What I've Been Working On
A Sneak Peek
The primary purpose of the Window Light newsletter is to offer commentary on events and issues of concern to theologians, those involved in pastoral ministry, and others with an interest in Catholic theology, but regular readers also know that from time to time I’ve written about topics related to my vocation as a theologian, sometimes from a very personal perspective but always hoping to offer reflections that are relevant or interesting to readers. Another way I would like to use the newsletter is to share with readers, particularly paid subscribers, an inside look into my work as a theologian, including sneak peeks into projects that are working their way toward publication or that I am in the midst of researching.
In that vein, I wanted to share three projects I have been working on over the past several months (or longer) but that are finally getting closer to seeing the light of day. In the long term, I’m working on a project looking at how theology can inform our understanding of privacy, particularly in our digital age, but that work is currently on hold until I have more time to come back to it. I have noticed, however, that even during times when I can’t engage in new research and writing to the extent I would like, projects that I have already put the work into come back around for editing, and that’s the case with these three essays.
The first is an essay on what the future of Catholic thinking on the economy and Catholic engagement in economic life might look like. The essay will be part of a two-volume edited work published by Pickwick Publications (an affiliate of Wipf and Stock) on the future of social Catholicism in the 21st century and edited by Bill Murphy, the theologian in residence at St. Edmund’s Retreat in Connecticut. The two volumes include an all-star lineup of contributors that will be familiar to many readers of Window Light; I haven’t had a chance to read the other authors’ contributions yet, so I’m looking forward to the eventual publication of the two volumes.
My essay builds on what I wrote in my last book, Interrupting Capitalism: Catholic Social Thought and the Economy, and anyone who’s read the book won’t be too surprised by what I have to say in the essay. The first half of the essay traces the decline of social Catholicism (the complex array of associations that organized Catholics’ participation in economic life and formed their spiritual lives) in the mid- to late-20th century and what we can learn from this decline, including the need to balance maintaining the Catholic identify of social Catholic associations and openness to cooperating with those outside the Catholic Church, and the need to abandon thinking of Catholic social teaching (CST) as a platform or ideology and instead to view it as a framework for engaging in gradual, transformative action.
The primary criticism of Interrupting Capitalism, however, was that, although the book gives a detailed and nuanced history of Catholic economic thinking in the 20th century and provides a coherent theological vision of economic life for the 21st, it stops short when giving examples of how this vision might be lived out in the concrete. In this latest essay, I tried to say a bit more about what “interrupting capitalism” might look like. Building on the ecological framework found in Pope Francis’s teachings, especially his encyclical Laudato Si’, and Francis’s teachings on social movements, I explore how, through creative involvement in new forms of business enterprise, social movements, and church-affiliated associations, Catholics can generate “mutations” in the economic ecosystem that help contribute to a more just and sustainable economy.
The second project is one I mentioned in the newsletter almost a year ago, in relation to an article on war crimes committed in the war in Ukraine. Cascade (another affiliate of Wipf and Stock) is publishing a revised an updated edition of Green Discipleship: Religion, Theology, and Ecology, which was first published by Anselm Academic back in 2011 (with the original subtitle Catholic Ethics and the Environment), and which is edited by Tobias Winright, now a professor of moral theology at St. Patrick’s Pontifical University in Maynooth, Ireland. Much like the book itself, my essay on the intersections between environmental ethics and the Christian ethics of war and peace is significantly updated compared to the earlier version, although it follows a similar structure, organized around three aspects of ethical reasoning about war: it looks at how environmental destruction can contribute to the outbreak of war, how the conduct of war can cause damage to the environment, and how the restoration of the environment plays a role in the reestablishment of peace in the post-war period.
