Photo by George Becker on Pexels During the closing days of its 2019-20 term, the Supreme Court’s trilogy of rulings in the companion cases of Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru and St. James School v. Biel, Little Sisters of the Poor Saints Peter and Paul Home v. Pennsylvania, and Espinoza v. Montana Department…
Photo by kkolosov on Pixabay This article is part of our “Reflecting on COVID-19” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. Like most of us these days, we were sitting on the couch. My husband said grimly, “Let’s see what’s going on in the world…” and turned on the news. The…
Photo by sk on Pexels The image of Donald Trump wielding a Bible outside St. John’s Episcopal Church, a snapshot that occurred immediately after protestors were penetrated with tear gas and rubber bullets in order to clear space for the President, quickly became a target of controversy. Some critics, including former Defense Secretary James Mattis,…
Photo by Nadim Shaikh from Pexels This essay was originally delivered as a speech at the annual dinner of Cooperative Metropolitan Ministries of Greater Boston on June 6, 2020. I am grateful for the invitation of Rodney Petersen and the Cooperative Metropolitan Ministries of Greater Boston to speak at this year’s annual dinner, this year a virtual event in…
Capitolio Nacional Seat of the Congress. Bogotá, Colombia. 2008. Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 3.0 Transitional Justice in Colombia In the past ten years, under the flag of transitional justice, Colombia has sought to implement a series of measures to confront the legacy of the conflict regarding property and land tenancy. In 2011, the government enacted…
“Mount Nebo” by Maya-Anaïs Yataghène / Wikimedia CC BY 2.0 The doctrine of subsidiarity is most closely associated with modern Roman Catholic Social Teaching, particularly as codified in the social encyclicals Quadragesimo Anno (1931) and Centesimus Annus (1991). In the latter document, Pope John Paul II defines subsidiarity as the principle that “a community of…
Civil unrest in Philadelphia, PA. June 2, 2020. / Rob Buhlman / Flickr / CC-BY-2.0 The murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020 triggered an unprecedented wave of protests in the United States and all around the world from Australia to the UK, France, Tunisia, and Iraq. This worldwide wave of protests…
Image by Sonny Sixteen from Pexels The racialization of security currently playing out is nothing new. Security has often been racialized and racism has always been securitized. Historically, the incestuous relationship between these two issues has been anchored in a logic of instrumentalization. Definitionally, racism is essentially a threefold dehumanizing construct representing a vision of…
Image by Pexels from Pixabay “The Blaine Amendment was ‘born of bigotry.”’ Reasonable people can certainly disagree over whether Chief Justice John Roberts’ forceful words in the opinion of the five-to-four judgement in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Taxation, which produced seven different opinions, was the stake through the heart of the anti-Catholic Blaine Amendments…
Photo by Fifaliana Joy (Pixabay) Americans looking for a way forward in this national crisis are calling for prioritizing anti-racism, demilitarizing American society, and democratizing the political and legal system. To do so will require understanding which institutions are most in need of reform. My research on the American border suggests that border policy should…