Mozaik 30/2012 Guilty or Not Guilty?

30 2012/Theology World Student Christian Federation Europe Region Ecumenical Journal, 2012/Theology

GUILTY OR NOT GUILTY?

Mozaik (established in 1992) is the ecumenical journal of the World Student

Christian Federation (WSCF, 1895) Europe Region, published two to three times a

Our illustrator

year. It aims to reflect the wide variety of opinions and viewpoints present among the different Student Christian Movements (SCMs) in ecumenical dialogue. You can find us Online at wscf-europe.org.

This issue of Mozaik follows the WSCF Europe theology conference “Guilty or Not

Guilty?”, which was supported by the European Commission and the European Youth Foundation of the Council of Europe. WSCF Europe also receives support

from several other church related agencies and from the General Budget of the European Communities. The contents of this publication reflects the views only

of the authors and not the opinions or positions of WSCF as a whole, the editorial board, the Council of Europe, the European Commission, or the other donors and

church-related agencies. Neither the European Commission, the Council or Europe, nor the other donors can be held responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained therein.

Editor-in-Chief: Paweł Pustelnik (Cardiff, UK) Editor:

Jill Piebiak (Alberta, Canada) Art Editor:

Maria Bradovkova (Slovakia) Address:

Storkower Straße 158 #710 D-10407 Berlin, Germany

ISSN 1019–7389 Illustrator: Georgina Hewitt (Manchester, UK)

Georgina Hewitt (1991, Britain)

I currently study Interactive Arts (BA Hons) at Manchester School of Art in the United Kingdom.

I specialise in illustration, pattern design and graphics. I am inspired by nature and how people interact with their surroundings.

My art work always tries to reflect positivity and humour, my mission is to make people smile.

Email: gin.georgina@gmail.com

"Men’s minds are too ready to excuse guilt in themselves." ― Titus Livy "Power acquired by guilt was never used for a good purpose." ― Latin Proverb "Oh, Lord, forgive three sins that are due to my human limitations. Thou art everywhere, but I worship thee here: Thou art without form, but I worship thee in these forms; Thou needest no praise, yet I offer thee these prayers and salutations. Lord, forgive three sins that are due to my human limitations." ― Mary Margaret Kaye "For if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things. " ― 1 John 3: 20

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EDITORIAL

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THIS Mozaik is in many ways very special. Firstly, it tackles a very difficult

matter of guilt and sin. Two concepts that are perceived differently. The manner we deal with them also varies. The aim we have is to make you think of the approach you have towards guilt, responsibility and repentance in various areas of life. Do we still have time in our hectic lives to take a moment and think about guilt or are we just limited to the guilty feelings after having eaten too much (but what is too much...) chocolate? In this issue we are trying to show as many approaches to the problem as possible. Ragnhild, from Norway, tells her story of reducing consumption taking us in with her to a compelling journey in a world full of tempting opportunities. Paul, from the UK, decides to live on one pound a day to draw attention to the problem of global poverty.

The “Guilty or Not Guilty?” conference that this issue follows up was packed with lectures. We try to share the facts participants have been privileged to receive first hand. David Weberman gives an interesting account of the separability between religion and ethics offering various thought-provoking perspectives.

On the other side, there is an article by Nenad Dimitrijevic who contributes a very personal piece on guilt based on his experiences related to the conflicts in Balkans. Asking questions like “How should I live?” he offers absorbing answers of a man who yet experienced and wise, still asks and never finds solutions. Finally, Anna Abram approaches the issue of guilt through reading poetry by a Polish Noble Prize Winner, Czesław Miłosz. Inspiring!

While we have been working on this issue, Katka Babicova has completed her time as Regional Secretary interim. You can read Katka's story of her engagement in the Federation on page 66. The new Regional Secretary Hans Hommens, who started his work in July, shares his first impressions as well.

Finally, I would like to express my gratitude I owe Jill Piebiak. After three extremely productive years of her commitment to WSCF Europe, Jill goes back to Canada. The four issues we have been working on together was a truly valuable time of learning, sharing and growing up.

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3 | Resources

1 | Act 6

MY LENT-ISH PROJECT Ragnhild Bjørvik Opsahl 9 LIVING BELOW THE LINE Paul Crome 13 THOUGHTS ABOUT SIN AND GUILT Eva Ungvari 15 SECULAR SOCIETY, CONSCIENCE AND GUILT: A BRIEF REFLECTION Janko Stefanov 18 WHAT HAS GUILT DONE FOR US LATELY? JoAnne Chung Yan Lam

2 | Know 22 SIMUL IUSTUS ET PECCATOR, OR ON THE PROBLEM WITH GRACE Marta Gustavsson 25 MORAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR COLLECTIVE CRIME Nenad Dimitrijevic 29 DOMINION OVER NATURAL RESOURCES AS CURATORSHIP, CUSTODIANSHIP OR STEWARDSHIP Alexander (Areshian-Hakopyan) Arktos 34 ARE ETHICS AND RELIGION SEPARABLE? David Weberman 37 A POEM Marta Gustavsson 38 WHAT KIND OF ETHICS DO WE NEED TODAY? Anna Abram 43 PSYCHOLOGY AND MORAL THEOLOGY: COLLABORATION AND CHALLENGES Vivian Boland 48 ARE DRUG USERS GUILTY OR NOT GUILTY? James Jackson

54 56 58 61

ABORTION: LAW AND MORALITY Magdalena Sławińska SHAME AND GUILT Pavlo Smytsnyuk TWICE ABOUT ONE GUILT: A BIBLE STUDY Gabriela Bradovkova THE FINANCIAL CRISIS: A ROLE PLAY Katka Babicova, Shannon Phillip, Paweł Pustelnik

4 | Federation 66 68 70 72 75

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A SHORT FUTURE MEMORY OF ONE Katka Babicova A LETTER FROM THE WSCF EUROPE REGIONAL SECRETARY Hans Hommens GEORGIA JOINS WSCF WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO FOLLOW CHRIST TODAY? Márta Várnagyi WSCF EXECUTIVE MEETING IN BERLIN Vera Papp CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

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1| Act "Fear is the tax which conscience pays to guilt." ― Unknown 6 MY LENT-ISH PROJECT Ragnhild Bjørvik Opsahl 9 LIVING BELOW THE LINE Paul Crome 13 THOUGHTS ABOUT SIN AND GUILT Eva Ungvari 15 SECULAR SOCIETY, CONSCIENCE AND GUILT: A BRIEF REFLECTION Janko Stefanov 18 WHAT HAS GUILT DONE FOR US LATELY? JoAnne Chung Yan Lam

Ragnhild Bjørvik Opsahl

What would Martin Luther do?

My Lent-ish Project

It turned out that most of my determinations for Lent sounded like a second chance for broken New Year’s Resolutions. But now I did it for Jesus! Then I started to make new rules, like “If I don’t eat candy on Sundays, when one traditionally has a “day off ”, then I can end my resolutions earlier, so that I can eat chocolate during the Easter Holiday”. When I tried to fast on meat; I did the same thing. Maybe I could just fast meat for dinner, but still have ham for breakfast. And fish. I could probably eat fish, because that isn’t real meat. Good plan.

IT’S Lent. It’s the time for to make amends for all Ragnhild Bjørvik Opsahl from Norway

is a member of a SCM in Oslo. She is

a theology student and

currently she is writing

her Master dissertation about coptic monks

and texts that have not been included in the Bible.

my broken promises. The time for second chances. The time to really try to see if I can work out twice a week, become healthier, drink less, not smoke. No, sorry, wait, it was to remember Jesus Christ. I was thinking about New Year’s Resolutions. This is the story of my “Lent Resolution”, during the year 2012.

Candy and alcohol

I have heard about a lot of different “determinations” people do for Lent. Fasting is, obviously, still the most popular choice. I have also heard about those who will give up smoking, sex, candy, pleasures or alcohol. I have heard about those who would read and contemplate over a bible verse every day. I have heard about those who gave up all of the above. I have tried most of them and succeeded for about a week.

No, that’s not right. I have made it once; It must have been four or five years ago. As a new theology student, I decided that I would not eat any candy and exercise every week. And I made it. And I was proud. And I boasted about it. And…wait; was that what Lent was all about?

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The Theological Faculty I attend in Oslo is Lutheran to the bone. Sometimes I think we ask ourselves more often “What would Martin Luther do?”, than “What would Jesus do?”. And Luther would probably question my intentions, my merits of piety and good deeds. I guess he would even call me self-righteous, blunt as he was. Actually, a fellow student of mine said the same thing.

Self-righteous? Not a good word after six weeks of looking at that chocolate with water running from my mouth and a longing for the Easter Holiday when I finally could quit and tell everyone about how good I had been. How hard it had been. But I, as a good Christian had done it. Besides, I had lost ten pounds!

This is not a critique

But both Luther and my fellow student (also, the quite blunt one) were right. My boasting and new rules said the same. I didn’t do it for anybody else, but me. It had nothing to do with Jesus, repentance or Lent. Thank you Jesus for dying for all my sins, but why do you have make me give up chocolate?

This is not a critique. I know of many, who every year fast and say not a word about it. Who don’t do it for themselves, but for all the right reasons that I couldn’t do. I applaud their resolution and patience. I envy their steadfastness and good intentions. It just wasn’t right for me.

Me, myself and I

Ah, there it was again. Me. It wasn’t right for me. My good or bad intentions. My Lent resolutions. What then, was I supposed to do? Following my merits of piety, I turned to the bible. To Isaiah 58, to be precise: Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house?

I had two epiphanies. First: Lent for me could be about me, but what I could and should do for others.

Second: It had to be something that I didn’t quit the first week, but something that would keep my focus and motivation. In other word, it had to be something that I really didn’t want to do. It had to be something that stung.

It’s all about the money

For the record, I’m greedy. It’s not one of my best qualities. It’s one of my worst, to be frank. I like to spend money on myself. I like to eat out, and I don’t like to buy cheap food in the grocery stores. I love shoes! Being a student, I don’t have much money, but being Norwegian, I can’t complain. Money, Mammon, unfortunately became a bigger part of my life than Jesus and Lent.

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Oh, no! I found my Lent resolutions. I would have to limit my expenses. Ok. I could do that. I would be saving money! But, hey, this smells like self-righteous merits of piety again. It is Lent, the year is 2012, and I was left with only one choice. I would have to give my money away.

My Lent-ish Project, or how to fast money

What? Give it away? My greedy heart wept. I decided to use my money on one project. In Oslo, there is a magazine called =Oslo. =Oslo is Norway's first street magazine. The magazine is a voice for social outcasts, the poor, drug addicts and other disadvantaged groups.

The idea is that the disadvantaged groups will be selling the magazine, and the seller retains half of the retail price. It’s a really good project, and one dear to my heart.

I decided to buy a magazine every time I saw a seller.

At “best”, this was once a week. At “worst”, it was thrice a day. One magazine cost 50 Norwegian kroners. This is four and a half cups of black coffee in the University.

One dinner. A seventh of a month ticket for public transport. I saw my shoes and cups of coffee fly away with different sellers, and I felt both joy and annoyance.

I felt joy, because I could have a Lent Resolution that didn’t circle around me. And I felt annoyance, because I really found that Lent Resolution that stung. Irony.

And I didn’t tell a soul. Damn, if someone would call my merits self-righteous again.

Hello, Jesus, where are you?

For the record, I bought one dress and one jacket, so I didn’t keep my promise. So you would be right to ask if I fulfilled my goal. Did it urge me to spiritual renewal, penance, refection or prayer? I don’t know. Silly answer, but it’s true.

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Ragnhild Bjørvik Opsahl: My Lent-ish Project

Paul Crome

Still, I think it was the best that I could have done. I did something that stung, but first and foremost, I did what felt right living in the money-spending and rich land that I live in. I even think it ended up being what Lent is supposed to be about: others. To share our bread with the hungry. To see, to do, to touch. It was a private deal between, well, Jesus and me. It’s not a universal solution, but it was the right decision there and then.

Living Below the Line

Lent is strictly personal that way, in all its collectiveness. █

Paul Crome studied Geography and History at the

University of Leeds and now works for the British Methodist Church at the Touchstone

Centre in Bradford, doing community

and interfaith work

and also volunteers

with Christian Aid. He served on the ERC as

the Gender Coordinator from 2010-2011, over-

seeing the organisation the conference Com-

municating Gender in October 2011.

THERE are 1.4 billion people living below the

extreme poverty line in the world; the World Bank defines this as living on $1.25 or less per day.1 I recently undertook the challenge to “Live Below the Line” in a bid to raise awareness of extreme poverty around the world and to raise money for the work Christian Aid is doing to help to combat it. This meant that I lived for five days with only £1 a day – roughly equivalent to $1.25 - to spend on food and drink. Whilst my experience during the week was a very watered down version of poverty, it made me think about things in a new way. It made me consider my day to day lifestyle more carefully in comparison with those who are deprived of such luxuries as I take for granted, and it made me think anew about why it is that one fifth of the world’s population is forced to live in conditions which deny their rights to dignity.

I started off by planning for my week below the line very carefully. My £5 budget stretched to cover the following: a large bag of lentils, a large bag of potatoes, a bag of flour, a packet of rice, a packet of porridge oats, three onions, three carrots, half a tablespoon of ground cumin, a tablespoon of salt and five bananas. I drank tap water, which was considered free of charge. On the first day, I made a huge pot of daal, with lentils, potatoes, onions, carrots, cumin, salt and water. I ate this twice a day, once at midday with chapattis which I made daily with flour 1 “World Bank Updates Poverty Estimates for the Developing World”, Research at the World Bank 26 August 2008, http://econ.worldbank.org/WBSITE/ EXTERNAL/EXTDEC/EXTRESEARCH/0,,contentMDK:21882162~pagePK:641654 01~piPK:64165026~theSitePK:469382,00.html.

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and water and once in the evening with rice. Breakfast each day consisted of porridge, made from oats and water, and I had a banana a day.

Sugar and caffeine are luxuries

This diet was actually more than enough to live on; I was not hungry at all during the week. Whilst it filled me up, though, it was still a struggle to adapt to living on mainly lentils and carbohydrates. With our hectic lifestyles, many of us rely on processed sugar and caffeine to get through the day, but my diet had neither of these elements in it. The result was that I quickly began to feel lethargic, and had noticeably less energy right from the start of the week. Sugar and caffeine are luxuries, however, that one can learn to live without, and in general the food I was eating was nourishing and sustaining. I approached planning my week to try to ensure that I would cover as many essential food groups as possible in a bid to have a balanced diet; I consumed three different types of fruit or vegetable each day, had plenty of carbohydrates, and lentils are a good source of protein and fibre.

Poverty as a lack of choice

What affected me most was not hunger or tiredness; it was the lack of choice in what I was eating. I was bored with eating the same thing after two days and by the end was craving something different. People living in extreme poverty in the Global South, however, have to eat the same thing again and again, day after day. In many parts of the world, especially in rural settings, there is only one staple food available, and that is what people have to spend their money on. In Sierra Leone, for example, the staple food is cassava. Cassava provides virtually no protein and this leads to serious problems of protein deficiency amongst much of the population.

Even if some people are getting enough to eat in terms of quantity they can still suffer from malnourishment.

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Paul Crome: Living Below the Line

Poverty is not just a lack of spending power; it is a lack of choosing power.

Was it really below the line?

This is why I came to realise that my five days living below the line were merely a pale reflection of the experience of somebody living genuinely in poverty. I had choices; I had the ability to plan my food carefully, using the internet to inform me on the prices of food and where best to buy from and using my education to plan a relatively balanced diet. On top of this, my £1 a day only had to cover food, in the Global South this would have to cover everything. I worked out roughly the other costs of my day to day living during that week, and whilst I tried to limit the money I spent on other things, it brings my expenditure considerably above the figure of £1. On any one of those five days, I spent an average of £9.57 on rent, £1.24 on transport, £0.25 on internet, £0.70 on my mobile phone, £0.65 on energy, £1.68 on council tax and around £0.25 on water and sewerage. This brings my total daily expenditure to a total of £15.34, including £1 for food, on just the things which I would consider essential or obligatory. Whilst in the UK this is quite low, mainly due to the reduced food costs and the fact that I split bills with housemates, in terms of percentages it’s astronomically above the figure of £1 a day that those who are genuinely living in extreme poverty have to live on. On any normal day when not living below the line that figure would probably be around £20; the essentials of my day to day lifestyle are worth twenty times those of somebody living in extreme poverty.

Exploitation, rise in prices and corporations

The poverty and poor food security of billions is a result of the blind profligacy of those leading overly privileged lifestyles, mainly in the Global North. Corporations exploit vulnerable people by paying wages a fraction of

what they should be; they use legal loopholes to avoid paying billions in taxes every year to the impoverished countries in which they operate. Governments support arms deals and wars which contribute to death and destruction, creating and exacerbating poverty. We live carbon intensive lifestyles, leading to climate change which affects mainly those in the Global South. I live a privileged life in a wealthy country, yet my country’s wealth was created largely by the inhuman exploitation that occurred during the colonial era. The disastrous rise in global food prices in recent years has little, if any, root cause lying with those who have suffered the most from it – the poor. The power and influence of global market forces on food prices, influenced and directed largely from the boardrooms of the Global North, carry increasing weight as power is conglomerated in an increasingly globalised structure of unaccountable multinational corporations.

