For the Sake of the Common Good: Essays in Honour of Lois Wilson 9780228011774

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For the Sake of the Common Good

For the Sake of the Common Good Essays in Honour of Lois Wilson

Edited by

Kate MerriMan and Bertha YetMan

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2022 iSBn iSBn iSBn iSBn

978-0-2280-1094-4 (cloth) 978-0-2280-1095-1 (paper) 978-0-2280-1177-4 (ePdF) 978-0-2280-1178-1 (ePUB)

Legal deposit second quarter 2022 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% postconsumer recycled), processed chlorine free

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: For the sake of the common good : essays in honour of Lois Wilson / edited by Kate Merriman and Bertha Yetman. Names: Wilson, Lois M., 1927- honouree. | Merriman, Kate, 1948- editor. | Yetman, Bertha, editor. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210346302 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210346388 | iSBn 9780228010944 (hardcover) | iSBn 9780228010951 (softcover) | iSBn 9780228011774 (PdF) | iSBn 9780228011781 (ePUB) Subjects: LCSh: Church and social problems. | LCSh: Christian sociology. | LCSh: Social problems. | LCSh: Social action. Classification: LCC hn31 .F67 2022 | ddC 261.8/3 – dc23

This book was designed and typeset by Peggy & Co. Design in 10.5/13 Sabon.

Contents

Foreword ix Louise Arbour Editors’ Introduction 3 Kate Merriman and Bertha Yetman 1

Witness to God’s Lament and Laughter: Personal Faith in Lois Wilson’s Life and Work Allan Saunders

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PART ONE ECUMENICAL AND INTERFAITH DEVELOPMENTS

2

Transformative Ecumenism: God’s Mission and the Whole Inhabited World Chris Ferguson

3

Peace and Reconciliation on the Korean Peninsula: An Interchurch Project 40 Erich Weingartner

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Women’s Voices, Pluralism, and the Common Good Diana L. Eck

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The Common Good: Through the Lens of Canadian Muslim Women Alia Hogben

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Visio Divina 76 Sean Mulrooney

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52

65

vi

Contents PART T WO FAITH AND PUBLIC POLICY

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Faith and Public Policy Bill Blaikie

89

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Public Witness in the Local Urban Congregation Alexa Gilmour

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The Whole People of God: Being the Church in the World Betsy Anderson

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Borders: Barriers and Blessings Mary Jo Leddy

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Last in the Queue: Refugees and Displaced Persons in a Time of Covid-19, Climate Change, Conflict, and Corruption 134 Lloyd Axworthy

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From Creation Chaos to Creaturely Solidarity: The Comingling of Faith and the Fate of the Earth Stephen Bede Scharper

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All My Relations: Living Respectfully on the Earth with All Creation 159 Stan McKay

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Fishing Communities in Decline: An Impediment to the Common Good Bertha Yetman

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112 124

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PART THREE HUMAN RIGHTS

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A Not So Gay World: Confronting Religious-Based Discrimination Brent Hawkes and Kimberley Vance-Mubanga

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The Global Women’s Movement: Gently Holding Each Other Up Aruna Gnanadason

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Human Rights: The Fallacy of “Cancel Culture” and the Power of Solidarity 208 Noa Mendelsohn Aviv

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185

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Contents

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Resurgent Global Authoritarianism, Democratic Backsliding, and the Assault on Media Freedom: Through the Looking Glass of Political Prisoners 221 Irwin Cotler Afterword 235 Michael Blair Contributors Index

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Foreword

I had known about Lois Wilson for some time before I met her in the late 1990s. She was a member of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association when I was a vice-president in 1985. She already had a stellar reputation as a chaplain to women prisoners when I conducted an inquiry into the Prison for Women in Kingston in 1995. As a president of the World Council of Churches, she was heavily involved with the emerging calls for accountability for war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity, while I served as chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda. When I finally met her, Lois was a Canadian senator and I had just been appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada. It was at a luncheon hosted by the lieutenant governor of Ontario. I was asked to say a few words. I referred to something I had heard recently: that we should wish that those who were hungry would get enough to eat and that those who had enough to eat would have an appetite for justice. When Lois was called upon to say grace, she claimed that I had stolen her lines! These chapters in honour of Lois Wilson offer particular insights into the many challenges posed to the common good within Canada and globally. The first-hand experiences recounted in For the Sake of the Common Good expose injustices, some well documented and others untold or unheard, while advancing the many causes to which Lois has always been committed. The three parts of the book – ecumenical and interfaith developments, faith and public policy, and human rights – speak with clarity and purpose to many current realities continuing to hinder the fundamental right to a life with dignity. Together with Lois, the authors have been involved in denouncing and taking action to counter the injustices that threaten the well-being

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of millions and the viability of the planet itself. Their testimonies to blatant disregard for the equality of all human beings and to the fragility of the freedoms we claim to cherish should come as a call to action. These accounts of destructive exploitation of the environment, mistreatment of minorities, and indifference to the needs of outsiders also speak of the entrenched colonial attitudes that continue to poison established religious, political, and secular ideologies and agendas. Denials of or attempts to justify these positions on the grounds of history and culture conveniently support positions of power, dominance, and self-interest. Lois Wilson is a trailblazer, a leader who has resisted long-accepted but misguided laws and customs that diminish the integrity of peoples and devalue their worldviews. Her place in the Canadian narrative is characterized by a spirit of compassion, goodwill, implacable determination, and joy. Her vocation to heal the wounded and let the oppressed go free underlines her commitment to public, political, and religious processes dedicated to ending large-scale suffering and oppression. Few have worked as effectively as she has, walking the delicate divide between church and state. In both venues she has advocated for access to the rights and freedoms to which one and all are entitled. Not content to be an outsider looking in, she has challenged institutions from the inside, with remarkable credibility and integrity. While the chapters highlight endless cycles of injustices associated with gender and sexual orientation, globalization, race, place, and creed, they offer hope. Hope comes alive in the passions of those who respect and value a world of many vulnerabilities but also of incredible strength  and resilience. The hope for peace and justice comes out as loudly in these chapters as it always has in the lifelong work of Lois Wilson. The Honourable Louise Arbour, CC, goq

For the Sake of the Common Good

Editors’ Introduction Kate Merriman and Bertha Yetman

For the Sake of the Common Good is a collection of chapters written by friends and colleagues to honour Lois Wilson and to continue her work. The Very Reverend, the Honourable Lois Miriam Wilson is a remarkable Canadian by any measure, one who has influenced and collaborated with countless others in local, national, and international organizations dedicated to creating a more just world. It is slightly ironic, then, that some of the contributors to this festschrift, eager to acknowledge her influence and to carry on her work, are now better known than she is. It is time to introduce Lois to a wider audience. As her title indicates, Lois is an ordained minister in the United Church of Canada and served as its moderator – the first woman to hold that position – from 1980 to 1982. From childhood, church was a positive experience for Lois, a place of acceptance and security. She was profoundly influenced by the Social Gospel’s insistence that God’s will be done on Earth as in heaven and by the Bible’s prophetic tradition. Her father, E.G.D. (Gard) Freeman, was a Presbyterian minister (and after church union, a United Church minister) who became professor of systematic theology at United College, Winnipeg, in 1938 and, later, dean of the faculty. Her mother, Ada Freeman, was renowned for her hospitality, her creative and biblically informed Sunday School lessons, her work with youth in the church’s drama productions, and her compassion for those living on the edge of poverty. As a student at United College (now the University of Winnipeg), Lois joined the Student Christian Movement (SCM). The SCM, a lay-led, ecumenical, and international organization, introduced Lois to the wider reality of the church. Through the SCM, she met Philippe Maury, who had been in the French Underground in the Second World War;

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K.H. Ting, later the chair of the China Christian Council; John R. Mott, one of the architects of the ecumenical movement; Suzanne de Dietrich, a French Protestant theologian and biblical scholar; and Augustine Ralla Ram, general secretary of the SCM of India, Burma, and Ceylon. In her words: “I was stirred to the depths of my being by the feeling of belonging to an ecumenical global community. My world expanded and my God became larger and more inclusive.”1 Lois’s ministry has been indelibly marked by its ecumenism, understood as both cooperation among Christian denominations and extending to “the whole inhabited world” – the root meaning of oikoumene and the motto of the World Council of Churches. Lois was president of the Canadian Council of Churches from 1976 to 1979, co-director of the Ecumenical Forum from 1982 to 1988, and the president of the World Council of Churches for the North American region from 1983 to 1991. In Greek thought, the oikoumene, the inhabited places of the Earth, were seen as separate from the uninhabited places. However, the environmental crisis so evident in the twenty-first century has shown us that Planet Earth is ultimately our habitat. Lois’s ministry has always included advocating for the environment by, for example, serving on an environmental assessment panel for Canadian nuclear fuel waste management from 1989 to 1996, staunchly defending the rights of groups and individuals who are true stewards of the Earth and its resources, and calling for an economy that has as its goal not the endless accumulation of wealth but the health of the planet and all its creatures.2 But how did Lois, so deeply rooted in the United Church and the ecumenical movement, reach beyond the bounds of the church and come to the attention of Canadian social and political leaders? Lois’s husband, Roy, a United Church minister, was called to First Church United in Fort William (now Thunder Bay) in 1960. Lois was ordained in 1965, and they became partners in ministry as in life. Always concerned to serve the needs of the whole community, Lois travelled to Minnesota to learn more about a Lutheran program in Duluth and Minneapolis that sought to help church members live out their faith in care and concern in the community. It was called Beyond the Sanctuary. Lois reached out to all parts of Fort William and Port Arthur society – all denominations, schools, community organizations and groups, the media, businesses  – and, with a committee of twelve, created Town Talk. In a blitz month, the town engaged in learning about, discussing, and seeking solutions to matters of importance to the welfare of Fort William and Port Arthur. About that experience, Lois later observed, Town Talk “marked my conversion to the importance of caring for the community in which I lived” and taught her that “Love was bearing some responsibility for the health and functioning of the city.”

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Canadian political leaders recognized Lois’s passionate commitment to the broader society and her abilities as an inspiring leader. In 1984, the Canadian government appointed Lois to the board of the Canadian Institute for Peace and Security. As mentioned above, in 1989 she was appointed a member of the Nuclear Fuel Waste Management and Disposal Concept Environmental Assessment Panel. Lloyd Axworthy, Liberal member of parliament and member of cabinet under Jean Chrétien, invited Lois to lead the Canadian Human Rights Mission to Sri Lanka in 1992, to serve as a member of the Central American Monitoring Group to El Salvador and Guatemala in 1993, and to be Canada’s special envoy to the Sudan peace process from 1992 to 2002. With Ed Broadbent she also monitored elections in El Salvador in 1994. And this is only a partial list. In 1998, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien appointed Lois Wilson to the Senate. She sat as an independent until her retirement in 2002. For her contributions to the common good, Lois has been awarded fourteen honorary degrees, the World Peace Award and Pearson Peace Medal in 1985, and was promoted to Companion of the Order of Canada in 2003. What did Lloyd Axworthy and so many others see in Lois Wilson that led them to want to collaborate with her, to place her in leading roles, to elect her to the highest positions, and to confer on her the country’s highest honour? Fundamentally, Lois’s vocation, firmly rooted in her Christian faith, was to offer her gifts and skills and time and formidable energy in the service of others to mend the world. She never sought power for its own sake, promotion to higher office, or personal recognition. For her it was always about the work. She took enormous pleasure in engaging with others, learning, listening, and sharing the work. She possessed the ability to talk to anyone and everyone; people found her approachable.3 Axworthy described her as bringing to her tasks a “controlled passion, optimism, and sense of reality.” She manifested an encyclopaedic interest in the news. But she was action-oriented, moving from information and theological and critical analysis to taking effective action. In working with others, Lois could accommodate and manoeuvre to get to the desired goal, a skill that she demonstrated in her work in South Sudan. And she had a sense of adventure, a quality illustrated in Allan Saunders’s account in chapter 1 of Lois’s 1981 visit to South Korea following a massacre in Kwangju.4 Irwin Cotler, an international human rights lawyer, collaborated with Lois in launching a protest against apartheid in South Africa in 1985, she representing the Canadian Council of Churches and he as Nelson Mandela’s lawyer. They both chaired the International Centre for Human Rights and Development and served on the board of directors of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. Cotler was elected

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member of parliament in 1999, one year after Lois was appointed to the Senate, and they continued their collaboration on Parliament Hill, organizing the first joint parliamentary group on human rights. They also worked together in the World Federalist Movement on issues of religious freedom, anti-Semitism, and arms control, and, in 2014, both were honoured by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association for their public engagement. Like Axworthy, Cotler highlighted Lois’s passion, describing her as a driving force and an inspiration. In her work with others, she was always prepared for the task at hand and extremely well organized. She readily formed relationships across political, religious, and ideological divides. In his estimation, Lois has left a legacy for Canada and the world.5 This book is another way not only to honour Lois but also to continue her work. It was conceived during the Covid-19 pandemic. The unexpected shutdowns imposed by the virus awakened us to the reality of exhausted health care workers; addiction counsellors working round the clock; the dispossessed homeless; frightened women with fewer ways to escape violence at home; families cut off from one another; anguished workers out of a job; people grief-stricken and unable to share the loss of a loved one with others; refugees fleeing war, violence, conflict, or persecution detained interminably at borders; businesses angst-ridden over possible foreclosure; the unprecedented challenges of policing lockdowns, travel bans, and social distancing; and the tireless efforts of religious, political, and secular officials to try to manage and ease the pain this virulent disease inflicts on the world community. While Covid-19 imposed exceptional hardships, it also gave room for pause. It allowed time to reflect and contemplate the necessity to help alleviate misery in this world through active care of others. It was time to act. Consequently, we proposed to Lois that a festschrift be created as a tribute to her life and work. She accepted our offer, but on one condition – that the contributions not be about her but about work currently being carried out for the sake of the common good. With a swift stroke of the pen she gave us a list of contributors who in some way had shared and participated in her journey in faith and service. Some are academics, some are not; all are active in seeking justice and dignity for all, not just a few. Several do so as a result of their Christian faith and theological understanding, some as members of other faiths, and some as allies in the secular world. The volume editors understood at the start that a festschrift is usually plagued with perplexing communications, contact hurdles, and overlooked timelines, requiring much more than eight months to accomplish. But the first stage of this project was completed in this time. The contributors were

Editors’ Introduction

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cooperative and more than ready to acknowledge the rich legacy Lois had bequeathed to the church, the country, and the world. The title, For the Sake of the Common Good, inevitably invites the question: What is the common good? In one sense, the answer is simple. The common good means the good of all, in the sense that it is a good proper to and shared by the community as a whole and also by individuals within that community. It is not the good of just one or the good of a majority that excludes minorities. The common good cannot be achieved alone but requires that members of a community work together in order to attain it in any concrete form. On the other hand, the answer is complex and ultimately elusive because a definitive answer would require consensus on what constitutes the good to which everyone has a right. History shows that diverse societies have thought differently about what constitutes the good for all. In pluralistic Western society, for example, people have different ideas about what is worthwhile or what constitutes love, justice, equality, or social and political responsibility. Chances of coming to a common word on the common good are highly improbable. This book traces the ever-expanding reach of the common good as exemplified in the life and work of Lois Wilson. After much discussion, Lois and the editors agreed that the chapters fall into three primary categories – ecumenical and interfaith developments, faith and public policy, and human rights. Beginning with her Winnipeg United Church Social Gospel roots, then extending to the ecumenical life of the church  in Canada and from there to the global church, and ultimately embracing the whole inhabited world – the oikumene – where she engaged with leaders of other faiths in interfaith dialogue and cooperation, with politicians and others actively seeking to protect and extend human rights nationally and internationally, Lois always sought to respond in faith to God’s mission to the world God loves. In chapter 1, Allan Saunders, a United Church minister and lifelong friend of Lois, tells the story of her life and work from the perspective of her personal faith and theological understanding. Lois’s parents, Gard  and Ada Freemen, created a loving and welcoming home environment, and the centrality of home as a place of love and nurture continued in Lois’s marriage to Roy Wilson, a true partner in love and life, as they raised four children and at the same time pursued active ministries. Chris Ferguson, Lois’s long-time colleague in the United Church’s work in global and ecumenical affairs, writes from his vantage as general director of the World Communion of Reformed Churches and with extensive experience at all levels of ecumenical work. He opens part 1

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by tracing the development of ecumenism within Christian tradition, demonstrating how one of its contemporary expressions, transformative or whole world ecumenism, recovers the deeper classical and biblical layers of meaning where ecumenism connects with two other “eco” words – ecology and economics. The author of chapter 3, Erich Weingartner, was a member of a Government of Canada-ngo delegation led by Lois to North Korea in 2000. He had previously lived in North Korea for several years working with the World Food Programme. He illustrates the power of ecumenical church relations to assist in healing and reconciliation on the Korean Peninsula. The next two chapters focus on the contributions of women to interfaith understanding. Diana Eck met Lois at a World Council of Churches event in 1983. Now the lead of a research team at Harvard, the Harvard Pluralism Project, she describes the gathering of an interfaith group of women religious leaders in Toronto in 1988 and the particular perspective on interfaith dialogue that emerged from it  – speaking from lived experience, occurring on the margins, accepting change as normative, and recognizing interdependence. Alia Hogben is one such religious leader, a founding member and long-time chair of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women. In her chapter, she looks at Canadian society from the perspective of Canadian Muslim women, highlighting both ongoing challenges such as religious conservatism, patriarchy, and Islamophobia, and women’s contributions as interpreters of their faith and defenders of human rights. The final chapter in part 1 brings art into the conversation. In her extensive world travels, Lois has always made a point of visiting art galleries to see where the artists’ prophetic vision has led them. Sean Mulrooney shares Lois’s deep love of art and, in his teaching at Regis College, uses the Christian tradition of Visio Divina as a way to help individuals deepen their relationship with God and to engage with each other across different faith traditions through a guided meditation on a work of art. Lois’s collaborators – Christian, members of other faiths, and secular allies – expected her to bring her faith perspective to their joint endeavours. Thus, the chapters in part 2 explore the increasingly complicated relationship between faith and public policy. Lois’s close friend and ally Bill Blaikie, ndP member of parliament from 1979 to 2008, argues that Walter Rauschenbusch’s understanding of the Social Gospel remains a valuable guide for Christians who work with others to create global institutions able to protect the common good. The current globalized version of capitalism, in contrast, threatens the environment, workers’ rights, and social harmony in the name of investment. The next two

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authors share Lois’s close association with Emmanuel College at the Toronto School of Theology (tSt). Lois was ecumenist in residence at tSt from 2006 to 2009 and distinguished minister in residence at Emmanuel College from 2009 to 2019. In her chapter, Alexa Gilmour, a graduate of Emmanuel, discusses how the local United Church congregation where she serves as minister has undertaken God’s work in the world. By turning outward rather than inward, they have become a public witness for social justice. Betsy Anderson planned and implemented the continuing education program at Emmanuel while Lois was distinguished minister there. Anderson grew up within the Student Christian Movement at one of its cooperative houses, Howland House, and provides concrete examples of the ministry of the whole people of God, the laity called to be the church in the world. The following two chapters focus on faithful and just responses to the refugee crisis gripping our world. Mary Jo Leddy, like Lois a senior fellow at Massey College at the University of Toronto, speaks of the lessons in trust, faith, and gratitude that she has learned from asylum seekers and refugees at Toronto’s Romero House. She invites Canadians to see their borders as blessings, as creating a sphere of responsibility and hospitality, and not as barriers between “us” and “them.” Lloyd Axworthy works with refugees and displaced persons around the globe. He first met Lois when he was a member of the youth group she led at Atlantic Avenue United Church in Winnipeg where her husband was the minister. His entire career, he maintains, was shaped by the Social Gospel tradition. Axworthy argues that there are ways to strengthen international institutions such as the Un and to devise a model of global governance able to respond to the violence, ecological devastation, and civil wars that drive people to flee for their lives. The last three chapters on faith and public policy turn to the interconnections among faith, the economy, and ecology. Stephen Scharper first encountered Lois as a powerful preacher at a Good Friday service in 1982 and much later at Massey College. He identifies her as a “bioneer,” one who speaks of the Earth not as a resource but as home. He highlights some specific ways in which faith communities are responding to the climate crisis. He then turns to the fundamental perspectives and values faith offers to counter our current malaise and sustain lives of courage and commitment. The next two chapters provide historical examples of the destruction of a local, sustainable, and ecologically responsible economy. Stan McKay, an Indigenous Canadian and former United Church moderator, studied theology at United College where Lois’s father, Gard Freeman, had been dean. McKay touches on two aspects of Lois’s home life that shaped her: her parents welcomed people from

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everywhere – neighbourhood kids, immigrants, and students (including McKay) – into their Winnipeg home, and they also took their infant daughter on the family’s annual canoe and camping trips on Lake Superior. Lois naturally assumed an affectionate relationship with creatures of the wild and marine life abounding in these northern waters, and she has returned to this place for spiritual renewal throughout her life. McKay shows the devastating results of the opposite attitudes, lack of love for one’s neighbour and lack of respect for creation. He describes the destruction of his community’s traditional way of life as a result of colonial attitudes towards Canada’s First Nations and failure to reverence God in all Creation. Bertha Yetman, whose friendship with Lois developed while she was a doctoral student at Regis College at tSt and Lois was ecumenist in residence, recounts the exploitation – almost to the point of extinction – of the world’s largest cod fishery off the coast of Newfoundland. As executive director of the Newfoundland Inshore Fisheries Association, she witnessed the triumph of corporate greed over a sustainable local economy and the failure of Catholic leaders and faith communities to heed the church’s teaching on the common good. Part 3 addresses questions of human rights at the local, national, and international levels. Lois met Brent Hawkes at Canadian Council of Churches meetings where, in contrast to some church representatives, she welcomed him warmly. He and Kimberley Vance-Mubanga survey the state of human rights of LgBt+ people in the member countries of the Un, finding that, while the trend is going in the right direction, there are still many countries where consenting same-sex relationships are illegal. Religious organizations are sometimes foes and sometimes allies in the struggle to extend and protect LgBt+ human rights. Aruna Gnanadason met Lois in 1975 when both were on staff at the Ecumenical Christian Centre in Whitefield, India. In her chapter on the global women’s movement, she describes the involvement of women in India in struggles for human rights around the world and at home. But she also cautions against a universalism that discounts the diversity of women, threatening to divide feminists and thereby to weaken their impact. Noa Mendelsohn Aviv, like Gnanadason, calls for solidarity among human rights activists. Based on her experience in the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, an organization that Lois has served as a director, Mendelsohn Aviv gives concrete examples of where widely differing groups have come together to protect human rights and counters criticisms that exaggerate and even fabricate divisions between activists. Irwin Cotler, the author of the final chapter, was minister of justice and attorney general during Lois’s time as a senator. They worked

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closely together on raising the profile of human rights instruments internationally and in Canada. Cotler describes human rights abuses in five countries from the perspective of individuals imprisoned for their work to preserve democracy and human rights. He then issues a call to action, outlining Canadians’ responsibilities to stand in solidarity with those who have courageously advocated for the very democratic freedoms we enjoy. But if it is true, as all the authors in this collection would say, that Lois Wilson has left a legacy, who are her heirs and what have they inherited from her? Michael Blair, the author of the afterword, is one such heir. Now general secretary of the United Church of Canada, he worked with Lois when he was the executive director of the Christian Resource Centre in Regent Park. Blair moves the discussion of the common good firmly into the present, highlighting two current movements – the movement in support of a guaranteed livable income and Black Lives Matter. And he summarizes what Lois teaches and models in her lifelong work for the common good that can be applied in the present and into the future –building partnerships, working ecumenically, focusing on systemic barriers, and, above all, responding with compassion. He concludes with a quotation from Isaiah 58, the same chapter that Allan Saunders cites at the beginning of the first chapter, thus nicely bookending the collection. We hope that readers of For the Sake of the Common Good will find that they have met an extraordinary Canadian, gained a deeper understanding of the common good, and been inspired to seek it in their own time and place. At the highest level, the common good – a good proper to and shared by the community as a whole and also by individuals within that community – is a matter of government, the economy, and ecology. Members of the community must structure their government and economy in ways that promote and safeguard, rather than work against, the common good. Hence, the high-level focus of Blaikie, Axworthy, and Cotler that governments, beginning with Canada’s, counter the globalized version of capitalism, live up to their responsibilities to protect their own citizens, and, in Canada’s case, promote and protect the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Scharper reminds us that the entire planet, the Earth, is our home, indeed a sacred space of divine hospitality. The common good cannot be achieved alone but requires that members of a community work together in order to attain it in any concrete form. Thus, Mulrooney, Eck, Ferguson, and Gnanadason examine some of the ways in which divisions are being bridged. And, ultimately, because the global is also local, the work for the common

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good is illustrated in very specific places – Weingartner in the Korean Peninsula, McKay on First Nations territory in Manitoba, Yetman in fishing communities in Newfoundland, Anderson in specific lay-led Christian organizations, Gilmour in a Toronto United Church congregation, Hawkes and Vance-Mubanga in the formation of Rainbow Faith and Freedom to protect LgBt+ human rights in Canada and internationally, Hogben in the lives of Canadian Muslim women, Leddy in welcoming refugees and displaced persons to Toronto, and Mendelsohn Aviv in the work of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. Several authors and the volume editors refer to the Covid-19 epidemic currently circling the globe. Gabriel Garcia Márquez wrote about love in another epidemic in Love in the Time of Cholera. The authors in For the Sake of the Common Good write about love in the time of Covid-19, a love that seeks the welfare of the whole inhabited world.

Q The editors have many people to thank for their contributions and assistance. Lois Wilson was an enthusiastic ally in the formative stages as we developed the outline for the book. All the authors responded graciously to the invitation to contribute chapters in Lois’s honour, and they wrote thoughtfully and passionately about their work. They are preserving and carrying forward her legacy. We are particularly grateful that they did their best to keep to the publishing schedule – not an easy thing to do for people whose expertise and leadership are so much in demand. This publication would not have been possible without the financial assistance of the following individuals and organizations: Avanti International (Jae Yol Chong); Noel Daley, LLB; John Deacon; Emmanuel College, Toronto; Eva Kushner; Loretto Sisters, Toronto; Gail McNaughton; Massey College, Toronto; Presentation Sisters of the Blessed Virgin Mary, St John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador; Nancy Ruth; Rosedale United Church, Toronto; Sisters of Mercy, St John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador; the Society of Jesus, Montreal; the Sisters of St Joseph, London; Sandra Pitblado. We are grateful for their generosity. The editors received expert guidance throughout the publishing process from the staff at McGill-Queen’s University Press. We are grateful to Kyla Madden, acquisitions editor, and Kathleen Fraser, managing editor, for their support and guidance, and to Joanne Richardson for her expert copyediting.

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noteS 1 Lois Wilson, Turning the World Upside Down: A Memoir (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 1989), 16. 2 There are three related words from the Greek root oikos, meaning family or family home, and oikeo, meaning inhabit – ecology, economy, and ecumenism. For an excellent discussion of the Greek understanding of economy, see Dotan Leshem, “What Did the Ancient Greeks Mean by Oikonomia?,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 30, no. 1 (Winter 2016): 225–31. 3 Jean Wilson, telephone conversation with Kate Merriman, 5 March 2021. 4 Lloyd Axworthy, telephone conversation with Kate Merriman, 2 March 2021. 5 Irwin Cotler, telephone conversation with Kate Merriman, 8 March 2021.

1 Witness to God’s Lament and Laughter Personal Faith in Lois Wilson’s Life and Work Allan Saunders Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? (Isaiah 58:6 nrSv)

Prior to Lois’s first trip as moderator of the United Church of Canada (UCC) to South Korea in 1981, she had been briefed by Sang Chul Lee, UCC moderator from 1988 to 1990. He told her that while members in the two main Presbyterian churches in South Korea all believed in Jesus, at one church they expected to go to heaven; at the other, they expected to go to prison because of their pro-democracy work. Lois would be visiting the latter and thereby risking jail and worse.1 A bloody massacre had recently occurred in Kwangju, a city of 800,000 south of Seoul. Reacting to peaceful pro-democracy demonstrations, over seventeen thousand armed troops stormed the city, gunning down all resistance. All travel to Kwangju was forbidden. Nevertheless, Lois went. She saw the bullet holes, the dried blood, the wanted poster for a local minister. “When I met his wife, who had no idea whether he was dead or alive, I wasn’t free to tell her I had visited her husband two days previously in his attic hiding place.” A local church member, whose son had been brutally killed, took her to a cemetery full of recent graves. Many were unmarked because parents were afraid to claim the bodies of their children. The bereaved father asked Lois to offer a prayer. “I wanted to, but I was drowned in sorrow and paralyzed with horror. I needed the father to comfort me.” That evening, back at her Seoul hotel room, she called the front desk for messages. “Have you been to the countryside?” she was asked, four

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times. The next day, Lois went through airport security – in her shoe, a list of political prisoners to give to Amnesty International, in her parka pocket, a book listing people she had met illegally. If either item was found, she would be detained “without much thought for the niceties.” Lois visited, within a year, South Korea, South Africa, Chile, and Argentina – all countries suffering massive attacks against human rights. In South Africa, Beyers Naudé, under house arrest, briefed Lois in his kitchen and set up illegal meetings for her. Beyers had resigned as moderator of an all-white church and joined a small, unknown Black church. He confided, “The hardest thing [when held in custody] was listening to my friends being tortured in the next room.”2 Such champions of justice emboldened Lois. “I was set free to engage in this cloak and dagger activity because they were risking much more  … I was witnessing the Christian Church in mission in a way I had never experienced it in Canada.”3 Lois Miriam Wilson has heard the lament and laughter of God. This shapes how she engages all of life: her compassion for the downtrodden; her courage in pushing boundaries; her curiosity in exploring ever-new territory, wherever the Spirit blows.

Where it aLL Started Sometimes … a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying, “You are accepted. You are accepted by what is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know … Nothing is demanded of this experience … nothing but acceptance.”4 Theologian Paul Tillich’s words resonate with Lois. Her sense of acceptance began in her childhood home in Winnipeg and extended beyond it to include church and community. “I always was surrounded by people I trusted.” In the summer, her mother, Minnie Ada Freeman, invited all the neighbourhood kids to help harvest potatoes. In the winter, with ice rinks nearby, the warm kitchen filled with kids putting on skates. Those with no place to spend Christmas dinner were invited to her home. Lois knew everyone warranted a place at the table. Ada’s generous hospitality was legendary. At first, Arthur B.B. Moore (later president and vice-chancellor of Victoria University, Toronto, and moderator of the UCC) thought the Freeman home was an immigration shelter! E.G.D. (Gard) Freeman, Lois’s father, was a United Church minister who became a professor, then dean of theology, at United College. In addition

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to theology and ethics, he had broad interests: fixing cars; developing his own photos; counselling gay men; handing out contraceptive aids when it was illegal; hanging out at the Union hall, mingling with Tim Buck, the communist leader. Just three months old, Lois was tucked into a tikinagan5 complete with moss diapers for her first annual month-long, seven-member family canoe trip. Lois came to experience “a profound need for the solitude a wilderness lake can give, and for the silences and sounds of nature through which God sometimes brought new perspectives to my life … I have ever since returned to the natural world. For healing, just being. Essential to my spirituality.” Ada tailored the world to her own needs. Chair legs were cut down to allow her feet to touch the floor. She wore leather sneakers called “scampers” slit at the front for comfort, even at university receptions with visiting dignitaries. Clearly, fashion and public opinion did not concern Ada. Ada and Gard were focused on other matters – including creatively introducing scripture to children – which also began to matter to their youngest child. Lois inherited her parents’ pragmatic and independent spirit. Her sense of the sacred, her focus on community, her emphasis on scripture and fairness – all became solidly grounded through these beginnings.

engaging the SoCiaL goSPeL Lois’s student days at United College (now the University of Winnipeg) marked an exciting period of expanding horizons and lifelong friendships. With its focus on the Social Gospel, the worldwide Student Christian Movement (SCM) was especially engaging. Mobilized by Ted Scott (later primate of the Anglican Church of Canada) in 1944, Lois and fellow SCM members protested the government’s internment of Japanese Canadians in British Columbia. Ted became a theological mentor and lifelong friend. Through the SCM, Lois met several international visitors. K.H. Ting of the “Three Self” movement in China especially deepened her appreciation of insights gleaned from Christians worldwide.6 Romance was in the air, too! Active in the SCM was Lois’s future husband of fifty-five years, Roy F. Wilson.7 Roy was “an anchor for me” – someone who “knew who he was.” They created a partnership with similar values and outlooks, and any differences were used to complement each other. When Lois was ordained, they pioneered team ministry for fifteen years. Roy’s prime focus was on congregational life; Lois continued her focus on the broader community. “In-house” and “Out-house,” they joked.

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In 1967, in Thunder Bay, Lois spearheaded a creative, far-reaching ecumenical program called Town Talk.8 The entire city was invited to discuss diverse issues. A Catholic priest called her: “What you’re saying about Town Talk sounds very much like Vatican II. Would you come over and talk with our parishioners?” Years later, Lois’s community involvement led to her appointment as chancellor of Lakehead University in Thunder Bay. Shortly after Lois and Roy moved to Hamilton in 1969, their church building burned down. From the ashes emerged First Place, a joint church and community venture whose purpose was to support a diverse mix of people. This was just the beginning of Lois’s journey of Social Gospel in action shaped by key themes: scripture, feminism and resistance, worldwide ecumenism, and global human rights and reconciliation.

SCriPtUre “The Bible and its visionary stories are the most vital element in my own self-understanding and in my concept of community.”9 Lois asks, “Reared on these texts [Isaiah, Amos, Micah], how could Jesus not be committed to social and economic justice? These texts are the spiritual history of our community, and it is to that community that I want to belong.” Scripture came alive for Lois as she wrote notes in her Bible on why a passage was important to someone she has known. “To repeat that scripture today with others incorporates for me the communion of saints with my own life.” Curiosity about scripture and the world keeps her faith fresh and ever progressing.10 A new appreciation of the word “salvation” came when former general secretary of the World Council of Churches (WCC) Phillip Potter described it as “wide, spacious, liberated, free. Deliverance from disaster, integrity, and just what a human being ought to be.”11 Insightful explorations of scripture in Miriam, Mary and Me 12 and Stories Seldom Told 13 reflect Lois’s ongoing exploration of scripture, faith, and justice. Scripture passages and hymns have become Lois’s prayers. “The words of Psalm 51, ‘Let the bones dance, which you have broken,’ connect me immediately with Margaret Laurence and her book Jest of God,14 and the several ways all of us are a collection of broken bones, broken lives, but with promise of dancing and restitution … That sustains me.” Scripture challenges an individualistic faith understanding. Lois asks, “Why [do] some view prayer mainly as a petition for themselves … as if God was a benign wizard handing out goodies to the favoured

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few?”15 In sharp contrast, most prayers in the Jewish tradition are for the collective vocation of the community to be a blessing to humankind. And no faking prayer! “For me, praying has to be as emotionally engaging as making love – full of passion and self-giving.”

FeMiniSM and reSiStanCe In 1980, as the first woman moderator of the United Church of Canada, Lois created a stir when she offered this blessing: “May the blessing of the God of Sarah and Hagar as of Abraham, and the blessing of the Son, born of the woman Mary, and the blessing of the Spirit, who broods over us as a mother her children, be with you all. Amen”16 A fresh, brilliant feminist blessing. Yet Lois was not a born feminist. When she was a young adult, K.H. Ting asked her what she planned to do with her life. She answered, “Get married.” Ting countered that she had not answered his question. “Heavens,” she thought, “do you mean I have to do something else with my life besides get married?”17 Regarding ordination, all the men she consulted, including the then moderator, discouraged her, except for Roy. When Lois was ordained in 1965, she was still signing “Mrs R.F. Wilson.” However, after reading Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique later that year, she became a convert. What had happened in the previous fifteen years, following her graduation? “Marriage and four kids (Ruth, Jean, Neil, Bruce): three pastorates for Roy, with me as minister’s wife.” How had she ever got herself into this? “Up half the night with a baby, answering calls at the door, what to have for dinner, other kids coming for a sleepover, etc.” Her love for family has remained constant as the seeds of so much that would follow were gradually planted. Lois’s faith understanding, preaching style, and focus became guided by a host of feminists worldwide, including “Third World” women from the lowest castes.18 Indigenous women like Rigoberta Menchú of Guatemala helped her see the intersection of feminism with economic and political discrimination. Feminist insights were fostered as Lois presented at numerous conferences, notably “Transforming the Faiths of Our Fathers”19 at Harvard University and “Re-Imagining” in Minneapolis. The WCC’s Ecumenical Decade of Churches in Solidarity with Women was epic for churches worldwide. The idea “was hatched over the kitchen table of the WCC staff person on the women’s desk, and yours truly who was staying with her in Geneva.” When the Decade was proposed to the Central Committee, a male delegate rose to declare, “I have had no trouble with my wife.” Another male delegate stood up,

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saying, “You are asking for a decade. You don’t need that long. So we will give you a year.” Lois’s reaction? “I was so furious that apparently I rose and said, ‘We are not asking you for anything, we are announcing a Decade of churches in solidarity with women. Judging by comments, it will take at least a decade before some of you catch on to what we are doing,’ and I sat down. I don’t have a clear memory of this, but others do!” She believes the Decade resulted in a vastly enlarged understanding of feminist approaches for many church women. However, changes in both church and society were relatively minimal. In Uruguay, Lois met a Bible study group of impoverished women who saw themselves in the gospel stories about the bent-over woman and the persistent widow. She imagined how they might respond to other biblical stories. Hearing about the woman accused of adultery, they asked why no man was accused. They read about Shiphrah and Puah, the two Egyptian midwives who disobeyed Pharaoh’s order to kill male Hebrew newborns, claiming Hebrew women delivered so quickly they could not arrive in time. And Pharaoh believed them! Hoots of laughter arose among the Uruguayan women. These midwives and Queen Vashti are among Lois’s favourite women of the Bible, although few biblical passages telling women’s stories are included in the common lectionary. For Lois, Mary, the mother of Jesus, is not a model of pious passivity. Instead, Mary’s radical Magnificat (Luke 1:46–55) connects her to the strong women of scripture who preceded her. This view of Mary was reinforced for Lois when Polish workers scratched on the Lenin shipyard walls “Madonna is on strike,” the military junta in Argentina banned the Song of Mary (Magnificat) from national radio, and women of Asia announced, “We reject Mary’s hijacking by a wealthy church, for the consolation of the rich.”20 In her nineties, Lois wrote: “Feminism is about visioning the world through new eyes. That of women. Collaboration rather than strong individual effort  … [r]elates readily to Indigenous sharing circles model.21 An ongoing process. My discovery of feminism was a long process over many years, with various stagnant periods!!” Miriam, Lois’s middle name, honours another strong woman of scripture. This name denotes obstinacy, contrariness, and revolt.

