Swarthmore Peripateo (Vol 3, Issue 2) by Swarthmore Peripateo

Volume 3, Issue 2 | Spring 2015

Peripateo

Sometimes, I Wonder

the Swarthmore College Journal of Christian Discourse

by Nathan Scalise

Also in this issue: The Sin of Adam:Two Allegorical Accounts of the Fall by Erin Kast

He Who Graciously Gives Us All Things by Dorothy Kim

A Letter from the Editor Dear Reader, The students of Swarthmore College are, if nothing else, people of deep and unmistakable intensity.There is the public passion of student advocacy, of loud and insistent cries for justice. There is the silent toil of concentrated study, of lonely vigils that bridge dusk and dawn.There is the vigor of athleticism and the vibrancy of the arts. How, then, in this world of intensity, can there be such lukewarmness about what matters most? We discipline our bodies and our minds in order to arrive at some partial satisfaction or to attain some partial truth, and too often, we are overly satisfied with what is partial. We glut ourselves on the fragments that the world has laid at our table and then find we have lost our craving for the transcendent. We tell ourselves it is a dream the sober-minded know better than to pursue – or worse, we tell ourselves that it will always be there, waiting for us, tomorrow. But the ultimate questions, What kind of meaning can a human life have? Is death the end of all things? Is there a God? do not suffer the approach of the sluggish, the cynical, or the lukewarm. If we are to make any progress, we must become sojourners stirred up by a pressing hunger for something richer and fuller than our current lives have to offer. We, the staff of Peripateo, have taken up this journey in the light of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We believe in the one Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and we believe that Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of the Father, emptied himself in an act of perfect humility, assuming a human nature out of love for us, so that he could draw us to himself.To make satisfaction for our sins, he submitted himself to an ignominious death on the wood of the Cross, mocked, betrayed, and reviled by those for whom he had laid down his life. We believe in the glory of his Resurrection and in its redemptive promise of everlasting life in God’s Heavenly Kingdom, our one, true home. As Christians, we believe our hearts ought always to be restless in seeking for a reality larger than this life. For every human heart bears the seal of its Creator and this seal is an admonition to seek him without tiring and to remain hopeful and courageous until the day we meet him face to face. Peripateo was conceived as a testament to the complementarity of faith and reason, and we offer it to you, dear reader, as an invitation to join us in a search that will engage heart, mind, and soul. In this issue, our writers have responded to the call to venture forth in a variety of unique and interesting ways. Nathan Scalise examines the intersection between thought and social action in “Wet Feet: Navigating the Intellectual and the Practical in Faith.” In “The Sin of Adam:Two Allegorical Accounts of the Fall” Erin Kast wrestles with the pervasive brokenness of our world and of our nature, and in “Finding Freedom in God” Mickey Herbert follows up with radically countercultural idea about what it means to be free. In true peripatetic spirit, we that hope you will “walk around in” these articles, and in all the articles included herein, with a bold openness to the transcendent. May you find them a source of nourishment and inspiration as you pause for a moment, and breathe, before taking the next steps in your journey. Nicholas Zahorodny Editor-In-Chief

i | Letter from the Editor

Photo by Kelly Hernández.

IN THIS ISSUE The Sin of Adam: Two Allegorical Accounts of the Fall

Peripateo

the Swarthmore College Journal of Christian Discourse

Essays & Ar ticles

by Erin Kast

Editorial Staff

The Vir tue of Charity: 18 Locating Love’s Foundation on Stable Ground

Nicholas Zahorodny ’16 Roy A. Walker ’16 Kelly Hernández ’18

by Nicholas Zahorodny

Many Par ts, One Body: 26 The Common Good and the Foundations of Society by Greg Brown

Sometimes I Wonder 34

Ar t & Poetry

by Nathan Scalise

Listening in Faith: 2 Challenging the Sacred and Secular Divide in Music by Nate Lamb

To Give or Not to Give 10 by Briani Kamilah George

Wet Feet: 13 Navigating the Intellectual and Practical

Reflections

Carlo Bruno ’17 Dorothy Kim ’15 Nate Lamb ’17 Nathan Scalise ’16 Michael Superdock ’15 Yared Portillo ’15 Heitor Santos ’17 Sam Gutierrez ’15

Editor-in-Chief Business Manager Design Manager Photography Editor Editor Editor Editor Editor Design Design Photography

Contributors

Greg Brown ’16 Briani Kamilah George ’15 Mickey Herbert ’15 Erin Kast ’15 Dorothy Kim ’15 Nate Lamb ’17 Nathan Scalise ’16 Nicholas Zahorodny ’16

by Nathan Scalise

He Who Graciously 16 Gives Us All Things by Dorothy Kim

Finding Freedom in God 25 by Mickey Herbert

Who We Are

Peripateo seeks to reconcile faith and academia by engaging religious issues through an intellectual

lens. We believe that the message of Jesus Christ has powerful implications for our daily lives and the world at large. We aim to fuse creativity and

intellectualism in this journal to invite readers into a thoughtful discourse: what role does God play in our lives? What are the ways that a Christian

perspective both compliments and complicates an academic one?

Swarthmore Peripateo | 1

Listening in Faith:

Challenging the Sacred and Secular Divide in Music by Nate Lamb

Immediately after convincing my parents to buy tickets for our family to the Radio 104.5 Seventh Birthday show I was struck by a rather large problem. None of the many bands that were going to be playing at the alternative rock concert were explicitly Christian. Both of my parents work in Christian ministry. I began to wonder if my plot to get them to pay for my tickets, cleverly disguised as a desire for more family time, was actually a good idea after all. In the end, it was not a problem in the slightest. It was actually a rather silly concern. After all, my parents had been listening to secular music since before they were even my age. We all really enjoyed the concert and no problematic theological issues were even broached. Yet my concern is one felt by many Christians to whom I have talked. The way that some music is labeled explicitly Christian plays on the fear that listening to non-Christian music somehow makes you unworthy. However, many Christians find this distinction unsatisfactory. Recently Jon Foreman, the lead singer of Switchfoot, wrote a brief essay explaining how his band will not write what the music industry and our culture define as Christian music.1 He argues singing about God does not make a song more Christian than any other, and one can glorify God through music indirectly, just as one can in their day-to-day life. This sentiment is shared by other Christians in the music industry, via Relevant Magazine, who lament the divide between the secular and the sacred.2 This argument is certainly compelling, not least because it allows Christians to listen to a wider range of music that they otherwise might feel guilty about listening to. Yet while Foreman et al. may be correct in claiming music itself cannot be more or less Christian, and the word “God” does not have to be in a song to glorify him, the fact remains that many songs

contain lyrics that explicitly advocate or condone beliefs or behavior that is contrary to what the bible teaches. Rather than embracing this music as acceptable, or dismissing it as sinful, I believe that we as Christians should think critically about what the purpose of our listening is, something that will challenge us to examine both the content of music and the nature of our relationship with God. As a potential guide, I will discuss how I listen to three songs, “Bukowski” by Modest Mouse, “Houdini” by Foster the People, and “Beautiful Day” by U2. “Bukowski” is a song by one of my favorite bands, Modest Mouse, off their fifth studio album Good News for People Who Love Bad News. Modest Mouse consistently has one of the most interesting and energetic sounds of any band I know, and their lyrics are intelligent, clever, and cryptic in a way that makes me think, not in a way that goes way over my head. However, if the title of the album isn’t a tip off, they can get pretty dark in some of their songs, and “Bukowski” is no exception. The lyrics are some of the most problematic for me as a Christian of any song I know. Apart from using the Lord’s name in vain, the lyrics claim, “if God takes life he’s an Indian giver,” and asks, “who would want to be such a control freak?” after describing God’s might. Enjoying this song a great deal, I am rather unnerved at the idea that I should stop listening to it almost as much as I am by the lyrics themselves. Yet, my faith informs the way I listen to music; it remains engaged, even when I start listening to something that couldn’t be played on Christian radio. Christian songwriter and producer Philip Larue points out that we can enjoy and be moved by art without believing every line.3 Although it is difficult to do in a song like “Bukowski,” my faith allows me to see elements of truth in it; questioning God does not get Modest Mouse struck by lightning whenever they perform the

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song, and their questioning is actually very Biblical. Now, I that can be enjoyed, even if much of it is twisted or imperfect think Modest Mouse draws the wrong conclusions about God, in some way. Cutting myself off from that would be tragic, but and I certainly do not wish to emulate their theology. But I also only as long as I can confidently appreciate a song in light of do not want to condemn them, or the countless others who are God’s goodness and not be tempted to take the message of the asking questions of God. Instead I strive to emulate the uncon- artists at face value. ditional love of Jesus in how I approach their music. One way The final song I want to examine is “Beautiful Day” by U2. that I can do that is to recognize their music and the experiences If “Bukowski” makes me struggle and “Houdini” makes me that helped them make it as valid, not worthy of merely being think, then “Beautiful Day” make me rejoice in God’s creation. shunned by uppity Christians. The song contains many lyrics that I simply do not understand, I still believe we should use discernment and wisdom in de- but also contains lyrics that talk about creation with resplendent ciding what we should listen to, but just like Foreman and oth- imagery that cautions us against exploiting the Earth and eners, I think it is harmful to make a divide between Christian courages us to protect what is good. It makes it so easy for me and non-Christian music. Labeling “Bukowski” as off-limits to want to enjoy and fight for good things and appreciate what seems pretty closed-minded and not only deprives one of the God has given us all. U2 does have Christian influences but joy of listening to the music in these songs, but also makes they are still a secular band. Yet songs like “Beautiful Day” are Christianity the religion of “taking the fun away” that many more common in non-Christian music than many might think. non-believers think it is. This, however, is a very personal deci- Unlike the other songs to which I have to devote thought and sion, and comes after a great deal of thought about where I am effort in order to appreciate God and his goodness through, with in my faith and how the song will “Beautiful Day,” after my initial exaffect me. I am not going to lose my amination of the lyrics, I can listen faith over this song, and so, I don’t to it comfortably and internalize the If “Bukowski” makes me struggle plan on removing it from my Spomeaning and message of the song and “Houdini” makes me think, then tify playlists. But I do give the song completely, as I find it consistent “Beautiful Day” make me rejoice in with my understanding of God’s a lot of thought and actively label and recognize the disturbing lyrics word. I find that, sometimes, I apGod’s creation. for what they are: a valid viewpoint preciate not having to think, and inof someone who is questioning stead just enjoying my music. God, but decidedly not something This approach may not seem I believe. very compelling to non Christians, but certainly there is content The next song, “Houdini,” by Foster the People, is certainly in a great deal of music that is troubling for non Christians as less problematic for me, but it illustrates a larger problem that well. I have discussed my take on how I believe music should sometimes comes up when I listen to secular music. Most of the be engaged with, one I hope might prove useful for someone lyrics are pretty typical of alternative/indie rock music: they holding any worldview. My chief point is merely this, that a seem pretty artsy and poetic, but I struggle to find much per- keen engagement with a song is crucial in order to not only apsonal meaning in them. I’m okay with that, as I usually find preciate it fully. The worst thing you could do while listening to more enjoyment in the music itself anyway. But the next to last music is to turn of your brain and assume what you are listening line of the song, “focus on your ability,” which may sound non- to is okay, a temptation I know is all too real, because that is harmful, perpetuates a message that does not fit well with the how messages and ideals creep in and influence you in ways you message of Christ. The uplifting message of “Houdini,” which might not have thought possible. For me, the most important encourages its listeners to be the best person they can be, is cer- thing in my life is my faith, and that is the lens through which tainly uplifting. However, from a Christian perspective, know- I view music, but for others it might be a cultural background ing that everyone is destined to fall short and sin if they try to or gender identity that informs how you listen. Wherever you live by themselves, this message may be more harmful than a come from, I urge you to take the lyrics seriously, and weigh the cursory examination of the song would suggest. truth in them against how they might challenge your belief. r Yet, taking seriously my conviction that there should be no divide between the secular and sacred when approaching music, I take my faith with me when I listen to the song. Instead of in- Endnotes ternalizing the uplifting message of “Houdini” as a suggestion 1.Foreman, Jon. Tumblr. http://whizzpopping.tumblr.com/ to try my best in life by my own means, I recognize the gifts post/6664742872/jon-foreman-when-asked-if-switchfoot-is-a God has given me and “focus on [my] ability” in that way. The 2.Mineo, Andy; Larue, Philip; Studarus, Laura; Barron, Andy; song still hits home for me and gives me a great deal of inspira- Huckasee, Tyles. “2015 New Music Guide.” Relevant, Mar/Apr tion even though the way I internalize it is different from what 2015:http://www.relevantmagazine.com/culture/music/2015the songwriters intended. As a follower of Christ, I make every new-music-guide effort to view the world through the lens of the word of God, 3. Ibidem and his Truth, and there is so much of that Truth in our culture

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The Sin of Adam: Two Allegorical Accounts of the Fall by Erin Kast

Photo by Kelly Hernández.

