On this Thanksgiving weekend, I am grateful for my family and friends. I am also grateful for our beautiful world ("charged with the grandeur of God" says Hopkins). I am especially grateful for the Outer Banks of North Carolina where we vacation in the summer. Meditating on the beauty of the Outer Banks makes me grateful for the Climate Summit in Copenhagen because if we do not reduce carbon emissions, that wonderful sandbar of recreation will be swallowed by the sea. I am sure so many other people can recall other wonderful beach places that will disappear if we do not reduce the trend.
Thinking of this issue is especially important if you consider that the recent email leaks from Climate scientists are being used to confuse people regarding the consensus on warming. Carbon emissions are warming the atmosphere according to the vast majority of climate scientists. The ice caps are melting. There is concrete evidence.
Whether by cap and trade or through a carbon tax, we need to meet the challenge. I am grateful for our brave president for travelling to Copenhagen and for our democracy for taking the issue seriously. Prayers for the President at Copenhagen.
Friday, November 27, 2009
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Pass the Senate Bill with the Public Option
I have gone back and forth on this. A reform bill without a public option is better than no reform at all; however, we need to think about the 10% of the American public that is currently unemployed. What is going to happen to them when their COBRA runs out? Moreover, listening to the most honest financial analysts will tell you that our financial system could undergo another shock and make unemployment worse. The public option is just that--an option. It is not socialism. It is a safety net for all of the good hardworking people who have lost their jobs. It also prevents people from being kicked out of our health care system because of excessively high premiums.
I respect my Republican brothers and sisters but on this one they are too beholden to moneyed interests. In the same way that Democrats can get a little too stuck on the support of certain constituencies, Republicans are too stuck on the support of those opposing health reform. Please keep in mind that the Republican reform would leave 95% of the uninsured in their current state.
I respect my Republican brothers and sisters but on this one they are too beholden to moneyed interests. In the same way that Democrats can get a little too stuck on the support of certain constituencies, Republicans are too stuck on the support of those opposing health reform. Please keep in mind that the Republican reform would leave 95% of the uninsured in their current state.
Monday, November 16, 2009
More Reflection On Health Care
From Mordecai Shani's Article in the August 19, 2004 JewishJournal.com:
"Universal access to Israel's national health care basket means that there is no underinsurance in Israel, which happens when there are gaps in coverage. In the United States, more than 100 million citizens are underinsured -- including 40 million with Medicare, 50 million with Medicaid and at least 10 million who are employed in large companies that have self-insurance."
When people make the argument that our national security commitments demand that we not spend a lot of money on social welfare policies, consider Israel. Which nation on the planet has a more urgent need to spend for national defense and yet Israel has 100% coverage through national health insurance. Consequently, Israel has a much lower infant mortality rate than the US. Our infant mortality rate is much higher than Cuba's. Take a look at the CIA Factbook.
"Universal access to Israel's national health care basket means that there is no underinsurance in Israel, which happens when there are gaps in coverage. In the United States, more than 100 million citizens are underinsured -- including 40 million with Medicare, 50 million with Medicaid and at least 10 million who are employed in large companies that have self-insurance."
When people make the argument that our national security commitments demand that we not spend a lot of money on social welfare policies, consider Israel. Which nation on the planet has a more urgent need to spend for national defense and yet Israel has 100% coverage through national health insurance. Consequently, Israel has a much lower infant mortality rate than the US. Our infant mortality rate is much higher than Cuba's. Take a look at the CIA Factbook.
Increase In American Hunger
From Amy Goldstein's article in today's Washington Post:
"The nation's economic crisis has catapulted the number of Americans who lack enough food to the highest level since the government has been keeping track, according to a new federal report, which shows that nearly 50 million people -- including almost one child in four -- struggled last year to get enough to eat."
If this does not turn around, we will need to change the current Food Stamp and Welfare policy. That is, we will need to re-reform welfare so that children can eat. We definitely need to do something.
"The nation's economic crisis has catapulted the number of Americans who lack enough food to the highest level since the government has been keeping track, according to a new federal report, which shows that nearly 50 million people -- including almost one child in four -- struggled last year to get enough to eat."
If this does not turn around, we will need to change the current Food Stamp and Welfare policy. That is, we will need to re-reform welfare so that children can eat. We definitely need to do something.
Obama's Bow
I have only one question before I weigh in on this one: Consider the day when William Bennet was a candidate for president. If he had met the Pope, would he have kissed the Pope’s ring? As a Catholic, I would.
The Legacy of Abraham Joshua Heschel
Abraham Joshua Heschel, teacher and prophet of social justice, wrote that God wants the world to be redeemed and that the world is redeemed through justice. For a Christian it reminds me that God wants to draw us into the life of the Trinity—the just society. In the mystery of the Trinity, the Father accepts and nurtures the Son, the Son accepts and nurtures the Father, and the Holy Spirit is this acceptance moving human beings in the world to live righteously and joyfully. This joy is not the “Oh yeah” of triumphing over another person in a spirit of competition. This joy is working with the other person in a spirit of solidarity, which includes laughing at foibles, shrugging off sin, hoping for peace, and seeking to turn each labor into something that is life-giving for the entire community. Most Jewish people that I have known have been so very open to me and have challenged me at times to consider all of my motivations—whether or not I truly opt for the common good of the world.
At times, we all live from a sense of being wounded and that leads to more conflict. The Dalai Lama writes that at those times, one must meditate. For me it also helps to pray with the Spirit of the Risen Christ. And to listen very carefully. We live in a world with a lot of noise, but God’s word is spoken very gently—as Elijah realized at Mount Carmel. Last night I attended a series of talks about the Theology and Social Justice teaching of Rabbi Heschel. Prior to last night I knew only one story about Heschel and I recall it very vaguely. I cannot even remember exactly in which book I read about it, but it goes something like this: a friend of Heschel’s was complaining about himself wondering why he couldn’t be more like Moses. Heschel responded: “God does not ask of me why are you not Moses? Rather, God asks me why are you not Heschel?” Apparently, Heschel was Heschel most of the time for he taught with such insight he moved Senator Sherrod Brown, Congressman Louis Stokes, Reverend Marvin McMickle, Ambassador Andrew Young, and Stephen Hoffman, a friend of President Bush and interim president of the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute.
The story I knew about Heschel has stayed with me for about 20 years. I repeat it to myself at times, even if I have some of the details wrong. God wants me to be me, not anyone else, but I am me only in authentic relationship with others. As Jesuit Conference 32 notes, oppression oppresses the oppressed but also the oppressor. Our hearts are not at peace while we try to torment or control another. We know this because when we are acting in such a way, we whine about everything and we resist any kind of positive change. Oppression--anti-charity, anti-reconciliation—is poison. Healing means letting go of the desire to control others—whatever position of power or powerlessness one finds oneself in. Nevertheless, the efforts of the poor to cry out for justice are not an attempt at control. The LORD hears their cries because God is charity, perfect Trinity, perfect society, and God tries to freely draw the human community forward into the goal of human history—justice.
Marxism was an attempt to control and thus created havoc. We have the imagination to envision creative strategies to work with the LORD toward this goal, but it requires patience and acceptance. I pray that I might have such patience and that I can be accepting and forgiving as Heschel was for Heschel wrote that God does not demand judgment. Rather, God wants repentance and redemption. God wants justice.
So much from the evening stayed with me, but since I am currently watching my three year old, I will comment on a few nuggets of wisdom: In Dr. Susanna Heschel’s keynote about her father, she remarked that a Jew was a person in whom Abraham was alive. She also noted that since Abraham challenged God we are free to challenge all of our leaders when they stray from justice. She told the story about how when Rabbi Heschel showed up at a Viet Nam War Protest, someone asked him why he had come. Heschel replied that he came to the protest because he could not pray. When asked why he could not pray, Heschel replied that when he opened his prayer book, he saw Vietnamese children burning. She concluded by remarking that her father constantly asked “How can we make this a better world? “ Heschel was a prophet of progress.
Senator Brown appropriately connected health care reform to the vision of Heschel. We do need this reform, including the public option, for in the words of Senator Brown and Rabbi Heschel “Mankind must live by justice and compassion.”
Representative Louis Stokes spoke of how Blacks and Jews worked together in the 50s and 60s and need to work together again to continue to spread civil rights to all. He spoke of the need to continue to change our great country and I agree with him because our country is great because it has been a beacon of positive change for over two centuries.
Reverend McMickle really moved me. His knowledge of scripture is inspiring. He spoke of Heschel’s understanding that God gets angry at human cruelty and injustice, but that God wants his anger to be annulled by people’s repentance. That way the need for judgment would be set aside. Rev. McMickle also gave an insightful interpretation of the transfiguration: Jesus tells Peter not to tell anyone about this great event and then continues on with his ministry. As Rev. McMickle interprets the text, it means that we should not cling to past milestones and accomplishments in justice work but need to keep building. He noted that MLK and Heschel would not let us rest. I pray that that spirit might guide me and others.
Ambassador Young, who helped bring the Olympics to Atlanta, emphasized the need to help people who have become sick because of their injustice, not to become angry with them, which is something the ambassador did in living through the violent reactions to his civil rights work with MLK.
Unfortunately, I needed to leave in the middle of Mr.Hoffman’s speech. I had to get home to allow my wife time to grade her papers and prep her classes. It would have been unjust to her if I had stayed.
I am so deeply grateful to have attended this evening. The cultural life of Northeast Ohio is so very rich. I hope that I can contribute to this rich cultural life with the Innovation conferences and the Lake Erie Olympics I have dreamed about, but I will need a lot of help to make the dreams a reality. I am not a great detail or calendar person.
Finally, as we read about the struggle in Brazil to end violence and keep their homes powered, we need to enter into a relationship of solidarity with that wonderful country. Let’s not Brazil lose their Olympics. Let’s rally to Brazil’s side and help them develop solutions to these problems, as people rallied to our side after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina.
At times, we all live from a sense of being wounded and that leads to more conflict. The Dalai Lama writes that at those times, one must meditate. For me it also helps to pray with the Spirit of the Risen Christ. And to listen very carefully. We live in a world with a lot of noise, but God’s word is spoken very gently—as Elijah realized at Mount Carmel. Last night I attended a series of talks about the Theology and Social Justice teaching of Rabbi Heschel. Prior to last night I knew only one story about Heschel and I recall it very vaguely. I cannot even remember exactly in which book I read about it, but it goes something like this: a friend of Heschel’s was complaining about himself wondering why he couldn’t be more like Moses. Heschel responded: “God does not ask of me why are you not Moses? Rather, God asks me why are you not Heschel?” Apparently, Heschel was Heschel most of the time for he taught with such insight he moved Senator Sherrod Brown, Congressman Louis Stokes, Reverend Marvin McMickle, Ambassador Andrew Young, and Stephen Hoffman, a friend of President Bush and interim president of the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute.
The story I knew about Heschel has stayed with me for about 20 years. I repeat it to myself at times, even if I have some of the details wrong. God wants me to be me, not anyone else, but I am me only in authentic relationship with others. As Jesuit Conference 32 notes, oppression oppresses the oppressed but also the oppressor. Our hearts are not at peace while we try to torment or control another. We know this because when we are acting in such a way, we whine about everything and we resist any kind of positive change. Oppression--anti-charity, anti-reconciliation—is poison. Healing means letting go of the desire to control others—whatever position of power or powerlessness one finds oneself in. Nevertheless, the efforts of the poor to cry out for justice are not an attempt at control. The LORD hears their cries because God is charity, perfect Trinity, perfect society, and God tries to freely draw the human community forward into the goal of human history—justice.
Marxism was an attempt to control and thus created havoc. We have the imagination to envision creative strategies to work with the LORD toward this goal, but it requires patience and acceptance. I pray that I might have such patience and that I can be accepting and forgiving as Heschel was for Heschel wrote that God does not demand judgment. Rather, God wants repentance and redemption. God wants justice.
So much from the evening stayed with me, but since I am currently watching my three year old, I will comment on a few nuggets of wisdom: In Dr. Susanna Heschel’s keynote about her father, she remarked that a Jew was a person in whom Abraham was alive. She also noted that since Abraham challenged God we are free to challenge all of our leaders when they stray from justice. She told the story about how when Rabbi Heschel showed up at a Viet Nam War Protest, someone asked him why he had come. Heschel replied that he came to the protest because he could not pray. When asked why he could not pray, Heschel replied that when he opened his prayer book, he saw Vietnamese children burning. She concluded by remarking that her father constantly asked “How can we make this a better world? “ Heschel was a prophet of progress.
