economic justice – Feminism and Religion

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Green Solutions To The Greek Economic Crisis: We Are The 99%!

This post was originally published on May 28th, 2012

A green solution to the economic crisis insists that people and the environment can be saved together. We must dare to envision prosperity in conjunction with sustainability, social justice, nonviolence, and participatory democracy.

A rational analysis would make it clear that the Greek people did not “create” the economic crisis. Yet the poor and middle classes are being asked to “pay” for it. There is massive corruption in the public sector in Greece. But this should not blind us to the fact that the Greek people do not bear the major responsibility for creating the crisis. Those responsible include:

the international money interests (the 1%) who at this very moment are charging 26% interest on the Greek national debt and “hedging” their “bets” (betting for and against a complete collapse of the Greek economy) and hoping to “win” (make money on their bets) in either case;
the international military industrial complex (which US President Eisenhower warned might one day control the world) that is selling more arms to Greece per capita than to any other country in Europe;
the industrial interests in the larger countries in Europe which viewed the eurozone as an open market to sell their products (thus raising the GDP in industrialized countries like Germany);
European leaders who promote the interests of their own players in the international financial, military, and industrial marketplace above the good of the whole;
the Greek governmental elite (the 10%?) who have pocketed bribes and stolen money from public coffers;
and finally the Greek people (the 99% or the 90%) who have participated in or benefited in small ways from a corrupt system. Continue reading “Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Green Solutions To The Greek Economic Crisis: We Are The 99%!”

On the Good and the Bad of Behar by Ivy Helman

The Torah portion for May 21, 2022 is Behar (Leviticus 25:1 – 26:2). In it, the Israelites receive instructions for sh’mita and yovel – two types of sabbatical years. These years attempt to set up right relations between the community, the inhabitants of the land, and the land itself. From an ecofeminist perspective, not all is as idyllic as the Torah wishes it to seem.

Behar begins with sh’mitah, a sabbatical year that takes place every seventh year. During sh’mitah, the land must lay fallow. Both humans and animals can eat from what the land will naturally grow.

Bringing African American Churches into Reproductive Justice by Mariam Williams

I don’t expect to hear anything in church about the 40^th anniversary of Roe v. Wade during the month of January, the month marking 40 years since the U.S. Supreme Court made the decision to legalize abortion in this country. This is for a number of reasons: 1) it’s January, and at my church the pastor always starts off the year with a series of sermons that illustrate the church’s mission statement, and women’s choice may be off the subject; 2) Martin Luther King Jr. Day is this month, and if a black church is going to honor something or someone besides Jesus in the month of January, it should probably be MLK; and 3) I haven’t heard anything about abortion from the pulpit in a long time.

A local pro-choice movement leader asked me recently about how black churchgoers feel about abortion. I didn’t know what to say. The last time I heard it mentioned was in a Sunday School class in which a woman said that she almost aborted her daughter. It wasn’t a big confessional moment, just part of a longer testimony as to why she was happy her daughter was around, and it wasn’t received with any shock or fanfare. I can remember hearing once from the pulpit of my current church that while abortion might be wrong, the law shouldn’t interfere with what a woman chooses to do with her own body. Many years before that, in the church I grew up in, a preacher said that we would never find a cure for AIDS because the person who would have grown up to discover the cure was aborted. (What made him so sure of that? Who knows.) Continue reading “Bringing African American Churches into Reproductive Justice by Mariam Williams”

GREEN SOLUTIONS TO THE GREEK ECONOMIC CRISIS: WE ARE THE 99%! by Carol P. Christ

the international money interests (the 1%) who at this very moment are charging 26% interest on the Greek national debt and “hedging” their “bets” (betting for and against a complete collapse of the Greek economy) and hoping to “win” (make money on their bets) in either case;
the international military industrial complex (which US President Eisenhower warned might one day control the world) that is selling more arms to Greece per capita than to any other country in Europe;
the industrial interests in the larger countries in Europe which viewed the eurozone as an open market to sell their products (thus raising the GDP in industrialized countries like Germany);
European leaders who promote the interests of their own players in the international financial, military, and industrial marketplace above the good of the whole;
the Greek governmental elite (the 10%?) who have pocketed bribes and stolen money from public coffers;
and finally the Greek people (the 99% or the 90%) who have participated in or benefited in small ways from a corrupt system. Continue reading “GREEN SOLUTIONS TO THE GREEK ECONOMIC CRISIS: WE ARE THE 99%! by Carol P. Christ”