Article
What are the causes of world hunger? What must be done to overcome world hunger? Obviously, the Bible does not supply any direct answers to these deep questions. We may not look here for clear proposals or concrete strategies. The Bible (in this as in many matters) offers only impressionistic hints subject to varying configurations …
Continue reading “A Biblical Perspective on the Problem of Hunger”
Article
Ten little Injuns standing in a line, One toddled home and then there were nine; Nine little Injuns swingin’ on a gate, One tumbled off and then there were eight. Eight little Injuns gayest under heav’n, One went to sleep and then there were seven; Seven little Injuns cutting up their tricks, One broke his …
Article
Santa Fe When I was a child growing up in a small town in southern Illinois, my parents once took me to the central part of the state to see the capitol building and Abraham Lincoln’s home in Springfield. On that same trip my father decided that we should drive some 60 miles further to …
Continue reading “Bare-Bones Imbroglio: Repatriating Indian Remains and Sacred Artifacts”
Article
Haiti cast a spell over me in 1978. Never had I visited a land where such a tiny minority of people owned so much wealth while the majority, without enough to eat, accepted their portion as though decreed by fate. Their fatalism bewildered me then, but a 1981 visit to Haiti and the Dominican Republic …
Continue reading “Bondage in Old Hispaniola: The Haitian Canecutters”
Article
A Dalit Goes to Court When Bhanwari Devi’s 13 year-old daughter was raped in the bajra fields by an upper caste youth, she picked up a lathi and went after the rapist herself. She had no faith in police and courts. Either way, she was prevented from seeking any redress by the upper castes …
Book Chapter
The global economic order needs fundamental restructuring, and the United States through low-intensity conflict seeks to block or control any such changes. It regards changes in the present world order as communist-inspired threats against U.S. national security interests. The poor whose survival depends on such changes are considered enemies.
Book Chapter
Why are Nicaragua’s efforts to address the needs of its poor majority by reordering political and economic life considered dangerous to U.S. interest?
Book Chapter
Low-intensity conflict is a comprehensive, totalitarian project through which the United States seeks to manage social change in the third world in order to protect perceived vital interests.
Book Chapter
Since low-intensity conflict defines the poor as enemy, it is clearly in conflict with a biblical God who takes sides with the poor. This calls for confession on the part of American Christians.
Book Chapter
How low-intensity conflict undermines democratic institutions at home and abroad.
Article
In the past few years some huge cracks have developed in the façade of democracy and respect for human rights which the Colombian government has sought to create. Although Colombia is nominally under a civilian regime, the military forces are really in command — not only lurking behind the civilian president and congress, but recently …
Continue reading “Colombian Coal Mines: The Pits of Exploitation”
Article
Among the arguments for and against school busing, we do not hear much about the fundamental issue of racial alienation. We hear that busing is expensive. The rides seem long. Children are dragged out of their neighborhoods. The test scores of blacks don’t improve. And some white children’s idealistic beliefs about equality are shattered in …
Article
Social ethicist Joseph Fletcher — author of Situation Ethics, Morals and Medicine and The Ethics of Genetic Control — is a visiting professor of medical ethics at the University of Virginia Medical School and at the Texas Medical Center’s Institute of Religion and Human Development. Q.: CALIFORNIA biologist Garrett Hardin has been the most recent …
Continue reading “Famine and Global Policy: An Interview with Joseph Fletcher”
Article
Marie, a 14-year-old runaway, stumbled into a San Francisco-area all-night restaurant and begged the night manager, “Please let me call my church.” She thumbed through the Yellow Pages, found the number, deposited the two dimes the manager had given her, and dialed. The minister of a small Pentecostal church answered. She explained that she was …
Article
In 2006,the United States provided 6 million tons of food aid to agencies such as CARE, Catholic Relief Services, World Vision and Save the Children, which distributed the bags of wheat, rice or corn and containers of vegetable oil. Some of the aid went to places wracked by war or natural disaster, where it directly …
Article
Review: Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire, by Peter Brown, University Press of New England, 176 pp., also in paperback. Upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, former president Jimmy Carter remarked that the “growing gap between the rich and poor” is the most elemental problem facing the world economy. But the gap between …
Book Chapter
Low-intensity conflict is the key strategy by which the United States seeks to project its power in the third world in order to protect perceived vital interests.
Article
There is enough food to feed everybody in the world now; in the year 2000 there will still be enough food for everyone. And yet 500 million people are malnourished. The realities linking these statements are a relatively inconsequential part of our lives here in the United States, but in Third World countries these realities …
Article
According to the Exodus story, the Egyptians had begun to fear that the Israelite people living in Egypt had grown more numerous and powerful than the Egyptians themselves. To prevent these Israelites from joining Egypt’s enemies, fighting against the Egyptians, and escaping from the land, the Egyptians set taskmasters over them to oppress them with …
Continue reading “No One is Disposable: The Fight Against Slavery in the New Global Economy”
Book Chapter
The murder of Jesuit priests in El Salvador, the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the invasion of Panama, the “war on drugs,” and changing East/West relations — all add urgency to our need to confront the U.S. strategy of “low-intensity conflict”.