We are each complicit in these structures which keep millions in poverty. How much of the guilt should be placed with us, though, and how much with the corporations and the governments? Multi-national corporations can defend any number of actions by saying that they are responding to market demand, governments can say that they are acting in the interests of their people and to a certain extent these things are true. I believe we are all guilty of not creating a market demand for socially and environmentally responsible corporations and governments. We may not feel rich or powerful, but most of us in Europe still enjoy the power of choice, this is something that my week below the line taught me. We vote politically for our leaders and mandate them to represent our views on the world stage. More than that, however, we vote with our money. Where we spend our money and where we save, invest and donate our money has a massive impact on the lives of the disadvantaged.

Am I guilty?

Our individual culpability for extreme poverty has to be considered limited; I was born into this lifestyle and I do not feel I, at any point, knowingly chose to be complicit in a system that exploited millions of people worldwide. A lack of individual culpability does not deny individual responsibility, though. Even if we are only guilty as part of a collective, we each individually have a duty to contribute to the atonement for that collective’s wrongdoings. Indeed, there is no other way in which the collective can hope to atone. The reduction of hunger is not simply a question of individuals being charitable; each person on this earth has the human right to food and that right is being denied, either by inaction or by unjust structures, to 1.4 billion people.

We have individual responsibility to end this injustice, we may not each be guilty but we are each responsible.

I was lucky enough to go on a trip to Tajikistan with Christian Aid in January this year. Tajikistan is one of the world’s most disadvantaged nations. It is the poorest of the ex-Soviet states, and faces a plethora of problems, including increasing climate change, rife corruption, emigration and HIV/AIDS. I met people first-hand who were living in extreme poverty, as well as seeing some of the work that Christian Aid and other NGOs are doing to help them into a position where they can help themselves. I visited several projects which are doing innovative and important work to lift whole communities out of extreme poverty. Access to Market schemes put into place by Christian Aid and their partners enable rural communities to be economically active and secure by teaching them the skills and giving them the equipment and support to grow, preserve and sell food in increasingly difficult climatic conditions.

This includes education and training programmes, the provision of solar greenhouses and support for those experimenting with new farming techniques.

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I cannot feel individually responsible for the conditions that I witnessed in Tajikistan, even though I recognise that the lifestyle I have inherited is part of the root cause of the poverty of people worldwide just like those I met whilst I was there. I do feel a responsibility to try to redress the balance. The work of development NGOs is vital in redressing the balance and as Christians surely we are duty bound to support it. However, our responsibility cannot be simply to set up a direct debit to a charity and then to let them get on with righting the wrongs of the world. In choosing who we buy from and who we vote for we have the political and economic clout to make a difference to the global structures that deny dignity to 1.4 billion of this world’s people, and we have a responsibility to use it. In Europe most of us are in the privileged position of being able to exercise our right to lobby politicians and big companies.

The form that globalisation has taken thus far has meant that the Global North has been enriched at the expense of the Global South, creating a global economic system of which the enforced poverty of 1.4 billion people is an integral part. Globalisation has always meant exploitation and its exponents have a lot to feel guilty about. If globalisation carries any message, though, it should be one of our shared humanity. The African philosophy of Ubuntu, roughly translated as ‘I am because we all are’, is helpful in understanding why it is that we have a responsibility towards those in poverty. It is not simply because we feel guilty for our part in creating poverty and need to try and redress the balance, but because of our common humanity and common future. We can see those amongst us who are hungry, we have to try to the best of our ability to feed them; we can see those who are thirsty, we have to try to give them something to drink; we can see those who are naked, and we have to clothe them. █

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Paul Crome: Living Below the Line

Eva Ungvari

Thoughts about Sin and Guilt Eva Ungvari is 24 years old, from Romania and has a

Bachelor in Acting and Protestant Theology, and a Master Degree in Acting. She works

in the National Theatre in Sibiu and hopes to

find a way to combine her two fields of

studies more. Her

interests are in theatre, feminist theology and pastoral care.

YOU can make me guilty of anything, because I am

human. Sin and guilt are part of our lives. We grow up and learn from our parents and later from our teachers what is right and what is wrong. As children we act naturally, then like our parents, by taking them as a role model. After a couple of years we learn to understand what others feel and learn to share our feelings. Step by step we learn to judge what is good and what is wrong for us in this world. We learn to judge by our personal experience and education. That's why sometimes my ‘right’ can be in your eyes ‘wrong’.

Our whole life is an endless sequence of decisions. It starts in the morning with your coffee. Is it fair trade or one you just picked up in haste? It was a decision to buy that coffee and by buying it you stepped into a production line. Where are these coffee beans from?

Have children been sold, kidnapped and brought to work on the plantation where your coffee beans come from? Are the workers paid properly? You don’t know.

I can’t tell you either. But if it is like that, then you are supporting this production line by buying this product.

I always feel bad, about buying products when I can’t be sure where they come from. Most of the time we can’t even find out where the things we buy come from when we take it from the shelf of our nearest supermarket. So what to do?

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This is the problem, how to live and try to make good decisions; not to sin against God´s Creation and still keep on living. Sometimes I think the only way is to move to the mountains and cut myself off from civilization, living in solitary, and still this is not the answer.

We feel guilty if we do something wrong; accidentally or on purpose. We feel guilty if we know that we could have done something in another way or because we did not do it.

Guilt is something that most people learn as children and will never forget. Everybody feels guilty about something: not replying to mom’s calls; buying cheap clothes made by young girls in Bangladesh; always wanting the newest electronic device that just came on the market, although your old one is still perfectly ok. I always feel guilty when I am running late or have forgotten something.

But the most important thing is not to feel sorry for yourself, because of what you have done, or haven’t done.

In a way, just take this feeling of guilt and transform it into responsibility. Take the feeling of guilt as a warning sign to take the next step towards changing something.

Baby steps. Every little change starts with the way you think about it.

Sin

I want to start with sin by naming it and then ask what it means. I can explain 'sin' as the separation from God. But how can we understand this separation?

The Bible tells us the story of Adam and Eve, in the Christian tradition it is called: “the fall into sin”. But this is just tradition, for example in the Jewish tradition, with which we share the five books of Moses, don’t see this story as the falling into sin. They see it as a story where Adam and Eve break their relation to God.

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Eva Ungvari: Thoughts about Sin and Guilt

Janko Stefanov

Sin is not just stealing, murder, lying, betrayal, greed, not cherishing your parents, and so on. In the Orthodox context, sin is when human beings put themselves into God’s place and act like God. Human beings wanted to be like God and know what is good and what is bad.

Liberal theology defines sin as “lack of love”.

I ask myself, why we always hear and have to talk about sin. Why do preachers preach over us about how full of sin we are? What do we need that for? This talk about sin and guilt is such a powerful weapon against people.

It can be used to keep people small, impotent, sinful and ashamed; in this way they can be manipulated. We can’t speak in a right way about sin and guilt if we can’t look ahead to God’s grace and forgiveness. It is all about the small steps that we make towards change, baby steps towards changing ourselves.

I don’t want to talk so much about sin and guilt. Nobody can avoid it and we all have it. I want to talk about grace and forgiveness. These give us freedom and love to share with the rest of the world. I think this is the thing that really can change the way we see the world and then the world itself. █

Secular Society, Conscience and Guilt: A Brief Reflection Janko Stefanov was born is Dryanovo, in the heartland of

Bulgaria. He enjoys the splendour of nature and the warmth of friendship, as well

as good tea and beer.

Janko was a Muslim

in his early youth and later converted to

Orthodox Christian. He has a Bachelors degree in Theology from his local St Cyril and St

Methodius University of Veliko Tarnovo.

LIVING in today’s secularized society can be (and

very often is) somewhat difficult and challenging for every Christian, regardless of denomination, country of residence, sex and race. Indeed, the world has changed a lot during the last century. An American Orthodox priest, monk and scholar Seraphim Rose (†1982) states in one of his works: Anyone who looks at our contemporary life from the perspective of the normal life lived by people in earlier times – say, Russia, or America, or any country of Western Europe in the 19th Century – cannot help but be struck by the fact of how abnormal life has become today. The whole concept of authority and obedience, of decency and politeness, of public and private behaviour – all have changed drastically, have been turned upside down.1

The modern world has become more egocentric than ever before and “all about me and my comfort” is now a main principle in people’s lives. Therefore it is not surprising for me why Christianity, a philosophy built on the conception of unselfish love and responsibility for others, is increasingly seen as something 1 Seraphim Rose, “The Orthodox World-View – a lecture”, The Orthodox Word, vol. 18, no. 4, (California, 1982), p. 160.

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“uncomfortable”; sometimes even as a taboo which has to be avoided. Our modern world, same as Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, is asking Christ the dreadful question: “Why did you come here, to interfere and make things difficult for us?” Many Christians today are judged as followers of obsolete beliefs. Moreover, a great number of people say that Christian teachings fill them with guilt and worthlessness, blaming Christianity (often times along with other religions) as one of world’s greatest evils of all time.

Archdeacon Andrew Kuraev, professor at the Moscow Spiritual Academy, writes:

God, the real and only God will be forgotten. His face will be too faint in comparison to the modern billboards and political images. The society would not be able to answer the question what does it mean to be Christian.2

I clearly remember, during my theological studies, being asked the same question by one our faculty lecturers.

I was curious about his point of view so then I begged him to give me the answer. These simple words I shall always remember – “Being Christian – he said – is to realize the fact that you are a sinner, to understand when you fall, and to know how to stand up and carry on right away”. The realization that our nature is harmed by sin, in other words – sinful, and therefore capable of committing faults and mistakes, is what seems to be really missing nowadays. In a relation to this I will cite St. Apostle Paul:

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For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do (Romans 7: 18-19).

Often today, the mistakes made are not even recognized as what they really are, but instead they are accepted as something normal, something we should not be worried about. For instance, big natural gas and petroleum companies are still assuring people all over the globe that hydraulic fracturing (known as “fracking”) is something that does not endanger our environment, although it is well known and proven that the aforementioned technique is absolutely devastating for it.

Many more examples of such mistakes are present, but the one I will point had recently made quite an impression on me. It was in Charles Ferguson’s documentary about the financial crisis called “Inside Job”, which I watched while at the WSCF Europe Theology conference in Bratislava. In the documentary, the majority of the interviewed bankers showed absolutely no signs of regret or whatsoever about the decisions they have made, although being warned that these decisions can actually lead the whole world into a deep financial recession, leaving thousands of people homeless and unemployed. And sadly that is how many other people, a great deal of them Christians, think and live nowadays – as if they have no conscience to listen to.

Nearly 1400 ago the Palestinian Christian hermit Abba Dorotheos of Gaza (around †620) wrote the following:

When God created man, He planted something divine into him – a certain conception – a spark that has both light and warmth. The conception that enlightens the mind and indicates what is right and what is wrong is called conscience... It is in our power to either bury our conscience, or allow it to shine within us and enlighten us through our subordination to it. Because when our conscience tells us to do something and we ignore it, or when it advises us to do something and we don’t do it, we burden it or, as though, bury it so that its voice becomes fainter from the weight on it.3

Andrew Kuraev, On Our Defeat, (Sofia, 2006), p. 18.

Janko Stefanov: Secular Society, Conscience and Guilt: A Brief Reflection

The conscience plays a key role in one’s life, for it is through conscience that one can perceive God’s voice and realize his or her own duty. It is very important for us as Christians to protect our God-given conscience from being demised, burdened and buried. We should carefully listen to its voice and help others, no matter Christians or not, to do the same as well, although that sometimes we may feel uncomfortable and even guilty while listening. But after all, feelings of guilt are also an inevitable part of life, but “the man who is conscious of his sins is greater than he who profits the whole world by the sight of his countenance”.4 I really like the words of an American Evangelical author, Philip Yancey concerning guilt:

God gives people the freedom to choose. If you sense a longing for God, a desire to change and be a new person, that’s God speaking in your heart. And when you respond to Him, God will change you… You must repent, and repentance means to turn around, to change your way of living.6 Our society will have to go not just through the feeble feeling of regret, but true repentance that implies action, knowing that there is no sin that can overcome the great love which the Lord haves for us. Love that, despite of our imperfectness and committed sins, goes far beyond we can even imagine. █

Guilt is not a state to cultivate, like a mood you slip into for a few days. It should have directional movement, first pointing backward to the sin and then pointing forward to repentance... A sense of guilt, vastly underappreciated, deserves our gratitude, for only such a powerful force can nudge us toward repentance and reconciliation with those we have harmed.5

My opinion is that guilt should not be assessed as a good or a bad psychological feeling, but instead it should be comprehended as a peculiar indicator that tells us whenever we are in a conflict with our conscience. And whenever we are in such conflict, reconciliation should be a condition sine qua non. The latter is possible only through what unfortunately this secular world lacks the most – repentance. “Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord” (Acts 3: 19). The renowned American Evangelist, Rev. Billy Graham says on repentance: 3 St. Dorotheos of Gaza, Discourses and Sayings, (Minnesota: Collegeville, 1977), p. 104.

4 St. Isaac the Syrian, The Ascetical Homilies (2nd revised edition), (Massachusetts: Brookline 2011), p. 193.

6 Billy Graham, Unto the Hills. Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1986, p. 121.

5 Philip Yancey, “Guilt Good and Bad,” Christianity Today, vol. 46, no. 12, (Illinois, 2002), p. 112.

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JoAnne Lam contributes her second column related to the ongoing themes explored in Mozaik. She has been involved in WSCF work in the past and is now researching issues pertaining to the Eucharist. She’s a blogger, mother and enthusiastic ecumenist.

JoAnne Chung Yan Lam

JoAnne Chung Yan Lam is a Master of Divinity

student at the Waterloo Lutheran Seminary in Canada. She has

served as an intern

at the WSCF-Geneva

office in 2002-2003.

She is a graduate from the Toronto School of Theology, Master of Theological Studies

and the Ecumenical Institute of Bossey,

Master of Advanced Ecumenical Studies

programme. Her latest

project was a thesis on

the Lutheran-Orthodox dialogue on Eucharist.

Her intercultural

identity includes being born in Hong Kong,

immigrated to Canada, and now residing in Switzerland. Email: ijklam@gmail.com.

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What has Guilt Done for Us Lately GENERALLY, guilt triggers negative reactions

and emotions. As a tool of manipulation, guilt can influence decisions and actions. At the minimum, guilt exists like a shadow, following us as we go about our daily tasks, making us question each decision we make.

As children, guilt is used to sway from disobeying, acting accordingly to societal standards and expectations. An extra serving of dessert brings on a guilty conscience.

Guilt is a part of the human condition, but how does guilt relate to faith and especially Christianity?

In the Creation story from Genesis 2, Eve is the traditional culprit who listened to the serpent and partook of the forbidden fruit along with Adam.

Historical doctrines formulated from this account established the female sex as the one responsible for humanity’s rejection from paradise. The designation that Eve was the cause for the “Fall of Humanity” creates complex repercussions that have contributed in the devaluation and the exploitation of women throughout the generations. In this instance, the guilt of disobedience against God found women to be its

scapegoat. God created women as the suitable partner to men, but through the placement of guilt onto Eve, part of that original intent has been lost. Guilt acts as chains, holding women prisoner in a systemic inferiority. How does guilt fit into a God of liberation and Creation?

Through the development of Christian doctrines and teachings, guilt is prevalently used to keep believers aligned with doctrinal positions and understandings.

In the Ten Commandments as well as the Deuteronmic texts, extensive laws prescribe how one is to behave and that to deviate would result in punishment.

Remembering from childhood, my Sunday School teachers emphasized how Jesus died for my sins and that because humanity was disobedient to God’s commandments, God had no choice but to redeem the world through the blood of Christ. This claim and explanation create a heavy responsibility on the believers to carry the guilt of the death of Christ. The Gospel of John even names the Jews as the crowds calling out to crucify Jesus. To place the guilt of Jesus’ death on the Jews has created anti-semitic attitudes between Christianity and Judaism. Guilt is the instigator for scapegoating and hatred. Has there a purpose to blame and to cast a heavy load of guilt on another?

During World War II and under the Japanese occupation, young Korean girls and women were taken to serve as sex slaves in the military brothels.

They were young women ripped from their families and their innocence. This happened to young girls in other countries under Japanese occupation as well.

The Korean women filed a class-action lawsuit against the Japanese government, demanding an apology and reparations for the estimated 10 000 victims known as “Comfort Women”. The Japanese government has been identified with the guilt in this instance, but what of that? Does guilt aid in the truth and reconciliation for the women or merely to cause shame, forming a barrier

towards a restoration to humanity in all its fullness?

