Category: Blog

This piece originally appeared at Sojourners on October 14, 2013.

I watched 12 Years a Slave today. The film is based on Solomon Northup’s autobiography by that name. Northrup was a free black man living in Saratoga, N.Y. He was lured away from his home to Washington, D. C., on the promise of lucrative work and was kidnapped, transported to Louisiana, and sold into slavery. He was rescued 12 years later.

Some of the questions and issues that the movie raises are: What right do people have to own others? Do money and might make right? Unjust laws — such as slave laws — exist. It just goes to show that something can be legal, yet morally wrong. Still, laws come and go. We must not confuse laws with rights, which are universal and enduring truths that do not change. What is true and right and good is always so. So, too, that which is evil is always evil. Even if unjust laws are overturned and abolished, evil can still return in other guises.

I asked myself as I watched the movie, “Could it happen again?” Some of us may think, “Surely, something like this could never happen in our day.” And yet, people are abducted and sold into various forms of slavery here and abroad on a daily basis. Granted — people are not publicly bought and sold on the slave block in America today because of skin color; however, people are enslaved based on race and class divisions.

I hear that redlining still exists, though cloaked in banking and business subtleties. I see that Jim Crow laws may be returning in many places, now that the Supreme Court has given states the right to oversee their own voting procedures. It is incumbent on us to call on Congress to act upon the Supreme Court’s ruling to put forth a contemporary formula for Section 4 “preclearance” so as to guard against the erosion of voting rights for minorities. The various costs involved in obtaining such things as identification cards for voting makes it difficult for many minorities as well as the young and old to exercise their fundamental democratic right to vote.

What if those of us who experience privileges that money can buy lose our privileges based on the loss of money? What if the laws change and those who are free and those who own or oppress other people lose their liberty and become slaves, as the film 12 Years a Slave suggests? Most likely, Solomon Northrup hadn’t thought it could happen to him. His slave owner thought it would never happen to him.

What about you and me? What would those of us who are free do differently if we knew the fate of those enslaved in various ways through poverty and economic exploitation or through injustices in the criminal justice system could be our own? Would we seek to free them? Would we seek to change the laws to ensure that laws reflect everyone’s fundamental rights? Would we seek to transform a criminal justice system that imprisons an inordinate percentage of African-American men, far beyond their numbers in the society at large? The prison system is a booming business in many spheres. What can we do to make sure it is not a modern-day slave block?

By becoming vigilant and making sure that such sectors as the government, the market (such as Wall Street, which was once built on the back of the cotton industry), criminal justice, and the educational system cultivate comprehensive reforms for equity so that people no matter their skin color get ahead and never fall back into slavery.

Only as we fight for political, judicial, economic, and educational freedom for all can each of us remain free. As 12 Years a Slave makes clear, something spiritual dies eternally in each of us as we fail to resist evil rather than support those in need. What is needed today, just as in the time of Northrup, is to experience again the better angels of our nature’s touch as we embrace justice, not just for some, but for all.

This piece is cross-posted at Patheos and The Christian Post. Comments made here are not monitored. To join the conversation, please comment on this post at Patheos.

How in the world did Marissa Alexander get sentenced to twenty years in prison for firing a gun in the air in self-defense against her husband whom she claimed violently attacked her and threatened to kill her? She didn’t even hurt him, and yet she ended up getting severely hurt by the whole ordeal.

How did Eve get blamed for everything in the garden of Eden in many circles for much of church history, when she wasn’t the only one eating forbidden fruit?

Is there a connection between the two stories? Why is it that both women have born unduly the burden of proof?

I am glad that a Florida appellate court ruled recently that the jury instructions in Marissa Alexander’s case were unfair: they made Alexander “prove ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ that she was acting in self-defense…” Many have protested that the Florida courts are unfair in how they apply the Stand Your Ground law in view of the recent decision that awarded George Zimmerman a not-guilty verdict in the slaying of Trayvon Martin. While the law and handling of it have faced increasing scrutiny, what needs to face even more scrutiny is how women so often bear the burden of proof in various legal defenses over self-defense and rape, for example.

