July, 2008

Saturday 5 July 2008

Mark,

I just finished The Book of Mev and I want to thank you for writing such a sensitive book. I found the book on Linda Panetta’s bookshelf and began reading it, and immediately called the publisher and ordered a copy for myself. I’ve always had a high regard for Mev and your book just deepened my admiration. It is a beautiful tribute to Mev as well as to you. I am sure it was not easy to write, but I am very grateful that you did it.

We probably have met in the past. I think both you and Mev were involved in the Pax Christi Assembly in Santa Clara in 1994. It’s nice to reconnect through the book. I’ve already given my copy away and ordered another. When I get mine back (hopefully), I’ll keep it circulating.

Sincerely,

Bishop Tom Gumbleton

This past spring, I asked my students to write Saint Louis University President Lawrence Biondi about their experience at and hopes for the university. The following is from Molly Berendt, and I am happy to share it here.

May 7, 2008

Dear Father Biondi,

My name is Molly Berendt and I am a junior (soon to be senior) here at SLU. As I prepare my applications for several post-graduate endeavors, including law school, Teach for America, and the Fulbright Fellowship, I find myself reflecting on the undergraduate application process that I went through four years ago. I applied to 11 different institutions, and at the end of the difficult process, I chose SLU. Now what I want to tell you is why I chose SLU. I was attracted to SLU because of the commitment to community service and social justice. This has been my consistent response to anyone who has asked me how I ended up here. SLU is a Jesuit institution that places emphasis on forming men and women for others; I came here not only to learn how to be a better student, but how to be a better person. I wanted to be at a university that valued service and social justice as much as I did.

In high school, at Ursuline Academy of Cincinnati, I learned the true importance of volunteering and serving my community. I lived and breathed service, and I think the passion I developed and my ability to communicate that with others greatly helped me to receive the Presidential Scholarship here. My final choice for universities came down to SLU and Xavier University in Cincinnati, where I was offered one of five full-ride scholarships based on service and academics. They value service and social justice too, but I saw something special here at SLU. I am enormously thankful for the SLU community, and I have seen a genuine desire on the part of the students to participate in countless community service activities. I am happy I came here, but I have also been disappointed. I challenge you, along with students and faculty, to reflect on what our real purpose as a Jesuit institution is, and think about what steps we can take to ensure that each of us lives that ideal, not in theory but in reality.

We have huge service events such as Make a Difference Day and Relay for Life, numerous immersion trips all over the country and around the world, we brew Fair Trade Coffee in our coffee shops, have recycling locations at various locations on campus, and many of our graduates go off to do service work and change the world. I ask you: is that enough? What are we doing to contribute, on a larger scale, to ameliorating the injustices that are plaguing our nation and our world? What are we doing to fix the injustices occurring in our own backyard? This semester I’ve been interning at the Circuit Attorney’s Office, and I’ve seen firsthand what happens when people fall through the cracks. There are so many problems in our world that need to be addressed, and a university is the perfect place to begin, more so a Jesuit university dedicated to social justice. Are the clothes our athletes wear made in sweatshops? Do you know what countries make our athletic garments? Do you know the conditions of the workers toiling hour after hour for a few cents a day? This is just one example of something within our reach; we can take the first step and put pressure on corporations to improve working conditions in their sweatshops. We should have students and faculty partnering to do more – it’s our responsibility. We are in a privileged place, and we have the power to achieve great change.

I wholeheartedly believe in this quote by Margaret Mead, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” We have plenty of thoughtful, committed students here at SLU, but they are disorganized factions in dire need of leadership and support. We have plenty of passionate, selfless students ready to devote their entire lives to service, but we do not have adequately efficient outlets for them. I offer a personal example to clarify: freshman year I joined several social justice campus organizations, but most lacked effective organization, leadership, and support from the administration. I decided my efforts were in vain, and left the organizations to spend my time in other ways. Students come up with great ideas, but for the most part, the groups remain composed of dreamers instead of doers – there are too many obstacles in the way.