Senator Brown appropriately connected health care reform to the vision of Heschel. We do need this reform, including the public option, for in the words of Senator Brown and Rabbi Heschel “Mankind must live by justice and compassion.”
Representative Louis Stokes spoke of how Blacks and Jews worked together in the 50s and 60s and need to work together again to continue to spread civil rights to all. He spoke of the need to continue to change our great country and I agree with him because our country is great because it has been a beacon of positive change for over two centuries.
Reverend McMickle really moved me. His knowledge of scripture is inspiring. He spoke of Heschel’s understanding that God gets angry at human cruelty and injustice, but that God wants his anger to be annulled by people’s repentance. That way the need for judgment would be set aside. Rev. McMickle also gave an insightful interpretation of the transfiguration: Jesus tells Peter not to tell anyone about this great event and then continues on with his ministry. As Rev. McMickle interprets the text, it means that we should not cling to past milestones and accomplishments in justice work but need to keep building. He noted that MLK and Heschel would not let us rest. I pray that that spirit might guide me and others.
Ambassador Young, who helped bring the Olympics to Atlanta, emphasized the need to help people who have become sick because of their injustice, not to become angry with them, which is something the ambassador did in living through the violent reactions to his civil rights work with MLK.
Unfortunately, I needed to leave in the middle of Mr.Hoffman’s speech. I had to get home to allow my wife time to grade her papers and prep her classes. It would have been unjust to her if I had stayed.
I am so deeply grateful to have attended this evening. The cultural life of Northeast Ohio is so very rich. I hope that I can contribute to this rich cultural life with the Innovation conferences and the Lake Erie Olympics I have dreamed about, but I will need a lot of help to make the dreams a reality. I am not a great detail or calendar person.
Finally, as we read about the struggle in Brazil to end violence and keep their homes powered, we need to enter into a relationship of solidarity with that wonderful country. Let’s not Brazil lose their Olympics. Let’s rally to Brazil’s side and help them develop solutions to these problems, as people rallied to our side after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Reflection on the Twentieth Anniversary of the Murders of the Eight Martyrs of El Salvador
Twenty years ago, a right wing death squad with links to the government of El Salvador murdered two Salvadoran women and six Jesuit priests. There is evidence that the individuals involved had received training at the School of the Americas. Whether or not they had connections to the SOA, these men brutally killed eight people because these people were critical of the right wing dictatorship that was governing that country. Ignacio Ellacuria and his friends were proponents of The Theology of Liberation and had every right to advocate their vision of the transformation of Salvadoran society. (I also advocate a theology of liberation, but I think that we need to re-envision it given the obvious failings and brutality of the Marxist ideology that informs certain strands of this theology.) The murderers, connected to a government supported by the US government, acted as many acted during the bloodiest century in history—they valued ideology more than human rights, power more than human dignity, and violence more than imagination.
Some think that the murder of the eight martyrs justify the closing of the School of the Americas rather than its reform. In this blog, I will not weigh in on that matter. I do not want to detract from the necessary prayer for peace that this occasion summons. No American who stands within our living American tradition can justify the murder of eight people and all Christians, all people of faith, all people of good will remember the passing of these eight prophets as testimony to the need to continue our task of building the Kingdom of God.
Some think that the murder of the eight martyrs justify the closing of the School of the Americas rather than its reform. In this blog, I will not weigh in on that matter. I do not want to detract from the necessary prayer for peace that this occasion summons. No American who stands within our living American tradition can justify the murder of eight people and all Christians, all people of faith, all people of good will remember the passing of these eight prophets as testimony to the need to continue our task of building the Kingdom of God.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
To All American Veterans And Their Families
A very sincere "Thank you" for all of your sacrifices for my family. You keep us safe in more ways than I can count. Thank you for all that you have done for the United States of America.
Delivering the Fourth Gospel from Anti-Judaism
An essay I submitted to a magazine. Have not heard back from them, but I think that the issue is so important that we need to start discussing it now.
As I pray with the resurrection accounts in Chapter 20 of the Gospel of John, in my imagination, I can see a silhouette of the risen Lord, in my backyard, inviting me to be with him. There is no artifice in him. He plays no games. He just is and his presence fills my heart with hope. For a very significant moment, I am not concerned about the affairs of the secular world. For a moment, I feel my purpose renewed. Glances and shimmering fragments of grace enlighten my mind, but then there is a jarring moment. I come upon the sentence “On the evening of that first day of the week, when the doors were locked, where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews. . . .” “The Jews”--the phrase bounces around in my mind. The disciples are afraid of the Jews. But the disciples were Jews. I return to the risen Lord. He’s still there, but now I am watching him with this awareness, that somewhere in the scene, the disciples are afraid of “the Jews.” These disciples—Peter, whom we as Catholics consider the first bishop of Rome, James, John, and other heroes of the early Church, they are afraid of the Jews. Why are they afraid of “the Jews”? We get our answer in John 19:6-7 in which Pilate protests that Jesus is innocent and “The Jews answered, ‘We have a law, and according to that law he ought to die. . .’” Later in John 19: 15 “The Jews cried out ‘Take him away! Crucify him.” As John portrays it, even though Jesus was crucified by the Romans, it is “the Jews” who have demanded his execution. Not “the Jewish Sanhedrin of Jesus’ day.” Not “the Jewish authorities,” but “The Jews.” Now why would a group of Jewish disciples be afraid of “the Jews”? Jesus himself was a Jew. It sounds a lot like saying that, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, the followers of Dr. King stayed in a locked room “for fear of the Americans.”
Sensing the absurdity present in the current text, we need to use our minds. The phrase “the Jews” is a translation of the Greek “hoi Ioudaioi.” Every major Protestant and Catholic Biblical scholar has explained that “hoi Ioudaioi” was not spoken by Jesus. In The Community of the Beloved Disciple, Fr. Raymond Brown, one of the best Biblical critics, Catholic or Protestant, of the past 50 years, argues that the word was inserted into the Fourth Gospel by the community that produced the Fourth Gospel because they had most probably been thrown out of Jewish synagogues after the council of Jamnia. It reflects a late first century polemic.
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the Church has been very clear about the danger of misinterpreting these texts (that is, claiming that “the Jews”—that is, every Jew of Jesus’ day-- conspired to kill Jesus. At Vatican II, the Church taught in Nostra Aetate that all of the Jews of Jesus’ day and the Jews of later generations are not to be blamed for the death of Christ. In his Speech to Symposium on the roots of anti-Judaism, Pope John Paul II has written “In the Christian world—I do not say on the part of the Church as such—erroneous and unjust interpretations of the New Testament regarding the Jewish people and their alleged culpability have circulated for too long, engendering feelings of hostility towards this people." He mentions in his Reflection on the Shoah that “Such interpretations of the New Testament have been totally and definitively rejected by the Second Vatican Council.”[1]
Yet, as I contemplate the scene and when I hear it read from the pulpit, I find the phrase “the Jews” jarring. Moreover, even though the Church has made it clear that these passages have to be placed in their historical context, as they are read, they have a particular effect. I contend that the very translation of the phrase “Hoi Ioudaioi” as “the Jews” fosters anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. First we need to clarify those terms. Anti-Judaism is a religious hatred and as such contains no racial hatred. Anti-Semitism, intimately connected to anti-Judaism, is a racial hatred. For the purpose of this paper, the two are so inter-related that I will use the terms interchangeably. It seems to me that centuries of anti-Judaism led to the anti-Semitism of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Today, as in the past, we need to examine why anti-Semitism and its closely related phenomenon anti-Judaism continue to exist.
At face and when analyzed, anti-Semitism is thoroughly irrational. In the first half of the twentieth century, when anti-Semitism reached its horrific zenith, the Jewish community was accused of controlling the world financial system and at the same time causing the Bolshevism that sought to undermine it—a strange and existentially vicious contradiction. Yet it was revealing—Nazis and Christians were obsessed with the Jew as a conspirator, always nefarious. Why would such an image develop? While I was attending a Bearing Witness Program in Washington, DC, one Catholic commentator remarked that anti-Judaism has been part of the Christian collective unconscious. Inasmuch as images of the Blessed Mother and the risen Christ give us peace, the unconscious image (archetype?) of Jews as conspiring to harm Christ and by extension--Christians has led us to horrific acts and outlandish accusations. It also seems that, sometime during modernity, anti-Judaism crept into the collective unconscious of Muslims. I personally think that there are many factors that contribute to anti-Semitism with the anti-Judaism of Christian sources being one of the most important factors. The views that led to the Nazi Holocaust were also fed by a bizarre racial Darwinism, rising nationalism in Europe, and a rejection of spirituality and ethics as the cultural grounding of Europe. Nonetheless, for decades we have been grappling with the question why so many Christians, Protestant and Catholic, actively cooperated with Nazism or were unwilling to risk their own lives to save the lives of their Jewish neighbors. Examining the anti-Semitic statements made by influential Christians over the last four decades such as Richard Nixon’s paranoiac “The Jews are all over the government. . . Most Jews are disloyal” and Mel Gibson’s, "The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world,"[2] we have to admit that to Christians, in many ways, Jews remain an other whom we frequently feel discomfort with, and even suspicion towards. Consider the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s claim that President Obama will not talk with him not because the President considers it prudent to part ways with a man who has made overtly racist comments, but because “them Jews aren't going to let him talk to me."[3] The Vatican’s welcoming back of Lefebvrist Bishop Williamson who (prior to discipline from Rome) had denied the Holocaust and accused the Jewish people of plotting world domination has once again brought the issue into the light. Because of this, I think it is time to take some significant action to undo the errors in the Gospel narrative that have leached their way into our Christian Collective Unconscious. It is time for a hermeneutical and translative metanoia .
Why consider a change in translation? First, if we simply reflect on our lived experience, we will have to admit that from time to time, we hear the word “Jew” used in a contemptuous way, and if not contemptuously, then irreverently or mockingly. What is the historical source of the association of the phrase “the Jews” with someone or something demonic? The clear answer is the historical roots of the expression in the Gospel of John. If we consider a different ethnic phrase such as “the English” or “the Americans,” we will have to admit that it does not carry the same linguistic valence. In and of itself, if a Jewish person were to say, “I am a Jew” there is no negativity to that. If someone were to say, “Jews are literate people” he would simply be stating a fact, but if a non-Jew says, “Here comes a Jew” or “Oh, the Jews” there is a bite, a sting to it. If you doubt this, consider the difference between saying “The members of the Jewish community are discussing this issue” and “The Jews are discussing this issue.” “The Jews,” when uttered by non-Jews with a particular tone, brings to mind the 2000 year old Christian habit of proclaiming on certain liturgical days that the Jews are conspiring to kill the savior. Quite simply, one must wonder how the cultural usage of the phrase “the Jews” would change if we changed the translation from “the Jews” to “the authorities.” I consider this particularly relevant because at The Shrine of the Blessed Sacrament in Washington DC, sometime in 1994, I heard a young Catholic priest preaching about the Gospel of John say, “And who is it that gives Jesus trouble? Why, of course, the Jews.” Thankfully, that was the only time I have ever heard a priest say such a thing.
As I comment upon this issue, I do so as one who has undergone his own metanoia. As a child, I knew only one Jewish boy. He was ridiculed by many of my Christian friends. One friend in particular would shout “Jew” or “Hebe” whenever we saw David. I didn’t always like it when he did it. In all honesty, I didn’t shout at the Jewish boy, but I didn’t tell my friend to be quiet. I didn’t find it funny, but I didn’t see why I should stand up to my friend and ask him to stop. On another occasion, when I was fourteen, thinking it funny to be obnoxious around my Catholic friends, I did shout something offensive to a group of Jewish students at a rival high school. They laughed—more at the shock value than anything else. On another occasion, when I was in college, a relative of mine (who tends to say ethnic things about everyone, himself included) continuously referred to one man as “Herbie the Jew.”