4 | The Sin of Adam: Two Allegorical Accounts of the Fall

Antonio Spadaro asked the pope point-blank: “Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio?” The pope looked at his interviewer a moment, then responded: “I do not know what might be the most fitting description... I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner.”1 Few concepts are more central in Christian theology than that of sin. Indeed, arguments over the meaning of sin and its import for understanding of human nature and salvation have figured prominently in the rhetoric of reform movements throughout the history of Christianity from the Albigensians to the Anabaptists. Reformers—as well as their counter-parts in the established church—were forced to grapple with what sin is and how we as humans can hope to heal the pervasive wound it leaves in the lives and actions of those around us; for one thing no human can deny is that sin is abundantly present in the world. No one who turns on the news or even observes the sincere interactions of those around oneself can help but witness the ubiquity of both genuine, self-sacrificing goodness as well as disturbing hatred and willful neglect. Even as we may affirm the profound goodness that blossoms in the darkest places, the human being is confronted by the unsettling awareness that something is wrong with the world. But what does this sense have to do with the individual sinner? When Pope Francis identified himself as a sinner, he did so not only in recognition of the personal and voluntary sins that he has and continues to commit in word, deed, omission or

commission; the pope’s identification as a sinner also runs deeper than this—it is the expression of something that touches the bone of his humanity, and no less so because he is a baptized Christian. To impute his sinfulness to his humanity at first appears absurd—is to be human to be a sinner? What I would like to address in this essay is why the answer to that question is yes and then, briefly, how a Christian is given the tools to grapple with this reality through one of the most ancient traditions of the Church, baptism. However, to answer the first question, I will need to uncover a very ancient—and controversial— concept that remains at the center of much Christian theology and ethics: the doctrine of original sin. Traditionally, original sin has been tied all the way back to the first human beings and the consumption of a forbidden fruit from the tree of good and evil. As such, Christians from St. Basil the Great to the present have harkened back to the story of Creation and the Garden of Eden to explain the strange predilection humans evince for darkness and sin. Yet at the same time, beginning as early as Origen of Alexandria in the second century, the creation story and thus the explanation of original sin has taken on distinctly allegorical nuances. In fact, allegorical interpretations of the creation story can be found in the writing of none other than the towering Christian philosopher of the 5th century, St. Augustine of Hippo, who affirmed that Scripture was revealed for humanity’s salvation, not the elucidation of scientific propositions. By drawing this distinction, Augustine opened the door to allegorical interpretations of the Christian canon, including Genesis.2

With these ancient hermeneutics in mind, we may begin to approach a study of original sin beginning first with an entirely traditional construction. In the Catholic understanding— shared in most respects with other forms of Christianity and especially Eastern Orthodoxy—original sin has its origin in the sin of Adam whereby human beings “preferred [themselves] to God” and so, abusing their freedom, were immediately deprived of “the grace of original holiness.”3 Critically, Adam’s sin is construed as a voluntary sin for himself alone while the stain of original sin transferred from this primal event constitutes a transference not of guilt, but of corrupted nature.4 Thus the sin of Adam was for him a willful sin and a denial of grace, but for humanity it was the source of an inward distortion of an intrinsically good creation. Needless to say, the foregoing description of original sin leans heavily on the literal events of the Fall; however, it need not do so and can as well be interpreted symbolically. In this reading, the distortion of our nature symbolized by the consumption of a forbidden fruit is in fact no more or less than our tendency to ignore our inherent human limits and in so doing turn our hearts away from an all powerful and abiding God. The soul, which the monk Thomas Merton calls God’s “little word” within us, is ignored for the proud guidance of a will that has been fooled into the illusion of self-sufficiency.5 This analysis of human nature and original sin may be understood not as issuing from an event that occurred at a singular moment (e.g. 6000 years ago) but as a description of the situation in which humans find themselves. We find ourselves sinners

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for whom the Word of God falls on deaf hearts—beings for whom what was first and fundamentally good is again and again misdirected towards an end improper to our natural identity as children of God. Recovering the literal sense of the Greek hamartia—translated in our Bibles as “sin”—we have “missed the mark.” We have turned our face from God. We are sinners. Yet this brief discussion has not, in fact, answered any important questions. That the Biblical text can be interpreted metaphorically is hardly more than banal. The true nodus which confronts the exegete is not if the text can mean what tradition has ascribed to it, but why tradition has ascribed to it such a meaning in the first place. Put a different way, why has a fundamentlly good creation been given hearts that are easily disposed to go astray and fall deaf to the voice of their God, to whom they owe their entire existence and being? How could a good creation be born so inclined to deny the grace and love of its Creator and in so doing strive towards ends incommensurate with its own inherent being? Answers to these questions have varied widely over the centuries and I cannot hope to summarize, let alone explore, all of them. Indeed, what I hope to do here is present for consideration just two theories and a supporting ecclesiology that have arisen more or less within my own tradition, that of the Catholic Church. Neither theory exhausts the theological depth of original sin, but both shed some light on its profound significance in our modern world. However, before I begin this brief and necessarily incomplete foray into the doctrine of original sin, I feel it is important to restate the central paradox at the heart of this entire venture: that despite the world and all that is in it being good, creation is marked by a fundamental and profound sinfulness. At the close of the sixth day, after God had created the world, “God saw everything that he had made and, behold, it was very good.”6 How can it be, then, that the Christian church has taught for centuries that all humans are born “marked by the original fault freely committed by [human kind’s] first parents,” first parents whose existence, if one lends credence to modern paleontological research, is tenuous at best?7 If Adam and Eve didn’t literally pass their

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sin onto humankind, then why has a good creation been marked from birth by this so damaging “original” sin?8 In the 1960s the Catholic Church underwent a major renewal in theological as well as ecclesiological practice. Among other important insights of the Second Vatican Council (as this renewal was called within the Church), was a rediscovery of the Christian community’s identity as a pilgrim Church.9 To be a pilgrim means to be directed towards a particular end—to be going somewhere in order to obtain, experience, or achieve something. As Christian pilgrims, we are part of a journey that has a distinct beginning and end; in one sense, the beginning may be conception and the end natural death, but in another, the beginning is the inception of life itself and the end the reunion of all being into God, that God might be “all in all.”10 With this insight in mind, the first theory of original sin I’d like to present is that of the renowned paleontologist and 20th century priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who developed a theology of original sin which placed this spiritual pilgrimage toward God into the context of biological evolution. Teilhard de Chardin’s musings were first condemned by the Church and indeed it was not until nearly a decade after his death that his work was exonerated. However, once exonerated, de Chardin’s work has been acclaimed by all recent popes as both remarkably insightful and contributing to the enrichment of modern Catholic theology.11 In his theorizing, original sin as a corruption of nature was in fact nothing more or less than the necessary death and transformation of all created matter as it progressed from a starting point of multiplicity toward a state of final communion and reunion with the singularity at the center of creation, God. Thus, in the theology of de Chardin, the unfolding of evolution was itself a pilgrimage towards Christ through whom creation gradually rises to God in an intricate and creative process, mirroring the magnificent and creative acts which marked the beginning of creation itself.12 What is important to note here is that the conception of “the mark of Adam” necessarily leads to incompleteness, and consequently to an evolutionary process that

tends towards completeness in and through Christ. This necessity explains both the ubiquity of original sin and its existence despite the work of an all-good, all-powerful God. Here, the allegorical Adam’s first sin is simply the “primary transgression” of the first culpable agent (who was the first human being) who willfully turned his/her heart from the journey of ascension to God and so followed the tendency “retained in [our] fibres” to “fall back towards the bottom [the multiplicity of creation], into dust.”13 Thus, for de Chardin, to be human is to be a creature in a constant struggle to ascend against all the natural force that pulls creation back down toward its diffused origins in God’s first creative act of completely diffusive self-giving love. Evolution takes on a majestic spiritual aspect of pilgrimage from multiplicity towards the unifying principal of Christ, through whom all creation is beckoned back into Godself. Teilhard de Chardin’s theology gives us a new perspective from which to understand the concept of original sin that firmly roots the doctrine in both modern science and Christian spirituality. As a counterpoint to this spiritual exegesis of creation comes the theorizing of another Catholic, Terry Eagleton. Though most of Eagleton’s writing is not distinctly Catholic (or even religious), his work on original sin is disarmingly insightful and adds an important piece of nuance to the foregoing discussion. Eagleton’s understanding—following his Marxist background—is entirely grounded in the material reality and circumstances of human society. For Eagleton, original sin refers to the network of responsibilities, causes, consequences, and conditions—what he calls the “complex web of human destinies”—which immediately engulf a child the moment he or she enters the world.14 No human being is born outside of the imperfect relationships and sinful tendencies of every other human being in existence or, for that matter, ever having existed. The love and hate of a child’s parents as well as the sin and oppression permeating the economic and social world around the child ensconces the young human in a web of dependencies and responsibilities that tie the single, embryonic life to the entire life of the world. A

child knows nothing of the torturous labor of sweatshops in continents far removed, but the very clothes she wears attach her inextricably to the life, death, and suffering of those she does not know nor ever will know. No human being can escape these ties that bind her to all the rest of creation, and so, due to the willful and compounding sin of all humanity, the child is conceived in the context of a perfect creation distorted by this “original” sin.15 Eagleton’s analysis provides a second explanation of original sin, similarly rooting the doctrine in a concept utterly plausible in the modern world: the community of all humans means that as soon as sin enters the world it places all humans, present or future, in an ineluctable relationship which will invariably shape them, distorting the purity of creation placed there at its origin by God. Thus for Eagleton, Adam’s first sin is a symbolic referent to the first sin of the first human which laid the first thread of that web which has bound all humankind since. Our existence from conception in this ever expanding web of sin militates against ascension to God and so constitutes the force of our profound spiritual corruption. We are bound up in this darkness, and, born into a community we cannot escape, we are forced to “live in spite of [our] blood”—to labor in the working out of our salvation despite an existence in the clutches of sin.16 Importantly, the theoretical bedrock of Eagleton’s theorizing on original sin—his notion of human solidarity—is entirely orthodox. Indeed, none would question the towering credentials of the newly minted saint who penned the following words, words whose implication bear weighty testimony to the pertinence of Eagleton’s own: “every sin can undoubtedly be considered as social sin” because, by the mystery of human solidarity, just as “every soul that rises above itself, raises up the world,” so too

A child knows nothing of the torturous labor of sweatshops in continents far removed, but the very clothes she wears attach her inextricably to the life, death, and suffering of those she does not know nor ever will know.

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each “soul that lowers itself through sin drags down with itself the church and, in some way, the whole world.”17 It is from a theology of solidarity such as that on display in the writings of Pope St. John Paul II and Terry Eagleton that we may interpret the famous words of the English Catholic G. K. Chesterton who wrote that, “We men and women are all in the same boat, upon a stormy sea. We owe to each other a terrible and tragic loyalty.”18 Together with de Chardin, Eagleton’s understanding of original sin allows Christians in the 21st century to conceive of sin and solidarity in a way consistent with modern sensibilities regarding the world’s origins and the profound fellowship of our shared humanity. From the two perspectives presented above, humanity’s original sin exists not so much as an explanation for but rather a description of the nature of our species’ existence as we find it after the long process of human history up to this point. And now finally, the reader must ask: can a Christian ever overcome this innate tendency to sin? As suggested at the outset, I feel the answer to this question depends upon the ancient Christian rite of hope offered against the world’s wages of sin: baptism. However, why this might be the case is not straightforward; given the theories presented above, how could baptism confront the necessary death and synthesis mandated in a human’s evolution towards God (de Chardin) or entrenchment in the calamitous web of human sin (Eagleton)? To address this conundrum, we must turn again to the theology of Vatican II adumbrated earlier and its conception of the Church as a pilgrim people. Through baptism, we are initiated into a community whose purpose is the direction and guidance of its people on the universal pilgrimage toward reunion with God in Christ. By the grace effective in baptism, a human being is made aware of his or her spiritual situation in the world; baptism

Baptism neither satisfies nor erases the nature of corruption, but instead turns and re-orients the individual into such a relationship with others that the corruption may be transcended by love.