Pondering on the topic of guilt, I have grown oddly aware of the guilt that I impose on myself, as well as adopting societal dosage of the same. Guilt weighs down our spirits because it imposes an enslavement, binding our capacity to make choices counter-status quo. All of this does not displace the usefulness of guilt to deter undesired behaviours. However, I would propose that it is not guilt but the focus on consequences, cause and effect, that will help each of us to live responsibly in the world. Furthermore, in the context of Christianity, guilt should not motivate our faith but rather - grace. It was grace that moved God to redeem the world and in love God continues to find ways to connect and nurture that connection. Grace will overcome guilt as love shall overcome hate. █ Mozaik 30

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2| Know "Guilt is the very nerve of sorrow." ― Horace Bushnell

22 SIMUL IUSTUS ET PECCATOR, OR ON THE PROBLEM WITH GRACE Marta Gustavsson 25 MORAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR COLLECTIVE CRIME Nenad Dimitrijevic 29 DOMINION OVER NATURAL RESOURCES AS CURATORSHIP, CUSTODIANSHIP OR STEWARDSHIP Alexander (Areshian-Hakopyan) Arktos 34 ARE ETHICS AND RELIGION SEPARABLE? David Weberman 37 A POEM Marta Gustavsson 38 WHAT KIND OF ETHICS DO WE NEED TODAY? INSIGHTS FROM CZESLAW MILOSZ’S POEM CAMPO DEI FIORI Anna Abram 43 PSYCHOLOGY AND MORAL THEOLOGY: COLLABORATION AND CHALLENGES Vivian Boland 48 ARE DRUG USERS GUILTY OR NOT GUILTY? James Jackson

Marta Gustavsson

Simul Iustus et Peccator, or On the Problem with Grace Marta Gustavsson lives in Ängelholm and is a recently ordained pastor in Church of

Sweden. When she is

not working, she likes cooking, singing and

biking around in her beautiful new town.

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IN someone's personal Internet presentation I once read:

”If I would choose one religion, I'd be a Christian.

You can do absolutely anything and God would still forgive you”.

The sentence was meant ironically but also gives a mirror to a central theological problem. How can we reflect on the relationship between grace and action? Is Christianity the religion in which nothing is expected?

Can Christianity be accused of being the religion that in effect produces totally unchanged followers? And maybe worst of all, can the Christian concept of Grace be used to cover human evil and wrongdoings, claiming them as a necessary implication of our original and inherited sinfulness that God anyway accepts? Would this not be a psychopath's dream, that any outer moral standards anyway would be overruled by a principle of acceptance?

This is a question of how the situation of being saved relates to the goal of being holy, that is, to actually live according to God's will (which we here presume is a will of goodness). Are we saved although we never will be holy or will we necessarily be holy because we are

saved? There is always a risk in communities where the former is accentuated, that no search for sanctification is needed. On the other hand, in many Christian communities, the later view has questioned the state of salvation of people. Unless they forced themselves to a certain amount of “holiness” (according to the norms of the group) their reception of Christ would not be counted as valid. This view, I believe, shows too little understanding for the limits of human life. The Gospel is then transformed into yet a law, more heavy than any.

There are probably many reflections about this over the history of theology, and I can only present a small share, but I'd like to contribute with a reflection of the Lutheran concept of simul, which, I believe, can be helpful for us to find a way through. To be simul iustus et peccator, that is, both justified and sinner, was in Luther's view the central expression for the situation of the Christian. It expressed that the new situation of a human being in the acceptance of Christ would not make you less a sinner, it just make you justified as well.

The expression, I think, must not be understood in the sense that grace would be a useless but comforting fact for a hopeless human condition. Instead, grace should be the comfort for the believer that although the old Adam seems difficult to get rid of, he is already somehow dead in the eyes of God and through the works of Christ. Simul expresses that the process of sanctification follows the fact of salvation, not that salvation stands alone without the aspect of sanctification. The factor needed to make the leap from salvation to sanctification, would be gratitude. This seems also to be the lack in the claim made by the quote in the Internet presentation. If doing nothing, expecting everything and not being grateful would be the Christian experience par excellance, we clearly did something wrong. Now, luckily, I don't believe this is the common view of Christians.

Maybe these views are self-evident not only for Protestants but even for Christians of all denominations, although others may express them different from Luther.

But my concern is not only to frame Christian teachings to defend them from the heresies of bad practice, but also to discuss how good teachings actually give rise to good practice. In the face of the evils of this world, the Christian discussion should not only be about how our dogmatics are pointing towards the good but also about what would be required to show the world that they are also better in effect.

If we believe that what comes after our redemption in Christ is better than what we can achieve by just knowing moral standards, then we should also have as aim to make action an integral part in our teachings on justification. I will here give a threefold contribution on how the concept of simul can be a call for resistance to a theology without consequences:

1. The condition of a Christian knowing her ambiguous state as both justified and sinner, calls us never to take the love of God for granted. This is not a call for an image of a God whose wrath and love are equally close, but instead the conviction that God's love calls for our renewed response. The Christian Church should be eager in its wish to overcome the gap to its beloved, just as God is passionate about finding and keeping close to us. This is what I mean by gratitude, and this should be Church's collective step toward a willingness for action.

2. The concept of simul can be understood as the acknowledgement that a perfect set of righteous actions do not bring salvation and that salvation does not bring a perfect set of righteous actions. It is the claim of sorrow, that even in the community of strong belief, human brokenness will be present.

The Christian community in which the confession of sins is a common element, knows this. The practice Mozaik 30

23

Nenad Dimitrijevic

of continuously praying for forgiveness and receiving the absolution of sins can bring her ambiguous state into light, where it can become a fertile ground for the hope that brings action. The calling of God does not search for a more holy community than the Church, but it searches for the Church to be more holy.

3. When expressing a Christian as simul iustus et peccator, one gives a focus to the perspective of order. However critical we can be towards grace without action, I believe calling for action without preaching grace is even more frightening. The Christian view must be that action is a consequence of grace, that sanctification follows salvation. Why does a Christian fulfill the will of God? Because it is already her truth. The freedom of the holy life in Christ is also what makes it sustainable.

If this is true, it is nevertheless a problem to have the calling for holy actions but no place to act. What Church in much is about is to be a space for action, discipleship and difficult meetings. Church should not only prepare the inner life of believers for living holy as an effect of salvation, but should in itself be the place where such expression is possible and even necessary. The serving attitude, the search for holiness, the responsibility for humankind, the facing of various sufferings and the sharing of the common good should not just be an encouragement within Church, it should constitute Church and be done by Christians together.

I believe the accusation of grace being just an excuse for not acting has its validity. I believe we are often too concerned with the comfortable settlement of the soul without preaching or encouraging action as an integral part of faith. The closeness is my point; being simultaneously justified and sinner means that grace and work is the same movement. â–ˆ 24

Marta Gustavsson: A Simul Iustus et Peccator, or On the Problem with Grace

Moral Responsibility for Collective Crime Nenad Dimitrijevic teaches in the Political

Science Department at the Central European

University in Budapest, Hungary. His main

research interests are

transitional justice and constitutional theory.

THE origins of my interest in moral responsibility are

non-academic. Initially it was – and it still is - all about emotions: sadness, mourning, shame, embarrassment, hopelessness, feeling of the loss of the place in the world.

Why such emotions? I am an ethnic Serbian, a member of a social group in whose name the grave crimes were committed in the recent past. I am haunted by the ghosts of the innocent people killed. Some of my co-nationals thought and acted on the assumption that I would be morally better off if some children, women and men whom I never met would not live on Earth anymore. And so they were killed. Had it not been for a certain moral reading of my good as a member of the Serbian nation, they would still be alive.

In light of this simple moral fact, I have to re-visit some basic moral questions: How should I live? What should I think and how shall I feel about what happened? How should I perceive my place in the world? What should I believe? What should I do? How should I treat other people?

Answers to these questions ought to follow a broad set of guidelines. First, post-criminal society, its political regime, and all its citizens are duty-bound to explicitly disassociate themselves from the criminal past. Second, this disassociation ought to go beyond legal and political accountability: it requires asking the question of moral

Mozaik 30

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responsibility. Third, provided certain conditions are met, all members of a non-voluntary group in whose name mass crime is committed, share responsibility for it. ‘Certain conditions’ point to a special case of mass crime, which I will call ‘collective crime’.

This introduction is followed by two sections. The first section offers a summary account of the concept of collective crime. The second section explicates the concept of collective moral responsibility.

Collective crime

In my focus are societies whose pasts are distinguished by massive and systematic violations of the right to life and basic human dignity. Such acts of violence can be preliminarily named mass crimes. Mass crime is a regime-sponsored criminal practice, which is identified on the basis of the following elements: the number of perpetrators; the number of victims; variety of types of harm; the role of political authority; the ideological foundation of crime; the manner in which the victims were chosen; the character of response of the majority of subjects to the wrongdoings and their justification; the grave moral and political consequences that ensued and that go beyond the direct harm and suffering of victims.

An important inference of these features is normalization of crime, which itself has two important aspects.

The first consists in ideological, legal and political institutionalization of crime: the system of values, political arrangements and legal norms are shaped in a manner that allows, justifies, and renders routine harming targeted people. The second possible aspect of normalization is the majority support for the regime and its practices. If both aspects of normalization are present we can talk about ‘populist criminal regime’.

26

Populist criminal regime relies on the support of its subjects, or more precisely, on the support of those subjects who belong to the group in whose name the regime rules. The essential quality of this relationship is not repression, but rather populist integration, which includes a high level of ideological and practical agreement about crime. Nazi Germany and Serbia under Milosevic's rule provide examples. Crimes committed by such a regime can be identified as ‘collective crimes’.

Collective crime is an act committed by a significant number of members of a group, in the name of all members of that group, with the support of the majority of group members, and against individuals targeted on the basis of their belonging to a different group.

There is one important point to note in the analysis of collective crime: wrongdoers act not in their own name only, but in the name of the whole group. Those who join for the criminal purpose, who formulate and spread criminal intention, and who engage in criminal acts, will justify each of their steps by invoking the identity of the whole group and some alleged good of each of its members.

The necessary feature of such an ethical attitude is the representation of the targeted group in the same perverted ethical terms, as the embodiment of everything that is morally wrong. Targeting innocent human beings is justified by the claim that they are not simply inherently 'less worthy' – they represent the threat to ‘our good’. The circle is closed by inferring that destruction of the ‘enemy group’ is both necessary and good. Consequently, killing is ethical. The fact that at work is a perverted 'ethics of evil' does not deprive this justification of importance – without its acceptance by the majority, collective crime would not be possible at all. Here is a simple equation: the more horrifying a criminal practice, the more it is presented in moral categories, by promoting ultimate moral wrong – killing and harming innocent persons – into the basic standard of right and good.

Nenad Dimitrijevic: Moral Responsibility for Collective Crime

Collective crime leaves difficult legacies. First, the regime change cannot possibly turn those who until yesterday voluntarily supported killing into decent persons. Second, the character, and magnitude of the recent atrocities are such that they cannot be wilfully erased from collective memory, nor disassociated from the present. Third, collective crimes ought not to be forgotten. The fact that it was possible for such things to happen outlines the range of necessary paths of dealing with the past. We have to reflect on past atrocities, and we have to condemn them. This is not a moralistic stance that would depart from a metaphysical perspective of an abstract moral truth, to end up with posing unachievable demands on ordinary people. Rather, this is the minimum requirement of practical morality – without meeting it, post-criminal society would remain caught in the past.

Collective moral responsibility The idea of collective moral responsibility is simple. It says, to repeat: all members of the group in whose name the collective crime was committed should be held accountable.

A powerful objection against the concept of collective responsibility is well known: how could someone who did not intend, support, or participate in wrongdoing, i.e. someone who did nothing legally punishable or morally wrong, be still held morally accountable?

I want to argue that the nature of the evil past requires contextual rethinking of the concept of moral responsibility. The moral predicament requires going beyond the first person singular: the crime affects individuals as group members. We need to think in terms of responsibility beyond causality and control.

Here is the somewhat extended claim: Mozaik 30

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There can be situations in which each member of a collective can be held morally accountable, regardless of whether he or she contributed to an action and its consequences, regardless of his or her attitude to that action, and regardless of whether he or she was able to influence that action.

This approach to responsibility is based on the insight that collective crime has become integrated into the individual identity of each member of the group. It was committed by some members of a social group, in the name of all members of that group. It was justified by reference to the core of the group identity, its alleged shared values, norms, traditions, and interests. This justification was accepted by the majority of the members of the perpetrators’ group. We agreed, or at least we witnessed to a publicly made and implemented agreement that our world would start anew and that it would be based on two pillars: voluntary self-exemption of our group from the civilizational constraints and the forced exclusion of the targeted group from our community, which was at the same time meant as their exclusion from the moral commonwealth of human beings, and, ultimately, their physical destruction. At stake is the fall below a certain civilizational minimum, which directly targets the moral integrity of each member of the perpetrators’ group.

Thus, the foundation of my responsibility becomes the identity I share with the perpetrators. It is only by coincidence that I am a member of a non-voluntary social group (say, a nation), but the crime was consciously and systematically committed in my name.

The contingent nature of my national identity is revoked by the intention and action of those who proclaimed my national name as the very reason for killing the people of another name. The ideological foundation, character and scope of the crime, all penetrate my individual identity.

The fact that my inclusion in the ideological pattern of the crime rested on the ideological manipulation and 28

Alexander (Areshian-Hakopyan) Arktos

an institutionalized lie, which I perhaps consistently opposed, does not suffice to exempt me from the duty to respond. Once the innocent people were killed, the lie expressed in my name has ceased to be a mere lie: it has become a fact. This is why the mere fact of my group identity yields my duty to acknowledge the injustice done, as well as the victims’ right to demand from me an unambiguous, public demonstration of the rejection of the crime.

If this holds good, collective moral responsibility could be understood as the duty of all members of the group to take a moral stance towards the crime that was committed in their name. What ‘taking the stance’ exactly means will depend on where the person stood during the atrocities. But nobody is free from the sinister past. This ‘past that has not passed’ defines moral position of each group member, by posing at least three broad requirements. First, we all have to reflect on recent wrongs, learn from our moral fall, and find in these lessons the guidelines for re-shaping internal group relationships. Second, we are duty-bound to publicly acknowledge victims’ suffering, to tell them that what happened was wrong and unjustifiable, and that we are sorry. Third, we should be able to demonstrate – as individuals, society, and polity – that we deserve to be granted one more chance to return to the civilized human community. █

Nenad Dimitrijevic: Moral Responsibility for Collective Crime

Alexander (AreshianHakopyan) Arktos is Master of Philosophy

student in International

Peace & Conflict Studies

at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. His current research interests are on natural resources based disputes and

conflicts, especially

in extractive industries.

This is his publication debut.

Dominion over Natural Resources as Curatorship, Custodianship or Stewardship This article was developed from the presentation given at WSCF Europe theology conference in Bratislava, Slovakia in March, 2012.

And God said to them ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth’ –Genesis 1: 28

His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshall Al Haji Dr. Idi Amin, … Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea, and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular –Paul Collier, 2007

The epithets presented above open a solid ground for discussions and debates about the nature of dominion over natural resources. How the relationship between humans and earth creates a sense of guilt or pride

Mozaik 30

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in humans as habitants with home address called Earth? Human’s increasing influence on this plan is undeniable. In 2008, an article in Science magazine cited a proposition by a group of geologists at International Commission on Stratigraphy to mark a new geologic epoch of Anthropocene.1 The Encyclopedia of Earth defines Anthropocene as the most recent geologic time period as being humaninfluenced, or anthropogenic, based on overwhelming global evidence that atmospheric, geologic, hydrologic, biospheric and other earth system processes are now altered by humans. The word combines the root "anthropo", meaning "human" with the root "-cene", the standard suffix for "epoch" in geologic time.2

Thus humans have reached an unprecedented level of dominion over the Earth. This is particularly evident in such area of human activity as usage of natural resources. So with this in mind, how does consumption of an extra paper towel or an extra liter of water make us feel – guilty, concerned, indifferent or none of the above?

In exploring further these thoughts and sentiments this article will discuss three approaches to the relationship between humans and Earth: curatorship, custodianship and stewardship. Before getting further into details about these approaches a question of ownership of natural resources, in ethical and legal sense, appears in the first place. Who or what can claim ownership over natural resources?

In attempting to answer this question general definitions for ‘natural resources’ and the word ‘dominion’ have to be established. ‘Natural resources’ include minerals, such 1 Phil Berardelli, “Human-Driven Planet: Time to Make it Official?” Science, 24 January 2008, http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2008/01/24-01.html, 16 July 2012.

2 Erle Ellis, et. al, “Anthropocene”, The Encyclopedia of Earth – Environmental Archeology, 30 May 2012, http://www.eoearth.org/article/ Anthropocene?topic=49578, 16 July 2012.

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as oil, gas, coal, metals and stones as well forests and the most precious resource – water. In addition, resources such as oceans and forests include their ecosystems which consist of diverse flora and fauna. Natural resources are not made by humans. They are made by God or by nature, depending on individual perspective.