Now that we have established the fact that the current translation of the Gospel of John has fomented hatred and intolerance in our world, we next need to consider why the effect that a translation has upon a society determines the validity of a translation. Every translation is an interpretation. For example, St. Jerome, influenced by his own theological horizons, translated the opening verse of Psalm 23 as “The Lord rules me.” This translation, the Vulgate, stood as the official Catholic interpretation that was read at the Mass, prayed with, and studied in seminaries for a Millenium. Throughout the centuries, the Jewish community had always understood that translation to be less accurate than the translation we use now: “The Lord is my shepherd.” In Protestant circles, “The Lord is my shepherd” became the translation thanks to the reformers. How does this particular verse demonstrate that every translation is an interpretation? During the act of translation, a translator studies many different translations of the Bible. That is, when translating the Hebrew Scriptures, she looks at a variety of early Hebrew or Greek versions, the Aramaic targums, Jerome’s Vulgate, English translations, French translations, and countless other texts and compares how a particular verse is written in those texts. As seen in Psalm 23, one Bible may understand Psalm 23 as “the Lord rules me” and another may understand the Psalm as “the Lord is my shepherd.” These are very different understandings. “The Lord is my shepherd” is much more tender than “the Lord rules me,” and given the Christian and Jewish experience of a loving God, “the Lord is my shepherd” is the more accurate translation. As translators have analyzed the Psalms, they have also analyzed the Greek New Testament. When a translator is considering a particular passage, she once again compares a variety of texts. Basically, a translator, or more accurately, a community of translators looks at the various reasons for a translation, discerns how the Spirit of Truth is at work, and then makes a decision about how the translation should be written. How does the nature of a translation weigh in on the translation of “Hoi Ioudaioi”? We must study the various texts and look at all of the reasons it has been translated as “the Jews.” We must ask as we asked with Psalm 23 whether “the Jews” is the most loving translation of “Hoi Ioudaioi.”
At The Catholic University of America, when I would discuss Biblical translation and interpretation with Professor Stephen Happel, personal theologian to Cardinal McCarrick, he would remind me that a text is the performance of the text and that there is no such thing as a value neutral translation. Dr. Happel would frequently point out that a text is just “marks on a page” until there is a reader who interprets those marks on the page. The Bible has never been able to read itself. It becomes the Word of God for a community as it is read, and in the reading, performed, that is, lived by the community of readers. Moreover, the translation is always informed by the moral, theological and spiritual horizons of the translators. That is, the task of translation is always informed by the level of a translator’s attentiveness to all of the relevant data regarding a text, the intelligence of the translator, the ability of the translator to discern the various reasons for a particular translation and against another translation, and by the commitment of a translator to the responsible use of skills as he seeks to live what he has learned from the study of translation.
What makes a good translation is a good translator and a good translator is aware of the history of translations and the effects those translations have had upon the Christian community as we attempt to live the Gospel in the world of Christians and non-Christians. Another way to understand this is to say that the Christian Truth is a lived truth. It is not an abstraction. We understand this from the beautiful poetry, the inspired word, of the Fourth Gospel itself. As the community of the Fourth Gospel produced the Fourth Gospel, the community reflected on the meaning of the oral tradition about Jesus, and guided by the Holy Spirit, the community tells us that Jesus said that he is the “way, the truth and the life.” Jesus, the word of God (John 1:1), tells us that he is the truth. Jesus is alive. The truth is something that lives. It is not just a concept that we memorize and then talk about. It is the way of love. “Beloved, let us love one another for love is of God and God is love.” (1 John 4:7) What does this mean for translation? It means that a Christian translation is valid if it promotes love and understanding. An interpretation that promotes division and suspicion between Christians and another religion is not a living truth but a distortion and an interpretation that has historically encouraged Christians to slaughter Jews or to stand by in indifference as Jews are slaughtered, terrorized, or neglected (as the translation “the Jews” has done) is completely antithetical to the truth.
Furthermore, as Christians, we know that God’s word is active. As the Lord tells us in Isaiah 55,
9 As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts.
10
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 him who sows and bread to him who eats,
11
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.
The word of God acts like the rain and snow, actively watering the fields. Moisture accumulates, the clouds gather, the moisture actively condenses in time, and acts in time to water the fields. Then the wheat and corn grow. God’s word is spoken in time, written in time, translated in time, meditated upon in time, discussed in time and lived in time. As the weather changes, as farmers develop new strategies for harnessing the weather to feed their people, so the cultural milieu for understanding God’s word changes. In the modern and post-modern world, we have developed a reflective cultural milieu, one that examines the historical origin and the validity of our traditions. Hence, in a new era, the Holy Spirit will reveal new insights.
God’s word acts as history unfolds. God’s word as logos is not a philosophical concept or a phrase to be memorized and used to test whether others have memorized the word or particular word. God’s word as logos in the fourth Gospel is a translation of the Hebrew term dabar, and as we see in the previous passage from Isaiah, God’s dabar is active in history. This leads us to ask, as we proclaim that the disciples were hiding from “the Jews” and that “the Jews” conspired to kill Christ, whether, in this translation, we are actively listening to how God is speaking his word to us now, in a world in which Christians have killed and tortured millions of Jews from the time of Constantine to 1948 and in which Christians have been involved in conflicts with Jews from the time of Constantine until this present moment. Can the Holy Spirit who guides the Church be leading Catholics to conclude that centuries of brutality toward and suspicion toward “the Jews” motivated by the fourth Gospel’s blaming “the Jews” for the death of Christ endorse maintaining the current translation of Hoi Ioudaioi as “the Jews”? This question is particularly relevant as we consider the words of Pope John Paul II (as he comments upon Vatican II’s document on Judaism and other non-Christian religions):
We deeply regret the errors and failures of those sons and daughters of the Church. We make our own what is said in the Second Vatican Council's Declaration Nostra Aetate, which unequivocally affirms: "The Church ... mindful of her common patrimony with the Jews, and motivated by the Gospel's spiritual love and by no political considerations, deplores the hatred, persecutions and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews at any time and from any source".(18)
The highlighted terms “from any source” call us to reflect: can we finally in all humility and sincerity admit that the language of one of the four canonical Gospels is a source of anti-Judaism and hence, anti-Semitism? As a Catholic, I find that I can answer this question very easily. Since we belong to a communitarian tradition that recognizes that it was the Holy Spirit motivating human Christian communities to produce each Gospel, we can say “Yes, our tradition has some minor distortions which can be corrected and one of those corrections is the mistranslation of Hoi Ioudaioi as ‘the Jews.’” The Catholic Church is communitarian. Interpreting the Bible in the Catholic Church is never just a ”me and Jesus” operation. We believe that scripture developed within the context of the situation in life of the early Christian community. We also know that the community deliberated and discerned about which writings should belong in the Christian Scriptures. Within this context of communal interpretation, we have come to understand that the community teaches authoritatively. Hence the term “magisterium”—the official teaching authority of the community. The magisterium, the teaching office of the Bishops in union with the Pope, tends to get a lot of negative news coverage, and in some cases, justifiably so. There have been times when bishops have erroneously disciplined theologians. The history of the development of Catholic doctrine tends to read like this: scholar X publishes a legitimate interpretation, the Pope or individual bishops investigate the interpretation, the bishops declare the interpretation erroneous and suppress the theologian’s writings, after a generation or two, the magisterium decides that after all, the interpretation is insightful, even authoritative. In such a manner, Thomas Aquinas, Galileo, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, John Courtney Murray, Karl Rahner, and certain aspects of liberation theology have been suppressed and then embraced. In the case of this translation, I know of no scholar whose writings have been suppressed, but I do know of many Catholics who have puzzled about how to read “the Jews.” We have been seriously studying this situation for decades and wondering about solutions. I think we should consider an act of magisterial teaching authority.
It is important to note that the actions of individual members of what we consider the magisterium or at least the historical forerunners of those we call the magisterium have not always treated Jews with kindness. As a matter of fact, their acting on the mistranslation of the Gospel of John has produced the following anti-Judaic statements (which no doubt led to anti-Judaic actions):
Justin Martyr in his Dialogue with Trypho claimed that Jewish suffering was due to the fact that “the Jews” had killed the Messiah:
For the circumcision according to the flesh, which is from Abraham, was given for a sign; that you may be separated from other nations, and from us; and that you alone may suffer that which you now justly suffer; and that your land may be desolate, and your cities burned with fire; and that strangers may eat your fruit in your presence, and not one of you may go up to Jerusalem.' For you are not recognised among the rest of men by any other mark than your fleshly circumcision. For none of you, I suppose, will venture to say that God neither did nor does foresee the events, which are future, nor fore-ordained his deserts for each one. Accordingly, these things have happened to you in fairness and justice, for you have slain the Just One, and His prophets before Him.[4]
Augustine follows suit in Against Faustus: “the Church admits and avows the Jewish people to be cursed, because after killing Christ they continue to till the ground of an earthly circumcision. . .”[5]
Augustine again in On the Psalms:
O you Jews, killed him. Whence did you kill Him? With the sword of the tongue: for ye did whet your tongues. And when did ye smite, except when ye cried out, “Crucify, crucify”? .... This is the whole of the Jews sagacity, this is that which they sought as some great matter. Let us kill and let us not kill: so let us kill, as that we may not ourselves be judged to have killed’[6]
John Chrysostom is even more shocking in that he prescribes a particular course of action for what he considers the crime of “The Jews”: “Although such beasts are unfit for work, they are fit for killing. And this is what happened to the Jews: while they were making themselves unfit for work, they grew fit for slaughter.”[7]
Now, ironically, I will make the case that the very same men who misinterpreted the Gospel of John also provided a method for undoing the mistranslation that led to the current crisis. Consider the fact that the New Testament canon was not given some universal official status until 393 at the Council of Hippo Regius (The canon was finally defined at an ecumenical council at Trent in the 1540s). That is, the early Church bishops and theologians actually debated which writings from the early Church should be considered inspired. There were a series of debates. One of the first concerned the writings of Gnostic Christians. Around 180 CE, Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, rejected the Gnostic Gospels because they did not teach what was taught in the churches that were founded by the apostles of Jesus. Later debates considered whether or not the Book of Revelation should be included in the canon. The fact that the community debated which texts should be included based upon what the apostles had taught their ancestors which their ancestors in the Christian faith then orally passed down to them points to a deeper reality—the later words about Jesus were judged by what the Christian community was living which was inherited from those who had lived with Jesus. What the apostles, who were Jewish, had lived, was caritas flowing from agape—love. It is telling that Irenaeus considers the Gnostic writings outside the canon because they did not contain passion and death accounts—the very testimony of Christ’s love. So, what we can conclude is that the reality of love guided the early leaders of the Church as they considered the validity of various writings about Jesus. Why then, did they do the unloving thing and include passages blaming the Jews for the death of Christ? They were people of their time. Walter Benjamin once remarked that every act of civilization is also an act of barbarism. Rene Girard has demonstrated that as cultures are forming, including our early Christian culture, people tend to be scapegoated. It is a dynamic of the culture of humanity to exclude, even to do violence to, an “other.” However, in all truly Catholic traditions, traditions that are open to the whole truth, we seek to move beyond the violent, resentful dynamic of culture and move into the kingdom of God, which excludes no one.
But does moving into the kingdom of God include re-translating a Gospel? Yes, since to do so would continue our acts of repentance (teshuva) for two millennia of massacres, demonstrate to Jewish people that the Catholic Church is a real peace-maker when dealing with fate of Israel, and prevent future discord between Christians and Jews. Consider the following situation: nothing better exemplifies harmony between Christians and Jews than the loving marriage between a Christian and a Jew. But imagine what it must be like for the Jewish spouse who accompanies his/her Christian spouse to a Christian liturgy and hears that “the Jews” conspired to kill the Christian messiah. It has to cause extreme discomfort. To overcome this and other possible suffering, we need to change the translation.
How then can the Catholic Church claim authority to change a translation which has stood for two millennia? Consider the change to be proposed:
John 8:32-44:
Jesus then said to a crowd of people who believed in him, "If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." They answered him, "We are descendants of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone. 16 How can you say, 'You will become free'?" Jesus answered them, "Amen, amen, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin. A slave does not remain in a household forever, but a son 17 always remains. So if a son frees you, then you will truly be free. I know that you are descendants of Abraham. But you are trying to kill me, because my word has no room among you. 18 I tell you what I have seen in the Father's presence; then do what you have heard from the Father." 19 They answered and said to him, "Our father is Abraham." Jesus said to them, "If you were Abraham's children, you would be doing the works of Abraham. But now you are trying to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God; Abraham did not do this. You are doing the works of your father!" (So) they said to him, "We are not illegitimate. We have one Father, God." Jesus said to them, "If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and am here; I did not come on my own, but he sent me. Why do you not understand what I am saying? Because you cannot bear to hear my word. You belong to your father the devil and you willingly carry out your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in truth, because there is no truth in him.
John 19:15
And he said to the Jewish authorities, "Behold, your king!"
They cried out, "Take him away, take him away! Crucify him!"