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apprises us of that universal tendency towards aimlessness and regression—in the verbiage of the Catechism, a face turned from God—that characterizes our spiritual evolution if left unattended. However, one ceases to be an aimless wanderer the moment one is situated within a community of pilgrims, both living and dead, that exists to help gain each member safe passage to the farther shore. Therefore baptism is a response to both the aimlessness (de Chardin) of the soul that lacks guidance in her spiritual sojourn on this Earth and the individualism (Eagleton) that blindly ignores the depth of our shared human existence. Indeed, if in our journey sin blinds us with thick scales to the eternal tether that binds us to our God and all humanity, then baptism is a moment of overflowing grace whereby the scales are wiped clean and, like Paul on the way to Damascus, the human being’s face is forcibly turned towards the light and love that are its proper end.19 The mark of this vision is indelible just as once one has seen a thing, the memory of it cannot be erased, even if one subsequently goes blind or attempts to forget. It is no wonder the Catechism of the Catholic Church calls baptism an “enlightenment” of the Christian soul, for though the scales of sin may—and will (though perhaps differently)—return in the years that follow, the image of God remains permanently emblazoned in the baptized soul.20 Thus through baptism, Eagleton’s web of sin and responsibility may finally be overcome by a corresponding web of selfgiving and love. Put differently, a web of interconnectedness—here called community—which implicates the individual in the sins and virtues of all her brothers and sisters, is an acceptance of the responsibility incurred by original sin. Baptism neither satisfies nor erases the nature of corruption, but instead turns and re-orients the individual into such a relationship with others that the corruption may be transcended by love. For, returning to de Chardin, evolution is not the journey of one being moving in a detached and disconnected pilgrimage towards God—evolution is an evolution of all creation, and to make this odyssey requires a solidarity of all parts directed towards a complete and final union

with God.21 And so perhaps here, after theoretical discussion of both sin and baptism, it is appropriate to return to the simple figure whose words began this entire discussion: Pope Francis. Pope Francis, the man whose life, though dedicated to love and service, remains mired in the sin not only of his own doing, but of the whole world and all humanity. The philosopher Jan Potočka once wrote that we are defined “by the uniqueness of what situates [us] in the generality of sin.”22 In a way, this is exactly what Pope Francis was seeking to convey in his interview with Antonio Spadero. For Pope Francis—and all Christians—are like the prodigal son who has discovered his own waywardness and must now begin the long journey home. Like the prodigal son, it is only after the acknowledgement and the awareness of our situation in the “generality of sin” that the first steps of our pilgrimage back into the waiting arms of the Father are made possible.23 So by the grace of God and with the assistance of the entire community of believers, we are cautioned of our responsibility in this world and so assume our place within it, to re-orient ourselves on this holy pilgrimage in such a way as to raise up the entire human community. This pilgrimage is a journey from fragmentation and the illusion of separateness to what the Indian Christian Sadhu Sundar Singh called our “spiritual oneness with God,” broken by ignorance and irreverence but redeemable by the grace of God and participation through baptism in the body of Christ.24 When we do this we discover this journey is not only for attaining that spark of sublime charity by which we perceive “all earthly things are full of vanity.”25 No, to redirect our nature is to enter upon something far more mysterious than ascetic renunciation: it is to discover under the thick film of sin the divine seed that resides deep within. It is a pilgrimage into God that finally discovers God’s own image as the kernel of our humanity all along. For despite sin and all its corrupting influence, we have been taught that when God created the world and all that is in it, God did not turn his face away, but instead “saw all that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” r

Endnotes 1. Antonio Spadero, “A Big Heart Open to God,” America Magazine, September 30th, 2013. Accessed January 30th, 2015 at http:// www.americamagazine.org/pope-interview. 2. For example, Origin of Alexandria in De Principiis IV, 16 Accessed February 1st, 2015 at http://www.newadvent.org/ fathers/04124.htm. For Augustine, see St. Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis. vol. 1, Ancient Christian Writers, vol. 41. Translated and annotated by John Hammond Taylor, S.J. New York: Paulist Press, 1982. 3. Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), 397-399. 4. By “voluntary sin” I here mean to describe an act which; 1) amounts to a “missing of the mark” and a turning from the light and truth of God that is 2) a voluntary act of a disordered will and thus 3) rightly producing a sense of guilt/culpability in the actor. Here it is important to note that other Christian traditions differ with respect to the transference of guilt. 5. This description borrows heavily from CCC, 385-421; Merton, Thomas. New Seeds of Contemplation, New York: New Directions Publishing, 2007, 3. 6. Genesis 1:31 (KJV). 7. CCC, 390. 8. This question leaves aside the equally important question, if one accepts the existence of an historical Adam and Eve, why the sin of two human beings would irreparably and grievously afflict all ensuing humankind. 9. Dogmatic Constitution on the Church: Lumen Gentium, Solemnly Promulgated by His Holiness, Pope Paul VI on November 21, 1964. Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1965. 10. 1 Corinthians 15:28 (KJV). 11. Ockham, William. “Dan Burke and Accuracy on Teilhard de Chardin” Accessed on February 1st, 2015 at http:// teilhard.com/2013/11/01/dan-burke-andthe-accurate-story-why-teilhard-de-chardinis-important-to-catholic-theology/. 12. “Evolution and Original Sin: the Problem of Evil” Accessed on February 1st, 2015 at https://whosoeverdesires. wordpress.com/2009/09/13/evolution-andoriginal-sin-the-problem-of-evil/. See also The Phenomenon of Man (1976) by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. It may be appropri-

ate here to note that some still question the orthodoxy of de Chardin’s writings, though these critiques are fewer than in his own lifetime. That said, my discussion of de Chardin’s ideas here are both simplified and cursory—I suggest further reading if you would like to pursue his thought in greater depth. 13. Teilhard de Chardin, “Christology and Evolution” in Christianity and Evolution. New York: Mariner Books, 2002, 84. 14. Eagleton, Terry. On Evil. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010, 33. 15. For exposition of these ideas, see Eagleton’s On Evil (2010). 16. Ezekiel 16:6 (The Jewish Study Bible); cf. Philippians 2:12. For, indeed, to work out our salvation is to truly live; to live that we no longer live, but “Christ lives in [us]” (Galatians 2:20). 17. Pope St. John Paul II, Reconcilatio and Paenitentia, 1984, Accessed on February 1st, 2015 at http://w2.vatican.va/content/ john-paul-ii/en/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_jp-ii_exh_02121984_reconciliatio-et-paenitentia.html; or as Thomas Merton put it: “My dear brothers, we are already one. But we imagine we are not.” (Merton, Thomas. The Essential Writings of Thomas Merton. Ed. Bochen, Christine M., Modern Spirituality Series, New York: Orbis Books, 2000, 173). 18. Ahlquist, Dale. “Lecture 91: The Boat on a Stormy Sea,” The American Chesterton Society, 2014 Accessed on February 1st, 2015 at http://www.chesterton.org/ lecture-91/. 19. cf. Acts 9:18. 20. CCC, 1216. 21. It is only then that, as the Apostle writes, “the Son also himself [may be made] subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28 KJV). 22. Derrida, Jacques, The Gift of Death. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996, 52. 23. cf. Luke 5:31 and Luke 7:47. 24. Singh, Sadhu Sundar, Essential Writings of Sadhu Sundar Singh. Ed. Charles E. Moore. Modern Spirituality Series. New York: Orbis Books, 2005, 42. 25. Thomas-a-Kempis. The Imitation of Christ, Bombay: The Bombay St. Paul Society, 2001, 50.

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To Give or Not To Give by Briani George

I’m sitting on the 4 train in New York City at 7:30 am on my way to work when a rather disheveled looking older woman sits next to me about 1.5 feet away. She spits on the ground. The person across from me looks on in disgust. The woman takes out lotion and wipes it on her hands and face. She continues spitting. People on the train begin to complain and some even tell me to move away from her. At this point I’m frozen. I had just come back from a Missions Conference less than 48 hours prior. Less than 48 hours before I had been talking and learning about Jesus loving the least of society and providing for the poor. I was torn between staying and emulating Jesus by hanging out with those who are ostracized in society, or moving away in disgust. Yes, I did not want to get spat on, but I also wanted to show this woman that although people were yelling at her and calling her horrible names, she is loved, and that she does matter. Whether it was food, money, or social support, this wasn’t the first time I was faced with the question of “to give or not to give.” Being a New Yorker, I have seen my fair share of people begging and asking for help. Each time I come across someone I am torn. I begin to ask myself, “Should I give this person money when I don’t know what they’re using it for? What if I’m perpetuating some harmful habits like addiction?” Considering whether or not giving money is fueling an addiction is a tough question to ask. It means projecting my own biases about the ailments of those in need and how they got to this place in their lives. It means questioning

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their actions rather than the systemic oppression, which may have propelled them into a life of poverty. It requires trusting those in need to put my gift to good use. It means questioning whether or not I should care what those in need do with the gifts they receive. But perpetuating addiction wasn’t the only question I had. I wondered, “What if those who asked for help are just swindling me and don’t actually need it?” I found myself making criteria for giving to people in the street or on the train. Those criteria consisted of giving food instead of money and of not giving to people whom I see consistently for several weeks. I begin to wonder if asking for money on the street is their job. I wonder if they have sought out other sources of help or employment. Is it that simple to seek employment or other avenues of help? Am I naïve in thinking that consistent beggars have turned asking people for help into a form of employment? Am I wrong in “turning my face” in situations where I feel like I’m doing more harm than good? Is it okay to want to protect my own livelihood and myself ? Does that mean that I don’t trust God to provide for me when I do his work and address the injustice I see around me? As these questions show, I still am very uncertain about how to approach this dilemma. I still struggle with the intricacies of giving. I think that as someone who wants to show her love for people by caring for them in their deepest need, these questions are important. I want to meet the needs of those around me rather than inflict more pain. I found myself asking these sorts of questions a lot, especially during my time abroad in Beijing, China.

When I first took the train in Beijing, I was with the other two program participants and our student activities coordinator. While on the train a woman with a child on one hip and music playing on the other came through the aisle bowing her head asking for money. The student activities coordinator told us not to pay her any mind and not to give her money. I figured that as a Beijing resident he would know how to deal with the situation better than I would. Later that day I asked the office assistant about why we shouldn’t give to people begging for money on the train and street. She told me that in the particular instance that I witnessed it is possible that the child the woman was holding may indeed have been stolen from his parents. At that point I felt helpless. I wanted to help, but I also didn’t want to perpetuate the system of child endangerment and kidnapping. All I could think was 我怎么办？(What do I do?). Experiences like these have taught me the intricacies of giving. They made me wonder whether or not I should give to those in need. Do I dare protect myself or feel as though I am protecting others through these self-made giving criteria? I feel as though if I gave food rather than money then that would both help them and protect me. But then I still end up perpetuating poverty in that it may be difficult to get a job if one doesn’t have the financial means to pay for transportation. These experiences made me grapple with distinctions between societies’ expectations and reservations, my own desire to not ignore the people around me crying for help, and what God has to say on the matter. Society and even the NYC

transit authority rules of conduct say that I shouldn’t give to people asking for money on the train. However the rules of conduct state that, “leafletting or distribution of written noncommercial materials;...; solicitation for religious or political causes; solicitation for charities” are allowed. The rules of conduct for the NYC transit authority say that it’s okay for me to spread the gospel but that it’s not okay to give to people asking for help on the train. When did the two become separated? When did meeting the needs of people become separated from sharing the good news of Jesus Christ? I found myself asking the oh so famous question “what would Jesus do?” I began to gain some insight into this question on a vacation trip while I was abroad. While laying in a bed on a train from Shenzhen to Beijing, I began reading Radical: Taking back Your Faith from the American Dream, by David Platt. Platt raised a good point that very much describes my thoughts on giving: “If I have been commanded to make disciples of all nations, and if poverty is rampant in the world to which God has called me, then I cannot ignore these realities. Anyone wanting to proclaim the glory of Christ to the ends of the earth must consider not only how to declare the gospel verbally but also how to demonstrate the gospel visibly in a world where so many are urgently hungry. If I am going to address urgent spiritual need by sharing the gospel of Christ or building up the body of Christ around the world, then I cannot overlook dire physical need in the process.”1 Here Platt is referring to the scripture Matthew Photo by Sam Gutierrez.

