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Social Justice and
the Church
Prof. Randall Smith Professor of Theology E-mail: rsmith@stthom.edu Office Hours: By appointment (pretty much any time I'm not teaching) Quick-and-Dirty
Course Description for Those Who Want the “Bottom Line”
Fast:
Here’s the course description from the University
of St. Thomas course catalogue: “Catholic teaching on
social, political and economic issues: freedom; law;
conscience; marriage and family; political authority;
just war and nuclear arms; human dignity and rights;
work; private property and social justice.”
That’s not bad — for a start. But that
description would fit almost any class on Catholic Social
Justice. So, the next question is: What are
the distinguishing characteristics of this course on
Catholic Social Justice?
What are the
Distinguishing Characteristics of This Course in
Social Justice?
Good question.
There are many different ways of doing the same
course, and it’s generally a good idea early on to get a
basic “read” on the instructor’s approach to the material. By that I don’t
necessarily mean you should worry too much about whether
the instructor is a “liberal” or “conservative” — although
that, of course, may be an issue as well, depending upon
the person.
If you’re wondering about that, let me just say
this: However “good” or “bad” a Catholic I happen to be (I
do my best), the relevant point is that I take it as my
sworn duty to present to you as faithfully as I can
exactly what the Church actually teaches. And as much as I
can, I will try to get my own “personality” out of the
way, and let the texts
speak for themselves.
That is not entirely possible, of course, so you
should always be wary of my judgments.
But here’s the beauty of the thing: You have the texts. Read them. Study them. Make up your own
minds. Come
to your own conclusions.
You don’t have to listen to me. You don’t have
to agree with me. What
you will be responsible for, however, is reading and
understanding the texts.
As for “distinguishing characteristics” of this course, let
me point out four in particular.
The first one you may notice is that we’ll be
dealing with the Church’s teaching on marriage and the
family. The issues related to“marriage and family” are not
always considered under the general heading “social
justice,” which is a shame. One reason for the problem is
that, in this country, if you’re a liberal, you generally
tend to favor the Church’s teachings on many economic and
political issues, while holding aloof from the Church’s
teachings on things like abortion, contraception, and
homosexuality, whereas if you’re a conservative in this
country, you tend to favor the Church’s teachings on
marriage and the family, while holding aloof from many of
the Church’s teachings on things like “preferential option
for the poor,” its criticism of laissez-faire
economics, and its insistence that political and economic
policy should have distinctly moral goals. The difficulty
for both political parties, however, is that, within the
self-understanding of the Church, the social and economic
teachings and the teachings on marriage and the family are
really two sides of the same coin. There is one
underlying theology of creation and of the human person
that grounds both. Thus,
as we will see, there is one “social
doctrine,” in which the teachings on marriage and the
family serve as the ultimate foundation of all
the rest. Indeed,
understanding the interrelationship between all the
various elements of the Church’s social teaching will be
one of the goals of this course.
The second distinguishing characteristic of the
course is that we will be reading the texts in a topical order,
and not in a strictly historical sequence,
and this topical order will be determined by the structure
of the Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution
on the Church in the Modern World, commonly known as
Gaudium et Spes. The Second
Vatican Council was an ecumenical council, which means its
teachings, especially the pastoral and doctrinal constitutions,
have the highest level of authority within the Church
short of infallible declarations. Like nearly all
ecumenical councils, the various documents of the Second
Vatican Council have been the subject of no small amount
of conflict and dispute since the Council finished its
work in 1965. But
there is simply no denying the fact that the social
teaching of the Church since the Council, especially the
social teaching of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI,
both of whom participated in the Council, have their
intellectual foundations in the theology laid out in the
Second Vatican Council.
Seeing the connection between the work of the
Council and the encyclicals of these later popes will be
another important goal of this course.