WorLdWide eCUMeniSM The word “ecumenism” refers to the whole inhabited world – and that was what Lois had started inhabiting during her time in Hamilton, Ontario. She connected with the local synagogue, co-sponsored a public film series on human rights at Mohawk College, and counselled

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women contemplating abortion (although performing abortions was then illegal). Attending a WCC consultation in Crete in 1973, Lois experienced an incredible Pentecost. She encountered daring Christians from around the globe, was introduced to the theology and Easter practices of the Orthodox Church, and met with South African Blacks. Never again would Lois settle for denominational isolation from others. “What excited me in Crete was seeing the many facets of love  … Love as respect for human rights in South Africa  … as a Central American nation’s control over its destiny. Love as new life, as transcendence, as resurrection. So many people I met in the world church had been victims of hate or persecution or poverty, and yet, miraculously had continued to love.”22 After her experience in Crete, back in Hamilton, Lois invited a Muslim family recently expelled from Uganda to the Wilson home for dinner. The interaction stirred Lois to organize the first interfaith panel in Hamilton and join the city’s anti-racism committee. Later, she organized a local all-women interfaith group. Meeting monthly in their homes, they discussed how their faith traditions helped, or hindered, an understanding of what it means to be a woman. They discussed menstruation, intercourse, pregnancy, delivery, lactation, menopause – topics mostly not on the male agenda. An intensive three-month visit to India, her first time in a developing country, sealed Lois’s commitment to world engagement. Crete had set the agenda for her public Christian ministry for the next dozen years as president of the Canadian Council of Churches, moderator of the United Church of Canada, and one of seven presidents of the World Council of Churches. Lois shared her insights into world ecumenism at the Religious Leadership in Secular Society conference in Jerusalem, where she was a panellist with the chief rabbi of Europe and the archbishop of Milan.23 Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, was sitting in the front row. “Don’t know for sure whether he had his earphones turned on during my presentation!” jokes Lois. Latterly, Lois was Ecumenist in Residence at the Toronto School of Theology and Queen’s Theological College, and Distinguished Minister in Residence at Emmanuel College. “Make friends with a Jew, or a Buddhist, or a Muslim,” she tells young Christians today. “It is more important to know someone of another faith than to know about Islam, Buddhism, etc. You will find these people in your own neighbourhood. An individual whom you trust can open up all sorts of new paths for you.”

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gLoBaL hUMan rightS and reConCiLiation “Where do those who resist oppression and injustice find the strength to be bold?”24 Visiting Argentina during the “Dirty War,” Lois met illegally with the Mothers of May Square: mothers whose children had disappeared or been murdered.25 Every Thursday, they walked arm in arm before the government buildings of May Square, crying out for justice. Lois gave one Mother a pendant she had received from a Korean mother. The inscription read, “Jesus Christ is Lord” in Greek and “Set the Prisoners Free” in Korean. The Mothers decided each would wear it for two weeks in rotation. Lois realized that, “out of their individual suffering and pain, they had forged themselves into a caring community.” Another source of inspiration was theologian Dorothy Soelle’s image of birthing new life in society. Lois says: “Labour pains are not pointless. They are preparing for a new creation. The important thing is knowing when to push!! Because that is when we flex our muscles with all our strength and cooperate with creation in bringing about new life. So, with movements for social and economic transformation … Having been pregnant four times, I strongly relate to this.” In every country she visited, Lois met theologians whose theology emerged out of the life struggles of the vulnerable, not just out of a textbook. This gave her the theological rationale for opposing violence. In each country, she first visited the art galleries “because the art was an early warning re what was going on in that country.” During a later visit to Argentina, Lois led an ecumenical group of students on a visit to a base community of poor people evicted to make way for a superhighway. The students were busily snapping photos. Suddenly, one slum dweller stood up and read out Romans 8:24–5, in which Paul speaks about endurance. Then, he said, “Put down your cameras and join us.” The slum dwellers, one by one, spoke. “I scavenge the garbage dumps for food for us all.” “I look after the kids all morning.” “I fetch clean water from a distant well.” Lois declares, “They created hope,” and points to how the word “resurrection” and the phrase “stand up” arise from the same root word. Among Lois’s mentors were four Nobel Peace Prize winners  – Adolf Perez Esquivel (Argentina), Rigoberta Menchú (Guatemala), Kim Jae-dung (South Korea), and Desmond Tutu (South Africa) – and women living on the margins (whom she would always seek out upon arriving in a new location). Her human rights work was far-reaching, including monitoring elections and referendums in El Salvador, Taiwan,

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and Chile. She supported the WCC Programme to Combat Racism and its controversial provision of humanitarian aid to liberation movements. She declares that economic and political policies excluding the majority of the population are themselves a form of violence.26 “The violence I saw in South Africa,” Lois reflects, “was a knothole through which I could see into the violence of our own [Canadian] society.”27 Lois was called upon by the Canadian government to serve in various capacities: International Peace and Security, Refugee Status Advisory Committee, Chair of Rights and Democracy, Nuclear Waste Management Panel.28 Sometimes she was the lone voice raising ethical issues. An advocate of gay rights, Lois was invited by the University of Toronto Faculty of Law to give a lecture on sexual orientation. Her exegesis of the Old Testament story of Sodom and Gomorrah revealed that “all biblical references to Sodom had to do not with sex but with poverty and wealth!!” Lois was appointed to Canada’s Senate as a rare “independent” member. “My faith was always at the core of making decisions  … Every bill that came up had ethical questions associated with it. And I discovered that other senators expected me to speak from a faith basis.” Calling attention to the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, her first address to the Senate lifted up the aspirations of Indigenous people in northern Ontario.29 Once, when Lois and Roy went to British Columbia’s Government House for dinner with Lieutenant-Governor Iona Campagnolo, a staff member greeted Roy: “Senator Wilson!” Smiling, Roy gestured towards the actual senator. What did the actual Senator Wilson learn through her years in that position? Among numerous discoveries, she learned “that  … progressive people could be found in all parties, and mainstream churches were very suspicious of government.” Most important, she assisted in establishing the first standing committee of the Senate on human rights, and this committee still functions. In this world, Lois has seen countless cases of incalculable suffering caused by gross injustice and the denial of basic human rights. Therefore, she does not take forgiveness and reconciliation lightly. South Africa’s truth and reconciliation process was groundbreaking, a signal to the world of a new way of dealing with historic injustices. “The fact that the public narrative of sad events and historic injustice was submitted by the ‘losers’ and not the dominant class was astounding.” “Justice has to come before forgiveness. The ‘losers’ [victims] must be the ones to say whether justice has been satisfied and the long path to reconciliation begun.”30

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Lois served as special envoy to Sudan and led Canada’s first parliamentary delegation to North Korea in 2000. “Ottawa civil servants warned me I would be searched, etc., on arrival. Instead, I was greeted with wine and roses and ushered into the viP lounge. Due to the long memory of North Koreans for the Canadian missionaries who had done stellar work in North Korea, especially around health care. So, on the strength of that historic memory, we could go to all parts of North Korea, where usually foreigners were not allowed.” She has been a tireless advocate for the reunification movement for the Korean Peninsula. Recalling the diplomatic relations between North Korea and Canada established in 2001, Lois would later write in the Ottawa Citizen, encouraging Canada to be present and engaged in North Korea rather than continuing to follow the United States’s approach: “the well-known and failed tactic of all sticks and no carrots.”31

endingS and BeginningS On the subject of death, Lois enjoys her husband Roy’s response when their minister asked him which scripture he would like for his funeral: “Surprise me.”32 Now in her nineties, Lois remains open to surprises, reflecting about “a profound thankfulness that I have experienced Life in so many dimensions. Wow! I have no certainty re what the next stage is, but I hunch there iS a next stage of some kind!!! If I am wrong, so be it, as I have had the gift of life here. The United Church of Canada creed says ‘in life, in death, in life beyond death, we are not alone.’ It doesn’t specify details re life beyond death, but simply affirms it … I have no idea what it will be like, but I do not doubt that the one who created us is capable of creating life beyond death, in some form or another.” When her father died, Lois wrote, “I had an extraordinary sense of the mystery of both birth and death being cut from the same cloth.”33 She now reflects further: “The body slows down and one grows accustomed to limitations. Then the death itself, as I have observed it, is somewhat like a birth: some hard work, whether it be a long illness or a short time such as a heart attack, it still is hard. Then the delivery. The sadness at parting mixed with thanksgiving at what WaS, and a certain expectation of a new creation of some sort beyond our imagination.”34 Lois hopes our highly individualistic, death-denying culture will discover “the community of saints.” She writes about the “cool saints” she has known,35 and she still feels their strengthening presence long after their final breath. Engaging both life and death, Lois draws upon the wisdom of a poem by Hafiz of fourteenth-century Persia:

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Every Child has known God. Not the God of names, Not the God of don’ts, Not the one who never does Anything weird, But the God who knows only four words, And keeps repeating them, saying: “Come dance with me. Come dance.”36 Resurrection and new life come in many forms. When Namibia was liberated on 21 March 1990, Lois was there. She knew most of the newly sworn-in cabinet because the WCC had been working with them to dismantle apartheid for years. Among the speeches, “Tutu outdid them all  … ‘God is really laughing this time. You thought God had forgotten you. No. God went to work, and today we hear the laughter of God, as Namibia is free. South Africa will be next, and I hope you will all come when our independence is achieved.’” Lois paints the exuberant scene of overwhelming joy: “There were tears in my eyes as young people danced for joy, doves were released, balloons sent off, and ‘a people who were no people’ became a liberated people. Dizzy Gillespie’s cheeks were puffed up like grapefruit that night as he made beautiful music on his trumpet and led us in celebrating the historic event that was absolutely pivotal for South Africa and the healing of its peoples. That night, I too heard the delighted laughter of God.”37 Yes, Lois Miriam Wilson has heard the lament and laughter of God. She has known the labour pains and the birth cries of new life. Throughout her life, she has leapt to her feet, welcoming God’s invitation, “Come Dance with Me.” For you shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. (Isaiah 55:12 nrSv)

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noteS 1 Lois Wilson, Turning the World Upside Down: A Memoir (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 1989), 80–7. 2 Lois Wilson, Out of the Box (Toronto: self-published, 2019), 124. 3 An e-mail exchange with the author, summer of 2020, likewise for other quotations not footnoted. 4 Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948), 19. 5 Moss bag cradleboard used by Indigenous people to keep a baby safely wrapped. 6 Self-governance, self-support, self-propagation. See Lois Wilson, I Want to Be in That Number (Toronto: self-published, 2014), 91–4. Their friendship continued as Ting later became chair of the China Christian Council. Ting gave Lois a Chinese wood carving of the Last Supper, which has always hung in a place of honour in her living room. 7 Roy and other family and friends are featured in Wilson, I Want to Be in That Number, 132–5. 8 Wilson, Turning the World Upside Down, 46–50. 9 Lois M. Wilson, Streams of Faith (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 2006), 10. 10 Wilson, Streams of Faith, explores many faith topics. 11 Similar quote in Wilson, Streams of Faith, 102. 12 Lois Miriam Wilson, Miriam, Mary and Me (Winfield, BC: Wood Lake, 1992). 13 Lois Miriam Wilson, Stories Seldom Told (Winfield, BC: Northstone, 1997). 14 Wilson, Turning the World Upside Down, 229–37; Wilson, I Want to Be in That Number, 69–73. 15 Wilson, Streams of Faith, 75. 16 Voices United (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1996), 428. Lois gives permission for amending this historical blessing to suit other contexts. 17 Wilson, Turning the World Upside Down, 20. 18 Several of Lois’s feminist mentors are featured in Wilson, I Want to Be in That Number. 19 See Anne Braude, editor, Transforming the Faiths of Our Fathers: Women Who Changed American Religion (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2004). 20 Wilson, I Want to Be in That Number, 50–1. 21 In a telephone conversation with Kate Merriman on 12 March 2021, Lois acknowledged that her interpretation of feminism as naturally leading to collaboration is not shared by all feminists or scholars. This comment reflects her experience of feminism and the perspective on it that she would defend. 22 Wilson, Turning the World Upside Down, 63–4.

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23 Lois, the chief rabbi of Europe, and a Roman Catholic bishop were also presenters at a Choisir gathering of female legislators. 24 Wilson, Turning the World Upside Down, 93. 25 Ibid., 89–90. 26 Ibid., 118–20. 27 Ibid., 125. 28 Lois also provided leadership in the World Federalist Association, including meetings in The Hague in 2004 and in Montreux, Switzerland, at the sixtieth anniversary of World Federalism in 2007. 29 Canada, Debates of the Senate, 1st session, 36th Parliament, vol. 137, 22 October 1998, 2042–3. 30 For an account of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, see Stan McKay, chapter 13, this volume. 31 Wilson, Out of the Box, 100. 32 Wilson, I Want to Be in That Number, 132. 33 Wilson, Turning the World Upside Down, 228. 34 Lois favours assisted dying with one’s choice clearly articulated beforehand. 35 See Wilson, I Want to Be in That Number. 36 Hafiz, Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West, trans. Daniel Ladinsky (New York: Penguin Compass, 2002). 37 Wilson, Streams of Faith, 75–6.

Pa r t o n e

Ecumenical and Interfaith Developments

2 Transformative Ecumenism God’s Mission and the Whole Inhabited World Chris Ferguson

introdUCtion The understanding of God’s mission (Missio Dei) as the justice- and peace-centred healing and reconciliation of the whole inhabited world (oikoumene) has been profoundly shaped by, and has in turn contributed to, the shaping of the radical and transformative stream of the modern ecumenical movement. Ecumenism is at the very beating heart of the gospel and is a necessary and urgent expression of our understanding of God’s purpose and saving action in history and creation. Far beyond any church-centred understanding of ecumenism as interdenominational cooperation or even the more profound vision of the integral unity of all Christians expressed in one visible church, Lois Wilson, in her life and ministry, has embraced, incarnated, and to a large measure given fresh expression to what her own denomination, the United Church of Canada, has called “Whole World Ecumenism”  – the passionate, transformative understanding of God’s mission being to and for the whole inhabited world. The 1997 United Church of Canada document Mending the World: An Ecumenical Vision for Healing and Reconciliation begins with a story told by Rabbi Abraham Heschel. Heschel says that “when God, the Holy One, gets up in the morning, God gathers the angels of heaven around and asks this simple question: ‘Where does my creation need mending today?’” And then Heschel continues, “Theology consists of worrying about what God worries about when God gets up in the morning.”1 This story embodies the paradigm shift to refocusing theology on the Missio Dei to all of creation and the whole Earth community. In

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Jewish theological terms this is Tikkun Olam, “mending the world.” On this understanding, ecumenism is global in reach and breadth and mission-centred, and that mission is the Missio Dei, God’s mission of justice, peace, healing, and reconciliation. Although ecumenism can mean much more, it can never mean less than a transformative mission engagement for the whole inhabited Earth. In this chapter, I explore the tradition of oikoumene from its roots in the Greek world to today. “Tradition,” from the Latin tradere, to hand over, surrender, deliver, or entrust, carries within it the notion of development. In the very act of receiving what is being handed on to us, we adapt it to our own time and then entrust it to those who follow us, knowing that they will do the same.

the rootS oF eCUMeniSM Oikoumene is a Greek word with the root oikos. Oikos means family, house, or household, and from it English derives the words “economy” (oikos and nemein [management]) and “ecology” (oikos and legein [to count, speak of, study]), hence the science of the relationship of living things to their environment. Oikoumene means the whole inhabited world. The meaning of the terms oikos and oikoumene varied during the Greek period but generally meant male-led households, including large estates, and the Greek world as distinguished from the barbarian. In the Roman era oikoumene meant the Roman Empire and subjects of the Empire. The early church picked up the geo-political meaning that restricted “ecumenical” to the area controlled by the Greco-Roman Empires. It was often synonymous with empire. As described in the United Church’s document, “The Greek word  … occurs fifteen times in the New Testament, whose writers used it to describe … more specifically the Greco-Roman world.” However, as Christianity spread and matured, theological differences emerged, and the question of right belief  – orthodoxy  – became prominent. Church councils were convened to determine what beliefs all Christians held in common, and they issued what have come to be known as the ecumenical creeds. Thus, “by the year 381 Ce [oikoumene’s] meaning had been more sharply defined to refer to that which is accepted as authoritative for the whole Church, and by the sixteenth century it had ceased to have any meaning other than a narrow ecclesiastical one, referring to councils, creeds, and the Patriarchate of Constantinople.”2

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the Modern eCUMeniCaL MoveMent The modern ecumenical movement was born as a movement rooted in and inseparable from Christian mission. The task of proclaiming and realizing the life-giving gospel of Jesus Christ, many church leaders believed, could only be accomplished through cooperation and common cause focused on reaching out to and addressing the needs of people and of the world beyond the limits and constraints of church structures and denominationalism. This is an ecumenism focused on the world, not on the church; on life and transformation, not on structures, doctrines, and Christian institutional identity. The Student Christian Movement (SCM) and its global expression, the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF), were among the seedbeds and precursors to the modern ecumenical movement. Significantly, they were not expressions of denominations but mission-oriented student and youth movements responding to the need for common and cooperative witness and service. They illustrate both the global and world-focused origins of transformative ecumenism as well as the intrinsic relationship with Christian mission. This was particularly significant in the face of the great needs of a rapidly changing world in the last part of the nineteenth century, a world situation that only became more dramatic and tortured with the ravages of the First World War. (And as the twentieth century raged on, the oppressive realities of imperialism and colonialism with which the world missionary movement was entwined became exposed and required a revitalization of God’s purpose for this creation groaning in travail [Romans 8].) In formal terms, the modern ecumenical movement is often presented as the conciliar expression and the merger of three movements or streams. In 1910, Protestant and Anglican missionary societies, almost all from North America and northern Europe, convened the Third World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh. No Orthodox or Roman Catholic representatives were invited. John R. Mott, an American Methodist and leader of the Student Volunteer Movement for Christian Missions, Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCa), and the WSCF, chaired the meeting. Joseph Oldham, born to Scottish parents in India and a leader in the SCM, was the main organizer. He was also influential in the formation of the World Council of Churches in 1948. The second stream was the Faith and Order movement. After the 1910 World Missionary Conference, Charles Brent, an American Episcopal bishop, proposed a conference on matters of faith and order. Planning was complex and interrupted by the First World War, but the first conference finally took

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place in 1927 in Lausanne, Switzerland, with delegates from Protestant, Anglican, Old Catholic, and Orthodox churches. Roman Catholics were invited but declined to attend. The third stream was the Life and Work movement. Nathan Söderblom, Church of Sweden archbishop, encouraged Christians to work together for peace, and in 1919 helped to convene the World Alliance for Promoting Friendship among the Churches. Under his leadership, the World Conference of Life and Work took place in Stockholm in 1925. There were no delegates from the Roman Catholic or Pentecostal churches, however. These developments all led to the formation of the World Council of Churches in 1948 and have given birth to specific church identities such as the United Church of Canada in 1925. The modern ecumenical movement has found its expression as interchurch cooperation after the world wars; in the WCC’s Faith and Order Commission, which has Roman Catholic members and continues the tradition of the Faith and Order movement; in conciliar ecumenism; in the Second Vatican Council; in the explosive growth of local and national councils of churches; in the World Day of Prayer; and in theological dialogues that attempt to overcome historic divisions. Not surprisingly, many focus on ecumenism as detached from mission and as about inter-Christian relations even when it is clear that some of that cooperation is in service of others. Others in the ecumenical movement are shifting the paradigm past local, national, church-centred, or inter-Christian concepts of God’s mission, forcing a robust engagement with the most profound understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ as peace, justice, reconciliation, and healing for God’s entire creation (Micah 6:8, Luke 4:16ff, John 10:10).

tranSForMative eCUMeniSM: eCoLogY, eConoMY, and eCUMene According to Psalm 24:1, “the Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the oikoumene and all that dwell therein.” Transformative ecumenism is the radical movement that reactivates the subversive memory of the Bible to focus on God’s liberating activity in the world. This requires a permanent recontextualization of God’s mission and challenges  the limited horizon of interchurch and inter-Christian cooperation. The  stream of “whole world ecumenism” within the ecumenical movement has embraced the shift to a world-centred Missio Dei theological commitment. While the exploration of Missio Dei is beyond the scope of this chapter, we can see that by insisting that God’s mission is engagement with the whole inhabited Earth, the church and the believer are required to grapple with the historical reality in which

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they are immersed far beyond religious practice, which leads in turn to a deepened encounter with God and understanding of the Missio Dei. One example of how the focus on the crises afflicting the whole inhabited Earth enriches our understanding of mission and ecumenism is found in Konrad Raiser’s short book on the ecumenical response to globalization, For a Culture of Life. He draws out the connections between oikoumene and ecology. The psalmist, along with the Greeks, made the then common distinction between the Earth, on the one hand, and the world, those places that are inhabited, on the other. Raiser observes that “most of the attempts to interpret and bring alive the ecumenical vision go back to the original meaning of oikoumene, which is ‘the whole inhabited earth.’” However, the contemporary climate crisis, which Raiser argues is due to “the affliction of globalization,” requires us to probe more deeply into the thick and layered understanding of oikoumene that goes beyond the simple description of geographical scope, and “this leads to a new understanding of oikos, i.e., as habitat or habitation for all life. The earth is the common living space for all living things, ‘the household of life.’”3 To show the profundity and valence of the biblical concept, Raiser cites Larry Rasmussen, the American social ethicist: “Habitat is the core meaning of all eco words: economy, ecology, ecumenicity itself. oikos – earth as a vast but single household of life … Without adequate hospitable habitat, nothing lives. Not only humans but all life forms need carefully fitted habitats.”4 The other eco word, economy, has perhaps the most fraught history of the three. As contemporary economics developed in the twentieth century, economics was held to be distinct from ethics and neutral with respect to ends. In contrast, the ancient Greek writers held that the main purpose of economic rationality (i.e., wise management) was to advance the good life as they saw it, that is, to support the life of philosophy and involvement in public life. “That oikonomia is so rooted in ethical judgments raises questions about whether or in what ways modern economics should be linked to a more explicit consideration of what constitutes a good life.”5 In the New Testament, oikonomia is primarily seen as the management of a household or estate, most often belonging to someone else, and as stewardship, including of God’s grace. Thus, understanding the biblical depth of the meaning of oikoumene leads one to embrace ecology, economics, politics, and all aspects of life and culture as matters of faith. The ecumenical must therefore embrace the ecological and the entire creation now in peril due to the overreach of neoliberal capitalism and ideologies of domination. This wider view of the Missio Dei was evidenced in emerging ecumenical statements such as the Accra Confession, adopted at the

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2004 General Council of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches. This alliance held a uniting general council with the Reformed Ecumenical Council in 2010 to create the World Communion of Reformed Churches and, at the same time, to re-endorse the Accra Confession. In the words of that confession, there is “a dramatic convergence between the suffering of the people and the damage done to the rest of creation.”6 In 2015, Pope Francis issued his second encyclical, Laudato Si’,7 which also lifted up the threat to our common habitat caused by the current economic order and linked human oppression and suffering to the “groaning of all creation” (Romans 8:22) under the current world order. Thus, the other eco words, “economy” and “ecology,” are foundational to sustaining life in our common household. Whole world ecumenism embraces the relationship between economic and ecological justice and sees the flourishing of economies of life as deeply embedded in the Missio Dei.

WhoLe WorLd eCUMeniSM todaY The structure adopted by the World Communion of Reformed Churches may serve to illustrate the creative tensions within the global ecumenical movement. “Called to communion and committed to justice,” the organization has two offices: (1) theology and communion, which is responsible for official dialogues with other religious organizations, scholarly work, and the bi-annual Global Institute of Theology, and (2) justice, which promotes human rights and economic and ecological justice. Thus, dialogue and cooperation move along two tracks, and failure to reach agreement on matters of theology may make it difficult to achieve common action on urgent justice issues. This tension can be illustrated in three areas: interfaith dialogue, the place of women in the church and society, and gender (LgBt+) equality. Dialogue between the different religions of the world has certainly grown as populations migrate, and, for example, countries that historically had tiny Muslim populations are seeing large Muslim communities take root; opportunities and means of communication and travel have grown exponentially; and, in some quarters at least, there is strong interest in mutual understanding and joint action. The theological underpinning was expressed as early as 1966 by the United Church of Canada when it affirmed in Report of the Commission on World Mission that, “while maintaining the primacy of Christ, the Church should recognize that God is creatively and redemptively at work in the religious life of all of mankind [sic].”8

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However, moving from dialogue for mutual understanding to more fulsome interreligious cooperation and common cause for transformation and justice is impeded by several factors. Despite the active participation of most church world communions, the World Communion of Reformed Churches, and the Vatican in both interfaith and interreligious action, rampant anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and the religious justification of ideologies of superiority and domination hinder this dimension of transformative ecumenism. Beyond the urgent call to free ecumenism from a narrowly church-centred inter-Christian endeavour and to embrace the deep, radical, biblical understanding of God’s mission to the whole inhabited world, we need to face certain ecumenical truths. One has been the uptick in disunity and division within the historic expression of Christianity around the full participation of women in the life of the churches. The struggle for the equal status of women and against patriarchy in church and society continues. There have been important ecumenical efforts on this front. Emulating the United Nations’ Decade for Women (1975–85), the World Council of Churches launched the Ecumenical Decade of  the Churches in Solidarity with Women in 1988. It was addressed to churches and to women, especially at the local level; called on churches to recognize the contributions of women; and focused on the situation of women in both the churches and their societies as well as the churches’ participation in seeking justice for women in society. As a result of the decade, there was a growing understanding that patriarchy is not part of the Gospel, recognition that women are in fact essential for the life of any church, and an expansion of women’s roles in the churches. At the same time, unanimity on the equality of women in the church and how that is to be expressed remains elusive, with some denominations ordaining women and calling them to the highest positions of leadership (for example, Linda Nicholls is the primate of the Anglican Church of Canada), while others do not permit women to be ordained. These differences strain ecumenical relations and even threaten schisms within denominations. Meanwhile, such issues as violence against women – rape, domestic abuse, human trafficking – remain pervasive around the globe, pointing to the urgent need for a united and effective response. Similarly, there is an urgent need to promote the human rights and equality of LgBt+ people. As detailed in Hawkes and Vance-Mubanga’s chapter in this volume, many Un member nations continue to criminalize same-sex relations between consenting adults, impose legal barriers on freedom of expression of sexual identity or sexual orientation, and

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provide no protection against discrimination. LgBt+ members and allies within various Christian denominations and world faiths are working to achieve full recognition within their own religious bodies. Within the Christian Church, some communions have defended LgBt+ human rights  – for example, the United Church of Canada argued that the Canadian government should legalize same-sex marriages – and many have taken steps in the direction of full recognition of the equality of LgBt+ within the church. But again, deep divisions remain between churches and within churches on this matter, making concerted effort to defend LgBt+ rights much more difficult. At the same time, there are new and vigorous rapprochements and startling synergies in the ecumenical world. In 1999, the Roman Catholic Pontifical Council for Promoting Unity and the Lutheran World Federation produced and agreed to the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, declaring that theological conflicts of the sixteenth century no longer have the power to divide them.9 Subsequently, the World Methodist Council, the World Communion of Reformed Churches, and the Anglican Consultative Council agreed to the declaration. In fact, there is a new determination for Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Anglicans to find stronger common witness aided in large measure by the bold leadership of Pope Francis. The great divide between the evangelical and the ecumenical movement is both widening and hardening, and at the very same time showing new paths towards common witness in the face of massive world crises. The formation of the Global Christian Forum (gCF), which provides a space of encounter and dialogue between and among the churches of the WCC, the Orthodox, Protestants, Anglicans, the World Evangelical Alliance, the World Pentecostal Fellowship, and Roman Catholics is a significant sign of hope. An idea first floated by Konrad Raiser while he was general secretary of the World Council of Churches in 1998, the gCF has convened regional consultations in Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and North America. The third gCF Global Meeting took place in Bogota in 2018. The gCF has no members per se and attempts to function purely as a forum for dialogue and developing mutual understanding. Yet it is increasingly motivated by a great desire to expand its horizons towards common witness in service of the Gospel.10 Yes, all this while other divides deepen. And then, too, there was the confluence of voices and common concerns at the WCC Commission on World Mission and Evangelism’s World Mission Conference in Arusha, Tanzania, in 2018. Christian communities more known for tension than harmony were able to

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join together under the banner of transforming discipleship to issue a call that included this description of the world situation: Despite some glimmers of hope, we had to reckon with deathdealing forces that are shaking the world order and inflicting suffering on many. We observed the shocking accumulation of wealth due to one global financial system, which enriches the few and impoverishes many (Isaiah 5:8). This is at the root of many of today’s wars, conflicts, ecological devastation, and suffering (Timothy 6:10). This global imperial system has made the financial market one of the idols of our time. It has also strengthened cultures of domination and discrimination that continue to marginalize and exclude, forcing some among us into conditions of vulnerability and exploitation. We are mindful that the people on the margins bear the heaviest burden.11 Here we see a strong common recognition of the threats to life itself in the oikoumene that God loves. There are many such stirrings even as the religious dimension of conflicts become more frequent and acute; many signs of common cause among people of faith and people of good will in increasingly broad coalitions of social movements for transformation and justice are rising up in defence of life and creation. In terms of the oikumene, as a human family we were just beginning to open our collective eyes to world-shaking crises and unparalleled threats to the life and the future of the planet. We were just on the edge of naming the ravages of empire being revealed in a system of global apartheid that pits the interest of 1 per cent of the world’s people against the other 99 per cent. Just as we were grasping the extent of the massive woundedness of living in a world fallen among thieves (John 10:10), just as most people and certainly many, many people of faith seized the truth of the rising racism, toxic nationalism, and economic and ecological and gender injustice, then came the Covid-19 pandemic. At first it obfuscated and covered up and distracted from the interlocking global crises. At first it was called the great leveller, showing we were all in the same boat. But now the truth is out, the Covid-19 pandemic is the great revealer, in theological terms it is “apocalyptic” in nature. It has unveiled, revealed, exposed, made plain, and shown the truth of the unjust, broken world in which we live and has shown that the oikumene is at risk; the truth is that the “old normal” taken from us was itself unjust, destructive, and unsustainable for people and planet.

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ConCLUSion: tranSForMative eCUMeniSM in a WorLd FaLLen aMong thieveS The current world situation finds the ecumenical movement and its official expressions weak and divided. Dwindling resources, shrinking numbers, aging members, and serious internal divisions over issues of human sexualities and political orientation have left many of the traditional ecumenically minded churches in the West weakened, and the driving vision of conciliar ecumenism and visible church unity has waned. The post-globalization disintegration of multilateralism and coherent global governance has left this weakened global ecumenical movement without influence or serious interlocutors. All too often, the massive challenges of climate justice, economic injustice, poverty, patriarchy, and unparalleled forced human displacement find church structures fighting for institutional survival and struggling to move beyond the rhetoric of justice and peace to true transformative and world-mending ecumenism. There are serious attempts at global and local levels, but a true metanoia is required. The basic commitment to interfaith dialogue must be deepened to radical interreligious cooperation for transformative coalitions for justice and peace. The growing theological consciousness now must shift from theological and ecclesiological agreement to radical alliances for common cause for the sake of the world. The churches must become, in the words of German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the church for others. As recent WCC documents have said, this requires us to orient mission from below; to follow the leadership of the marginalized and the dispossessed; to see “mission from the margins” in common cause with social and poor peoples’ movements. At its 2017 General Council meeting, the World Communion of Reformed Churches laid the foundations for a strategic vision firmly rooted in the transformative ecumenical spirit. The strategic plan that emerged is entitled “Confessing the God of Life in a World Fallen among Thieves.” Fundamental to this vision is the call to all Christians to embrace both unity and justice and thus to follow God’s lead in focusing on transformation of the world. So, we now see that the radical vision of whole world ecumenism is more relevant than ever as creation continues to groan and the suffering of people and the planet cry out. It is clear that whatever else ecumenism means, it must also mean vigorous service to God’s mission to the whole inhabited Earth. This vision continues to call us, unsettle us, and urge us forward with a passion to serve the God of Life.

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noteS 1 United Church of Canada, Mending the World: An Ecumenical Vision for Healing and Reconciliation, 36th General Council, 1997, available at http://ecumenism.net/archive/docu/1997_ucc_mending_the_world.pdf. 2 Ibid., 5. 3 Konrad Raiser, For a Culture of Life: Transforming Globalization and Violence (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 2002), 160–1. 4 Larry Rasmussen, Earth Community, Earth Ethics (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1996), 91. 5 Dotan Leshem, “What Did the Ancient Greeks Mean by Oikonomia?,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 30, no. 1 (Winter 2016): 226. 6 The Accra Confession, http://wcrc.ch/accra. 7 Pope Francis I, Laudato Si’, (Rome: Vatican, 24 May 2015), no. 5. 8 Report of the Commission on World Mission, Record of Proceedings, United Church of Canada, 1966. 9 Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church, Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, https://www.lutheranworld.org/jddj. 10 Global Christian Forum, https://globalchristianforum.org/category/bogota/ page/2. 11 Commission on World Mission and Evangelism, Conference on World Mission, https://www.oikoumene.org/resources/publications/conference-onworld-mission-and-evangelism-2018.

3 Peace and Reconciliation on the Korean Peninsula An Interchurch Project Erich Weingartner

The more you know of church history, the less likely you are to claim that Christians are particularly adept at promoting peace and reconciliation. The case of Korea does not offer an exception to this generalization. Even before the occupation and annexation of Korea by Japan in 1910, Christian churches practised a form of territorial division in order to avoid conflict among missionaries from Canada, the United States, and Australia. American missionaries in particular tended to be theologically and politically conservative, willing to cooperate with landowners and Japanese administrators. Canadian missionaries tended to be more liberal and open to the nationalist aspirations of Koreans suffering under Japanese colonialism. Korean churches that emerged from these missionary movements tended to promote a multitude of social and political orientations. After Soviet and American occupational powers divided Korea in 1945, pre-existing tendencies hardened into an ideological split between pro-socialist and anti-communist Christian communities. That Christian churches have been part of the problem on the divided Korean Peninsula was eloquently admitted in the groundbreaking 1988 Declaration of the Churches of Korea on National Reunification and Peace by the National Council of Churches in Korea (nCCK). In a substantial section entitled “A Confession of the Sins of Division and Hatred,” the document highlights the propensity of Korean Christians to harbour “a deep hatred and hostility toward the other side.” Although the Korean homeland was divided by foreign powers, the statement reads, “we have hated, deceived and murdered our compatriots of the same blood, and have justified that sin by the political and ideological rationalization of our deeds.” On both sides of the peninsula, the

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declaration continues, Christians “have made absolute idols of the ideologies enforced by their respective systems.”1 When war broke out seventy years ago, Korea became a battleground for ideological supremacy between the two emerging superpowers – their first proxy hot war in what was euphemistically called the Cold War era. Churches often framed this as a contest between the Christian West and godless communism. The fledgling United Nations, under strong American influence, sided with South Korea, authorizing a multinational “police action” to punish the North for its invasion of the South. The US commanded a multinational military force that continues to operate under the United Nations flag to this day. The churches, including the World Council of Churches (WCC), supported this stance wholeheartedly. There was a naive assumption that the United States necessarily stood on the side of freedom, democracy, and justice. That support had consequences not only in Korea but also in China. It led to the withdrawal of Chinese churches from the WCC, which meant that both the North Korean and the Chinese churches became isolated from the ecumenical community for almost four decades. Those who remained in the North had to struggle for their existence completely cut off from their sisters and brothers in the South and the rest of the world. The Korean War claimed millions of lives between 1950 and 1953. With the signing of an armistice, the hot war was put on hold. But an armistice is not a peace, and the hostilities of the Cold War have not ceased. The world’s largest armies still threaten each other across the so-called “demilitarized” zone that dissects this beautiful country. Peace and people’s well-being continue to be sacrificed in favour of military prowess. The pain of this tragedy is borne primarily by Koreans, but the illness that caused it is global. Mistakes of history cannot be undone. But they can be overcome if the right lessons are learned. What the ecumenical community learned from its mistake is that churches must build bridges, not pass judgment or carry out sentences. That lesson took quite some time to sink in, however, because the more progressive sectors of South Korean churches were kept busy struggling for human rights and democracy on their own side of the divided peninsula. The political leaders that the United States supported in the South were hardly paragons of freedom and democracy. In the name of protecting the capitalist Republic of Korea (roK) from the communist Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (dPrK), the Korean people’s aspirations were brutally repressed on both sides. A succession of military dictatorships in South Korea crushed all opposition and imprisoned and tortured students, workers,

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and clergy. The notorious National Security Law (nSL), still in force, prohibited any contact with North Korea. Even discussion about peace or reunification was proscribed. After a brief period of hope following President Park Chung Hee’s assassination in 1979, a coup engineered by General Chun Doo Whan – with tacit consent from American authorities – established yet another military dictatorship that would last another decade. Massive military force was used to crush a democratic uprising in the city of Kwangju in May 1980. An estimated two thousand people were killed. The future roK president and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Kim Dae-Jung was arrested, tried, and sentenced to death for allegedly instigating the rebellion. These events alarmed churches, both local and international. The WCC Central Committee sent a high-profile pastoral delegation to Korea in January 1981. The delegation met with church leaders as well as government and military officials. Its members were not permitted to venture outside of Seoul, and opportunities to meet local church groups and families of political prisoners were severely limited. The only woman in the delegation, the Right Reverend Lois Wilson, at that time moderator of the United Church of Canada (UCC), was approached by the only two Korean women attending the welcoming reception. They talked her into making an illegal and clandestine visit to Kwangju. To accompany her, she recruited UCC missionary Walter Beecham, who knew the language, the people, and the risks. They visited the hospital that treated the wounded, the blood-spattered YWCa that doubled as a morgue, and the cemetery where victims of the massacre were buried. They met with family and friends of victims and prisoners, including Lee Hee-Ho, the wife of Kim Dae-Jung.