What is often forgotten regarding the biblical account is that Genesis 3:16’s verdict on Eve’s judgment is post-fall: “To the woman” God said, “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”

Regardless of whether or not one believes male headship is a creation reality, the husband’s rule over his wife is not something that God applauds; rather, such rule is the consequence of their fallen state as man and woman. Given what transpires as a result of Genesis 3:15, where Eve’s seed (namely, the Christ) will crush the head of the serpent who strikes his heel for taking the burden for sin and its consequences, a new order has been established in and through Christ’s church and in the world. Christ bears the burden of proof, not woman.

What bearing might Christ’s own trial and atoning work have on women’s undue burden in many court hearings to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they are innocent? What bearing might Christ’s trial and atoning work have on proceedings, when the men whom they claim are guilty are only convicted—if they ever are—when the women first experience the conviction of shame in such cases as rape? At least in the Genesis account, the serpent and the man also experience outright shame and blame.

This piece is cross-posted at Patheos and The Christian Post. Comments made here are not monitored. To join the conversation, please comment on this post at Patheos.

When it comes to justice issues, activists, theorists and policy makers living in the moment often charge where angels fear to tread and newcomers to the issues waffle in confusion. The newbies like myself can easily feel like they are drowning in the depths of the complexities surrounding the issues in question. What should they (we) do? Wait for handouts, where the experts on the issues give them basic meat and potato food for thought?

Newbies should be humble enough to ask questions about what they don’t know rather than erroneously claim that they have it all figured out or refuse to ask open questions because they don’t want to be humbled. They will only further injustice. What is really detrimental is when people engaged in justice concerns come across acting as if they know when they don’t know rationally or experientially.

Newbies should also learn to think through where they have gaps in thinking and experience about the justice issues before them, and why. Identifying blind spots is very helpful. Still, so often those of us who are newbies don’t even know enough to ask questions. So, there may be times when we need to ask people in the know to let us know what they think we don’t know and why: the answers to the why question might possibly arise from the community in which one has been inculcated: perhaps that community has not addressed the issues at hand, or has been involved with advancing directly or indirectly the injustices that gave rise to the justice concern in the first place.

Lastly, it is important to do research. Rather than expecting others to do the work for them, newbies to justice issues should ask people more knowledgeable about a pressing justice issue for resources that they would recommend. They should also listen to different perspectives so as not to be driven by ideology, but rather by goals geared toward comprehensive education and reform on the subject at hand. Those doing research should not simply ask for information but also perspectives based on people’s experiences. All our talk of objectivity on matters of justice research often clouds our insecurities and veiled forms of subjectivity that betray how insulated we really are. Perhaps nowhere has this problem been more acute than among white men like me, who often put on airs that we have it together and don’t need anyone’s help-especially people of minority perspectives and seemingly less elevated status in society. To the extent this is true, it just goes to show that we need to ask questions and listen more than anyone.

In all these things, the posture we take is all-important. I have often played the fool because I did not know what to do or where to go to address justice concerns. But I would rather be humbled by asking for help than by hurting and shaming others and myself by claiming to have it all together when I don’t. If we are to think justly about justice, we need to pursue equity by favoring humility in solidarity with others. So, will we go forward together? Will you help me?

***************
An example of the kind of thinking and activity that is envisioned in this post is displayed in my church’s (Irvington Covenant Church) Intergroup Dialogue on Race and Reconciliation. Here is one short video dealing with this work. Longer videos will be posted in coming days.

This piece is cross-posted at Patheos and The Christian Post. Comments made here are not monitored. To join the conversation, please comment on this post at Patheos.

