News & Media
Given all the exposure you now have to unpredictable real-life situations, what are the common misconceptions that academics have about developmental and economic problems on the ground?
The most common misperception is the impression by certain academics that development work is mostly practice without theory and data verification. While there is much room for improvement, large-scale development work often has to present its theory of change and provide assessment of its work. The information collected covers many projects over decades of work by different agencies affecting hundreds of thousands of beneficiaries. I have seen a number of academic presentations based on work with only one or two communities and from which conclusions were drawn.
Very briefly, what were your impressions of the Moral Economy conference? Were you introduced to any new ideas? Did you meet people who inspired you to think about a problem in a different way?
I thought the best paper was presented by Cardinal George: it inspired me to think about the transcendent nature of humans created by God and how our human activities (including economic transactions) must not lose this transcendence.
You have said that you have three older sisters who didn’t go to college and that the Chinese way was to marry well. Given that in your background, opportunities for women were limited, what does it mean for you to be so involved in public life? What does it mean especially since many of the countries in which CRS functions, women have a limited societal voice or role?
The opportunities and success that I have enjoyed make me realize how important it is that EVERYONE has opportunities to flourish and to come into his or her full potential. There are all sorts of barriers and not just against women. While much progress has been made with respect to the progress of and equal treatment for women, girls and women are still not valued, not respected, not empowered in certain countries and cultures. But there are other obstacles that hold back the education and development of individuals: extreme poverty, stunting that diminishes intellectual development, conflicts that disrupt education, violence that compromises healthy brain development and cognitive functioning, under-estimation of people with mental disabilities or writing off of youths in gangs. I have now met many people, for different reasons, who are sidelined from reaching their potential. Education provides the key and access to knowledge, to opportunities, to livelihoods, to certain social standing in society, to the levers of change, and ultimately to a voice and a place in formal structures.
What are your thoughts about the role of laity in the Church given that you were one of the first lay members of the CRS Board prior to your assuming your current role as president and CEO?
I think all would agree that the invitation to lay members to the CRS board significantly expanded the breadth of professional experiences. These have included expertise in governance, audit, financial administration, investments, communication, law, administration of highly complex organizations such as universities and hospitals and approaches to problem-solving. The lay members also opened our eyes, minds and hearts to the immense needs of the world and the inspiring commitment of the Church to step up to these problems through aid, advocacy and solidarity. Laity and the clergy together comprise the Body of Christ who calls us to be His eyes, hands, and feet on earth, to bring His love and His bounty to everyone, to take care of each other and to remember that He is with us and in us. We all have our unique gifts to bring and our part to do. This is a big task and we need all hands on deck working shoulder to shoulder for the kingdom of God.
Lumen Christi brings the light of faith to young intellectuals and aspiring and current academics. What do you see as the relationship between intellectual formation and living the faith? Does it help to have an informed faith? How has your knowledge of the faith inspired you to help others? How does it sustain you?
Wow, that is a big question! In second grade, I learned my catechism and there was a set of answers I memorized about God from the abridged Chinese version of the Baltimore Catechism on mimeographed sheets. The answers have not changed, but what they mean to me, what they call me to do and why I believe have continuously deepened due to life experiences, interactions with people of faith and the intellectual tradition of the Church. Faith calls us to seek the truth in all its realms: physical, intellectual, relational, and spiritual. For me, the gift of the Church’s intellectual tradition is to put into words and therefore greater clarity of the transcendence, which I and perhaps everyone experiences but cannot name. I think as much as possible, our faith needs to grow with our level of intellectual maturation. Otherwise we would deploy a second grade or eighth grade level of understanding to the decisions and experiences of our lives in a highly complex world.
“I first got interested in Flannery O’Connor in 1980 because I started doing work on religion and literature and everyone asked me if I had read O’Connor and I hadn’t,” says Richard Rosengarten—former Dean of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago and now Associate Professor of Religion and Literature. “All I knew of her was that I saw somewhere this book with a big peacock on it.” From a sense of professional obligation, he decided that it was time for him to get acquainted with the twentieth-century Southern Gothic writer.