The third distinguishing characteristic of the
course is that we
will be focusing our attention almost entirely on the more
recent documents by Pope John Paul II rather than all the major
documents prior to Vatican II back to Pope Leo XIII and Rerum Novarum. One of the great
things about the Church’s doctrinal tradition for our
purposes is that later texts take up into
themselves and incorporate the earlier teachings in
later documents. That
doesn’t make reading the earlier texts unnecessary or
unimportant. Far
from it. But
since we don’t have time to do everything and thus serious
decisions need to be made about which documents to read
and which to leave for the student to do at some future
date, for the purposes of this course, I opted for the
more recent documents over the earlier ones, even though
cutting out the earlier documents really breaks my heart. (“If there were
but world enough and time,” says the poet.)
The fourth distinguishing characteristic of this
particular course on social justice is that we will
constantly be referring back to the specific theological
anthropology that animates the Church’s entire
approach to social justice. That is to say, what the
Church believes it has to offer the modern world as it
struggles with its various problems is a certain view of
the human person. Christians
(along with Jews and Muslims) believe, as it says in
Genesis 1, that man is made “in the image of God.” Pope John Paul
II was especially effective in stressing that, if we are
meant to be “in God’s image,” then we can look to God’s
revelation for important clues as to what it means to be
fully and authentically human. God reveals
Himself to man, we might say, in order to reveal man to
himself. As
we will see, this approach to Catholic social justice came
as a response to the modern challenges of “secular
humanism” or “atheist humanism”: a critique that came to
see “God” and “theology” as somehow detrimental to human
flourishing. What Will We Be
Reading?
The major doctrinal texts from the Church’s
Magisterium that we will be reading for this course
include the following: * Gaudium et Spes:
The Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the
Church in the Modern World * Familiaris Consortio
by Pope John Paul II * Laborem Exercens by
Pope John Paul II * Centesimus Annus
by Pope John Paul II *Evangelium
Vitae by Pope John Paul II
Along with these official magisterial texts, we
will be reading several others (not magisterial, and thus
of a very different level of authority) that are intended
to help set the historical or cultural context for or
discussions. These
include: * Russell
Hittinger’s “Introduction to Modern Catholicism” from The Teachings of
Modern Roman Catholicism on Law, Politics, and Human
Nature * John
Locke, “On Property,”from The Two Treatises on
Government,
II. 5 * Karl
Marx, “Estranged Labor,” from Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (The Paris Manuscripts)
All of these texts are currently available on-line
(see the course web site). Procedures and
Requirements: A) Reading,
This is a theology course, and theology has
traditionally been defined as “faith seeking
understanding.” The
means to our goal of an increased "understanding of faith"
will involve both reading and reflection. Reading
assignments are posted on the course web site. To encourage and ensure that
the students are doing the assigned reading, I will be
giving reading quizzes at regular intervals during the
semester, probably before every class.
In order to encourage serious, analytic reading of
the assigned texts, there will be preliminary reflection
on the reading due at the beginning of each class and a
concluding reflection due at the end. These
reflections are to be no more than a paragraph long. In
the preliminary reflection, I want you to pose a question
about the text or discuss something you found interesting
or puzzling. This is not to be a
summary. Summarizing will earn you a zero.
Asking Generative AI to provide a summary for you will not
work. You need to write a thoughtful reflection of
your own. Generative AI cannot come up with
thoughtful questions or reflections of this sort. It
will be glaringly apparent if you try to depend on it.
Scoring on these reflections will be very simple:
you will get a 4, 3, 2, 1, or 0. If you miss the
class or forget your reflection, you get a zero. There are no
late submissions. Businesses
are increasingly pleading with us not to send them
graduates who are not prepared for the world of work. If you miss a
meeting or show up without what you were assigned, you get
fired. There’s
no “I left it at home; can I bring it next time?” in the
business world, so it’s our responsibility to wean you
from these “high school” tendencies you may have
mistakenly fallen into.
Schooling, however, is a process, in which you
should be able to improve as you learn. At the end of
the semester, therefore, I will drop your four lowest
reflection grades. This
will allow you some leeway to get better, or to engage in
some “hit-and-miss.”
If you do not turn in a reflection on time, you can
simply take that zero as one of your low scores. It goes without
saying, however, that you’ll undoubtedly be better off at
the end of the semester statistically speaking if you
don’t miss turning in any of the summaries during the
semester.