I know that Chartered Student Organizations (CSOs) are student-initiated, but what if the administration and faculty paired with students to address significant issues of our time? What if the administration was able to agree on (say) three issues facing our society which they felt SLU, as a Jesuit institution, should work towards ameliorating? The students would have ideas given to them from the top, ensuring their support, and students would be encouraged to rally around these issues. There would be a direct, efficient outlet for student energy, passion, and determination. Students and faculty would work together. Administrative and faculty support is essential, because these injustices will take longer than four years, the average time a student is here, to fix. This is a long-term goal, change, and process. Think tanks could be formed around each issue and then the necessary steps would be taken to translate plans into action. We would start small, and constantly grow, as our goals were reached one by one. I foresee SLU working with other Jesuit universities across the nation and across the globe. Maybe each Jesuit institution could choose one specific issue, or maybe they could band together to tackle one or more. What is stopping us? I know universities have to run themselves like a business, but what do we stand for? We’re being hypocritical if we pretend to stand for social justice but we sit here and let injustices take place all around us. We are not doing enough.

As I’ve been writing this letter, I have talked with several other SLU students. There are so many who are just like me, itching to change the world, but we need help. We need your support and your blessing. More than that, we need a change of vision. We need to transform this university into a haven for social justice-minded individuals, people bent on making a difference. It’s easy to get caught up in day-to-day life and we end up forgetting what we’re really here for. I know you’re busy. I know it’s an enormous task to run a university. I’m sure you would love to make some of the changes I envision, but the question is how? It’s impractical in today’s society, I know, but that’s just it. We need to step back and ask ourselves what we’re really doing here. If we’re really committed to social justice, then we need much more than an Alpha Phi Omega chapter on campus. Our university needs a makeover, a new mindset and focus. Do we care about the environment? Sweatshops? Homelessness? Poverty? Equal opportunity in education? What do we care about? What is our university doing as a whole to live out the Jesuit mission? Right in the middle of our mission statement it says the University, “Maintains and encourages programs which link the University and its resources to its local, national, and international communities in support of efforts to alleviate ignorance, poverty, injustice, and hunger, to extend compassionate care to the ill and needy, and to maintain and improve the quality of life for all persons.” What is our university actively doing to alleviate poverty and injustice?

SLU is a great place, but we can do better – we have to. Who better to take on these challenges than our university, full of eager, ambitious students? This is a challenge, and something I hope you will take the time to think about. It’s easy to dismiss things as idealistic, but what I have in mind is possible, it’s just out of our comfort zone, and it would be difficult. I can envision great change starting here, but someone has to take the first step.

Thank you for your time. This is a great university, I am proud to be here, and my drive to do more comes only from love for this place and the people here. We can achieve great things if we step back and reject what society tells us we should do, and instead think about our Jesuit mission and what our hearts, minds, and souls tell us we have to do.

Sincerely,

Molly Berendt

The following is a chapter from The Book of Mev.

After the exhilarating World Youth Day experience, Mev jumped right into her doctoral program at the GTU in Religion and the Arts. Early on, she became acquainted with Maria Bower, a doctoral student in spirituality, with whom she increasingly spent time. She also continued her Haiti solidarity work with local activists Pierre LaBoussiere and Nancy Laleau. But even as she began her study, her experience earlier in the year in El Salvador was raising all kinds of questions to her about higher education. She dashed off the following letter to St. Louis University President Father Lawrence Biondi.

6 September 1993

Lawrence Biondi, S.J.
St. Louis University
221 North Grand Boulevard
St. Louis, MO 63103

Dear Father Biondi,

Greetings from a SLU alumna living in California. I hear good words about you from both my father, Peter Puleo, and from some SLU faculty with whom I keep in touch, such as Sr. Dolores Greeley. Congratulations on your good work.

I am writing in response to the “Campaign for St. Louis University” materials. You and those who worked on this produced a beautiful publication with an attractive layout — which I appreciate as a professional photographer. A while back, when I was heading to El Salvador for a meeting, Fr. McGannon gave me some literature on both the SLU Campaign and for the UCA-El Salvador Campaign. (I imagine you are familiar with that publication as well, put out by the AJCU in D.C.).

As a graduate and great fan of SLU, and as a person who has been active in solidarity work with Central America for more than a decade (which I began during my student years at SLU), I was jarred by looking at the two campaign booklets side by side. I am very impressed with the UCA’s attention to “Social Outreach,” their ongoing analysis of the “national reality,” their attention to institutional violence, defense of human rights, and to bringing together people from across the political spectrum to try to encourage a more just, humane society. They are explicit in their aims to educate the privileged (the literate and college-bound) to lead and serve the needs of the majority of the country. While the SLU booklet mentions community service and scholarship funds, these themes of immersion, analysis and engagement in the local social reality are absent.