O’Connor’s stories charmed him. “I couldn’t stop reading them, and I couldn’t make any sense of them. They were disturbing and odd, and I found myself laughing at points when I was uneasy about myself for laughing, and I wondered about that.”
He read everything she wrote, including her letters. “I fell in love with her stories; I fell in love with the woman who wrote those letters.” He was immediately captivated by her odd mix of humor and hard-bitten realism.
Ten years later, he decided he would write a book about her. But when he appraised the field, he realized that there was already a whole “Flannery O’Connor industry” out there, and that she was being used as a “football in the Catholic culture wars.”
“She didn’t deserve to be kicked around in it. I thought, what can I say about O’Connor without getting involved in those wars?”
It was frustrating. He decided to take a different approach—one in which he could debunk the myth that the First Vatican Council was anti-modern, and the Second Vatican Council pro-modern.
In his mind, O’Connor didn’t fit the mold of a person that lived between the Councils. But he felt that to say something substantive, he had to involve O’Connor in a conversation with her contemporaries.
That is why the book he is now working on includes O’Connor, but also two other women—the artist Frida Kahlo and the philosopher Simone Weil—who used Catholicism to mediate a deeply complex engagement with modernity.Rosengarten loves that these women were deeply loyal, but also deeply critical. He calls them “the Teresas of Avila of the twentieth century.” They thought about the tradition in complex ways. They didn’t glibly resort to equating modernity with evil, but neither did they think that modernity was unambiguously good. The book is simply titled Styles of Catholicism: Flannery O’Connor, Frida Kahlo, Simone Weil and should be ready for publication sometimes next year.
After all these years of research and getting to know O’Connor and her work, Rosengarten seems still freshly amazed by her ability to fictionalize the ineffable. Whereas tens years ago he was fascinated by her violent, disturbingly witty prose, he is struck now by the way in which her stories attempt to explore “what a moment of grace would be in a world that is insipiently inattentive to it.”
O’Connor really wanted to understand what grace meant, how it looked in a dark and gritty reality with everyday folk who were blind to it. “O’Connor was interested in the disjunction between the modern world and good news of grace,” Rosengarten explains. “What would it mean for the one to confront the other?” To this end, she brings together violence and humor, very different emotional valiances—all in the service of describing both the world and God’s grace accurately.
Rosengarten points out that O’Connor’s understanding of the faith was a simple yet profound one. Though she read Thomas Aquinas every night before bed, he says that people are stunned to learn that the book that most deeply shaped her understanding of Catholicism was the Baltimore Catechism. “She knew it cold. When asked about the ten most important books she read, she listed it as number one.” While O’Connor was unambiguously orthodox, his favorite line of hers is when she says that in the Church, “it’s always about the wrong man for the wrong job.”
It was as an artist—as well as a woman of profound faith—that Flannery O’Connor engaged with the ambiguities and contradictions of modernity. Through fiction—her local realism, her sense of mystery, her ability to see people the way they are, her deeply spiritual vision—O’Connor created entrancingly gruesome yet ultimately redemptive worlds.
Of all her stories, Rosengarten likes “Revelation” best. She completed the revisions for “Revelation” on her hospital bed, just before she died of lupus in 1964. “I can’t read the end of that story without being moved,” he says. “So many of her stories capture that moment of grace with the death of the protagonist. But Ruby Turpin doesn’t die. In one of her letters, she writes that Ruby Turpin ‘could go on to great things.’ She doesn’t kill Ruby Turpin. She marches out of the story a changed person, changed to the core of her being. I find that extraordinarily moving.”
On October 11th – the day the universal Church celebrated the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council – Fr. Edward Oakes, Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of St. Mary of the Lake/Mundelein Seminary, gave a lecture for the Lumen Christi Institute on the famously misinterpreted document Gaudium et spes, or the “Pastoral Constitution on the Modern World.”