Article
A few years ago I visited the pastor of an Episcopal church in an economically mixed neighborhood. To reach his office, I had to pass "emergency shelter" signs, piles of donated clothes, a soup kitchen and a few small mountains of donated food. Once inside his office, I congratulated him for all the activity, and …
Continue reading “Rethinking Hunger in America: Adapting the Sullivan Principles”
Article
One cool October afternoon in Vancouver, British Columbia, I took my place in line to see what the critics had deemed the runaway hit of the 1986 World’s Fair. “Spirit Lodge,” sponsored by General Motors, was a nine-minute Indian mystical experience. Crowds waited patiently in line, often for as long as five hours, to glimpse …
Article
Those who want to make lots of money and don’t care about breaking the law to do it have three main options: they can deal in drugs, deal in guns or deal in humans beings. Of these dubious but lucrative businesses, trafficking in humans is the fastest growing. Estimates put the number of slaves in …
Article
I first discovered that there are black people in the United States when I was a small boy of about eight years of age and I picked up a battered copy of Ebony magazine. I didn’t know that there could be literature of that kind, with such subversive qualities, because up to that point I …
Continue reading “South Africa’s Blacks: Aliens in Their Own Land”
Article
Book Review The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities of our Time. By Jeffrey D. Sachs. Penguin 397 pp. Crisis books usually follow a predictable pattern: first a searing depiction of the problem at hand, then some broad and sweeping assessments of how great changes in attitude might begin to address the issue, and then …
Article
Book Reviews: Reconciliation: Restoring Justice. By John W. de Gruchy. Fortress, 255 pp. A Human Being Died That Night: A South African Story of Forgiveness. By Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela. Houghton Mifflin, 208 pp. How was it possible for 40 million South Africans to avoid a disastrous civil war and create a new society that raised …
Article
There is a dire need for a comprehensive solution to the broken U.S. immigration system and Ralston Deffenbaugh, in this interview, discusses many solutions. Text: A human rights lawyer, Ralston Deffenbaugh has since 1991 been president of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, an agency of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Lutheran Church — …
Article
Scarcity, it would seem, is responsible for a crisis greater than any the world has recorded in its collective memory. Nearly 500 million persons, most of them children, are close to starvation. Tens of thousands will die this week. Before the crisis resolves itself, countless millions — perhaps as many as 1 billion persons — …
Continue reading “The Ethics of Triage: A Perspective on the World Food Conference”
Article
In August, starting from our home in Ohio. we drove our sultry, un-air-conditioned, ten-year-old Buick west, searching out the homeless and talking with shelter providers who act as their advocates. We had already spent time in the East working on a book about the homeless. Now we wanted to meet their counterparts in the Midwest …
Article
About a year ago, I came across a brief news item in our diocesan newspaper that referred to the work of a group called the Society of the Holy Innocents. The name would have been welcomed by leaders in the field of mental retardation 40 years ago. But no more. The image of mentally retarded …
Continue reading “The Mentally Retarded: Recognizing Their Rights”
Article
Ecuador is an oil-producing country, and most of its wealthiest citizens are connected with the international oil community — people who use gold credit cards, live in high-security mansions and drive Mercedes-Benzes. For the country’s poor, however, life is one long struggle to survive. Despite laws prohibiting the hiring of children under 15 years of …
Article
On weekends the kids from Lafanmi Selavi, our center for street children, come to our house to spend time, to share food, talk, play and swim in the swimming pool. It is a small pool, too small for 400 kids, but for them it is a piece of paradise. Sometimes we invite children from other …
Article
In November 1983, approximately 1,400 women, most of them Roman Catholic, met in Chicago for a conference called “Woman Church Speaks.” That gathering of women who together envisioned and to some extent modeled a church liberated from patriarchal bondage marked a turning point in the women’s movement in the United States. For the first time, …
Book
(ENTIRE BOOK) An analysis of “low-intensity conflict” — the United States global strategy of warfare waged against the poor — as seen in Nicaragua during the 1980s.
Article
Are the poor blessed or lazy? The prevailing answer in America is lazy. The welfare revolution of the past decade put the poor to work. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 changed the social support system. As the name of the law implies, people are held personally responsible for getting out …
Article
Last summer I was invited by a hospice chaplain to accompany him on a visit to the family of Maria Durand de Perez, a Mexican woman who had died a few weeks earlier in the border town of San Ysidro, California, at the astonishing age of 111. Knowing that I had once worked as the …