Therefore human claim over these resources is based on economic, political and social structures created by societies throughout history.

The word ‘dominion’ is defined as having the power to control, to rule and to govern. However with any privilege and benefit come obligations and responsibility, associated with control and authority. These responsibilities include human dominion over the Earth. If one imagines privileges and benefits on one side of an equation, and obligations and responsibilities on the other side, only then when both sides are present in equal amounts the equation works. So when nature and humans are in balance, our environment is in homeostasis. When one part of equation is not balancing the other, then the homeostasis is broken and the equation stops functioning. As theologian and scholar Ken Gnanakan writes, “When privileges are separated from responsibility exploitation is inevitable”.3

Curatorship, Custodianship, Stewardship

The first approach is what renowned economist Paul Collier calls curatorship. That is the preservation of nature as it is, just like in a museum. However, it is important to remember that nature is not a static entity and, as a result, the Earth is not a static entity as well. It is in constant, albeit gradual, state of flux. This process is accompanied by violent events like earthquakes, tsunamis and volcano eruptions. These cataclysms are stark and reflective reminders of human fragility in the face of natural processes despite all scientific and 3 Ken Gnanakan, “Creation, Christians and Environmental Stewardship,” Evangelical Review of Theology, 2006, 30:2, 110-120

Alexander Arktos: A Dominion over Natural Resources as Curatorship, Custodianship or Stewardship

technological progress. They also demonstrate that humans are present within a context of living nature accompanied with the cycles of creation then destruction and then again creation. Without these processes the life itself would not exist. So, although curatorship may appeal to our natural inclinations of preserving and saving, it is not viable not only from economic perspective but also from the perspective of natural processes of creation, destruction and transformation.

The second approach to dominion is custodianship. It is an obligation to pass to future generations’ equivalent value of natural assets that we received from previous generations.4 This approach, at least in economic terms, addresses the question of balance of resources. If one imagines natural resources as a bank account, then the amount one removes from the account should be replenished in the same amount that was removed. In other words, this approach addresses one of the famous quotes from the letter by Chief Seattle to the American government. Although historically contested for its accuracy, it states, “We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children”.

As mentioned earlier economic, political and social structures of societies, just like natural processes, continuously change and transform. This may result in reevaluation and possible shift in priorities of human societies. Pressing needs of our society today may be very different from the needs of future generations.

In fact, our impact today on the Earth may be inconceivable to future generations. They may even view us as environmental terrorists. For these reasons, the custodianship approach, despite its initial strengths for addressing the question of guilt, has potential shortcomings which have to be taken into consideration.

The shortcomings of this view are apparent in the sphere of natural resources management as well. For 4 Paul Collier, The Plundered Planet: How to Reconcile Prosperity with Nature, (London: Penguin Books, 2010).

example, in the case of cod fisheries off the northeast coast of North America where as a result of extraction rates, based on the models of equilibrium between reproduction and harvesting, the ecosystem reshaped itself to a new equilibrium which was not understood by conventional resource management models.5

The third approach is known as stewardship. It is part of a wider approach known as Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation.6 Its main idea is to view the Earth as a household and humans as special part of this household in charge of maintenance. Thus, humans occupy an integral and a constituent part of the creation.7 This point was also presented centuries ago by St. Francis of Assisi throughout his activities. However, the institutionalization and power accumulation by religious institutions in conjunction with technology based on secularizing societies took the concept of dominion of the Earth and its resources into a production-consumption mode of existence. To magnify the significance of this issue, it is important to keep in mind the massive rate at which natural resources are used. It took about an hour for the author to present this topic at the WSCF conference in 2012 in Bratislava.

Within that one hour humanity consumed: 17kg of Platinum Group of Metals (PGM)

360 metric tons of lithium, 8

> 3.5 million barrels of crude oil

> 12 million cubic feet of natural gas

5 Thomas Homer-Dixon, “The Newest Science Replacing Physics, ecology will be the Master Science of the 21st Century”, Alternative Journal, University of Waterloo, 2009.

6 World Council of Churches, “The World Council of Churches and EcoJustice” http://www.oikoumene.org/en/programmes/justice-diakonia-andresponsibility-for-creation/eco-justice.html, 21 July 2012 7 Douglas John Hall, The Steward: A Biblical Symbol Come of Age, Rev. ed. (Grand Rapids, Mich.; New York: W.B. Eerdmans; Friendship Press, 1990), p. 242.

8 Index Mundi, www.indexmundi.com, 21 July 2012.

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So the concept of stewardship, as having dominion over the Earth, emerges to the forefront of human thought. It starts with acknowledgement that humans inhabit the Earth which is a place in the ocean of cosmic creation.

As human ecologist Alastair McIntosh describes the concept of ‘place’ as a product of both environment, and, therefore, nature and culture, and therefore, human society.9 He suggests that this connection to a place is called ‘the Cycle of Belonging’ which consists of four steps. They are: 1. A sense of place (grounding); 2. gives rise to a sense of identity (ego/head); 3. which carries with it a sense of values (soul/heart); 4. generating a sense of responsibility (action/ hand).10

It is also important to add that stewardship carries with it, in addition to spiritual, also the same scientific and technological capacities of humanity, which on the one hand can endanger, but on the other, can alter and shape our environment in positive ways. Precisely for this reason, rather than for tautological debates about humans’ place in the hierarchy of creation, the concept of stewardship may give ethical and legal capacity to better manage natural resources of the Earth and beyond. As renowned environmental activist Vandana Shiva writes, “The future of our world depends on how we steward our land, soil, water, and seeds and pass them on to future generations”.

So just as paradoxical combination of institutionalized religion and scientific triumph created anthropocentric view of humanity, the same view has the capacity to reassess and readjust human action based on powerful human aspects of spirituality, science and technology.

This kind of anthropocentric view is not based on belief

9 Alastair McIntosh, Hell & High Water: Climate Change, Hope and the Human Condition (Birlinn Ltd: Edinburgh, 2008), p.235.

10 Ibid 8.

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in invincibility of human gods or human technological progress, but on human ability to put its survival and development at the centre of its existential priorities.

As Universal Declaration on Population and Sustainable Development states in its first principle, “Human beings are at the centre of concerns for sustainable development. They are entitled to a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature".11

Guilty or not guilty

In the story How Much Land Does a Man Need? by Leo Tolstoy the main character of Pakhom complains that his main grievance is not having enough land.

This statement is overheard by the Devil. As a result, Pakhom starts an obsessive quest for acquisition of land. This obsession eventually brings him into contact with community of Bashkirs who offer Pakhom the following proposition. Pakhom will pay 1000 rubles for a day in exchange he may take as much land as he can cross within a period of that one day from sunrise to sunset. However, it will happen under one condition. If Pakhom will not return to his starting point by the end of the day, he will forfeit his money. Pakhom succeeds in reaching starting point at the time of sunset, but as a result of exhaustion, he collapses and dies on the spot. His worker digs a grave for him six feet in length which is how much land Pakhom needed at the end. So is humanity like Pakhom on its obsessive quest for more and more material possessions exemplified by modern production and consumption mode of existence? As a result of such quest is humanity guilty in its lack of care for Earth, especially exploitation of resources?

As presented in this article, the idea of dominion over natural resources can be viewed through multiple prisms such as: curatorship, custodianships or stewardship.

11 Rio Declaration, “Population Dynamics and Sustainable Development,” Issues Briefs, No. 14, UN Conference on Sustainable Development, Rio de Janeiro, June 2012, www.uncsd2012.org, Table 1, p.3.

Alexander Arktos: A Dominion over Natural Resources as Curatorship, Custodianship or Stewardship

Each prism has its relevant points. However, in the case with stewardship approach to dominion, stemming from already established scientific and technological capacities of humans, there is a possibility to integrate spiritual, ethical and legal dimensions into our understanding of the concept of dominion. It may create a more harmonious relationship between humans and Earth with giving humans more sense of pride than guilt in stewardship of their home they affectionately call Earth. Such interpretation of dominion has a potential to limit the cases of viewing dominion over the Earth in terms preferred by Idi Amins of this world and give humanity better chance of not ending like Pakhom by forfeiting its presence on the Earth. The presence or absence of humanity on the face of the Earth is the ultimate verdict in evaluating humans’ guilt in their relation to the Earth. █ I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Geraldine Smyth, Professor Andrew Pierce and Dr. Cathriona Russell all at Trinity College Dublin for their initial guidance. I also would like to thank Pawel Pustelnik and Jill Piebiak both at Mozaik and Olha Sinkevych at Oxford University for their valuable comments and suggestions on the original draft of this article.

Further Readings: Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: why the poorest countries are failing and what can be Done about it, (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2007).

James Lovelock, “Living Planet,” Geographical, August 2000, p. 25 – 27.

Shiva, Vandana (2012) www.vandanashiva.org Leo Tolstoy, How Much Land Does a Man Need? And Other Stories, (Penguin Books: London, New York, 1993).

Christopher Vena, "Beyond Stewardship: Toward an Agapeic Environmental Ethic", Marquette University e-publication, http://epublications.marquette.edu/ dissertations_mu/16, 2009.

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David Weberman teaches philosophy at

the (English-language) Central European

University in Budapest,

Hungary. He specializes in 20th German and

French philosophy. He

studied at University of Michigan, University of Munich, Germany and Columbia University.

He taught for a number of years at American universities before

moving to Hungary. He is presently working

on a book on a theory of interpretation.

David Weberman

No God, no morality

No God, out with the old, in with the new

Are Ethics and Religion Separable?

First there is the view attributed to Dostoyevsky’s character Ivan Karamazov according to which if God does not exist, everything is permitted.2 One finds pretty much this same Karamazovian position in the words of the Senator and Democratic candidate in 2000 for US Vice President Joseph Lieberman who denied that “morality can be maintained without religion.”

Lieberman may have meant that a non-religious person cannot be moral. There is plenty of evidence against that idea. More plausibly, he may have meant that it is inconsistent or incoherent to judge and act ethically unless one has some religious beliefs that support one’s ethics.

The second answer, one given by the 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, is less well known and gives an interesting twist to the matter. In agreement with the Karamazovian position, Nietzsche also thought that morality which, as he understood it, is a mode of valuation rooted in the contrast between good and evil, is inextricably bound to the belief in a transcendental realm. But this does not mean that we are left with immorality or an amoral vacuum (nihilism) in which life can no longer be oriented on value judgments.

ARE ethics and religion separable? I am not asking

whether they are separate since it is very clear that they often appear together, sometimes quite intertwined with one another. As children, many of us learn about ethics in the context of religious instruction. And as adults, the ethical or moral judgments of many of us are often shaped by our religious background, whether consciously or not.1 Sometimes religion is even given as the justification for our ethical ideas. No, the question here is not whether they are separate but whether they are separable. This question breaks into two parts: 1) Is religion separable from ethics? That is, can there be religion without an attached ethics? And 2) Is ethics separable from religion? That is, can you have a coherent set of ethical judgments and a coherent ethical life without any appeal to or grounding in religion? The first depends on a definition of religion whether one might have beliefs about God and metaphysics without there being any implications for how we live our lives. This is an interesting question but different from the one I want to deal with here. Here the issue is this: Can you have a coherent ethics without religion, or does ethics depend on God or some divine order in the universe?

As I see it, there are, broadly speaking, three answers to this question.

1

34

I use the terms “moral” and “ethical” interchangeably here.

Why would one think this? The reasoning must be something like this. It only makes sense to act and judge in a certain way if there is something that provides grounding for our actions and judgments such that we have good reason to act and judge as we do. In the case of non-ethical beliefs such as that the belief that a stone is white, we find grounding in observational (empirical) evidence. But in the case of ethical beliefs, there is no such grounding.

In the parlance of contemporary philosophy, ethical properties have a certain special or queer status.3 That is, we cannot see wrongness in killing in the way that we see the whiteness of a stone. The only kind of support there can be for ethical beliefs must come from somewhere else, from some transcendent source. In effect, if killing is wrong, it can only be because God or some divine order regards it as wrong.

2 Two things should be noted here. First, this was the view of Dostovesky’s fictional character not (necessarily) of Dostoyevsky himself. Second, the character, Ivan Karamazov, holds this view but, despite frequent misattributions, he never quite says these exact words as such.

3 See J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977).

Nietzsche argued that we need to find a new mode of valuation, a replacement for morality. This new valuation would be this-worldly rather than otherworldly, it would be based on human needs not on any sort of divine source. What this new valuation would look like is hard to say. Nietzsche’s new valuation looks, at times, “dangerous.” Yet despite its reputation in some quarters, it is not at all fascistic or even sadistic.

It is meant to champion life-enhancement. Still, one wonders what constraints such life-enhancement must submit to and whether Nietzsche’s ideas allowed for such constraints so that not just my life-enhancements counts but also the interests of all. If he cannot accommodate such constraints, one wonders whether this kind of valuation is really acceptable to those who value a decent life for all.

With or without God, morality survives

The third answer directly opposes what the first two answers affirm, namely, that our moral ideas of right and wrong or good and bad can only be supported by something transcendent. The third answer is a widespread position among secular philosophers (at least, in European and American circles). It does not at all presuppose atheism or agnosticism since one might Mozaik 30

35

hold that God commands us to act morally, but also hold that morality can be justified on God-independent grounds as well (or that it must be justified without appeal to God because we cannot be sure to know exactly what he commands). In any case, it rejects the view that moral acts are moral (solely) in virtue of God’s commands.4 So if ethics can stand on its own without religion, then there must be something else that can support or underwrite our ethical commitments.

But what is it? This is not an easy question. Various philosophers have various approaches but what unites all such philosophical approaches is the idea that one can offer up some kind of support without relying on any sort of religious back-up. One might argue against killing innocents on the grounds that it creates more pain than pleasure (utilitarianism) or on the grounds that it is wrong to treat others in a way that one would not wish for oneself or that one would not wish to be the rule of the land (Kantianism).

But how?

But, of course, the question arises as to what supports the preference for pleasure over pain or the preference for doing unto others as one would have others unto us.

In other words, there is an unresolved question about ultimate foundations. The thing is that this difficulty in finding ultimate foundations is not at all unique to secular ethics. It arises just about everywhere. For example, with respect to our beliefs about empirical matters such as the whiteness of the stone or scientific knowledge more generally, these beliefs and theories rest on observational evidence. But what supports or guarantees the reliability and authority of observational

evidence? And to give another example: If ethics rests on religious beliefs, what do religious beliefs rest on?

Once again, the question of ultimate foundations arises.

So this difficulty in finding rock bottom certainty on which our principles and common claims rest is not at all unique to secular ethics.

This is no place to try to answer questions about ultimate foundations, questions such as whether and how such foundations can be provided or even whether they are really necessary in the first place. The fact is that we continue to trust most observational evidence in large part because it serves us well. We might continue to prefer aggregate pleasure over pain for the same reason. Or one might have other arguments in favor of ethical foundations. Some of these arguments are what philosophers call contractualist and constructivist. They are justifications that depend on our own inventions.

But they are inventions which perhaps can be shown to be ones that are acceptable to all reasonable human beings who accept certain basic facts about our species and who accept a certain reciprocity in which we stand to one another. So, one might argue that the preference for pleasure over pain needs no grounding since it is a basic fact about all sentient creatures. Furthermore, one might argue that it is not just my needs that count but the needs of others too on the grounds that what we all need, we all in some sense deserve. In any case, one can live a life based on an ethics supported by that preference. It may (or may not) lack ultimate foundations, but it does not seem to me to be an incoherent or inconsistent way to live a life. â–ˆ

Marta Gustavsson surely, not betraying you with her hands sharing a meal with you over your body yet denying her responsibility keeping silent what she owes you what happened between your words as if she never knew you like this and even, maybe, carries a hand on your throat is signing your conviction calling "crucify" who can not stay by promises lips have kissed who can't keep watch one single hour I?

4 Most philosophers have thought that God’s commands only what is ethical but the 19th century Danish philosopher and theologian thought that God could command what is unethical as in Genesis where God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. Kierkegaard wanted to show that religious and ethical duties can come into conflict with one another. See Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983)

36

David Weberman: Are Ethics and Religion Separable?

7

Anna Abram

Anna Abram (Ph.D) lectures in ethics

and Christian Ethics

at Heythrop College,

University of London.

She is also a convenor

of Master in Contemporary Ethics and Head

of Pastoral and Social Studies Department.

38

What Kind of Ethics Do We Need Today?