Q I had been aware of a vivid debate among South Korean peace and human rights activists regarding priorities for their actions. One faction held that democracy would have to be achieved in the South before Korea could be reunified. Others insisted that only after reunification could both parts of the country be democratized. Considering Korea’s extreme ideological paranoia and the excessive violence such paranoia engendered, I was convinced that you cannot have the one without the other. Peace and justice are inseparable and must be dealt with simultaneously. That conclusion was powerfully expressed at the sixth WCC General Assembly in Vancouver in 1983, where Lois Wilson was elected to the WCC Presidium. That assembly mandated an exploration of prospects for peaceful resolution of critical regional conflicts.

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Since churches were barred from organizing discussions about reunification in South Korea, they turned to the WCC to host such a dialogue outside Korea. It wasn’t an official request, of course. The WCC would have to “go it alone” and take full responsibility for the outcome. Even then, there were risks attached, especially for leaders of WCC member churches in Korea, who could be charged with complicity. At the end of October 1984, the YMCa retreat centre at Tozanso (a small town near Tokyo) served as venue for an extraordinary meeting. It was here that top-level representatives of the WCC’s member churches in the roK first encouraged the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs (CCia) to initiate contact with North Korean Christians on their behalf. To anyone unfamiliar with the Korean trauma, this may seem mundane. After all, Germany’s division did not prevent churches from engaging in ongoing and comprehensive East-West contact. The case of Korea is quite different. Even indirect contact with North Koreans is punishable under the nSL in the South. Church representatives returning from WCC events routinely faced interrogation by the notorious Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCia). Decades of total information blackout about life in North Korea led to the broadly held conviction that Christianity had effectively disappeared in the northern part of the peninsula. To forestall any problems for Koreans attending the Tozanso meeting, my colleague Victor Hsu and I travelled to Seoul to explain the nature of the proposed international conference  to a top-level commander of the KCia. In return for our promise of full transparency, we received verbal assurances that South Korean participants could attend without fear of reprisal. As a result, the head of each WCC member church was able to attend, a key factor in the success of the conference. In addition to myself as conference coordinator, three other Canadians participated in the meeting: the recently appointed WCC president Lois Wilson, Rev. Lee Sang-Chul (later to become UCC moderator), and Dr Rhea Whitehead, Asia and Pacific Secretary of the UCC Division of World Outreach. Regrettably, North Korea’s Christian Federation (KCF) could not attend, but it transmitted a cable of greetings, with assurances of prayer and support. Despite extremely nervous Korean participants and at times heated discussions and disagreements, a breakthrough was achieved in the final plenary. Laconically worded, though breathtaking in its implications, was the addition of one sentence in the conference report: “The WCC, in collaboration with the Christian Conference of Asia [should] seek to facilitate opportunities where it would be possible for Christians from both North and South Korea to meet in dialogue.”2

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Celebrating the successful conclusion of the consultation that evening, I could not have guessed that the name Tozanso would soon be inscribed in Korean church history on both sides of the military demarcation line. The term “Tozanso Process” became a symbol of openness and dialogue, hope and healing, peace and reconciliation. Repeatedly over the decades to follow, barriers were overcome, doors were opened, and misunderstandings were removed. A series of “firsts” was added to historical chronologies. Each breakthrough was an emotional highlight not only for Koreans but for all of us in the ecumenical community who were privileged to share their joy.

Q Exactly one year later (November 1985), CCia director Ninan Koshy and I visited the dPrK for the first time. We discovered that Christians in Pyongyang had waited prayerfully for news from Tozanso and had welcomed the results with relief and thanksgiving. We brought gifts of Bibles and hymnbooks from the nCCK. We worshipped with local Christians in a house church. We conveyed the desire by South Korean churches for a face-to-face dialogue and negotiated the required authorizations with government officials. This first visit opened my eyes to many contradictory aspects of life in North Korea. While I was encouraged to find a small Christian community still practising its faith with enthusiasm, government control over people’s lives appeared to be ubiquitous, especially so with regard to religious communities whose activities were tolerated only within strict limits. In subsequent years we would find that our ability to visit the KCF or to receive KCF delegations outside the country could easily be derailed by tensions between the dPrK and the international community. Two years after Tozanso (September 1986), the first direct encounter between North and South Koreans at a non-governmental level became a reality. The neutral location I chose for this meeting was in Glion, Switzerland. Glion One, as it came to be called, began with fear and trembling. Each side tested the other, both openly confessing their respective mistrust. Both were keenly aware that they would have to account for their words and deeds back home. While celebrating the Eucharist at the close of the consultation, the prayer “Peace be with you,” spoken one to another, finally broke down the invisible walls of separation that have tormented the Korean nation for too long. Participants from North and South dissolved into tears and embraces. The Tozanso Process had taken root.

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Three years after Tozanso (November 1987), a second, larger CCia/ WCC delegation visited both North and South Korea. In South Korea, large audiences gathered to hear reports about the life of Christians in the North. These were received with both fascination and skepticism. Government spokespersons told us we had been duped by North Korean communist agents. Four years after Tozanso (November 1988), Glion Two was held, this time expanded to include women from both parts of Korea. They declared 1995 – fifty years after Korean division – the Year of Jubilee for Unification. They inaugurated an annual day of prayer for peace and drafted a mutually agreed common prayer text for the occasion. Five years after Tozanso (July 1989), the WCC Central Committee issued a policy statement on peace and the reunification of Korea, committing the worldwide ecumenical community to the search for peace and justice in Korea. For the first time, a North Korean delegation attended as observer. Six years after Tozanso (December 1990), Glion Three was held. A five-year plan for the 1995 Jubilee Year of Peace and Reunification of Korea called for the broadening of contacts and exchanges involving a greater number of people from both sides. The hope was expressed that future meetings in the Glion series be held on Korean soil. Seven years after Tozanso (February 1991), a KCF delegation for the first time attended a World Council of Churches Assembly in Canberra, Australia. Other ecumenical partners meanwhile played their own part in following up Tozanso. Most important in this respect (considering the crucial role of the United States in Korea’s predicament) were the activities of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USa. nCCCUSa delegations visited both parts of Korea in 1986 and again in 1987. A national policy statement launched a campaign to encourage the US government to move towards a comprehensive peace settlement in Korea. In 1989, a KCF delegation was hosted by the nCCCUSa, the first time since the war that a North Korean group was granted visas to visit the US. A Canadian delegation visited North Korea in 1988, and a KCF delegation visited Canada in 1991. Churches in Europe created an Ecumenical Network on Korea. In 1989, a KCF delegation attended the German Kirchentag in Berlin/West. In South Korea, the nCCK organized the Jubilee Preparation Committee for Peace and Reunification, with a membership of fortysix South Korean denominations. This was the group that issued the courageous Declaration of the Churches of Korea on National Reunification and Peace quoted above. In April 1988, an international consultation

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was convened in Inchon, where, for the first time, the reunification question was discussed openly in a public forum. Meanwhile, Christians in North Korea gained some tenuous influence. Alongside the KCF, which has existed since 1946, the Korean Catholic Association was formed in 1988. In the same year, two church buildings – the Protestant Bongsu Church and the Roman Catholic Changchung Cathedral – were consecrated, the first to be built since the dPrK was founded. A year later, a second Protestant church – Chilgol – was under construction in Pyongyang. Not all observers of the Tozanso Process are convinced that progress was genuine. Skeptics both inside and outside Korea are numerous and influential. When the KCF delegation visited the US, analysts were quick to claim that North Korea was using Christian channels for its own ends. Dissenting Korean-American pastors collected thousands of signatures in protest and dogged the North Korean visitors with street demonstrations. Although the South Korean government grudgingly tolerated formal contacts via the WCC, informal contacts with the North continued to be proscribed. In 1989, Rev. Moon Ik-Hwan, Ms Im Su-Kyong, and Father Moon Kyu-Hyon made unauthorized visits to North Korea and were imprisoned under the nSL when they returned to the South. Other arrests followed, including that of Rev. Hong Keun-Soo, who was accused of “praising” North Korea in his sermons. Still, the churches persisted in their bridge-building efforts. nCCK general secretary Rev. Kwon Ho-Kyung made a historic visit to Pyongyang in January 1992, which included a luncheon with President Kim Il-Sung. The KCF accepted an invitation to attend the nCCK’s General Assembly in Seoul in mid-February and discussed plans for a larger North-South church meeting to be organized in Pyongyang later in the year. Unfortunately, none of these plans materialized.

Q North Korea became weakened by the loss of its economic allies in Eastern Europe following the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991. In the summer of 1994, Kim Il Sung died, further compounding uncertainties on the peninsula. As might have been expected under these circumstances, church efforts for reconciliation ground to a halt. Meetings of any kind between North and South Korean Christians became impossible. The WCC, which had planned to withdraw from its intermediary role, was once again summoned to convene the two sides.

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After a hiatus of nearly five years, Glion Four was finally held in March 1995, this time in Kyoto, Japan. The Jubilee Year of Peace and Reunification had arrived, but the goals the churches had set for themselves seemed more remote than ever. A shadow of disappointment dogged the meeting from the outset. The members of the South Korean delegation were badly divided among themselves and in no mood for compromise. The North Korean delegation clearly exhibited less flexibility under the new dPrK leader Kim Jong Il. The meeting erupted in acrimony. The concluding document fell far behind that which had already been agreed in Glion Two and Glion Three. The only tangible agreement was to hold a joint worship service at Panmunjom, North Korea, in August 1995. On their return, South Korean participants were harassed by their government. Permission to worship at Panmunjom was denied. The developing famine in North Korea refocused everyone’s attention from peace promotion to humanitarian aid. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to expand on the relationship of humanitarianism to peace, except to point out that my position as resident humanitarian aid worker in North Korea from 1997 to 1999 was heavily influenced by my role in the Tozanso Process. Kim Dae-Jung became president of the roK in 1998. He pursued a “sunshine policy” of rapprochement that culminated in the NorthSouth summit of June 2000. He openly acknowledged that the work of the churches inspired his reconciliation policies. Among the ecumenical guests invited to his inauguration was Rhea Whitehead. In 2000, President Kim Dae-Jung invited two other Canadian Tozanso veterans to a twentieth anniversary commemoration of the Kwangju massacre – Lois Wilson (who was appointed to the Canadian Senate that year) and Sang Chul Lee. Before my departure from Pyongyang as head of the Food Aid Liaison Unit in the World Food Program, I was approached by dPrK vice-foreign minister Choe Su Hon with a message for the Canadian government. It was the first step in what turned into the establishment of diplomatic relations between Canada and the dPrK. In September  2000, Senator Lois Wilson led a seven-person parliamentary delegation to Pyongyang, including me as adviser. Based on instructions from Canadian foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy, the delegation was to provide content to eventual normalization by exploring potential areas of bilateral cooperation. Largely due to the trust Canadian churches had nurtured in North Korea, the Canadian delegation received unprecedented access on overnight field trips across the peninsula. A prominent feature of the delegation’s recommendations was to

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encourage people-to-people exchanges in fields like health, education, agriculture, sports, and women’s groups. Diplomatic relations were officially established in February 2001. For a brief period, Canada’s civilian and diplomatic relations flourished. I collaborated with Senator Wilson in creating the Canada-dPr Korea Association (not to be confused with the Korean Friendship Association), which organized conferences, lectures, and visits to North Korea by groups of Canadian citizens. Most memorable in that respect (if somewhat bizarre) was the celebration of Canada Day 2002 in Pyongyang, an idea that surfaced when Canada’s ambassador, Joseph Caron, presented his credentials. Canadians hosted an ecumenical women’s conference in 2001 that included delegations of women from both North and South Korea. A second conference entitled “Women and Peace-Building” was held in Toronto in 2004, but by this time CanadadPrK relations had begun to sour, with the result that North Korean women were unable to attend.

Q During the decade following the Kyoto meeting, in response to the famine, ecumenical partners concentrated almost all their efforts on humanitarian aid. The Tozanso Process took a back seat. An attempt to revive interest was made in 2004 with a twentieth-anniversary consultation at the original Tozanso location. Unfortunately, the KCF was unable to attend, so the meeting produced little more than nostalgia. A larger conference was held in Hong Kong in 2009 to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Tozanso, this time with North Korean participation. Contrary to previous agreements, however, the program was constructed without prior consultation with the KCF. The majority of participants and speakers had no knowledge of the Tozanso principles. Some presentations were so insensitive they insulted the KCF to the point that its delegates walked out and threatened to end future collaboration. In 2005, the dPrK declared that food aid should be replaced by development assistance. A year later, the nCCK and relevant church agencies agreed to create an ecumenical forum for development cooperation. Adhering to the Tozanso principle of full partnership with North Korean counterparts was always difficult, but it was especially so after the dPrK tested its first nuclear weapon. Very worried about escalating international tensions, the KCF requested that the forum mandate be broadened to include peace promotion. To reflect this concern, the forum was renamed Ecumenical Forum for Peace, Reunification, and

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Development Cooperation on the Korean Peninsula – or Ecumenical Forum for Korea (eFK) for short. In the US, South Korea, and Canada, conservative political leaders took a more aggressive stance towards North Korea. In response, the dPrK intensified efforts to solidify its missile and nuclear weapons potential. The United Nations imposed ever more stringent sanctions, and the US, Canada, and others added supplementary sanctions. In 2010, Canada froze diplomatic relations under its Controlled Engagement Policy towards North Korea. These developments overshadowed enthusiasm for peace efforts. A generalized fatigue seemed in evidence. It wasn’t until 2013 that interest in Korea was revived by the venue of the WCC’S tenth General Assembly. The new generation of church leaders that assembled in Busan, South Korea, renewed the WCC’s commitment to Korean peace and reconciliation as a key priority. The following year, on the thirtieth anniversary of Tozanso, the WCC once again convened an international consultation (this time in Bossey, Switzerland), at which the members of a new and younger KCF leadership impressed participants with their knowledge and candour. Peter Prove, the new director of the WCC Commission of the Churches on International Affairs, took over leadership of the Ecumenical Forum for Korea, cleverly converting it into a revitalized vehicle of the Tozanso Process. Under the eFK label, several high-level delegations have visited North Korea, engaging in surprisingly open communication with officials. Ecumenical attention has once again shifted back to the original Tozanso concerns: reduction of tensions, inter-Korean rapprochement, nuclear disarmament, reconciliation, and peace. For a brief moment in 2018, it seemed that Korea had taken a dramatic new turn towards reconciliation when South and North Korean leaders met and shook hands across the dividing line at Panmunjom. roK president Moon Jae-In and dPrK leader Kim Jong-Un pledged their commitment to peace, prosperity, and reunification of the Korean Peninsula. Shortly afterward, another summit brought US president Donald Trump to the same place. Unfortunately, as too often happens in Korea, these significant openings were trumped by domestic politics, this time primarily in the US. The Covid-19 pandemic prevented many of the in-person events planned for 2020, but the WCC, in cooperation with the nCCK, launched a seventy-day global prayer campaign for peace on the Korean Peninsula, inviting Christians across the world to participate under the slogan “We Pray, Peace Now, End the War!” A live-streamed event on 22 June promoted ecumenical advocacy for a permanent peace regime in Korea.

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In September of that year, the WCC published a booklet entitled The Light of Peace: Churches in Solidarity with the Korean Peninsula. A variety of authors from different parts of the world contributed educational, spiritual, and theological resources to encourage churches and individuals to pray for peace and reconciliation.3

Q How are we to evaluate these almost forty years of ecumenical effort? If we approach this question from a results-based management (rBM) perspective, we might look for measurable indicators that the Tozanso Process has brought us closer to the establishment of peace on the Korean Peninsula. I am afraid such measurements would conclude that our efforts were a resounding failure. But a corporate model like rBM is hardly applicable here. The premise that outcomes can be attributed to particular programs or organizations is simply wrong. Real-life outcomes are produced by a huge range of factors and interventions working together. Peace and reconciliation are emergent properties of very complex systems. Still, it cannot be denied that Christian churches and movements are a significant part of those systems. They can amplify constructive or destructive interference in the waves of history. When the ecumenical community recognized its shared responsibility for division, it became motivated to reconnect and re-establish relationships that were broken. The Tozanso Process may not have resulted in victory over Korean division but it has certainly opened communication across a previously impenetrable divide. By maintaining an ongoing dialogue across ideological chasms, it has created a community of advocates for peace, confident that victory is possible. Despite continuing political and military confrontation, it has demonstrated that ordinary people can become agents of reconciliation. Instead of trying to quantify results according to an irrelevant rBM model, it may be more instructive to examine some lessons that have been learned. Here are a few insights that I have found particularly relevant: • No one is unaffected by political or ideological prejudice. General knowledge about the North Korean people is grossly inadequate at the best of times and continues to be skewed in the direction of demonization. Reconciliation requires a willingness to suspend judgment of the other side’s failings and an openness to seeing fault on one’s own side.

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• The principal actors in the struggle for peace are Koreans themselves. International support for peace can only be effective when both sides are involved. People-to-people contact at a variety of levels is essential for mutual understanding and ought to be part of all engagement efforts. • Peace promotion must be cooperative and inclusive. Malign forces can easily exploit divided efforts. The participation and central role of women has been shown to be essential for the long-term success of any peace process. • Breakthroughs can be ephemeral and setbacks are inevitable. Reconciliation is an ongoing process that needs to be continually nurtured. We are living in an age of fear that has done violence against people living in hope. We have become lovers of bad news and have lost track of good news in our lives. Without hope, we grope in the dark, vulnerable to the false prophets of gloom and doom. Having so long accentuated the negative, not only have we forgotten the positive, but we no longer trust it. In an age of despair, the “spirit” of Tozanso can teach us lessons that reach far beyond Korea. The antidote to despair is a stubborn determination to persevere against all odds. It is in the soil of commitment and action that hope can proliferate and prosper.

noteS 1 https://hyeyoungkurtkorea.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/declaration-of-thechurches-of-korea-1988-ncck.pdf. 2 Peace and Justice in North East Asia, Background Information 1985/1, CCia/ WCC, 13. 3 The 180-page booklet can be downloaded here: https://www.oikoumene.org/ en/resources/publications/new/TheLightofPeace2_final_CovInt.pdf.

4 Women’s Voices, Pluralism, and the Common Good Diana L. Eck

I first heard of Lois Wilson at the sixth assembly of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in Vancouver in 1983. The Canadian churches and the Native Peoples of Canada were the hosts of the assembly, and Lois had just finished her term as the moderator of the United Church of Canada and was beginning her service as one of the presidents of the WCC. I was then a young professor, beginning to be involved in the program unit of the WCC on Dialogue with People of Living Faiths and Ideologies. Our group addressed a multitude of interfaith issues that concerned the churches and met in various parts of the world where religious diversity was a critical reality. We learned about the  local situation, met local leaders, and listened to each other across the traditions from which we came. A few years later, I became the moderator of that WCC dialogue program and dreamed of a serious week-long convening of women who were engaged in the theological, religious, and ritual leadership of their traditions. Toronto seemed ideal: there were many long-standing and newer immigrant communities there and local participation would be assured. Convenings on interfaith dialogue were not planned from afar by a global body like the WCC but in close cooperation with local leadership. Toronto had significant leadership in Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, Chinese Buddhist, and Muslim communities and already had a budding interfaith coalition. Victoria College at the University of Toronto extended an invitation to us, and the women’s film studio of the National Film Board of Canada wanted to participate  – and to film the proceedings.1 Very few women were involved in the early days of global interfaith engagement. Many of us remember the colourful lineup of swamis,

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bishops, rabbis, and imams, the religious leaders called to the Assisi Day of Prayer by Pope John Paul II in 1986 or to the Oxford Global Forum called by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1988. The early WCC dialogue meetings of the 1980s were, frankly, no better. The photo-ops of the time were a kind of visual shorthand for religious diversity that was male, hierarchical, and visible. But the absence of women in the interfaith movement was due not only to the intransigence of our traditions but also to the inadequacy of our knowledge. I personally did not know many of the women leaders and activists in traditions other than my own. Many of the distinctive women’s religious networks that would support the full participation of women were just developing. In retrospect, the irony was, as we discovered, that women’s participation in interfaith dialogue changes the nature of the dialogue significantly. Women’s full presence held immense potential for grassroots attitudinal change. The women who gathered for the Toronto meeting in June 1988 were an astonishingly diverse group. Some came from highly multi-religious contexts such as Birmingham, Mumbai, Jamaica, and Delhi, where interfaith dialogue was a matter of everyday life. Some of the women who met in Toronto came from what one might call “major” religious traditions – Christians and Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists. Others came from a variety of traditions and contexts – from the Chippewa Cree and Mescalero Apache people, Afro-Brazilian communities in Brazil, and the Wiccan tradition of Goddess spirituality. All the participants, especially those of the “major” global traditions, were sensitive to the tremendous range of internal diversity within their traditions. They spoke of internal diversity to an extent rarely articulated by men in similar conference situations. None wanted to speak as a “representative” of her tradition but simply as a person of faith, aware of and sometimes in tension with other standpoints within the tradition. Our round of introductions made clear that the meeting of religious traditions does not take place far away or in a contrived context but in the very substance and grain of our daily lives. Lila Fahlman from Edmonton, Alberta, had launched the Canadian Council of Muslim Women. Her father was a shaykh, her mother a Methodist, her husband a Roman Catholic; both her mother and husband became Muslims. Saroj Gupta was an Indo-Canadian Hindu whose son had become Catholic, and Vasudha Narayanan was a south Indian Vaishnava Hindu who had attended Roman Catholic schools. Rabiatu Ammah from Ghana said, “I have Muslims, Christians, and African traditionalists in my own family.” Judith Simmer-Brown, raised in a Methodist household, became a Buddhist and taught at the Naropa Buddhist University in Colorado.

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Amarjit Khera, a Sikh from Malaysia, was educated in a Protestant school and lives now in multicultural Britain. Inez Talamantez of the Mescalero Apache Nation described her father as a traditionalist and her mother as a Catholic. Sylvia Boorstein, an American Buddhist and teacher of vipassana meditation, explained: “I was raised in a traditional Jewish family and raised my children in that tradition. As a Buddhist teacher, I continue to enjoy a warm and positive relationship with Jewish culture.” Akiko Yamashita from Japan told us that she was the only Christian in her entire family, a fact making her dialogue with Buddhists an inextricable part of daily life. Margot Adler spoke of being raised in a Marxist secular Jewish environment and becoming active as a member of the Covenant of the Goddess, a Wiccan community. Selena Fox, the spiritual head of Circle Sanctuary in Wisconsin, spoke of the interfaith celebrations of the Spring Equinox at Circle, attracting people from throughout the religious communities of Wisconsin. The interfaith dialogue in which these women were involved was what some might simply call the “dialogue of life.” For example, Lalitha Das from India spoke of the Women’s Centre in Mumbai as a place where Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and Sikh communities work together on common women’s issues. Gill Cressey from England lived in an ecumenical neighbourhood in Birmingham, right in the middle of a large Muslim community. She found meeting over the fence or at the gate to be the primary locus of interfaith dialogue, even though there are much more “formal” dialogues that take place in that multireligious city. These are complex religious lives and they were to become even more complex in the intensive week ahead. For some women, the relationships they developed in these days were new. Two of the Native women confessed that not only had they never met a Sikh but that they had never heard of them before. For many, the Wiccan tradition was new and, at first, a bit suspect. Towards the end of the week together, women knew each other well enough to discuss frankly the stereotypes with which they began. Wicca, for example, had elicited feelings of suspicion and discomfort – feelings that were overcome during these days by experiencing the warmth and vibrancy of Margot and Selena. Jaji Mandana from India commented that many people see her tradition as having “too many” gods without understanding the ways in which the various images are symbolic of a large and embracing understanding of the Divine. Coming to recognize the stereotypes held by others as well as one’s own stereotypes was one of the most important fruits of dialogue.

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the eMerging revoLUtionS During these eight days of intense discussion and relationship building, we could see that revolutions were under way. First, there was a revolution of language. These women began with the understanding that we are included or excluded by the very words we use. As one woman put it, “The limits of language are the limits of our experience.” Inclusive language is not just a new and polite way of speaking: it is a new way of thinking. And even the use of a seemingly inclusive “we” came under investigation: whom do you mean when you say “we,” they would ask. Second, we spoke of a revolution of historical consciousness. What constitutes our past? Our religious tradition? Much of what was thought of as the history of our traditions has not included the history of women’s experience. Women’s names, voices, rituals, songs, lives, and deaths – all this needed to be excavated and reclaimed to the best of our ability. Vasudha Narayanan, a Hindu scholar, put it this way: “My tradition goes back to about the eleventh century and honours several saints who are women. But we need to retrieve images of these women from the Sri Vaishnava literature – the Goddess, the saints, and the great women of the tradition who have been forgotten, or who remain ‘the wife of so and so.’ ” But history is not simply an excavation of the past. History is not over, and we were able to look carefully at the present. Buddhism, for instance, is a tradition-in-process, constantly new as it is expressed in the Thailand of today, in Japan, in Scotland, and in North America. Chatsumarn Kabilsingh, a Thai Buddhist, was concerned about the work of enabling women to reconstitute a religious order in Thailand. A Canadian Muslim woman, Aisha Khan, said of her situation, “A lot of Muslim women have grown up here without the ‘chattels’ of Muslim cultures in other countries which have influenced the religion to such a great extent. Here in Canada we have the opportunity to start over again. We feel as if we are pioneers building Islam as we think it should be and as we think it fits the practice that we follow in this country.” Third, we were engaged in a revolution of interpretation. What is authoritative in our tradition? If it is scripture, then how do we understand the authority of scripture? What happens when women begin to set their hand to interpreting texts long interpreted primarily by men? The process of interpretation is as old as scripture itself, said one Jewish woman, and it is clear that women are now about the business of reading and interpreting scripture with new eyes. Contributing to this discussion was Rev. Connie Parvey, a Lutheran pastor in Cambridge,

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Massachusetts, and one of the first women graduates of Harvard Divinity School. She described her move from simply ignoring or discounting the misogynist texts of the New Testament to searching scripture for the missing women and asking questions that might bring them to life, such as “Who was the mother of the prodigal son? How might her presence have changed our reading of the parable?” Riffat Hassan, a Qur’an scholar, began her work by asking, “How could the ethos of human equality and justice in the Qur’an be controverted by Hadith, the ‘traditions’ of the Prophet that seem to make women secondary to men?” The dedication with which Riffat addressed herself to Qur’anic exegesis was eye opening and exciting for many women who had no idea there were women like her at work. In the Buddhist tradition, Chatsumarn Kabilsingh told us, “the trouble is that Buddhist texts were recorded by monks for monks, and how monks are supposed to behave toward women. There is no message here of what women are supposed to do … But if we go back to the time of the Buddha himself, it is heartening to find that Buddhist women proved themselves worthy. Some were ordained and singled out for being learned and having the ability to preach. The records of some of these Buddhist sisters are preserved in the canon itself.” Five years later, Dr Kabilsingh, a professor at Thammasat University, became ordained as a nun, the Venerable Dhammananda Bhikkuni, one of the first in Thailand. Fourth, it was clear that a revolution in leadership was also under way by the late 1980s. In some cases, there were new people in leadership roles, including women. Of course, there is no point in simply replacing one dominant group with successors from a previously subjugated group, what Gandhi used to call “British rule without the British.” So, we’re talking about new styles of leadership and new configurations of authority, not simply about new persons in positions of leadership. What will it mean, for instance, to have new generations of nuns providing leadership? In Taiwan, where there are seven new nuns for every three monks, we can be sure it will mean something new. As Kabilsingh put it: “Now we have come to the realization that Buddhism in the hands of the monks alone has failed. It is becoming irrelevant in our society. What do laypeople do? The real question for us is, are there new ways of leadership that can be expressed by women, so that we do not fall into the old patterns? How can we do this and still stay in our traditions?” Sitta Campi, a pastor from Geneva, spoke of how “we have become more and more confident in our own ways of being ministers. We have found that there were important differences between us and our male

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colleagues – the ways in which we approached people, the way in which we celebrated the liturgy, the way in which we understood God, the world, and the ministry.” Similarly, Caryn Broitman, a young Jewish rabbinical student, spoke of her struggles to become a rabbi since she had only male models for who a rabbi was supposed to be. “I want to be a model for girls and women, and frankly it is happening without my having figured it out. Every time I lead the service and read the Torah for a new group of people, there has been a woman who has come up to me to tell me how important it has been for her to see me doing this, and to share with me some of the pain that she felt growing up and being shut out.” Finally, all real revolution must involve a ritual revolution, for it is in ritual that communities enact in their most self-conscious way who they are, what their hierarchies and values are. Rituals are the condensed dramas of our societies, and when they begin to change, we know that real change is afoot. Women’s leadership in such rituals cannot be seen as “merely symbolic” in its import but, rather, must be seen as a sign of deep change that will begin to reshape the consciousness of the community. Experimentation with women’s rituals has been a part of the women’s revolution in several traditions. Ritual is not simply a celebration of what is but, rather, has the power to transform our established order. Ceremonies of growth into womanhood, celebrations of the birth of a child, and ceremonies of marriage – all have been reshaped at the hands of women. For example, Asma Taha from Sudan spoke of the ways in which her group of women had reformed marriage rites, eliminating the dowry system and expensive parties for a simple rite and an egalitarian marriage contract. The experience of another ritual environment also raises challenging questions. It is very often in ritual settings that we sense most instinctively the boundaries of our assumed religiousness. In the Thornhill area of Greater Toronto we went for an evening’s walking tour. Beginning at the Cham Shan Chinese Buddhist Temple complex, we then went to the Ja’ffari Islamic Centre nearby, and then next door to Temple Har Zion. For many in our group, it was a first. Jewish women who had never seen the inside of a Buddhist temple were at first shocked to see the golden images of the Buddha. Their understanding of “idols” was challenged as they observed women in our own number press their hands together in a gesture of reverent prayer, bowing their heads before these images. Conversely, for most of the Hindu and Buddhist women, it was the first time they had been in a synagogue. At first, they were puzzled by an environment that seemed almost like a lecture hall. But when the curtain was drawn back and the ark opened and the beautiful

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velvet-covered and silver-cased Torah scrolls were taken out and carried ceremonially around the room, they gave an almost audible sigh, as if to say, “So they do have holy things here after all!” An American Jewish woman later reflected, “Nobody’s got the handle on it all. I approach in my own way, but God does not belong to me. God is not a Jew. I was moved by the experience at the Buddhist temple. I found it appealing, but it’s not my way. Nobody’s got it wrapped up.” A Canadian Christian woman mused, “Some things have an echo in me. Others don’t. But I believe we send our prayers to the same address, so to speak, though having different concepts in our minds.” Ines Talamantez moved us all when she told us: “When we sing our songs and pray in women’s ceremonies to bless our young women, we sing and pray for all women everywhere. When we Apache pray, you women are in our prayers.”

PerSPeCtiveS on interFaith diaLogUe In these amazing days in residence in Toronto, there emerged a very particular perspective on interfaith dialogue that stands in contrast to many of the dialogues dominated primarily by men. First, dialogue began by speaking from experience. One of the most distinctive characteristics of the discourse of these days was the relative absence of universalizing speech. No one began her remarks, “According to Islam” or “In the Christian tradition.” There was usually a preface, contextualizing her remarks within the context of a particular strand of the tradition and within the context of her own experience. As one woman put it, “How much easier it is to begin establishing relationships and trust between us by connecting our own experience.” The courage to claim one’s own experience as having authority is revolutionary. It is, as one woman put it, “getting our own life and breath back.” Among these women engaged in dialogue, it was common to say, “I do not speak for my tradition, but out of my context this is what I think.” These are not individualistic ad feminem interpretations but, on the contrary, are grounded in context, embedded in experience. Asma Taha from Sudan stated: “I am a Republican Muslim from the Sudan. Although I am speaking from an Islamic point of view, my point of view is opposed by the majority of the fundamentalist and traditional Muslims. They don’t want to hear any voice which speaks about the equality between women and men.” To try to speak out of one’s own experience, not to universalize and speak in generalities about the whole experience of a people, and not

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to characterize the experience of another without listening to how the other speaks of her/his own experience – all this is foundational to all interfaith dialogue, as much as it seems to be innate as an operational methodology of women. Seeing persons, not religions or theologies, was also a gift that many took away from Toronto. Sylvia Boorstein later wrote from California, “I always see the faces of Jean Zaru and Deborah Weissman whenever I read the newspaper or talk about political, social, or religious issues in Palestine or Israel.” Second, the margins are a good place for dialogue. Many women described themselves as living in tension with their own traditions and as being at the margins. “It is the tension between affirming the community that has nurtured us and critiquing the community that has simultaneously broken our hearts and spirits,” as one Christian woman put it. For some it was the insistence that we will neither align ourselves with injustice nor throw the whole tradition out. We will not acquiesce in the community as it is, nor will we cut ourselves off from it. How can we change the community without fracturing it? Akiko from Japan described how a woman was dragged off the stage at a Shinto shrine festival because her mere presence had polluted it. At home, she recalled being a bride in a traditional family where she could use the bath only after the men had used it. Towards the end of the week, as we reflected on the issues that seemed “most difficult to discuss” across lines of faith, it was clear that the “most difficult” were those within our own faith traditions. The strongest feelings were often about the ways in which one’s own tradition was the source of anger, exclusion, embarrassment, and betrayal. Diversity within our traditions changes the shape of the dialogue. Women perhaps experience the diversity of their own traditions more consistently than men simply because they do not share substantially in the centres of power and are constantly adjusting the lens to see their own experience, which is often at odds with the public face of the tradition. This experience of the inner diversity and conflicts within one’s own tradition also seemed to enable the reach across boundaries to engage the wider diversity of traditions. As Fredelle Brief, a Jewish woman from Toronto long involved in interfaith work, put it, “We are really going to the boundaries here, and reaching over to talk with one another.” Third, change is normative. As our discussions stretched through days and nights, I had a strong sense of the contingency of our so-called “religions.” They are more like rivers than establishments. The ability

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to see the structures of our religious traditions as fluid, constantly in the process of reformulation and change, is what has given many women the hope and courage to stick with it. To a woman, they would say, “We are not invested in the status quo, the way things are.” New forms of leadership, scholarship, scriptural interpretation, and liturgical innovation were clearly happening. The revolutions were under way. Our Wiccan participants affirmed the change in a song that many came to sing and treasure, “We are an old people, we are a new people, we are a changed people, deeper than before.” Fourth, interdependence is the ethic of the future. “My liberation is linked to your liberation,” said Deborah Weissman to Jean Zaru, a Palestinian Christian from Ramallah. Jean had long argued that peace between Israel and Palestine would depend on recognizing how deeply both sides depend upon each other for a shared future. In the world of global issues such as climate change and environmental pollution, and in countless intractable regional and local conflicts, we cannot “go it alone” for there is no such thing as “alone.” Our lives are linked inextricably to one another. And so it is with our work as women. As Chat Kabilsingh put it, “At this crucial stage, women cannot work alone. We must come together to voice ourselves as one. I see our extreme individualism as a weakness. We need to be able to work together.” Our lives and futures are mutually dependent upon one another. One final observation about this dialogue among women: one of the most striking features of the week we spent together was the total absence of a certain kind of theological discussion that finds its way into other dialogues. I don’t recall anyone raising the question of whether God or truth was to be seen wholly or partially in traditions other than one’s own. I think it would be fair to say that none of the women there were concerned about the salvation of others. We began with a sense of “we” already larger than the “we” of our particular traditions. The energy and movement, therefore, was towards the issue of how we might be further involved with one another in the work of building a better world. The 1977 WCC “Guidelines on Dialogue” had stressed that dialogue begins not in theological schools but in the communities where people meet. The Toronto women’s dialogue exemplified this: that the most vital centres of interfaith encounter are the communities where women work, even though they often do not think of their work as “interfaith dialogue.”