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28:18-20 where Jesus tells his disciples to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and [teach] them to obey everything I have commanded you.”2 Platt shows the struggles of heeding Jesus’ call in the society in which we live. Platt reminded me that when Jesus drew people to him he didn’t just heal their souls, he also healed their bodies. If Jesus cared about and met the needs of those who were without both physically and spiritually, then as a follower of Christ I am called to do the same. Jesus addressed the physical and social needs of those around him, even to the point of turning water into wine at a wedding. If he could meet the need of saving someone’s face at a wedding how much more would he meet the needs of someone in poverty? After reading Platt’s section on consumer society and giving in the United States I felt so convicted and motivated. But as soon as I got off that train I couldn’t help but wonder if I would be perpetuating a system by thoughtlessly giving my money by Suness Jones to anyone who needed it. During my time at Swarthmore, I was fortunate to be friends with Josh Satre who once said “the more I give the more I have to give.” In other words, the more I give the more God will supply me with things to give. Taking up this ideology requires me to have total faith and trust that God will continue to supply my needs as I share his love through meeting the needs of those around me. I’ve found that it is easy to slip into a place of uncertainty when I don’t rely on the fact that God will provide and take care of me as I do his work. At this point in my life, I think that searching for organizations that help those in need in a way that doesn’t cause one to question the existence of an ulterior motive is the best way. Giving my time, a helping hand, and a comforting word is also equally important. Sometimes meeting the needs of those in poverty comes in the form of love that is more than just a physical gift of food or water but being there, being a friend in the midst of a society that looks down on the poor in disgust. This does not mean that meeting physical needs aren’t important, it means that there is more beneath the surface than the need for food and money. So then the question isn’t “to give or not to give” but “how do we give?” Some organizations that I have come across that address the needs of the public are Convoy of Hope and Love Wins. I particularly like Convoy of Hope because of the range of ways in which they support people, from job placement and food, to training churches to be more active in meeting the needs of their community. Also a large portion of their funds goes to funding these programs; in 2012, 90% of the funds went toward funding the programs. Love Wins deals with both homelessness and hunger in a unique way in that they don’t consider themselves to be just a feeding ministry or a shelter, but an organization that is focused on caring for people. They acknowledge the fact that homelessness is much more than the loss of a house, but rather can be the result of a series of losses. Love Wins chooses to support people who are impoverished and lets them know that they have not lost everything. Their vision allows people to realize there is more to homelessness and hunger than material needs. They produce awareness about the variety of scenarios that may result in homelessness and poverty. I think that keeping this in mind helps me remember that there is more that I can do than just giving someone food.

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In terms of how to help those who do not fall into the structures of charities and organizations, I’m still not completely sure. However, I think prayer and love really play a large role. I see prayer as a love language, a low-risk form of love, in that I am saying that I believe that there is someone greater than I who can meet your need and that I will act as a mediator on your behalf. I think through prayer God can also give direction on how to best love the person in front of me. When considering the subset of homeless people who have to resort to swindling and hustling, I must remember that that action may be coming from a place of being hurt by others and not being able to trust people. Thus, I think being a person whom they can trust and working to soften their heart is key. I think this is the stance to take in those moments when I am on the train and everyone around me is telling me to shun the woman that they don’t understand. It means praying for that woman right then and there. Is it scary? Yes. But I wonder how that woman would have reacted if I had said to her, “Despite what these people are saying, you are loved by God and I’m sorry that you have to go through this.” I think love is the key to answering the questions I posed at the beginning of this reflection. I think it is important to focus on loving in the way that Christ loves me, in a way that is counter cultural, and radical, and doesn’t make sense. I think by asking myself this question, I can better understand how best to show that love and meet the needs of those around me. For me, loving people is different from being nice. If I gave a dollar to every homeless person I came across that would be being nice, but that would only scratch the surface of the real issue at hand, the lack of relationship and hope. It means not just providing a hand-out but also a hand that supports. It means reminding the homeless and the marginalized that they are still human beings. I think that if enough people loved the homeless instead of attacking them, maybe we wouldn’t worry as much about ulterior motives because it’s easier to trust someone who loves you. In closing, I think loving and giving to those in poverty looks a lot like Matthew 25: 34-40: “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’ The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’”3 So how do we give? BY LOVING! r

Endnotes 1. Platt, David. Taking Back Your Faith in Action. 108-109. 2. Matthew 28: 18-20. NIV 3. Matthew 25: 34-40, NIV

Wet Feet

Navigating the Intellectual and Practical by Nathan Scalise

“Hey, sorry to bother you guys-” the man wore

more layers than I could count and spoke in a halting tone that had a tinge of shame to it. “Hi,” I answered, trying to quickly assess the situation. “I don’t want any money or anything-” It was just before 10 o’clock on a Saturday night, and my brother, Greg, and I were walking down the street in Boston looking for a bite to eat. “I just… my feet are wet, and I was hoping someone could go into the Walgreens and get a pair of socks for me, they’re like $1.99.” It had snowed all morning, turned to rain during the day and then back to snow. Now, there was slush everywhere, the kind of slush that’s cold like snow but soaks like water. In fact, about a block earlier, I had slipped a little on a frozen patch and gotten a good portion of slush all over my right foot, which was still wet. “Sure,” I answered, and he continued, “I’m just getting my life back together and I got a job, seriously, and I can’t get sick, I just can’t get sick, and with the weather today…” “Oh yeah,” Greg answered and gave him a supremely understanding nod as I opened the door to Walgreens. We couldn’t find socks at first, except some large Valentine’s Day socks that were more expensive. The man looked at them and hung his head, then looked at me rather sheepishly. I saw that there was a discount if you bought three pairs, picked up three, looked at him and doing my best to sound both warm

and serious, said, “If we’re getting you socks, we’re getting you socks.” I paid for the socks and the three of us went outside. The man thanked us repeatedly, then kind of blurted out, “I’m Rob!” extending a hand to Greg and me. We introduced ourselves in turn and as we were about to part he added, “God Bless you guys, seriously.” “You too, seriously.” Greg and I answered in the sort of spontaneous unison that makes people think we’re twins, then made our way into the Chipotle across the street. Allow me to backtrack a little bit, I was in Boston that weekend for the Augustine Collective Retreat, a conference that helps to equip and educate the students who work on Christian Journals like Peripateo. I had spent Friday afternoon and all day Saturday in intense discussions on writing, contemporary culture, and theological issues ranging from Calvinism vs. Arminianism to what is necessary for salvation. After Greg and I ate, we went back to the hotel where the conference was held and I spent three more hours discussing theology with different people. All of this is to demonstrate the following statement, I value intellectual thought, I value serious academic endeavor and believe it is important that everyone, Christian or non-Christian think rigorously. However, the juxtaposition between the intellectual exchange of the conference

Photo by Kelly Hernández.

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and my encounter with Rob has stuck with me. It has left me wondering about the interaction between the intellectual and the practical. This is a tension that strikes me as both relevant to Christian life because Christians are called both to learn about God and to live out God’s will, and relevant to Swarthmore, because we are an institution of higher education with a stated emphasis on social justice work. Let us explore that tension together. I love ideas, and I believe that what we think is important. It is important to train the mind; I would’ve gone to another college and slept a lot more if I believed otherwise. But, thinking is important only instrumentally, through its effects on actions. A Christian framework would draw support for that idea from a passage such as the following “Who is wise and understanding among you? Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom.” ( James 3:13, NRSV) In other words, actions demonstrate wisdom. This is how grades work, our actions on tests are taken as representations of our thinking. The question of whether tests are the best way to do that isn’t relevant to this article, but it is difficult to imagine a valid and useful means of assessing a person’s thinking independent of their actions. Even in the case where a person might forget how to take a derivative, while still retaining some understanding of the incremental changes involved in calculus, that retained understanding must have some effect on the person’s actions in order to be of value. The other question that must be asked in order to arrive at a Christian understanding of this tension is: How does Jesus handle it? How and to what extent does Jesus engage in both the intellectual and the practical? I would note first that Jesus studies. In Luke 2:46, we find Jesus sitting in the temple intellectually engaging with the teachers of the law. Throughout all four Gospels, Jesus repeatedly demonstrates an understanding of the scriptures that surpasses that of everyone around him. He out-argues the teachers of the law to the point where they’re afraid to continue testing him. Second, I would note that while Jesus

This is not to say that we should not engage with questions in an academic way, but rather, that is necessarily insufficient to engage with them in a strictly academic way. If our studies, whether they be of scripture or sociology, do not alter our lives, we have wasted our time.

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talks much more theologically in John than in Matthew, Mark, or Luke, even in John, the Gospel does not read like a philosophical dialogue between Jesus and the disciples or Jesus and his opponents. There is action. When Jesus proclaims the “Good News” there are actions attached, when he preaches from the passage in Isaiah that says “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4:18-19) He then does those things over the course of his ministry. In dealing with ideas of social justice, there is often a balance between a desire to have an unproblematic remedy for a situation and a desire to do something immediately. I’m sure there was a more systematically effective option than buying Rob socks. I don’t doubt that walking around the streets of Boston distributing socks would be inefficient. It doesn’t do anything to stop the same problem from occurring again. But, to stay in the terms of the opening vignette, coming up with a solution that provides socks for everyone a week from now doesn’t do anything for someone who has wet feet and no socks tonight. Both of these approaches are necessary; short run help without long run solutions is inefficient and a temporary fix at best. Long run solutions without short run help do nothing for the people who are actually suffering from systemic problems right now. As a Christian, I believe that I have an obligation to do what I can to meet the needs that I see. The book of James puts it as follows, “If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” ( James 2:15-17). Practicing Christianity cannot mean stopping at meeting spiritual needs. In a parable of the last judgment (Matthew 25:31-46) Jesus characterizes the righteous as those who saw the hunger, thirst, nakedness, sickness and imprisonment of the “least of my family” and responded with food, drink, clothes, and care. So, what does embodying this kind of care look like at Swarthmore? There are and should be lots of distinct answers to that question. There are certainly a lot of unmet needs and

untreated hurts on our campus. But for me, this has meant looking outside of Swarthmore. When I look at the world, I can see more injustices and problems than I am capable of seriously endeavoring to remedy or resolve. Furthermore, as a Christian, I believe that I have to do something, but which thing(s)? For me, this is where faith comes in. I trust that if I go where God tells me to go and meet the needs that I see there, I am engaging with the right issues. Rather than spending an inordinate amount of time and energy analyzing the issues and solutions and trying to maximize the impact that I have, I trust that God can do the optimization problem better than I can. The challenge in this is that it requires actually listening for God and living in accordance with what I hear. When I engage with issues on and off campus, it is because I am going where I believe God is leading me. When I’m at Swarthmore, I worship and teach music and the Chester Salvation Army, where I have experienced the power of the immediate transition between ideas and actions. Last summer, I got a grant from the Lang Center to run a music day camp there. I was frequently at the Corps for ten hours a day. I immersed myself in a faith community where if you were going to say that Jesus broke bread with tax collectors and sinners, you had better be willing to eat with whoever came through the door. If I sat there and shouted “Amen!” when the Major1 preached on Jesus walking on the water and exhorted us to be “Waterwalkers” rather than “boat-sitters” I could bet that I was going to have to “get out of the boat” on Monday. In fact, I spent the whole summer stretched across the gap between theory and practice in ways that I could never have anticipated. In my interactions with the rest of the Chester Fellows, I examined questions centered on social justice work and understanding the power structures that have combined to perpetuate the problems of Chester. In summer Bible studies and at the Salvation Army, I looked at the passages that have led Christians to view social justice work as an integral component of lived faith. Then, there was camp, where I had to respond to the challenges resulting from broken systems in a way consistent with Jesus’ teachings. Ideas are neat and clean. I can choose when to engage with Jesus’ teaching on going the extra mile.2 If I’m in a Bible study and I

decide to check out, the tangible and immediate consequences are minimal. Moreover, I can argue that one should “go the extra mile” without anyone actually making me do it. If, on the other hand, it is an hour past the end of my camp and I’m exhausted, but one of the students still hasn’t been picked up, disengaging isn’t really an option. The circumstances are such that I’m not just going to have to think about going another mile, I’m going to have to do it. Being forced to live out my faith like this led to some of the most impactful experiences of the summer. I consistently found myself in situations where I had to choose between ignoring what I knew God wanted me to do and doing something that I felt some combination of unqualified, untrained and too tired to do. For example, one day after camp, an hour after camp had ended, I taught our most pugnacious and generally difficult 6-year-old to play the djembe and then picked up my trombone and played something that he could groove along to. When his mom got there, she started dancing around the room and smiling. The two of them enjoyed themselves tremendously. She then apologized for being late and thanked me very profusely. I found out later that my student’s father had been murdered recently and I immediately felt very small and foolish for caring about having to stay engaged for another hour at the end of the day. I don’t doubt that the people on this campus, Christian or not, who are working for social justice generally have their hearts in the right place. I question whether our feet are in the right place. When I have an encounter like I had with Rob or when someone at Chester Corps praises God for helping him get off the street and into housing, I am left wondering what I am doing at Swarthmore. I am left wondering about what it means to be rooting myself in a hyper-academic community. This is an institution that at the very least professes a great interest in advocating for social change. It is certainly a place where social justice and the systems it seeks to combat are the subjects of academic study. But it is also a place with a remarkable capability for detachment and compartmentalization. We can study food justice and still send an unfathomably large quantity of food into the garbage at Sharples. We can study environmental justice and divestment, but still send all of that trash three miles down the road to get burned in Chester and leave lights on all over campus. This is not to say

that we should not engage with questions in an academic way, but rather, that is necessarily insufficient to engage with them in a strictly academic way. If our studies, whether they be of scripture or sociology, do not alter our lives, we have wasted our time. It is important, therefore, to get out of the bubble. It is important for us to “get our feet wet” as the saying goes, and to engage with the world in practical ways. I use “get your feet wet” because there is nothing that Rob could’ve said to convey the difficulty of his situation better than the slush I had stepped in myself. My first thought, when I felt the water get through the thin webbing of my running shoes was “Good thing I have a clean pair of socks at the hotel.” Getting our feet in the right place might mean getting them wet. Responding practically to need and hurt is not going to be comfortable. But treating people as fully human necessarily entails a multifaceted approach. Jesus proclaims “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind and with all your strength.”3 Given that loving God entails responding to human needs, there is no reason that we should respond to human needs with less than that. It is good for us to use our minds; I came to Swarthmore in part because I wanted to be a part of a community of people who were intellectually invested in questions of social justice. But it is not good for us to become so focused in any one side, the intellectual, the physical, or the spiritual, that we neglect the others. Moreover, it is important that we understand meeting basic physical needs as a foundation on which we must build in order to meet the others. This isn’t to say that the physical is inherently more important, only that order matters. Roofs and foundations are both essential parts of houses, but it’s impossible to put the roof on first. Human beings have minds, we have hearts, we have spirits, and we have feet. Sometimes, those feet are wet. r

Endnotes 1. Essentially, the Major is the Pastor for the Chester Corps. 2. Matthew 5:41 3. Mark 12:30, it shows up in other gospels, sometimes in a different order.