Insights from Czeslaw Milosz’s poem Campo dei Fiori Moral learning through poetry Ethics as an academic discourse is a rational, normative, enquiry into what makes an act right or wrong and the human being good or bad. Concepts of creativity, improvisation and imagination do not always fit easily into ethics. In the last three decades, however, thanks to the revival of Aristotelian philosophy with its emphasis on virtue and good character, many moral thinkers have embarked on the project of expanding the boundaries of ethics. Even if the majority of ethics handbooks continue to favour the act-centred (deontological and utilitarian) approaches, more creative ways of doing ethics are constantly emerging. For example, as the title of one of the key texts on religious ethics Comparative Religious Ethics: A Narrative Approach suggests, one creative method to explore religious ethics is through the study of narrative. Christian ethicists such as Vigen Guroian, Vincent MacNamara, Philip Keane and William Spohn draw from the works of literature and stress the importance of imagination in fostering moral growth. In

this article, I will attempt to show what kind of moral lesson one can learn by turning to a poem such as Campo dei Fiori by Czeslaw Milosz, a Polish poet and the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1980).1

There are two key pictures in this poem: the execution of Giordano Bruno in 1600 in Campo dei Fiori (one of the loveliest market squares in Rome) and the burning of the inhabitants of the Jewish ghetto in 1943 in Warsaw.

Bruno was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher and astronomer. He was burned at the stake by civil authorities after the Roman Inquisition found him guilty of heresy. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe during the Second World War. Over 400,000 Jews were crammed into an area of 1.3 square miles. The Nazis were systematically ‘liquidating’ the ghetto by burning its buildings and murdering its inhabitants.

The poem captures the deaths of both Bruno and the Jews and describes the bystanders’ reactions to these two tragedies. Do ‘the people of Rome or Warsaw’ in the two scenarios have anything in common? Milosz does not seem to be interested in cultural similarities but in the common human condition which, according to him, remains unchanged. Although the images evoked in this poem portray events differentiated in time and space, they are profoundly linked.

Milosz thinks that humanity does not learn from the atrocities of the past. He observes that human beings do not find it easy to pay attention to the suffering of others, especially those who are different (different worldviews, different religion and different race).

Paying proper attention to the suffering Other would involve going against the stream (crowd’s behaviour), making an effort to see what is really going on around

and within oneself. Our natural tendency is to escape from uncomfortable realities that life brings on us. The poem, nevertheless, does offer the possibility of taking a less common stance by remaining at the scene. This is the option that the poet himself chooses to follow: But that day I thought only of the loneliness of the dying, of how, when Giordano climbed to his burning he could not find in any human tongue words for mankind, mankind who live on.

The choice is conscious and involves a careful exercise of the poet’s imagination. I call this exercise a ‘training of moral imagination’. What does this training entail?

The poet decides to engage and to think only of one thing: ‘of the loneliness of the dying’. The training of the moral imagination entails making a choice to connect: he consciously connects in his imagination with those who are victims, both Bruno and the Warsaw Jews. The poet attempts to feel in his inner being what it is like to climb, as Bruno did, ‘to his burning’.

The training of the moral imagination also entails an emotional engagement: the poet wants to feel and understand what it is like to be alone, misunderstood and marginalized. Unlike the people with ‘baskets of olives and lemons’ who turn to their daily routine soon after the tragic ‘spectacles’ are over, the poet engages both rationally and emotionally with the reality of the ‘loneliness of the dying’:

1 This poem can be downloaded from http://info-poland.buffalo.edu/ classroom/milosz/Campo.htm.

Mozaik 30

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Already they were back at their wine or peddled their white starfish, baskets of olives and lemons they had shouldered to the fair, and he already distanced as if centuries had passed while they paused just a moment for his flying in the fire.

The result of this engagement is the poet’s discovery that there are no words left ‘in any human tongue’ which could adequately express the moral climate of what he sees: Those dying here, the lonely forgotten by the world, our tongue becomes for them the language of an ancient planet.

Until, when all is legend and many years have passed, on a new Campo dei Fiori rage will kindle at a poet's word.

The poet also accepts that one has to live with the aftermath because ‘mankind lives on’. The poem seems to suggest that ‘the loneliness of the dying’ is the moral failure of the living. The poem pierces our imagination with the same picture of baskets of olives and lemons which like a refrain reminds us of what we human beings are like, how little we change, how little we allow ourselves to stretch our imagination.

He predicts a new Campo dei Fiori. He expects that we cultured people will read his poem with interest, will analyze it as I am doing in this article. We will learn the Campo dei Fiori legend, will even be able to spot a new Campo dei Fiori, but we will continue to go in circles like the figures of the carousel to which he alludes in the poem. Milosz predicts that we will experience rage at a poet’s word because the kind of analogy he is giving us

40

Stretching the imagination seems to be a condition of moral progress. True moral conversion is a conversion of imagination. The action that springs out of this converted place is a true moral action. It comes from the centre of one’s being and not from a code of ethics presented in a document. This kind of inner action to which the poem alludes involves deliberate looking for what is not visible, trying to notice the background but also looking for finer detail. This stress on moral attentiveness, this invitation to stretch the imagination and see the whole picture (or to see the two pictures as one) is what Milosz as a poet is perhaps trying to awake in us.

Czeslaw Milosz. Photo Credit: http://cdeemer2007.blogspot.sk/2011/08/ meaning-by-czeslaw-milosz.html

is too uncomfortable. This is how he presents our human condition.

So, what is the moral lesson that Milosz wants us to learn? Does he want us to agree with his scepticism about the human condition? Or, does he want us to prove him wrong? Can we be different? In the end he himself shows us what being different may entail by attending to the situation of the victim. Perhaps by attending to the past atrocities, considering the victim’s perspective, making a choice to pay attention to what is uncomfortable, we can eventually break the cycle of Campo-dei-Fiori-violence.

It seems that moral transformation starts at the level of imagination by – doing what the poet did – stepping into the uncomfortable shoes of the other, seeing things from their perspective, going against the natural instinct to escape. For the poet it was stepping into Giordano’s shoes, taking an imaginative step behind the walls of the ghetto in order to hear the screaming of the oppressed, to see children cuddling-up to their mothers, and lovers departing from their beloved.

Anna Abram: What Kind of Ethics Do We Need Today?

If we accept that imagination is important for morality then, having looked at Milosz’s poem, we can conclude that poetry can help us mobilize and shape our imagination. Zoe Bennett in her paper ‘Creation Made Image and Image Made Word’2 makes a very useful distinction between ‘eye-sight’ and ‘heart-sight’ (or ‘sight’ and ‘insight’). To understand the human condition, Bennett implies, one has to have both: ‘providing the eyesight is “clear” there is a correlation between what is seen and what is the truth’.3

Milosz seems to suggest that we tend to operate at the level of eye-sight and lack heart-sight. Until these two ways of seeing (eye-sight and heart-sight) merge and become what I call a ‘moral seeing’, the openness to goodness or transformation cannot take place. The leap from mind to heart; from mental recognition to heart acceptance and then from heart acceptance to decisionmaking and action is a process which, at each stage, involves imagination.

2 Zoe Bennett, “Creation Made Image and Image Made World: John Ruskin on J.M.W Turner’s Snow Storm”, Approaches to the Visual in Religion, Daria PezzoliOlgiati and Christopher Rowland (eds), (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), p.249-260.

3 Ibid, page 255.

4 Aristotle, De Anima; http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/soul.mb.txt, (20 October 2011), Part III.

So, what kind of ethics do we need today?

Standard ethical theories are useful. However, in order to deal constructively with our current moral climate, in order to deeply embrace life’s ambiguities and uncertainties, successes and failures, we need an ethics that is capable of stretching rationality and including the emotions; we need ethics that uses imagination as one of its key concepts and fosters a proper training of moral imagination.

At its most basic level, imagination is the ability to form mental images. We think all the time through images, whether we are asleep or awake. From a philosophical perspective, the role of imagination has been variously evaluated. For Aristotle, imagination was afforded a central role in how humans piece together their world.4 In the history of Western philosophy, up until Kant, many philosophers held that the imagination was a secondary movement following upon perception; its role was deemed to be essentially reproductive, in the service of memory and reason. As a consequence, imagination was often regarded as an inappropriate faculty to rely on for knowledge; as a subjective ‘sense’ it was viewed as incapable of contributing to objective moral claims. Admittedly, there could be problems of distortion when it comes to making moral judgments on the basis of imagination but imagination doesn’t have to be either dangerously misleading or subjective, for we share appreciation of imaginative works, such as works of art.

Milosz’s poem helps us appreciate that the imagination is a key human faculty that can foster ‘moral seeing’.

Campo dei Fiori facilitates a recognition that only when we imagine ourselves to be incapable of being distracted by ‘the baskets of lemons and olives’, of being unable to think of the loneliness of today’s Giordano Brunos and today’s ghettos, of being capable of truly accepting the other, that we can really change.

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Vivian Boland

Much that we value depends on what we notice through imagination. Evil conditions often persist because we lack imagination, because we are not able to let go of certain familiar images. Conversely, human beings flourish when they can see beyond what is externally visible. Although moral rules and norms may guide our responses, it is the images that help us ‘see’: what we ‘see’ and not ‘see’ gives the direction to what we choose to do and what, in a moral sense, we choose to be. █ Further Readings: S. Blackburn, Being Good: A Short Introduction to Ethics, (Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 2002).

Z. Bennett, “Creation Made Image and Image Made World: John Ruskin on J.M.W Turner’s Snow Storm’”, in Daria Pezzoli-Olgiati and Christopher Rowland, Approaches to the Visual in Religion (Research in Contemporary Religion), (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011).

DJ Fasching and Dechant, Comparative Religious Ethics: A Narrative Approach, (Oxford: Blackwells Publish ing, 2001).

V. Guroian, Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child's Moral Imagination, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

B.M. Guevin, “The Moral Imagination and the Shap ing Power of the Parables,” Journal of Religious Ethics, 17(1989), 63-18.

M. Johnson, Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993).

P. S. Keane, Christian Ethics and Imagination, (New York: Paulist Press, 1984).

B. Williams, Morality: An Introduction to Ethics, (Cambridge: CUP, 1993).

42

Anna Abram: What Kind of Ethics Do We Need Today?

Psychology and Moral Theology: Collaboration and Challenges Vivian Boland is an Irish Dominican priest who currently

works at Santa Sabina, Rome, the world

headquarters of the Dominican Order.

He has previously

been based in Dublin, Edinburgh, Trinidad, Rome, London, and

Oxford, working mainly as a preacher and

teacher. He publishes

regularly in the fields of theology and spirituality.

Based on talk given at the theology conference in Bratislava on 29 March 2012

ALTHOUGH psychology and moral theology

have human behaviour as their subject matter, each considers it from a distinct perspective and with distinct concerns. What I offer here is a sketch of ways in which these perspectives overlap, contrast with or complement each other.

Psychology Aids Moral Theology

Psychology helps moral theology in a number of ways.

It offers empirical confirmation or correction of many of our intuitions about human behaviour. It reminds the moralist that the human agent is a complex being, not a disembodied rationality, for example, but an embodied creature, not just intellect but emotions, imagination, memory, and so on.

Good Passion

An example of this collaboration is the substantial treatment by Thomas Aquinas of what he calls passiones animae, the passions of the soul. It is tempting to translate passiones as ‘emotions’ or ‘feelings’ but neither

Mozaik 30

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English word catches the full sense of what Aquinas intends. We get a sense of his holistic understanding of human behaviour in a statement such as the following:

Since human nature means being composed of soul and body, as well as of an intellectual and a sensual nature, the good of the human being requires that he be totally subject to virtue, namely in his intellectual part and in his sensual part and in his physical part.

So for human virtue it is required that the desire for due retribution [he is considering a case of justified anger] should be present not only in the rational part of the soul, but also in the sensitive part and in the body itself so that even the body is moved to serve virtue.1

So a full human response or action is never simply intellectual but always also emotional and physical.

Disposing Ourselves

The notion of habitus (beware of translating it simply as ‘habit’) is an idea in philosophical psychology that provides the basis for how Aquinas understands the virtues. There are things we are actually doing (I am typing this into the computer), things we have the potential to learn how to do (I could learn Chinese if I put my mind to it), but there are also things we have the ongoing capacity to activate if necessary and these last are habitus or dispositions. I can speak Italian, for example. I am not actually speaking Italian, I am typing in English, but my capacity for Italian is not simply passive potentiality as it was before I learned it. Because I have acquired the disposition of knowing Italian I can do it easily (and with pleasure) when circumstances require. But I do not need to speak Italian all the time in order to hold on to this disposition. The moral agent is a bundle of capacities and dispositions, we might 1 Thomas Aquinas, Disputed Questions on Evil, 12,1.

44

say, capable of some things simply in virtue of being a human being at all and capable of other things because of the ways in which we have applied our capacities and developed our abilities.

Becoming Free

Freedom is a crucial notion for any moral discipline. If human beings are not free in their choices and actions then it makes no real sense to speak about responsibility and all guilt would be pathological. Why should we get credit or blame for actions of which we are not at least to some extent the originating source? If talk of morality is to make any sense then the cause of our actions must to some extent be our free judgement and action. Saint Augustine of Hippo was no mean psychologist. In his argument with Pelagius about freedom, Augustine’s experience (recounted so powerfully in his Confessions) taught him that human freedom itself needs to be healed and strengthened by grace. Pelagius took the view that we are grown-ups faced with good and evil, we should simply choose what is good and get on with it. Augustine knew it was not as simple as that since many things battle inside us to distort and distract our desires for what is good.

Thomas Aquinas for his part gives an account of what came to be called hostes libertatis, the enemies of freedom; things like violence, fear and desire: how do such things strengthen or weaken our freedom for action? Modern psychology offers vastly more detailed and sophisticated analyses of such enemies; analyses that are of great help to moralists in thinking about their subject. Such analyses help also to distinguish pathological guilt and healthy guilt; to distinguish feelings of guilt and recognition of guilt. It is not always wrong to feel guilty: there are situations where this is the healthy and appropriate response to where we find ourselves. The French Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac writes: “Humanity is a marvel, wounded yet

Viviand Boland: Psychology and Moral Theology: Collaboration and Challenges

indestructible, which finds the meaning of its liberty in the confession of its guilt”.2 A frank acknowledgement of our responsibility for doing wrong is at the same time a recognition of our dignity as free moral agents, as sources of action. There can, of course, be feelings of guilt that go beyond what is true to the circumstances: spiritual directors, counsellors and psychologists help people discern when their guilt is appropriate and when it is not.

Deadly Thoughts

Psychologists are rediscovering in ancient and medieval traditions many important things about human behaviour. For example Evagrius of Pontus, a 4th Century Egyptian monk is one of the first to write about what came to be called the deadly sins. He called them logismoi, ‘thinkings’, or in modern parlance ‘phantasies’: pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, sloth, and vainglory. He shows great psychological wisdom in the way he analyses the operation of these things in us, a wisdom that was developed further by later teachers such as John Cassian and Gregory the Great. Monastic life continues to present its practitioners not only with theological and spiritual questions but also with psychological ones.

Spiritual direction and pastoral care are greatly assisted by psychological knowledge and insight, by knowledge of counselling skills, of the dynamics within groups, of the mechanisms of transference and countertransference in human relationships, and by shedding light on moral and faith development.

Psychology also challenges moral theology in a number of key areas. Understandings of unconscious motivation oblige moral theology to think again about the sources of human action. It reminds moral theology that the human being is an animal that develops and is not complete all at once. This is perfectly consistent with

earlier virtue theory approaches that understood that it is only in living human life that we learn how to live it well. Psychology also poses some serious questions to moral theology about the understanding of human sexuality with which it has worked up to now.

Theology Aids Psychology

The most important way in which moral theology aids psychology is by inviting it to consider these fundamental questions: what is the human being?

And what is the human being for or towards? In what direction is human fulfilment to be sought? A growing number of psychologists, becoming discontented with the understanding of the human person implicit in their discipline, have begun looking to earlier traditions in philosophy, and even in theology, in developing an adequate ‘anthropology’. It means an understanding of human nature and destiny adequate to the dignity of the human person.

Image of God

The answer to these questions in the theological traditions that come from the Bible is in terms of the image of God: the human being is a creature unique among the creatures. In some way it mirrors or images the source of creation. Just as that source is believed (by Jews, Christians, and Muslims, at least) to be intelligent, free and creative, so the human being is intelligent, free and creative. Here is how Thomas Aquinas describes it at the beginning of the moral part of his famous Summa Theologiae: Since to say that the human being is made to God’s image implies, as John of Damascus says, that he is intelligent and free to judge and master of himself, so then, now that we have agreed that God is the 2 Henri de Lubac, A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,1988), p.157.

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exemplar of the things that issue from God’s power through God’s will, we go on to look at God’s image, that is to say, at the human being insofar as he also is the source of actions which are his own and fall under his responsibility and control. 3 To be the image of God means to be capable of love, for which intelligence, freedom and creativity are required.

Theology thus counters any temptation there might be for psychology to narrow its understanding of the human being in ways that would subvert our capacity for love. This would happen if we were to regard ourselves as merely reacting to external stimuli and as determined in our actions.