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the PLUraLiSM ProjeCt Those days in residence in Toronto were transformative, with top-level women scriptural interpreters, religious activists, and community leaders. I learned a great deal about one of North America’s most diverse cities. I had known, of course, that Canada was “multicultural,” but I had not experienced it first-hand. After the Toronto dialogue, I began to realize that the United States itself was increasingly and visibly diverse. It had begun in 1965 with the Immigration and Nationality Act that opened the door for immigration to the US from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. These were nationalities previously barred by restrictive laws going back to the Chinese Exclusion Act, 1882, and reaffirmed through gradually expanding exclusions. By the 1960s, the US was in the midst of civil rights protests, and this 1965 act was essentially the third in the landmark civil rights bills that included the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. As President Johnson said in signing the Immigration Act at the base of the Statue of Liberty: “This is one of the most important acts of this Congress and of this administration. For it does repair a very deep and painful flaw in the fabric of American justice. It corrects a cruel and enduring wrong in the conduct of the American Nation. And this measure that we will sign today will really make us truer to ourselves both as a country and as a people. It will strengthen us in a hundred unseen ways.” And so began a new period of immigration, especially from Asia. I had been studying in India when the 1965 Immigration Act was passed. There, the discussion was about the “brain drain” and what this new burst of emigration to the United States would mean for India. It was not until the year following the Toronto conference that I began to realize what it would mean for the United States. What were the multicultural and multi-religious dimensions of my own country? By that next academic year, the children of the “new immigration” had reached college age and were in my classes at Harvard. There was a Hindu from Pittsburgh who had been to a Hindu summer camp in the Poconos, a Muslim who had attended youth leadership programs in Chicago. I realized that I knew very little about the religious communities that the new immigrants had brought to the United States. I started in Boston and developed a seminar in which students found and made team visits to the new Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Sikh, and Jain religious centres in the Boston area. It was revealing work for the students – and for me. That first

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seminar eventually led to a publication, World Religions in Boston, and to a new phase of research. In 1991, I launched the Pluralism Project, enabling student researchers to do “hometown” research all across the United States.2 For more than twenty-five years now, the Pluralism Project has engaged students and colleagues in research on the dynamic life of religious America in our time. We have studied individual temples, mosques, and gurdwaras, doing micro-histories of communities that are ordinarily brand new to the cities and towns of which they are now a part. We have asked how these traditions are changing as they put down roots in American soil. Increasingly, we have asked how the United States is changing as “we the people” become more complex. Where are the tensions and fault lines, the ugly stereotypes, and the hate crimes? Perhaps more important, where are the new connections and the convergences? Where have people in cities and towns, in colleges and companies, been truly creative in forging bonds of connection and relationship among diverse communities? This really is the test of pluralism: Can we cultivate an ethic of living together in a diverse society? This is a civic challenge for citizens in the nations and cities where our co-citizens are of many faiths. It is a challenge for mayors, elected officials, hospitals, public transportation, school boards, and corporate boards. Indeed, there is no public institution where diversity does not pose new questions. But the questions of diversity are also a religious and theological challenge for Christians and Jews, Muslims and Sikhs: How do we understand and interpret the faith, the truth, the spiritual path of the other? Religious life where it is vibrant is lived in the awareness of multiple frames of faith, in awareness that one’s neighbours, whether around the world or across the street, do not share our own faith tradition. For some, this awareness may be frightening and trigger the tightening of bright-line boundaries around our own tradition. For others, it may trigger an exploration of religious meaning that takes one into a deep appreciation of the faith of others – and perhaps deeper into one’s own faith as well. This religious diversity is both problematic and potentially creative. The problems and the creativity are not just theoretical. They are grounded in the everyday, living contexts of our nations, our cities, our neighbourhoods. These are the workshops where the future is being built. Looking ahead, the voices of women gathered in Toronto not only stimulated my own investigation of the promise of pluralism but, in

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retrospect, even thirty years later, presaged the kinds of leadership that women bring to the world we now know. In these years many women’s dialogue groups have emerged, giving intentional expression to the need to connect with one another. Women Transcending Boundaries began in Syracuse, New York, in the days after the 9/11 attacks when a Muslim and Christian woman met for coffee to discuss what they could do together. They each invited a few other women and before long they formed what is now an ongoing multireligious movement in New York. They describe it as “an egalitarian community of women coming together to respect and learn more about each other’s various spiritual beliefs and common concerns … to share our experiences with the wider community, to educate and to serve.” This is but one of a multitude of grassroots initiatives that have emerged “from the ground up” so to speak. Some are widely multi-religious, others are more focused, such as the Daughters of Abraham book clubs or the Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom.3 In these years, scholars have written about the issues of women, feminism, and interreligious dialogue from a more academic perspective. In 1990, Maura O’Neill published Women Speaking, Women Listening: Women in Interreligious Dialogue, providing a methodology and rationale for women’s dialogue.4 She followed with Mending a Torn World: Women in Interreligious Dialogue, looking at a range of viewpoints in every religious tradition from conservative to progressive and suggesting topics for dialogue.5 In 1998, British scholar Ursula King wrote a much-quoted essay, “Feminism, the Missing Dimension in the Dialogue of Religions.”6 In 2002, Helene Egnell in Sweden wrote “Feminist Approaches to Interfaith Dialogue.”7 Most recently, Catherine Cornille at Boston College published Women and Interreligious Dialogue, essays from a symposium of women scholars. They include Christian theologians Rosemary Radford Reuther and Jennine Hill Fletcher; Muslim scholars Zayn Kassam and Aysha Hidayatullah; Jewish thinkers Nancy Fuchs Kreimer and Sue Levi Elwell; and Buddhist scholars Anne Klein and Rita Gross. Each explores her own experience and theological perspective on interreligious encounter, and Cornille, in her introductory essay, asks more generally if women have a distinctive contribution in approach and style to the dialogue of religions.8

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noteS 1 Studio D, the women’s initiative, produced six hour-long documentaries: “Gathering Together,” “Harmony and Balance,” “I’ll Never Forget You,” “Priorities and Perspectives,” “Texts and Contexts,” and “Working toward Peace.” They were directed by Kathleen Shannon and broadcast in 1990. Access to these documentaries has enabled me to quote the women who are cited in this chapter. 2 The Pluralism Project website is http://pluralism.org. 3 See “The Interfaith Infrastructure” at the Pluralism Project, https://www. pluralism.org. 4 Maura O’Neill, Women Speaking, Women Listening: Women in Interreligious Dialogue (New York: Orbis, 1990). 5 Maura O’Neill, Mending a Torn World: Women in Interreligious Dialogue (New York: Orbis, 2007). 6 Ursula King, “Feminism, the Missing Dimension in the Dialogue of Religions,” in Pluralism and the Religions: The Theological and Political Dimensions, ed. John D’Arcy May (London: Cassell Academic, 1998), 40–55. 7 Helene Egnell, “Dialogue for Life: Feminist Approaches to Interfaith Dialogue,” in Theology and the Religions: A Dialogue, ed. Viggo Mortensen (Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans, 2003), 294–55. 8 Catherine Cornille and Jillian Maxey, eds., Women and Interreligious Dialogue (Eugene, or: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2013).

5 The Common Good Through the Lens of Canadian Muslim Women Alia Hogben

Canada’s strength as a nation is its overarching unity as a country and the diversity that is integral to its very being. It is a country that has welcomed immigrants from all over the world to create a society with values of human well-being at its core. This chapter is about how one group of women experiences the world through the lens of being Canadian, Muslim, and of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. Without being Polyannaish or ignoring difficult issues – those addressed in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report, for example – they see Canada as a country of possibilities. This building of a community of Canadians is an ongoing process full of exciting challenges and resolutions for this group of women and for the country itself.

a BrieF hiStorY oF MUSLiMS in Canada The history of Canadian Muslims starts in the 1850s, and although many of the first Muslim immigrants were men, the early census also lists families as settlers, indicating that women followed soon after. Although most Muslims have arrived in Canada in the last fifty years, the first families have been here since the mid-nineteenth century and are recorded in the 1871 census. These were James and Agnes Love, converts to Islam who emigrated from Scotland, and John and Martha Simons from the United States. They were joined by at least one escaped African Muslim slave, Mohammah Baquaqua, who came via the Underground Railroad and settled in Chatham in the 1850s. We know of him because he wrote his autobiography.1

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Most of the Muslim newcomers were young men from the Ottoman Syria-Lebanon area who landed in Canadian or American ports and usually started their new lives as peddlers. They walked the country roads with huge packs on their backs or, if successful, travelled by horse and cart to rural farms. They eventually settled and opened small stores in villages and towns across Canada or set up trading posts in the Far North. Once established, these men often returned to their countries to marry and then brought their wives back to Canada. Another group, Albanians and some Bosnians from the Ottoman Balkan provinces, settled mainly in the Toronto area in the years before and after the First World War. A third group was composed of labourers from then British India, and later from Fiji, who came to British Columbia to work in the timber industry. In the early years, these Muslim immigrants struggled to survive and had neither time nor energy to start any community or religious organizations. By 1931, their numbers had increased to 645, after which the Canadian census bureau stopped recording them as a distinct group for the next fifty years. The late historical researcher Daood Hamdani has estimated that, by 1961, the population of Muslims had risen to fifty-eight hundred.2 However, the major increase occurred from the late 1960s onward after the introduction of less racially based immigration laws, including the dismantling of the discriminatory quota system and the introduction of the fairer points system for immigration to Canada. The more recent groups have come from all over the world, are of diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds, and are found in every walk of  life, from factory workers and farmers to shopkeepers, educators, lawyers, judges, and politicians. They have travelled to all parts of the country although most have settled in Ontario and, more specifically, in larger urban centres. They have arrived as families rather than as individuals, and this has encouraged the building of community organizations, especially mosques and Islamic centres. The first mosque in Canada was built in Edmonton in 1938 by a very small but vibrant Syrian Lebanese community. Many women were involved in galvanizing the Muslim community, as well as the larger community, to contribute to the building of the Al Rashid Mosque. When the mosque became too small and there was talk of destroying the building, a group of women, members of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women (CCMW), collected funds to move it in 1992 to Fort Edmonton Park, where it still stands.3 For most Muslims, it has been, and continues to be, a difficult journey of adaptation and adjustment. It was harder in the earlier years when Canadians viewed themselves exclusively as white, mostly British,

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and Christian. As late as the 1950s, beyond the borders of Quebec, even the French Canadian population was on the periphery, and Indigenous people and Blacks were barely visible. Newcomers were expected to adapt even if this meant giving up much of their culture, changing their names, and discarding some of their religious practices. In this milieu, where former Ottoman Muslims from the Middle East and the Balkans were viewed as “Turks” and as foreign, Asians from Fiji or India would have experienced even greater discrimination upon arriving in Canada. One of the Albanians who came to Toronto in 1912 told us that none of them could find employment because one of the requirements was a reference from a Christian clergyman. As a result, they opened small businesses. One of these leaders, Regep Assim, became a prominent figure in the early development of the Toronto community in the 1950s and 1960s. However, since the 1980s, with the changes in immigration policy, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms of 1984, and the Multiculturalism Act of 1988, there has been a dramatic increase in the Muslim population. By 2011, there were over one million Muslims from every part of the world as well as the Canadian-born and converts, and their common identity of being Muslim has led to the creation of mosques and Islamic centres all across Canada.

Canadian MUSLiM WoMen So, what about Muslim women? In the early years, likely very few were proficient in English and their focus would have been on solidifying a sense of family within their ethnic communities. To be immigrants and to learn to live in this environment, often in isolated situations, would have been difficult. Nevertheless, in Edmonton in the late 1930s women were certainly active in their community, as is seen in their participation in the building and maintaining of their mosque. Their community, Lebanese or Syrian, included their Christian neighbours since their links were through their common cultures and were not limited to religion. On a personal note, I settled in Toronto in the early 1960s after marrying a Scottish Canadian who converted to Islam. As a young, eager couple we searched for other Muslims and found a small community of Albanians, Bosnians, Lebanese, and Indo-Pakistanis who welcomed us with warmth and generosity. With this group, which was international and welcoming to all, we established Toronto’s first Muslim Centre. In 1982, educator and activist Dr Lila Fahlman, a descendant of a rural Saskatchewan Syrian-Lebanese family, founded the Canadian Council of Muslim Women. Convinced that there should be an independent

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women’s organization, and with the financial support of the Council of Muslim Communities of Canada, she travelled across the country and galvanized other Muslim women of diverse ethnicities. Her inspiring vision of women’s empowerment, equality, and equity has continued to guide the work of this organization. Lila has been recognized by her fellow Canadians and awarded the Order of Canada, the first Muslim to be so honoured. An elementary school has been named after her in Edmonton. CCMW has continued its work in support of women since 1982, with local chapters across the country. It addresses critical issues relevant to their lives. CCMW has created partnerships with other women’s organizations and with other Muslim organizations so that the voice of Canadian Muslim women is heard in diverse gatherings. It is active in advocacy, education, public communication, and in identifying issues so that these can be addressed. There have been projects to increase community resilience, youth engagement, and interfaith partnerships. CCMW focuses on strengthening civic engagement by fostering the development of an integrated Canadian identity, for both women and youth, that combines all aspects of their life’s experiences. The emphasis has always been on ensuring a balance between Canadian and religious identities.

PrejUdiCe and PatriarChY The challenges for Canadian Muslims are similar to those other newcomers are facing, including prejudice and racism. Added to these is the burning issue for Canadian Muslim women of the pervasive teachings and practices of patriarchy, a result of the influence of a very traditional, male-dominated interpretation of Islam. As Muslims, we are the inheritors of the centuries-old prejudices against Islam and Muslims in the West. These started with the first encounters between Muslims and Christians in the Byzantine era in what is now Turkey, and they continued with the Crusades, confrontations in the Iberian Peninsula, and, from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth, the West’s colonization of the world where Muslims lived. The tragic events in the United States on 9 September 2001 have dramatically added to the West’s negative attitude towards Islam and Muslims. In Canada, the federal government quickly introduced the Anti-Terrorism Act (Bill C–36), which received royal assent in December 2001. The repercussions for all Muslims have been pervasive and frightening. There have been several anti-Muslim attacks in Canada and serious violations of Muslims’ basic human rights. The most notable

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cases are those of Omar Khadr and Mahar Arar. A further example of security scrutiny has been the Canadian government’s No Fly List, which cast a wide net and wrongly named some innocent individuals. In one instance, a grandchild of a CCMW member, who happened to have the same name as an adult suspect, was targeted and pulled aside at the Canada-US border a number of times. Muslim youth have borne the brunt of racism and prejudice and many have sought answers by creating groups of like-minded youth beyond Canada, for example, in some countries in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa. This radicalization led some to reject the norms of Canadian society and to turn to an extreme version of their Muslim identity. Along with these external challenges, there have been, and continue to be, issues within Muslim communities, especially related to the interpretation and practices of Islam. Most Muslims are practising believers. However, some literal interpretations of Islam are detrimental to women and their rights. How has this literalist version of Islam  – Wahhabism  – come to predominate? Begun as a reform movement in the eighteenth century by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, Wahhabism teaches a strict monotheism, the literal meaning of the Quran and Hadith, and the patriarchal model of society and family in which roles are defined and rigidly upheld. Men are the head of the household and women and girls are obedient to their authority. Ibn Abd Al-Wahhab formed an alliance with a local leader, Muhammad bin Saud, promising obedience and loyalty in return for protection and support in propagating the movement. This alliance with the House of Saud has endured, and with the formation of Saudi Arabia in 1932 and the immense wealth based on its oil exports, Wahhabism has grown and spread around the world. Thus, with immigration to Canada from areas influenced by Wahhabism and backed by the wealth of the Gulf States, this patriarchal model is practised in communities here. Its influence is now being spread by preachers on the internet. There is also a blending of cultural practices with those of the faith, which has led to negative effects on women and girls. One example is that of polygamy. It is well understood that polygamy is illegal in Canada, but it is also understood that some other religious groups, such as Mormons, practise polygamy and that not much is done to address this illegal practice. Some Muslim male leaders preach that polygamy is allowed in Islam and are secretly performing polygamous marriages.4 It is difficult to address this issue for two reasons: first, any public

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discussion of controversial matters related to Islam has a tendency to arouse anti-Muslim feelings in the wider community; second, within the traditionalist Muslim communities where polygamous marriages exist, there is a conspiracy of silence.

WoMen advoCating For WoMen There are excellent scholars, men and women, who have conducted critical analyses of the Quran and Islamic traditions, but mainstream Muslim majority states work to sideline and silence these diverse voices. For example, there are several interpretations of the Arabic Quran, especially regarding the verses on women’s rights. Laleh Bakhtiar, an Iranian American scholar and translator, has translated the Quran into English, and in her translation she provides alternative meanings for ambiguous terms. The Quranic verse regarding the husband’s treatment of a rebellious wife, “beating of wives,” can, she argues, be interpreted as “go away.”5 Her work is sidelined by conservatives, but it has still filtered into discussions on the treatment of women. Some of these women scholars are also community activists and are influential members of national and international organizations. Several international networks, such as MUSaWah (meaning equality) and the Women Living Under Muslim Family Laws network, are trying to reform Muslim family laws in Muslim majority countries. There are national women’s organizations, like CCMW, working hard to critically analyze those Quranic verses that have until now been expressed in anti-women ways. Another indication of the role of women in Islam is their place and location inside mosques and Islamic centres. Where do they stand for prayers and public events? In Canada, Tammy Gaber, professor of architecture at Laurentian University, conducted a fascinating research study of Canadian mosque design in collaboration with the CCMW. Her drawings of the layout of space for females clearly demonstrate the limited space assigned for women worshippers as well as the inferior quality and location of that space.6 However, change is occurring. At the lovely Noor Cultural Centre in Toronto, women and men pray together, and at times women lead the congregation; the Unity Mosque, also in Toronto, was founded by a queer Muslim lawyer as a safe place for LgBt+ people where everyone is welcome and all pray together; and a new group in Toronto has formed the Women’s Mosque. But perhaps the best known example of advocacy for changes in support of women is the struggle against the use of religious laws

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in family matters that took place between 2003 and 2005. While CCMW took the lead, there was a strong and active coalition of organizations, including women’s, labour, and others, to ensure that religious family laws could not be used in legally binding arbitration. The Arbitration Act in Ontario and similar legislation in other provinces, with the exception of Quebec, allowed for religious laws to be applied in settling family disputes. Under the act, a faith-based, privately arbitrated decision was legally binding. As an organization of believing women, the CCMW advocated for one set of laws to be applied to all, regardless of faith, ethnicity, race, or culture, under the existing family law legislation. This struggle took over two years before the Ontario government at last agreed to change the relevant legislation, and this ruling was followed by the other provinces. As in the case of polygamy, the spectre of stirring up anti-Muslim sentiments was very much present. So the CCMW had to balance the need to advocate for these changes against the conflict this would create among Canadian Muslims and the strong anti-Muslim feeling in the wider society. These powerful emotions were elicited in no small part because the issue was often described as one of sharia. And our efforts to explain did not always work! Thus, we need to pause here and take a side road to speak of sharia in the context of Muslim family law and its effect on women’s rights. Attempts to understand Islam’s teachings across language and culture barriers, even when well intentioned, have resulted in misunderstandings and mistaken meanings applied to Islamic concepts. For example, in English, terms such as “sharia” and “jihad” are now in common use, but their meaning has been corrupted. Sharia is defined as a well-trodden path leading to the source of water – that is, as a path towards God. The scholar M.S. Mahmassani defines sharia as a “bundle of moral ethical principles and a value system which provide tools to guide humanity.”7 Another scholar, Khaled Abou El Fadl, writes that “God’s law as an abstraction is called the sharia, while the concrete understanding and implementation of this Will is the fiqh, or jurisprudence.”8 Therefore, there are two distinct terms  – “sharia” and “fiqh.” Sharia is the set of ethical principles for moral guidance, while fiqh is the concrete human understanding of these Quranic principles. The development of a legal framework was the work of male scholars from all parts of the then Muslim world between the eighth and ninth centuries Ce. It is not a uniform codified set of laws. Of the six thousand verses in the Quran, approximately five hundred deal with legal matters and have been the basis for an entire legal system. Jurists solidified the system in the early centuries of Islam,

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and this system has been practised to the present day in many Muslim majority countries. The other source of information for the Muslim legal system is Hadith – the practices and sayings of the Prophet Mohammad, which were recorded years after his death. Most of these practices are accepted, but some are controversial. Due to the continuous flow of newcomers to Canada from Muslim majority countries, and because traditionalists and conservatives preach the importance of using these family laws as a religious duty, Canadians need to understand the context for Muslim family law. One of the ongoing tasks of CCMW is the public education of Muslims and others about these laws, in contrast to Canadian family laws. The sharia is based on the ethical principles of justice, morality, prevention of hardship, and prevention of oppression. It also includes the five pillars of Muslim practice: belief in one God, ritual prayers, fasting, charity, and the pilgrimage. CCMW was able to argue that these same principles underlie family laws in Canada, and if changes were required, then we could advocate for these without invoking our religious teachings.

the FUtUre What of the future for Canadian Muslims? What will be the contributions of Muslims to their country?

Enhancing the Canadian Landscape One major contribution is the diversity Muslims bring to the Canadian landscape. Since they come from many ethnic, racial, and cultural backgrounds, Muslims have enhanced the country’s identity. While it is true that their shared religious beliefs constitute a powerful bond, these are expressed differently through different cultures. But it is important that as Canadians we emphasize values and practices that bind us together rather than separate us into communities fragmented by race, culture, or religion. The Ghanaian British philosopher Kwame Appiah has written about individual identity as “national” or “cosmopolitan.”9 Cosmopolitanism sees all humans as citizens of a single community, with more that is shared than divisive. While cosmopolitanism values respect for human diversity, it emphasizes qualities and experiences that unite rather than separate people. Canadians, including Muslims, can live out their cosmopolitanism by finding ways to be in contact with different peoples

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and experiences and being open to diverse ideas. They can cultivate a shared feeling of belonging to the world and not be limited by national or ethnic or religious boundaries. The American political scientist Robert Putnam has put forward another concept that helps to explain the significance of citizenship and how to strengthen it – the accumulation of “social capital.” Social networks are crucial for the development of citizenship. Through them, citizens develop trust, cooperation, reciprocity, and connections with others. Putnam calls this “bonding capital” and cautions that it must be balanced by “bridging capital,” that is, connections between individuals who are significantly different from one another. Peaceful multi-ethnic societies require both.10

Protecting Human Rights: A Mutual Responsibility Regarding immigration, adjustment, and adaptation, it is important to emphasize that there is a reciprocal relationship between the larger society and the distinct communities within the state. Both the host society and the newcomers’ communities share responsibility for improving the lives of all and overcoming racism and prejudice. In Canada, there are laws that can be invoked to ensure the rights and welfare of all citizens, the two most important of which are the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Multiculturalism Act. However, even with these in place, the application can be, and has been, erratic, depending on the stance of the political party forming the government. Stephen Harper, Conservative prime minister from 2006 to 2015, fanned Islamophobia by stating in an interview with CBC in 2011 that “Islamism” was the greatest threat facing Canada, committing Canada to the American war on iSiS under the umbrella of fighting “jihadism” in 2014, and invoking identity politics in the 2015 election race with the proposal of an rCMP tip line to report “barbaric cultural practices.” Internationally, there are tragic failures of ethical leadership among those wielding political power, including in Muslim majority countries, to address human rights abuses internally or across borders. Because of our shared religion, Canadian Muslims have a particular concern for the oppression of the Rohingyas of Myanmar, the Uighurs of China, and Indian Muslims. These abuses call upon not only Muslims but also all who care about human rights and the welfare of others to voice their concerns and seek justice. Canadian Muslim women can be active members of the Muslim “ummah” – the community of believers – and play a leadership role in addressing issues within Muslim communities at home and abroad.

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Women’s Voices within Islam As discussed earlier, rather than allowing the traditionalists to take the lead in interpreting Islam, Canadian Muslim women have joined in partnerships with international networks to change the understanding of Islam, especially regarding patriarchy and feminism. They have contributed to a richer understanding of the teachings of the Quran and Hadith and the interplay between religion and cultural practices. As believers, they have a responsibility to explore the links between Islam and human rights, including the rights of women and girls. It is essential that Canadian Muslim women continue to advocate for the application of a framework of human rights and to ensure that these are congruent with Islamic ideals of social justice and equality of all.

Q In conclusion, all Canadian Muslims, women and men, must actively struggle for the right to participate and be involved in the daily life of our adopted country. Certainly, there are many issues, ranging from racism, prejudice, and the vagaries of immigration policy, that must be addressed, and women can join with other human rights groups to improve the laws and practices of the land. The recent struggles against racism in Canadian society have exposed the systemic nature of racism, which goes beyond religion and ethnicity. However, there is at the same time an ongoing process of learning to value diversity, no matter how slowly or painfully. Muslims have a role to play in ensuring that all Canadians continue to fully implement this value as part of our democracy. We must not let racism and anti-Muslim sentiments create divisions among us.

noteS 1 Hassam Munir, “Remembering the First Muslims in Canada,” http://www. ihistory.co/first-muslims-in-canada. 2 Canadian Muslims: A Statistical Report, Canadian Dawn Foundation, 29 May 2015, https://muslimlink.ca/pdf/Canadian-Muslims-A-Statistical-ReviewFinal.pdf. 3 See Daood Hamdani, The Al-Rashid Mosque: Canada’s First Mosque 1938 Edmonton (n.p.: Canadian Council of Muslim Women, 2010).

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4 For a defence of the practice of polygamy within Islam, see Abu Ameenah Bilal Philips and Jameelah Jones, Polygamy in Islaam (Riyadh: International Islamic Publishing House, [1999] 2005). 5 The Sublime Quran, trans. Laleh Bakhtiar (Chicago: Kazi Publications, 2007). 6 Tammy Gaber, Beyond the Divide: A Century of Canadian Mosque Design and Gender Allocation (n.p.: Canadian Council of Muslim Women, 2017). 7 Maher S. Mahmassani, Islam in Retrospect: Recovering the Message (Northampton, Ma: Olive Branch Press, 2014), 321. 8 Khaled Abou El Fadl, Speaking in God’s Name (Oxford: Oneworld, 2001), 32. 9 See Kwame Appiah, “Education for Global Citizenship,” in Why Do We Educate? Renewing the Conversation, ed. David L. Coulter and John R. Wiens (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), chap. 6. 10 See Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).

6 Visio Divina Sean Mulrooney

introdUCtion Although I love the practice of Visio Divina, I confess that I find its name off-putting. It’s in Latin and so sounds rather erudite, complicated, and churchy; but, in fact, the practice of Visio Divina (or holy seeing) is rather simple and refreshing and need not be done in a church at all. It is a practice intended to bring ordinary people to a deeper awareness of themselves, the world, and God. In my experience, it works very well. I came across Visio Divina while preparing to teach a graduate course in art and spirituality with Dr Katharine Lochnan at Regis College at the Toronto School of Theology in Winter 2020. Especially for beginners, talking about art and spirituality is rather intimidating, so finding an easy point of entry is crucial. In half an hour or so, I explained the history and structure of Visio Divina to our students and then had them apply the technique first to some Rembrandt etchings and, a month later, to a Van Gogh painting called Noon.1 The results were stellar – insightful, surprising, personal, and profound – far beyond any expectations I had for an academic exercise. I realized that I had stumbled upon a treasure that deserves to be better known. In this chapter, I describe the antecedents of Visio Divina by examining the veneration of icons in the Eastern Church and the medieval practice of Lectio Divina in the Western Church. Then, by looking at a letter from Clare of Assisi, I outline the practice of one version of Visio Divina in the Middle Ages. Next, in the central part of my chapter, I examine the revival and practice of Visio Divina in the twenty-first century. Finally, I consider some implications of Visio

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Divina for contemporary ecumenical and interfaith movements as well as for  initiating dialogue on spirituality with the increasingly large number of people who have no particular religious affiliation.

tWo anteCedentS oF viSio divina Veneration of Icons in the Eastern Church In Exodus 20:3–4, we read the first commandment: “I am the Lord your God; you shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an image of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.” In Judaism, idolatry is prohibited. While rooted in Judaism, Christianity is the religion that believes that God  became flesh. Christians believe that at a particular place and time, God became visible. If Christianity is true, then suddenly what was formerly forbidden becomes entirely appropriate because the visible has become a vehicle for the divine. In Christianity, idols are still forbidden; but icons become possible. It is hard to overstate the significance of icons to the life of the Eastern churches (whether Catholic or Orthodox). Icons are considered not just beautiful pictures but windows to heaven.2 Indeed, in the Eastern churches, icons depicting biblical scenes are central to activities in the liturgy and in the home. It is a false contrast to say that the East is visually oriented and the West is aurally oriented. It’s not an either/or. First, from the Eastern side: most icons depict scenes taken from the narrative of scripture. For instance, Andrei Rublev’s famous fifteenth-century icon of the Trinity is based on Genesis 18:1–8, in which Abraham and Sarah entertain three angels. Second, from the Western side, when you hear a passage from scripture, you are usually going to imagine what is being described; and that is just a step away from depicting images from scripture. So there is no strict division between Easterners seeing and Westerners hearing. In fact, in his 1995 encyclical on ecumenism, Ut Unum Sint (That All May Be One), Pope John Paul II urges communion between the Eastern Catholic and Orthodox Churches on the one hand and the Roman Catholic Church on the other, famously using the metaphor of the church breathing with two lungs again instead of with just one. So although it is an oversimplification to say that the Eastern Church is exclusively visual and the Western exclusively auditory, it is fair to say that the East emphasizes the one whereas the West emphasizes the other.

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One further comment: both Eastern and Western Church Fathers (such as Origen and Augustine) were Platonists, and, as Platonists believe that the material world is an imperfect image of the true world of the divine Forms, it follows that they believe that all material things are imperfect images of the invisible God. This resonates well with the claim in Genesis 1:27 that human beings are made in the image and likeness of God.

Lectio Divina in the Western Church While the practice of Visio Divina is not widely known, many people have heard of her more famous sister: Lectio Divina. There are important connections between the two, so it is well that we should look at Lectio Divina at some length.3 The Bible has always been central to Christian worship. But we forget that for many centuries after the time of Christ, most people did not know how to read; and so, for them, Lectio Divina was not reading the Word of God but hearing it. The distinction is significant because the word “hearing” emphasizes not the agency of the believers but, rather, their receptivity. The early Christians believed that when they heard the Word of God, God was the agent and they were the patients. And so, at its best, Lectio Divina results not just in believers forming true opinions about God and the life of Jesus but in believers actually encountering the living God. Seen in this light, Lectio Divina was not a matter of fitting information from the Bible into our pre-existent conceptual schemes; rather, it was a matter of having our already held concepts “blown open” by God’s Word.4 Study is for mastery of the Word; Lectio Divina is for surrender to it. While Lectio Divina had been practised in Benedictine monasteries for centuries, the practice was famously formalized in 1132 by Guigo II, the ninth prior of the Grand Chartreuse Carthusian monastery in France, in his book The Ladder of Monks.5 Guigo identifies four steps of Lectio Divina, and these steps became canonical: hearing, meditation, prayer, and contemplation. His words require some brief unpacking to see what he actually meant. Hearing meant listening to the Word of God (often from the Offices of Readings for the day); not analyzing it but receiving one key word or phrase from the readings that resonated with the hearers. Once this central word had been identified, in meditation, the hearers would allow the word to work on them and break them open and reform them in accordance with its divine nature. The next step was prayer in which the recipient of the word would respond to it in thanksgiving, praise, petition, repentance, or adoration. Finally, having gone through

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the steps of hearing, meditating, and responding, the fourth step was contemplation, or abiding with God. In this final step, one did not look for new insights but simply spent time with God. This final step is like silently spending time with a close friend or a spouse in nature, both wordlessly revelling in all that surrounds them and in each other, enjoying an ever more perfect union with all they encounter. In sum, practitioners of Lectio Divina saw themselves as imitators of Mary at the Annunciation: we are all called to ponder the Word of God we have received in our hearts and to allow ourselves to be transformed by that profound encounter.

viSio divina in the MiddLe ageS Although the practice of Lectio Divina was well established in the Benedictine and Carthusian monasteries of the Middle Ages, the practice of Visio Divina was less so. But sometime between 1235 and 1238, when the abbess Agnes of Prague was being pressured by Pope Gregory IX to accept an endowment for her monastery, Saint Clare of Assisi (companion of Saint Francis) wrote a letter to Agnes urging her to refuse the endowment on the grounds that accepting it would be violating Agnes’s Franciscan vow of poverty. Even though her refusal of the endowment would displease the pope, Clare argued that Christ himself was held in contempt by the religious authorities of his day, and so Agnes’s refusal of riches would unite her more closely to Christ. To encourage Agnes to remain strong and to prefer Christ’s poverty to the pope’s more fiscally sensible advice, Clare told Agnes that she should spend time in front of an image of Christ crucified to gaze upon, consider, and contemplate her beloved.6 More specifically, Clare told her to (1) gaze upon the wounds of Christ; (2) consider how much he has suffered on her behalf; and then (3) contemplate how all her sufferings will be turned into joy because she has united herself to Christ. These three steps (so briefly stated) would become the template for what has come to be called, on analogy with Lectio Divina, Visio Divina.

viSio divina in the tWentY-FirSt CentUrY Some Obstacles to Contemporary Visio Divina: The Word, the World, Work, and Worry Much has changed since Clare instructed Agnes on how to spend time with an image of Christ crucified. What follows is a brief look at some of the most significant cultural changes that have taken place between her time and ours. More precisely, I argue that, since the Middle Ages,

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attention in the Western world has not been focused on seeing the divine in art and creation; on the contrary, attention has been focused on hearing the Word of God (rather than seeing the image of God in creation), understanding the world (rather than understanding God through the world), making tools (rather than contemplating God), and worrying about what others are saying about us (rather than focusing on what God is saying to us). First, the Protestant Reformation in the early sixteenth century not only divided the Western Church into Protestant and Catholic; it also changed the way we viewed religious art. In many places throughout northern Europe (in England and Holland, for instance), churches and monasteries were looted and paintings and statues were destroyed. Although Anglicans and Lutherans retained the use of stained-glass windows and altar adornment, in the eyes of some Protestants, the church building was not a place to gaze on graven images but a place for the faithful to come together to listen to the Word of God. In many places, the elaborate stained-glass windows of medieval Catholic churches were shattered and replaced by clear glass panes to let the pure light of God shine on the gathered faithful. In such a context, the contemplation of images to connect with the divine was not a priority. The focus of the Reformation is not on gazing on images of God but on listening to God’s Word. Second, the seventeenth century saw the dawn of the Scientific Revolution. Rather than considering the cosmos primarily as a way for humans to return to their Creator, the world came to be seen as a thing in its own right. Rather than considering creatures as manifestations of the divine, scientists such as Galileo, Descartes, and Newton taught us to focus on the movements and natures of things as they exist in themselves so that we could come to understand the physical world mathematically and use it for our gain. The sacramental quality of the physical world as an expression of divine goodness was, if not denied, at least ignored or pronounced too nebulous a topic for serious study. Scientists qua scientists were not focused on the divine presence in the world but on the world itself. Third, the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries changed the way we looked at reality. Focus was on doing work more efficiently, not on contemplation of the divine. Even an atheist like Karl Marx lamented the loss of a contemplative attitude that was necessitated by the demands of capitalist production: an animal “produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need …

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Man therefore also forms things in accordance with the laws of beauty.”7 According to Marx, in the nineteenth century, efficient production had eclipsed every other human activity and approach to life. Focus on work had totally trumped contemplation of beauty. Fourth, whatever its extravagant benefits, the Digital Age of the twenty-first century has also interfered with humans’ contemplative abilities. The internet provides a bewitching, ever-available supply of images of human constructs that call for our attention 24/7. While parents lament the loss of their children’s attention to their iPhones, these same parents are hardly immune from the constantly available distractions offered in cyberspace. Rather than calm contemplation of the natural world around us and of the supernatural realm, we now obsessively worry about what we can buy and what others are saying about us.

How Do We Do Visio Divina in the Twenty-First Century? Still, the formidable obstacles to practising Visio Divina in the contemporary age do not make it impossible. On the contrary, these obstacles underline its uniqueness and its importance for contemporary life. Although it is not the job of scientists to focus on the divine presence hidden in the world, many artists have taken up this quest. In fact, rather than focusing on painting angels and scenes from the Bible, many contemporary artists seek to portray the spiritual and mystical elements of reality through their depictions of the material world. And if this strikes some as excessively secular, it was St Paul who said that, “since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature  – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made.”8 Furthermore, the founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556), instructed his followers to “find God in all things.” And, in our own day, eco-theologian Thomas Berry (1914–2009) tells us that “the universe itself can be understood as the primary revelation of the divine.”9 If Paul, Ignatius, and Thomas Berry are right, we do not have to contemplate explicitly religious images to find God. I first became aware of contemporary Visio Divina when a version developed by Dr Maureen McDonnell and Brother Ignatius Feaver, oFM, was being used in a course offered at Regis College. Although that version is unavailable to the public, Feaver has recently described his method in Holy Seeing: A Visual Invitation to Prayer.10 What follows is my adaptation of McDonnell and Feaver’s method of Visio Divina.

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The Five Steps of Contemporary Visio Divina 1 PreParation We cannot come in from shopping or online browsing and enter directly into Visio Divina. We need to acquire a certain calmness in disposition before Visio Divina becomes possible. We need to switch from our ordinary way of seeing things as either obstacles or tools to just seeing them for what they are in themselves. After all, if I have a sore leg, a steep path up a mountain is experienced as a burden rather than as a thing of beauty. Visio Divina is about detaching from our usual way of looking at the world so that we can experience it contemplatively. Further, to enter into Visio Divina fully, we need to become aware of our particular preoccupations and let go of them. And so I ask my students, “What practical problems were you thinking of before you came to class? What to get for dinner? What to say to your boss because you have not yet finished the project you promised to do? We all have daily cares that need our attention, but now is not the time to focus on them. I promise you that all your problems will be waiting for you when you finish with Visio Divina, so I’ll ask you to ignore them for now.” So detaching from our ordinary way of seeing the world and from our particular preoccupations tells us what not to do. But what can we positively do to enter into a contemplative mindset? As many traditions from around the world suggest, one of the best ways to gather ourselves is to focus on our breathing. However different individuals from around the world are, we all breathe. If we didn’t, we would literally be dead. So now that we have put aside all earthly cares, we need to become aware of our breathing. Realize that it has been going on for our whole life – and for most of that time, we have been unaware of it. (I wonder what other essential things we have been unaware of?) Breathe slowly and deliberately and enjoy. 2 gazing Now that you’ve quieted down your mind and body, your next task is simply to look at the picture in front of you. What catches your attention? Don’t choose to focus on what you think is most important. Instead, relax and receive. What is your eye drawn to? A certain figure? A colour? A setting? What is it? Once you’ve found that, use your imagination to fill out the picture with the remaining senses. What sounds might be present in the scene? If you were in the scene, would you feel hot or cold? Is there a wind blowing? Once you have imaginatively entered into the scene, focus on what is going on inside you. Does what has caught your eye make you happy?