John 20:19
On the evening of that first day of the week, when the doors were locked, where the disciples were, for fear of the authorities
There is nothing lost and everything gained from the proposed change. Jesus is still Messiah. Christian moral teaching is still grounded. No doctrines have been altered and the violence that existed in previous translations has been overcome.
As we examine the various possible translations of a Gospel, we need to remember that each Gospel did not fall from the sky ready to interpret itself. In each of the communities that produced a Gospel, the community acted under the guidance of the Holy Spirit in re-telling the stories of Jesus that related to their situation in life. Each Gospel was the product of a tradition of communal reflection. The community would ask, as I am asking, what words of Jesus will help us to live life fully—and that means justly—today, and the words of Jesus most relevant then as now are love and metanoia.
The change that metanoia brings is intellectual, moral and religious and one of the intellectual changes that Christians most need is to accept that inspiration does not mean that the word of God was divinely dictated to each evangelist. Each evangelist was in most cases a representative of a community that reflected on the meaning of the life of Jesus in relation to their communal living. In the case of the Fourth Gospel, the community reflected on the meaning of the life of Jesus and developed the awesome theology of Jesus as “the word” that became flesh. Some of the most moving theology in the Christian tradition is found in the Gospel of John, but there is another element of that Gospel. It was the product of a community that had suffered a wound—they had been turned away from Jewish synagogues because of their belief in Jesus. They then did what many human beings do—they wrote their resentment into a text—the Gospel text. They were Jews who had come to believe that Jesus was divine and were now grappling with being rejected from a community to which they had belonged. It was at that point that they decided to re-write the history of the Roman crucifixion of Jesus and to blame his death on the community that had rejected them—“the Jews.” Every Catholic teacher explains that, as Vatican II explained, the Bible is “the word of God in the words of human beings.” There is a divine element to scripture and a human element to scripture. “Hoi Ioudaioi” is a product of the sinful human element of resentment. As such, it is not essential to the word of God. Because of this, the Universal Magisterium, through synod or otherwise, should adopt this new translation.
In this paper, since I am not an ecclesiologist, I will not consider what the proper limits of Magisterial authority are. I will simply make the case that the Bishops of the Catholic Church have the authority to adopt this new translation. We have interpreted scripture in the context of a dynamic tradition for 2000 years. The community, in prayer, debate, and reflection took 330 years to agree on which early Christian writings it would consider to be inspired. In the meantime, Christian Bishops and theologians were busy defining doctrine. For example, in 325 at Nicea, “homoousion,” which is not a Biblical term, was introduced into the creed. The term defines how Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox Christians understand Jesus—that he is “one in being with” the Father. This occurred 42 years before the Council of Hippo Regius defined the canon. The Church’s use of homoousion helped the community to understand the meaning of the Gospel even before the Church had finally agreed on which books should be included in the New Testament canon. Hence, the authority of the magisterium has in many ways translated the meaning of the Gospel to the community. For this reason, the magisterium can make a decision regarding the proper translation of a Biblical term which has produced such turmoil in our attempt to imitate Christ.
For all of these reasons, at this time, having heeded Pope John Paul II’s insights regarding the Shoah, having listened to the Bishops and theologians of the Church at Vatican II and having prayed with Pope Benedict over the reality that God is love and that love is lived, I urge a more loving, more living translation of the Gospel of John. The term “the Jews” must be removed from the Gospel and “Hoi Ioudaioi” must be translated as “the crowd” or “the authorities.”I hope now, as I pray with the Gospel of John, that as I enter into the resurrection scene, my fears might better connect with the fears of the early disciples. We all have fears and we are all surprised when the risen Lord enters our scene and blows them away. I have fears, but I do not fear Jews, nor do I even want to imagine that there is any reason to fear a people as forgiving, as intelligent, as generous, and as helpful as the Jewish community.
[1] L'Osservatore Romano, 1 November 1997, p. 6.
[2] Reported by Jeremiah Marquez, SFGate, online service of the San Francisco Chronicle, Monday, July 31, 2006, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006/07/31/entertainment/e143903D69.DTL&type=politics#ixzz0RlbPByMC (accessed October 24, 2009).
[3] FOXNews.com, Wednesday, June 10, 2009, http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/06/10/wright-suggests-jews-white-house-wont-let-speak-obama (Accessed October 24, 2009).
[4] Justin, Dialogue with Trypho, Chapter XVI, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/justinmartyr-dialoguetrypho.html.
[5] St. Augustine, Against Faustus, Chapter 11 (Translation by Richard Stothert), http://www.logoslibrary.org/augustine/faustus/1211.html.
[6] St Augustine, On the Psalms, 63:4,5, quoted in Fr. Vasile Mihoc, St Paul and the Jews According to St John Chrysostom’s Commentary on Romans 9-11, http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/religious_studies/SBL2007/Mihoc.pdf, September 30, 2009.
[7] Medieval Sourcebook: Saint John Chrysostom: Eight Homilies Against the Jews, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/chrysostom-jews6.html#HOMILY_I.
As I pray with the resurrection accounts in Chapter 20 of the Gospel of John, in my imagination, I can see a silhouette of the risen Lord, in my backyard, inviting me to be with him. There is no artifice in him. He plays no games. He just is and his presence fills my heart with hope. For a very significant moment, I am not concerned about the affairs of the secular world. For a moment, I feel my purpose renewed. Glances and shimmering fragments of grace enlighten my mind, but then there is a jarring moment. I come upon the sentence “On the evening of that first day of the week, when the doors were locked, where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews. . . .” “The Jews”--the phrase bounces around in my mind. The disciples are afraid of the Jews. But the disciples were Jews. I return to the risen Lord. He’s still there, but now I am watching him with this awareness, that somewhere in the scene, the disciples are afraid of “the Jews.” These disciples—Peter, whom we as Catholics consider the first bishop of Rome, James, John, and other heroes of the early Church, they are afraid of the Jews. Why are they afraid of “the Jews”? We get our answer in John 19:6-7 in which Pilate protests that Jesus is innocent and “The Jews answered, ‘We have a law, and according to that law he ought to die. . .’” Later in John 19: 15 “The Jews cried out ‘Take him away! Crucify him.” As John portrays it, even though Jesus was crucified by the Romans, it is “the Jews” who have demanded his execution. Not “the Jewish Sanhedrin of Jesus’ day.” Not “the Jewish authorities,” but “The Jews.” Now why would a group of Jewish disciples be afraid of “the Jews”? Jesus himself was a Jew. It sounds a lot like saying that, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, the followers of Dr. King stayed in a locked room “for fear of the Americans.”
Sensing the absurdity present in the current text, we need to use our minds. The phrase “the Jews” is a translation of the Greek “hoi Ioudaioi.” Every major Protestant and Catholic Biblical scholar has explained that “hoi Ioudaioi” was not spoken by Jesus. In The Community of the Beloved Disciple, Fr. Raymond Brown, one of the best Biblical critics, Catholic or Protestant, of the past 50 years, argues that the word was inserted into the Fourth Gospel by the community that produced the Fourth Gospel because they had most probably been thrown out of Jewish synagogues after the council of Jamnia. It reflects a late first century polemic.
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the Church has been very clear about the danger of misinterpreting these texts (that is, claiming that “the Jews”—that is, every Jew of Jesus’ day-- conspired to kill Jesus. At Vatican II, the Church taught in Nostra Aetate that all of the Jews of Jesus’ day and the Jews of later generations are not to be blamed for the death of Christ. In his Speech to Symposium on the roots of anti-Judaism, Pope John Paul II has written “In the Christian world—I do not say on the part of the Church as such—erroneous and unjust interpretations of the New Testament regarding the Jewish people and their alleged culpability have circulated for too long, engendering feelings of hostility towards this people." He mentions in his Reflection on the Shoah that “Such interpretations of the New Testament have been totally and definitively rejected by the Second Vatican Council.”[1]
Yet, as I contemplate the scene and when I hear it read from the pulpit, I find the phrase “the Jews” jarring. Moreover, even though the Church has made it clear that these passages have to be placed in their historical context, as they are read, they have a particular effect. I contend that the very translation of the phrase “Hoi Ioudaioi” as “the Jews” fosters anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. First we need to clarify those terms. Anti-Judaism is a religious hatred and as such contains no racial hatred. Anti-Semitism, intimately connected to anti-Judaism, is a racial hatred. For the purpose of this paper, the two are so inter-related that I will use the terms interchangeably. It seems to me that centuries of anti-Judaism led to the anti-Semitism of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Today, as in the past, we need to examine why anti-Semitism and its closely related phenomenon anti-Judaism continue to exist.
At face and when analyzed, anti-Semitism is thoroughly irrational. In the first half of the twentieth century, when anti-Semitism reached its horrific zenith, the Jewish community was accused of controlling the world financial system and at the same time causing the Bolshevism that sought to undermine it—a strange and existentially vicious contradiction. Yet it was revealing—Nazis and Christians were obsessed with the Jew as a conspirator, always nefarious. Why would such an image develop? While I was attending a Bearing Witness Program in Washington, DC, one Catholic commentator remarked that anti-Judaism has been part of the Christian collective unconscious. Inasmuch as images of the Blessed Mother and the risen Christ give us peace, the unconscious image (archetype?) of Jews as conspiring to harm Christ and by extension--Christians has led us to horrific acts and outlandish accusations. It also seems that, sometime during modernity, anti-Judaism crept into the collective unconscious of Muslims. I personally think that there are many factors that contribute to anti-Semitism with the anti-Judaism of Christian sources being one of the most important factors. The views that led to the Nazi Holocaust were also fed by a bizarre racial Darwinism, rising nationalism in Europe, and a rejection of spirituality and ethics as the cultural grounding of Europe. Nonetheless, for decades we have been grappling with the question why so many Christians, Protestant and Catholic, actively cooperated with Nazism or were unwilling to risk their own lives to save the lives of their Jewish neighbors. Examining the anti-Semitic statements made by influential Christians over the last four decades such as Richard Nixon’s paranoiac “The Jews are all over the government. . . Most Jews are disloyal” and Mel Gibson’s, "The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world,"[2] we have to admit that to Christians, in many ways, Jews remain an other whom we frequently feel discomfort with, and even suspicion towards. Consider the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s claim that President Obama will not talk with him not because the President considers it prudent to part ways with a man who has made overtly racist comments, but because “them Jews aren't going to let him talk to me."[3] The Vatican’s welcoming back of Lefebvrist Bishop Williamson who (prior to discipline from Rome) had denied the Holocaust and accused the Jewish people of plotting world domination has once again brought the issue into the light. Because of this, I think it is time to take some significant action to undo the errors in the Gospel narrative that have leached their way into our Christian Collective Unconscious. It is time for a hermeneutical and translative metanoia .
Why consider a change in translation? First, if we simply reflect on our lived experience, we will have to admit that from time to time, we hear the word “Jew” used in a contemptuous way, and if not contemptuously, then irreverently or mockingly. What is the historical source of the association of the phrase “the Jews” with someone or something demonic? The clear answer is the historical roots of the expression in the Gospel of John. If we consider a different ethnic phrase such as “the English” or “the Americans,” we will have to admit that it does not carry the same linguistic valence. In and of itself, if a Jewish person were to say, “I am a Jew” there is no negativity to that. If someone were to say, “Jews are literate people” he would simply be stating a fact, but if a non-Jew says, “Here comes a Jew” or “Oh, the Jews” there is a bite, a sting to it. If you doubt this, consider the difference between saying “The members of the Jewish community are discussing this issue” and “The Jews are discussing this issue.” “The Jews,” when uttered by non-Jews with a particular tone, brings to mind the 2000 year old Christian habit of proclaiming on certain liturgical days that the Jews are conspiring to kill the savior. Quite simply, one must wonder how the cultural usage of the phrase “the Jews” would change if we changed the translation from “the Jews” to “the authorities.” I consider this particularly relevant because at The Shrine of the Blessed Sacrament in Washington DC, sometime in 1994, I heard a young Catholic priest preaching about the Gospel of John say, “And who is it that gives Jesus trouble? Why, of course, the Jews.” Thankfully, that was the only time I have ever heard a priest say such a thing.