One reason my essay was in need of substantial revision was that scholarly research into the relationship between war and the environment has blossomed in the years since the first essay was published. This interdisciplinary field emerged in the 1990s and 2000s (and in particular owes much to the work of political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon), but more recently it has come into its own. In particular, there have been a number of works looking at the environmental impact of particular wars, and my essay draws on research into the Thirty Years War, the American Civil War, the Second World War, and the Persian Gulf War, for example. This research looks not only at the environmental destruction caused by war, but also the environmental impact of the resource extraction needed to build the weapons of war. In addition, there has been a great deal of legal work exploring whether environmental damage during war, particularly when it’s intentional, could be considered a war crime in light of the international laws of war, and how the victims of such crimes might be compensated in the aftermath of war. Some of the most interesting research I encountered while working on the essay explored whether climatic instability in 1st-century Galilee might have contributed to social conflict in the region, potentially influencing the ministry of Jesus; the best research I found, however, suggests this was likely not the case!
Of course, another good reason for the revision and republication of Green Discipleship was the publication of Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’ in 2015, which has become the touchstone for Catholic thinking about the environment. My essay opens by claiming that the intersection of war and environmental destruction demands the integrated approach to addressing global problems promoted by Francis in Laudato Si’, and it closes by proposing that Francis’s notion of “ecological conversion,” a spiritual transformation of how we see and relate to the world around us, will be necessary to respond to these problems.
The last essay that I want to highlight is unlike anything else I’ve ever written. It is part of my work representing the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCCB) as a participant in the theological dialogues conducted by the Faith and Order Convening Table, one of the forums of the ecumenical National Council of Churches. Since 2018, the National Council of Churches’ work has centered around the theme of “Act Now to End Racism,” calling on churches to awaken to the reality of racism in American society and in our churches, confront racism, and transform the people and structures that make up our churches and American society. I wrote about this initiative in more detail for Window Light here.
The Faith and Order Convening Table took up this task by centering its dialogue around three topics: Awakening to the Reality of Racism as America’s Original Sin, Confronting White Supremacy as the Defining Myth of America, and Transforming the Church and Humanizing the Public Square. For most of this period, I participated in the dialogue centering on the second theme of confronting white supremacy, but at the very end of the process, I realized that the contribution I had been working on better fit in the latter dialogue on transforming the church and public life. One of the fruits of our dialogue will be an edited volume to be published by Friendship Press later this year titled Confronting Racism and White Supremacy in the US: Twenty-First Century Theological Perspectives and edited by Michael Fisher, Jr., a professor of African American Studies at the Ohio State University and who represents the United Church of Christ at the Faith and Order gatherings.
My contribution to the volume is an essay titled, “How to Be an Antiracist Congregation,” a play on the title of Ibram Kendi’s book How to Be an Antiracist. In the essay, I describe six “exemplar congregations” from several denominations from across the United States, including one Catholic parish, that are intentionally trying to live out a commitment to be antiracist. For all but two of the congregations, I interviewed or engaged in email conversations with staff persons who could provide me with more information on their congregations’ activities. It was fun to take a break from burying my nose in books and do some “field work” talking to people doing exciting things like building interracial congregational partnerships, holding educational sessions and book discussions for congregants, and even creating an inter-congregational effort to promote reparations at the local level by offering grants to fund college scholarships, provide loans or grants for first-time home buyers, and promote black-owned businesses.
The essay ends by describing several best practices for antiracist congregations, some of the common characteristics of the "exemplar congregations” that other congregations could imitate and adapt. As I note in the essay, however:
None of these churches are perfect, and in fact all of them showed a sense of humility about the antiracist work they have done. Indeed, this sense of humility—the acknowledgement that our work is imperfect and that there is always more, sometimes much more, that could be done—is one of the hallmarks of a truly antiracist congregation.
As I noted above, this essay was unique for me, not just because it involved field work, but also because I wasn’t writing it from an explicitly Catholic theological perspective (despite the fact that it arose out of a dialogue where I was representing the Catholic bishops…). I wrote it with ecumenical sensibilities in mind, without, of course, abandoning my grounding in Catholic theology.
All three of these essays are in the relatively late stages of editing and preparation for publication, but I wanted to give readers a sneak preview before they are published. Hopefully I might have some more exciting projects to talk about in a few months or so!