Some of you may be familiar with Pink Floyd’s classic song “Comfortably Numb,” which appears on the album, The Wall. As I understand it, the song is about the character Pink’s battle to deal with the world as a result of abandonment and isolation. The song fits within the framework of The Wall as a concept album. Among other things expressed through the album, Pink had experienced the loss of his dad during World War II and his teachers’ hostilities growing up. These and other experiences lead him to isolate himself from the surrounding society, signified by a symbolic wall.

One may wonder how one can be comfortably numb: how can one experience comfort when one is numb? Shouldn’t the apparent comfort we experience from being numb make us “feel” quite uncomfortable? Just like Pink, the trauma we experience on account of personal abandonment in life can lead us to build walls that isolate us from society at large.

There is no seeming connection in the song “Comfortably Numb” between a medical doctor who inspects Pink and the patient himself, just as there is no connection between Pink and other authority figures on the album, such as his teachers. As I reflected upon the healthcare conference I am hosting tomorrow, I thought about the numbness many people throughout our society are experiencing presently on the subject of healthcare. The government shutdown based on infighting among our nation’s leading political authorities over Obamacare has led many to shut down emotionally and intellectually on the subject of healthcare. And while the shutdown that affected scores of people around the country was only temporary (even though the politicians still got paid!), a long-term shutdown of the federal government may be only temporarily delayed. Somehow or another, they have to bring down the partisan wall of isolation that separates the two parties in Washington, and which also separates them from the public at large.

The rest of us may also have very different views on the subject of healthcare. But we shouldn’t allow our disillusionment with Washington or the menacing and overwhelming healthcare complexities and costs shut us down from caring. Any form of numbness on these issues is a cause for feeling quite uncomfortable. We must be willing to keep pressing into taxing issues such as healthcare no matter how painful and no matter our present view on how we will eventually cover the various costs, financial, relational, and otherwise.

Doctors, patients, government officials, insurance providers, pharmaceutical companies and other businesses must not build walls of isolation from one another on the subject of healthcare. Nor must we as a public be tempted to sink beneath consciousness and become numb, refusing to listen and talk with those who represent different positions. If we shut one another out, we will eventually shut down. Quite often, numbness reflects the loss of bodily functions. Amputation or worse death can result. The best way to stay conscious and alive is to keep talking and feeling—even pain. Don’t stop feeling pain, including on the subject of healthcare. Pain is an indication that you and I and, more broadly, we as a society are still alive. If we do not feel pain in our social sickness, perhaps there is no hope that we will ever be able to address it so that we can be healed as a nation regarding public health.

This is nowhere more true than for we who claim to serve Christ, who is the ultimate wounded healer. Unlike medical doctors who seek to take away pain, spiritual doctors are those who do not anesthetize pain, but rather intensify it so that we are no longer isolated from one another in our pain; instead we share it. As Henri Nouwen wrote so profoundly, “A minister is not a doctor whose primary task is to take away pain.  Rather, he deepens the pain to a level where it can be shared” (See Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society {New York: Image, 1979}, 92–93). Rather than become comfortably or even uncomfortably numb, let us intensify the pain of our healthcare struggle as a nation by continuing to struggle through the various healthcare challenges so that we can share in holistic and healthy change together. Only as we move beyond personal and social abandonment and isolation through shared pain will we become relationally whole.

Join me at The Institute for the Theology of Culture: New Wine, New Wineskins’ conference on Healthcare this Saturday, October 19 to further engage these issues.

This piece is cross-posted at Patheos and The Christian Post. Comments made here are not monitored. To join the conversation, please comment on this post at Patheos.

What makes for healthy theology on the subject of healthcare?

I suppose it all depends on which theologian you are asking. From my vantage point, drawing as I do from certain Trinitarian thought forms, one must be attentive to guard against the extremes of individualism and collectivism respectively. The ground of all reality is neither an individual(s) in isolation who is selfishly concerned nor a collective without distinctive particularity and responsibility. God is three distinct persons in eternal communion. As those created in the image of this God who is eternally one in relational otherness, we are not left to fight for ourselves; nor are we parasites.