In the Beginning, the End

If the human being is the image of God, and so capable of truly loving, then human behaviour must be understood in terms of ‘ends’, not just as technical and utilitarian action. Thomas Aquinas continues the text just quoted by adding this: Firstly we deal with the destiny of human life and then with the ways in which the human being may reach or miss this destiny. It is from their goal or end that actions towards a goal or end get their meaning.4

The ‘end’ of an action is first in our intention, Aquinas says, even if it is last in execution, and it is also the meaning of a human act. Philosophy and theology thus defend the meaningfulness of human action, regarding it from the point of view of the ends it serves. It means we can call actions ‘good’ or ‘bad’ because we have some conviction about the ends at which they are aimed. A good act brings us closer to enjoying those things in which our nature flourishes; a bad act leads us away from that flourishing.

3 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I.II, prologue.

4 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I.II, prologue.

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After Virtue

Theological Consummation of Psychology

In his influential book After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre shows how classical traditions in philosophy and theology always involved three elements in thinking about the morality of human action: human nature as it is; human nature as it could be with the realisation of the human telos (goal or end); and the moral precepts which enable a person to pass from one state to the other. If reason is no longer capable of judging about ends all that is left of the classical scheme is human nature as it is, and the set of precepts.5 This is where he thinks many discussions of morality get stuck now. If there is no agreement about what human nature will be with the realisation of its goal or end then there cannot be agreement about particular judgements and actions. If that second element falls out completely then all that is left is human nature as it is and a set of precepts and it becomes increasingly difficult to see where the set of precepts comes from, why it should have binding force, why it is not simply arbitrary.

Theology also challenges psychology in a number of ways. It questions its tendency to reduce human action to ‘behaviour’ that can be fully explained in terms of positivist science (most recently neuroscience).

Theology lays down the challenge of developing a healthy understanding of moral responsibility and guilt. To quote Henri de Lubac again, he writes as follows about the loss of a sense of sin:

This kind of philosophical analysis, developed by theology also, should serve to enrich psychology’s contribution, fitting it into a wider and deeper contextualisation of human nature and destiny.

Set Free for Freedom

Theology also helps psychology by broadening our understanding of freedom. In his Letter to the Galatians, Saint Paul famously says ‘for freedom Christ has set us free’. The Belgian theologian Servais Pinckaers develops a crucial distinction between ‘freedom of indifference’ and ‘freedom for excellence’.

5 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, (London: Duckworth, 1981), p.52

Viviand Boland: Psychology and Moral Theology: Collaboration and Challenges

A universe is constructed where evil is everywhere denounced, but nowhere admitted; where it is always endured, never committed.6

The Bible itself speaks of sin in (at least) two senses: on the one hand it is clearly the responsibility of the individual who commits it; on the other it is a force or power working mysteriously in creation to subvert human beings, their true flourishing, and their relationship with God. In this second sense ‘sin crouches at the door’ and it leads Paul to say ‘I do not understand my own actions’.

Theology, finally, warns psychology against thinking it knows all that is necessary. Henri de Lubac once again:

Even though they cannot always pretend to possess scientific exactness these disciplines [the human sciences] can be a valuable help to us by making us see in greater detail some of the hidden mechanisms by which, as we already knew in general terms, our nature is conditioned; but if we imagine that by such means we shall succeed in penetrating into the depths of man’s being, we shall be acting like sophists.7 █

6 Henri de Lubac, A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,1988), p.136.

7 Henri de Lubac, A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,1988), p.143.

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James Jackson

Are Drug Users Guilty or Not Guilty?

James Jackson is a 23 year old

political theology

student in Manchester,

England. He is currently researching the origins of rastafarianism and

the role of satan in the

bible. He enjoys trance music, festivals and

insulting his friends with dreadlocks.

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AT the WSCF Europe “Guilty or Not Guilty” theology

conference in Bratislava, many of the talks were unsurprisingly concerning the question of ethics. Ethics can be broadly divided into two subcategories – applied ethics, the question of how to act in a certain concrete situation, and meta-ethics, which is the deeper question of why is a certain action ethical or unethical?

Briefly, there are two types of answers to the metaethical question. The consequentialist perspective states that things are wrong because of the consequences, and as such decisions should be made on the basis of the outcomes of the decisions. Many consequentialists would then, in the abstract at least, have no problem with killing an innocent child to save the entire world (a question which Dostoyevsky posed in The Brothers Karamazov). This is often criticized as clinical and calculating, but it has the benefit of being explicit about the motivations of action – to bring about the consequentially best outcome, whatever the cost. The other main branch of meta-ethics is deontological ethics, which sees certain things as inherently wrong, regardless of the consequences. The problem with deontological ethics is that who or what decides whether an action is moral or not? A Christian answer to this could be natural law, the Bible, or the teachings of Jesus Christ, with the first being preferred by Catholic understandings of Christianity, the second by Protestants and the last with liberals of any denomination.

I want to use this article to discuss the somewhat taboo subject of drug use and apply the ethical question to this topic. Drugs can be damaging, dangerous, and addictive.

I think it is worth mentioning at the outset that, whether recreational drug use is ethical or not, that doesn’t mean it is a good idea to take them. Illegal substances can get you a criminal record or jail time, or much worse, a drug habit.

The War on Drugs

Some countries, notably Portugal, the Czech Republic and Switzerland, have adopted a progressive approach, with the former two decriminalizing drugs completely, and the latter giving addicts free heroine supplies. The results of these somewhat counter-intuitive actions (how do you stop drug use by giving people drugs?) have been questioned, but generally are seen to have had a positive impact. Few politicians in Portugal or the Czech Republic wants to go back to the old system, where ethnic minorities are disproportionately arrested, where non-dangerous recreational users can have their lives and careers ruined just by being one of the unlucky percentage of users who gets caught.

Last summer, I worked in a think-tank which has funded a number of studies into the medical effects of psychedelic drugs, and there I learned that LSD would make an excellent treatment for alcoholism, psilocybin (found in magic mushrooms) for depression, and MDMA aka ecstasy for post-traumatic stress disorder. Of course, it should be stated that medical use is a different topic to recreational use. Just because these chemicals have medicinal qualities within certain limited situations, this does not necessarily have any implications for the ethics of recreational use. One could easily legalize a certain drug for medical use only, as has happened in 17 1 “17 Legal Medical Marijuana States and DC Laws, Fees, and Possession Limits”, Medical Marijuana, 1 June 2012http://medicalmarijuana.procon.org/view. resource.php?resourceID=000881, 24 July 2012.

states, including the most populous state – California, in the USA.1 In fact, 1 in 3 US Americans lives in a state where cannabis is legal for medicinal usage.2

Some politicians think that, if cannabis (and by extension other drugs) were to be legalized, it would lead to an increase in the amount of people taking the drug.

This is possible, but not definitive. Dutch teenagers, for example, smoke less cannabis than their British counterparts, despite the fact that cannabis is decriminalized in Holland, whereas it is a ranked “class B” in the UK, the same level as methamphetamine.

There is no doubt that the political element of this debate should have a prominent position. However, I think it is interesting to note that the philosophical and ethical dimensions of drug use are often avoided, consciously or not. Most rhetoric seems to be based on the assumption that taking drugs is morally wrong, either for the individual, or for society. Using what I have learnt about ethics at the conference, I would like to question this assumption. In fact, many people who themselves have taken illegal drugs oppose legalization or decriminalization, and I believe that this demonstrates either that they have internalized the dominant rhetoric (“drugs are bad/winners don’t do drugs”) leading to a peculiar cognitive dissonance of believing that taking drugs is morally wrong yet simultaneously believing that they themselves are not doing anything wrong by taking drugs. Or perhaps people merely state that drugs are bad, because they don’t wish to be seen as a dangerous and unrepentant criminal, or even worse, a “druggy”. The purpose of philosophy is to question underlying assumptions, and so we should examine the question of whether it is ethically unsound to take drugs.

2 “2010 Census State Population and the Distribution of Electoral Votes and Representative”, 6 January 2012, http://www.thegreenpapers.com/Census10/ HouseAndElectors.phtml, 24 July 2012.

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Drugs and Ethics Is there something inherently wrong with drug taking?

Assuming that you are a conscious moral agent and making the decision for yourself and not for anyone else, I simply cannot see what is wrong with the simple act of ingesting a plant, or a chemical, and feeling different because of it. Doesn’t this happen every day when we eat food? Sugar makes us feel hyperactive and chocolate can cheer us up. Does this mean that they are bad? I think all but the most puritanical, hair-shirted ascetic would agree that they are not. This is one difficulty with the argument that drugs are inherently bad – there is confusion on the most fundamental level, as to what a drug actually is! Are sugar and chocolate drugs? Tobacco and alcohol? Some could argue that taking drugs is unethical because it is damaging to your health. Many Christians believe that we do not own our own bodies, rather they are temples to God and that therefore it is wrong to do things that defile them. This argument against drug use is based on a number of assumptions – chiefly, that drug use is unhealthy. It can be, but many drugs are surprisingly safe. LSD and magic mushrooms, for example, have little to no physical toxicity: they are close to harmless to the body, but can cause serious damage to a susceptible mind. Also, scientists have rated alcohol and tobacco as more harmful than illegal drugs such as ketamine and ecstasy. Therefore, if one is say that drug use is unethical because it is unhealthy, then that discounts usage of alcohol and tobacco as well, something few people would do, particularly followers of a religion where wine is one of the main sacraments!

We can accept that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with drug use, but believe that such usage cannot be separated from its context, and that it is this context which makes taking drugs unethical. I think that this argument has some strength. If taking a particular drug causes violence, either in the user or in the production and trafficking then this it would be fair to say that this

50

drug is unethical. Behind the conflicts in the Middle East and Central Asia, the War on Drugs in Central and Latin America is the most violent conflict in the world, worse (in terms of lives lost) than in Sudan.3 People are murdered every day in Mexico; many are innocent civilians caught in the crossfire, some are politicians and officials that the drug cartels make examples of. The cause of this violence is undoubtedly the drug trade.

The drug market is extraordinarily lucrative, and can be highly profitable for ruthless criminals, who could then use these profits to purchase weapons and further destabilize the region. It could be said that taking drugs is contributing to this horrible situation, and that this is the reason that drug use is unethical, as it leads to further violence in poor countries that produce and traffic the drugs to the richer western countries. This argument fails to take account of the significant variation in the production of illegal drugs – many are created in laboratories or grown in gardens, with nothing to do with vast criminal organisations. I think that given this variety, the ethics of each drug should be analysed individually. On the other hand, one could also argue that the drug trade exists because, rather than in spite of, drug prohibition. If cocaine was sold in bars legally, there would be no profit for gangs to use to destabilize Latin American governments and fight bloody turf wars, the money would be used in more legitimate businesses.

Applied ethics

Cocaine, for instance, is nearly impossible to separate from this violent context, and therefore it makes sense to conclude that taking it (or at the very least buying it) is in most cases unethical – it makes violent criminals richer, and creates problems for South American society.

What about cannabis? Although some people may naively believe that it all comes from Jamaica, different types of cannabis originate in different parts of the

world. Cannabis resin (also known as hashish) is produced mostly in Morocco or, more worryingly, Afghanistan. It has been estimated that the Taliban and other Afghan warlords make more money from selling cannabis than the other drug they are commonly associated with, opium. Whatever your opinion on the invasion of Afghanistan by Western forces, it is doubtful that many people would support indirectly funding the Taliban themselves! A majority of cannabis in the UK is of the herbal variety, and comes mostly from Europe or Africa. Increasingly cannabis is being grown in this country, in order to cut the risk of it being seized by customs officials. Some of it will be grown by users, in order to supply their own needs and often those of their social group. A surprisingly large amount, however, is grown by gangs in rented houses, and there are reports which indicate that Vietnamese gangs are particularly bad as they force trafficked people to work in what is effectively slavery in these intensive cannabis farms. If we accept the earlier statement that supporting violent groups is ethically wrong then we should conclude that actually cannabis, despite being the most commonly used illegal drug in Europe and the world, can be one of the less ethical drugs to take.

To conclude, there are many things to consider when looking at the topic of ethics and drugs. The fact that drugs are often harmful and illegal is relevant. It is difficult to maintain that drug use in itself is unethical, largely because there is little which separates illegal drugs from legal ones. The main problem, taking a consequentialist viewpoint, is that participating in the drug economy can lead to violence and suffering. This is not true of all drugs, principally of cocaine, heroin and certain strains of cannabis. █

3 “List of ongoing military conflicts”, Wikipedia.org, 27 July 2012, http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ongoing_conflicts, 24 July 2012.

James Jackson: Are Drug Users Guilty or Not Guilty?

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3| Resources To feel guilty is not to be guilty. ― Sigmund Freud 54 ABORTION: LAW AND MORALITY Magda Sławińska 56 SHAME AND GUILT Pavlo Smytsnyuk 58 TWICE ABOUT ONE GUILT: A BIBLE STUDY Gabriela Bradovkova 61 THE FINANCIAL CRISES: A ROLE PLAY Katka Babicova, Shannon Phillip, Paweł Pustelnik

Magda Sławińska

Magda Sławińska graduated in

Psychology and Russian Studies and is currently finishing her PhD in Cultural Studies at

Jagiellonian University

in Krakow, Poland. Her main interests cover

Orthodox Christianity

and theology as well as Jewish culture.

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Abortion: Law and Morality

Participants: 5-10 people Materials: sticky notes, pens or pencils, flipchart, copies of the case study for each participant Duration: 90 minutes The workshop: Allows participants to explore, question and clarify their perception of abortion. It gives opportunity to discuss the theoretical perspectives and analyze a case study. It is important for participants to feel safe and comfortable engaging in honest exploration of their beliefs and opinions so facilitator needs to create and maintain this environment.

PART ONE: HOW WE SPEAK ABOUT ABORTION?

1. Participants are asked to answer following questions and to write each thought on a separate small piece of paper or a sticky note: • What is a first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the word “abortion”?

• Which arguments (for or against), according to you, are crucial in a debate on abortion?

2. Participants are asked to stick their notes under one of two keywords written on a flipchart: “law” and “morality”. The facilitator analyzes the outcomes and leads a discussion around questions: • What is debated more: Morality or legality of abortion and why?

• Legal and moral: Can they go together? Can they be separated?

• Law and morality: Who defines it?

PART TWO: CASE STUDY

Participants receive a brief description of a case, a chamber judgment and an opinion of Justice Javier Borrego Borrego

1. Tysiąc vs. Poland study case The European Court ruled on the case of Tysiąc vs.

Poland in 2007. The woman in question was Alicja Tysiąc, who argued that continuing with her pregnancy could aggravate her severe case of near-sightedness.

Several Polish doctors, including the specialists and her GP, studied Tysiąc’s case and they said that it did not meet the criteria for a legal abortion. Although she insisted that she wanted to abort her child, doctors told her that the baby posed no risk to her life. After giving birth to this child, her third, her eyesight subsequently deteriorated.

In 2007, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Poland has no effective legal framework for women to assert their right to abortion on medical grounds and ordered Poland to pay Ms. Tysiąc €25,000 in compensation. Ewa Kowaleska of the Forum of Polish Women, a group who supported Ms. Tysiąc in her case, said that, “The judgment of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has an ideological basis. It is a form of pressure on Poland to consider abortion as a ‘woman’s right’”.

2. The Chamber Judgment The Court held: • by six votes to one, that there had been a violation of Article 8 (right to respect for private life) of the European Convention on Human Rights; • and unanimously, that there had been no violation of Article 3 (prohibition of inhuman or degrading treatment) of the Convention;

Under Article 41 (just satisfaction), the Court awarded the applicant €25,000 in respect of non-pecuniary damage and €14,000 for costs and expenses (€2,442.91 received by way of legal aid from the Council of Europe).

3. Dissenting opinion of Justice Javier Borrego Borrego It is true that there was a controversy in this case. On the one hand, we have Polish law, the unanimous opinion of the medical experts and the confirmed lack of a causal link between the delivery and the deterioration of the applicant’s eyesight. On the other hand, we have the applicant’s fears (…). All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. Today the Court has decided that a human being was born as a result of a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights. According to this reasoning, there is a Polish child, currently six years old, whose right to be born contradicts the Convention.

I would never have thought that the Convention would go so far, and I find it frightening.

Question to be discussed: » Do you agree with a court judgment? Is money com pensation enough? » Is it ethical to give birth to an unwanted child? » Is it ethical for living six-year old child to be a subject of debate? » What would you do if you were a judge on this case?

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Pavlo Smytsnyuk

Shame and Guilt Pavlo Smytsnyuk is 29 years old and Ukrainian. After

studying in Rome, Athens and SaintPetersburg, he is

currently project

manager of Institute

of Ecumenical Studies

and lecturer in theology at the Ukrainian

Catholic University in Lviv, Ukraine.

Participants: It can be used for both small and large groups. It is composed of three discussions, advertisement preparation and presentation and a conclusion.

Materials: PowerPoint presentation or printed reproductions of the paintings and posters mentioned below or similar; printed Bible passage and a synthetic story of Hester Prynne, clean sheets of paper Duration: The workshop can take between 1-2 hours depending on the length of conversation, and of how much time you give the groups to create the advertisements.