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Does it calm you down? Or does it stir you up? Does it give you a feeling of anguish? Of sadness? Whatever the feeling is, pay attention. Enter into that feeling and experience it as deeply as you can. 3 ConSideration The gazing step is entirely experiential – what caught your eye and how you felt about it. In this third step, consideration, add thought to your experience. Whatever your feelings are about your experience, what are these feelings tied to? What past events, people, or ideas are being raised by your experience of this picture? No one else has your past or present experience. It is now time for you to explore that experience and find out why you might have focused on what you did and why you feel about it the way you do. What’s your story? Take your time and let it unfold. 4 ConteMPLation Now that you’ve identified what caught your eye and why, look again at the picture and enjoy all that has happened to you. Now it is time to ask a further question: What might the God who is everywhere present and filling all things be saying to you through this experience? And if you don’t believe in God, imagine that there is someone in this world who loves you without reserve. Be still and listen to what the voice of Unconditional Love wants to reveal to you through this present experience, whether it has been light or dark. Bask in this moment of revelation. 5 tranSForMation Reflect on the process that you have just gone through. What really gripped you? What resistances did you experience? What surprised you? What delighted you? Have you been changed in any way? How?

a ConteMPorarY PraCtitioner oF viSio divina: henri noUWen Henri Nouwen (1932–1996) was one of the most popular spiritual writers of the twentieth century. A Dutch Roman Catholic priest, Henri was a theology professor at Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard before he became the pastor of the L’Arche Daybreak community north of Toronto, a community of developmentally delayed adults, for the last ten years of his life. Nouwen had a great way of making religious and spiritual topics accessible to a broad public. As well as his interests in theology, Nouwen was deeply interested in the connections between the visual arts and spirituality. For

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instance,  in the late 1970s, while he was at Yale, Nouwen taught a course for three years on the ministry and art of Vincent van Gogh. Furthermore, he wrote three books that explicitly consider connections between visual images and spirituality: Behold the Beauty of the Lord is about praying with icons; Walk with Jesus (with illustrations by Sister Helen David) is a series of meditations on drawings of the Stations of the Cross; and his most popular book, The Return of the Prodigal Son, is an extended meditation on the spiritual significance of the Rembrandt painting of the same name. Granted that Nouwen wanted to connect art and spirituality, do we have any evidence that he used Visio Divina to do so? Actually, we have evidence of the strongest kind. Before Nouwen published The Return of the Prodigal Son, he gave a workshop to the assistants of the L’Arche Daybreak community in the fall of 1988. The workshop was a series of nine talks, and at the end of each talk, Nouwen gave his students an exercise. The structure of each exercise was the same: listen, journal, and commune.11 By “listen,” Nouwen means “receive” or “gaze” (step two of our Visio Divina); by “journal,” he means “consider” (step three); and by “commune,” he means “spend time with God” or “contemplate” (step four). Although Nouwen may have never formally encountered Visio Divina, his practice in his workshop on The Return of the Prodigal Son conforms to the middle steps of our Visio Divina in a striking way.

the eFFeCtiveneSS oF viSio divina I believe that one of the reasons that Visio Divina works so well is that it is a fruitful union of subjective and objective approaches. On the one hand, whenever you look at a piece of art, there are objective elements to be taken into account: What style is the artist painting in? What techniques is she using? What other artists have influenced this artist? And there are many other such questions, and the more you know the answers to them, the richer your interpretation of the artwork will be. On the other hand, even if you have minimal training in art history, you can look at a piece of art and simply become aware of how the picture stirs up elements of your own personal history. Art historians know nothing about your personal history – but you do! – and you are free to explore the riches of your past and how they might be related to this image, to your personal spiritual journey, and to God. Another reason that Visio Divina is so effective is that it can be practised individually or in a group. If a group of people does Visio Divina together, when the process is over, individuals can be invited to share what they experienced. The key word here is “invited.”’ No one

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has to share if they don’t want to, but I have found that the sharing at the end of the exercise often enriches and surprises others who have been immersed in their own experience, and this sharing evokes further unfolding of one’s own experience.

iMPLiCationS oF viSio divina For eCUMeniCaL, interFaith, and SeCULar diaLogUe The history of the Christian churches has been marred by a shocking amount of violence. Although inter-Christian religious wars are mostly a thing of the past, dogmatic differences in creeds are still too often causes for different Christian denominations remaining separate and suspicious of each other. One of the advantages of Visio Divina is that it focuses on image rather than on word, with the result that verbal dogmatic differences are never the focus of the exercise. Even when participants share the fruits of their contemplation, they describe what they themselves have experienced rather than what others ought to believe. Just so, looking for God’s ongoing activity in us as mediated through our experience of visual images is something that anyone who believes in God can do. When practising Visio Divina, the precise nature of God is not something that we are going to debate; instead, we can simply open ourselves to how God is acting in us at present and rejoice at the depth of responses that each of us has and marvel at their diversity. In this context, it is easy to experience our differences as a gift rather than as a threat. But what about the many who do not identify themselves as members of any particular religion or who may be agnostic or atheist? I would say that Visio Divina is an especially welcoming way for such people to enter into spiritual practice. Never once is the neophyte required to make a profession of faith. On the contrary, beginners are asked to disengage from their worries, become present to their breathing and to what is staring them in the face, see what catches their attention, discover why they may have focused on that feature by exploring their personal histories, and then ask what Unconditional Love may be telling them about reality, whether they believe Unconditional Love is real or just a heuristic construct. I have found Visio Divina an exhilarating and surprisingly rich practice; and many of my students have found it so as well. It seems to me to be a particularly compelling and non-threatening way for people living in a pluralistic postmodern culture to take their first steps in discovering and practising an authentic spirituality.

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noteS 1 To see some Rembrandt etchings, go to https://www.masterworksfine art.com/artists/rembrandt. To see Van Gogh’s Noon, go to http://art-vangogh. com/saint-remy_112.html. 2 See, for instance, Elizabeth Zelensky and Lela Gilbert, Windows to Heaven: Introducing Icons to Protestants and Catholics (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2005). 3 This account of Lectio Divina draws from M. Basil Pennington, oCSo, Lectio Divina: Renewing the Ancient Practice of Praying the Scriptures (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1998). 4 Pennington, Lectio Divina, 27. 5 Guigo II, The Ladder of Monks: A Letter on Contemplation and Twelve Meditations, ed. and trans. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh (Garden City: Image Books, 1978). 6 Clare of Assisi, The Letters to Agnes, ed. and trans. Joan Mueller, oSF (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2003), 30. 7 Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in The MarxEngels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978), 76. 8 Romans 1:20, New International Version. 9 Thomas Berry, The Christian Future and the Fate of the Earth, ed. Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2009), 67. 10 See Ignatius Feaver, Holy Seeing: A Visual Invitation to Prayer (Toronto: Novalis, 2020). For other contemporary treatments of Visio Divina, see Karen Kuchan, Visio Divina: A New Prayer Practice for Encounters with God (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 2005); Juliet Benner, Contemplative Vision: A Guide to Christian Art and Prayer (Downers Grove: ivP Books, 2010); Stephen Binz, Transformed by God’s Word: Discovering the Power of Lectio and Visio Divina (Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press, 2016). 11 Nouwen outlines these three steps in his Home Tonight: Further Reflections on the Parable of the Prodigal Son, ed. Sue Mosteller, CSj (New York: Doubleday, 2009), xxi–xxii.

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Faith and Public Policy

7 Faith and Public Policy Bill Blaikie

Lois Wilson is no stranger to the intersection of faith and public policy, and I am honoured to have been asked to reflect on that intersection in a book dedicated to her life and work. I hope to shed some light on the challenges, and intersections within intersections, that people of faith encounter or need to take into account in the current context when advocating in the public sphere for public policies that derive from their faith perspective. It is a different world from the world in which Lois Wilson and I first wrestled with such questions. At this moment, the role of the Christian church and other faiths in public policy discussions faces multiple challenges. One of those challenges is the self-fulfilling feedback loop that has arisen in recent decades between the rise of religious extremism, including religious terrorism, and secularism. This has had the effect of accelerating a view, already active through various manifestations of secularism and pluralism, that religion is more than just outdated; it is also toxic and should have no place in the public realm. This perspective was expressed in a particularly forceful and popular way by philosopher Christopher Hitchens in his book God Is Not Great.1 In the North American Christian universe, this view of religion has been increasingly prominent since the rise of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. The high profile given to conservative Christian voices since the late 1970s arguably obliterated, or at the very least eclipsed, the fact that for many decades in the twentieth century it was the Christian left who had to argue for the role of religious perspectives in public policy discussions, often over the protestation of evangelical Christians who had not yet turned their attention to the world.

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More recently, the role of religion, and particularly Christianity, in public policy, or the politics of public policy, has suffered an added and highly regrettable complication with the growing evidence that implicit and explicit forms of white supremacy are part of the conservative Christian mosaic. There is a white Christian America that feels under siege, demographically, culturally, and politically. The evidence of just how dangerous this siege mentality can be was on vivid display on Capitol Hill, Washington, dC, during the “insurrection” of 6 January 2021. This state of siege seems to have been unexpectedly brought to a head by the election in 2008 of Barack Obama as the first African American president of the United States of America. Contrary to the expectations and hopes of many progressive Christians that the election of Obama would be the beginning of a new era in American politics, in race relations, and in the relationship between religion and politics, given Obama’s high profile as a Democrat and a Christian, it seems rather to have in some way paved the way for Donald Trump. Instead of a new era, we are experiencing a Jurassic Park-like resurgence of racism, blessed by Trump and by his white evangelical Christian court prophets who, by their silence, have long since both qualitatively and quantitatively outdone the disciple Peter who denied knowing Christ in the immediate aftermath of Christ’s arrest. The cock must crow incessantly in their minds, or at least one hopes so. Or perhaps an analogy between them and Judas Iscariot would be more instructive. When I was a student at Emmanuel College from 1974 to 1977, I attended a guest lecture by prominent Roman Catholic theologian Gregory Baum. I believe it was in a Christian history class about ecumenism taught by the respected church historian John Webster Grant. Baum told us that in the current historical context, the line dividing Christians from one another was drawn not between the denominations but within the denominations. The line was how to deal with the demise of Christendom. On one side of the line were those who saw the demise of Christendom as they had known it as a calamity and were determined to save it from its enemies. On the other side were Christians who saw the demise of Christendom as an opportunity  – an opportunity for discerning and discarding all the cultural baggage, colonial and otherwise, that has accumulated over centuries of Constantinian Christianity, an opportunity for an expanded ecumenical perspective that was open to deeper and more respectful dialogue with other denominations and other religions. This certainly was an opportunity that the robust ecumenical spirit in Lois Wilson saw and devoted much time to, an opportunity to live within a more biblical

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Christianity, where Christians were a justice-seeking and self- sacrificing minority challenging the powers and principalities, instead of, like the false prophets, crying peace when there is no peace. In Canada one could argue that something like this was happening in a significant way during the 1970s, with the proliferation of interchurch coalitions concerning themselves with issues like global trade relations, Aboriginal rights, nuclear disarmament, poverty, and so on. Unfortunately, although the work of KairoS continues this to an extent, it remains true that what power there was in the original coalitions was severely weakened by the combined effect of the “culture wars” over abortion and homosexuality, which damaged Catholic-Protestant relations, and the attention given to the destructive legacy of the residential schools. The church was both divided and discredited. Having recognized all this, it is safe to say that finding our way to a way of speaking effectively in the public realm, or in dialogue with other religions, including radical secularists, about faith or public policy or the intersection between them will not be easy. The challenge is to be faithful and authentic, to speak with the authority that comes from doing so, while scrupulously avoiding the older authoritarian vibe that came with Christendom. This is not easy, even for those who are really trying hard. In the Canadian context I believe this is hard for mainstream Protestants, and the United Church in particular, which was founded in part out of a triumphalist streak that hoped someday it would be the national church. I sometimes find residual strains in my own approach. Simultaneously, the religious community must be making an argument for what Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor calls inclusive secularization, a secularization that goes both beyond the older competing religious exclusivisms and new forms of secular exclusivism. If pluralism and diversity are to be real, Taylor argues that, just as one form of belief should not be privileged over another, neither should unbelief be privileged if we are to have healthy democracies. The challenge, as Taylor sees it, is to create a sense of social solidarity in the midst of an increasing degree of diversity and diversifying populations. Taylor points to what he calls the unprecedented historical challenge of creating “a powerful political ethic of solidarity grounded self-consciously in the presence and acceptance of differing points of view.”2 In other words, one might argue, or I might anyway, that we must find such a powerful political ethic of solidarity if we are to deal with the impending existential risks to humanity of climate change, radical inequality, and nuclear weapons. We need an ethic that enables us to act on these issues now, not only after we have agreed on all the other issues, or successfully

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politically excommunicated those who don’t agree with us on such non-existential issues. I am reminded of insights that resonate with elements of Taylor’s argument for an inclusive secularism, gleaned many years ago in reading the great American democratic socialist thinker Michael Harrington’s book The Politics at God’s Funeral: The Spiritual Crisis of Western Civilization, in which he pleads for an alliance, a common front between faith and anti-faith, between believers and unbelievers, for the very existence of normative values and against the mindless hedonism of capitalism that is the enemy of both atheistic humanism and religious faith.3 At this point I want to do the perhaps unexpected thing: after having talked about what is needed in the future, I want to look to the past for guidance. The past I refer to is the Social Gospel, which by both name and in practice participated in the ethos of Christendom. But there is much in the Social Gospel that can be properly mined for use in any current conversation about finding a uniting analysis to ground a powerful political ethic of solidarity. Walter Rauschenbusch was the pre-eminent theologian of the Social Gospel, an American who wrote at the beginning of the last century, penning both Christianity and the Social Crisis and A Theology for the Social Gospel.4 He was a great influence on the young Methodist preacher J.S. Woodsworth, who later became the first leader of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), forerunner to the New Democratic Party, who together influenced the many Social Gospelers who came together with others to form the United Church of Canada in 1925. Rauschenbusch, in a chapter entitled “The Super-Personal Forces of Evil,” eerily and unknowingly describes our current situation when he states: “Predatory profit or graft, when once its sources are opened up and developed, constitutes an almost overwhelming temptation to combinations of men. Its pursuit gives them cohesion and unity of mind, capacity to resist common dangers, and an outfit of moral and political principles which will justify their anti-social activities.” He cites numerous groups down through history who have extorted their fellow human beings in this way, refers to them as human parasites, and observes, correctly, that such groups tend to resist political liberty and social justice for, as he says, “liberty and justice do away with unearned incomes.” The solution as he saw it was the creation of “righteous institutions to prevent temptation,” righteous institutions that would seek to redeem the “sinfulness of the social order,” a sinful social order that had to take a “share” in the sins of all individuals within it.5 The word “share” is significant here. It wasn’t, at least for Rauschenbusch, a question of an uncritical social determinism that

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absolved the need for individual morality, a false charge often made against the Social Gospel by Christians who seek to discredit it. What Rauschenbusch called “the lust for easy and unearned gain” had to be contained. In the wake of the Great Depression, and in the post-Second World War Western economy, it is fair to say that many “righteous institutions” were established in order to prevent temptation, to inhibit exploitation, and to protect most people from predatory profiteering of the worst kind, at least in the so-called developed world, and then primarily for the benefit of the dominant demographic group. Such measures went hand in hand with other measures designed to promote equality and to empower the powerless. So it was that in Canada, by the 1970s, we had achieved our own unique, but of course partial, version of the world that many Social Gospelers dreamed of and worked for, alongside trade unionists, farmers, activists on the intellectual left, and Canadians from other religious traditions, particularly Jewish Canadians like David Lewis, for example. Beginning in the 1930s and ending in the 1970s we enacted child labour laws, and many other labour laws to regulate the relationship between capital and labour, establishing collective bargaining as a right and promoting workplace health and safety. We built kindergartens and schools and a public education system that provided opportunities previously unavailable to working people. We brought many necessary public utilities under public control and ownership in the fields of transportation, communication, energy, automobile insurance, and water works. We developed orderly marketing systems in many sectors to take the rough and tumble and cruelty out of the marketplace for primary producers. We created a relatively progressive tax system, in which at one time the corporate sector paid a much larger share of the tax load than it does now. We enacted generic drug legislation that speeded up the affordability and availability of new drugs. We put in place a public pension system  and a family allowance system, whose cornerstone was the concept of universality, which embodied the important symbolic and practical insight that some social benefits ought to come to us because we are members of the community and not because we are charity cases. We enshrined the notion that foreign investment should have to show how it would benefit the community. We had housing policies that made good housing affordable for most, and certainly no one homeless. And last, but certainly not least, because we have done it better here than almost anywhere else, we took health care out of the marketplace with the establishment of Medicare.

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All this was done, largely, by the nation-state. What was first known as the neoconservative, but came to be more commonly known as the neoliberal, agenda was developed in response and in resistance to what was seen by the corporate powers and principalities as an overabundance of equality, sharing, and democratic input into economic decision making. The result has now been a decades-long political process that, through free trade agreements, deregulation, outsourcing, and privatization, has worked at weakening or bringing down all the “righteous institutions” that were set up to create a more just and humane society. In the Canadian context, it is instructive to remember that the righteous institutions were not created by ideas alone but by political action. It is no coincidence that many of the things I have listed as accomplishments of the postwar era had their decisive moments when the CCF or later the ndP either held the balance of power in Parliament, were threatening to form a federal government (as they were in 1943–44), or pioneered changes when they did take power at the provincial level. It may be, as some have argued, that the postwar contract was the creation of elites who were motivated by the sense of social solidarity and shared sacrifice that came out of the Second World War, along with a desire to avoid the social unrest that followed the First World War. Nevertheless, I think it is also true that the many churches in Canada, both Protestant and Catholic, might have had a conversionary effect on certain national elites. This is important to take into account when we talk about the future possibilities for religious influence in any consideration of faith and politics. For the fact is that the elite, which is both the promoter and the product of the current dilemma, is increasingly neither national nor religious and is, therefore, less responsive to the moral demands of either the larger community (national or global) or God. The elite I have in mind describes itself expansively and selfcongratulatingly as so-called citizens of the world when they are really non-citizens of the non-community called the global marketplace. In the places where they live, they increasingly want to draw away from contact with the body politic of which they used to be citizens and look to private schools, private health care, and other forms of privatization, both institutional and psychological, to protect them from the call to re-engagement. They are well on their way to developing what Rauschenbusch refers to as “an outfit of moral and political principles which will justify their anti-social activities” (see above). This world without borders, or world without obligations one might say, was enshrined and entrenched via the ideological coup d’état that was accomplished first by free trade agreements. Former communities

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are being asked to redefine themselves as amoral “competitors” in a global Darwinian contest that will further polarize the world and its societies. What the global and regional free trade agreements are about is breaking down the community rules that we have built up over the years to make private economic activity respect our humanity and our life as a community. In this sense, the use of the word “free” in free trade is a tragic misnomer. In Make This Your Canada, a book written by David Lewis and Frank Scott in 1943, these two founders of the CCF argue that the old Anglo Saxon word freo, which is the root of our word “free,” brings out the communal basis of liberty very clearly. It means to be loved. The free person was the loved person, the respected member of a group, someone within the family circle. And they said that no man or woman is really free in a society that does not care whether he or she lives or dies, is underpaid or under-employed, ill housed, or poorly nourished.6 As I have said, through politics we were able to humanize that economy and to make it into something more like a community. But big business interests never accepted those boundaries. And now they have broken free of the community in the name of free trade. They must be reined in again, for our sake and for the sake of the future, and that can only be done by those who see clearly what is really going on here: that the global community we have now, thanks to so-called globalization, is nothing more than a global flea market, or worse, a cattle auction, where the environments, the workers, and the social harmony of various countries are pitted against each other in the so-called competition for investment and employment. In a book called For the Common Good, John Cobb and Herman Daly say it better than I can: Real community now exists only at national and sub-national levels. The goal of building up a community of communities, a community of nations at the world level, is one we share. But we are sure it will not be achieved by sacrificing the real bonds of community at the national level. For a nation that has attained a high standard of living for most of its people to have its capitalists say to its working class, “You must now compete in the world labour market against the hungry of the other nations, and in the interest of efficiency your wages must fall to the world level,” is the destruction of existing community in the interests not of a broader world community that does not yet exist, but in the interests of a smaller “community,” a class of wealth and privilege, which does exist.7

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As not only the American Dream but also the superior Canadian dream dissolves in the race to the bottom engineered by globalization, as people in Canada and around the world begin to see the consequences of the political imbalance that dominates our time, surely there will be a renewed place for those who are critics of this new world order. The global economic crisis of 2008 sowed new doubts, but so far there has been little real change, except for the odd flare up of temporary movements like Occupy Wall Street – unless one counts the Donald Trump phenomenon, which is an ironic reaction in which Americans whose economic way of life has been wrecked by globalization have turned to a rogue element of the very political party that was the biggest fan of the process they lament. Real change will require trying to retrieve a measure of the national sovereignty lost in recent trade agreements while, at the same time, and more important, creating truly global institutions that can forcefully regulate on an international basis for the planetary common good, a higher authority to which one would be glad to cede significant national sovereignty. The world now needs to do globally what some countries were able to do nationally: to contain, to shape, to control, to make accountable, and, finally, to replace the current global economic system in order that human life might be served and enhanced rather than having tens of millions of people declared surplus to the needs of the new capitalist world order, while both rich and poor, each in their own way, contribute to the ecological crisis in the absence of any order or purpose other than the marketplace. It is time to work with our brothers and sisters all over the world to build an alternative to the current model. We must build, globally, the righteous institutions that Walter Rauschenbusch called for, institutions that seek to redeem the temptation inherent, and so abundantly realized, in globalization. A good example, however imperfect, of such a righteous global institution is the Paris Climate Accord, which currently struggles to survive in any meaningful way. A good example of a national righteous institution might be a guaranteed annual income, which as I write this, is being widely and actively advocated by the United Church of Canada in the spring of 2021. Other examples of needed righteous institutions must surely be the long overdue just settlement of Indigenous land claims and the legislative embodiment of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. A necessary condition for this possible better future is the rehabilitation of politics, in a practical sense, and in terms of public perception. It is no coincidence that the neoliberal agenda has been accompanied

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by a time of hyper-cynicism about politics. This cynicism makes it easier to argue that the fate of humanity be surrendered to those in the corporate boardrooms who are supposedly free from the sins so manifest in the political class. Crimes against creation and the human prospect go either unreported or underreported while twelve-dollar glasses of orange juice put on an expense account at a London hotel bring down cabinet ministers and governments. As long as Canadians can be convinced that the real elite in Canada is the political class, their ability to discern who the real elite actually is, who is actually running the country and the world, and for what ends, will be obscured. Rauschenbusch made a similar distinction in A Theology for the Social Gospel when he referred to having “one kind of constitution on paper, and another system of government in fact.”8 Indeed, to the extent that the political class is an elite, perhaps a social elite, but even then a lesser elite, it is the one such group that is not multinational, that must answer to the community, even if, from time to time, it is co-opted or bought off by other interests. Politicians are the last defence, if not always a strong one, against the wishes of a global elite that disdains national, regional, communitarian, and environmental arguments. The circumscription of the political arena by the market and the sometimes single-minded persecution of the political class go hand in hand with the corporate globalization agenda in which all the big decisions are to be made outside the political arena by powerful actors in the marketplace. What passes itself off as a democratizing urge is in fact perfectly suited to hiding and obscuring the anti-democratic agenda of the multinationals because it jeopardizes the role of government and the role of politics in reclaiming the human prospect from the cult of inevitability built up around the idolatry of the market inherent in the current model of globalization. The moral imperative is clear. The world is being divided, starkly, into the powerful and the powerless, the rich and the poor, the minority who benefit from globalization and the majority who do not. In the context of the book of Jeremiah, the reform of Josiah, represented by the postwar Keynesian welfare state, is over. It is over, and it didn’t go to the heart of the matter, however well intended it might have been in some quarters. It didn’t redistribute power and it didn’t create the kind of social solidarity and shared sense of meaningfulness that might have preserved it from the critique of the powerful when it became more than they were willing to finance – like the reform of Josiah in Jeremiah’s time, which would not save Israel from the judgment of God. Repentance and not only reform is necessary if justice is to be served in the twenty-first century.

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In this increasingly divided world, the place of people of faith is with all those who are being marginalized, working with kindred souls all around the world in creating and strengthening the global institutions and policies that will be necessary for a just, participatory, and sustainable global economy. It is the “ought” that we find in the prophetic tradition of confronting the way things are with the demand of justice. The prophetic tradition is the history of calling humanity to greater forms of community than are possible within the bonds of blood, soil, nation, and, finally, class. F.D. Maurice is credited with first using the term “Christian Socialist” in 1848. In the Tracts on Christian Socialism put out between 1850 and 1851,9 he dreamt of a new moral world in which there would be order rather than anarchy, and fellowship rather than rivalry, the law of love instead of the law of competition. Politics and economics were not to be realms unto themselves. They were human activities that ought to conform to that law and order that is the ground of its very existence, the reality of God and God’s intention for human life. We have the knowledge and capacity to make frugal abundance for all a reality. And it is necessary because unless we organize that knowledge and capacity in the service of the whole, we shall have sown the wind and reaped the whirlwind, socially and ecologically. The new global consciousness, the political ideology of the planet Earth, will have to both comprehend and transcend traditional forms of allegiance. To the extent that the nation-state continues to wither, subnational and regional identities must be able to flourish, but in non-xenophobic ways. Unfortunately, the xenophobic option often seems more attractive and easier to get people worked up about. The source of all genuine universalism is religion, in spite of the way in which it has been used to absolutize particularities. The brotherhood and sisterhood of all human beings must not only be chosen, it must be chosen in the confidence that what we are choosing when we do this is not a temporal fiction but something that corresponds to an actuality about ourselves that is greater than ourselves. We must be confident that what we are moving towards is in some sense what we already are, that the future for which we work is grounded in an ultimate reality that, from the very first, intended that we should live with and love one another. The role of that religiosity or faith that correctly perceives this need cannot be underestimated or replaced: it is present in the biblical tradition. It is present in other religious traditions as well. And new forms of ecumenical endeavour, between faiths and between faith and anti-faith, that wish to be worthwhile will work on discovering and consolidating

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this insight not for the sake of unity itself, but for the sake of the world, which cries out for leadership in how to love one another rather than to destroy one another, physically and/or spiritually (for it shouldn’t be only physical destruction that we seek to avoid). Physical survival might be possible through the total subservience of the human spirit to a global managerial elite that was doing its job, what some might call friendly fascism. But would this be a survival worth surviving for? It certainly wouldn’t be the world that Walter Rauschenbusch had in mind.

noteS 1 Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve, 2009). 2 Charles Taylor, “All for One, and One for All,” Globe and Mail, 30 September 2010, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/all-for-one-and-one-for-all/ article4327522. See also Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003). 3 Michael Harrington, The Politics at God’s Funeral: The Spiritual Crisis of Western Civilization (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1983). 4 Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, [1907] 1991); Walter Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel (Nashville: Abingdon Press, [1918] 1945). 5 Rauschenbusch, Theology for the Social Gospel, 72–3, 73. 6 David Lewis and Frank Scott, Make This Your Canada: A Review of ccf Policy History (Toronto: Central Canada Publishing Company, 1943). 7 John Cobb and Herman Daly, For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 234. 8 Rauschenbusch, Theology for the Social Gospel, 75. 9 Tracts on Christian Socialism (London: G. Bell, 1850).

8 Public Witness in the Local Urban Congregation Alexa Gilmour

The Reverend Dr Lois Wilson has long held that a thriving church takes its cue from the New Testament and lives within the creative tension of being the gathered church (the “holy nation,” the “royal priesthood,” the salt that gives tang to all it touches) and the scattered church (focused on “outwardness, mission, function”).1 This is a case study of just such a church.

a dead ChUrCh iS hoPeFULLY PoiSed For reSUrreCtion When Covid-19 came to Canada in March of 2020, at the directive of the Ontario provincial government, I hung a sign on Windermere United Church (WUC) saying, “This building is closed.” Then, like Martha and Mary standing at Lazarus’s tomb, I wept, saying, “Lord, if only you had been here this church would not have died.” As predicted, the pew that Pierre Berton wrote about in his 1965 critique of the church was no longer scathingly comfortable, it was shamefully empty.2 Fifty-five years ago, Berton’s readers learned that, by and large, Christian churches in Canada were self-interested, locked into dying traditions, and failing to be demonstrably compassionate or relevant expressions of Christ’s mercy and prophetic witness in the world. And now, everyone knew it was true: a nonessential church will be closed. While some ministers, as I do, preach on death and resurrection themes from the pulpit weekly, we rarely encourage the churches that pay our salaries to explore if it’s time for them to die. There is so much we cling to in church that no longer serves God’s purpose. Locked

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inside buildings, the body of Christ grows weak living off meagre, mouldering scraps of yesteryear. In the street, the Spirit pipes a resurrection tune for us to follow, but many churches die broken-hearted, locked inside their buildings, with the idol of Christendom in place of Christ on their altars. This could, and perhaps should have been WUC’s fate, but we were revived by the Spirit’s call to embrace a costly discipleship involving solidarity with at-risk strangers.3 God resurrected us for a purpose. In 2020, the local member of parliament, Arif Virani, called on WUC to be an ally for justice because, he said: People see Windermere United as much more than just a church for themselves but a church vested in the common good of the community and reaching out beyond its wall to the neighbourhood and even across borders on migrant rights issues. WUC is dedicated to a benevolent view of the world where looking after the neighbour is manifested in concrete actions within the community like marching for Black Lives Matter, offering sanctuary to refugees, forming rings of peace around mosques and shuls, taking up a human rights complaint against islamophobia and homophobia, and championing menstrual equity.4 The church he describes is very different from the one that long-time congregant Susan Hinchcliffe remembers joining in 1962.5 “This was a time when going to church was more important than being the church. Church was about setting the perfect luncheon tables, getting the best speaker … and everyone we served was already a member of the church. We never went out to the community.”6 The story of WUC isn’t so different from the majority of white, middle-class, Protestant churches in Canada. WUC began in 1912 as a Methodist church and was brought into the United Church of Canada through union in 1925. The postwar baby boom saw Sunday School numbers climb to over three hundred and steadily decline in the 1960s. While many long-term congregants would agree that for many years WUC was closed to outsiders and was exclusive (“I think of us as the poor man’s version of an elite social club,” one congregant said at a meeting in the early 1990s),7 there were always elements of what we might call the Social Gospel present. In the 1980s, Windermere sponsored Vietnamese refugees. In the late 1990s and early 2000s there was an Amnesty International group, a clothing bank, and an Out of the Cold program. But by 2010, all outreach programs had ceased because the volunteer leads were exhausted. When

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I arrived in 2011, I asked the members of the congregation about our relationship to community housing seven blocks away. They said it was non-existent. It turns out we didn’t have a relationship with the neighbours on our own block either. In her 1969 bachelor of divinity thesis, Lois Wilson proposed that a thriving church takes its cue from the New Testament and lives within what Dr Franklin Littell described as the creative tension of being the gathered church and the scattered church.8 Without that tension, the gathered church risks becoming a fortress church (insular and unable to follow Christ into the world) and the scattered church risks becoming the culture church (servant to changing cultural norms rather than to Christ). In the early 2000s, the members of the WUC congregation came to recognize that, though they never intended to be, they were in fact a fortress church. Pancake suppers and chili dinners in 2010 were fledgling attempts to reach out and invite the neighbourhood in. WUC was still a few years away from going out to witness in the world, but a “creative tension” had been kindled. Faced with death, its members asked, “Do we want to close with a whimper or bang?” Their decision led to investment, starting with an increase in ministry hours, from half-time in 2010 to full-time by 2012. “We knew from research that churches with less staff overall (not just clergy) over time lose visibility, become less effective, and then weaken,” said Anne Shirley Sutherland, the chair of council at that time.9 In a church that is dying, a half-time minister has little time for anything other than last rites and palliative care. WUC wasn’t looking to die; it was looking to resurrect. The risk taken by the church council renewed the church mission and capacity for service. By 2019, staff hours had doubled, income and congregational givings increased 90 per cent, and rental income was up 80 per cent. The congregation doubled in size, church membership increased 50 per cent, and the leadership has been renewed with newer members sharing the load. The building, which once echoed with loneliness every day but Sunday, has become, through wise rental choices, a community hub for over four hundred families. For ten years, we took ourselves out into the streets looking to join God at work in the world. Then, when the Covid-19 virus arrived in 2020, the neighbourhood started coming to us. The building was closed but we were busier than ever. People we had never met requested our help. Others answered our call to be part of our Neighbours Helping Neighbours Covid response project. Despite the province’s initial determination, we were essential and were allowed to remain open to provide the necessities of life.10 Through it all, Sunday worship attendance has remained constant at around forty-five.11 The decision to go out didn’t translate to “bums in

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pews” and, for the most part, that was fine by us because we see them Monday to Sunday working alongside us for the mending of God’s world. One of our neighbours, Kate Manson, recently put it this way: I don’t come on Sundays and yet I feel like I’m in the congregation informal, if not congregation proper. WUC brings me back to that place of ‘helping your neighbour’ from my childhood. I did try knocking on the door at other churches and it was like a club that I needed to work hard to get into. Our tendency when we feel small, which so many churches feel now, is you close in on yourself, become smaller and more secure, and there is a lot of safety in that. Reaching out is a risk. WUC people are risk-takers. I feel like the church has created a method for people in the community to do really important things that I am passionate about.12 When I answered the call to minister to WUC in 2011, I was given a mandate “to move the church out into the community.” The church and I were a perfect fit  – strong innovative lay leadership and me, an unchurched, out-of-the-box budding activist minister, fresh out of seminary with a lot to learn. This is the story of how we learned to become the scattered and gathered church.

the ChUrCh and oCCUPY: MiniStrY aS ChriStian direCt aCtion When the Occupy movement hit in the fall of 2011,13 only a couple of months into my ministry at WUC, I began using my off hours to pastor to the occupiers in St James gardens. Rev. Evan Smith, Rev. Rafael Vallejo, and I formed the Toronto Occupy Protest Chaplains and began holding communion services for the protestors on Wednesday nights. At that time, I saw congregational ministry and prophetic advocacy as distinct and discrete. I didn’t trust the congregation to support my Occupy ministry. Only when someone from the Occupy movement began using my WUC e-mail account did I let the church know about my volunteer activities. Believing it would frown on activism, I pre-emptively promised that my volunteer chaplaincy would not be at the expense of my congregational calling. After hearing my promise, the secretary of council, David Allen, spoke with gentle surprise in his tone, “But Alexa, I thought we hired you to take us out into the world.” I never again presumed what the congregation could or could not be involved in!

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Many times I have seen ministers decide not to bother their council, board, or elders because they fear the opportunity will become the nail in the church’s coffin. Like a dying person whose energy is drawn inward to the body’s core, dying churches sometimes find it hard to look beyond their weakening shell. They have retreated to the upper room but don’t recognize the Divine Stranger that comes to their door with new life on his lips. They peer out from the top of the church steps, refusing to travel the Emmaus road (Luke 24:13–35) that winds through their neighbourhood, on its way to resurrection.

the hoLY FaMiLY CoMeS KnoCKing With dePortation order in hand When Dr Mary Jo Leddy, founder of Romero House (a welcome centre for refugees), called me in December 2012, the church was busy with Advent activities, Christmas services, year-end accounting, and benevolent Christmas baskets. “I hate to bother you, but it’s a matter of life and death,” she said. “You won’t believe this, but his name is Jozsef. He has a wife and child and they need a place to stay.” Mary Jo explained that the Pusuma family were Roma refugees, from Hungary, whose negligent lawyer had botched their case. Now under a deportation order, they were requesting sanctuary within a church, where they could live for a few months while their new lawyer fought for their right to stay. I agreed to call an emergency council meeting and get back to her. “Oh, thank you,” she said. Then she paused and sorrow crept into her voice, “I’ve called twenty other churches, but they all said they were too busy with Christmas.”14 If I answered, “My church is too busy planning Christmas,” the congregation might never know that God knocked. Instead, within an hour of that call, the chair of WUC’s council agreed to call and meet, and soon the whole church entered into a period of discernment that led to the Pusuma family coming to live inside our church for the better part of two years.15 Initially, we were a congregation divided on what to do, so a four-part congregational discernment process, led by Mardi Tindal and Jane Clendening, was developed around the questions: “Is God calling us to participate in sanctuary and, if yes, how? If no, what other demanding task might God be calling us to?” The process nurtured our faith and developed our capacity to be sacrificial, rather than superficial, followers of Christ. We crafted safe spaces to explore the congregation’s hopes, fears, and questions. We delved deep into the ancient practice of welcoming the desperate stranger whose hope had run out. We saw sanctuary in

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Canada for refugees facing deportation and death as biblically rooted in God’s call to Moses to establish six cities of refuge (Numbers 35:13, 15), the early Christians’ story of being spared persecution by brave souls offering a place of refuge, the Middle Ages churches that offered asylum, the Underground Railroad’s sanctuary churches  that opened their doors  to slaves seeking freedom, and the Christian families offering sanctuary to Jews in countries occupied by the Nazis. In the end, everyone agreed that sanctuary was a holy calling, but a few congregants still voted against offering it, citing our small size and limited capacity. No one left the congregation, and some opponents grew to be sanctuary’s biggest supporters. “Giving sanctuary to Jozef, Timea, and Lulu changed my thinking on so many issues,” says Susan Hinchcliffe, a congregant in her late seventies. “Before, I was like those in the moderate white church that Martin Luther King, Jr, was writing to … but now, I think I’d be in jail with him.”16 Providing sanctuary shattered WUC’s complacent worldview, tested our theology, deepened our faith in God, and transformed us into activists who marched to the immigration minister’s office demanding freedom for our beloved family. Turning outward to the world God so loves by hearing the real needs of refugees inspired us to get involved. Our neighbours noticed and many responded positively. But for all the blessings it brings, the congregation will tell you that sanctuary was the hardest thing we have ever done. However, because of sanctuary, “our faith and our love now run deeper.”17 If the discernment process gathered and nurtured the church, then the desire to serve our refugee family well caused us to scatter into the neighbourhood looking for resources. When the call for help went out from WUC, it was our Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and secular allies from around the city that answered. They fundraised, visited the family, and advocated publicly on our behalf. Children from around the city formed the basis for the FreeLulu Multifaith Coalition that ran campaigns demanding the Pusumas’ freedom. These interfaith partnerships renewed WUC’s spiritual life and continue to provide opportunities for mission and meaning today. For example, in the aftermath of the 2017 Quebec mosque shooting, WUC hosted the Community Interfaith Discussion on Promoting Tolerance and Understanding. When the Pittsburgh synagogue was attacked in 2018, WUC congregants joined the Ring of Peace movement, placing their bodies protectively around synagogues during shabbat worship.18 As a member of Faith in the City, I was asked to write liturgy and provide the welcoming remarks at the #TorontoStrong interfaith vigil after the 2018 van attack left our city in mourning.19 One year later, I was invited

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to co-host the 2019 Interfaith Vigil in the wake of the Christchurch mosque attack in New Zealand.20 The apostle Paul said that every member of the body is important, and we were beginning to trust the role God has for us in the mending of creation.