While some may find treatments of the Trinity rather parochial, I beg to differ. The Trinity is the very basis for addressing the age old conundrum of the one and the many, the collective and the individual, as my own doctoral mentor, Professor Colin Gunton maintained. Moreover, not only are Christian Trinitarians created in the image of the triune God. All people are created in the image of the Trinity. Thus, Christians should not be surprised when they find people who don’t hold their religious convictions living in a way that models them. Take for example the story of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10. We don’t know anything about the religious convictions of this Samaritan of extraordinary mercy; nor do we know anything about the religious views of the person left for dead whom he helps. All we do know is that Jesus uses this Samaritan to rebuke a religious scholar who knew well the Scriptures.

What would modeling Christian or Trinitarian convictions look like as it pertains to the subject of healthcare? Should Christians and those in the community at large be committed to individualized healthcare, corporatized healthcare, or socialized healthcare? Certainly, opinions vary widely. While I believe we all want affordable, quality healthcare, and better public health, we differ on how that should be effected.

Whatever the case may be as to the specific policy we advance, hopefully we are biblical and seek to account for the biblical exhortation to care for our neighbor and to foster shalom in the communities where we live and work.

Consider once again the Samaritan of extraordinary mercy in Luke 10. He did not leave it to Obamacare or Medicaid, but attended to the person left for dead on the side of the road. So, the socialized soul must also understand that he or she has a personal responsibility to care for the person in need; he cannot leave it to the system.

And yet, that does not mean that the individual alone is left to care for the person in need. Nor is the church alone responsible before God to care for those in their midst. The society at large has a responsibility in Scripture to care for the widow, the orphan and the alien in distress.

Someone responded to one of my posts on public health by saying that the church should not look to the society as a whole to assist with caring for the needs of the poor; the church alone should take up that challenge.  In response I wrote that Christians don’t have a corner on civic virtue. So, why shouldn’t taxpayers, including Christians, care for the poor in our society? In fact, many people outside the church desire to pay taxes to address the needs of people in poverty. Moreover, while according to Scripture, Christians are to care for those in need in their own ecclesial communities, why should our concern as Christians end there? The Samaritan in Luke 10 is set forth as a model for how all of us (Christians and those not yet Christian) are to care sacrificially for our neighbors. The Samaritan’s neighbor in this case was someone he did not know; the person in need was not part of his personal community. Moreover, Jesus tells a religious scholar who does not believe in him that he, too, is to act in this way (like the Samaritan). While this parable does not speak directly to the subject of taxes, it does speak to the issue of how all people are to care for their neighbors in need in a sacrificial manner. The biblical call to care for the poor is not limited to care for our Christian communities or limited to Christians to be those who care. In fact, I often come across people outside the church who have a concern for the poor that outweighs many Christians’ concerns. Such people give sacrificially to the poor and are willing for their tax dollars to go toward the poor. They sense their responsibility to give, which I take to be a reflection of the image of God and God’s grace at work in their lives. They also realize that without the government’s help, we are not able to address well the overwhelming costs and complexities in our society today concerning public health. The individual, the religious community, the government and businesses must all play their parts for the well-being of our society.

We are all responsible, and we must move forward together. In view of the God who is three persons in eternal communion and who makes it possible for us to move beyond individualism and collectivism, we must continue to work together to account for personal responsibility and corporate solidarity. What will such responsibility and solidarity entail for healthcare?

Join me at The Institute for the Theology of Culture: New Wine, New Wineskins’ conference on Healthcare this Saturday, October 19 to further engage these issues.

No system is foolproof. Some people will seek to leech off of nationalized healthcare. When they don’t seek to contribute to the system but simply benefit from it, they injure their distinctive identity as well as harm the social health of the community. When individuals without enough money to pay into Obamacare but too much to benefit from Medicaid have to pay a penalty, the system robs them of benefiting from public health. When we leave it to the market to work it all out without imposing any constraints on human depravity and selfishness, the market will make it possible for the fittest to thrive; even so, a nagging question persists: who will ensure that the truly poor and those approaching poverty survive?