The workshop: Shame is considered one of the most complex human emotions. The aim of the workshop is to investigate the phenomenon of shame, to see its relation with the concept of guilt and to reflect whether it is a positive moral compass or a block that limits the development of our freedom. We propose to approach the topic of shame from different sides: biblical, psychological and artistic, and to make conclusions on the basis of our own experience.

1. Discussion about the connotations of the meaning of the concept of shame in different languages.

This discussion - if done in groups, composed of people of different mother tongues - can bring a lot of confusion and some very interesting insights into understanding of the idea of shame. For example, in some languages the concept of shame and that of embarrassment are expressed with the same term.

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Example questions: What is the difference between shame, embarrassment and shyness?

Are those concepts expressed by different words in your language?

2. Discussion about shame in the Bible.

Read with the participants the biblical account of the fall (Genesis 2: 25; Genesis 3: 7-10, 21), show them the painting of Tommaso Masaccio, The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden, ca. 1425 (maybe one of the best examples of how the shame is represented in art). Let discussion follow.

The embarrassment of being seen naked is excellently depicted in the paintings based on the Biblical account about the chaste Susanna (Book of Daniel 13). You can also show the reproductions of Rembrandt, Susanna and the Elders, 1636; Pierre Van Hanselaere, Susanna and the Elders, 1820.

Example questions: What do Adam and Eve feel: guilt or shame? Where is shame and where is guilt? What comes first?

Why did they feel no shame being naked before the fall?

Why do Adam and Eve feel naked after the sin?

Why people are normally ashamed/embarrassed to be nude in presence of the others? What does it reveal about humans?

3. Discussion about the shame as social control/ conditioning. a. Tell or read the story of Hester Prynne (the protagonist of Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel, The Scarlet Letter) convicted of the crime of adultery, and sentenced to be forced to wear a prominent scarlet letter 'A' for the rest of her life. b. Show the British poster of Savile Lumley, Daddy, What did YOU do in the Great War? 1915 (http://

collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O74621/daddy-whatdid-you-do-poster-lumley-savile/), and the Soviet poster of Velezheva/Kuzovkin, «He drank, swore, broke tree - ashamed to look in the face of people», 1958 (http://wallpaper.easytask.biz/Data/plakat/ File0392.html) c. Show the Andrex 'Moistened' advertisement, Could you be cleaner? (http://www.nmauk.co.uk/nma/do/ live/breakingads?showBrowse=false&creativeMod el=4700). d. To stimulate discussion of the relationship between advertising and shame, the groups can be invited to create two advertisements, either a spectacle or a poster, that will refer to the feeling of shame of the spectators (one - which refers to the moral feelings; another - in which the manipulation with ones feeling of shame or embarrassment is present). Let the groups present and comment on the advertisements.

Let the discussion follow.

Example questions: Is shame a mean of social control over people?

What are the positive and negative effects of the social dimension of shame?

How does advertising use our feelings of shame and embarrassment?

So, what is shame??? █

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Gabriela Bradovkova

Luke 17, 36-39 and 44-50 When one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him, he went to the Pharisee’s house and reclined at the table. 37 A woman in that town who lived a sinful life learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee’s house, so she came there with an alabaster jar of perfume. 38 As she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them. 39 When the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is—that she is a sinner.”

36

Gabriela Bradovkova (Roman Catholic) is from Slovakia.

Graduated in international relations.

She has been involved in WSCF Europe since 2009. She is currently

living, working and enjoying Italian language course in Bratislava.

She loves swimming, art and Spring.

Twice About One Guilt: A Bible Study Read both sections from the Bible. Try to find out answers to the questions below.

Genesis 3: 6-13 and 23

When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

6

Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?” 10 He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” 11 And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?” 12 The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.” 13 Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

8

So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken.

23

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Then he turned toward the woman and said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. 45 You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. 46 You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. 47 Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—as her great love has shown.

44

Then Jesus said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.” 49 The other guests began to say among themselves, “Who is this who even forgives sins?” 50 Jesus said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”

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Guilt in general 1. What is guilt in your opinion?

2. Both texts obviously present situations when individuals are considered guilty. However, neither of the texts directly mentions word “guilt”. Can you come up with any other synonyms for guilt?

3. What are usual consequences of guilt?

4. Theological guilt (trespassing against God´s law), sociological (trespassing against civil law) and psychological guilt (a guilty conscience) can be

classified as the main kinds of guilt. Can you add any others?

One guilt, different approaches 1. Why are the people from the texts considered guilty?

What is the cause of their guilt? Do we know what they really did?

2. Did anyone directly accuse them? What is Pharisee´s role in the 2nd story?

3. Do they feel guilty? How can we find it out?

4. Can we talk about a collective or a shared guilt in the 1st story?

5. Dealing with guilt – based on their behavior, compare how Adam and Eve in one story and the woman in the other story deal with their guilt in front of God/ Jesus. What do they do? What do they say? What is their intention?

6. What is a consequence of their actions? How does their “end” differ from one another? Why do you think it is so?

7. One was justified - the other not. What impact do their attitudes to own guilt have on their relationship to God? Why do you think God treats them differently?

Taking from the stories…

1.

Do you think there is a relation between (objective) 2. guilt and (subjective) guilty feelings?

“To feel guilty is not to be guilty.” (Sigmund Freud) 3. Do you agree? Explain.

How can guilty feelings be expressed in ordinary life?

What kind of behavior can result from guilt/guilty 4. feelings? Are guilty feelings always legitimate?

Based on your findings can you describe an adequate 5. way to cope with guilt from the Christian point of view?

Based on the readings, Adam and Eve were blaming others; the Pharisee was condemning the woman. Can you name any other ways how people usually excuse their (wrong) acts or point at guilt of the others?

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For inspiration or further discussion » “In so far as you approach temptation to a man, you do him an injury; and if he is overcome, you share his guilt.”. (Samuel Johnson, English Poet) » “Men's minds are too ready to excuse guilt in themselves”. (Titus Livy) » “Fear is the tax which conscience pays to guilt”. (unknown) » “Sin with the multitude, and your responsibility and guilt are as great and as truly personal, as if you alone had done the wrong”. (Tryon Edwards, American Theologian, 1809-1894) » “Guilt is the very nerve of sorrow”. (Horace Bushnell) » “Power acquired by guilt was never used for a good purpose”. (Latin Proverb) █

Katka Babicova, Shannon Phillip, Pawel Pustelnik

The Financial Crisis: A Role Play Participants: 6 or more people Materials: one copy of the Roles, Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 to be given to the participants.

Duration: 90 minutes The workshop: This role play divides groups into different roles/actors and given their roles. Three “days” will pass and the groups and actors will need to decide how to act based on their characteristics, rules and personal morals. Each role is limited by their circumstances.

The group is divided and each participant is given one of the six roles. If there is more than one person per role they can first discuss how they want to interact with the other participants.

The first “day” begins and each role is given their corresponding scenario. They can choose to act, discuss with other groups or react alone. After everyone has decided what they will do and talked to the other actors if needed the “day” ends and the groups will report to the whole group what they did, why they did it and what rules/values made them choose their actions.

This continues with each “day” and finally at the end of the “Financial Crisis” the entire group reflects on their experience together.

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Gabriela Bradovkova: Twice About One Guilt: A Bible Study

Who are the different actors?

1. National Government 2. Financial Institution 3. Local Bank 4. Credit Rating Agency 5. Civil society 6. Economic Scientists and Advisors

Roles: 1. National Government: You are an economically liberal government with a limited budget, which means that careful spending is required. The country, Greedland, is already highly indebted however, you have a very high GDP. If you provide government bail-outs for the Bank or Financial Institution you will have to cut on public spending.

2. Financial Institution: You represent Greedy Brothers, a global financial services firm, the fourth largest investment bank in the Greedland (behind Scrooge McDuck, and Ebenezer Ltd.), doing business in investment banking, equity and fixed-income sales and trading (especially Greedland Treasury securities), research, investment management, private equity, and private banking. You pay high salaries to your employees. Your link with the Local Bank is that you provide them with financial liquidity.

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3. Local Bank: You offer services to Civil Society who are not wealthy enough to be involved in private banking.

Most of the people would come to you in order to get mortgages for their properties. You are very closely related to the Financial Institution as they secure your transactions and lend you money for your operations.

4. Credit Rating Agency: A credit rating agency is a company that assigns credit ratings for issuers of certain types of debt obligations as well as the debt instruments themselves. In most cases, the issuers of securities are companies, special purpose entities, state and local governments, non-profit organizations, or national governments issuing debt-like securities (i.e., bonds) that can be traded on a secondary market. A credit rating for an issuer takes into consideration the issuer's credit worthiness (i.e., its ability to pay back a loan), and affects the interest rate applied to the particular security being issued.

5. Civil Society: You represent the home-owners, renters, mortgage holders, etc. You are a teacher, have a wife who is a nurse, have 3 children living in the suburbs in a home that you have just bought because the Local Bank has given you a very good price on a mortgage.

6. Economic Scientists and Advisors: You are working at a very esteemed university and at the same time you perform different commitments for the private sector (for example: you serve as an advisor to a board of a Financial Institution or you help to give the credit ratings with the Credit Rating Agency). Sometimes you may be approached by the representatives of the private sector or National Government to provide analyses or forecasts of economic situation. One member of your group is has published a paper about the future causes of the financial crisis (a realistic uncovering the high risks of the system).

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Day 1: Leading up to the crash

Day 2: The crash

1. National Government: You can see that the financial market is growing every day; the “growth” especially in housing is substantial. People are buying goods and borrowing money extensively. Do you think this is good for your country? Is it risky? You can ask the economic scientists for their predictions and advice. Are there any restrictions you need to make for the nation?

1. National Government: You want to bail out the banks and the Financial Institution, because they are closely linked to your government.

2. Financial Institution: You know the crash is on the way – how do you deal with these nerves? Do you feel you need to warn anybody (such as the National Government or your Bank clients)? Do you need to ask anybody for help?

3. Local Bank: You have lent out all your money and you know that if you don’t have enough money your ratings will be decreased. Who do you ask for help?

4. Credit Rating Agency: You know that the liquidity of the Financial Institution is poor and their rating should be downgraded substantially, however they oppose that fact. What do you do?

5. Civil Society: Your bank has just announced that the interest rate of your mortgage loan for your house has been raised of 150%. Are you afraid? Do you feel guilty for taking such a risky the loan? Do you ask for another mortgage or a bigger loan to help support yourself?

6. Economic Scientists and Advisors: The government is going to ask you for advice and to forecast “growth”. The financial market actors (that you are closely related to) want to pay you to publish analysis’ about the “stability” of the situation. What do you say?

Katka Babicova, Shannon Phillip, Pavel Pustelnik: The Financial Crisis: A Role Play

2. Financial Institution: How do you continue? Are you going to announce bankruptcy or not? Are you going to pay salaries/bonuses to your staff? How much? What do you tell your clients?

3. Local Bank: Are you going to announce bankruptcy to the public and your clients? Are you going to ask for a bailout? From who, the Financial Institutions that you have been doing business with or the National Government? What do you tell your clients?

4. Credit Rating Agency: How do you respond to the crash, when it is visible that you have not been granting the correct rates to both the banks and governments?

5. Civil Society: You have not been able to pay your loan for a couple of months. Now the bank wants to take your property, which is the only thing you own. You are already working extra hours but your salary still does not suffice.

6. Economic Scientists and Advisors: What is your response to the crash? How can you provide advice now?

Day 3: The recession

2. Financial Institution: You are still paying your people high salaries and bonuses, this information leaks to the media and causes massive protests.

3. Local Bank: Your position has change immensely.

The Financial Institution does not support you anymore and your customers are much poorer than they used to be. Your speculative potential has been drastically decreased. You are looking for new possibilities to regain trust and find new customers.

4. Credit Rating Agency: Your reputation is not as strong as it used to be before the crisis. You are still an important actor, however society does not trust you. All the decisions you take are widely discussed by the media.

5. Civil Society: You still work excessively and have moved to a rented flat. Your standard of life has decreased, you cannot afford to pay for your children’s education and have no money left for holidays.

6. Economic Scientists and Advisors: Your position has been weakened. Neither banks nor governments ask you for analyses. Currently, all your papers are being judged as being full of prejudices and nobody wants to publish them. Your university is facing serious financial obstacles since many sponsors withdrew their support. █

1. National Government: If you have bailed out the banks yesterday, you are no longer able to pay social revenues to your people and institutions, people don’t have money, are not spending and the business, in general, is going down. Your whole economy is sinking. What do you do? Are you going to enforce any restrictions on the financial market?

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4| Federation "Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do." ― Voltaire 66 A SHORT FUTURE MEMORY OF ONE Katka Babicová 68 A LETTER FROM THE WSCF EUROPE REGIONAL SECRETARY Hans Hommens 70 GEORGIA JOINS WSCF 72 WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO FOLLOW CHRIST TODAY? Márta Várnagyi 75 WSCF EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE MEETING IN BERLIN Vera Papp 78 CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Katka Babicová

Katka Babicová is a Roman-Catholic

student from Slovakia.

She was involved in EKUNET, the SCM

in Slovakia, in 2005

and since then with

the Central European

Subregion of WSCF-E.

Since 2009, Katka has

volunteered as WSCFE´s Links Coordinator and Vice-Chair and in 2011-2012 served as a Regional Secretary

for a ten month interim

position. She graduated with a Bachelor's from

Comenius University in

Swedish and German in 2009 and is currently doing her Masters

in the Psychology of

Language at University of Copenhagen.

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A Short Future Memory of One

To begin with, I would like to thank one more time all who supported me during the ten months of my interim service as a Regional Secretary. It was a great honour to work with all the history, present and future, of an organization with so much to give to the world and so many people educated in the spirit of “Living faith together for justice”.

Honestly, I was afraid to start, as I was feeling very young and not experienced. But after every managed task, with a little help many times, I could admit that it was the best school of life to learn decision making and friendship. Therefore, I will repeat what my colleague Luciano Kovacs, WSCF North America Regional Secretary, said, that this organization is truly raising people.

This is what the World Student Christian Federation is doing with people.

What WSCF has brought and taught me is how to be part of the community that is very diverse culturally in all its aspects. Even though it sounds like something that has already been shouted out so many times, it is a constant challenge to get to know, work and live with people from the different cultural, religious and working backgrounds. This is what has always brought paradoxically both new fresh air and struggle. It is

Katka Babicová with Mrs. Alice Jean Finlay, the chairperson of the Centennial Fund,*Y during WSCF Executive Committee Meeting in Berlin, 2012

really full everyday life.

If I would be allowed to generalize from my experience, though it can seem so, WSCF is not about the past and memories. It is a developing the life of a community with the same character – full of energy, faith and longing for justice. This has been a continuous driving force for so many years. But is there enough of it always? How to create it again if there is not enough?

From time to time, the lack of energy and resources can make the struggle much more difficult leading to greater force, continuous fighting or passivity. It depends what we choose. WSCF was for me an example of the first two; but in times, perhaps not sadly but at least not luckily of passivity. Is this a normal development of issues in one organization, I am asking myself. I believe that my question can be a question for WSCF and me as well, every day. █ Mozaik 30

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Hans Hommens

Hans Hommes studied South

Asian history and Anthropology in

Berlin and Heidelberg from 2003 to 2009.

He also did a Masters degree in Bradford University's Peace

Studies Department. He has been active in the

ecumencial movement

of Taizé for many years and was a member of various ecumenical communities

in Heidelberg and

Bradford. Currently,

he works as the WSCF Europe Regional Secretary.

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A Letter from the WSCF Europe Regional Secretary

Dear WSCF Europe people!

´Guilty or Not Guilty´ Conference, Bratislava, 2012. Photo credit: Artturi Hirvonen

First of all I want to say how glad I am to be given this opportunity to serve as WSCF Europe’s Regional Secretary. While I am writing this the first two months of work in the Berlin office are now over. Looking back, I am impressed by how fast everything has unfolded for me. My time at work, so far, has been extremely empowering and although I have been involved with ecumenism for a very long time, the practicality of my vision of it has been developing and has been deepened a lot recently. Starting this job as Regional Secretary of WSCF Europe is therefore an amazing opportunity for me to live my hopes and dreams for the ecumenical community in a new way.

I am very convinced of the power and relevance of ecumenical encounters and exchange for Christians living in the world of today. I believe we are called to find new ways of living in and interacting with social environments that are more and more distant from the worldview and the expressions of Christianity as a living reality. Also, I think we as young Christian students need to challenge ourselves in what it means to be Christian and we need to find new understandings of community and solidarity. For all this, I believe,

ecumenical encounter is central in that it can be a safe space in which we can go beyond experiences of our own context, meet the Other and discover our common calling.

My main ambition for my time ahead as Regional Secretary is to help WSCF Europe grow stronger roots at the local level. We need to find ways of developing our links to our member movements much more and need to reach more people. This also means that we must develop ways of being present and relevant in the SCM experience and the lives of our members in ways that go beyond the immediate context of two or three big WSCF Europe conferences (which, by their nature, are restricted to a couple of dozen people).