Since “the document as a whole implies throughout…that the era of the ‘fortress mentality’ Church is over and done with,” many have taken this to imply that the Church is wholeheartedly embracing the world, even those contemporary trends that directly contradict its teachings.
Oakes argued that “far from countenancing a gushing wonderment at the achievements of the modern world (impressive as they undoubtedly are), Vatican II explicitly endorses an active political engagement by Christians, based on Church teaching, to counter what John Paul II would later call the culture of death.”
Interestingly, two experts who had great influence on the drafting of the document – French Jesuit priest and theologian Henri de Lubac and French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain – later diagnosed the problems that would beset the Church after the council, namely a “neo-modernist fever” that would capitulate to all the “pathologies of the modern world” and a failure to announce the salvation that comes from Christ, what de Lubac called, “the betrayal of our obligation to the world.”
Both de Lubac and Maritain had indirect connections to the work of the Lumen Christi Institute, as de Lubac taught philosopher Jean-Luc Marion, and Maritain gave lectures as a guest of the University of Chicago’s prestigious Committee on Social Thought.
Oakes concluded his talk saying that though Gaudium et spes includes important doctrinal teaching (influenced by de Lubac and Maritain) about the centrality of the Paschal Mystery of Christ’s Death and Resurrection for determining the final end of man, and the need for an independent secular sphere, ironically its very purpose “will inevitably make it the least enduring of the major documents of the council, precisely because it was meant as a reading of the ‘signs of the times,’ and of course these times have much changed since then, requiring a new reading of new signs.”
The Lumen Christi Institute, Georgetown University, and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development
present
The Catholic Criminal Justice Reform Network
Inaugural Invitational Conference
Thursday-Friday, April 28-29, 2022
The Georgetown University Law Center
Please contact CCJRN@lumenchristi.org for registration information
Calling on all network members, scholars, practitioners, those impacted by our system, and clergy, to join us in a forum where your voice will be heard and you will hear from others in a conference grounded in prayer, our common devotion to the Gospel, and the teachings of the Church.
A curated two-day dialogue between diverse participants.
View Daily Schedule. Meals included. Thursday and Friday include round-table dialogue sessions, fellowship and networking, and Mass.
ACCOMODATIONS
Room blocks have been reserved at the following hotels. Please follow the links below to receive the group rate:
- Phoenix Park Hotel
- 0.2 miles to law center
- $259 single/$279 double per night
- Book by March 24, 2022
- Call and mention Lumen Christi Institute or book online with group code 24064.
- Double Tree Crystal City
- 4 miles to law center
- $169 per night
- Book by March 28
- Call 1-800-HILTONS or book online.
- YOTEL Washington D.C.
- 0.2 miles to law center
- $279 per night
- Book by February 26
- Use the group booking code 2204THELUM or book online.
- Hilton Garden Inn Arlington/Courthouse Plaza
- 6.5 miles to law center
- $149 per night
- Book by April 6, book online here or by calling 800-774-1500.
We are also seeking to arrange low-cost accommodations at local religious guest houses. Details forthcoming.
Please direct any questions to CCJRN@lumenchristi.org. Our Program Coordinator, Tamiko Russell, will respond to your inquiry.
The Catholic Criminal Justice Reform Network is grateful for the co-sponsorship of the following institutions:
Georgetown University Law Center, Notre Dame Law School, Boston College Law School, Fordham University School of Law, Loyola University Chicago Law School, University of St. Thomas School of Law, The Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage, The Institute on Religion, Law, and Lawyer’s Work at Fordham University School of Law, Center on Race, Law, and Justice at Fordham University School of Law, Catholic Lawyers Guild of Chicago, Catholic Prison Ministry Coalition, Kolbe House Jail Ministry, Thrive For Life, Catholic Mobilizing Network, and Santa Clara University School of Law.