Swarthmore Peripateo | 15

He Who Graciously Gives Us All Things by Dorothy Kim

“When they came to my house—the time they took my mother—they found a picture of the North Korean president. We had heard that if we poked holes in it, then we would be able to harm him through the photograph. So we had taken needles and poked many holes in his eyes. Because of this picture, they took my brother and me to different rooms to question us separately. They told us that if we had different answers, they would kill us. I played dumb saying, ‘I’m only a student! I don’t know what this picture is!’ But that didn’t work. So finally I begged him; I asked him to consider what he would do if he had a sister, and she were in my place.” There were several moments of silence. ‘This photo—I’ll take care of it,’ he said. They could have killed us you know. Killing meant nothing to them: one more person dead would not have made a difference— but they let us go.” Just a few months after this incident, during which her mother was taken from her, my grandma was kidnapped during the Korean War at only 20 years old. --“After we knocked on her door, a middle-aged woman poked her head out of her house to see three young women at her doorstep. ‘우리는너무 피곤 하다’(We are so tired.) ‘물 한잔만 주시겠어

Photo by Kelly Hernández.

16 | He Who Graciously Gives Us All Things

요?’ (May we have a drink of water?) She replied in North Korean dialect, ‘You sound like you are from Seoul.’ ‘We are.’ ‘What are you doing in North Korea at a time like this?’ the woman asked us. ‘Here, here is some water. This is a Christian household. You should stay with us for a while.’ ” My grandma continued to tell us the story of what happened to her 65 years ago. “But at that time, we couldn’t trust anyone. So we took the water and went on our way.” --About two months later, my grandma and her friends made it back to South Korea. The stories from this period are worth being written separately and could stand on their own. “We stayed in empty houses, and ate any food we could find. I cried a lot. I was hungry a lot. I did not even have a penny from August until November. I don’t know how I lived without money,” my grandma recounted to my sister and me on Christmas Eve this year, over a raging fire in the background with family all around. “When I came back home, I found my younger brother in the middle of an empty home, with nothing. He had been going from house to house begging for food for months—he was only ten years old at the time.”

The captivating story she was telling was so far from the reality that was around me then at home, and is around me now at Swarthmore. I have all my basic needs met; I really do have everything I could ever need and more. Yet, this story gives me insight into God’s character. I am constantly learning to trust that the same God will provide for me, not only in the mundane but also in every situation imaginable. My grandma describes her escape journey as a testimony of God’s providence. This is, indeed, supported by the Scripture that says, “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.” 1 These snippets of my grandma’s story are just small pointers to the goodness of God; they are glimpses of the greater good God has in store for us. Like the soldier, God is merciful. Like the woman who gave water, God gave us his son, Jesus Christ, by whom we may never thirst again. By him and with him, we will find our way home to him. As a reminder to myself, and others, in times of struggle and need: What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?2 I am hopeful because of and thankful for the goodness of the God I serve. r Endnotes: 1. James 1:17, English Standard Version 2. Romans 8:31-32, English Standard Version

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The Virtue of Charity:

Locating Loveâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Foundation on Stable Ground by Nicholas Zahorodny

Photo by Sam Gutierrez.

18 | The Virtue of Charity: Locating Loveâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Foundation on Stable Ground

Love occupies a paradoxical position in the conceptual space of ordinary language. Considered from one perspective, love is a commonplace of everyday experience. Some almost universally accessible notion of love seems to inform the interactions, and consequently the relationships, that constitute our lives as social creatures. For a man to wake up, therefore, and find his existing notion of love fundamentally muddled or impoverished seldom happens, and, when it does, it is a truly remarkable occurrence. Considered from another perspective, however, love cloaks itself in the ineffable, so that many have forsworn the possibility of any comprehensive conceptual formulation. Some part of love, they say, is simply beyond words. The paradox, then, is that a concept that grounds so much of the mundane should itself be so deeply mysterious.

Although there is something worthwhile in each part of this paradox, the paradox also contains a danger. The danger consists in believing that an investigation of love is either unnecessary or impossible. For there do exist, even given certain important overlaps, substantial disagreements about what it means to love another human being and about what counts as an authentic expression of that love. The failure to pursue some middle way is, therefore, the failure to engage questions of fundamental importance to human life. In this article, I will present an â&#x20AC;&#x153;emotiveâ&#x20AC;? conception of love that is widely represented and widely influential in popular culture. This conception of love is only superficially attractive, I will argue, and, because it is incapable of continual growth and renewal, will never suffice for the flourishing of either a secular or a Chris-

tian life. As an alternative, I will present a traditional Christian conception of love as the virtue of charity1, the fullness of which conception I contend is rich enough and deep enough to satisfy the human heart. The core of the emotive conception of love is, as the name implies, a conception of love as the intense upwelling of passionate feelings. It is the sort of love immortalized in romances like Romeo and Juliet, The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Titanic. To love at the height of emotive love is to feel despair at the thought of separation, ecstasy at the thought of togetherness, to feel, in short, as though the whole happiness of life were eternally and inextricably bound up in a relationship with oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s beloved. It is easy to imagine one lover saying to her beloved: You are everything to me. I cannot imagine my life without you. (continued on next page)

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It is for this reason that emotive love is particularly given to the glamour of dramatic selfsacrifice or self-destruction.2 Closely related is the hope of radical satisfaction – the feeling that one’s beloved, perhaps in the spirit of the Symposium, is like Human beings are limited a missing part of creatures; no relationship oneself, and in fact, only part that between humans can render the is missing.3 This its participants impervious to interpersonal comthe vicissitudes, often times munion is felt to be both necessary bitter, bewildering, or tragic, and sufficient for that are, for most, inevitable the enjoyment of a parts of the human happiness without measure and withexperience. out end. Again, our lovers might say: All we need is each other. As long as we have each other, our love will be enough. Altogether, these feelings lie along a spectrum. As they wax, one is falling deeper into love, and as they wane, one is falling out of love, or coming to realize that the feeling had not been true love after all. So much for the matter, or content, of emotive love. What follows from its form, namely that of a feeling, an upwelling of emotion? The first major point is that, as Kant claims, love cannot be commanded.4 As a feeling, emotive love is spontaneous in the sense that one cannot choose its object and one cannot will it either to increase or to decrease. The waxing and waning of the passions are irresistible; one can choose to struggle against them, but one cannot, in the end, honestly deny them. Falling under this point, then, is the idea that restraint is no real part of love. For the concealing of one’s love, or lack thereof, is considered, once again, at best a form of cowardice or dishon-

esty. In the most significant respects, then, the emotive account of love places love outside the influence of the will. To the extent that this brief account of emotive love expresses an underlying model or ideal commonly drawn upon in popular culture, it will be worthwhile to consider some of the problems lurking beneath the surface of such a conception. The first and most significant problem is the fatal tension that exists between the matter of emotive love and its form. The expectation or hope of emotive love points toward a union that is permanent and comprehensive, that is of a union fulfilling the partners completely and lasting indefinitely. Feelings, however, are notoriously changeable and therefore particularly ill-suited to these sorts of hopes and expectations. For a particular feeling to endure for a year in a vacuum environment is conceivable. For the same feeling to endure for decades in the real world, with all its variability, is an expectation that flirts with absurdity. Feelings are closely bound up with one’s perspective and one’s circumstances, such that, as time goes on and one’s perspective and circumstances shift, it is almost inevitable that one’s feelings shift as well. Feelings of indifference may blossom into attraction, and likewise feelings of attraction may fade into indifference. So two people awash with a passionate upwelling of emotive love may easily come to find that, after the course of a few months or a few years, the current that drew them so close together has since retreated, or at least changed its shape. Even in a culture heavily influenced by the model of emotive

20 | The Virtue of Charity: Locating Love’s Foundation on Stable Ground

love, there is an acknowledgement of these sorts of realities in commonly invoked concepts, such as the “honeymoon phase” of a relationship or the “growing apart” of a couple. The emotive conception of love also tends to turn people into the victims of an impossible ideal. An individual who believes that her beloved will complete her in a way that wholly satisfies her desires will tend to mistakenly attribute any deep or persistent sense of frustration or disappointment to the inadequacy of her partner. Human beings are limited creatures; no relationship between humans can render its participants impervious to the vicissitudes, often times bitter, bewildering, or tragic, that are, for most, inevitable parts of the human experience. Certainly, two people can depend upon each other for emotional and spiritual support in times of confusion, anxiety, or distress. To model one’s expectations for a love relationship on the emotive understanding that lovers complete each other absolutely, however, is unreasonable. For it is to expect that the richly textured landscape of human needs and desires can be reduced down to a single dimension and, therefore, satisfied by a single person – an impossibility, to be sure. These problems with the emotive understanding of love also manifest in a set of problems unique to Christianity. For the Christian self-image is of Christianity as a religion deeply rooted in love. Consider the Greatest Commandment as it appears in the Gospel of Mark: “thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind, and with thy whole strength. This is the

first commandment. And the second is like to it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There is no other commandment greater than these.”5 It is inevitable, therefore, that a Christian’s understanding of love will determine, in a fundamental way, the lens through which she views the faith to which she has consecrated her life. The emotive conception of love, I will argue, renders the injunction of the Greatest Commandment almost incoherent. As previously mentioned, on an emotive understanding, the mere idea of commanding love is absurd. If love is a feeling and if feelings arise more or less spontaneously, then a command to love is nonsensical. A person can be faulted for failing to act in accordance with some duty, but there can be no duty, and therefore no fault, in failing to feel anything at a particular time or with a particular intensity. Just such a duty, however, seems to be what the Commandment entails. A second problem concerns the first half of the commandment in particular. Loving God with all one’s heart, in other words, having all one’s feelings of desire directed towards God, seems to leave no emotional voltage left for loving others. Yet many faithful Christians, it would seem, have fallen deeply in love with other human beings, even to the point of joining together in marriage. One must, then, reconcile the giving of all of one’s love to God with the apparent possibility of giving at least some part of one’s love to one’s spouse. Finally, there is the deeply problematic second part of the Commandment. To be inoffensive and, in general, kind to one’s neighbors is possible, but

to love them, on the emotive understanding, is the height of unrealistic idealism. One’s passions are generally directed only towards a few, sometimes only towards one, and certainly only towards those people with whom one has cultivated some kind of love-inspiring relationship. Neighbors, though, especially when considered in the extended sense of the word, which is to say all men and women, fall far short of meeting such a standard. How could one possibly feel love, that deeply moving passion, for someone with whom one barely exchanges a hasty hello in passing? For Christians and nonChristians alike, therefore, an emotive conception of love fails on many counts. The hopes of emotive love are profoundly exaggerated and not at all well-suited to its form as a feeling. The commandments at the heart of Christian life become either idealistic or incoherent. To find a solution to the problems of emotive love, though, is a daunting task. One must capture the essence of the common language use of love while avoiding its excesses; one must find an important role for feeling, but a role in which feeling is competent to serve. Any alternative conception of love must be accessible to and attainable by real human beings, as beings undeniably capable of experiencing some part of genuine love, even in the cases that their notions of love are partially obscure or in error. I will argue that the solution to this problem lies in the traditional Christian conception of love as charity. What, then, is charity, and how does it differ from emotive love? In the Christian tradition, charity is considered,

above faith and above hope, the queen of the theological virtues: “And now there remain faith, hope, and charity, these three: but the greatest of these is charity.”6 To convey precisely the significance of shifting one’s notion of love from feeling to theological virtue, it will be helpful to consider the notion of virtue itself. Human virtues are, stated briefly, dispositions that incline their possessors to act in ways consonant with human flourishing; they are the habits that one must cultivate in order to live a good life. Just as much as emotions, then, virtues are a ubiquitous part of everyday experience and are essential to success in everyday pursuits. Parents, for example, must practice the virtue of patience in teaching their children to read. Students must practice the virtues of industry and humility in their pursuit of a sound education. As these examples suggest, virtues as habits are much more stable and enduring than feelings. Because virtues, as well as vices, develop through the repeated performance of even the most mundane actions, they tend to become fairly ingrained aspects of a person’s character. A student that has striven for years to develop a robust work ethic will only after some extended period of regression settle back into her former laziness. Unlike feelings, then, virtues have permanence and deepen with practice. To claim that love is best understood as a virtue, therefore, is to claim that expressions of love are expressions of a certain behavioral disposition, an inclination that can be strengthened actively, through the performance of loving actions. A distinction in form be-