Clearly these positions have been shaped by the national reality of El Salvador: wealthy elites and impoverished masses, civil war, corruption, brutal disregard for human rights. The philosophy of education developed by Ignacio Ellacuría, Ignacio Martín-Baró, and, since their deaths, by Jon Sobrino and Dean Brackley, was and is in response to that reality. Specifically, they sought and seek to be a Christian university and to make the option-for-the-poor universitariamente (as a university). Because of this vision, the six Jesuits and two women were killed in 1989, but their successors still struggle to keep the vision alive at the UCA and in post-war El Salvador. In fact, there may never have been peace negotiations without the leadership, vision and moral courage of Ellacuría and others.

Well, this brings me to the question: What would it mean for St. Louis University, as an institution, to more fully embody the social dimension of the faith and make an option-for-the-poor universitariamente? There have been good efforts throughout SLU’s history — community service, scholarships, shaping the public debates. My own moral consciousness was shaped at SLU — through the example of professors and campus ministers — in a way that inspired me to devote my energies towards building a more compassionate and just world community. And yet, I suspect this is not the case for most SLU students. During my four years at SLU, it was a small group of a lot of the same faces who joined Pax Christi, SLUCAP (volunteering in the inner-city), Amnesty International, etc. I wonder, institutionally and in our own local St. Louis community, what more is being done? I believe we have so much to learn from the UCA experience! One place to begin might be the writings of the Jesuit martyrs on the social role of a Christian university.

Might it be possible for SLU to generate its own such vision — rooted in a context of St. Louis and the United States — a vision that analyzes the national and local reality, that seeks to understand the institutional violence in the U.S., that promotes social outreach and defends human dignity in the St. Louis community. While our national reality is far from that in El Salvador, the levels of drug dealing, the conditions of prisons, the numbers of murders, unemployment, poor public education and other afflictions in urban St. Louis, especially on the Northside, are really tragic. This is our national/local reality. This is where we are called to be Christian as individuals and as a university.

Dolores Greeley told me of several projects where St. Louis U is trying to be of service to the local community. I am writing both to ask what is happening in this area, and to ask that the University (administrators, staff, faculty, students, alum) really listen to the example of the UCA and join in more dialogue with our local community to try to be a truly Christian university, a sign of God’s reign of justice, peace, dignity and compassion in the world.

By way of concrete suggestions:
1. Perhaps select members of the SLU community could invite Dean Brackley and/or Jon Sobrino to help them shape a vision for a university in the U.S. to adopt a similar, though indigenous, vision.
2. Perhaps the University could establish regular dialogue with SLU alumni who are truly immersed in the life of St. Louisans who struggle with poverty, unemployment, homelessness and neighborhood violence. (The Catholic Worker Karen House on Hogan Street comes to mind as it is staffed by several SLU alum. I also think of urban churches — in particular St. Matthews and the neighborhood center they participate in, since it is a Jesuit parish!)
3. Perhaps the University could begin “listening sessions” with the actual disenfranchised who live within a certain radius of the University — again, the unemployed, young people, the homeless, struggling families who have to cope with neighborhood violence and drugs.

I would love to take part in something like this or at least be kept abreast of such developments, and I could recommend other wonderful alumnae and faculty for this kind of project. There must be other similar initiatives happening somewhere in this country. Any such initiatives would have to include women and men, religious leaders and African-Americans and community members from Midtown and from North St. Louis. Given the location of Parks College, more dialogue might begin with East St. Louisans.

Again, I write this imagining that many efforts similar to this are already underway, but the very difference in the campaign booklets reminds me how far we at SLU (and overall, we in the U.S.) need to grow in our vision. A bold project in this direction at SLU would not result in Jesuits and their friends being shot in the middle of the night. Rather, a bolder vision and a more courageous response to the “signs of our times” would build up the St. Louis urban community and the University.