Now for the good news: There will not
be a large research paper due for this course. The daily
reflections you will be doing will be sufficient writing
for the semester. It's
worthwhile noting, moreover, that doing the reflections is
undoubtedly the best way to prepare for the exams. That’s why I
have you do them. B) Exams
As for exams, there will be two of them: a mid-term and a
comprehensive final exam (note the adjective
“comprehensive”). These will be essay exams with questions
on both the reading and the in-class lecture and
discussion.
It has often been my practice in the past to offer
review sessions to help students prepare for the exams. I am not
required to give these review sessions, but students have
often told me in the past that they found them extremely
helpful. Be
that as it may, there is no reason to schedule them if
students aren’t interested.
Thus, review sessions will be offered by request
only and only if there is enough of a demand for them. Otherwise,
questions can and should be handled during my regular
office hours. Students should make a request for a review
session no later than two class periods before an upcoming
exam. There
will be no review session for an exam if there is no
demand for one. Some Important
Clarifications about Faith:
Since this course deals with “Social Justice in the Church” —
and by that we mean “the Catholic Church” — I think it’s
important to introduce you to a distinction between two
senses of the word “faith.”
There can be: (a) "Faith as a certain intellectual content" -- a
certain set of propositions which can be read, understood
and repeated. Or: (b) "Faith as an act of the intellect and will by
which we actually believe the things (the content) we
believe." This
is a sense of "faith" which implies both "hope" and
"love." It is
that act by which we entrust ourselves, both intellect and
will, freely to God. We might also describe it in terms of
a “connatural” understanding; that is, the depth of our
understanding depends upon our relationship to the thing
known
My reason for introducing this distinction right up
front is to clarify that “faith” in the second sense is not a requirement
for taking or doing well in this course. Your grade in
this course — whether you are a Catholic or a
non-Catholic, a believer in God or a total atheist — will
be based entirely on your understanding of “faith” in the
first sense, and not on your piety or “faith” in the
second sense. In fact, given the nature of the course, not
only would it be possible for a non-Catholic to take this
course, quite frankly, it would be possible for a
non-Catholic to teach this course and do a perfectly good
job, if he or she had read the texts well and could
present them sympathetically.
By the same token, I've had wonderfully pious and
extremely nice Christian students who have done poorly. It is just as
important for Catholics as it is non-Catholics to
understand that their grade in this course has nothing
whatsoever to do with their “faith” (in the second sense)
or their piety. Trust me, you might be the most holy and
pious Catholic who ever lived — you might even be a young
Mother Theresa of Calcutta in the making (in which case I
would be unworthy to untie your sandal strap, and I mean
that in all sincerity) — but I will still give you a "C"
in this course if you don't score well on the assignments
and tests. I
give my students exams for two reasons: (a) to encourage
them to study, and (b) to help them gauge how well they’ve
mastered the material being taught. An A, B, C, D,
or F on an exam or in the course is not a judgment on
your faith or your character. It is nothing
more than a measure of how well you have been able to
express your understanding of the material on the kind of
exams I give.
Think about it this way: There are plenty
of times in almost every department in every university
when you are required to study things that you are not
required to believe in.
We have professors at this university who teach the
major works of Plato and Marx, Aristotle and Nietzsche,
Buddhism and Hinduism, and they don't necessarily agree
with all that is contained in each of those books. That would be
impossible given the diversity of their views. We ask
students at this university to study those texts
critically, but with an open mind. We don't require
that they agree with them. In fact, there are many of
those books we hope they don't agree with. When a Jewish
history professor such as my colleague Dr. Irving Kelter
shows his students the Nazi propaganda film The Triumph of
the Will or has them read Hitler's Mein Kampf, he is
not doing so with the hope that they will accept Nazism.
Quite the contrary. He
wants them to understand those ideas, not accept them.