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tween charity and emotive love, however, far from exhausts the grounds for their differentiation. For charity is radically unlike emotive love both in its object and in the role it plays in a flourishing human life. A more precise specification of these differences requires a consideration of charity’s status as a theological virtue, which is to say, as a virtue that “adapt[s] man’s faculties for participation in the divine nature” and in so doing serves as the wellspring from which all other virtues flow.7 Under the emotive conception, love is primarily directed towards other human beings. The initiation or continuity of a close relationship with the beloved is what satisfies the feelings and desires bundled together in emotive love. Love as the virtue of charity, however, is not fundamentally directed towards other human beings; it is fundamentally directed towards God. As St. Thomas Aquinas writes, “Each kind of friendship regards chiefly the subject in which we chiefly find the good of the fellowship on which that friendship is based…therefore God ought to be loved chiefly and before all out of charity: for He is loved as the cause of happiness.”8 If relationships conceived in charity are meant to fulfill the human person, which deep and comprehensive fulfillment was known to the ancients and medievals as “happiness,”9 then it is clear that no creature can ever be the fundamental object of charity. Creatures are by their nature finite, finite in their goodness and finite in their capacity to love, and yet they are made with an ineluctable longing for the infinite. It is God alone who is infinite in his goodness

and hence in his capacity to fulfill the human person, his own creation. As St. Augustine so poignantly remarked, “You have made us for thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.”10 To whatever extent one loves another creature in charity, then, one will have prior reason to love, as the foundation of all love, the Creator. It is this foundational love of God that animates the flourishing life and the practice of every other virtue. The energy of emotive love is narrowly bounded, in the sense that it is unlikely to transform any aspect of the lover’s life that is not directly related to her beloved. Many have experienced emotive love and, while denying their beloved nothing, remain temperamental, selfish, and indifferent in their treatment of others. It is far different for those souls, however, who have grown to master the practice of charity. Here, St. Augustine writes with remarkable boldness: “Love the Lord, and do whatever pleases you.”11 The implication here is not that one may praise God piously, in words brimming with emotion, and then embrace flippancy in one’s moral life. On the contrary, it is that the choice of evil and the love of God are incompatible. For one fully in love with the Lord, one’s own will and the will of God are the same – nothing displeasing to the Lord can be pleasing to those who truly love Him. As a result, one cannot grow in charity but that every aspect of one’s life becomes transformed, suffused more and more with the radiance of God’s goodness. Wisdom, temperance, fortitude, justice, and all the other virtues are practiced, not in the cold

22 | The Virtue of Charity: Locating Love’s Foundation on Stable Ground

and forced manner of one who must bear a heavy burden, but rather with the lightness and eagerness of a lover seeking to please his beloved. Only in the light of charity do the words of Christ assume their full meaning: “Take up my yoke upon you and learn of me…for my yoke is sweet and my burden light.”12 Such, at least, is what Christian charity purports to be. At this point, however, one might advance serious objections against the notion that anything resembling charity, as it is described above, could possibly serve as a viable alternative to emotive love. Casting love as a virtue, one might argue, trivializes the deeply emotional experience of being in love. Even conceding that love might not be essentially emotional, to conceive of love as a virtue is to ignore the rich emotional texture of love relationships, reducing them almost to a theater for the practice of some semi-technical skill. Love as charity also seems to disrespect the special value that human beings attach to particular people. If love were just a virtue to be practiced, then it would seem that the people with whom one practices charity are only of secondary importance. Any plausible conception of love, it could be argued, must allow for a differentiation amongst persons, according to which the practice of love is connected to some in ways that it is not connected to others. As an extension of this criticism, one might argue that charity’s primary directedness towards God is enough to show that it cannot serve as a replacement for emotive love. Love simply must be able to be fundamentally directed towards other

people; a trickle-down conception of love does not treat love relationships between human beings with the sincerity that they deserve. Charity as an answer to the deficiencies of emotive love does not, for all these reasons, even rise to the level of serious consideration. In what follows, I will answer these objections and then illustrate charity’s unique solution to the problems of emotive love. The first objection, that the conception of love as charity contains no space for meaningful emotion, fails because it assumes the alienation of virtue from desire. It thereby forces a false choice between a heart filled with sudden, uncontrolled movement and a sterile heart that mechanically produces hollow acts of love. The interaction between virtue and emotion is, in fact, much richer and more complex. Consider again the case of a student engaged in cultivating the virtue of industry. Prior to the development of this virtue, she likely found idle days quite pleasing, whereas she found the thought of continuous and attentive application a source of anxiety or dread, at best a necessary evil. The strenuous character of the work ahead impressed itself upon her much more immediately than the value of the ends toward which she was laboring. Nevertheless, as she develops industry, the opposite set of reactions begins to obtain: the thoughts of entire mornings wasted in bed become irksome to her and she feels a much greater desire to spend her time productively. The work ahead is still challenging, but the worthwhileness of her pursuit and the desirability of her end gain priority in her thinking. Her lazy friends cannot quite grasp

the appeal of her new mode of living and working, while her more industrious friends congratulate her for finally “getting it.” In this way, the application of her will, in an effort to alter past patterns of behavior, also has the effect of changing her perspective and reordering her desires. Contrary to the objection currently under consideration, the traditional Christian perspective does not advocate, either directly or implicitly, for the extirpation of the passions from human life. It does, however, recognize the distinction between passions and desires that are well-ordered and those that are disordered. One of the functions of the virtues, then, is to order the passions so that they contribute in a healthy way to the flourishing of the whole person; and consequently, it is one of the functions of the passions to motivate virtuous action by lending a sense of sweetness and satisfaction to virtuous pursuits. Without desire, the virtuous life becomes inhuman. Without the foundational practice of the virtues, though, desires become ill-formed and destructive, especially in cases involving love. Conceiving of love as the virtue of charity does not, then, eliminate the emotions, but rather allows for the possibility of their perfection. The second objection to understanding love as the virtue of charity is the thought that the practice of love as a virtue is incompatible with the various kinds and degrees of love it is natural to feel for different people. One will love one’s spouse and one’s children more than the poor strangers one passes on the way to work and certainly more than one’s enemies. The suggestion that such a reality undermines the plau-

sibility of conceiving of love in terms of charity, however, conflates two separate claims. The first accurate claim is that one ought always to practice charity. The second mistaken claim is that the demands of the practice of charity are always the same. On the contrary, charitable practice is deeply sensitive to social circumstance and to the relationships between people. In the Summa Theologica, St. Thomas Aquinas presents an “order of charity,” an outline of the structure of the demands of charity based upon the object under consideration.13 Simply because it is an act of charity to spend one’s savings on food, shelter, and clothing for one’s family does not necessarily mean, ceteris paribus, that it is an act of charity to do the same for one’s enemies.14 Mastery of charity is less about overcoming the desire to love some more than others Creatures are by their and more about overcoming the de- nature finite, finite in their sire to love others goodness and finite in their less than we ought, given the sorts of capacity to love, and yet they connections that are made with an ineluctable bind those others to longing for the infinite. ourselves. It is within this variegated structure that there is room to order some closer and others further from one’s heart and to show those that stand closest, as is natural, the special tokens of friendship and affection. If the practice of virtue prepares the way for grace, it is helpful to remember here, as always, that “grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.”15 The third objection broadly denies that any conception of love is workable if its first and fundamental object is God. Human beings love each other directly, not derivatively, as one

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might love a keepsake that reminds one of one’s beloved. As with past objections, the failure of this objection lies in its oversimplification of a certain key complexity. Consider the words of St. Thomas Aquinas on the subject: “Now the aspect under which our neighbor is to be loved, is God, since what we ought to love in our neighbor is that he may be in God. Hence it is clear that it is specifically the same act whereby we love God, and whereby we love our neighbor.”16 As the above passage suggests, neighbors are not objects of love simpliciter, but rather they are objects of love considered under some particular aspect or description. A friend, for example, may be a faithful companion while simultaneously sporting chronically bad breath. Love would be directed toward this friend in his capacity as a faithful companion and not so much in his capacity as someone with chronically bad breath. The general aspect under which it is possible to practice charity towards all human beings is that human beings are in God and from God. Such love, however, presupposes a logically prior love of the God in whom they are and from whom they come. Hence, acts of love directed to one’s neighbors are capable of embracing God, and if they are genuine acts of charity, then they embrace our neighbors through their embrace of God. To echo Aquinas, God and neighbor are thus loved in one and the same act. Armed with just such an understanding, it becomes possible to appreciate Christ’s meaning more fully when he assures his disciples: “I was hungry and you gave me to eat; I was thirsty and you gave me to drink…Amen, I say to you, as long as you did it to one

of these my least brethren, you did it to me.”17 Humans are not, therefore, to be loved derivatively, in the sense of the above objection, but rather they are to be loved together with God, although God, as the source of all goodness, retains priority in any genuine act of charity. Having defended the conception of love as charity from a few possible objections, it remains only to recall briefly the problem posed toward the beginning of this article: a working understanding of love must provide an appropriate account of the role of emotion, one that recognizes the importance of love’s experiential dimension without thereby locating love’s foundation upon unstable ground. Plausibility in the light of experience also demands that many men and women, even those without a proper understanding of love, be able to participate, to some extent, in the pursuit of its characteristic ideal. The Christian conception of love as charity, I submit, solves this problem. Love as the virtue of charity orders desire in accordance with human flourishing, in such a way that the satisfaction of desire does not become a blinding or self-destructive pursuit. Rather, such satisfaction lends sweetness to the authentic gift of self that charity teaches lovers to make to their beloved. Furthermore, as a habit integral to the good life, charity and its practice are built up gradually through repeated action, and hence possess a permanence and universality capable of grounding the intuition that love can transform every human life radically and comprehensively. Finally and most importantly, in being essentially directed towards God, charity ensures that a lover, in her affections and in her

24 | The Virtue of Charity: Locating Love’s Foundation on Stable Ground

acts of love, does not find only her beloved, or worse, only herself, but also finds what is infinite, overflowing, and eternally self-giving. It is this sort of love that fully renews the human spirit and renders possible the overflowing of one’s own love, even unto the whole world. r Endnotes 1. As will become evident later, “charity” does not here refer to acts of almsgiving, but rather the virtue on account of which such acts are called “charitable.” 2. Keeping with the above examples, consider the double suicide of Romeo and Juliet, the suicide of Werther, the self-sacrifice of Jack Dawson in Titanic. 3. See the speech of Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium. 4. See Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. 5. Mark 12:30-31 DR. 6. 1 Corinthians 13:13 DR. 7. The Catechism of the Catholic Church 1812. 8. St. Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica 2.2.25. 9. Generally eudaimonia in the Aristotelian tradition. 10. St. Augustine Confessions 1:1. 11. Attributed to St. Augustine. 12. Matthew 11:29-31 DR. 13. For more details, on Aquinas’ order of charity, see Summa Theologica 2.2.26. 14. For example, to pass along to one’s enemies resources for which one’s family has serious need would be considered positively irresponsible and uncharitable. 15. St. Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica 1.1.8 16. St. Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica 2.2.25 17. Matthew 25:35-40 DR