Father Biondi, I thank you for your time in reading this letter and for your dedication to shaping the future of SLU. I have studied some of the writings of the Salvadoran Jesuits and was very inspired by my visit there in January. As a theology student and photojournalist, I have also been inspired by the academicians I have met in Brazil — Catholic theologians who teach 6 months in the university and spend 6 months in the Amazon building up Christian communities, or working with labor unions in urban areas. So, I have been shaped by this vision of socially-engaged-academics and the socially-committed Christian university.
These campaign booklets have been on my desk for 10 months now, and I am finally getting around to actually writing these thoughts to you. Perhaps, oddly, my delay in writing reflects how crucial I believe these issues to be for the future of SLU and our community. I wanted to wait a good while to see if I still felt as strongly as when I first saw them, and I do. In fact, I just spent three days working with and visiting with Fr. Gustavo Gutiérrez, the Peruvian theologian, and in hearing about the direction of theology and pastoral practice in Peru, it stirs me to want to do more to foster truly Christian social commitment in our U.S. practice and institutions as well.

If these thoughts provoke reflections or reactions in you, please contact me at the address on the first page. I would be glad to hear from you. In any case, I continue to wish you well in your ministry of administration at SLU.

Peace be with you and may God continue to bless you!

Most sincerely,

Mev Puleo

The Bible and Zionism: Invented Traditions, Archaeology and Post-Colonialism in Israel-Palestine, by Nur Masalha. New York and London: Zed Books, 2007. 321 pages. Notes to p. 335. Bibliography to p. 354. Index to p. 366. $126.00 cloth; $36.00 paper.

This review is forthcoming in the summer edition of the Journal of Palestine Studies.

Among the most prominent of the ideological weapons deployed in service of Israel’s Jewish ethnocracy are the Bible and biblical archaeology. In his latest book, The Bible and Zionism, Palestinian scholar Nur Masalha concentrates on how both are used to effectively further Zionist and Israeli strategic aims. The book, divided into three parts, provides an effective critique of these tactics and offers constructive resources for countering the “invented traditions” used in support of Israeli state power.

Part one, divided into two chapters, focuses on Jewish and Christian Zionism, respectively. In chapter one, Masalha investigates how Jewish Zionism, “a secular European conquering ideology and movement[,] mobilized the figurative language of the Jewish religion into a sacrosanct ‘title deed’ to the land of Palestine signed by God” (p. 16). Masalha highlights the role played by David Ben-Gurion, an atheist who used the Bible—especially the Book of Joshua—to mobilize both secular and religious Jews in the cause of the Zionist project. Zionists (and, later, Israelis) were also able to skillfully deploy the themes of “promised land” and “chosen people” to gain acceptance for the idea of a State of Israel from European Christians, who were themselves adept at using the Bible to justify colonial intervention in other lands.

Christian Zionism, the subject of chapter two, began in the era of the Protestant Reformation, and boasts a long lineage of intellectual and pastoral advocates that predate Theodore Herzl, the “father of Zionism,” by centuries. Masalha focuses the nexus between Protestant theology and colonial interests in Britain leading up to the pivotal Balfour Declaration of 1917. He then scrutinizes the rise of U.S. Christian fundamentalist support for Israel, which paralleled the rise of the post-1967 Jewish fundamentalist settler movement, and particularly the development of “Armageddon Theology.” Masalha demonstrates how, for such fundamentalists, “the existence of the Palestinians, including a Palestinian Christian church, is either ignored completely or maligned as theologically liberal and spiritually dead, an irrelevance in the inexorable movement of world history towards the imminent return of the Jewish Messiah” (p. 129).

Part two focuses on particular themes of how Jewish fundamentalist movements have recently aided the secular Israeli drive toward domination of Palestine. In chapter three, on neo-Zionism, Masalha shows how some Jewish fundamentalists take seriously the biblical/divine call to wipe out the “Amalekites,” a biblical non-Jewish tribe: “Clearly for [Rabbi] Hess Amalek is synonymous with the Palestinian Arabs, who have a conflict with the Israeli Jews, and they must be ‘annihilated’, including women, children, and infants. His use of the Arabic term jihad leaves no doubt as to whom such a war of ‘annihilation’ should be waged against” (p. 151). Chapter four attends to Jerusalem and the work of fundamentalists to Judaize the Old City, while chapter five examines the remarkable way in which the twelfth-century Jewish scholar Maimonides has been embraced by fundamentalists in their campaign against the Palestinians: “The reinvention of one of the great symbols of Arabo-Muslim-Jewish understanding as a religious bigot is an extraordinary phenomenon that is a product of post-1967 Israel” (p. 210).