Stone SoUP For everYone Our desire to see freedom for the Pusumas launched us into the realm of public advocacy. However, it was the family’s private needs that took us hat in hand into the community. Procuring free haircuts, laptops, dance classes, and more became the seed for a ministry we call the Stone Soup Network.21 When we asked a hairdresser to give free haircuts inside the church, she replied, “Yes! I’ve always wanted to do some good in the world but all I know how to do is cut hair.” When you tap into people’s intrinsic need to give, you feed the giver’s soul, too. Working with our sanctuary guests and low-income neighbours, it became clear that it takes more than grocery gift cards to feed the soul. Some children get trips to Florida for March break and others ask, “Why didn’t Santa bring me what I wanted this Christmas?” The disparity tears at the soul of those who cannot afford a child’s birthday cake or dance lessons. We knew our small church Benevolent Fund could not meet these needs, so we turned to local businesses. We solicited pledges for free dance lessons, daycare spots, dinners for four, haircuts, and more and stored the offers in an online databank (stonesoupnetwork.ca). Then we gave local social connectors (ministers, school social workers, shelter and community housing staff) the password to gain access to and download vouchers for their clients in need. The recipient took the voucher to the local store for redemption. A girl, living in the temporary shelter for families fleeing domestic violence, received a prom dress and updo at the salon for graduation. A boy who saved up to buy a second-hand electronic keyboard was given free lessons from a local music store. A wife, living with cancer, was taken out for a fancy restaurant meal. In 2017 our Benevolent Fund provided $3,000 in grocery gift cards. Two years later, thanks to the Stone Soup Network, $83,000 in goods and services was made available to neighbours living with poverty. The project has been so successful that it is now expanding to neighbourhoods across Canada. In conversations with our neighbours, we learned that many low-income residents had previously felt unwelcome in the Bloor West shops. Some of our Bloor West neighbours admitted they had negative biases towards their community housing neighbours. As neighbours interacted, through our Stone Soup program, social barriers were being

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whittled away. We called the ministry “the Stone Soup Network” after the story of three monks looking for the secret to happiness. We discovered, like they did, that sharing is the way to true abundance.

a Sign oF the tiMeS In 2020, Bhutila Karpoche, member of provincial parliament for Parkdale High Park, said: “Jesus was about action. Windermere United Church embodies Jesus’ teachings really well. They aren’t focused on high liturgy. They are a grassroots with-the-people church. I’ve heard many constituents say, ‘I’m not religious but that sign outside their church calls me to be a better person.’ Regardless of whether a person is Christian or not, they feel welcomed by Windermere and invited to work alongside the church on issues of social justice that concern us all.”22 By the time the Pusumas received permanent resident status in 2015, WUC’s reputation for public witness was already growing and so was our courage to publicly witness to our faith. We were even using our church sign as an unconventional means by which to minister to religious and secular neighbours. The large, lit-up, temporary church sign was first rented from a local company in 2012 to announce our one-hundredth anniversary celebrations. However, we quickly discovered its potential for long-term ministry. With prayerful consideration of our community’s current state and spiritual needs, we crafted the weekly Spiritual Exercise message (“Hold someone who grieves this Mother’s Day,” “Less time on Zoom, more time birdwatching”), and the sign owner would post it on the sign. When Islamophobia resulted in the 2017 Quebec mosque shooting, we began to wonder how our sign could witness to our inclusive faith and express solidarity with those who were persecuted. In May 2018, we requested the owner post “Wish your Muslim neighbours a Ramadan Mubarek.” He refused, saying that to post it would be a sin. A few weeks later, he refused to post “Celebrate God’s diversity with Pride” and removed the sign from our lawn. When the sign owner refused a mediated solution, I filed a human rights complaint with the backing of the church council. We wanted those who had been hurt by religious bigotry to know that our church didn’t just put words on a sign or speak love from the pulpit. We would openly celebrate their God-given, beautiful diversity and stand with them against hatred. After the media shone light on our sign story,23 one local radio producer e-mailed me, saying: “In the space I inhabit as a journalist, the word ‘solidarity’ has become a feeble term. You hear it waved about to make us all feel good,

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but it rarely leads to action, so I have become a cynic. What struck me about your church of thirty-five to forty on a Sunday was that you were not powerbrokers in the city. You were risking purely for the sake of solidarity. It made me hopeful. It also made me want to do more and be more because if you can, I can too.”24 When our neighbours heard that our sign had been taken away, they were dismayed. People wrote telling us how important the sign’s messages were to them. Two neighbours, Maggie Knaus and Kate Manson, began a fundraising campaign and a few months later we were gathered on the front lawn, with congregants and neighbours we had never met before, for a Sunday morning new sign dedication.

the theoLogY oF the LaWn Seeing our secular and religious neighbours gathered on the lawn, Carolyn Spavor, our chair of council, coined a new term for the gathered and scattered church: “the theology of the lawn.” The lawn represents the in-between space of a church that nurtures the health of its own disciples and serves the community. She speaks of church being the liminal space that roots and sends out shoots. “Rooted in our faith, social justice work is the logical place that the scriptural reflection takes us. Every act of public witness has felt like a natural extension of our growing faith in God.”25 The Bible teaches us that we are called to do what Jesus did and more (John 14:12). There is a confidence at WUC that the Holy Spirit is moving in us and in others with whom we can align ourselves. There is a belief in the dignity of all creation and that we are called to do our part to bring about the better world that Christ called the Kingdom. There is an acceptance of the sacrifice that must be made and a belief in the profound blessing that comes of living with the cross and resurrection as central to the church’s story. We are forever dying to our old ways in order to embrace where God calls us today. Through communal faith formation activities, like worship, we are re-membered and sent out in sacrificial love to be the body of Christ in relationship and solidarity with the world God so loved. A few months after the sign dedication, I was once more standing on the lawn of our church. This time I was speaking to a crowd of four hundred supporters fighting racism in Toronto’s Bloor West. It was another “theology of the lawn” moment. The crowd was diverse in colour, class, abilities, and religious beliefs. Scattered among the crowd were members of our church. It felt good and right to be standing in the street, the church among and for the people.

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CoronavirUS Coda A few days after I put up the “closed due to pandemic” sign on our building, we were given permission from the province to reopen because our food pantry, benevolent program, Stone Soup Network, and the newly launched Neighbours Helping Neighbours during Covid-19 project fell under section 44 of the essential services list  – “Not-for profit organizations that support the provision of food, shelter, safety or protection, and/or social services and other necessities of life to economically disadvantaged and other vulnerable individuals.” Ten years ago, our hallways echoed lonesomely every day except Sunday, for we did not know our neighbours. Now, those seeking help – and those seeking to help – occupy the church during the week, while our formal congregation meets Sunday online. Globally, church leaders are scrambling to reimagine congregational ministry in the midst of enforced distancing and social isolation. We gather online, now, to grieve what was and face what is. Meanwhile, the weight of being the scattered missional church has fallen onto the shoulders of the few who are not in the high-risk health categories. WUC is once again looking to the community for partners to help us fulfill God’s calling to love our most vulnerable neighbours in this time. Anxiety threatens our trust in God but then we remember, as Lois Wilson did, that this is what it means to live in the tension of the church that gathers for spiritual sustenance and scatters for the sake of the world in need. Across the country, the mournful death rattle of churches can be heard as fortresses turn into tombs; a nonessential church will be closed. And yet, with every death, the possibility of resurrection. Christ has risen from the tomb and is calling us to rise and follow.

noteS 1 Lois M. Wilson, “Town Talk: A Case History in Lay Education” (Bdiv thesis, University of Winnipeg, 1969). This is based on Dr Franklin Littell’s ecclesiology. 2 Pierre Berton, The Comfortable Pew: A Critical Look at Christianity and the Religious Establishment in the New Age (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965). 3 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (London: SCM Press, 1964). 4 Arif Virani, MP for Parkdale High Park, author interview, 21 September 2020.

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5 I have relied heavily on interviews with congregants and church neighbours in this chapter because more formal or academic theologies are increasingly incorporating congregants’ voices into their work. See, for example, the work of ethnographic theologians like Natalie Wigg Stevenson, Ethnographic Theology: An Inquiry into the Production of Theological Knowledge (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); and Mary McClintock Fulkerson, Places of Redemption: Theology for a Worldly Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). See in particular the work of theologians deploying action research methods, for example, Helen Cameron and Catherine Duce, Researching Practice in Ministry and Mission (London: SCM Press, 2013) 6 Susan Hinchcliffe, congregant, author interview, 21 September 2020. 7 Ian Gilmour, former WUC council chair, author interview, 28 August 2020. 8 Wilson, “Town Talk.” 9 Anne Shirley Sutherland, former WUC council chair, author interview, 25 August 2020. 10 Research into traits of vital churches, as well as how-to approaches, can be found in the work of Diana Butler Bass, Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighbourhood Church Is Transforming the Faith (San Francisco: Harper, 2006). And for Canadian context research, see Barbara Lloyd’s Open to the Spirit: Five Traits of Lively Congregations (Toronto: United Church of Canada, 2011). This study guide explores the traits of (1) radical welcoming, (2) empowering leadership, (3) justice-making, (4) loving, and (5) risk-taking. 11 Windermere United Church Annual Reports, 2012–19, and statistics reports submitted to the United Church of Canada from 2012 to 2019. These figures were compiled and shared at the 2019 Windermere United Church Annual General Meeting, 23 February 2020. 12 Kate Manson, co-chair of sign fundraising campaign, author interview, 21 September 2020. 13 The Occupy movement was an international, intersectional, socio-political movement focused on social and economic justice and democracy that began on Wall Street in 2011. 14 Mary Jo Leddy, The Other Face of God: When the Stranger Calls Us Home (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2011). 15 For media publications and social media posts related to this story, see: https://www.thestar.com/news/immigration/2015/03/02/lawyer-admitsto-negligence-representing-roma-refugees.html; https://www.cbc.ca/ metromorning/episodes/2015/03/03/negligent-lawyer; https://twitter.com/ search?q=%23freelulu%20%40peggynash&src=typed_query. 16 Susan was referring to a letter written by Martin Luther King Jr, while he was imprisoned in the Birmingham Jail. He wrote to white moderate churches that issued a statement of concern and caution in response to the nonviolent Civil Rights movement.

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17 Mardi Tindal, former WUC council chair, author interview, 20 August 2020. 18 Global News, “‘Ring of Peace’ Formed around Toronto Synagogue One Week after Pittsburgh Shooting,” 3 November 2018, https://globalnews.ca/ news/4627288/toronto-community-synagogue-pittsburgh-shooting. 19 CBC News, “‘Tonight We Stand Together’: #TorontoStrong Vigil Honours Victims of Van Attack,” posted 29 April 2020, https://www.cbc.ca/news/ canada/toronto/torontostrong-vigil-1.4640446. 20 https://globalnews.ca/news/5059622/vigil-toronto-new-zealand-mosqueshooting-victims. 21 To learn more about this social innovation run by WUC, go to www.stonesoupnetwork.ca. 22 Bhutila Karpoche, MPP for Parkdale High Park, author interview, 18 September 2020. 23 Nicholas Keung, “Church Sign Meant to Spread Word of God Sparks Human Rights Complaint,” Toronto Star, 27 September 2018, https://www. thestar.com/news/gta/2018/09/26/sign-meant-to-spread-word-of-god-sparksrights-complaint.html. 24 Salma Ibrahim was the producer for CBC’s Here and Now. After I had been interviewed about the church sign, I e-mailed to ask if she was willing to talk about what our act of solidarity meant to her. This was her e-mailed response. 25 Carolyn Spavor, WUC council chair, author interview, 24 August 2020.

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9 The Whole People of God Being the Church in the World Betsy Anderson

“I greet you in the name of Christ, whose body you are,” Lois Wilson said as she prepared to lead us in worship at Emmanuel College, Toronto, where she was ecumenist in residence. One of her many retirement vocations, Lois engaged the whole university from her perch at Emmanuel College. It wasn’t difficult as she brought with her an impressive résumé as a Canadian senator, former moderator of the United Church of Canada, and one of eight presidents of the World Council of Churches (WCC). In these Covid-19 days, as the world braces for the second wave and those of us lucky enough to have homes and safety within them return once again to sheltering in place, what does it mean to be the Body of Christ? What does it mean to be the Body of Christ, the Whole People of God, when we cannot gather; when we cannot bring our incarnated, created selves into close contact with each other; when we must move through the world as if our neighbours, brothers, and sisters, are dangerous? These are challenging times and our theology will be changed as we live through this unprecedented experience in recent human history. The years following the Second World War in Canada were also challenging times, with huge shifts in all spheres of life. Strengthening the vocation of the laity as “the church in the world” was a key focus of the churches and the global ecumenical movement that formed the WCC in 1948. Lay education training centres were established, Sunday School wings built, and the Evanston General Assembly of the WCC, meeting in the United States in 1954, declared, among other things, that “the real battles of faith today are being fought in factories, shops, offices and farms, in political parties and government agencies, in countless homes, in the press, radio and television, in the relationship of nations. Very often it is said that the Church should ‘go into these

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spheres,’ but the fact is that the church is already in these spheres in the person of its laity.”1 Many theologians wrote about the vocation of the laity during the ecumenical height of the churches in Europe and North America. Hendrik Kraemer’s 1958 book A Theology of the Laity is seminal. In it, he traces some of the history of the laity in the church. He observes their consistent role as initiators of reform and change in the church from the monasteries to the Reformation and then the missionary movement. He points out that much of this lay ferment took place through organizations alongside the church, not within the church. Reclaiming the biblical understanding of laos (Greek for a people, nation, group) as the whole church, a royal priesthood, rather than the hierarchical and institutional meaning that had separated clergy and laity, was a hallmark of this period. Kraemer challenges the church to embrace the Bible’s witness to God’s burning concern for the world and its needs as the location of God’s self-disclosure. His vision is of a missional and ministerial church, sent to the world and intended for service in the world. The key for Kraemer is the conversion of the church to the world, the place of God’s self-disclosure, and away from its own institutional survival. Seven decades later, Michael Blair, newly appointed general secretary of the United Church of Canada, put it this way in a recent interview with the Henri Nouwen Society. “It’s not that the church of God has a mission in the world, but rather that the God of mission has a church in the world.”2 He calls for congregations and communities of faith to connect to the commons where they find themselves and to build partnerships within their communities. As we celebrate the breadth of Lois Wilson’s ministry in and for the world, this chapter explores how we build and support twentyfirst-century Christian discipleship, the ministry of the baptized, even as the church as we and Lois knew it is diminishing and transforming. There is no one answer. This chapter explores some of what the ministry of the laity and engagement in local communities looks like in these days. But we are in changing times, and so this chapter also traces the sustaining/remaining/defining threads that have been woven through the ministry of the laity in Lois’s lifetime and that may show us the way of discipleship in the decades to come.

SCM WorK CaMPS In these Covid-19 days, we are remembering class, noticing who the frontline workers are: those who don’t have the privilege to stay home in a pandemic but keep the food chain, transportation, and health care

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systems running. Class was the primary framework of social analysis for many who pushed the envelope on what the vocation of the laity meant in the post-Second World War era. The Canadian Student Christian Movement (SCM), formed in 1921 from the Student YWCa and YMCa, was a place of Christian formation for many Canadian students on campuses across the country. The SCM was also a member of the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF) formed in 1895, one of the early global ecumenical movements. The opportunities to engage with Christian students from other parts of the world, read their theology, and hear their political perspectives was profoundly formative for many Canadian SCMers. One of the SCM’s most transformative educational initiatives took shape in the postwar period: the summer Student in Industry Work Camp. In Canada, Bev Oaten, minister of Colborne St United Church in Brantford from 1941 to 1952 and visionary for, and first director of, the Five Oaks Christian Workers Education Centre in Paris, Ontario, was a key actor in the emergence of volunteer service work camps, out of which grew the student-in-industry work camps.3 From 1945 into the late 1960s the SCM’s summer work camps, in farm, industrial, and mental health settings, were life-changing experiences for many participants. Students emerged from these experiences seeking a way to translate the insights they gained relating to the lives of working people into a lifelong vocation. Lex Miller, an Australian SCMer, Presbyterian minister, and director of the first student-in-industry work camp in Welland in the summer of 1945, set the tone for the organization of these work camps. Using the Rochdale Principles of the cooperative movement, the community’s life was organized to include worship, work, learning, and sharing of resources. He introduced the “wage pool” concept, whereby people’s summer earnings were pooled and, at the end of the summer, people were left with a share based on what they needed for the coming year, not on what they had earned. Work camps, which combined living in intentional Christian community for the summer while working in wage-labour settings and engaging in worship and study at night, were powerful places of experiential learning and spiritual deepening for engagement in the world. Participants formed lifelong bonds of friendship and in some cases got married. Lex Miller, and subsequent work camp directors, challenged students to find the places where oikumene and economics really connected and to invest their lives there, as Christian disciples. In a December 1945 article in the SCM’s the Canadian Student, Dorothy

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Beales (now Wyman), a lifelong friend of Lois Wilson and participant in the first student-in-industry work camp in Welland, wrote that the question on many students’ lips was, “What shall I do with my life?” Lex Miller’s challenge was to resist seeing ordered ministry as the only specifically Christian vocation option. In “The Christian at Work in the World,” he suggests that “the challenge to undertake foreign mission work which created the Student Volunteer Movement should be broadened to awaken Christian students to the urgency of service in every secular calling.”4 As a young woman and theolog, Lois Wilson was active in the SCM at the University of Winnipeg. Though of different generations, Lois and I share roots in the SCM and its commitment to the vocation of the laity. I grew up with my brother as the only children in an SCM co-op called Howland House in the 1950s and 1960s in Toronto. Howland House was established by Bob Miller (no relation to Lex) and others as an extension of the summer work camp experience. Returning to Toronto in 1951 from graduate theological studies in Europe, Bob Miller became the Canadian SCM’s study secretary and eventually the manager of the influential SCM Book Room. In his memoir of Bob Miller, The Messenger, Douglas John Hall observes that “Bob Miller was among the first intellectuals in Canada to have read the works of scholars who, during the remainder of the century and beyond, would dominate the Protestant theological scene in the West.”5 In a 1951 letter to Hall, prior to his return to Canada, Miller asserts: “There have to be much more radical experiments in the life of the church than there have yet been. Some of us have to get onto the frontier, where there are no beaten paths of how or what to do … The ‘other’ world of the working man that has grown up here in Europe is completely isolated from the church … God will have us where the people are, with them in their work.”6 For Miller and others, the decision to establish a permanent “industrial mission” after the 1953 Bathurst St United Church SCM Work Camp, later known as “Howland House,” was a start.7 Growing up in the SCM’s Howland House gave me a lived experience of the ministry of the laity, which I have been unpacking and living into as I exercise my own vocation over more than sixty years. But what about our current context, where a great generational transition is under way? In a post-Christendom, interfaith, and intercultural world, where the painful consequences of Christian imperialism and colonial collaborations are exposed every day, what is the twenty-first-century church’s mission and how do the laity exercise their vocation?

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CoMMUnitY PartnerS United Neighbours, an initiative of St Matthew’s United Church in mid-town Toronto, where Lois Wilson is a member, may offer some ideas. In 2015, members of the congregation were galvanized like many Canadians by the heartbreaking picture of Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian refugee whose drowned body was washed onto a Mediterranean beach on 2 September. At one service, a congregation member pushed for St Matthew’s to do something. The congregation had many competing demands, and energy was scarce. What could they do? Calling a meeting to see who came forward was the first step. Thanks to social media, several community members, including three who themselves had come to Canada as refugees, joined the group. Within a few weeks they joined efforts with a group from the Regal Heights Residents’ Organization, which had been using meeting space at St Matthew’s to address the same issue. How could the community respond to this horrific humanitarian disaster and sponsor a Syrian refugee family? The congregation and neighbourhood groups agreed to join forces and United Neighbours was born. The United Church of Canada, as a sponsorship agreement holder with the Canadian government, had the infrastructure and expertise to channel the passion and energy of a community organization. The congregation, though small and tired, offered institutional resources to focus the energies in the surrounding community to accomplish the sponsorship of the Alaalyan family of seven in December 2016 and, more recently, the eight-member family of their relatives who arrived in January 2020, just months before the pandemic hit. Members of the United Neighbours group reached out to the broader St Clair West community and raised over $110,000 for the two sponsorships as well as in-kind donations to house and support each family through their first year in Canada. As important as practical support, they offered friendship, hospitality, and accompaniment during and beyond that first year as the families found their way in a strange land. This was the work of the laity of the congregation, in partnership with members of the community, some of whom found their way to the congregation through this connection but most of whom will never attend church at St Matthew’s. And yet, the congregation’s visibility as a resource, a hub, a partner has increased in this shared effort, and the Spirit was incarnated. Alexa Gilmour is the minister at Windermere United Church in Toronto’s west end, and her chapter in this book tells the story of

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that congregation’s engagement with its community, initially through offering sanctuary to a refugee family. In a recent conversation she talked about Windermere’s being a “resurrection church,” a congregation that expected to die but that finds itself very much alive with a ministry of radical hospitality. John Pentland in Calgary also serves a congregation, Hillhurst United, that thought, when its members called him in 2004, that he might be their last minister. In an interview included in the 2011 United Church publication “Open to the Spirit: Five Traits of Lively Congregations,” John Pentland talks about how Hillhurst United Church’s near-death experience opened the members of its congregation to change. Rather than clinging to their past, they wanted to honour it as they moved forward. My own congregation, Trinity–St Paul’s United Church on Bloor St in Toronto, has had more than one near-death experience. Bill Phipps remembered, in a recent anniversary conversation, that the elders who called him in 1974 said that he might be their last minister. In a time of angst a decade after that, when the future seemed risky and unclear, Yvonne Stewart reminded her fellow church board members that we should not worry about whether Trinity–St Paul’s was going to die but, rather, about how we would live until we died. These congregations, expecting to die, were able to respond to a new vision and live. But congregations are dying. We are told the United Church is closing a church a week. Where does the ministry of the laity, the whole people of God, find its formation, Christian community, discipleship, and worship if congregations disappear? Will we gather as did the early church and the church in Latin America, China, and the Soviet Union in base Christian communities, house churches, coffee shops?

diSeStaBLiShMent The vocation of the laity, the ministry of the whole people of God, is a foundation stone of the Protestant Reformation and the theology of Martin Luther. But people of my children’s generation who remain in the church are not inspired by this language. What is the language and theology that brings this key and radical Reformation conviction to life in the twenty-first century, a time when the clericalization and bureaucratization of the church may once again be strangling its mission and ministry? Douglas John Hall, in his 2003 book The Cross in Our Context: Jesus and the Suffering World, calls the church in Canada to take up another of Luther’s contributions to the Protestant church, the theologia crucis

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(theology of the cross) and leave behind the triumphalist theologia gloriae (theology of glory). He celebrates the disestablishment of the church and urges us to embrace, not resist, it: The Christian faith is being made free from the Babylonian captivity to political, cultural, racist and (yes) religious structures to the end that it may be and become what in essence it is: salt, yeast, light – a vigilant and prophetic diaspora in the midst of a global society that will from now on manifest immense multiplicity and the intermingling of people’s cultures, and cults. Christians ought to embrace this possibility. Instead of waiting passively for the final waves of the long process of disestablishment to wash over us, we should seek actively to direct the process. The message of the divine Spirit to the church is “Disestablish yourselves.”8 Current conversations and demonstrations in the streets raise the question of whether the powerful and privileged can disestablish themselves. But the stance Hall proposes for the Christian movement is compelling. “Discipleship of the crucified Christ is characterized by a faith that drives its adherents into the world with a relentlessness and a daring they could not manage on the basis of human volition alone.”9 It is challenging for institutions to live out of a theology of the cross, understood, as Hall proposes, in the Pauline trilogy of faith (not sight), hope (not finality), and love (not power).10 In a recent conversation, a candidate for diaconal ministry, when asked about how congregations could transform/disestablish themselves, observed that this may not happen until the last person who remembers the golden years of establishment is gone.11 But discipleship, whether of congregations, individuals, or denominations, needs places of worship and study of scripture, communities of love and grace, critique, and challenge to sustain and orient people in attending to God’s work in the world. How will this happen in a disestablished church? In Canada, the lay education centres that grew up in the late 1940s have been places of formation and training for laypeople, congregations, and leaders. They were founded in the tradition of the Iona Community in Scotland, where those preparing for ministry and unemployed workers gathered on a remote island in the 1930s to rebuild an ancient monastery. In their work together on Iona, they practised the understanding that work and worship are one. Five Oaks Education and Training Centre near Paris, Ontario, was seeded by the Iona Community’s postwar witness and has served the United Church for many decades. But its

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sustainability was often tenuous as it worked to evolve as the needs and resources of the church changed and diminished. In 2016, the board found that its proposed path to sustainability had become a dead end and put forward a motion to close the centre. The wider Five Oaks constituency was shocked and asked for a postponement of the decision so that they could develop an alternative plan. This plan, presented and adopted at a subsequent meeting in 2017, was encouraged by the interest of people from beyond Five Oaks  – the nearby Six Nations community and some young leaders in the Muslim community who had experienced the healing and sacred space of Five Oaks and saw its potential to be an interfaith and intercultural centre. They believed it must be preserved and reinvented. New partnerships, which included financial, governance, staff, and programming commitments, along with the loyalty of traditional church communities, forged a way forward that has breathed new life into the centre. Another near-death experience and a way forward that depends not on ourselves but on relationships with others: disestablishing ourselves, in order to be re-established with a different theology and understanding of our place in God’s oikumene. Michael Shewburg, Five Oaks’s director since 2017, believes that the calling of the Five Oaks Education and Retreat Centre at this time is to help people unpack colonialism and all the different ways we experience it – whether as Black, queer, white, Indigenous, immigrant, men, or women. Abdul-Rehman Malik, whose experiences at Five Oaks inspired him to engage his Muslim community in reimagining the centre, puts it this way: “Given the political context that we are living in and the challenges we face to preserve and engender a socially just, merciful and inclusive society, the need to have safe spaces which can facilitate meaningful dialogue and cross-cultural encounter has never been more urgent.”12 Michael also speaks of the Five Oaks Centre as a place where you come to be in right relationship with your self, your neighbour, creation, and Creator. Five Oaks equips people to do this in their daily lives, he says.

innovation in ChriStian ForMation Michael Shewburg has been an innovator in new approaches to spiritual and vocational formation in the United Church. Following his own experience of formation through summer camp and opportunities to exercise his leadership skills as camp director, he was chosen to participate in the Council for World Mission Training in Mission Programme, which involved twelve young adults from twelve different countries

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living for ten months in Cape Town and Madurai. They lived, worked, studied, and worshipped together. Steeped in the action/reflection model of learning, this opportunity to experience what it meant to witness to Christ in a global setting prompted Michael to propose a shorter, Canadian version of this mission exposure experience  – the Go Project. Founded in 2007 in the context of the youth ministry at Islington United Church in Toronto, but serving children and youth across the country, the Go Project offers “a theologically progressive mission trip in your own backyard for you to feel at home in the church.”13 Michael and the Go Project founders designed an experience that was long enough to have a formative experience and to establish relationships. Living as an intentional Christian community for eleven days involves establishing community norms and practices, daily check-ins, shared meals, worship and spiritual practices, and an action plan for yourself before you leave. Sarah Chapman, minister at Eglinton–St George’s United Church (eSg) in Toronto, worked in the Go Project and credits her experience there with developing her leadership skills and supporting her call to ministry. Youth Forum at Maritime Conference and significant mentoring from congregational ministers were key as well. In a recent conversation on the vocation of the laity, she commented that she had noticed a tendency for young people inspired by their experience in the Go Project, summer camps, or elsewhere to assume they were being called into ordered ministry. More recently she has been intentionally listening and naming with these young people the gifts they bring to work in the world. Like Lex Miller in the 1940s, she is helping young people to claim a Christian vocation outside the walls of the church. Sarah finds the language of spiritual gifts more helpful than vocation of the laity. It is less about the church institution and more about God at work in our lives. At eSg, a key is also supporting congregational members to see and welcome the gifts that new members and adherents bring, to be open to the new ministries and forms of ministry they will lead. But the vocation of the laity is primarily exercised in the world. Adele Halliday, a member of the national staff at the United Church’s offices in Toronto, affirms the significance of multiple points of connection for people to the congregational life of witness, worship, and formation. She believes these points of connection can be digital or in person and need to take place beyond Sunday morning. Both Sarah and Adele attested to the significance of places beyond their local congregation where their questions were heard, where struggles of faith were prayerfully held, and

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where the presence of the Spirit was deeply experienced. Often, they would then return to their local congregation inspired and engaged.

the WhoLe PeoPLe oF god The Body of Christ is alive in the world. Its manifestations are myriad but perhaps not always recognized by us. Lois Wilson, in the ministry we celebrate in this volume, has helped to build the path of incarnation for the people of God, through engagement in and for the world. Reading and studying scripture, risk-taking, building relationships across divides, offering critique  – to the world and to the church  – sharp, pointed, and fearless, organizing and mobilizing, connecting to the global community, in our own neighbourhoods and around the world, being a networker and inspirer. In Lois’s long ministry in the church and in the world, we see marks of the ministry of the whole people of God. In Doing Ethics in a Pluralistic World: Essays in Honour of Roger G. Hutchinson, published in 2002, Joe Mihevc, then councillor in the City of Toronto and adjunct faculty member at the University of St Michael’s College, Faculty of Theology in Toronto, reflects on the development of an emergent, urban, socially committed spirituality.14 He identifies eight characteristics: 1 Rooted in the imitation of Christ. 2 Ecumenical and interfaith and including secular humanism. 3 Action-oriented, rooted in the belief that people co-create history with God. 4 Exercising the politics of compassion and solidarity. 5 Tough, resilient, and persistent. 6 Employing the model of being the church in the world. 7 Rooted in the “preferential option for the poor.” 8 Making a vocation of our jobs. We are all called, in our chosen area of work, to integrate our labour into a vision of the reign of God. Only God knows whether congregations as we have known them will continue to be the base for the formation and sustenance of the ministry and vocation of the laity. The insights of Barbara Lloyd’s doctor of ministry thesis about lively and faithful congregations were distilled into a 2011 study guide for congregations: “Open to the Spirit: Five Traits of Lively Congregations.” The five traits she identifies are familiar: radical welcoming, empowering leadership, justice-making, loving, and risking. The challenges or growing edges, she observes, are familiar as well.

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1 2 3 4

Being open to rethinking our theologies – a call for humility. Being open to articulating our faith – a call for confidence. Being open to self-examination and critique – call for humility. Being open to risking more boldly for justice – a call for confidence.

“God so loved the world, not the church,” Lois Wilson is fond of saying. As communities of faith in the twenty-first century, we may want to reinvigorate the World Council of Churches 1952 Lund Principle, an articulation of ecumenism that called the churches to “act together in all matters except those in which deep differences of conviction compel them to act separately.”15 Today, those with whom we act together must go far beyond other churches. We must seek to bring the resources of inherited privilege to serve the communities in which we find ourselves – to disestablish ourselves in order to establish relationships that serve the whole people of God in this interfaith and intercultural world.

noteS 1 Hans-Ruedi Weber, Salty Christians (New York: Seabury Press, 1963), 3. 2 A 9 October 2020 interview of Rev. Dr Michael Blair by Karen Pascal on the Henri Nouwen Society’s Now and Then podcast. 3 A detailed description of the origins and operation of SCM work camps from 1945 until the early 1970s can be found in Betsy Anderson, “The Place Where ‘Men’ Earn Their Bread Is to Be the Place of Holiness,” Historical Papers: Canadian Society of Church History (2011): 129–50. 4 Alexander Miller, “The Christian at Work in the World,” scm Pamphlet, 1945, 15 (author’s personal collection). 5 Douglas John Hall, The Messenger: Friendship, Faith and Finding One’s Way (Oregon: Cascade Books, 2011), 77. 6 Ibid., 38. 7 For a fuller description of this experiment in lay vocation and intentional Christian community, see my paper, “The Story of Howland House: Being the Church on the Margins,” published in Historical Papers: Canadian Society of Church History (2013): 5–22. 8 Douglas John Hall, The Cross in Our Context: Jesus and the Suffering World (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2003), 169. 9 Ibid., 183. 10 Ibid., 193. 11 Bri-anne Swan, conversation with author, 10 September 2020.

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12 “Five Oaks Member Working Group Report,” Paris, Ontario, 17 April 2017, 5 (author’s personal collection). 13 https://thegoproject.ca/about-the-go-project. 14 Joe Mihevc, “Spirituality and Justice-Making in a City Context,” in Doing Ethics in a Pluralistic World: Essays in Honour of Roger C. Hutchinson, ed. Phyllis D. Airhart, Marilyn Legge, and Gary L. Redcliffe (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2002), 245–8. 15 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lund_Principle.

10 Borders Barriers and Blessings Mary Jo Leddy

introdUCtion For the past thirty years I have been travelling along borders and boundaries  – personal boundaries, social and political boundaries. I have thought as I travelled. Lois Wilson has been a good guide along this way. I welcome the space to think about spiritual borders, about guiding people along, through, over, and under borders of various kinds. This is a good place to think about our own place in the world – to think about borders that are barriers to living more fully – and borders that strengthen a positive sense of identity. I simply want to share a few things I have learned as I have worked along borders for the past thirty years. During this time I have lived with people who have taught me a great deal about borders. Refugees have become the eyes of my eyes and have helped me to see the difference between borders that are barriers to life and borders that delineate gratitude and responsibility. Over the past thirty years, I have discovered spiritual guides and spiritual resources in surprising places. Along these borderlands I have learned and relearned some of the most fundamental spiritual insights of the great world religions.

gUideS aLong the Border I first began to think seriously about borders thirty years ago when I visited people involved in the Sanctuary Movement in Tucson and Nogales. This visit took place just before the beginnings of Romero House in Toronto. I was on my way to California and had taken a detour to the southwest at the suggestion of Hilary Cunningham. She was

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then working on a doctoral dissertation that would later be published as God and Caesar at the Rio Grande.1 During my visit to the Sonora Desert, which runs along and through the border between Arizona and Mexico, I heard the remarkable story of Jim Corbett, the goat walker. Jim had grown up at a ranch along the border but had left it to study philosophy at Harvard. He never completed his course of studies and returned home when he had a kind of nervous breakdown. His healing and reconstitution took place as he worked on the ranch and tended a herd of goats. At some point he realized that the goats knew the desert far better than he did. Instead of leading the goats out to the desert to graze, he began to follow them. He allowed himself to be directed by them. They took him off the highways to the byways. The goats led him to water and to food. In the process he learned the pathways through the border, the pathways that were not on any map. He learned how to live in the desert, the borderlands. This goat walker eventually became the guide for the newly emerging Sanctuary Movement. It happened like this. In the 1980s, thousands of Central Americans were travelling through Mexico trying to reach safety in the United States. Many were dying in the desert where they were exposed to heat and thieves. Many were picked up by border patrols and deported back over the border. It was a time and place when the gifts of a goat walker were needed. Jim Corbett, Harvard dropout, almost crippled by arthritis, felt summoned. He began to guide groups of Central Americans, thousands of them, through the desert and over the border where they were then taken to Sanctuary at Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson. Corbett led people to springs of water and along the pathways of hope. Jim Corbett died a few years ago but I have kept in touch with the remarkable group of people who refused to accept the barriers to love. The Arizona Sanctuary Network formed an informal network with the Canadian Sanctuary Movement and the New Sanctuary Movement in Europe. Representatives of these networks met in Berlin a few years ago and we reflected on the barriers that were solidifying along borders in Europe and North America. There were many stories of the violence and corruption along these borders. Witnesses spoke of people dying along these borders, suffocating in shipping containers, and disappearing into detention centres. The borders seemed to be places where neither justice nor mercy could be found. As we reflected on this harsh reality, we became more conscious of the contradictory reality of national borders in a time of globalization. On the one hand, national borders are being erased every day as a global economy operates outside the control of any national government.