Finding Freedom in God by Mickey Herbert My first day at college was one of the most I wasn’t happy, I thought that it must have been because I was exciting times in my life. I remember thinking to myself, after I not doing enough to indulge my desires. With this justification, I said goodbye to my family, that I was finally free. I was free from became immersed more deeply in a lifestyle that was contradictory the constraints of my parents, free from high school expectations to my beliefs, and before long my situation had accelerated out of and labels, and free to pursue my passions. For the first time, I my control. Eventually I made the decision to completely commit to my thought, I could do whatever I wanted without any serious consefaith, which meant that I was going to need to radically change quences. Although I was in some ways sad to leave my childhood behind, the excitement I felt about this new opportunity was con- my behavior. This was extremely challenging. There were several suming. I was convinced that I had been waiting for this moment bumps in the road, but I found that trying to live a life that was consistent with my faith brought me so much peace. In surrenderfor most of my life, and now, finally, it had arrived. For the first few months of college, my highest priority was to ing to God’s will, my life improved dramatically as I experienced fit in, and in order to do so, I was willing to do just about anything. new levels of joy. I began to realize that the things that I had previously desired were actually harmful for me, I thought that partying and drinking excessively were the best ways to make friends, so There were several bumps and that what I truly desired was an intimate with Christ. this is how I spent all of my weekends. For a in the road, but I found relationship Finally, I came to understand that my prewhile I found this behavior to be enjoyable, but this feeling did not last long; I eventual- that trying to live a life that vious conception of freedom, along with the ly found this type of activity to be draining, was consistent with my inevitable happiness that I thought it would bring, was misguided. I thought that indulgand I usually felt empty after long nights. faith brought me so much ing all of my desires would make me happy, but During this time when I was trying to peace. it was actually on the verge of destroying me. adjust and acclimate to being at college, I In abandoning the idea that I had to be condecided on a whim that I would go to mass stantly pursuing pleasure in order to be happy, I opened myself up one Sunday morning. I had no serious reason for going, nor did I have any expectations. But to my surprise, I enjoyed the mass and to God’s love. Accepting God and believing that He loved me introduced me decided to continue attending. Despite my consistent attendance at mass, though, my behavior to a new kind of freedom—the freedom to pursue God’s will and outside of mass did not change. I was constantly trying to pursue to let him make me a light for others. In trying to relieve my inner pleasure and happiness by satisfying all of my inclinations, but this emptiness with sin, I was locking out the gifts God had given me, left me feeling worthless and alone. Despite these feelings, I was and I was not letting his light shine. As it turns out, the freedom I unwilling to give up on the idea that I was doing nothing wrong. I was searching for my entire life was not the freedom to do whatthought that I had waited my whole childhood to be having these ever I wanted, but was instead the freedom that I found in a loving experiences, and they were supposed to be making me happy. Since and eternal God. r

Photo by Kelly Hernández.

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Many Parts, One Body

THE COMMON GOOD AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIETY by Greg Brown

Much of morality is other-related. That much

is uncontroversial. But some would hold that morality is only other-related. Against this view, I’ve argued in “Rationality, Morality, and Natural Law”1 that the subject matter of morality is human flourishing—my flourishing as well as that of others. Suppose we do accept this starting point based on human flourishing. There still remains the question of how we ought to approach our relationships with others. This is the question I intend to survey by developing a Pauline view of the Christian community as the Body of Christ and the Aristotelian understanding of the polis. In this essay, I will defend this view against one alternative—that of consequentialism—for consequentialism embodies a very different form of sociopolitical reasoning. While St. Paul and Aristotle appeal to theology, metaphysics, and philosophical psychology to construct their understanding of what society should be like, consequentialists start with an intuition about how moral reasoning should proceed. Before comparing these two theories, let us take a step back. What is consequentialism? As the name suggests, consequentialism is (roughly) the theory that the permissibility of an act depends solely on its consequences. In a pithy statement of what consequentialism teaches, the philosopher Derek Parfit writes, “There is one ultimate moral aim: that outcomes be as good as possible.”2 Of course, this is still vague. More specifically, consequentialist reasoning proceeds by picking out certain premoral goods and pre-moral evils in the world. What is meant by the designation “pre-moral” here is that the goods and evils are good or evil prior to any properly moral reasoning. Examples would be the enjoyment someone obtains from playing a video game and the pain and fear of waterboarding. What counts as

26 | Many Parts, One Body: The Common Good and the Foundations of Society

good and why it should be regarded as valuable will vary from theorist to theorist. Classical utilitarians, like John Stuart Mill, balanced pleasures and pains. Peter Singer famously defends a version of preference utilitarianism; the satisfaction of peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s preferences is good, while the frustration of their preferences is bad. Consequentialism as a theory can be entertained, however, at some degree of abstraction from particulars and nuances such as these. There is a lot that could be said about consequentialism. My main interest is to contrast it with the view about the common good that I will articulate. One way in which my view will differ is in motivation. The idea behind consequentialism probably has a broad appeal; after all, in politics and economics, do we not attempt to weigh the positives and negatives against each other and pick what is overall best? Something like that should, apparently, be a part of any good theory, and the apparent simplicity and parsimony of consequentialism may be attractive. After all, consequentialism has one main rule: maximize. A good scientific theory accounts for the data using as few principles as possible. Suppose we treat our ethical intuitions as a sort of data. Perhaps we could say, analogously, that a good ethical theory is one that accounts for our ethical intuitions using relatively few principles. The sense that consequentialism excels in terms of theoretical virtues like parsimony is the backbone of Peter Singerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s brief argument for it. He notices that what is common to ethics is the universalizability and impartiality of ethical judgments; whatever ethics is, I am not thinking ethically until I recognize that I ought not to privilege my own perspective, my own interests. The self-interested man acts in his own interest; as he begins to

Photo by Kelly HernĂĄndez.

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think ethically, he begins to treat other people’s interests in a way similar to his own. Preference utilitarianism, Singer claims, is the bare minimum that a theory has to include in order to meet this condition. An ethical theory that claims [The consequentialist] move also has more than this has undesirable consequences: two societies to justify any adclaims that which only differ in that one contains one ditional it makes. Therefore, more person—who meets the average Singer concludes, level of happiness, will be equally good… there is a presumption in favor of conthe society’s average happiness will improve sequentialism, eswhen its less fortunate members die.. pecially if attempts to move past it are combated.3 One could, of course, advance arguments against consequentialism directly, but my aim here is less ambitious. I would like to cast doubt on these sorts of arguments for consequentialism. I claim that the simplicity of consequentialism is deceptive, for consequentialism faces a dilemma: it is either repugnant or far less parsimonious than it seems. What I mean by this latter possibility is that considerations of parsimony will only support very general, indeterminate principles like the directive to maximize. As I’ll show, finer-grained distinctions must be added if consequentialism is to be serviceable. But I will argue that the consequentialist method of drawing these distinctions is ad hoc. I have just commented on parsimony and the prospects for modifying consequentialism, but the first horn of the dilemma I just proposed was that consequentialism might be repugnant. What do I mean here? One problem that classical utilitarianism faces is what Derek Parfit calls the repugnant conclusion. Recall that consequentialism aims to maximize. How this directive is carried out is an issue in itself. A natural way to interpret the directive is this: a choice can be understood as a choice between different sets of consequences. For each set of consequences, “sum up” all the good things and “subtract” all the bad things. Then do whatever leads to the consequences that are best. How, exactly, is this moral mathematics actually carried out? Part of

an answer will specify what are the premoral goods and what are the pre-moral evils, for the summing of preferences (as in Peter Singer’s theory) will differ from the summing of pleasures (as in John Stuart Mill’s theory). But in either case, one could be excused for expressing doubt as to how we should ascribe summable values either to preferences or to pleasures.4 But the repugnant conclusion aims to show that this scheme faces another difficulty. Suppose what might be doubtful: that there is a clear and uncontroversial metric according to which pre-moral good and evils can in principle be valued. The idea behind the repugnant conclusion is as follows: according to consequentialism, the good is agglomerative. The good of society is the sum of the goods of its individual members. Now consider: (A) a possible society in which the people are very happy according to whatever metric one is aiming to maximize. This is a good society. Consequentialism directs us, generally, to choose acts that lead to these sorts of society. But for any such society as (A), it will always be the case (under some other plausible assumptions) that there is: (B) a possible society that is much larger and in which the people are far less happy. How much less happy are the people in (B)? How much larger is (B)? We stipulate: The lives of these people in (B) are— by consequentialist standards—“barely worth living.” Lives that are barely worth living are, nevertheless, worth living. So if (B) is sufficiently large—and there will be some size such that this holds—then (B) will be a better society than (A) overall. But this is very implausible.5 A first shot at a response might deny that consequentialist moral mathematics are a matter of summing. Instead, the consequentialist defender might suggest, we take averages. But this is not attractive either, for this move also has undesirable consequences: two societies which only differ in that one contains one more person—who meets the average level of happiness, will be equally good; this additional person’s life adds no value. On the other hand, the society’s average happiness will improve when its less fortu-

28 | Many Parts, One Body: The Common Good and the Foundations of Society

nate members die.6 The consequentialist can respond by devising more complicated principles. Summing and averaging both have undesirable implications. Perhaps there is an asymmetry between goods and evils, so that evils are particularly bad and can be summed, but—at least with respect to populations that are sufficiently large— additional goods do not make things better.7 This principle is already odd. But it is unattractive in another respect; Parfit shows that one can devise another unappealing situation—which he calls the absurd conclusion—that follows from this principle. For if we average goods but sum evils, we can create a case that is a lot like the repugnant conclusion. For consider: (C) a society which almost everyone is very happy, but one person lives a very tragic life; and (D) another society that consists of human colonies on many, many planets— where each human colony is just like the society in (C). The average goodness of all of the happy people in (D) remains the same as that of all of the happy people in (C) as we add more colonies. But the sum of the evils in (D) increases. So if there enough planets, (D) can be made as bad as we want—at least according to the principle we have just contrived to answer the repugnant conclusion. But why should (D) be any worse than (C)? It is merely a collection of societies just like (C) in the relevant respects.8 This could obviously go on and on. New principles are formulated, and the objector crafts a counterexample. The task of devising these cases and principles that accommodate them is purely formal. What I would like to emphasize is that the revised principles constructed to answer the repugnant conclusion and the absurd conclusion lack independent motivation; they are included in the theory precisely in order to combat scenarios like the repugnant conclusion. If they did not serve that need, then we wouldn’t consider them, for their formulations are bizarre. Therefore, I claim that the simplicity and parsimony of consequentialism are

deceptive. For the principle we started with, which seemed intuitively plausible, was simply the directive to maximize. But if our intuitions about the repugnant conclusion are correct, then maximize does not mean sum. Nor does it mean average. Nor does it mean average goods and subtract evils. So what does it mean? Perhaps there is some meaning we can give to the directive that is not vulnerable to unattractive counterexamples. But whatever it means, it is more complicated than we initially realized. The revisions of the simple directive are not simple and are ad hoc. Thus my dilemma: consequentialism is repugnant or lacks the theoretical virtues—simplicity and parsimony—that characterize good theories. There is one further problem that I would like to comment on before moving on. Things are worse when we consider what the consequentialist does in other contexts. In other contexts, the consequentialist is willing—happy, even—to accept the counterintuitive implications of his theory. We are asked by Peter Singer, for instance, to disabuse ourselves of the notion that there is anything intrinsically wrong with infanticide: I do not regard the conflict between the position I have taken and widely accepted views about the sanctity of infant life as a ground for abandoning my position. In thinking about ethics, we should not hesitate to question ethical views that are almost universally accepted if we have reasons for thinking that they may not Thus my dilemma: consequentialism is be as securely grounded as repugnant or lacks the theoretical virtues— they appear to simplicity and parsimony—that characterize be.9

good theories.

Now, I am in agreement with Singer’s last sentence here. Ethics would be a pointless field of study if it did nothing but vindicate our intuitions and the opinions predominant in our society. My complaint, though, is that consequentialism in other cases relies too much on pretheoretical intuitions. If he agrees that we must accept these implications (about

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infanticide), why not accept the repugnant conclusion? Maybe the moral truth is far less attractive than we thought in two respects: not only is it permissible in principle to kill infants, but it would also be better if we had a vastly larger population that was far less average. Thus, not only is it the case that consequentialism faces the dilemma I have outlined, but its practitioners often are not consistent. The problem here, to be sure, is that they can’t be consistent. What is needed are intuitions about summing and averaging apart from particular cases, but what we have is an intuition about maximizing—a task that is left indeterminate. What alternative is there? In what follows, I will briefly expound a theological and philosophical picture of how I think the common good should be understood. My view will differ substantially from that of consequentialism. Consider St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians: For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the organs in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single organ, where would We are members of the body of Christ the body be? As it as organs are members of a body. This is, there are many yet one body. captures much of what is common to parts, The eye cannot say other views of the public good, for to harm to the hand, “I have some member of the body is to harm the no need of you,” nor again the head to body itself, and what is good for some the feet, “I have no members is good overall. need of you”… But God has so composed the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior part, that there may be no discord in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another.