As I comment upon this issue, I do so as one who has undergone his own metanoia. As a child, I knew only one Jewish boy. He was ridiculed by many of my Christian friends. One friend in particular would shout “Jew” or “Hebe” whenever we saw David. I didn’t always like it when he did it. In all honesty, I didn’t shout at the Jewish boy, but I didn’t tell my friend to be quiet. I didn’t find it funny, but I didn’t see why I should stand up to my friend and ask him to stop. On another occasion, when I was fourteen, thinking it funny to be obnoxious around my Catholic friends, I did shout something offensive to a group of Jewish students at a rival high school. They laughed—more at the shock value than anything else. On another occasion, when I was in college, a relative of mine (who tends to say ethnic things about everyone, himself included) continuously referred to one man as “Herbie the Jew.”
Now that we have established the fact that the current translation of the Gospel of John has fomented hatred and intolerance in our world, we next need to consider why the effect that a translation has upon a society determines the validity of a translation. Every translation is an interpretation. For example, St. Jerome, influenced by his own theological horizons, translated the opening verse of Psalm 23 as “The Lord rules me.” This translation, the Vulgate, stood as the official Catholic interpretation that was read at the Mass, prayed with, and studied in seminaries for a Millenium. Throughout the centuries, the Jewish community had always understood that translation to be less accurate than the translation we use now: “The Lord is my shepherd.” In Protestant circles, “The Lord is my shepherd” became the translation thanks to the reformers. How does this particular verse demonstrate that every translation is an interpretation? During the act of translation, a translator studies many different translations of the Bible. That is, when translating the Hebrew Scriptures, she looks at a variety of early Hebrew or Greek versions, the Aramaic targums, Jerome’s Vulgate, English translations, French translations, and countless other texts and compares how a particular verse is written in those texts. As seen in Psalm 23, one Bible may understand Psalm 23 as “the Lord rules me” and another may understand the Psalm as “the Lord is my shepherd.” These are very different understandings. “The Lord is my shepherd” is much more tender than “the Lord rules me,” and given the Christian and Jewish experience of a loving God, “the Lord is my shepherd” is the more accurate translation. As translators have analyzed the Psalms, they have also analyzed the Greek New Testament. When a translator is considering a particular passage, she once again compares a variety of texts. Basically, a translator, or more accurately, a community of translators looks at the various reasons for a translation, discerns how the Spirit of Truth is at work, and then makes a decision about how the translation should be written. How does the nature of a translation weigh in on the translation of “Hoi Ioudaioi”? We must study the various texts and look at all of the reasons it has been translated as “the Jews.” We must ask as we asked with Psalm 23 whether “the Jews” is the most loving translation of “Hoi Ioudaioi.”
At The Catholic University of America, when I would discuss Biblical translation and interpretation with Professor Stephen Happel, personal theologian to Cardinal McCarrick, he would remind me that a text is the performance of the text and that there is no such thing as a value neutral translation. Dr. Happel would frequently point out that a text is just “marks on a page” until there is a reader who interprets those marks on the page. The Bible has never been able to read itself. It becomes the Word of God for a community as it is read, and in the reading, performed, that is, lived by the community of readers. Moreover, the translation is always informed by the moral, theological and spiritual horizons of the translators. That is, the task of translation is always informed by the level of a translator’s attentiveness to all of the relevant data regarding a text, the intelligence of the translator, the ability of the translator to discern the various reasons for a particular translation and against another translation, and by the commitment of a translator to the responsible use of skills as he seeks to live what he has learned from the study of translation.
What makes a good translation is a good translator and a good translator is aware of the history of translations and the effects those translations have had upon the Christian community as we attempt to live the Gospel in the world of Christians and non-Christians. Another way to understand this is to say that the Christian Truth is a lived truth. It is not an abstraction. We understand this from the beautiful poetry, the inspired word, of the Fourth Gospel itself. As the community of the Fourth Gospel produced the Fourth Gospel, the community reflected on the meaning of the oral tradition about Jesus, and guided by the Holy Spirit, the community tells us that Jesus said that he is the “way, the truth and the life.” Jesus, the word of God (John 1:1), tells us that he is the truth. Jesus is alive. The truth is something that lives. It is not just a concept that we memorize and then talk about. It is the way of love. “Beloved, let us love one another for love is of God and God is love.” (1 John 4:7) What does this mean for translation? It means that a Christian translation is valid if it promotes love and understanding. An interpretation that promotes division and suspicion between Christians and another religion is not a living truth but a distortion and an interpretation that has historically encouraged Christians to slaughter Jews or to stand by in indifference as Jews are slaughtered, terrorized, or neglected (as the translation “the Jews” has done) is completely antithetical to the truth.
Furthermore, as Christians, we know that God’s word is active. As the Lord tells us in Isaiah 55,
9 As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts.
10
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 him who sows and bread to him who eats,
11
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.
The word of God acts like the rain and snow, actively watering the fields. Moisture accumulates, the clouds gather, the moisture actively condenses in time, and acts in time to water the fields. Then the wheat and corn grow. God’s word is spoken in time, written in time, translated in time, meditated upon in time, discussed in time and lived in time. As the weather changes, as farmers develop new strategies for harnessing the weather to feed their people, so the cultural milieu for understanding God’s word changes. In the modern and post-modern world, we have developed a reflective cultural milieu, one that examines the historical origin and the validity of our traditions. Hence, in a new era, the Holy Spirit will reveal new insights.
God’s word acts as history unfolds. God’s word as logos is not a philosophical concept or a phrase to be memorized and used to test whether others have memorized the word or particular word. God’s word as logos in the fourth Gospel is a translation of the Hebrew term dabar, and as we see in the previous passage from Isaiah, God’s dabar is active in history. This leads us to ask, as we proclaim that the disciples were hiding from “the Jews” and that “the Jews” conspired to kill Christ, whether, in this translation, we are actively listening to how God is speaking his word to us now, in a world in which Christians have killed and tortured millions of Jews from the time of Constantine to 1948 and in which Christians have been involved in conflicts with Jews from the time of Constantine until this present moment. Can the Holy Spirit who guides the Church be leading Catholics to conclude that centuries of brutality toward and suspicion toward “the Jews” motivated by the fourth Gospel’s blaming “the Jews” for the death of Christ endorse maintaining the current translation of Hoi Ioudaioi as “the Jews”? This question is particularly relevant as we consider the words of Pope John Paul II (as he comments upon Vatican II’s document on Judaism and other non-Christian religions):
We deeply regret the errors and failures of those sons and daughters of the Church. We make our own what is said in the Second Vatican Council's Declaration Nostra Aetate, which unequivocally affirms: "The Church ... mindful of her common patrimony with the Jews, and motivated by the Gospel's spiritual love and by no political considerations, deplores the hatred, persecutions and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews at any time and from any source".(18)
The highlighted terms “from any source” call us to reflect: can we finally in all humility and sincerity admit that the language of one of the four canonical Gospels is a source of anti-Judaism and hence, anti-Semitism? As a Catholic, I find that I can answer this question very easily. Since we belong to a communitarian tradition that recognizes that it was the Holy Spirit motivating human Christian communities to produce each Gospel, we can say “Yes, our tradition has some minor distortions which can be corrected and one of those corrections is the mistranslation of Hoi Ioudaioi as ‘the Jews.’” The Catholic Church is communitarian. Interpreting the Bible in the Catholic Church is never just a ”me and Jesus” operation. We believe that scripture developed within the context of the situation in life of the early Christian community. We also know that the community deliberated and discerned about which writings should belong in the Christian Scriptures. Within this context of communal interpretation, we have come to understand that the community teaches authoritatively. Hence the term “magisterium”—the official teaching authority of the community. The magisterium, the teaching office of the Bishops in union with the Pope, tends to get a lot of negative news coverage, and in some cases, justifiably so. There have been times when bishops have erroneously disciplined theologians. The history of the development of Catholic doctrine tends to read like this: scholar X publishes a legitimate interpretation, the Pope or individual bishops investigate the interpretation, the bishops declare the interpretation erroneous and suppress the theologian’s writings, after a generation or two, the magisterium decides that after all, the interpretation is insightful, even authoritative. In such a manner, Thomas Aquinas, Galileo, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, John Courtney Murray, Karl Rahner, and certain aspects of liberation theology have been suppressed and then embraced. In the case of this translation, I know of no scholar whose writings have been suppressed, but I do know of many Catholics who have puzzled about how to read “the Jews.” We have been seriously studying this situation for decades and wondering about solutions. I think we should consider an act of magisterial teaching authority.
It is important to note that the actions of individual members of what we consider the magisterium or at least the historical forerunners of those we call the magisterium have not always treated Jews with kindness. As a matter of fact, their acting on the mistranslation of the Gospel of John has produced the following anti-Judaic statements (which no doubt led to anti-Judaic actions):
Justin Martyr in his Dialogue with Trypho claimed that Jewish suffering was due to the fact that “the Jews” had killed the Messiah:
For the circumcision according to the flesh, which is from Abraham, was given for a sign; that you may be separated from other nations, and from us; and that you alone may suffer that which you now justly suffer; and that your land may be desolate, and your cities burned with fire; and that strangers may eat your fruit in your presence, and not one of you may go up to Jerusalem.' For you are not recognised among the rest of men by any other mark than your fleshly circumcision. For none of you, I suppose, will venture to say that God neither did nor does foresee the events, which are future, nor fore-ordained his deserts for each one. Accordingly, these things have happened to you in fairness and justice, for you have slain the Just One, and His prophets before Him.[4]
Augustine follows suit in Against Faustus: “the Church admits and avows the Jewish people to be cursed, because after killing Christ they continue to till the ground of an earthly circumcision. . .”[5]
Augustine again in On the Psalms:
O you Jews, killed him. Whence did you kill Him? With the sword of the tongue: for ye did whet your tongues. And when did ye smite, except when ye cried out, “Crucify, crucify”? .... This is the whole of the Jews sagacity, this is that which they sought as some great matter. Let us kill and let us not kill: so let us kill, as that we may not ourselves be judged to have killed’[6]
John Chrysostom is even more shocking in that he prescribes a particular course of action for what he considers the crime of “The Jews”: “Although such beasts are unfit for work, they are fit for killing. And this is what happened to the Jews: while they were making themselves unfit for work, they grew fit for slaughter.”[7]
Now, ironically, I will make the case that the very same men who misinterpreted the Gospel of John also provided a method for undoing the mistranslation that led to the current crisis. Consider the fact that the New Testament canon was not given some universal official status until 393 at the Council of Hippo Regius (The canon was finally defined at an ecumenical council at Trent in the 1540s). That is, the early Church bishops and theologians actually debated which writings from the early Church should be considered inspired. There were a series of debates. One of the first concerned the writings of Gnostic Christians. Around 180 CE, Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, rejected the Gnostic Gospels because they did not teach what was taught in the churches that were founded by the apostles of Jesus. Later debates considered whether or not the Book of Revelation should be included in the canon. The fact that the community debated which texts should be included based upon what the apostles had taught their ancestors which their ancestors in the Christian faith then orally passed down to them points to a deeper reality—the later words about Jesus were judged by what the Christian community was living which was inherited from those who had lived with Jesus. What the apostles, who were Jewish, had lived, was caritas flowing from agape—love. It is telling that Irenaeus considers the Gnostic writings outside the canon because they did not contain passion and death accounts—the very testimony of Christ’s love. So, what we can conclude is that the reality of love guided the early leaders of the Church as they considered the validity of various writings about Jesus. Why then, did they do the unloving thing and include passages blaming the Jews for the death of Christ? They were people of their time. Walter Benjamin once remarked that every act of civilization is also an act of barbarism. Rene Girard has demonstrated that as cultures are forming, including our early Christian culture, people tend to be scapegoated. It is a dynamic of the culture of humanity to exclude, even to do violence to, an “other.” However, in all truly Catholic traditions, traditions that are open to the whole truth, we seek to move beyond the violent, resentful dynamic of culture and move into the kingdom of God, which excludes no one.
But does moving into the kingdom of God include re-translating a Gospel? Yes, since to do so would continue our acts of repentance (teshuva) for two millennia of massacres, demonstrate to Jewish people that the Catholic Church is a real peace-maker when dealing with fate of Israel, and prevent future discord between Christians and Jews. Consider the following situation: nothing better exemplifies harmony between Christians and Jews than the loving marriage between a Christian and a Jew. But imagine what it must be like for the Jewish spouse who accompanies his/her Christian spouse to a Christian liturgy and hears that “the Jews” conspired to kill the Christian messiah. It has to cause extreme discomfort. To overcome this and other possible suffering, we need to change the translation.