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Corporations have been closing plants, selling off assets, and moving them to places where labour is cheaper. A global communications network has sprawled outside any government control. The thousandchannel universe and the internet are destroying local cultures. Borders are open for business and international communications but are increasingly closed to the free movement of people. It seems that the less control countries really have over their borders, the more they want to control the flow of people across those borders. Those people who are forced to cross borders, in fear for their lives, are labelled refugees. They are treated with suspicion, accused of being frauds and criminals when, for most of them, their only crime is wanting to live. This contradictory situation cannot go on forever. In the meantime, borders are hardening into barriers. An American president calls for walls along the borders even as he and other global nomads jet around the world at ease and move their money and communications networks above and beyond the control of any national government. Most of us have probably travelled around the world with relative ease. Our passports are acceptable. But there are others for whom every border crossing is a challenge and a risk. I believe that refugees have a great deal to teach us about the reality of borders. In an immensely confusing world they can help us find a sense of direction. Like Jim Corbett, we need to discover the guides who will teach us how and where to place our trust.

LeSSonS Learned FroM reFUgeeS This is what I have learned about borders from refugees, with refugees. This is what I have learned about spirituality from them, with them. The first lesson I learned from refugees involved a deeper sense of the profound mix of fear and trust that lies at the heart of every border crossing. I learned this first from a remarkable Eritrean woman called Ghidey Mahmoud. Her husband had been kidnapped by political opponents and she knew that she and her five children were now in danger. She sold everything from her comfortable middle-class existence and bought tickets and false passports to New York City. She did not know any English. Nevertheless, she landed at Kennedy Airport and then made her way to the Port Authority in New York City. (Not a place that is easy to navigate even if you speak English!) From there she took a bus to Buffalo and a taxi to the Peace Bridge. She had only a diagram of a bridge with the word PeaCe written underneath it. Her five children were under seven. She walked with them over the bridge carrying only the youngest child and an overnight case.

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She told me what she felt as she crossed the bridge from Buffalo to Fort Erie: she did not know anyone on the other side. She did not know whom she would meet or what would happen to her and her children. “I was afraid,” she recalls. “I prayed to Allah and asked for mercy.” She crossed the bridge to the unknown. Unknown to her I was one of the persons on other side of the bridge. Unknown to me, I would be meeting a wise spiritual guide who would teach me and others: • How to cross a bridge to the unknown. • How to cross a bridge to a strange and unfamiliar reality – to another culture, to another group, to another faith, to another social reality. • How to cross a bridge over fear because you love and care for someone. • How to cross a bridge from the self that you know to the self you can barely imagine. • How to cross the bridge of death to a larger life. • How to cross the bridge from the God that you know to the God who is greater than your god. Jim Corbett and Ghidey Mahmoud taught me that there are barriers in this world but that you can go around them or over them – in trust and faith. The time in the desert and the space of the bridge: these are images deeply embedded in the tradition of Christian spirituality. The ancient spiritual guides had wise things to say about the significance of “the dark night” in the journey to the unknown: it was integral to learning that God was always more than my image and experience of God. I believe that there are people today who know this experience of darkness in the concrete. There are spiritual guides to walk with us if we are open to recognizing wisdom wherever it is to be found. At some point, after I had been living with refugees for a while, I realized that they knew a great deal about life, about the spiritual life, and that I should begin to learn from them, to follow them. I knew that everything depended on trust. I let go of some false securities. This meant, most concretely, removing the inside locks from the rooms in the house where I lived with the refugees. That simple gesture meant that I trusted that we did not need to be afraid of each other, that we could live as good neighbours. Trust created trust. It meant, for example, going into the unknown world of Islam by living side by side with Muslims. For several years I was the only

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Christian in a house full of Muslims. In the beginning we could not speak together as we did not know each other’s language. But we had tea together every night. Sipped and smiled. In the morning I would wake up, sensing there was movement in my room. I would see Ghidey’s three little girls sitting on the floor by my bed, watching, curious about this strange white woman who was slumbering in their midst. I laughed. “I see three little mice,” I said, and they squealed “Habibte, Habibte” (my sweet, my sweet) as they scampered away. We entered each other’s worlds, simply, easily. Sometimes it is that simple. We cross boundaries in such ordinary ways, in a daily sort of way. We hardly notice we have crossed over until one day we look around and realize we are in a different place, that we are different, more ourselves. I listened to the Muslim sheik from Somalia chanting in the middle of the night. I joined in the fast at Ramadan as the time when you remember your hunger for God and those who are hungry. I believe I became a better Christian in the process. I saw the gospels live, stand up, and walk off the page. I loved my neighbours. My Muslim neighbours did not want to become Christian and they did not want me to become Muslim. We all became more like who we really were. Then came the attacks of 9/11. All of a sudden I could see my Muslim neighbours shrink, want to become invisible as people looked at them with suspicion. The stranger was no longer a potential neighbour but a potential enemy. The barriers were real. The afternoon of 9/11 many of our Muslim refugees came to the Romero Centre and sat in a corner: What will happen to us? Will they put us in prison? Will they send us away? They were ashamed. Jamal, one of the Muslim men, was so ashamed that he took his wife and children over to the home of a Jewish neighbour. He rang the doorbell and when the neighbour answered Jamal just stood there with tears running down his checks. The family was invited in and they stayed for supper.

the other FaCe oF god The second lesson I learned from my new spiritual guides was that not every border crossing is easy and simple. There are times when you are summoned by a stranger, to the unknown, whether you want to go or not, whether you are ready or not. I have described this in a prose poem about an almost daily experience of opening the door and being faced with the summons to cross yet another border. There is a knock at the door Of the place that structures

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Everything that is familiar and safe. It is only the sound Of one hand knocking. You can choose not to answer. For reasons unclear even to yourself You open the door slightly And see the eyes and then The blur of a face as it looks down And then up again. It is the face of a stranger, The face of a woman. You do not know who she is, You do not know who you are. You could close the door. Perhaps she senses this. The face of a woman with a voice says, “Please help me.” You could say No. I am too busy. I am too tired. It is too late. There are other places to go. I do not know what to do. You used to know before You learned how the system can file People away … forever. But you know that you are, here and now The one, the one who must respond. This you must do. There is no other. Now and not later. You have been faced. The stranger moves forward and fills the frame of your mind and slowly comes into focus. And you become focused. Your life becomes weighty, consequential, significant. In this, and countless other experiences, I learned that you do not always have to be good before you can do good. You do not have to have discerned deeply and at great length before you can act for the good. Sometimes you simply have to do what is called for, whether

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you are ready or not, and you become good (weighty, consequential, significant) in the process. Sometimes you are simply summoned by the call of the hour and the reality of the place. I think that personal discernment always needs to take place in tandem with what I would call political discernment or reading the signs of the times.

gratitUde and reSPonSiBiLitY The third lesson I learned from Ghidey was gratitude. The years that passed since her arrival have been difficult. She worked double shifts cleaning, double shifts sitting with the dying in care facilities for the elderly. Her five children have all completed university and are, as they say, “doing well.” They are now citizens. Yet she herself never takes for granted that she is alive, that they are alive, and that she is here and safe. It made me realize how much I/we take for granted. It has reminded me of the fundamental truth that gratitude is the beginning of a spiritual and religious life. Radical gratitude, which is far deeper than gratitude for this or that, is a foundational attitude that does not take anything or anyone for granted, that is moved to worship and to prayer and to give of self with the realization that all is gift. In this culture, we spend so much time adding up the pluses and minuses of our lives that we often miss the most amazing fact – that we are alive. The greatest loss in the process of secularization is the loss of a sense of gratitude. People who are shaped by a modern Western worldview are so busy trying to improve the world and themselves that they forget that they are taking the existence of the world and their own existence for granted. It sometimes takes a person whose life has hung in the balance at some border to remind us that nothing and no one should be taken for granted. I now see, with the eyes of my eyes, that this lack of gratitude affects how we situate our lives in the countries that we inhabit, how we visualize the borders of these countries and those who live inside and outside those boundaries. I would suggest that it is important for us to reflect on the spiritual attitudes that are associated with our political context, attitudes that affect our personal spirituality far more than we know or understand. As I listen to the language of border guards and officials, I hear echoes from ordinary conversations: this is our country, we own this land, we have a right to be here, we decide who gets in and out, we own its resources, we have a right decide what resources to sell and how to profit.

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I remember going with a lovely African woman who had been “called in” to have her application to stay evaluated. The immigration officer became quite belligerent and I said, “She has rights you know.” The officer became quite hostile: “Listen Sweetie, in this room I decide who has rights.” An apt statement about the reality of human rights in the cubicles of Canada. The language of ownership, control, rights, and profit is taken for granted. The social consequences are enormous: it neglects the fact that the Indigenous people were the first inhabitants of this land and that they did not see the land as a place to be owned but to be shared, not as a place of rights but of responsibilities. This language of ownership and control is inherently conflictual and violent. It is an attitude that builds borders to protect what we own and think we have a right to. I believe it is the newcomers to our countries who remind us what the Indigenous people taught long ago – that this place on earth is a gift, that it is meant to be shared, that it is a place that none of us own but for which all of us are responsible. This conversation of perspective on the place where we live leads inevitably to a change in attitude towards the borders of our particular nation. It is possible to think of borders not as defending the place that we own but, rather, as defining the particular area of our responsibility for the Earth. We are all being awakened to a new global and planetary consciousness that summons a new contemplative awareness. At the same time many are feeling a call to more local and concrete commitments. In the process of this awakening of global consciousness and local commitments, many are abandoning the struggle for a healthier national politics. This is unfortunate as it leaves national politics to the most extreme crazies and abandons those who are living and dying along the border and in the no man’s land of permanent refugee camps. Yet it is possible to reimagine our country as the particular place where we can concretely be responsible for the whole Earth, where we can shape policies and programs that help care for the Earth. To do this we must undergo a profound spiritual conversion from seeing our country as a place that we own to a place that we share as a gift and for which we have a responsibility. Is this place on Earth an object that we own or is it a gift to be shared? How we answer this question will determine how we see our borders  – as protective barriers or as the markers of our area of responsibility for the Earth.

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exCLUSion and inCLUSion My guides along various borders have made me aware of the deeper considerations of exclusion and inclusion that are involved in the realities of borders. Refugees have been excluded from one country on Earth and they have yet to be included in another country. They live precariously, at least for a time, in a no person’s land. They are nowhere – until or unless they find some status in a country. There is a long strand of Christian social and spiritual thought that is intensely suspicious of nationalism. It is conscious of all the wars and the violence and injustice committed in the name of kingdoms, empires, and nations. The Kingdom of God, as it is taught, is never to be identified with particular political entities. In this line of thinking, borders are not God-given but are artificial human constructs and, at times, can and should be disregarded. This attitude is very much assumed by most Sanctuary movements. And yet, and yet. Feminist thinkers have been reminding us of the significance of healthy boundaries in personal relationships. Without personal boundaries one’s identity can be violated. Other perceptive thinkers, such as Christopher Lasch, have described how a lack of boundary between the self and the world can create either a culture of narcissism, in which the self projects all of its needs and wants onto the world, or a minimal self, in which the reality of the world crashes in on the self.2 One contemporary theologian, Miroslav Volf, who writes out of the crucible of the wars in the Balkans, stresses that a lack of solid boundaries creates a crisis of identity in a political or social group. He asks how we can create boundaries that affirm identity without being exclusionary and violent.3 His main insight, and what I want to emphasize here, is that boundaries are exclusionary if they are defined by who or what they are against. He says that what we need are boundaries that are set in terms of who or what we are for. I suggest that this is an important point of discernment for each and all of us – in our personal lives, in our political lives. Are our borders/ boundaries defined positively, by who/what we are for, or negatively, by who/what we are against? So much depends on how we answer this question. We will become like what we are against. If we are defined only by an enemy, it reveals that we do not know who we are for. We all know groups working for justice, for change, that have become defined by the enemy – even as they are working for change in the church.

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People of the borders, refugees, can tell us whether the border is defined positively or negatively – they know when they are welcomed, they know when they are treated with suspicion.

ConCLUSion Finally, and most important, I have learned that the border, however harsh and cruel, is also a place of joy. It is a place of anguish and disappointment. However, for those who are called to live its harsh beauty, it is a place of blessing. It may be where your deep joy meets the deep suffering of the world.4

noteS 1 The first draft of this chapter was given as a keynote at Spiritual Directors International, San Diego, April 2016. It was later expanded as the book Why Are We Here? A Meditation on Canada (Toronto: Novalis, 2019). Hilary Cunningham, God and Caesar at the Rio Grande: Sanctuary and the Politics of Religion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). 2 Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979); Christopher Lasch, The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984). 3 Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996). 4 A saying made famous by Frederick Buechner.

11 Last in the Queue Refugees and Displaced Persons in a Time of Covid-19, Climate Change, Conflict, and Corruption Lloyd Axworthy

ProLogUe Atlantic United Church occupies a corner lot intersecting Arlington Street and Atlantic Avenue in Winnipeg’s North End. It’s a tawnycoloured stucco building with a simple nave that seats a hundred congregants, with one small, foot-height gold cross in front of the altar as befits the Methodist tradition of simplicity. That’s where I first met Lois Wilson and her husband Roy, who had become the church ministers; it was 1954 and I was fourteen. I benefit from the meeting still some sixty-seven years later. The North End was the melting pot of the city – ethnically diverse; working, lower-middle class in caste; home to immigrants, and, like my family, returning veterans who were given affordable starter homes by a grateful government. What better place to be introduced as a young, questing teen to the call of the Social Gospel delivered with the power of the Wilsons’ honed intellect and their faith-inspired passion for social and political justice? From the pulpit on Sunday mornings to free form discussions in Young Peoples meetings in the basement of the manse (we would even dance there on Saturday nights), spiced with visits to settlement houses and meetings with other church groups, labour organizations, and community activists, it was an education in the reality of a difficult, conflicting world, leavened by the teachings of Jesus that one can make a difference in improving that reality. Through their ministry I gained traction towards my future choice of a political career and a faith that revealed how a political career can make a difference. They nominated me to become a member of

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tUxiS (training for service with Christ in the centre and you and I on either side) and Older Boys Parliament, now Youth Parliament. It was a chance to test out parliamentary skills and to speak on one’s feet. And through their tutelage, aided and abetted by my parents, who grew up in Saskatchewan during the Depression, I entered United College, the successor to Wesley College and the hotbed of Social Gospelism in western Canada, soon to be the University of Winnipeg. There the tradition of Christian commitment wafted through the halls and a pathway opened for me towards public service. What more can one receive than the blessing of education based in a faith and a calling that has a purpose? Of course, Lois continued to be an influence, especially after she joined the Senate and we could call upon her skills, leadership, and zest for adventure. As foreign minister I asked her to become our envoy to the South Sudan peace process. She was the leader of a mission to North Korea as we prepared for diplomatic recognition. When I became president of the University of Winnipeg she was a constant source of support and critique as we sought to be a relevant learning centre in the inner city. And now, as you will see from this chapter, the lessons learned in the basement of the manse on Atlantic Avenue still resonate. Early in June of 2020, I participated in a zoom conversation with hundreds of refugee women and girls from around the globe to discuss how the spread of Covid-19 was affecting them and their communities. It was a joint effort by the Global Independent Refugee Women Leaders network and the World Refugee and Migration Council (WrMC).1 Its purpose was to provide a platform for these women to give voice to the circumstances they were facing, to help mobilize aid and assistance, and to support women taking leadership locally and globally. Their basic message was one of being forgotten and a very deep concern that when it came to distribution of remedies for the disease, they “were at the back of the queue.” It was a cri de cœur that was repeated several times over that summer in subsequent, similar exchanges with refugee groups both digitally and in direct conversations. In Lebanon the port explosion caused over 300,000 displacements, many being Syrian and Palestinian refugees and other displaced persons. Their plight has been exacerbated by the ongoing sectarian struggles, a corrupt government, and rampant purloining of international humanitarian aid.2 The same situation of abuse and neglect was brought to the attention of the WrMC  by the  Vancouver-based Women’s Refugee Advocacy Group, who related  the dire condition of the Yazidi in northwest Iraq who were

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being persecuted by iSiS and who were now facing violent attacks on their journey back to their home in Sinjar. They suffered from a lack of food, water, and health care as well as from sexual violation.3 This is the ongoing sad and serious litany of vulnerable refugees and displaced persons, those at the back of the queue who are facing disruption and deprivation around the globe. Estimates put the number close to eighty million – the over one million Rohingyas residing on three hundred acres on a flood plain in Bangladesh, the Central American migrants fleeing gang violence, the dispossessed on the Greek island of Lesbos whose camp was burned down, leaving them on the streets. The geographic distribution of refugees places unequal burdens. Ninety per cent of the world’s refugees are hosted by neighbouring states, most of which scarcely have the resources to look after their own people. It is a narrative that casts a dark shadow on the world  – the compounded impact of an epidemic that preys on those in crowded, unhygienic environments lacking, as the Global Independent Refugee Women Leaders network exchange portrayed, proper equipment, public health infrastructure, and replacement of economic wherewithal, while facing extremist threats, punitive governments, and an indifferent international community. Looming as a potential miscarriage of basic principles of justice is what the World Health Organization calls vaccine nationalism, whereby wealthy countries confiscate vaccines for their own populations. The Guardian issued a strong alert to the danger. “In several months into the crisis, the virus has crept into the populations of refugees and internally displaced people, where stopping its advance will be close to impossible. Up to fifteen million people across the region [Middle East], many of whom were already at risk of disease, now face a rampant spread through their communities.”4 This calamity for the most vulnerable will require major financial and resource support and an effort to ensure that refugees and displaced persons are in a position to help shape programs for epidemic control and economic recovery. Being stateless, refugees and displaced persons must be given the right to be involved in decisions and programs that deeply affect them. There are efforts under way to guard against a monopolistic control of Covid-19 remedies. Canada is participating in a coalition of likeminded governments that promise equitable sharing of vaccines, a position taken by several large pharmaceutical companies. But those good intentions have yet to meet the pressure of nationalist motivated

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governments, especially the Big Powers who show no interest in collaborating in serving a global common good.5 Indeed, the onset of the virus only amplifies an already negative trend to ignore the precepts of international sharing of responsibility for protection and reception of refugees and displaced persons. The despair of these vulnerable people is further fuelled by a retrograde turn in twenty-first-century attitudes towards them. The humanitarian commitment of nations has given way to nativism. Walls are being built. Children are wrenched away from their mothers. Unscrupulous kleptocrats steal aid money destined for humanitarian relief. Refugees are stereotyped as security threats. Politicians of populist persuasion prey on fears by labelling them criminals. After the migrant surge of millions of displaced persons across the Mediterranean in 2015, the European Union (eU) initially sought a resettlement program, led by Angela Merkel in Germany, but soon borders closed and the eU adopted a containment policy of limiting access and paying Turkey and countries in Africa to manage the flow of people through restrictions on travel and by providing economic investment in exchange for offering resettlement. The recent eU policy on refugees eliminates the migrant quota system and will pay countries to take control of sending refugees back to their home state. A common sight on media to this day is the hunting down of boat people on the open sea or the long-term incarceration of migrants. There is a compelling need to resolve the conundrum of ensuring that there is effective and secure border management of refugees without abandoning international standards and cooperative action. There are far-reaching, dangerous consequences for world stability if the contradiction is not resolved. When I became chair of the WrMC in 2017, its mission was to support Un efforts to reform the international system managing refugee and displaced persons in light of the dramatic migrant surge to Europe that took place in 2015. Our mandate was to be a catalyst in creating practical solutions that were outside the Un political restraints of calibrating to the lowest common denominator. Since then, an epidemic and nature have altered the landscape of where and how to map a way forward to save the refugee system. Increasingly, the imperative is crisis management, a form of 911 to aid those under severe duress. But thinking in more holistic, transformative terms has also become more necessary. In their book The Power of Pull, John Seely Brown, John Havel III, and Lang Davison describe what they call the Big Shift, “a fundamental reordering of the way we live, learn, socialize, play, and

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work that is now taking place, driven by new technology infrastructure and public policy changes. The Big Shift is redefining what success means in a wide range of endeavours for both individuals and society.”6 Marilynne Robinson puts this big shift in these contemporary terms: “Without an acknowledgment of the grief brought into the whole world by the coronavirus, which is very much the effect of sorrows that plagued the world before this crisis came down on us, it might seem like blindness or denial to say that the hiatus prompted by the crisis may offer us an opportunity for a great emancipation, one that would do the whole world good. Options now suddenly open to us would have been unthinkable six months ago.”7 This becomes even more urgent as we witness the layering of epidemic infection and climate change on population disruptions caused by conflict and poor governance. There are prophetic omens of large movements arising from the climate turmoil created by increasing carbon emissions in our atmosphere. Over the next thirty years, we can expect millions of people to be forced from their homes due to the degrading effects of climate change. Some will need to leave their countries, others will be forcibly displaced inside their country. Drought, desertification, extreme storm surges, uncontrolled fires, and rising sea levels are a potent brew. This is not tomorrow’s problem, but today’s reality. The end result of the variety of climate impacts will be a series of retreats and movements to escape out-of-control forest fires  – think Oregon and  California  – rising waters in coastal regions, the damage of a hurricane or the salinization of cropland. Filippo Grandi, Un high commissioner for refugees, has issued a stark warning: “The world needs to prepare for millions of people being driven from their homes by the impact of climate change.”8 His words come at a time when the crescendo of anti-refugee, anti-immigrant political rhetoric continues to rise, leading to governmental actions designed to suppress the right to sanctuary and asylum. One only has to see the perfidy of our North American neighbour who, under the thrall of President Trump, became hostile to people forced to seek shelter from the forces of oppression. The Call to Action of the WrMC makes this case: “Our world suffers not so much from a refugee crisis as from a political crisis – a deficit of leadership and vision and, most fundamentally, a shortfall of humanity and empathy. Those holes have been filled instead with a surfeit of indifference, cynicism, and greed.”9 Core problems in the structure of the global refugee system impede effective leadership. One is the anachronism of the legal framework

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defining who is a refugee. The 1951 Refugee Convention definition – “one escaping political persecution” – is a reflection of the movement of people from the Soviet Union after the Second World War. While amended by practice over the years to be slightly more permissible, it still does not include migrants being forced out by governmental whim and caprice nor does it take into account other reasons for migration, such as sexual discrimination or economic destitution. Now we need to step up again to respond to the growing numbers of people in need of protection, through no fault of their own, due to the destructive impacts of climate change. At what point does a person forcibly displaced by the environmental destruction of her home qualify for the same protection as a refugee fleeing from war or conflict? Both are innocent victims whose lives are in danger and whose homes and livelihoods have been destroyed. Equally problematic is the dependence of the refugee system on voluntary contributions. Unlike Un peacekeeping, which is funded by a compulsory assessed fee to member states, the budget for UnhCr relies on contributions from governments and private donors. As each new crisis emerges there are pledging conferences not unlike those held for private charities or spring proms. Having once been party to those sessions, I can attest to the fallibility of a system that can’t relate resources to need. We discovered in the WrMC consultations that the number of pledges is waning and that often pledges are not fulfilled. There is no mechanism to hold deadbeats accountable. The Un hosted major conclaves on migration and refugees in the fall of 2018 in an attempt to update its capacity to meet new challenges. It brought together all member states to agree on new compacts that could deal with the movements of people in a comprehensive way. However, recommendations were non-binding and there was no accountability to hold governments to their commitments. New financing was left off the table. Nor did these compacts address the thorny question of adapting the definitions to those forced to move because it’s too hot to survive or the seawater is eroding your coastal community or, as in the case of several Pacific islands, your home is being submerged. There was a deep fear that, if the 1951 Convention definition were to be opened up, then the forces of anti-immigration and supra-nationalism so extant in so many countries would lead to erosion of the existing system. For all the dire warnings on the climate impact affecting millions of people and the related consequence of fostering further disputes and conflicts, the Un has not found the governance system to bring together the respective agencies and political bodies to address the human security crisis at hand. There is a degree of muddling through

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and, therefore, a vacuum in the ability to cope with the triple whammy of Covid and climate and mass migration. In June of 2020 a glimmer of hope appeared. Ioane Teitiota, a man from the Pacific nation of Kiribati, brought a case against the government of New Zealand at the Un Human Rights Committee (hrC) in February 2016 after authorities denied his family’s claim of asylum as “climate refugees.” They were deported from New Zealand to Kiribati in September 2015. Kiribati is expected to be fully submerged in the ocean in ten to fifteen years. While the New Zealand courts rejected their refugee claim and deported them, the hrC, on an appeal of their case, said that, while in this instance the family did not face immediate danger since the Kiribati government was trying to protect its population from the threats to life due to rising sea levels and other climate change impacts, it did necessitate a broadening of refugee law. The committee said it may require countries to protect those not otherwise entitled to refugee status. The principle of non-refoulement is a cornerstone of international refugee law. By suggesting it should also apply to climate refugees facing an imminent life-threatening situation if returned home, it has invited, if not urged, a refreshed look at the global governance of refugees. “The decision sets a global precedent,” said Kate Schuetze, Pacific researcher at Amnesty International. “It says a state will be in breach of its human rights obligations if it returns someone to a country where – due to the climate crisis – their life is at risk, or in danger of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”10 But, are we presently capable of resetting the appropriate definitional changes? And is the international community able to mount the political capacity to make the necessary changes? What concerns me is that the governance conundrum is becoming even more complex, and existing models cannot cope with the merging confluence of epidemic, climate, and conflict that is mixing a more toxic brew affecting marginal, displaced people around the world. Here’s an example. A recent report from the International Peace Institute Global Observatory described how the Sahel region of Africa is being whipsawed by coronavirus, rampant desertification, extremist groups, and weak governments. The report opens with this dire warning: “While the world struggles to address the challenges presented by the Covid-19 pandemic, many vulnerable populations are combatting cross-cutting threats to their livelihood, peace, and security. A stark example is in the Sahel and Lake Chad Basin regions of Africa, where attacks by violent extremist groups have persisted since March. Violence in these regions is having major effects and presenting challenges for

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the already overburdened network of camps and informal settlements across the continent.”11 There are initial efforts under way to counter these transgressions, led by regional multilaterals like the Economic Community of West African States and the African Union. But for most of the world, burdened by its own struggles to cope with the coronavirus, the Sahel is barely on the radar screen, resources are low, and the calls for ceasefires go unattended. Left unchecked, the burgeoning tragedy will have worldwide ramifications. The world is experiencing a situational septic tank of mass migrations, food and water shortages, civil conflicts, and the spread of extremists. It’s an existential threat. Yet, the Un, the institution that has the formal responsibility for global security, hasn’t been able to get its act together. The Un’s own Peace Building Commission recognizes the cross-cutting nature of climate- and epidemic-related risks but regretfully reports that member states cannot agree where responsibility resides.12 In its Call to Action, the WrMC recommended a coming together of the separate silos of climate and refugee advocates, amplified by a cohort of like-minded countries and supportive international agencies. In discussing the potential for such a partnering to take place during a panel discussion sponsored by the Stimson Center on the occasion of the Un’s seventy-fifth anniversary, I was asked if the Ottawa Process that led to the treaty banning the use of anti-personnel land mines might be a model. My answer was a qualified yes. Here’s why. The Ottawa Process, as the treaty-making effort on land mines became known, has acted as a model for several other international campaigns designed to limit the use of force, establish new norms of international law, and provide protection for innocent people against the violation of their basic rights. Many see it as an alternative way of conducting global affairs in contrast with the realpolitik of national interest and foreign policies based on the doctrine that might makes right. It demonstrated that world politics do not necessarily have to be the exclusive preserve of great powers or always determined by military force. Instead, soft middle-power contributions and ethical foreign policies have demonstrated their viability within the dynamics of the international system, stimulating new ways of thinking about international cooperation. The Ottawa Process grew out of a strategy of human security that was developed as a foundational framework of the Chrétien government in the mid-1990s in resetting Canadian foreign policy. Using the 1994 United Nations Development Program report as a base, it focused

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on people security as being just as relevant a way of looking at the world as national security. Protecting civilians, addressing the plight of war-affected children and the threat of terrorism and drugs, managing open borders, and combating infectious diseases are now part of the dialogue. These, in the words of the late Kofi Annan, are the “problems without passports.”13 The framework for peace and security had become more disparate, types of threats were more variable, and the international structure was not geared to meet the complexity of the post-Cold War era. The crux of the problem was the many outbreaks of conflict and violence leading to acts of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and mass violations of individual rights. The Un was caught between the hard edge of sovereignty and the obvious need to protect people. Srebrenica was a turning point, with the massacre of ten thousand men and boys while a Un force stood aside, followed by the Rwanda genocide, where Un action to protect the mass extermination was forestalled. This led to our initiative on the Security Council to change the peacekeeping mandate (Resolution 1295) to protect civilians. Then came Kosovo and the nato intervention to stop the attack on civilians. The ad hoc nature of the Kosovo mission led to a realization that there had to be a more consistent set of rules to guide intervention in a collaborative way. Canada, with the support of Kofi Annan, sponsored the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty in 1999. Its report, entitled The Responsibility to Protect, came out late in 2001. It offered the revolutionary perspective that state sovereignty is not a divine right but is based on the ability and interest of governments to protect their own citizens. The report proposed that, should a state not fulfill this requirement, the responsibility then fell on the international community to intervene in the matter. Under the principle of r2P, it is no longer permissible for states to harm their populations with impunity. If for some reason a state is unwilling or unable to protect its citizens, the responsibility then falls on the international community to do so. This concept was adopted by the 2005 Un Leaders Summit agreement on r2P to act in protection of civilians in cases of conflict, genocide, and ethic cleansing. What often goes underappreciated is the incredible pace at which the language of r2P application, as well as its adoption by the international community, took place. For the first time, an exception was made to the Un Charter’s prohibition against international involvement in member states’ domestic jurisdiction. r2P does not displace sovereignty as the source of authority in the world order: it serves to reaffirm and reenforce it. It recognizes, however, that sovereignty gives rise not only

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to rights and privileges but also to duties and obligations. Based on the human security framework, it provides the terms through which the members of the Un can fulfill their mandate to promote collective security in a world of globalized threats. Fast forward to 2020. What greater threats to the security of ordinary people are the aggressive virus, a galloping forest fire, a submerging of one’s island home, the threats of hunger in a coastal arctic Indigenous village? Should not r2P apply? In 2009, Allan Rock and I wrote an article titled “r2P: A New and Unfinished Agenda,” in which we made the case for unbundling the basic precepts of r2P and applying them to a broader range of existential threats. We recommended that “discussions begin on establishing a new International Commission to carefully and comprehensively revisit the creative enterprise that inspired r2P by examining how the principles inherent in the r2P concept represent one of the few ways of bridging the gap between the nation state system of political management and the global nature of risks and threats requiring cooperation and collaboration.” Does it not make sense to use the language of security as articulated by r2P as a way of drawing a much larger circle of interlaced issues together?14 Such a commission could draw on recommendations of the WrMC. The report states: “4.1 The World Refugee and Migration Council calls for an ad hoc and regionally balanced group of international legal experts to form in order to draft a new protocol to the 1951 Convention on responsibilitysharing for refugees. Such a protocol could include a definition of responsibility-sharing, a commitment to share responsibility for refugees, and agreement on the modalities by which responsibilities could be shared, including financial contributions and resettlement, as well as other expressions of solidarity.”15 Beyond that, there have to be efforts to establish a non-combat form of Un and/or regional organization rapid deployment capacity dealing with climate and infectious disease outbreaks and emergencies. There needs to be a much stronger involvement of women in the decisions and actions on responsibility-sharing initiatives. Connectivity technology is a valuable new tool in keeping people informed, distributing resources, setting up early warning systems, and promoting participatory democracy at the local, national, and global levels. That’s just a partial list. There are many good ideas from which to draw. The question is, is there a possibility of change of the kind needed to implement a 2020 version of r2P with a broader mandate? If there is no effort to retool the Un mandate, then China and other authoritarian states may continue to

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pursue a multilateralism that harbours no accountability for actions of persecution taken by individual states in the name of sovereign rights. An article in Politico sets out the threat. “Beijing has moved expeditiously to impose its illiberal values on international organizations. Through a combination of deft coalition-building, strategically timed financial contributions, and narrative-shaping efforts, Beijing has made progress in transforming the Un into a platform for its foreign policy agenda, including advancing China’s economic interests, stifling dissent and democracy, and hollowing out the rules-based order.”16 The imperative of challenging these manoeuvres in the absence of US interest in multilateralism means that others must begin the process of reform. The overhaul of the refugee/displaced person system is a good place to start. I believe that cooperation in rebuilding the architecture to fit the reality of contemporary human security issues is possible. Consider some emerging trends that increase the political odds: Mathew Burrows from the Atlantic Council, in his recent book The Future De-Classified: Mega Trends, projects a rising middle class across the globe, in every region, in every culture. And what are the dominating interests of the middle-class demographic? Order, rules, opportunities, and well-being for families. They don’t want to be murdered in their beds, afflicted with unknown diseases, faced with staggering costs of infrastructure rebuilding, or forced to do without access to nature, to the arts, or to education for their children.17 This growing demographic can also be more politically engaged. Its members know how to use the system to protect their interests, get involved, and influence the decisions that affect them. And they are going to increasingly demand action, reform, and change. What’s more, they now have the digital systems to connect, communicate, and organize. I began this chapter describing the exchange of virtually connected women refugees around the world becoming a catalyst for action. In the midst of the pandemic, a new generation of woman leaders is coming to the forefront. The nomination of Kamala Harris as a Black woman candidate for vice-president of the United States is an inflection moment. Angela Merkel has shown the value of experience, skill, and empathetic instincts in leading her country on a principled refugee policy in 2015 and then laying out a series of effective Covid-19-related actions, as have the prime ministers of New Zealand, Denmark, Finland, and Taiwan. The New York Times headlined the effectiveness of women in dealing with coronavirus.18 That new style is based on developing trust, showing empathy, being evidence-savvy, and being prepared to take tough decisions. It stands in stark contrast to the conniving buffoonery

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and savagery of the Trumps, Xi Jinpings, Putins, Bolsanaros, Dudas, Erdogans, Orbans, and others of their ilk. Women are showing the way. Here’s how Madeleine Albright sees it: “In the modern world, women’s empowerment is not merely a goal, but a cornerstone of democratic growth. This is because women’s voices raise issues that others overlook, devote energy to projects that others ignore, reach out to constituencies that others neglect. Women have also shown talent and commitment in helping societies to recover from civil war and natural disaster.”19 With women in the lead, there needs to be a new model of global governance that is realistic but that has the scope and capacity to respond to the confluence of threats to our human security. There is a cynicism about politics, primarily because it deals in clichés and has no pathway that appears clean of old ruts and barriers. There is a growing constituency for changing models built on the precedent of r2P. To that end, the WrMC proposed building a constellation of international players to work in a united network to steward reforms. One of the strategies to counter the reactionaries who want to return to “right-is-might” behaviour is to reconfigure the way that a global system can be organized to enable more flexible arrangements, coalitions, and networks that draw together the better actors of our global community. Charles Taylor writes: “Our age makes higher demands of solidarity and benevolence on people today than ever before. Never before have people been asked to stretch out so far, and so consistently, so systematically, so as a matter of course to the stranger outside the gates.”20 The challenge now is to unpack the r2P idea to launch the crucial task of forming and shaping a global ethos and political movement to suit the times. With this comes global cooperation that works towards values of human security, well-being, and justice beyond our borders.

noteS 1 Virtual Conference Report – Refugee Women: Responding to Covid-19, July 2020, https://wrmcouncil.org/publications/refugee-women-responding-tocovid-19. 2 “Crisis in Lebanon: The Impact on Refugees and the Forcibly Displaced,” 9 September 2020, https://wrmcouncil.org/events/crisis-in-lebanon. 3 “Call for Intervention in the Humanitarian Crisis Taking Place as Thousands of Yazidi Leave Refugee Camps to Return to Sinjar,” 15 September 2020, https://wrmcouncil.org/news/call-for-intervention-yazidi. 4 Martin Chulov, “Aid Agencies Warn of Covid-19 Crisis in Refugee Camps as Winter Approaches,” Guardian, 23 September 2020, https://www.theguardian.