By the same token, I’m not trying to pose as
someone who is totally neutral on the issue of
Catholicism. The
truth is, I'm not. I
am an adult Catholic convert. For me, there is
nothing more important in my life than my Catholic faith. But my faith has
nothing to do with your grade. Besides, I
couldn’t test you on “faith” in the second sense of “what
you actually believe in” even if I wanted to — which I
don’t. I
can’t see into the deepest recesses of your heart, into
that most intimate part of your soul where you and God go
to talk to one another (and where even you don’t go all
that often). No, life tests you on your faith in that
sense. Only God can judge it. I wouldn’t dare
try. On Core Courses and
Developing Basic Skills:
Many students seem to think that the main goal of
college is to “get a degree.” While this is
not entirely untrue, it is not entirely correct either. College degrees
are supposed to be an indication that the person so
honored has achieved a level of excellence in the use of
certain basic skills.
The tragedy is that we can easily mistake the real
goal—facility in the use of basic skills—for the symbolic
goal: “getting
a degree.” Some
students seem to think that “getting a degree” will be
enough and will suffice to “get them a job.” It will not. And even if you
can fool people into giving you an entry-level job, you
will not rise about that entry-level position, if you
cannot read analytically, write clearly, think critically,
and reflect meaningfully on your own progress. For a time I
taught at a school vastly more expensive than this one and
was often scandalized at the degree to which students,
after the expenditure of thousands and thousands of
dollars, had been left with relatively low skill-levels in
basic reading, writing, and critical thinking. The system had
cheated them, yes, but unfortunately, they had often
conspired in their own self-defrauding.
You may of course do what you wish, but for my
part, I am resolved to do what I can not to allow students
to defraud themselves out of thousands of dollars of
tuition money and not get a real education in the basic
skills they need to succeed.
Thus, please take note that one of the underlying
goals of this course is to help students develop their
skill-levels in several basic areas:
A) Reading
analytically: There is, as I mention below, a lot of
reading for this class. And
you will be responsible for taking note of the
thesis and basic structure of the text. More on this
below.
B) Writing
clear expository prose: There are
several different kinds of writing we will be doing in
this class, from summarizing book-length arguments to
answering reading and reflection questions on-line. A (Relatively) Short
Digression on Critical Thinking:
In 1956, University of Chicago educational
psychologist Benjamin Bloom published his famous
classification of levels of intellectual behavior
important for learning.
In that study, Bloom identified six levels in the
cognitive domain. (He did a subsequent study on the
“affective domain” — that is to say, the domain related to
the passions and emotions, which are equally important for
learning, but we’ll leave that aside for the moment.) The six levels
in what is often referred to as “Bloom’s Taxonomy” are
these (for our purposes, I’ve turned his nouns into
verbs): 1. Remembering: To find or
remember information 2. Understanding: Explaining ideas
or concepts 3. Applying:
Using information in a new way or new situation 4. Analyzing:
Distinguishing between the different parts and seeing the
connections between the parts and the whole. 5. Synthesizing: Building a
structure or pattern from diverse elements; putting parts
from diverse sources together to form a new whole. 6. Evaluating: Justifying a
stand or a decision; making judgments about the value of
ideas or materials. After distinguishing
these six levels, Bloom then identified the kinds of
questions that correspond to each of these types (or
levels) of cognition: 1. Remembering: define,
duplicate, label, list, memorize, name, order, recognize,
relate, recall, repeat, reproduce, or state basic
information such as who, what, when, where, or how. 2. Understanding:
classify, discuss, explain, express, identify, indicate,
locate, recognize, report, restate, review, select,
“describe in your own words.” 3. Applying:
apply, choose, demonstrate, dramatize, employ, illustrate,
interpret, operate, practice, sketch, solve, or use. 4. Analyzing:
analyze, appraise, calculate, categorize, compare,
contrast, criticize, differentiate, discriminate,
distinguish, examine, or “test this assumption.” “What are the
parts or features of...?” “Classify...according to....” “Outline/diagram
the following.” “How does...compare/contrast with...?
“What evidence can you list for...?” 5. Synthesizing:
arrange, assemble, collect, compose, construct, develop,
formulate, manage, organize, plan, prepare, propose, set
up, create, design, or write. 6. Evaluating:
appraise, argue, assess, compare, defend, estimate, judge,
predict, rate, select, support, value, or evaluate. “Do
you agree or disagree?”
“What is the most important?” “How would you
decide about...? “What
criteria would you use to assess...?