How then can the Catholic Church claim authority to change a translation which has stood for two millennia? Consider the change to be proposed:
John 8:32-44:
Jesus then said to a crowd of people who believed in him, "If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." They answered him, "We are descendants of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone. 16 How can you say, 'You will become free'?" Jesus answered them, "Amen, amen, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin. A slave does not remain in a household forever, but a son 17 always remains. So if a son frees you, then you will truly be free. I know that you are descendants of Abraham. But you are trying to kill me, because my word has no room among you. 18 I tell you what I have seen in the Father's presence; then do what you have heard from the Father." 19 They answered and said to him, "Our father is Abraham." Jesus said to them, "If you were Abraham's children, you would be doing the works of Abraham. But now you are trying to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God; Abraham did not do this. You are doing the works of your father!" (So) they said to him, "We are not illegitimate. We have one Father, God." Jesus said to them, "If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and am here; I did not come on my own, but he sent me. Why do you not understand what I am saying? Because you cannot bear to hear my word. You belong to your father the devil and you willingly carry out your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in truth, because there is no truth in him.
John 19:15
And he said to the Jewish authorities, "Behold, your king!"
They cried out, "Take him away, take him away! Crucify him!"
John 20:19
On the evening of that first day of the week, when the doors were locked, where the disciples were, for fear of the authorities
There is nothing lost and everything gained from the proposed change. Jesus is still Messiah. Christian moral teaching is still grounded. No doctrines have been altered and the violence that existed in previous translations has been overcome.
As we examine the various possible translations of a Gospel, we need to remember that each Gospel did not fall from the sky ready to interpret itself. In each of the communities that produced a Gospel, the community acted under the guidance of the Holy Spirit in re-telling the stories of Jesus that related to their situation in life. Each Gospel was the product of a tradition of communal reflection. The community would ask, as I am asking, what words of Jesus will help us to live life fully—and that means justly—today, and the words of Jesus most relevant then as now are love and metanoia.
The change that metanoia brings is intellectual, moral and religious and one of the intellectual changes that Christians most need is to accept that inspiration does not mean that the word of God was divinely dictated to each evangelist. Each evangelist was in most cases a representative of a community that reflected on the meaning of the life of Jesus in relation to their communal living. In the case of the Fourth Gospel, the community reflected on the meaning of the life of Jesus and developed the awesome theology of Jesus as “the word” that became flesh. Some of the most moving theology in the Christian tradition is found in the Gospel of John, but there is another element of that Gospel. It was the product of a community that had suffered a wound—they had been turned away from Jewish synagogues because of their belief in Jesus. They then did what many human beings do—they wrote their resentment into a text—the Gospel text. They were Jews who had come to believe that Jesus was divine and were now grappling with being rejected from a community to which they had belonged. It was at that point that they decided to re-write the history of the Roman crucifixion of Jesus and to blame his death on the community that had rejected them—“the Jews.” Every Catholic teacher explains that, as Vatican II explained, the Bible is “the word of God in the words of human beings.” There is a divine element to scripture and a human element to scripture. “Hoi Ioudaioi” is a product of the sinful human element of resentment. As such, it is not essential to the word of God. Because of this, the Universal Magisterium, through synod or otherwise, should adopt this new translation.
In this paper, since I am not an ecclesiologist, I will not consider what the proper limits of Magisterial authority are. I will simply make the case that the Bishops of the Catholic Church have the authority to adopt this new translation. We have interpreted scripture in the context of a dynamic tradition for 2000 years. The community, in prayer, debate, and reflection took 330 years to agree on which early Christian writings it would consider to be inspired. In the meantime, Christian Bishops and theologians were busy defining doctrine. For example, in 325 at Nicea, “homoousion,” which is not a Biblical term, was introduced into the creed. The term defines how Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox Christians understand Jesus—that he is “one in being with” the Father. This occurred 42 years before the Council of Hippo Regius defined the canon. The Church’s use of homoousion helped the community to understand the meaning of the Gospel even before the Church had finally agreed on which books should be included in the New Testament canon. Hence, the authority of the magisterium has in many ways translated the meaning of the Gospel to the community. For this reason, the magisterium can make a decision regarding the proper translation of a Biblical term which has produced such turmoil in our attempt to imitate Christ.
For all of these reasons, at this time, having heeded Pope John Paul II’s insights regarding the Shoah, having listened to the Bishops and theologians of the Church at Vatican II and having prayed with Pope Benedict over the reality that God is love and that love is lived, I urge a more loving, more living translation of the Gospel of John. The term “the Jews” must be removed from the Gospel and “Hoi Ioudaioi” must be translated as “the crowd” or “the authorities.”I hope now, as I pray with the Gospel of John, that as I enter into the resurrection scene, my fears might better connect with the fears of the early disciples. We all have fears and we are all surprised when the risen Lord enters our scene and blows them away. I have fears, but I do not fear Jews, nor do I even want to imagine that there is any reason to fear a people as forgiving, as intelligent, as generous, and as helpful as the Jewish community.
[1] L'Osservatore Romano, 1 November 1997, p. 6.
[2] Reported by Jeremiah Marquez, SFGate, online service of the San Francisco Chronicle, Monday, July 31, 2006, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006/07/31/entertainment/e143903D69.DTL&type=politics#ixzz0RlbPByMC (accessed October 24, 2009).
[3] FOXNews.com, Wednesday, June 10, 2009, http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/06/10/wright-suggests-jews-white-house-wont-let-speak-obama (Accessed October 24, 2009).
[4] Justin, Dialogue with Trypho, Chapter XVI, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/justinmartyr-dialoguetrypho.html.
[5] St. Augustine, Against Faustus, Chapter 11 (Translation by Richard Stothert), http://www.logoslibrary.org/augustine/faustus/1211.html.
[6] St Augustine, On the Psalms, 63:4,5, quoted in Fr. Vasile Mihoc, St Paul and the Jews According to St John Chrysostom’s Commentary on Romans 9-11, http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/religious_studies/SBL2007/Mihoc.pdf, September 30, 2009.
[7] Medieval Sourcebook: Saint John Chrysostom: Eight Homilies Against the Jews, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/chrysostom-jews6.html#HOMILY_I.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Heartfelt Prayers for the Families and Friends of the Victims of the Foot Hood Shootings
I respect all American soldiers for their courage and for their commitment to the global common good. They liberated the US from tyranny. They have spread Democracy around the world.
Monday, November 9, 2009
Prayer for Creativity and Progress On the Twentieth Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall
LORD,
We pray that your spirit of progress continues to inspire your people.
We pray that we might envision a new economics, one that overcomes the greed of one error and the envy of the other.
If all human beings are encouraged to dwell on their infinite creativity, will they recognize the infinite dignity of others?
If all human beings are encouraged to live in the paradise of their own freedom, will they spread the joyful zeal of earnest labor?
Yes, LORD, yes. You answer yes!
Let that answer move my heart out of my comfort zone to share the joys, hopes and dreams of all people. Let that answer help me to accept myself as a gift, to love myself as you love yourself and from that self love to give to all in peace, each what they deserve—the right answer at the right time for the right reasons--
Happiness,
Well-functioning,
Virtue,
Acceptance,
Solidarity,
Justice,
Peace.
We pray that your spirit of progress continues to inspire your people.
We pray that we might envision a new economics, one that overcomes the greed of one error and the envy of the other.
If all human beings are encouraged to dwell on their infinite creativity, will they recognize the infinite dignity of others?
If all human beings are encouraged to live in the paradise of their own freedom, will they spread the joyful zeal of earnest labor?
Yes, LORD, yes. You answer yes!
Let that answer move my heart out of my comfort zone to share the joys, hopes and dreams of all people. Let that answer help me to accept myself as a gift, to love myself as you love yourself and from that self love to give to all in peace, each what they deserve—the right answer at the right time for the right reasons--
Happiness,
Well-functioning,
Virtue,
Acceptance,
Solidarity,
Justice,
Peace.
Recalling Teilhard's Beautiful Prayer: Patient Trust
Patient Trust - Teilhard de Chardin, SJ
Above all, trust in the slow work of God
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages,
We are impatient of being on the way to do something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you.
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.
Above all, trust in the slow work of God
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages,
We are impatient of being on the way to do something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you.
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
The Path Toward the Progressive Olympics
I have given a lot of thought about how to bring about the Progressive Olympic Movement that I wrote about yesterday. It seems to me that for it to be truly progressive it needs to encourage its organizers and sponsors to reflect. Thus it is necessarily spiritual. It seeks to bring out the best of the human and thus the Olympic Spirit.
I have developed a loose outline of a series of Innovation Conferences which will bring people together to facilitate the development of these Progressive Olympic Games. The conferences could take place anywhere, but it might make sense for some of them to take place in the locations of the suggested Progressive Olympic Games (Rio, Sarajevo, one of the Lake Erie cities). It might also make sense for the conferences to take place in a city which has hosted large, culturally significant conferences before (such as Washington, New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago). That is not important at this moment.
As I understand it, it seems to me that the following topics would facilitate reflection on economic development, cooperation among businesses, and formation of Olympic committees for each of the games. Obviously, Rio already has an Olympic Committee. The point is to turn the Olympics into a mechanism for promoting economic growth and liberation of the poor.
Here is a loose structure for these Innovation Conferences:
2010: Spiritual Innovation: Pink, Lowney and Teilhard
2011: Humanism and Innovation
2012: Evaluating Past Olympics
a. Economic Contribution to host region
b. Respect for preferential option and fair trade
c. Utility of Olympic park and housing after games
d. How can future Olympics build upon past experience?
2013: The Freedom of Green Energy and Green Economics.
a. Conclusion: How to host a Green Olympics.
2014: Women’s Innovation
a. Women’s innovation in science, art, business, religion, culture and politics.
b. The spirituality of women’s innovation
c. Feminist humanism
d. How feminist humanism has liberated women
e. Feminist humanism and international athletics
f. Have the Olympics served women well?
g. How can the Olympic movement contribute to the freedom and well-being of women around the globe?
At this point, I would want to be open to the suggestions of others about developing future innovation conferences.
I have developed a loose outline of a series of Innovation Conferences which will bring people together to facilitate the development of these Progressive Olympic Games. The conferences could take place anywhere, but it might make sense for some of them to take place in the locations of the suggested Progressive Olympic Games (Rio, Sarajevo, one of the Lake Erie cities). It might also make sense for the conferences to take place in a city which has hosted large, culturally significant conferences before (such as Washington, New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago). That is not important at this moment.
As I understand it, it seems to me that the following topics would facilitate reflection on economic development, cooperation among businesses, and formation of Olympic committees for each of the games. Obviously, Rio already has an Olympic Committee. The point is to turn the Olympics into a mechanism for promoting economic growth and liberation of the poor.
Here is a loose structure for these Innovation Conferences:
2010: Spiritual Innovation: Pink, Lowney and Teilhard
2011: Humanism and Innovation
2012: Evaluating Past Olympics
a. Economic Contribution to host region
b. Respect for preferential option and fair trade
c. Utility of Olympic park and housing after games
d. How can future Olympics build upon past experience?
2013: The Freedom of Green Energy and Green Economics.
a. Conclusion: How to host a Green Olympics.
2014: Women’s Innovation
a. Women’s innovation in science, art, business, religion, culture and politics.
b. The spirituality of women’s innovation
c. Feminist humanism
d. How feminist humanism has liberated women
e. Feminist humanism and international athletics
f. Have the Olympics served women well?
g. How can the Olympic movement contribute to the freedom and well-being of women around the globe?
At this point, I would want to be open to the suggestions of others about developing future innovation conferences.
Reflection on Evolution
I feel a lot of empathy toward relgious people who reject evolution. I think there are a variety of reasons for this
1. People think that the idea that we evolved from other animals means that human beings are animalistic, that we lack the dignity of being created in God's image.
2. People are afraid that evolution means that human beings just came into the world by chance, through survival of the fittest. If that is the case, then life seems meaningless.
3. People approach the question solely through a literal interpretation of the Bible and are afraid that non-literal interpretation of one passage of the Bible means that you interpret other important passages (like the ten commandments) in a less than literal way. If that is the case, then Christian moral teaching gets watered down. Some literalists think that non-literal interpretations of the Bible have contributed to what they see as moral decay in American culture.
I respect conservative Christians and I share their concerns about moral formation; however, accepting evolution as a scientific fact does not mean that we should then water down the laws of love given to us by both the Torah and Jesus. As a matter of fact, if we accept evolution we then see Jesus' teaching as the evolution of centuries of human moral reflection and as the most progressive form of moral teaching.