If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.10 This is no biological treatise but is rather St. Paul’s understanding of the Christian community as the body of Christ on Earth. We are members of the body of Christ as organs are members of a body. This captures much of what is common to other views of the public good, for to harm some member of the body is to harm the body itself, and what is good for some members is good overall. Moreover, both the unity of and diversity within the community are captured by this vision, as well as the sense that the human community is a whole to which individuals make unique contributions according to their various talents. But Paul’s idea is thicker. In what way? Paul’s view depends on an anthropology, so it will help first to develop an account of what it is to be human and then see what implications this conception has. My account is based on the work of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas; I will merely assume the consistency of this approach with the Pauline view and hope that in its fruitfulness lies its own defense. What is a human person? A human person is—at least—an object in the world. What are objects in the world? According to the view I am propounding, the metaphysically fundamental constituents of the world—substances—are composites of matter and form. At a first approximation, matter is stuff and form is its shape. But things are more complicated than this. Matter is what persists through change, while form is what “configures” matter to possess the orientations and potentialities that it has in any particular instance; form is what makes this stuff the thing that it is. As such, it is related intimately also with the notion of essence, or nature. An apple, for example, consists of matter and a particular form, the latter of which determines the sort of thing that it is. When I eat the apple, I incorporate its matter, which then loses its form and acquires my own; thus, the matter persists through the change, which is characterized as the loss and acquisition of a

30 | Many Parts, One Body: The Common Good and the Foundations of Society

form.11 This characterization is “topdown” rather than “bottom-up.” The parts of something exist for the whole, and the substance is what really exists. For that reason, it is appropriate to say that the integral parts of a substance (like, say, my arm while it is attached to me) exist in the substance only “virtually”— in a derived sense, as configured by the form which configures the whole, as ordered to the whole. Since the parts are oriented to the whole, the form of the whole is wholly present in each of the parts. Humans differ from inanimate objects like stones. According to the view I am articulating, souls are simply the forms of living things. So trees and otters both have souls, but this unintuitive result is merely a re-

Sculpture in Philadelphia by Jacques Lipchitz. Photo from http://sh.wikipedia.org/.

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sult of our own altered usage of the term “soul.” A soul is, on this view, an “animating principle,” or that which configures the activities of things that are truly animated. The important point is that humans are substances composed of matter and form, and consequently, it is the level of their humanity (rather than a collection of organs, tissues, cells, or particles) that is fundamental. Their organs share in the humanity—the human form, the animating principle—of the whole and are ordered to the activities of the whole.12 Return now to the analogy between the Christian community and a body. What makes something a body rather than a collection of constituents with no essential relation is its soul or animating principle. As the spiritual writer and Trappist monk Eugene Boylan points out, this is what distinguishes the Church from other merely accidental collections of men, for there is an additional operative principle that binds it together as a body: the Holy Spirit. What animates the body of Christ is the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit is the “soul” of the Church. Here I use scare-quotes to emphasize that this is an analogy; the Holy Spirit is not a form and does not fall into the same ontological category as, for example, my human form (my soul). What the analogy highlights is a similarity between the way in which the Holy Spirit animates the Christian community and the way our human souls animate human bodies. In the body of Christ, then, because each member is ordered to the whole body, the Church, the “form” is present to each member; that is, the Holy Spirit animates each member as a In the body of Christ, then, because each part of the whole. whole human member is ordered to the whole body, “The soul is in the finthe Church, the “form” is present to each ger, and the whole member; that is, the Holy Spirit animates human soul is in the eye; of course, each member as a part of the whole. it exercises different activities in each organ. The Holy Ghost is the soul of the Mystical Body [of Christ: the Church], and is wholly present in each member. So also Christ is wholly present in each member.”13 Like all analogies, this one will limp in

certain respects, and we should take account of where it does so to avoid confusion. As noted, the Holy Spirit is not literally a form like those that inform the material objects of our world, and one distinction consequent upon this point, stressed by Pope Pius XII, is that participation in the Church does not annihilate one’s personality. How can this be understood? Eugene Boylan proposes a case where a soul animates but the underlying nature is in some sense retained. In Christ, there are two natures, human and divine. The mystery of the Incarnation is the fact that Christ’s divine nature can exist alongside his human nature. So we can say: the mystery of the Church is the fact that the Holy Spirit animates it alongside the human natures of its constituents. As Christ Incarnated could be fully human and divine, the Church can be fully composed of human members while also being fully divine insofar as it is totally animated by the Holy Spirit. There is an important consequence of this limitation of the analogy, whereby the human members of the Church are still by nature human: “each member retains the dominion over his own actions.”14 For we retain the choice to be parts of that body, and in that respect retain a supernatural capacity to receive God’s grace—for the gift of charity could only be realized in acts of love: In the beginning of the partnership at baptism, when Christ and His Holy Spirit come into our souls, the fundamental effect is the infusion of sanctifying or habitual grace. The best way, perhaps, to regard grace is as a new nature—a participation in the divine nature—which is superimposed upon our old nature. A ‘nature’ is a principle of operation, and by this new nature, the soul becomes capable of living in a higher order and of becoming the agent of acts which are completely beyond its natural possibilities.15 But “[i]f we then do not interact beneficially with the rest of the members of Christ’s body, our title to living membership is immediately compromisted.”16 That is, to act in discord with the will of

32 | Many Parts, One Body: The Common Good and the Foundations of Society

God is to remove oneself from the body of Christ. To obey God’s will is to put oneself in communion with the Church, that is, the body of Christ, for in obeying God’s will one orders oneself as the Holy Spirit—the principle of the body—directs. Now, attacking a member of a body is tantamount to attacking the body itself; therefore, attacking a member of the body of Christ on earth is tantamount to attacking Christ himself. As our Lord said, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”17 Christ’s words about ignoring the poor thereby acquire a surprisingly literal sense. More could be said about this view. I have invoked Aristotle’s metaphysics to develop the philosophical anthropology on which Paul’s view for the Christian community can be made more articulate. Aristotle, of course, is famous for his political theory as well. However, I will conclude here by returning to the repugnant conclusion to see how the Pauline alternative handles it. To be sure, both Aristotle and St. Paul would have denied that consequentialism’s moral mathematics are possible, that we can neatly sum up what is good and bad in a given society. But more to the point: the analogy of society with a human body helps us to see why the repugnant conclusion would not follow. For what makes a society a good society is not anything like the sum of the respective goods of its individual members, but the overall coherence of the parts—the people—directed toward the purpose for which the society exists. Imagine a society that is the paradigm case of human communal flourishing. A society that is several times larger but in which members persistently fail to be virtuous will not be better—doubling the size of a society in order to double its goodness would be like doubling the size of your body to double your goodness; it would not work, and there was never any reason to expect it to. This, I hope, shows how a constructive account of sociopolitical reasoning—one that starts with the human person and builds upward—might avoid problems that we might otherwise face. Metaphysics and theology seem inappropriate in contem-

porary ethical discussion. But I would suggest that something thicker than intuition is necessary if our theory is to fit reality. r Endnotes A society that is several times larger but 1. Peripateo, v. 3, no. 1, Fall 2014. in which members persistently fail to be 2. Parfit, Derek, virtuous will not be better—doubling the Reasons and Persons (Oxford Unisize of a society in order to double its versity Press: New goodness would be like doubling the size York, 1987), 24. of your body to double your goodness; it 3. Singer, Peter, rd Practical Ethics 3 would not work. ed. (Cambridge University Press: New York, 2011), 8-15. 4. I believe this question of possibility of moral mathematics is a serious problem for consequentialism. For a critique with which I am sympathetic, though on which I am not entirely sold, see Finnis, John, Fundamentals of Ethics (Georgetown University Press: Washington, D.C., 1983), 86-94. 5. Parfit, op. cit., 387-388. 6. For other more technical concerns about averaging, see ibid., 399-405. 7. Ibid., 391. 8. Ibid., 410-412. 9. Singer, op. cit., 151. 10. 1 Cor 12:14-26; all quotes from the Revised Standard Version. 11. Note that “matter” here need not have the technical sense it has in recent physics. 12. Today, forms, powers, and essences are widely thought to be metaphysically suspicious and explanatorily otiose. I do not believe this to be the case, though I cannot rebut the charge here. For contemporary defenses of this metaphysics, see Oderberg, David, Real Essentialism (Routledge: New York, 2007) and Ross, James, Thought and World: The Hidden Necessities (University of Notre Dame Press: Notre Dame, 2008). 13. Boylan, M. Eugene, This Tremendous Lover (The Mercier Press: Allen, Texas: 1964), 48. 14. Ibid., 42. 15. Ibid., 55. 16. Ibid., 70

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Sometimes, Sometimes, I wonder— I wonder who I’m trying to satisfy I wonder why I stay Why I don’t just tell the church that I’ve had it That I can’t take one more formulaically life changing retreat, That if being “in” means I have to sing “One Way” one more time, I’m out, That instead of talking about Jesus, maybe we should try listening to him. Sometimes, I wonder— I wonder how I can willingly bind myself to an ancient book Written in a language I’ll never really know, I wonder how I can seriously believe that a Bronze Age tribe in the Middle East Stumbled into a relationship with the God of the universe, I wonder if I’m wrong. Sometimes, I wonder— I wonder how much would change If I walked away, If I slept in on Sundays, I wonder how much would change If Jesus told me exactly what the scriptures meant, Would I actually try living them out? Or just keep interpreting? I wonder if I want clarity or just comfor t.

34 | Sometimes I Wonder

I wonder by Nathan Scalise

Sometimes, I wonder— I wonder about the harm the church has done, About crusades and abuses About the people of other faiths who seem closer to the divine Than plenty of the ones I’ve seen tucked into the pews, Muttering their way through prayers. I wonder about them too, I wonder how they got there, and what keeps them on the edge of belief. I wonder how far from them I really am and if we’re all just wasting our time. But sometimes, I wonder— I wonder at a God who grabs hold of me, Who says “follow my lead and hang on for the ride.” And drags me through odysseys I could not imagine, I wonder at the God who brought me to Swar thmore, to Chester, And all the stops along the way. I wonder at the God who most emphatically demonstrates his presence In the moments when I am most in need of it. I wonder at a God who gets his hands dir ty, Who is brave enough to bind himself to loving all people. I wonder at a God who transforms death into life. I wonder at a God who is too big for me, Who I can only know in fragments and fleeting glimpsesUntil the day I will know him fully. But for now, I am only human. And sometimes, I wonder.

Photo by Kelly Hernández.

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PERIPATEO CONTRIBUTORS AND STAFF Michael Superdock ’15

Dorothy Kim ’15

Michael is from Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania and is a major in Computer Science. When holding a hot object, he likes to drop it like it’s hot.

Dorothy is a Biology major and English Literature minor from Long Island. She prefers to have chapstick and coffee with her at all times.

Carlo Bruno ’17 Carlo is an intended Political Science major from Half Moon Bay, California. He misses the beach and the Mexican food.

Yared Portillo ’15 Yared is a Latin American Studies major from Santa Maria, California. She likes playing jarana and singing rancheras and nor teñas.

Briani Kamilah George ’15 Briani is a Health and Societies special major and Chinese minor. She often enjoys making chipmunk cheeks and random dancing.

Nate Lamb ’17 Nate is a minimalist.

Heitor Santos ’17 Heitor is a Political Science and Education special major from Brazil. He likes to lie on Parrish beach and complain about pasta bar.

Greg Brown ’16 Greg wins some and he loses some. He never frets, and always says it ain’t so.

Mickey Herbert ’15

Nathan Scalise ’16

Mickey Herber t is commonly referred to as the Beast of the East. His passions include bowling, bobsledding, and basket weaving.

Nathan is from Brewster, Massachusetts and is currently searching for the 25th hour of the day. When not running or eating, he basically lives in the Lang Music Building.

Erin Kast ’15

Nick Zahorodny ’16

Erin is a seniorn from Wausau, Winconsin and is double majoring in Biology and Religion.

Nick is an Eastern Rite Catholic and a double major in Philosophy and Economics. He loves to set his alarm clock to ring at 5:30 AM on Saturdays mornings.

Roy Walker ‘16 Roy is an Economics major and Statistics minor. He believes that matter can be created and destroyed. That’s why he studies econ.

36 | Peripateo Staff and Contributors

Kelly Hernández ’18 Kelly is a Biology and Educational Studies special major from Los Angeles, CA. Her bio is better than Greg’s.

Selah.

Pause. Breathe. Think of that.

May the path rise to meet you and surround you with good yet to be done. May your hands grasp onto love and establish peace. And when you are weary, may the Spirit overflow its banks and bathe your feet in grace. Selah

‫סֶלָה‬