In the biblical world, the poor have a stake in society. What should we conclude about our society, if we were to run it completely like a market driven by shareholder concerns? However, if we approach consideration of the market more communally, we will find that the economic crisis does not have to result in a moral crisis that involves discounting the poor and those approaching poverty in our midst. Nor does it have to involve discounting people generally, reducing persons in communion to commodities in isolation. Trinitarian thought as espoused by this author views God as supremely personal and communal. The named God of Father, Son and Spirit in eternal communion does not allow the creation to be commodified: God has a longstanding stake in making sure that those created in the divine image are valued for their inherent worth as those loved by God rather than for how they benefit the free market’s shareholders.

This calls to mind a recent Economist article that explores the longstanding debate on whether firms should focus their attention on shareholders or stakeholders: “The economic crisis has revived the old debate about whether firms should focus most on their shareholders, their customers or their workers.”

In an article in a recent issue of the Harvard Business Review, Roger Martin, dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, charts the rise of what he calls the ‘tragically flawed premise’ that firms should focus on maximising shareholder value, and argues that ‘it is time we abandoned it.’ The obsession with shareholder value began in 1976, he says, when Michael Jensen and William Meckling, two economists, published an article, ‘Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behaviour, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure’, which argued that the owners of companies were getting short shift from professional managers. The most cited academic article about business to this day, it inspired a seemingly irresistible movement to get managers to focus on value for shareholders. Converts to the creed had little time for other ‘stakeholders’: customers, employees, suppliers, society at large and so forth. American and British value-maximisers reserved particular disdain for the ‘stakeholder capitalism’ practised in continental Europe. “A New Idolatry,” The Economist, April 22, 2010, (accessed on 1/20/2013).

Shareholders are stakeholders in corporations, but not all stakeholders are shareholders. While shareholders own portions of companies through owning stocks, stakeholders are concerned about the performance of companies based on various factors, not just the appreciation of stocks. Stakeholders can include employees, customers, suppliers, bondholders, and the general public. According to a May 8, 2009 entry at Investopedia,

The new field of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has encouraged companies to take the interests of all stakeholders into consideration during their decision-making processes instead of making choices based solely upon the interests of shareholders. The general public is one such stakeholder now considered under CSR governance. When a company carries out operations that could increase pollution or take away a green space within a community, for example, the general public is affected. Such decisions may be right for increasing shareholder profits, but stakeholders could be impacted negatively. Therefore, CSR creates a climate for corporations to make choices that protect social welfare, often using methods that reach far beyond legal and regulatory requirements (Reference, accessed on 2/9/2013). See the debate, “‘Stakeholders vs. Shareholders’: Haas faculty debate ‘Whom exactly should business serve?’”.

Whom exactly should businesses serve? Whom exactly should society serve—God or mammon? How should we approach public health? Healthcare providers must guard against raising premiums simply to make more profit. Pharmaceutical companies must concern themselves at every turn with making medicines that the sick really need rather than what won’t help and may even harm them. Injured patients must not seek to get rich on malpractice, raising malpractice insurance costs through the roof. Doctors should not approach their vocations from the vantage point of prestige and financial well-being, but from the vantage point of the Hippocratic Oath. Everyone has a stake in public health; no matter our stock portfolio or position, we all share in the consequences as participants in the greater public.

We must be willing to ask the various hard questions, not to paralyze discussion, but to advance the conversation. What is required is an open table, where we move beyond oversimplified ideology in search of complex solutions. The God who is triune moves forward not by advancing a platform position that is pushed down people’s throats. The God who is triune is not an ism; rather, this God is supremely personal and communal and makes it possible to share a meal at his open table and reason together.

This piece is cross-posted at Patheos and The Christian Post. Comments made here are not monitored. To join the conversation, please comment on this post at Patheos.