Part three considers the archaeological enterprise and also offers examples of ways in which scholars have successfully countered the Zionist narrative. In chapter six, Masalha examines the emergence of the religious nationalism of Hamas, giving critical attention to Hamas’s own use of “promised land” discourse and its Charter’s vision of Islamic sovereignty in Palestine, which, like Israeli exclusivism, does not allow for full equality among all citizens. Chapter seven explores Israeli historiography and pro-Zionist biblical scholarship, especially the contributions of archaeology: “Traditional biblical scholarship has been essentially ‘Zionist’ and has participated in the elimination of the Palestinian identity, as if over 1,400 years of Muslim occupation of this land has meant nothing. This focus on a short period of history a long time ago participates in a kind of retrospective colonizing of the past. It tends to regard modern Palestinians as trespassers or ‘resident aliens’ in someone else’s territory” (p. 262). Masalha then assesses the contribution of recent archaeology and the critical biblical school of Minimalism in subverting this scholarship.

In the next two chapters, Masalha gives extensive overviews to two thinkers who offer some hope of countering the Zionist narrative by dint of their dogged willingness to challenge conventional wisdom and articulate a humane vision for both peoples in Palestine/Israel. Masalha appreciatively reviews how Catholic theologian Michael Prior stood in solidarity with the Palestinians by critiquing biblical narratives justifying the domination of “the Canaanites,” past and present. Masalha then approvingly treats the many works of Edward Said specifically on the question of Palestine and endorses “the creation of a democratic framework which respects the right of equal citizenship of all inhabitants of Palestine-Israel (including the return of those ethnically cleansed by Zionism), irrespective of religious affiliation” (p. 319).

Drawing on Hebrew, Arabic, and English sources, Masalha’s cogent essays give both the scholar and the common reader a strong sense of the links between recent history and contemporary events, and between the politics of dispossession and the religious justifications used to defend it. While some essays overlap and have slight repetition, Masalha’s extensive and sobering book deserves a wide readership, especially in the United States, where the pro-Israel lobby has received increasing support from those who see the Bible as central to what is happening on the ground in Israel and Palestine.

by Sharifa Barakat

I am pleased to share the following essay written by one of my former students from Social Justice at SLU, Sharifa.

Palestine, Jerusalem, the Middle East—all conjure up various images and thoughts. For me, it’s the birthplace of my parents and the part of my heritage that I’ve grown up with through photographs and stories, the language and food, and, most outwardly, through the conflict that has been stewing for more than half a century as noted in our history books and the media. I felt like I already knew this place, but I had never visited it until last year. This past summer, my family was able to make the trip there, and I had an eye-opening experience that cemented my perception of the world before I even set foot in my family’s hometown of Ramallah, Palestine.

(more…)

Friday 4 July 2008

Marine General Smedley Butler, in a 1933 speech:

“I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major General. And during that period I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism… I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American Republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912… I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In Cuba I helped to see that Standard Oil went is way unmolested.”

Thursday 3 July 2008

I’ve been reading a lot of Ernesto Cardenal lately, unfortunately only in English translation. In the New Directions collection, Zero Hour and Other Documentary Poems, he includes an “Epistle to Monsignor Casaldàliga (whom Mev interviewed in her book The Struggle is One, and from which I quoted in The Book of Mev). Dom Pedro has been marked for death for years by the landowners who were furious with his defense of the campesinos. The following is a short excerpt from Cardenal’s provocative, prophetic poem….

Monsignor, we are subversives
a secret code on a card in a file who knows where,
followers of the ill-clad and visionary proletariat,
a professional agitator, executed for conspiring against the System.
It was, you know, a torture intended for subversives,
the cross was for political criminals, not a cluster of rubies on a bishop’s breast….

The Brazilian miracle of a Hilton Hotel surrounded by hovels.
The price of things goes up
and the price of people comes down.

Wednesday 2 July 2008

Sister Louise Lears has made availability and accompaniment a way of life. I have seen how much thoughtful attention and encouragement she gives to her students at Saint Louis University in her popular course, Spirituality of Nonviolence. Several times our community in Saint Louis traveled to the annual School of Americas vigil in mid-November, and I was always touched by Louise’s calm and compassionate presence over those long weekends.

She also participated in our direct-action efforts to raise awareness and provoke responsible action about the U.S. government use of torture in Iraq and at Guantanamo. In such wise, wherever she is, she continually nurtures a community of conscience as naturally as she breathes.