Now we needn’t linger over whether Prof. Bloom’s
specific taxonomy is entirely adequate (it’s not,
especially since the affective or emotional dimension is
missing) or over whether there is a cognitive hierarchy of
the sort he envisions, with remembering at the bottom and
evaluating at the top.
Clearly you can’t apply, analyze, or evaluate
information if you can’t remember, recognize, or locate
it. And to
the argument over whether “creating” is really a more
sophisticated cognitive act than, say, “evaluating,” I can
only say: maybe,
maybe not. But
let’s put all those questions aside for the time being. What is perhaps
more revealing is the fact that, in his survey of American
schools, Bloom found that over 95% of the test questions
students encountered required them to think only at the
level of the recall of information. Now you’ll find
that I’m a big fan of memory as a kind of sine qua non of
education, but even I think we should be mixing things up
a bit and getting students to think in ways they are not
yet accustomed to. So look for questions that test you at
various other levels of Bloom’s taxonomy.
Here’s the problem with that proposal: it hurts your
head. Thinking
in new ways is difficult.
It requires developing new synapses in your brain. And while the
results can be extraordinary, the process can be
excruciating. But
there’s no way around it.
You have to start taking those first faltering
steps (and probably fall more often than you’d care to
imagine) if you’re ever going to learn to walk and then to
run. It’s
do-able alright: You
can learn to read and write and think well. But no one ever
said it was going to be easy.
Many of the questions I ask you will be at the
level of remembering or understanding. I’ll want you to
recall information, state arguments, and “describe in your
own words.” These
are not unimportant skills.
But take special notice when I ask you to analyze
or compare or evaluate.
Those are often more difficult tasks for students
because they aren’t often asked to do those sorts of
things. It
might be a much more pleasant class for you if I didn’t
ask you to do engage in that sort of thinking. But it wouldn’t
be better for your development as an educated person. (NB: Take notice
of this point and the next one right now. I’m not
bluffing. I’ve
had students in the past who got near to violence because
they didn’t understand in advance what I would be
requiring of them. If you don’t want a challenging course,
you want another course.
If you don’t want a real education, you want
another university. Before
you go, though, you may want to read this article:
I will take attendance daily at the beginning of
each class. If you are late, it is your responsibility to
see me after class to make sure you are marked present
(but late). If you haven’t informed me of your presence, then you didn’t
attend.
Please be forewarned that more than three absences
will result in a decrease of one-third of a letter grade.
Further absences will result in further proportionate
decreases. After
six absences, you will be excused from further attendance
in an official way by the University Registrar.
Please also take note that I make no distinction
between “excused” and “un-excused” absences. You may excuse
yourself for whatever reason you deem important enough to
miss class. I realize that there are certainly times when
attending class is not the most important thing in your
life. On the
other hand, since you are enrolled, attending class is not
unimportant if you are to get the educational benefit for
which you are paying.
Three absences, therefore, seems about right. On the other
hand, any student who achieves a semester-long record of
perfect, on-time attendance will receive two extra points
on his or her final total.
(So, for example, if your final total is a 91, this
little bonus could mean the difference between getting an
A- and an A.) Some
Important Comments Concerning Your Participation in the
Class:
With regard to class etiquette, it should go
without saying (but let me say it anyway) that respect for
your fellow students in the class demands the following:
* If you should (heaven forbid) come in late,
please take your seat quietly.
* Once you have arrived and class has begun, please
don’t leave the classroom unless there is a dire physical
necessity. Buying
a coke or making a phone call is not a dire physical
necessity.
* In this class, you are permitted to bring food,
drink, or any other legal stimulants to keep you awake and
alert during the class period. But please keep
slurping and gurgling to a minimum. And please, clean up
your own mess before you leave. The janitorial
staff is here to do basic maintenance, not to clean up
after spoiled children who can’t clean up after
themselves.
* All cell phones and pagers must be turned off (or
you will be turned out).
* That means no text messaging on your cell phone
during class. If
you have something to say, say it out loud to everyone.
* NB: It
has also come to my attention that many students use their
computers not to take notes during class, as they should,
but to surf the web or check e-mail. This distracts
other students greatly.
Therefore, because of the many abuses that I have
seen and others have mentioned to me, no computers will be
allowed in this class.