I would like to respond to each of the three concerns:
1. If we accepted that God guided the process of evolution so that the Jesus movement came into existence, we then see evolution from earlier animal life as a holy endeavor. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin saw this. Also, a literal reading of Genesis 2 means that God made us out of clay. Which is more dignified--a creature made from dirt or a creature that came into existence from earlier life forms that had hearts and brains?
2. As a believer who thinks that God gave us the gift of faith and the capacity for reason, nothing that is the product of valid scientific reflection could be meaningless. We live meaningful lives because we can think and science is a manner of human reflection. There is a debate about the whole question of intelligent design. Without getting involved in that debate, what we could say is that part of what is at stake here is our understanding of God. God is not an old white man with a beard who literally breathed into clay. The Bible uses figurative language. As Moses is told in the Book of Exodus, you cannot "see the face of God." That is, God in God's glory is beyond our capacity to imagine. God then can create through the process of evolution just as easily as he could breathe into clay.
Second, an important issue is the issue of religious experience. All believers at one time or another have had some experience of God's presence--of God redeeming them, of God teaching them, of God moving their hearts, of God giving them the gift of faith, for some of "being saved." It is an experience. I would like to suggest that those moments are moments of God's creating us in the here and now. I am being created by God who draws me out of the chaos of life and who breathes life into my heart by moving me to work creatively and to love others. The experience behind the texts in Genesis 1 and 2 is the experience of the people of Israel being created as a people and of the authors of those texts being moved to faith, being moved to see God creating them from the abyss of their own lives. So, for the text to be meaningful, the question is not, "How can I defend a literal interpretation of Genesis so that people will believe that God created?" but rather "As I pray over Genesis, can I become aware of how God is creating me right now, hovering over the abyss of anxiety produced by 10% unemployment, fear of terrorism, conflict within our world, other fears, and unrealized dreams?"
That is, as I pray over Genesis, I am seeking to understand how God's word is speaking to me right now, not just how it spoke to the ancient Israelites.
The metaphor of God creating out of chaos in Genesis 1 and the metaphor of God breathing life into me in Genesis 2 are then meaningful, not meaningless. The metaphor of God creating my marriage by leading me to the woman who is "for me" as I am "for her" is not only life-giving, but so beautiful as to fill my life with its highest meaning--fidelity to my wife and our children.
3. As for non-literal readings of moral teachings like the ten commandments, we have to admit that the truths of the ten commandments are always true, but that, to understand that truth, we have to read them in a less than perfectly literal way. Conservative Christians overwhelmingly supported the US invasion of Afghanistan (whehter they want to war to end is another matter). The fifth commandment reads "Thou shall not kill." Obviously, they are interpretting the fifth commandment in a less than literal way.
1. People think that the idea that we evolved from other animals means that human beings are animalistic, that we lack the dignity of being created in God's image.
2. People are afraid that evolution means that human beings just came into the world by chance, through survival of the fittest. If that is the case, then life seems meaningless.
3. People approach the question solely through a literal interpretation of the Bible and are afraid that non-literal interpretation of one passage of the Bible means that you interpret other important passages (like the ten commandments) in a less than literal way. If that is the case, then Christian moral teaching gets watered down. Some literalists think that non-literal interpretations of the Bible have contributed to what they see as moral decay in American culture.
I respect conservative Christians and I share their concerns about moral formation; however, accepting evolution as a scientific fact does not mean that we should then water down the laws of love given to us by both the Torah and Jesus. As a matter of fact, if we accept evolution we then see Jesus' teaching as the evolution of centuries of human moral reflection and as the most progressive form of moral teaching.
I would like to respond to each of the three concerns:
1. If we accepted that God guided the process of evolution so that the Jesus movement came into existence, we then see evolution from earlier animal life as a holy endeavor. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin saw this. Also, a literal reading of Genesis 2 means that God made us out of clay. Which is more dignified--a creature made from dirt or a creature that came into existence from earlier life forms that had hearts and brains?
2. As a believer who thinks that God gave us the gift of faith and the capacity for reason, nothing that is the product of valid scientific reflection could be meaningless. We live meaningful lives because we can think and science is a manner of human reflection. There is a debate about the whole question of intelligent design. Without getting involved in that debate, what we could say is that part of what is at stake here is our understanding of God. God is not an old white man with a beard who literally breathed into clay. The Bible uses figurative language. As Moses is told in the Book of Exodus, you cannot "see the face of God." That is, God in God's glory is beyond our capacity to imagine. God then can create through the process of evolution just as easily as he could breathe into clay.
Second, an important issue is the issue of religious experience. All believers at one time or another have had some experience of God's presence--of God redeeming them, of God teaching them, of God moving their hearts, of God giving them the gift of faith, for some of "being saved." It is an experience. I would like to suggest that those moments are moments of God's creating us in the here and now. I am being created by God who draws me out of the chaos of life and who breathes life into my heart by moving me to work creatively and to love others. The experience behind the texts in Genesis 1 and 2 is the experience of the people of Israel being created as a people and of the authors of those texts being moved to faith, being moved to see God creating them from the abyss of their own lives. So, for the text to be meaningful, the question is not, "How can I defend a literal interpretation of Genesis so that people will believe that God created?" but rather "As I pray over Genesis, can I become aware of how God is creating me right now, hovering over the abyss of anxiety produced by 10% unemployment, fear of terrorism, conflict within our world, other fears, and unrealized dreams?"
That is, as I pray over Genesis, I am seeking to understand how God's word is speaking to me right now, not just how it spoke to the ancient Israelites.
The metaphor of God creating out of chaos in Genesis 1 and the metaphor of God breathing life into me in Genesis 2 are then meaningful, not meaningless. The metaphor of God creating my marriage by leading me to the woman who is "for me" as I am "for her" is not only life-giving, but so beautiful as to fill my life with its highest meaning--fidelity to my wife and our children.
3. As for non-literal readings of moral teachings like the ten commandments, we have to admit that the truths of the ten commandments are always true, but that, to understand that truth, we have to read them in a less than perfectly literal way. Conservative Christians overwhelmingly supported the US invasion of Afghanistan (whehter they want to war to end is another matter). The fifth commandment reads "Thou shall not kill." Obviously, they are interpretting the fifth commandment in a less than literal way.
A Holy Land Olympics
Consider the following: if we obtain a lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace in the next six to eight years, the Holy Land could host the Olympics and during that Olympics, we could host a Ceremony of Healing for the 1972 Munich Olympics in which Israeli athletes were murdered. It would involve Muslims, Jews and Christians. It is a dream but it is a wonderful dream.
Friday, November 6, 2009
On Being American
A few quick thoughts before I sign out tonight:
I belong to a number of traditions all of which give me life:
Christian tradition
Catholic Christian tradition
Ignatian tradition
Human tradition
American tradition
For me as for most Americans, being an American means being free. It also means knowing that our society and our world can change for the better: we can look at our past and say let’s preserve what is good and let us use our God-given minds to become even better.
I am grateful for the USA which:
*Established a constitutional democracy with a bill of rights at a time when tyranny was ruling the world.
*Ended slavery
*Gave women the right to vote.
*Ended fascism in Europe and Japan.
*Was the fundamental power that established the UN—the first global format for preventing another world war and for coordinating global efforts to aid the poor and promote inter-cultural understanding. This is one of the foundations of our world’s future.
*Set the example for many other cultures in how to promote the peaceful transition of power, even when there is major disagreement about an election—as in Bush vs. Gore. This cannot be understated.
I belong to a number of traditions all of which give me life:
Christian tradition
Catholic Christian tradition
Ignatian tradition
Human tradition
American tradition
For me as for most Americans, being an American means being free. It also means knowing that our society and our world can change for the better: we can look at our past and say let’s preserve what is good and let us use our God-given minds to become even better.
I am grateful for the USA which:
*Established a constitutional democracy with a bill of rights at a time when tyranny was ruling the world.
*Ended slavery
*Gave women the right to vote.
*Ended fascism in Europe and Japan.
*Was the fundamental power that established the UN—the first global format for preventing another world war and for coordinating global efforts to aid the poor and promote inter-cultural understanding. This is one of the foundations of our world’s future.
*Set the example for many other cultures in how to promote the peaceful transition of power, even when there is major disagreement about an election—as in Bush vs. Gore. This cannot be understated.
Support the President's Health Care Legislation
The experts have backed the latest house bill, which includes the public option. That is, the American Medical Association, the nation's best and most revered association of doctors, and the AARP, who watches health reform like a hawk, have both endorsed the house bill. In the meantime, the Republicans have produced a bill which will not cover 95% of the uninsured. While conservatives like Charles Krauthammer have declared the 2008 transformation dead, the President is about to secure the greatest victory for working people since FDR over the deliberate obfuscation and lies produced by the Republican party about health care reform. If the Republicans cannot listen to the AMA who for years opposed health reform, you know that their motivations are completely tied to moneyed interests. I do not write this lightly. I have very deep respect for intelligent conservatives like Krauthammer and Will,but this time the right is way off. If we do not pass health reform now, we will not be able to pass it for another 20 years. In the meantime, and I write this with absolute certitude, another 30 to 40 million workers will lose health insurace.
Right now, we rank behind Cuba--Cuba--the Marxist prison state--in infant mortality rate. To ignore this and to listen to the moneyed interests opposing health reform would be a terribly irresponsible thing to do.
The President is not imposing socialism on anyone. The reform relies on private insurance. The public option is just that--an option!!! It would promote competition in a market in which current insurers are underinsuring Americans, especially working people.
The President's Health Reform is an example of progress.
Right now, we rank behind Cuba--Cuba--the Marxist prison state--in infant mortality rate. To ignore this and to listen to the moneyed interests opposing health reform would be a terribly irresponsible thing to do.
The President is not imposing socialism on anyone. The reform relies on private insurance. The public option is just that--an option!!! It would promote competition in a market in which current insurers are underinsuring Americans, especially working people.
The President's Health Reform is an example of progress.
The Reason For This Blog
David Tracy once wrote that today we live in a world in which there are many different cultural “centers” (I would say common places) from which people think. Tracy goes on to describe that some people live in a pre-modern mindset, some in a modern mindset and others in a post-modern mindset. I accept post-modernity, but not a post-modernity that is relativistic. We are raised in and we do think through language and culture, but we still can accurately understand or inaccurately understand our world. Human beings also make decisions that are ultimately responsible or irresponsible.
I know and hold to the conviction that one of the most important truths for our world is the truth of progress (evolution). Many have written about this. Like David Tracy, I am a believing Catholic. My understanding and my living are sacramental. My spirituality is Ignatian. I seek to find God in all things—including in the history of humanity. When one studies the history of humanity, there is no doubt that we have changed and have developed methods for changing the world around us—technological progress, but there is a more fundamental and necessary form of change—spiritual progress. Spiritual progress is necessarily social and personal and, in this inter-cultural age, necessarily respectful of all humanistic religious traditions.
I am creating this blog because once again, in the USA, and in many places in the world, we are lapsing into a polarized understanding of religion and change. I have a deep respect for conservatives because they seek to pass on tradition in a world in which many have naively, narcissistically and destructively sought to overthrow traditions—the most awful examples being Nazism and Marxism which combined slaughtered hundreds of millions of people. Nevertheless, to conserve human rights, human dignity and the common good, religion needs to progress with technology and continually develop intelligent interpretations of tradition in light of social change.
For some conservative Christians, the world is just a shadow of the heavenly kingdom. Our task is then to escape from this inherently depraved realm. The end of time is thus understood as some form of destruction of the world (often through weapons of mass destruction) during which an elect is taken from this depravity and into heaven. While I respect how conservatives have encouraged people to maintain their relationship with Christ in the midst of a world which mocks religion at times, I do not accept their interpretation of the end-time. The eschaton—the word for end which is used in the Bible-- means end of time in the sense of the final phase of history. We are living in “these last days” and history as it was understood previously to Jesus of Nazareth has reached its end. Middle Eastern history and culture prior to Jesus, as well as European history and culture at that time, understood that culture was held together through intimidation, scapegoating, and collective violence. Jesus changed that. He resisted scapegoating (he reached out to scapegoats like lepers and prostitutes), did not use violence or intimidation to maintain social bonds (he forgave enemies) and accepted suffering rather than impose suffering on others (died on the cross). God raised him from the dead, revealed Jesus’ divinity and thus revealed that God’s kingdom breaks into human history through acts of love.
What Jesus brought about was spiritual and cultural progress. Many Christians have chosen to ignore his example and have committed acts of violence, especially against Jews. In those instances, they have fostered regress rather than progress. In today’s world, we have learned through our God given ability to reason that biological evolution has occurred and is occurring. For Christians, Jesus then is the most important moment in evolution for he ushered in the final phase of evolution—humanity’s task of cooperating with God in building God’s kingdom of harmony, justice and peace.