Photo credit: Artturi Hirvonen

Another goal I have for my work is to strengthen the awareness in WSCF Europe of being part of a global federation and to intensify inter-regional cooperation.

I see our global network as an amazing resource and potential for inspiration, in faith as well as in action, which we should draw upon more.

Finally, I hope to be able to find ways to strengthen the spiritual component of WSCF Europe’s work as the basis of our identity in the most fundamental sense of the word. Rightfully is there a strong activist focus in our activities and I think that one of the important implications of God becoming human in Christ is that as Christians we cannot detach ourselves from the world and the injustice we are living in. Salvation needs to be a process that transforms not only spiritual individuals, but societies and finally the world as such.

Still, I believe that the foundation of our work and of our life as Christians and the source of our strength is our relationship to God. It is God’s transformative love that allows us to own who we are and become who we are, sometime in strength, sometimes in vulnerability.

Sharing our inspiration and our struggles in this regard is, I believe, something that I hope to bring out more in our community.

I feel that working for WSCF Europe is full of potential for growth for me and I am very thankful for that. I am looking forward to meet as many of you as possible! █ Mozaik 30

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Georgia joins WSCF On 30 October 2011, Young Christians for Peace and Democracy (YCPD) (http://ycpdgeo.wordpress.com/) became an associate member of WSCF-Europe. Yulia Bajelidze interviewed the YCPD's chairperson and theologian Mirian Gamrekelashvili.

Please tell us briefly about YCPD’s foundation aims and what changes are seen after becoming associate member of WSCF-Europe?

Our organization was founded via ecumenical parity on 9 May 2006 and its major function is supporting religious tolerance, theological education, dialogue between churches and cultures in general. Like other countries, there is the historical experience of religious tolerance in Georgia as well. Though, Georgia still undergoes the process of political transformation, unfortunately, reflections around such experience are less. Tolerance failed to shape into public norm.

Growing isolationism inside Orthodox Church of Georgia incurred from various difficulties and other socio-cultural factors make factual, peaceful coexistence and development of real ecumenical relations of religions impossible. Lack of academic theological literature also complicates this problem.

For this reason, we would like to renew interconfessional dialogue on theological or other issues and support tolerance and peaceful coexistence of different religions. As we considered it necessary to establish close relations with international religious organizations for reaching our aims, as soon as our organization was incorporated (2006), one of our 70

major goals was to establish intensive cooperation and practical partnership with international organizations.

Was it your strategy to be a member of any international organization? Does it have any specific basis and goal?

We really aimed to the membership of any international organization; it was one of our major goals.

While discussing this issue, it is impossible not to mention religious discourse determined by the Orthodox Church of Georgia. In 1997, the Orthodox Church of Georgia left World Council of Churches and Conference of European Churches. This was followed by inertial growth of isolation thinking inside the Church.

Structural detachment from the rest of the Christianity in the world caused detachment of the Georgian Orthodox organizations from the rest of Europe.

YCPD aims to forward international relations in this field and help to integrate into religious organizations of the west. Being the member of World Student Christian Federation encourages us to think that we are also able to contribute in a global process of peace-making and humanness. We are happy to have a possibility to contribute to this process!

Tell us about beginning of relations with the WSCF Europe.

Our relation with WSCF Europe began when I was in Berlin as the Chairman of YCPD, in August of 2008, attending international conference jointly convened

by ESG (Evangelische StudentInnengemeinde in

Deutschland) and WSCF Europe. It is notable that, we are significantly liberal-democratic religious organization in Georgia, which is quite rare in our country. For the next years, active participation of our organization's members in international meetings, our activities (accomplished by own sources and capabilities) and negotiations were very effective and successful. When our special representative in relations with international organizations, Yulia Bajelidze notified us about this wonderful news of becoming an associated member of WSCF Europe at the European Regional Assebly in Løgumkloster, Denmark, we were all very happy and thankful to God. Tell us about current activities and future plans of YCPD.

To say honestly, the specific public-political situation in Georgia doesn’t provide preferable preconditions for developing our activities, thus our activity area is somehow limited and we focus only on necessary priorities. As one of the most effective ways to overcome the above said problems is supporting students, wishing to receive education in west, considering that except the competent and scientific knowledge, they acquire intercultural view in Western universities and comprehensive approaches towards the different.

Because of the support of YCPD, fifteen Georgian students received professional education in various countries of Europe. Most of them are theologians and some of them chose theology as minor specialization.

Additional forms of exchange of education and information is participation of our organization members, volunteers in international meetings and workshops, giving us the chance to get involved in quest of problem overcoming methods at international level.

From October of 2012, our Organization will start to publish a Georgian theological magazine “IOTA”. Our editorial team has already prepared the first issue of

the magazine. This magazine will try to introduce in Georgia theological discussions ongoing in western countries, including other information regarding various religions, confessions or other affairs in ecumenical field. It is notable that first issue of the magazine will cover information on WSCF Europe and on our associate membership.

Besides such activities, YCPD plans to activate in supporting of projects for establishing more precise contacts. We wish to operate summer school project in Georgia in cooperation with SCM Norway (Norges Kristelige Studentforbund). Besides that, the field of summer school refers to modern challenges of Christianity, there will be held interesting discussion as well, students from various countries will introduce with Georgia and its culture. It should be noted that our country is being developed following the Christian line beginning from the fourth century, thus, the Georgian Orthodox Church is one of the oldest churches in the world.

Also, we shall be very glad to cooperate with WSCF Europe, if the organization decides to arrange any of its workshops in Georgia.

We also plan to carry out and set the Tolerance Cup as an annual event; a project accomplished by us and our partners. In 2006 we held the first Tolerance Cup; within the project, football teams of various confessions competed for first place. Practical communication among participants and supporters will help to overcome existing negative views and establish friendly relations.

Our organization will continue to actively participate on the international level and try to cooperate with international organizations, as we consider that our goals can be reached via international platform. █ Mozaik 30

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Márta Várnagyi

Márta Várnagyi When Márta is not reading, hiking

or planting, she is studying an

International Relations Masters in a German language University

in Budapest, writing articles and taking a slow speed PhD

in literature theory in contemporary

feminist literature criticism. Márta

serves as well as

one of programme

coordinators on WSCF European Regional Committee. Email:

eventscoord2@wscfeurope.org.

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What Does it Mean to Follow Christ Today?

How do I follow “up”?

I spent four days at the Seminar in the SCM house at Haugtun, Norway at the Seminar on Ecumenical Student Work in Europe with the title “What does it mean to be a Christian today?” in the light of the Nordic midsummer. While letting the chilly brightness shine through my heart and mind, I was sharing thoughts and exchanging experience in community with Christian students. The venue was embraced by the wonderful, green mountains and looked like the imaginary house in the story of Hansel and Gretel, with the difference that the cakes and the chocolates were on the table instead of on the fence, and the hosts had much better ideas than the witch had, about filling the discussions with fire.

How a potato and laughter are breaking ice?

Through the usual, cheerful ice-breaking part of the seminar beginning I got know more than 40 names, from eleven countries, jumped in a sack, balanced a potatoes on a spoon, learned through team games about the perfect Norwegian lunch package: three cheese-slices with marmalade between cracker bread – enough to share with friends.

For me the ice – that was not that thick at all, or definitely thinner than the pullovers we were wearing – was really broken and turned into a comfortable “swimming temperature” as the preparations for the Scandinavian cultural night started. As I love flowers I recovered my forgotten talent of making flower crowns for the midsummer evening. With the crowns on my head I found myself later singing a Swedish children song about frogs, while jumping left and right standing on one leg in the circle: our laughter filled the gaps of differences between us.

Learn, understand and change!

The plenary session made a place for many new thoughts and ideas. We cleared first in a silent smiling agreement that first of all “love” is the best word to start the brainstorming list about the question “How do I follow Christ today?” We discussed what kind of actions can we take and how this attitude influences our lives, from the suggestion “Take the train!” – meaning by that, being environmental friendly – all the way to practicing solidarity.

In the Bible study section we had a fascinating discussion on the story of Jesus and the Canaanite women, about the ignorant face of Jesus and the purpose of his behaviour, ignorance about asking a women in need, who belongs to another religion, might mean. At the drama workshop we formed in our group a trustful atmosphere, where there was a place for improvisation, jokes and for experiencing our boundaries.

Tastes of diversity

These experiences enriched and opened new dimensions for conversation, where we could continue the discussions at the lunch table meanwhile getting know the tastes of Norway between the two extremes: the sweet brown cheese and salty black candy. Other tastes are lasting for a long time in my memory too, the tastes of the cultural evenings: A piece of hearty chocolate brought by the girls with the most smiles at the conference from Lithuania, a great dinner made by the funny and enthusiastic Palestinian students, a sip of Georgian wine – as small and tasty cultural ambassadors gave a chance to get know the passion and get an impression of the countries.

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Vera Papp

Vera Papp is one of the two

European Executive

For me sharing food and praying together are the most important elements to celebrate my spirituality.

We ate together and we prayed together every day; held worship in different denominations. The sacred meanings behind the unknown Arabic, Georgian and Lithuanian liturgy filled the room with the sense that is higher than understanding. Moments I will always remember: when the words transferred faith and resonated in beautiful languages with my soul.

On the path of solidarity and service

The gender and sexuality workshop about tolerance by panel discussion and situation exercises made it clear how we perceive gender in everyday life and what stereotypes and meanings the words we use have.

The presentation of the project “LGBT <3 Religion” helped me to understand the ambivalent meanings and hierarchical structure that is covered by the sentence “I tolerate you”. This session made me want to change my vocabulary on the question of the diversity of sexual orientation.

74

The essential and practical value of the seminar program was to get know, through the Youth in Action program, examples for service. Probably the most concrete and encouraging part about activism was the presentation on the cooperation between the Palestinian SCM and the Norwegian SCM. The humbling personal experiences, which were told, how Palestinian Christians live day by day in danger and repression underlined the importance of the possibilities for peacemaking that is had through ecumenical cooperation. By sharing best practices and getting know other student movements and fundraising methods I took home my folder full of notes, contacts and ideas waiting to discuss them within my movement.

As the conference was over and we hugged each other at the airport, I realized, that the biggest challenge of the conference had not even began yet: namely, to find and integrate the symbolic path behind me – and go on it back in my life, after being in community in Haugtun with my sisters and brothers in faith. █

Márta Várnagyi: What Does it Mean to Follow Christ Today?

Committee Members

of WSCF. She graduated in Medicine in 2011

and is currently living and working

in Liverpool, UK.

WSCF Executive Committee Meeting in Berlin There was great anticipation before we gathered for the WSCF Executive Committee (ExCo) meeting in May. The ExCo members are nominated by each of the six regions and are responsible for overseeing and assessing administration, programming, finance and personnel matters at the global level. Before I go into detail about what decisions were taken I want to thank SCM Norway for making it possible for us to have this meeting through their financial support. Takk, Norges Kristelige Studentforbund!

There was a really positive atmosphere at the meeting and for the first time we had systematic tools to work with an external facilitator to give us some guidance and training. I feel that we grew a lot as a team during our time together.

We set purpose and desired outcome for each day of the meeting to focus our attention. We were working on a new vision and mission statement for the WSCF, which is part of our preparatory work for the next General Assembly (GA). We learnt about governance and management and tried to set clearer priorities to help the work of our regional secretaries. We got reports from all regional secretaries, the Inter-Regional Office (IRO) and our global working groups. We had sessions in working groups about the future of the Advocacy and

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Solidarity Committee, the Communication Committee, the Ecumenical Assistance Programme and the Identity Diversity and Dialogue programme. We approved to set up a task group on Identity Diversity and Dialogue to serve up until the next GA and to focus its work on making recommendations to the GA about how to move forward in the life of the Federation around the topic of human sexuality.

We discussed a lot about fundraising and how to overcome our deficit. Last year was the first year that we had an operating profit, which means an excess income over expenditure for the year 2011. We work hard to keep this tendency and hope that we can build up general reserves. This would be an essential step to get back to our co-secretary model (to have two cosecretary generals). It was a great pleasure to have Mrs. AJ Finlay, the chairperson of the Centennial Fund, an endowment fund of WSCF, with us. We made plans to work together more closely with the Fund and outlined a common strategy to reach out to Senior Friends in all regions.

person meeting in Berlin gave the opportunity for the European ExCos, the European Chair and the Officers and Co-Secretary General to sit down and talk openly about these tensions and get a common understanding of why things were communicated the way they were.

It was a relieving and important moment for all parties involved and made a good starting point for our future work together.

All in all I am very pleased with the results of this meeting. It is great that we made and approved an action plan which we can follow and refer to when we work.

I want to congratulate all those who put their time and energy to make this meeting successful, especially our outgoing Regional Secretary Interim, Katka Babicova. â&#x2013;&#x2C6;

We approved the new salary scale which aims to take into consideration the local economic and living conditions for the salaries of our staff. Practically we set a minimum salary which resulted in raising the salaries of some regional secretaries. We discussed and approved the budgets for 2012 and 2013.

We made an action plan, setting our work until the next GA. We made it clear who is responsible for what and set deadlines for each task. We decided about the time and date of our next GA, which is going to be in Mexico City in June 2014.

The former European Regional Committee took an active and critical stand on the financial situation of WSCF global. The communication around this created tensions between the two bodies. The in-

76

Vera Papp: WSCF Executive Comittee Meeting in Berlin

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Submissions

As the ecumenical journal of the European Region of WSCF, Mozaik aims to provide a forum to explore and share your ideas, experiences and faith. It is also a resource for SCMs, Churches and student groups to give ideas on how to interact with the topic at hand.

We encourage contributors to write from their own tradition, both with confidence and openness. We believe in the value of exposure and interaction with new ideas and perspectives. We value student voices.

As thinkers and disciples, students hold a unique perspective as they look from their academic situation out onto the world, and vice versa.

Mozaik values prophetic voices and seeks to provide space for sharing and discussion of new ideas that may not otherwise find an outlet within the traditional established gathering of intellectual and theological discussion.

We accept essays and articles about 800-2000 words long, with footnotes, including some suggested readings when appropriate. For information about formatting please consult previous issues of Mozaik (www.wscfeurope.org) or email mozaik@wscf-europe.org.

Who is my Neighbour?

The next Mozaik will follow the WSCF Europe’s solidarity conference “Who is my Neighbour?: Migration and Xenophobia in Europe” to be held Velletri, Italy 27 October to 1 November 2012 in cooperation with the European Inter-Faith Youth Network.

We are looking for submissions that reflect on questions about what it means to live in a community and how you honour the task to “Love thy neighbour”.

Share your thoughts on the rise in xenophobia in Europe, how you see links to migration and racist and xenophobic attitudes in Europe and your experience as a student when faced with these issues. How do you see religion playing a role in such issues?

If you are interested in answering one of these many questions or in contributing in any way to the next issue of Mozaik, please inform the editors as soon as possible by emailing mozaik@wscf-europe.org. They will be able to help you with any questions you may have.

Watch for the Call for Articles in your email inbox and on our website (www.wscf-europe.org) for more details.

Mozaik is also a space to share news about your SCMs, to reflect on discipleship and culture and to express your creativity. So, we also value shorter articles, interviews, book and film reviews, reflections, resources, and reports from your SCM. Contributions of artwork, poetry, short stories, prayers, and liturgies are also strongly encouraged.

78

Photo credit: Annika Rotter

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Mozaik (established in 1992) is the ecumenical journal of the World Student

Christian Federation (WSCF, 1895) Europe Region, published two to three times a

Our illustrator

year. It aims to reflect the wide variety of opinions and viewpoints present among the different Student Christian Movements (SCMs) in ecumenical dialogue. You can find us Online at wscf-europe.org.

This issue of Mozaik follows the WSCF Europe theology conference “Guilty or Not

Guilty?”, which was supported by the European Commission and the European Youth Foundation of the Council of Europe. WSCF Europe also receives support

from several other church related agencies and from the General Budget of the European Communities. The contents of this publication reflects the views only

of the authors and not the opinions or positions of WSCF as a whole, the editorial board, the Council of Europe, the European Commission, or the other donors and

church-related agencies. Neither the European Commission, the Council or Europe, nor the other donors can be held responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained therein.

Editor-in-Chief: Paweł Pustelnik (Cardiff, UK) Editor:

Jill Piebiak (Alberta, Canada) Art Editor:

Maria Bradovkova (Slovakia) Address:

Storkower Straße 158 #710 D-10407 Berlin, Germany

ISSN 1019–7389 Illustrator: Georgina Hewitt (Manchester, UK)

Georgina Hewitt (1991, Britain)

I currently study Interactive Arts (BA Hons) at Manchester School of Art in the United Kingdom.

I specialise in illustration, pattern design and graphics. I am inspired by nature and how people interact with their surroundings.

My art work always tries to reflect positivity and humour, my mission is to make people smile.

Email: gin.georgina@gmail.com

30 2012/Theology World Student Christian Federation Europe Region Ecumenical Journal, 2012/Theology

GUILTY OR NOT GUILTY?