You’ll have to take notes the old-fashioned way:
with a pen or pencil.
* Bottom line: All electronic devices must be
turned off and stowed for the duration of the class. Seat backs and
tray tables must also be in their upright and locked
position.
Finally (and perhaps most importantly): In order to
help encourage good analytical reading, I will ask a group
of randomly-selected students to sum-up the reading
assigned for the day.
These little summaries will help determine your
class participation grade at the end of the semester.
So, what should you expect when you come to class? You should be
able to lay out for the class the basic structure and the
order of the argument of the text we are reading. For each text we
read, I will be asking the following sorts of questions:
* Title, and its significance? * Basic thesis? * Structure of the text and order of the
argument? (How does the author reach his conclusions?) * What are the key terms, and how does the
author use them? I will be hammering away on these points for
every single text we read.
Be ready. You will need to
learn to read
actively, not passively. Grading: Please note that your final grade will be
calculated according to the following formula: Daily
Reflections = 20% (I will drop your four lowest
scores) Reading Quizzes = 10% (I will drop your two
lowest scores) Final Exam = 35 % Class Participation = 10 % Please note as well that I assign letter
grades based upon the following standard scale: A
93-100 A-
90-92 B+
88-89 B
83-87 B-
80-82 C+
78-79 C
73-77 C-
70-72 D+
68-69 D
63-67 D-
60-62 F
Anything below 60 Contacting
Me:
My e-mail address is rsmith@stthom.edu.
I must, however,
warn you of the following.
Because like most people who have an e-mail account
in America, I am constantly being besieged by literally
hundreds of e-mail messages, I don’t always return e-mail
messages.
I’m sorry about this, but information overload has
simply resulted in the breakdown of the electronic
communications systems at many businesses. There are
executives in major corporations who send automatic
replies to each and every e-mail message that reads: “If
you haven’t heard from me by the end of the day today, you
will have to try again, because I simply delete all
untouched e-mail messages at the end of each business
day.” Experts
estimate that businesses are losing as much as two hours
of productive work per person per day while their
employees are checking e-mail.
What does one do when the technology fails? Revert back to
the classic, tried-and-true methods of the past: namely,
walk over and actually talk to the person. It’s not as
though we live on separate continents. We are within a
two- or three-block radius of one another nearly every
day. And you
will be seeing me in class at this time every week . It’s not as
though I am unavailable, simply because you can’t always
get in touch with me instantly with the touch of a button. So, you may need
to plan ahead.
If you need to get in touch with me, the best way
is to make an appointment after class. But please, please,
don’t get personally offended if I don’t respond
immediately to your e-mail message. It may be a
technical glitch (my system has on numerous occasions
filtered out student e-mails), or I may just be way behind
in checking e-mail. Either
way, I cannot guarantee that I will be able to keep up
with all the e-mail traffic.
So, for example, at different points in the
semester, I may have to declare a moratorium on e-mail in
order to be able to finish grading student papers or
exams. Finally:
Finally, please be assured I want you to do well in
this course, and I will do whatever I can to see to it
that you get the grade to which you aspire. But for now,
don’t forget to do the following as soon as possible: * Check the course web site at: http://t4.stthom.edu/users/smith/socialjustice * Be sure you can access the course
Blackboard site. * Read the material for the next class and
write the required executive summary. Most of all, a very warm welcome to you all!
Students seeking accommodations due to a disability must make a formal request with the office of Access and Disability Services and provide supporting documentation. To request accommodations for this course, please register with the Office of Access and Disability Services (ADS) at STTHOM.EDU/ACCESS. Students are encouraged to initiate this process as early as possible to ensure timely and appropriate accommodations. Please note that accommodations are not applied retroactively. Testing Accommodations Students with approved testing accommodations are required to communicate accommodation needs with the instructor in advance of assessments. Detailed guidelines for scheduling exams in the testing center are available on the test center website, STTHOM.EDU/TESTING. ADS Contact Information Email: ACCESS@STTHOM.EDU, TESTING@STTHOM.EDU Website: STTHOM.EDU/ACCESS Phone/Text:
713-525-3546
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