I know and hold to the conviction that one of the most important truths for our world is the truth of progress (evolution). Many have written about this. Like David Tracy, I am a believing Catholic. My understanding and my living are sacramental. My spirituality is Ignatian. I seek to find God in all things—including in the history of humanity. When one studies the history of humanity, there is no doubt that we have changed and have developed methods for changing the world around us—technological progress, but there is a more fundamental and necessary form of change—spiritual progress. Spiritual progress is necessarily social and personal and, in this inter-cultural age, necessarily respectful of all humanistic religious traditions.
I am creating this blog because once again, in the USA, and in many places in the world, we are lapsing into a polarized understanding of religion and change. I have a deep respect for conservatives because they seek to pass on tradition in a world in which many have naively, narcissistically and destructively sought to overthrow traditions—the most awful examples being Nazism and Marxism which combined slaughtered hundreds of millions of people. Nevertheless, to conserve human rights, human dignity and the common good, religion needs to progress with technology and continually develop intelligent interpretations of tradition in light of social change.
For some conservative Christians, the world is just a shadow of the heavenly kingdom. Our task is then to escape from this inherently depraved realm. The end of time is thus understood as some form of destruction of the world (often through weapons of mass destruction) during which an elect is taken from this depravity and into heaven. While I respect how conservatives have encouraged people to maintain their relationship with Christ in the midst of a world which mocks religion at times, I do not accept their interpretation of the end-time. The eschaton—the word for end which is used in the Bible-- means end of time in the sense of the final phase of history. We are living in “these last days” and history as it was understood previously to Jesus of Nazareth has reached its end. Middle Eastern history and culture prior to Jesus, as well as European history and culture at that time, understood that culture was held together through intimidation, scapegoating, and collective violence. Jesus changed that. He resisted scapegoating (he reached out to scapegoats like lepers and prostitutes), did not use violence or intimidation to maintain social bonds (he forgave enemies) and accepted suffering rather than impose suffering on others (died on the cross). God raised him from the dead, revealed Jesus’ divinity and thus revealed that God’s kingdom breaks into human history through acts of love.
What Jesus brought about was spiritual and cultural progress. Many Christians have chosen to ignore his example and have committed acts of violence, especially against Jews. In those instances, they have fostered regress rather than progress. In today’s world, we have learned through our God given ability to reason that biological evolution has occurred and is occurring. For Christians, Jesus then is the most important moment in evolution for he ushered in the final phase of evolution—humanity’s task of cooperating with God in building God’s kingdom of harmony, justice and peace.
Thanksgiving For the Gift of the Imagination
LORD,
Thank you for the gift of the imagination, the psychic place where our minds meet your future. I ask for the grace that you might lead me more deeply into my imagination, that I might act from that mysterious place of truest freedom.
Help me to trust that my imagination is the path to reality,
Help me to accept this truth and to live it as creatively as you breathe life into me.
I ask that my plans bubble up from the peace that is you,
a peace that is rooted in a justice which melts my fears away.
Help us to be real.
Help us to make decisions that liberate communities through the progress of the personal, the most authentic tendencies of the human heart, redeeming glimpses of the Trinity.
Help us to know ourselves in honesty and humility, so that we might have the serenity to accept our limits and the courage to act from conviction.
Help us to reject the false humility of self-hatred.
Help us to believe in ourselves, in our dreams, and in the gift of your vision.
Thank you for the gift of the imagination, the psychic place where our minds meet your future. I ask for the grace that you might lead me more deeply into my imagination, that I might act from that mysterious place of truest freedom.
Help me to trust that my imagination is the path to reality,
Help me to accept this truth and to live it as creatively as you breathe life into me.
I ask that my plans bubble up from the peace that is you,
a peace that is rooted in a justice which melts my fears away.
Help us to be real.
Help us to make decisions that liberate communities through the progress of the personal, the most authentic tendencies of the human heart, redeeming glimpses of the Trinity.
Help us to know ourselves in honesty and humility, so that we might have the serenity to accept our limits and the courage to act from conviction.
Help us to reject the false humility of self-hatred.
Help us to believe in ourselves, in our dreams, and in the gift of your vision.
A Progressive Olympics
The following is a copy of the letter I sent to the International Olympic Committee this past summer. I firmly believe that for the Olympic Movement to be truly Olympic, it must include the concerns of the poor and vulnerable.
International Olympic Committee
Château de Vidy
1007 Lausanne
Switzerland
Dear Members of the International Olympic Committee,
Peace! I write to you with a sincere appreciation for all that the Olympic movement has done to unify our world. I recall with joy all of the wonderful events I have witnessed as an avid fan of the summer and winter Olympics. There are no other international events that capture the attention of people around the world and that sow hopes for peace and justice in our world like the Olympics do. It seems strange to suggest that, given all of your dedication and work, there might be a way to improve an already successful movement, and yet there is one area in which the Olympic movement can grow: to continue its progress as an international athletic and cultural movement, the Olympic movement must transform itself into a vehicle for lifting up the global poor and for healing past divisions.
Each Olympics has been characterized by international cooperation and a healthy competition which has sowed international brotherhood and sisterhood among athletes and spectators, and yet at many of the past Olympics, the very effort to prepare a host city for the games has displaced the very people who are most in need. According to The Center for Housing Rights and Evictions, the Beijing Olympics displaced 1.5 million people and many other Olympic games have displaced the poor. Moreover, at some Olympics, the host city incurs a massive debt which inevitably leads to a reduction in services for the poor.
I propose that the International Olympic Committee adopt the following criteria:
1. The Olympic Committee will adopt the ethical principle of preferential option for the poor and encourage cities and countries in need of development to develop bids to host the summer and winter games.
2. When discerning among a group of Olympic sites, the site most in need of economic development and best suited to develop the appropriate venues will win the bid.
3. No single person will be rendered homeless as a result of Olympic preparations. If Olympic development will displace people, the host city must demonstrate the financing, architectural plans and the moving assistance it will provide to the people who will be displaced. The city and the people to be displaced must sign a contract requiring the city to honor this commitment. The top television sponsors must also sign a contract with the people to be displaced dedicating an appropriate percentage of their profit to assist in the process of moving those to be displaced.
4. No more than .0001% of a city’s population can be displaced.
5. The homeless will not be moved to render a games more cosmetically pleasing. If so, the host city will be publicly sanctioned and fined by the IOC and its sponsors.
6. In preparing an Olympic bid, a host city must demonstrate how the Olympic buildings will retain their value after the Olympics. For example, Atlanta was able to turn Olympic stadium into a baseball park. After the games, if the Olympic buildings will not be utilized at least two months per year, the city cannot host the games.
7. After the Olympics, a majority of the housing built for the Olympics will be turned into some form of housing for the poor. The income earned from the remaining housing will be used to help finance the percentage that will be given to the poor.
8. The Olympic Committee will do its best to prudently use the Olympics to unify formerly warring factions throughout the world. For example, a Holy Land Olympics would be hosted by Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia would participate in a manner acceptable to Saudi society.
9. The International Olympic Committee will require that all uniforms and clothing produced for the athletes to be used in official capacities at the games will be the product of fair trade contracts. All souvenirs sold within two miles of the Olympic Park will be produced through fair trade contracts.
To implement these principles, I strongly urge the consideration of these future Olympic sites:
1. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil for Summer 2016.
2. Sarajevo, Bosnia for Winter 2018 to heal wounds and restore a previously Olympic city.
3. Lake Erie (Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland, Akron, Canton, Columbus, Youngstown, Pittsburgh) for Summer 2020. This Olympics would create fair trade for Nicaragua and Haiti. The Cleveland Olympic park would be designed to host summer concerts, year round athletic events, and Ice Ballet in the winter.
4. A unified Korean Winter Games 2022, as a goal for nuclear disarmament and the unification of the Koreas.
5. Israel-Palestine-Syria-Lebanon-Egypt-Jordan will host together in 2024 to help secure a lasting peace. Saudi Arabia can participate in a way that Saudi society would find appropriate.
There are many other possible future sites including Belfast-Dublin, Warsaw, India-Pakistan, Istanbul, South Africa, Indonesia-Australia-Philippines, Mexico City, Buenos Aries, Taipei-Shanghai, Los Angeles- San Diego-Tijuana, and Nairobi.
I am grateful for your time, and I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Sincerely,
Ed Lynch
International Olympic Committee
Château de Vidy
1007 Lausanne
Switzerland
Dear Members of the International Olympic Committee,
Peace! I write to you with a sincere appreciation for all that the Olympic movement has done to unify our world. I recall with joy all of the wonderful events I have witnessed as an avid fan of the summer and winter Olympics. There are no other international events that capture the attention of people around the world and that sow hopes for peace and justice in our world like the Olympics do. It seems strange to suggest that, given all of your dedication and work, there might be a way to improve an already successful movement, and yet there is one area in which the Olympic movement can grow: to continue its progress as an international athletic and cultural movement, the Olympic movement must transform itself into a vehicle for lifting up the global poor and for healing past divisions.
Each Olympics has been characterized by international cooperation and a healthy competition which has sowed international brotherhood and sisterhood among athletes and spectators, and yet at many of the past Olympics, the very effort to prepare a host city for the games has displaced the very people who are most in need. According to The Center for Housing Rights and Evictions, the Beijing Olympics displaced 1.5 million people and many other Olympic games have displaced the poor. Moreover, at some Olympics, the host city incurs a massive debt which inevitably leads to a reduction in services for the poor.
I propose that the International Olympic Committee adopt the following criteria:
1. The Olympic Committee will adopt the ethical principle of preferential option for the poor and encourage cities and countries in need of development to develop bids to host the summer and winter games.
2. When discerning among a group of Olympic sites, the site most in need of economic development and best suited to develop the appropriate venues will win the bid.
3. No single person will be rendered homeless as a result of Olympic preparations. If Olympic development will displace people, the host city must demonstrate the financing, architectural plans and the moving assistance it will provide to the people who will be displaced. The city and the people to be displaced must sign a contract requiring the city to honor this commitment. The top television sponsors must also sign a contract with the people to be displaced dedicating an appropriate percentage of their profit to assist in the process of moving those to be displaced.
4. No more than .0001% of a city’s population can be displaced.
5. The homeless will not be moved to render a games more cosmetically pleasing. If so, the host city will be publicly sanctioned and fined by the IOC and its sponsors.
6. In preparing an Olympic bid, a host city must demonstrate how the Olympic buildings will retain their value after the Olympics. For example, Atlanta was able to turn Olympic stadium into a baseball park. After the games, if the Olympic buildings will not be utilized at least two months per year, the city cannot host the games.
7. After the Olympics, a majority of the housing built for the Olympics will be turned into some form of housing for the poor. The income earned from the remaining housing will be used to help finance the percentage that will be given to the poor.
8. The Olympic Committee will do its best to prudently use the Olympics to unify formerly warring factions throughout the world. For example, a Holy Land Olympics would be hosted by Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia would participate in a manner acceptable to Saudi society.
9. The International Olympic Committee will require that all uniforms and clothing produced for the athletes to be used in official capacities at the games will be the product of fair trade contracts. All souvenirs sold within two miles of the Olympic Park will be produced through fair trade contracts.
To implement these principles, I strongly urge the consideration of these future Olympic sites:
1. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil for Summer 2016.
2. Sarajevo, Bosnia for Winter 2018 to heal wounds and restore a previously Olympic city.
3. Lake Erie (Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland, Akron, Canton, Columbus, Youngstown, Pittsburgh) for Summer 2020. This Olympics would create fair trade for Nicaragua and Haiti. The Cleveland Olympic park would be designed to host summer concerts, year round athletic events, and Ice Ballet in the winter.
4. A unified Korean Winter Games 2022, as a goal for nuclear disarmament and the unification of the Koreas.
5. Israel-Palestine-Syria-Lebanon-Egypt-Jordan will host together in 2024 to help secure a lasting peace. Saudi Arabia can participate in a way that Saudi society would find appropriate.
There are many other possible future sites including Belfast-Dublin, Warsaw, India-Pakistan, Istanbul, South Africa, Indonesia-Australia-Philippines, Mexico City, Buenos Aries, Taipei-Shanghai, Los Angeles- San Diego-Tijuana, and Nairobi.
I am grateful for your time, and I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Sincerely,
Ed Lynch
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