum for redressing grievances, next to impossible.”ⁱⁱ

Then came Bernie Sanders, whose message of economic equality and revolution promised what sounded a lot like Peter Maurin’s “new society within the shell of the old.”^ⁱⁱⁱ I felt “the Bern” and became involved.

The presidential campaign system, however, already biased toward the Establishment of the wealthy and seasoned with dirty tricks, rendered its foregone conclusion. I was swayed by the advice that “voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for evil.” I therefore could not bring myself to vote for either of the candidates, whose policies, to me seemed equally evil.

“But,” I have asked myself more than once, “where can I run from such evil? Where or what is that system which allows principled, compassionate government? Is holding to my principles an excuse for doing nothing?”^{^iv} Is it possible for a radical Christian, a Catholic Worker, to live morally, responsibly, and effectively within the current society? What spiritual attitudes and behaviors are required?

“The Aims and Means of the Catholic Worker”^{^v} advises the adoption of nonviolence, practicing the works of mercy; doing manual labor; and voluntary poverty. Regarding nonviolent sociopolitical action, it advises:

Jesus taught us to take suffering upon ourselves rather than inflict it upon others, and He calls us to fight against violence with the spiritual weapons of prayer, fasting and noncooperation with evil. Refusal to pay taxes for war, to register for conscription, to comply with any unjust legislation; participation in nonviolent strikes and boycotts, protests or vigils; withdrawal of support for dominant systems, corporate funding or usurious practices are all excellent means to establish peace.^{^vi}

I would further recommend – particularly for those who are upset by the current administration of the Empire – the practice of contemplation, a mystical form of prayer slightly distinct from meditation. Contemplation, or Centering Prayer, which leads one away from what Alan Watts describes as our artificial “system of words and symbols”^{^vii} to what is real, the world as it actually exists. In other words, we stop looking at our human-made map and regard the scenery, the world as it is.

Contemplation allows us to “Be still and know that I am God!”^{^viii}; that God is ultimately responsible and capable, not me or any other human being or system. It reminds us:

For just as from the heavens
the rain and snow come down

And do not return there
till they have watered the earth,
making it fertile and fruitful,

Giving seed to those who sow
and bread to those who eat,

So shall my word be
that goes forth from my mouth;

It shall not return to me void,
but shall do my will,
achieving the end for which I sent it.^{^ix}

It helps me to realize that God’s creative work, although yet unfulfilled, is nevertheless evolving toward wholeness, and with my/our cooperation, God’s reign of justice will indeed prevail.

When I act politically with the confidence that God’s justice will indeed be accomplished someday, I can choose more calmly and proactively, per principle rather than expedient or knee-jerk reactions.

Strangers and sojourners though we may be as we make our life’s journey as subjects of the American Empire, we may travel in the certainty that God will lead us to the Promised Land of justice.

The Aims and Means of the Catholic Worker, http://www.catholicworker.org/cw-aims-and-means.html.

Ibid.

iii

Maurin, Peter; “Easy Essays”; http://www.catholicworker.org/petermaurin/easy-essays.html

The Communitarian Movement

aims to create

a new society

within the shell of the old

with the philosophy of the new

which is not

a new philosophy

but a very old philosophy,

a philosophy so old

that it looks like new.

Alinsky, Saul; Rules for Radicals (Vintage Books, 1989) p. 25.

Op. cit.

Ibid.

vii

Watts, Alan, Meditation, (Millbrae, CA; 1974) p. 5.

viii

Psalm 46.10.

Isaiah 55:10-11.

On Receiving the Works of Mercy in the Southernmost Capitals of the Americas

March 21, 2017 By Jeannine Pitas

I smiled with excitement as the plane landed on the runway and taxied toward the gate. It was March break (which as a teacher I anticipate just as eagerly as my students do), and I was looking forward to ten days in two cities I love: Buenos Aires, Argentina, where I was to present at my first academic conference in three years, and Montevideo, Uruguay, where I to participate in the presentation of a dear friend’s poetry book, which I’d edited and translated into English. After living and working in Uruguay for nine months in 2006 and returning for an extensive visit in 2013, I was excited to reconnect with old friends in a place that still feels like home

After getting through the Argentine passport control and picking up my bag, I used my bank card to purchase a bus ticket from the airport into the city Buenos Aires. The conference was scheduled to take place downtown at the Marriott Plaza Hotel, located along the famous Florida Street, a pedestrian walkway lined with shops. My bus ticket included a taxi that took me right to the hotel’s door, where I marveled at its elegance and luxury. I began talking with the other conference participants, most of them Spanish professors at various North American universities. That night we enjoyed a welcome banquet which featured live tango dance and music. It was truly a lovely beginning to what promised to be a great conference. (more…)

To Resist or Rise Above?

February 20, 2017 By Julia Smucker

I find myself in a disorienting dilemma.

Everything about Donald Trump repels me – to the point that, quite frankly, I can’t even bring myself to legitimize his presidency by referring to him by the title, a feeling reinforced every time a bratty, self-absorbed tweet is reported as news. During his improbable campaign, I vacillated between a certain level of understanding of the gamble some were willing to take on him and utter incredulity at how so many could be so easily played. Given his manifest narcissism that has only become more blatantly manifest since taking office, the incredulity is winning. I am increasingly baffled that anyone can believe this man genuinely cares about anyone beyond himself.

And yet. For all that moral and visceral repugnancy, I cannot join wholesale with the “opposition” coming from the left, which has been jumbling grievances together with a haphazardness that almost seems to mimic Trump’s own chaotic style. (more…)

Brains, Bodies, Borders, Biases and the Circle of Holy Belonging

February 5, 2017 By voxnovablog

Vox Nova is pleased to publish the following guest post by Rhonda Miska.

“Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls, to arrive at its destination full of hope.”

rhonda-4 — Rhonda Miska at the Healing Our Borders Vigil. Photo credit: Sister Lucy Nigh, SSND

This was the refrain repeated over and over as I stood in a prayer circle of about thirty interfaith activists, a few steps from the border checkpoint between Douglas, AZ and Agua Prieta, Sonora. Every Tuesday evening, local activists and visitors to the border gather for a “Healing Our Borders” Vigil to pray and remember those who have died making the journey north. We processed down the street towards the border checkpoint, calling out the names of some of the estimated 6,000 migrants who have died along the nearly 2000-mile US/Mexico border. For those whose bodies were decomposed when they were discovered in the desert – we simply announced no identificado or no identificada. We held up white crosses and named them present – presente – proclaiming their lives as dignified and their deaths as worthy of commemoration. Like John the Baptist, that marginal voice in the wilderness we had heard about in the week’s Gospel readings, we were seeking to speak truth.

Our prayerful remembrance of these migrant deaths happened as day turned to dusk, the crescent moon rose, and streetlamps with their fluorescent glow clicked on. Back home, I knew my Sinsinawa Dominican Sisters – along with all those who follow the monastic rhythm of liturgical prayer – were gathered for vespers, which closes with a supplication for “a restful night and a peaceful death.” My heart carried lament for deaths from hyperthermia and dehydration under the relentless desert sun, deaths not marked by the comfort of anointing oil, words of final blessing, or the ease of a deathbed attended by loved ones. (more…)

Quote of the day

January 30, 2017 By Matt Talbot

For all the talk about ‘populism’, what really imbues this White House is nationalism. But not just nationalism in a general sense which can have positive, communitarian aspects. It is a hateful and aggressive nationalism based on zero-sum relationships and a thirst for domination and violence. These are dangerous people.

-Josh Marshall