Exploring the F-word in religion at the intersection of scholarship, activism, and community.
The annual meeting of the Society of Christian Ethics is just around the corner (Jan 3-6, 2013). One of my responsibilities will be to meet again with members of the 2020 Future of Christian Ethics task force.
Our “charge” according to the chair of the committee, Charles Matthewes, is as follows:
Continue reading “The Future of Christian Ethics by Grace Yia-Hei Kao”
This weekend is the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR).
I’ll be giving a presentation in a panel that I organized in one session and serving as the invited respondent in another. I’ll also be spending approximately one-third of my total conference time interviewing candidates with my colleagues for a faculty position at my institution.
This is all to say that I’ll be attending the AAR with a modicum of status and power.
Continue reading “Status and Power at the AAR by Grace Yia-Hei Kao”
“What the report also makes clear is that sweatshop labor is highly gendered. Between 71-85%…are women, the majority of whom are also under the age of 35.”
I was recently drawn into a facebook discussion about the ethics and efficacy of refusing to eat at Chick-Fil-A on account of its president’s public “we are inviting God’s judgment on our nation” opposition to same-sex marriage as well as the chain’s financial support of socially conservative groups.
I noted that consumers who boycott businesses generally do so because they believe that (1) continuing to patronize a place would be at odds with their core values, or that (2) their actions will “make a difference” by exerting financial pressure on the company to amend their ways. These two reasons could be related, though they often are not. People can act in accordance with their conscience without believing that they have accordingly instigated social change (n.b., just think of the earlier 2004 decision by the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. to selectively divest from certain companies in Israel), just as companies can be compelled to alter their policies by other means than by their clientele taking their business elsewhere.
Continue reading “Appealing to Values and Interests in Consumer Choices by Grace Yia-Hei Kao”
“I had known that dumpster diving is subversive….What I hadn’t considered previously is its arguable feminist and biblical precedents.”
The following is a continuation of a two-part blog. Read part I for what prompted me to go dumpster diving, what freeganism is, and what three things surprised me the most about dumpstering beyond the sad and shocking reality of tremendous waste.
My Dumpster Dive Haul
After sorting through several trash bags of edible food in the approximately 10 minutes that we spent at one site in my first ever urban scavenging trip, this is what I ultimately brought home.
(Reminder: As explained in part I, I have intentionally photoshopped out the store’s name and the use-by/best by dates).
Continue reading “What I Learned (and Found) Dumpster Diving, Part II, by Grace Yia-Hei Kao”
“I get that consumers generally prefer to buy produce that looks a certain way, but can the routine act of trashing whole bags of clementines, apples, or tomatoes because of a few imperfections be justified in a world that is full of hungry and malnourished people?”
Renowned climate change activist and author Bill McKibben spoke at our graduation earlier this year. Among the charges he gave to all of us in attendance (i.e., not just the graduates) was for us older folks to be willing to bear more of the possible “costs” of political activism. His reasoning was that being a 20-something with an arrest record was not a particularly good thing for young job-seekers today.
I was inspired. I thought to myself, “I have tenure, I work with colleagues who champion prophetic civil disobedience, and my class privilege would allow me to post bail if arrested.”
When chatting with a graduate that afternoon, I told him that I’d like to make good on something we once discussed in class during a session on the ethics of consumption—I’d like to go dumpster diving with him.
Mind you, I don’t fit the stereotypical urban scavenger profile (although middle class dumpster diving is on the rise). I grew up in a gated community, once brought my portable curling iron on a junior high church group camping trip, and today am more bourgeois than Bohemian. So what interest did I have in electively digging through garbage?
Continue reading “What I Learned (and Found) Dumpster Diving, Part I, by Grace Yia-Hei Kao”
“I rejoice in this most recent admission of institutional racism. I am not naïve enough to believe that this public acknowledgment, like previous ones to other racial-ethnic groups, was untainted by political calculations. But I am also not Kantian (so I reject the view that anything done out of mixed motives accordingly lacks moral merit).”
Continue reading “Government “Apologies” for Historical Injustices: Why They Matter”
“As we approach Memorial Day Weekend (and the militaristic patriotism it promotes), as the 2012 election cycle heats up, and as I meditate more deeply upon my and my country’s many riches, one of [Walter] Brueggemann’s prayers in particular spoke to me.”
One of the three books I took with me on vacation is by the world’s leading interpreter of the Old Testament, Walter Brueggemann. It’s not actually on the Bible, but something he published in 2008 called Prayers for a Privileged People.
Continue reading “A Prayer From the Privileged by Grace Yia-Hei Kao”
“Did you know that…the Asian population grew faster than any other race group in the United States between 2000 and 2010…[and that] Chinese is the second most widely spoken non-English language in the country (behind Spanish)”?
“The Grace of Sophia is an openly ‘syncretistic’ work.”
Continue reading “The Boldness of Grace Ji-Sun Kim by Grace Yia-Hei Kao”
Feminism and Religion 