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com/global-development/2020/sep/23/aid-agencies-warn-of-covid-19-crisis-inrefugee-camps-as-winter-approaches. “Trump’s Refusal to Join a Global Vaccine Effort Epitomizes an America That Is Isolated and Weak,” Editorial Board, Washington Post, 2 September 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-refusal-tojoin-a-global-vaccine-effort-epitomizes-an-america-thats-isolated-andweak/2020/09/02/f64c23c6-ed44-11ea-99a1-71343d03bc29_story.html. John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison, The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 31. Marilynne Robinson, “What Kind of Country Do We Want?,” New York Review of Books, 11 June 2020, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/06/11/ what-kind-of-country-do-we-want. “World Needs to Prepare for Millions of Climate Displaced, Un Says,” https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/climate-refugees-un-1.5435843. A Call to Action: Transforming the Global Refugee System, WrCM Report, 24 January 2019, https://www.cigionline.org/publications/call-actiontransforming-global-refugee-system. “Un Landmark Case for People Displaced by Climate Change,” 19 January 2020, https://landportal.org/news/2020/01/un-landmark-case-peopledisplaced-climate-change. https://theglobalobservatory.org/2020/09/extremism-displacement-covid-19sahel-lake-chad-basin. Emphasis in original. Florian Krampe and Jake Sherman, “Peacebuilding Commission and Climate-Related Security Risks: A More Favourable Political Environment?,” https://www.sipri.org/publications/2020/sipri-insights-peace-and-security/ peacebuilding-commission-and-climate-related-security-risks-morefavourable-political-environment. Kofi A. Annan, “Problems without Passports,” Foreign Policy, special report, 9 November 2009, https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/11/09/problems-withoutpassports. Lloyd Axworthy and Allan Rock, “r2P: A New and Unfinished Agenda,” Global Responsibility to Protect 1, no.1 (2009): 54–69, https://doi. org/10.1163/187598409X405479. WrMC, A Call to Action, https://wrmcouncil.org/publications/a-call-to-actiontransforming-the-global-refugee-system. Kristine Lee, “It’s Not Just the Who: How China Is Moving on the Whole Un,” Politico, 15 April 2020, https://www.politico.com/news/ magazine/2020/04/15/its-not-just-the-who-how-china-is-moving-on-thewhole-un-189029. Mathew Burrows, The Future Declassified: Megatrends That Will Undo the World Unless We Take Action (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

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18 Amanda Taub, “Why Are Women-Led Nations Doing Better with Covid-19?,” New York Times, 15 May 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/15/world/ coronavirus-women-leaders.html. 19 Madeleine Albright, foreword, Democracy and the Challenge of Change: A Guide to Increasing Women’s Political Participation (Washington: National Democratic Institute 2010). 20 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 695.

12 From Creation Chaos to Creaturely Solidarity The Comingling of Faith and the Fate of the Earth Stephen Bede Scharper

My first encounter with the remarkable Lois Wilson was at a 1982 Good Friday service in downtown Toronto. In addition to being one of the most powerful and stirring homilists I had ever heard, Wilson to me embodied the Social Gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch and other prophetic Christian writers who saw social structures of economic and political oppression as central, rather than as peripheral, to the Christian message. She spoke of a popular but ahistorical image of the “honey-sweet” Christ, a pleasant, warm, affable fellow who ruffled neither feathers nor consciences. This was not, she averred, the Jesus tortured and crucified as a political thorn in the side of a Roman regime brutally occupying first-century Palestine. This image also diverged from the image of Christ as Liberator, an emergent Christology emanating from nations of the Global South. For Wilson, in the words of the old Protestant apothegm, Jesus came not only “to comfort the afflicted, but to afflict the comfortable.” Lois’s extraordinary journey exemplifies the life-yielding qualities of courage and commitment that faith communities can bring to our present climate emergency. After first reviewing, in broad strokes, some examples of how faith communities around the world have been addressing our current climate emergency, I focus on four gifts that faith groups offer our current ecological malaise: grace, gratitude, justice, and joy.1

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Faith, PoLiCY, and the Fate oF Creation For the past four decades, building on the work of their mentor, Passionist priest, cultural historian, and “geologian” Thomas Berry (1914–2009), scholars Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim have been pioneering a powerful and transformative nexus between world religions and our ecological moment. Spearheading the ten-volume series on world religions and ecology from Harvard University Press, and, in 1998, establishing the Forum on Religion and Ecology, now based at Yale University, they have helped shape not only the debate but also the design of how the world’s faith communities can effectively engage in our present ecological maelstrom. According to the forum’s website, the initiative is “an international multi-religious project contributing to a new academic field and an engaged moral force of religious environmentalism.”2 The forum has helped contour the efforts of many significant global partnerships in this area and provides a type of inventory of what faith groups are doing, academically and pragmatically, to address the climate emergency. Amidst this plethora of activity, from the “Green Monks” of Thailand protecting sylvan watersheds to the “Redwood Rabbis” of California saving these arboreal giants from clear-cutting, I’d like to highlight here three among the myriad global faith-infused environmental efforts.

The United Nations Environmental Program’s Faith for Earth Initiative Launched in November 2017, Faith for Earth strives to strategically liaise with faith-based organizations to help advance the Un Sustainable Development Goals (SdgS) 3 and fulfill the objectives of the 2030 Agenda.4 This agenda includes the seventeen Sdgs but also encompasses five core dimensions: people, prosperity, planet, partnership, and peace. In embracing these, Faith for Earth has several aims: (1) “to inspire and empower” faith organizations to safeguard the environment; (2) to help “green” faith-based organizations’ investments and assets to effect the advancement of Sdgs; and (3) to provide “knowledge and networks” to assist faith leaders to communicate persuasively with decision makers and the public. This initiative is significant for it is engaging world faith communities at an international policy level, viewing these groups not as obstacles but as vital partners in resolving our ecological emergency and helping alleviate social, economic, and gendered inequity.

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The Parliament of the World’s Religions Climate Action Task Force The Parliament of the World’s Religions, which held its first meeting in Chicago in 1893 and its most recent in-person meeting in Toronto in 2018, seeks through its Climate Action Task Force “to encourage and enable collective and individual action” to address human-caused climate change.5 The task force builds on earlier efforts to help create a global ethic that the adherents of the world’s faith traditions can support. It is republishing an updated Faith and Earth, showing the connections between tenets of the world faith traditions and ecological protection. It also sponsors a continuing Buddhist-Catholic Dialogue on Climate Change, suggesting that the wisdom of these two traditions, love and compassion for the Earth and all its beings, the deep awareness of the interconnectedness of all life, are essential to envisioning a new human-nonhuman future. The task force is expanding the Climate Commitments Project (CCP), launched at the Toronto Parliament in 2018, working to raise the ambition of climate commitments around the world. The group is also working with the United Nations and the United Religions Initiative on a report detailing progress faith-based groups have made towards the Sdgs, with recommendations for further action.

Interfaith Rainforest Initiative The Interfaith Rainforest Initiative (iri) is an international, multifaith alliance that endeavours to integrate “moral urgency and faith-based leadership” with global efforts to end tropical deforestation. Offering a platform for religious leaders to work closely with Indigenous peoples, governments, businesses, and ngos, it strives to foster actions that “protect rainforests and safeguard the Indigenous peoples that serve as their guardians.” In commemorating World Environment Day 2020, iri presented an online “Resource Guide on Rainforest Protection for Religious Communities.”6 It also released a primer for religious leaders and faith communities entitled “Forests and Pandemics: How Protecting Tropical Forests Can Prevent Coronaviruses and Other Emerging Diseases.”7 While these international initiatives reflect practical ways faith groups are working collaboratively and globally to address climate change, faith groups also offer the current environmental moment some deeper gifts, explored below.

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graCe As an undergraduate, I recall Gregory Baum, the famed Catholic theologian, describing the sense of solidarity between nations of the industrialized North and the Global South, beginning in the 1960s, as a “moment of grace.” This notion of international ecclesial solidarity was for him an indication of God at work in the world. It pointed to a global church that could “change its mind” and strive to shed the carapace of patriarchy, anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia, and colonialism by embracing the suffering, struggles, and aspirations for liberation that were erupting across the world. Our ecological moment, too, can perhaps be seen as a moment of grace, an epiphany, when the fate of humanity and the fate of the entire biotic community are seen not as separate stories but as a deeply interrelated, integral narrative. In the darkness and despair spawned by climate chaos, unprecedented species lost, destruction of life-giving rainforests from Brazil to Indonesia, unbridled plastic contamination of our water systems and ourselves – the litany goes on – faith communities, with their histories of hope and hardship, are invited to a special witness of grace. Faith communities around the world, as they address our climate emergency, remind us that we are not passive victims marching, Zombie-like, towards climatic Armageddon. They are awakening to the realization that humanity is a gifted co-creator with the divine and invited to help in the flourishing, rather than the diminishing, of the Earth’s ecosystems. For Christianity in particular, it is a call to rekindle a core precept: the belief that we are not alone and that this is not an abandoned world. This is our covenanted home; the divine does not let us fly solo in an indifferent cosmos. As Passionist priest and cultural historian Thomas Berry suggests, we are invited at this time to embark on the “great work” of befriending, rather than besmirching, the Earth. Berry’s diagnosis of our time, now described as the Anthropocene, in which humans are shaping geological evolution, points to a special moment of prophetic grace: What is happening in our times is not just another historical transition or simply another cultural change. The devastation of the planet that we are bringing about is negating some hundreds of millions, even billions, of years of past development on the earth. This is a most momentous period of change, a

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change unparalleled in the four and a half billion years of earth history … All indications suggest that we are, in a sense, a chosen group, a chosen generation … We did not ask to be here at this time … Some of the prophets, when asked to undertake certain missions, said, “Don’t choose me. That’s too much for me.” God says, “You are going anyway.” We are not asked whether we wish to live at this particular time. We are here. The inescapable is before us.8

gratitUde In numerous self-help books, meditation guides, and reflections upon ways to avoid despair, the value of fostering a sense of gratitude looms large. Faith communities at this time are especially called to reflect on the deeper spiritual posture that gratitude entails. While for myriad faith groups, the abiding love of the Creator and the continuing resilient life energies of the planet are undergirding sources of gratitude, such groups are now invited to a more widespread and humble gratitude. Faith communities, particularly in the West, have traditionally not been at the forefront of environmental movements and, indeed, through anthropocentric values, have contributed to our environmental maelstrom, as argued in Lynn White’s watershed 1967 Science article, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.”9 In acknowledging this, faith communities are invited to express gratitude for environmental pioneers, from Indigenous communities and wisdom keepers, such as Oren Lyons, Audrey Shenandoah, and John Mohawk; through groundbreaking environmental scientists, such as Rachel Carson and Loren Eisley; to contemporary youth, such as Swedish climate activists Greta Thunberg and Ojibway water advocate Autumn Peltier. These leaders have spoken truth to power in the prophetic tradition of multiple faith communities. Interestingly, when we reflect on the basis of life on Earth and the energy that yields life, the role of the soil itself – the energy in the Earth, which grounds so much of life – is more stood upon than celebrated. And yet it is one of the most profound bases of life for which we should be grateful. One of the pioneering environmental thinkers to highlight this was Aldo Leopold (1887–1948). Leopold, a conservation biologist, is considered a founder of environmental ethics. He saw the human species not as master and conqueror over nature but, rather, as just “plain member and citizen” of the biotic community. Leopold wrote in A Sand County Almanac (1949) that land “is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit

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of soils, plants, and animals. Food chains are the living channels that conduct energy upward; death and decay return it to the soil.” Leopold saw that soil was not just plain dirt but, rather, “a sustained circuit, like a slowly augmented revolving fund of life.”10 Decades before ministries of the environment or environmental protection agencies, Leopold advocated the extension of human ethics to embrace the “integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community,” a “land ethic,” which he saw as a positive and necessary evolution of ethics. Part of this evolution includes development of an “ecological conscience” that engenders “love, respect, and admiration for the land.”11 This sense of beauty in nature, and deep admiration for its mysteries, is not ancillary but constitutive of Leopold’s ethic. The understanding of the fundamental energy circuit of the soil from which so much of life on Earth springs becomes an essential consideration when pondering our future, particularly in the United Sates and Canada, which both lose approximately 1 per cent of their topsoil each year owing to erosion, contamination, “development,” and other factors. When we ignore these basic sources of energy and our rootedness in a biotic community, we lose a sense of who we really are: plain citizens rather than lords and masters of the larger Earth community. Leopold is proposing much more than a rational “best practices” approach to land stewardship. He is, in fact, advancing an ethics of the heart, one rooted in love as much as in reason, and incorporating awe-filled admiration as much as rational argumentation. Persons of faith, now embracing an environmental perspective, are indebted to the groundbreaking ethical advances of Aldo Leopold and the heirs of the environmental movement he helped spawn. Thus, when Greta Thunberg, one of the most celebrated contemporary lighthouses of this environmental legacy, writes stridently that she wants “panic,” not “hope,” from the adults of this world, faith communities are invited to be grateful, not offended. As Thunberg passionately declares: Adults keep saying: “We owe it to the young people to give them hope.” But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.12

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jUStiCe One of the most powerful insights of the liberationist thrust of the 1960s in Christian circles was the realization that “to know God was to do justice.” It was a truth as old as Amos but was expressed with new clarity and urgency through the theology and praxis of Christian communities of the Global South. In the 1970s in Latin America, for example, two-thirds of the population lived in poverty, and those fighting for better living conditions were often met with brutal repression. This realization was expressed strikingly in the 1971 Justice in the World statement of the World Synod of Roman Catholic bishops, who proclaimed that “action on behalf of justice” was a “constitutive” dimension of the preaching of the gospel.13 In concert with this insight, the World Council of Churches brought social justice and ecological concerns together under the Justice, Peace, and the Integrity of Creation initiative. Canadian theologian David Hallman, who served as the World Council of Churches point-person on global warming from 1988 to 2006, was among the vanguard in an international Christian movement that spoke out against not only the devastating ecological impacts of climate change but also its impact on many of the world’s poorest and most marginalized peoples, from Bangladesh to Nunavut. Hallman was among the “bioneering” faithful who spoke a different language from the scientists and policy-makers whom he engaged in climate change conversations. He spoke of the Earth, not as a resource, but as home, perceiving our planet’s ecosystems as a divine gift rather than as merely a profitable commodity. Building on the insight of “geologian” Thomas Berry, this ecologically sensitive faith spokesperson viewed the universe not as “a collection of objects” to be bought, sold, used, and discarded but, rather, as a graced creation. The involvement of faith groups in climate change movements suggests that what is at issue is not only a question of science, something to be remedied by technological innovation, but a profoundly moral and spiritual crisis, in which the most affluent and industrialized nations are helping render the lands of the poorest on the planet uninhabitable. The weight of suffering involved in climate change falls ponderously upon the poor. Here, faith communities bring their millennia of social justice concerns into conversation with global climate chaos. The islands of the Maldives, for example, are almost completely subsumed by rising seas, and in Bangladesh around one million are displaced every year by flooding, with an impoverished government unable to provide new

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housing, leading to a surge in homelessness that parallels the rise of the oceans. The rising sea levels are a partial result of melting polar ice caps, a phenomenon caused by human-engendered greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, the majority of Bangladeshis live on land fewer than ten metres above sea level, and 35 million live in coastal areas. If nothing is done to delimit climate change, these people are in grave danger of losing their homes and their livelihoods. And that is not all. With a sea level crescendo of forty centimetres, which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says is likely in this century, the number of people in coastal areas who could potentially be flooded out of their homes is 94 million, 60 million of whom live in Southeast Asia. As Christian ethicist Michael Northcott states in his hard-hitting study, A Moral Climate: The Ethics of Climate Change, “global warming is the Earth’s judgment on the global market empire, and on the heedless consumption it fosters.”14 What these religious voices are observing is that the climate crisis runs along the same fault lines of social, economic, racial, and political oppression. In embracing the notions of climate justice and environmental racism, which show that pollution and eco-destruction disproportionately affect Indigenous communities and  persons of colour, faith communities are creating, and will continue to forge, important connections for the global environmental movement. In echoing Brazilian liberation theologian Leonardo Boff’s call to heed both the cry of the poor and the cry of the Earth, Pope Francis, in his notion of “integral ecology” so powerfully unfurled in his 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si’, is building on this important comingling of ecological and social solidarity, which now informs the important work of faith coalitions in Canada and around the world. Listening to those cries of suffering species and economically and politically oppressed persons is a unified aural experience. As Pope Francis writes: “Today  … we have to realize that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.”15

joY As progressive activist Emma Goldman (1869–1940) allegedly remarked, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” And as The Boss, rocker Bruce Springsteen, declares, “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

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The joy of creation, the joy of liberation, the joy of right relationship, the celebratory beauty of a star-strewn sky or of riotous colours of sunflowers in bloom are a critical horizon for faith communities as they embrace creation. A grim, hardened, joyless faith is not what is needed at this time. Here again, faith communities might glean some insight from the wisdom of both Aldo Leopold and Thomas Berry. With a profound sense of the natural world’s beauty, Berry, like Leopold, also saw the need for admiration, awe, and wonder to be integral, rather than peripheral, dimensions of environmental discourse. There is a joy in life and the cosmos that is vibrant and divine. And for Berry, the energy of the dynamic universe is deeply interconnected with human energy – physical, psychological, and spiritual. We are faced not only with a technological question of alternative energies but also with a psychological and spiritual question of finding the energy needed to both imagine and help advance a new relationship with the Earth. To help nourish the cultural and psychic energy needed to respond to such seismic changes, Berry advocates a deepened awareness of the awesome beauty of the natural world. Berry claims that there is a psychic-spiritual dimension to all reality and that the emerging, expanding universe holds a place for human consciousness as one locus in which the universe, in a sense, reflects upon itself. Like Leopold, Berry sees the severe limitations of human effort to manage or control nature. Yet he also sees human inclination and spontaneity as part of nature, leading to a nuanced understating of the human vocation. “What we need,” Berry muses, “what we are ultimately groping toward, is the sensitivity required to understand and respond to the psychic energies deep in the very structure of reality itself.”16 Just as Leopold moved environmental ethics from land management to “love, respect, and admiration” of the land itself, so Berry moved environmental discourse from the land to the entire cosmos and attempted to show the interconnection of the energy of the cosmos, the soil, and the human species in all its manifestations: rational, physical, psychological, and spiritual. There is a divine ecstasy in creation: if we do not actively find it in creation, Berry suggests, we will seek it in unhealthy arenas – drugs, violence, extreme and destructive behaviour, and so on. This is a joy also celebrated by Pope Francis, who writes: “Let us sing as we go. May our struggles and our concern for this planet never take away the joy of our hope.”17

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FroM CLiMate Change to Creation Change What faith communities also bring to our present environmental moment is the realization that what we are effecting is not just an altered climate but an altered creation, a scarring of a sacred space of divine hospitality. Recognizing God’s imminence in nature, faith communities bring creation, not just ecology, to our environmental moment. They pose the question, “What does it mean to be a creature infused with divine love and intent?” Living within that question opens up a point of dialogue not only with other faiths but also with myriad lifeways, such as Indigenous cosmologies, which also perceive the awesome power of divine energy throughout the created world. Such an understanding embraces not only interrelationship but also a morally infused interrelationship, where, as in the inspired and inspiring trajectory of Lois Wilson, grace, gratitude, justice, and joy dance to the divine riffs and rhythms of creation.

noteS 1 The author wishes to thank Parmpreet Padam, Thea Koper, and Billy Gekas for their kind research assistance in the preparation of this chapter. 2 Forum on Religion and Ecology, https://hds.harvard.edu/links/forumreligion-and-ecology. 3 Un Sustainable Development Goals, https://sdgs.un.org/goals. 4 Un 2030 Agenda, https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015/ transformingourworld. 5 Parliament of the World’s Religions Climate Action Task Force, https://parliamentofreligions.org/program-areas/climate-action. 6 Interfaith Rainforest Initiative, “Resource Guide on Rainforest Protection for Religious Communities,” https://www.interfaithrainforest.org/s/Interfaith_ ResourceGuide_ENG.pdf. 7 iri, “Forests and Pandemics: How Protecting Tropical Forests Can Prevent Coronaviruses and Other Emerging Diseases,” https://www. interfaithrainforest.org/s/Interfaith_ForestsPandemics_Primer_ENG.pdf. 8 Thomas Berry with Thomas Clarke, Befriending the Earth: A Theology of Reconciliation between Humans and the Earth (Mystic, Ct: Twenty-Third Publications, 1991), 5. 9 Lynn White Jr, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” Science 155 (1967): 1203–7. 10 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949), 214.

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11 Ibid., 223. 12 Greta Thunberg, speech at World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland, 20 September 2019. See also Greta Thunberg, No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference, expanded ed. (Toronto: Penguin Random House Canada, 2020). 13 World Synod of Roman Catholic bishops, Justice in the World, Rome, 1971, https://www.cctwincities.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Justicia-inMundo.pdf. 14 Michael Northcott, A Moral Climate: The Ethics of Climate Change (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2007), 7. 15 Pope Francis I, Laudato Si’, (Rome: Vatican, 24 May 2015), no. 49 (emphasis in original). 16 Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988), 124. 17 Pope Francis I, Laudato Si’, no. 244 (emphasis added).

13 All My Relations Living Respectfully on the Earth with All Creation Stan McKay

An informal part of the orientation to United College’s theology program in 1964 was an invitation to dinner at the Freeman home. Mrs Freeman and her partner, the retired dean of theology at United College, hosted seven students. We had our meal and introduced ourselves. When the meal was completed and the table cleared, a large ancient slide projector was placed in the centre of the table. Three or four boxes of glass slides were brought to the table, and we were introduced to the activities of the Freeman family. The slides were black and white and not always focused. The memorable part of the presentation was the warmth of the Freeman hospitality and their commitment to their family. Many of the slides told of their annual family summer vacation at Lake of the Woods, on the Ontario/Manitoba border. The family members would drive to the lake, load their supplies into a canoe, and then camp by the lake and live on the land. This was Lois Wilson’s family. Her parents took her and her siblings out on the water to learn about life in Creation. I did not know Lois in 1964, and I was not able to identify her in any of the slides projected on the wall of her family’s home. The Freeman family pilgrimage onto the water and land was a way of maintaining balance and developing a respect for the natural world. It explains Lois’s attachment to her cabin east of Thunder Bay, Ontario, on Lake Superior as a place of sanity and renewal. It was in the tradition of the Freeman way of rediscovering one’s self in nature and then knowing one’s place in balance with all that is in Creation. The summer of 2020 has not been a time when people have been conversing about “living respectfully on the Earth,” but many are exploring ways to spend time in nature. It may be that the “Freeman formula”

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for finding family health in the natural world is being rediscovered. Obviously, governments and corporations have less time for programs addressing the environmental crisis. The impact of the global pandemic on our lives is immeasurable. We have daily reports on the health of regions and nations and there are regular statements on the economic impacts of Covid-19. The effects of isolation and social distancing on our families and communities will be difficult to assess. There is growing frustration among those who are economically connected with the need to have large numbers of people gathering for events. Fisher River was a community that maintained life with respect for Creation. In early memories of life in my home community, there was a sense that the Earth provided for our needs and that sharing what you had with neighbours was natural. At the signing of Treaty 5, Fisher River Cree Nation selected land on the west shore of Lake Winnipeg. Our leaders were seeking food security and chose to move from the north end of Lake Winnipeg to have access to arable land. The tradition of hunting and gathering could be supplemented with gardens and domestic animals.1 As a child I experienced my father being away from home for weeks at a time. While he was away for fishing, trapping, and hunting, my mother cared for us at home and tended a large garden each summer. She cared for a few cows, some chickens, and at times a team of horses. We learned our roles in sharing in the work of subsistence community living. Trappers from our community managed resources without government restrictions. Two or three men would walk in the springtime to their trapline and the first two days would be used to assess the potential of the area. They would count the number of active muskrat houses and determine how many animals they could harvest and still have an active population for the next year. We had a way of life that respected the natural world. The community economy was sustainable, and it was only because of the interference of the federal government that we experienced poverty. Without consultation, Indian Affairs introduced welfare and created a soul-destroying dependency. Following the Second World War the government of Canada legislated that Indigenous children had to attend school, and so the pattern of families having a semi-nomadic lifestyle ended.2 In a northern Manitoba community a story was told about a family who had their summer home in the village by the lake and their winter home in the woods near their trapline. In the summer they fished and lived in their village home and in the autumn they would go with two or three other

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families to their winter home. In the winter camp the elders, women, and children would gather wood, haul water, skin the animals, prepare food, and keep the fires going. The trappers would work the traplines and bring back food to the camp. Then the law was imposed and children had to attend the village school. The trapper who told me the story of his family and their seven children said it became difficult to maintain a home in the village as well as to trap. Every week he had to bring food to his family and then travel back to his trapline. The cabin on the trapline had no one to keep the fire going, prepare food, and skin the animals, so the trapper had to try to do it all. This was not possible, and the economy collapsed. Dependency on government welfare payments became a way of life, and relationships with the land ended. In this same village I was told a story about a trapper who came back from his trapline for the summer. He had had a successful season and brought some quality furs for the buyer. The buyer told him he could sell him some new metal traps and the trapper bought them. The next summer when he returned to sell his furs, he had an even more successful catch. The day after he sold his furs he placed half of his traps in a bag, paddled out to the middle of the lake, made a tobacco offering, and dropped the traps into the lake. He had determined he would only take what he needed from the land. There are many stories told by people who lived on the land in northern Manitoba that describe their connection to Creation. During a mid-morning break at a meeting, some of us chose to step outside into the warm sunshine. An elder standing in the group was looking at a large evergreen tree. He spoke in Cree, saying, “That tree has saved my life many times.” He went on to tell stories describing his experiences. Once he and a friend were canoeing on an autumn hunting trip when the wind came up and they were wet and cold. They landed on the shore, where they made a small fire in a grove of evergreens and were able to dry their clothes. Another time, in a winter blizzard, he remembered going into a cluster of large evergreens. There he was able to build a shelter and keep warm through the storm. “That tree saved my life.” For me, involvement in ceremonies for about forty years and active engagement in the sweat lodge ceremonies for thirty-five years has been a learning process about prayer and our relationship to all of Creation. The sweat lodge ceremony begins with relationship expressions acknowledging Earth as Mother, Moon as Grandmother, and Sun as Elder Brother. The ceremony recognizes all humans as relatives with gifts. There is an acknowledgment of the Great Mystery at the centre of our circle, and we welcome spirit helpers that journey with us.

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With the lodge being a central place for prayer it is also a place where a philosophy of life on the Earth is shared. Four colours  – yellow, black, red, and white – representing the four directions, mark the circle ceremony of prayer. The symbols for each direction are a way of honouring the peoples of the Earth and including them in the prayers. Elders speak of a coming together that is a form of reconciliation as well as a prophecy of the four winds. It is said that when the four winds blow the people will be healed and the Earth will be healed. This teaching has not been included in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action, and the conversation about reconciliation does not mention Creation.3 The elders teach that you must include Creation in the conversations about reconciliation and healing. The Paris Accord has been a disappointment,4 not just because nation-states have failed to meet their targets but also because it presents the climate crisis as a management issue. The accord assumes that we can work with percentages of improvement in amounts of pollution and that we will manage our way through this crisis without any significant change in how we relate to Creation. There is a need to create a shared response to a crisis that requires radical lifestyle changes. Resource extraction and environmental degradation are indicators of our rampant greed and attempts to build larger granaries (cf. Luke 12:13–21). There is an Indigenous circle teaching that addresses the potential for humans to move to an understanding of the expression “all my relations.” It is what we say as we exit the sweat lodge. It is an acknowledging of all peoples, and all that is in Creation, as relatives. The diagram that follows is an attempt to present the teachings about human development. Writing this section is a compromise because an oral tradition is being presented in a printed format.5 As the diagram illustrates, life begins in the eastern doorway. We are born into the world as totally dependent beings. We need others for food, warmth, protection, and love. In childhood we gain an awareness of ourselves as individuals and strive to do things because we are not comfortable remaining dependent. One of the first words a child learns is “no,” which is a way of testing the authority of others. It may be a time of experiencing a “good life” with opportunities for play, socializing, and engaging the natural world. The southern door is the direction of youth and the learning of independence. It is a time of heightened self-awareness and involves living what the elders call the “fast life.” Sometimes behaviour among the youth is dangerous and unruly. The community acknowledges this challenging stage of development and strives to offer guidance and

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Bison Elders Stories and teachings Maintaining cultural values

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Sacred Fire

At the centre of community

Eagle Birth Dependence

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Wolf Youth Independence Figure 13.1

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teachings on the land. The elders support the youth as they determine their strengths and skills for their future roles. The western door is the direction of adult responsibility for family and community well-being. It is the time of long hours of work and of moving into the pattern of life that is guided by a growing awareness of interdependence. There is a need to care for the children, youth, and elders. The clan systems organized responsibilities for the tasks of hunting, gathering food, preparing it, and distributing it. Everyone had a role in the caring for and sharing of life. The northern door is the door of clarity and dreams. It is the direction of the elders, the knowledge keepers, who maintain the balance of life in the community. The elders have teachings, often in the form of stories and community history lessons. They have among them medicine people, ceremony leaders, clowns, and counsellors. Their wisdom maintains an understanding of the philosophy of the circle of life, which is the basis for interdependence. A profound learning in our family life has been around the movement of the elderly to a completion of the circle of life. There is a gradual decline in an elder’s physical capacity and he/she again becomes

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dependent. Our youngest daughter and her great-grandfather were able to spend the last two years of his life together in our home. She was two and he was eighty-two. They took afternoon naps together and early evening walks in the yard. He was moving into a time of dependency and she was slowly moving towards independence. They walked hand in hand at the same pace. What I have shared has had no place in any of my educational experiences. I have spent time in an Indian day school and in a teachers’ college; I have had three years of college, and three years of theology. None of these institutions ever made positive reference to Indigenous spirituality or our philosophies of life. The schools and churches have had dominant roles in colonial missionary work and have actively suppressed our culture. I was ordained in 1971 by the United Church of Canada in my home village in Koostatak, Manitoba. I was settled in the Cree community of Norway House, Manitoba, where I experienced the history of colonial mission. The church elders of that community re-educated me regarding what constitutes humility and patience as I sought to be faithful in an oppressive institutional church. The recognition that generations of cultural genocide were a part of the Christian Church mission was traumatic, and I committed myself to work with the elders and youth to create change.6 In 1972, a missionary conference was held in London, Ontario. It was a two-week orientation and there was nothing that was relevant to the Indigenous missions in Canada. The courses were designed for international personnel. The central theme was that these missionaries would be going across the ocean to be “partners in mission.” The implication was that the peoples who were receiving them would direct the people being sent overseas. The new missionaries would respectfully listen to partners and follow the patterns of the culture already existing in the local contexts in far-away lands. I discussed with the program leaders the possibility of making this orientation process available for personnel going into Native churches in Canada. They responded that it was not their mandate. The church did not offer any orientation for Indigenous mission, and the schools of theology did not have the capacity to receive Indigenous students. I had a friend who was very involved in his home United Church in northern Alberta. He had a call to enter ministry, and, with support from his family and his congregation, he enrolled in a United Church theological school. His spiritual life as a Cree man included participation in traditional spiritual ceremonies as well as active leadership in the United Church. His professor of biblical studies

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assigned an essay topic, which was due at the end of the first month of classes. He struggled to write the essay but determined he could cover the assignment by making reference to his cultural practices and the wisdom of the elders. When his professor returned the paper it had a brief note, which declared that it was unacceptable and could not be graded. The next week my friend withdrew from the college and returned to his home. The theological programs that were offered in Canadian theological schools in the 1960s and 1970s were based on classical European perceptions of truth. While there was movement away from the use of the biblical Creation stories as an explanation of the fall of Creation, there was no significant teaching of our human connection to the sacred Earth. This gap in Christian theological thought has resulted in the churches being silent today when young people cry out about the climate crisis. The destruction of much of the natural balance on the Earth is a matter of faithlessness. Those who engage in actions against environmental destruction, including many youth, call out to science and industry to stop the madness. As Indigenous peoples, we have a vision of cyclical action and mystery in Creation that reminds us of our relationships. We do not follow linear thinking, which comes from a scientific worldview and which leads to futile efforts to manage chaos. Many people in Canada live in one-industry towns. These small towns and their churches exist in situations in which everything depends on resource extraction and the goodwill of the corporate managers. The person who leads worship looks out on a Sunday morning and sees managers in the pews. Will the leader of worship mention the toxic pond at the edge of town that has been overflowing into the stream that flows through that town? Or that the company that owns this mine also has four mines in Central America that have driven Indigenous peoples from their homelands? We are people of faith who are compromised by the actions of industry and governments who are committed to accumulating wealth and maintaining power. The devastating reality is that we as Indigenous peoples are divided, and we have been silent regarding, or misled by, the presentation of theologies and philosophies. We have many spokespeople who no longer uphold the visions of our ancestors, grandmothers, and grandfathers, who taught us how to live with Creation and honour “all our relations.” Our relatives are the ones that crawl, fly, swim, walk – all of Creation. When I was six or seven years old and living in Koostatak, my mother took me with her to an evangelical tent meeting. It was unusual to have visitors in our isolated Cree village, but that evening there were many. It

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was a long evening of reading scripture, preaching, and singing. There is one chorus to a song that I have not forgotten: This world is not my home, I’m just a’passing through. The angels beckon me from heaven’s open door And I can’t be at home in this world anymore. The words of this song present the powerful image of “pie in the sky when I die.” It is a presentation to poor marginalized Indigenous peoples, and others, that says that it doesn’t matter what you do to the Earth because it is evil and you are bound for heaven. An acquaintance tells of travelling on a highway and passing a train derailed beside a stream. Many tanker cars ruptured in the accident were leaking chemicals into the stream. A young Indigenous couple stopped to observe, and my friend said that this must concern them, as it would affect their village. Their response was: “It does not matter to us. We are going to heaven.” I describe this as the impact of what we have called mission, but is in reality cultural genocide. After ten years as a volunteer with the World Council of Churches, from 1986 to 1996, I left, feeling the deep separation between churches and a vision of what might lead to collaborative work to make peace and  create justice. The Program to Combat Racism was vibrant and affected many struggles, but the major focus was on apartheid in South Africa. When Nelson Mandela walked out of prison, the churches stopped contributing, and the capacity to affect injustice was lost. The council returned to its routines of negotiating how to survive as an ecumenical cluster. There is a body of work that outlines how many faith communities have philosophies in their traditions that are similar to the golden rule. Within some Indigenous communities there is a basic code of behaviour that is described as respect. In the time leading up to the Covid-19 pandemic, there was an interfaith group in Winnipeg that discussed the “spirit and intent” of the treaties made between Indigenous peoples and the British Crown. With what I have said in the preceding paragraphs and with the visions and teachings of knowledge keepers in Indigenous circles, I now present the following concept, which may be a place to involve all who wish to seek healing for people and the Creation. The global context reflects the vulnerability of the systems of governance in nation-states. The human focus on power and wealth has caused us to function politically now just as we did centuries ago. We have refined the framework but we live with structures that are

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similar to those that comprised the feudal systems of ancient times. The disproportionate distribution of wealth and the corporate giants’ control of the Earth’s resources have brought us to a climate crisis. This we know: in the midst of a global pandemic, we can be more creative in our responses if we collaborate. Indigenous peoples offer the concept of a circle of life that connects us as relatives. We are taught that we are a part of Creation and we arrive at maturity when we recognize that we are interdependent with all humans and all of Creation. Is it possible for human groupings to embrace the concept of interdependence? Could an invitation be issued for the members of  the global community to prepare draft documents, stories, music, and art that reflect their understanding of our sharing of life on the Earth? It would move beyond the anthropomorphic concept of the golden rule to consider how we share life in relationship with all Creation. Faith traditions could explore their texts and teachings for guidance. Philosophies could outline global understandings of community on the land. Research scientists could explore the potential for genetic links in all that is in Creation. The defending of limited truth has resulted in dogmatic positions that are hurdles to our sharing of life. The opening of our societies to engage in dialogue with diverse perspectives on interdependence would liberate us from the fear of creative change. When the Freeman family climbed into a canoe to spend their time on the water and land, they explored interdependence with Creation. Is it possible to connect Lois Wilson’s confidence and vision with her family’s grounding on the Earth?

noteS 1 The first signing of Treaty Five took place in September 1875. The treaty was between Queen Victoria and Saulteaux and Swampy Cree peoples living around Lake Winnipeg. There had been a decline in the fur trade, leading First Nations to seek to diversify their way of sustaining a living. 2 The first Indian residential schools were built and operated by churches prior to Confederation. After Confederation and the passing of the Indian Act, 1876, the schools were the responsibility of the federal government, which funded and oversaw them. The churches administered them. The purpose was to ensure that First Nations people were assimilated into the dominant Canadian culture, and so the schools were built at some distance from Indigenous settlements, making it difficult for parents to visit their children. The schools were seriously underfunded, the education was of poor

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quality, and, in addition to the suppression of their language and culture, students suffered physical and sexual abuse. There were also Indian day schools in some communities, which were not residential. After the Second World War, government policy shifted from assimilation to integration, and Indigenous students also began to attend the public school system. Truth and Reconciliation Commission Summary Report, 2015, https://www. united-church.ca/sites/default/files/Executive_Summary_English_Web.pdf; Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Calls to Action (Winnipeg: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015). Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change reached an agreement to combat climate change in Paris on 12 December 2015. It opened for signatures on Earth Day in April 2016 and entered into force after receiving signatures from fifty-five countries, accounting for 55 per cent of global emissions. By 2017, 127 countries had signed. For discussions of Indigenous oral history traditions and the issues involved in moving to written form and going into print, see Sylvia Moore, Trickster Chases the Tale of Education (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017); Peter Geller, “Many Stories, Many Voices: Aboriginal Oral History in Northern Manitoba,” Oral History Forum 23 (2003); Laura Jane Murray and Keren Dichter Rice, Talking on the Page: Editing Aboriginal Oral Texts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). The United Church of Canada ran fourteen residential schools. When courageous survivors stepped forward to tell the stories of the abuse they had suffered, the various denominations reacted defensively, engaged in disputes with the federal government about the division of responsibility, and feared that lawsuits would lead to bankruptcy. The United Church made a first apology in 1986 and a second in 1998: https://www.united-church.ca/socialaction/justice-initiatives/reconciliation-and-indigenous-justice.

14 Fishing Communities in Decline An Impediment to the Common Good Bertha Yetman

I first met Lois Wilson in 2006. She was ecumenist in residence at the Toronto School of Theology and I was a doctoral student in theology and social ethics at Regis College. We sat across from one another at the annual Regis multicultural fest. There, we shared our history of common experiences with rural cultures and societies. Both of us had grown up in large families, lived in rural communities touching the waterfront, fished the lakes and oceans in small boats, and lived the lure and wonder of the wild. Over the years, we have reflected and commiserated on the misuse of natural resources, unstable economies, and disappearing ways of life that endangered the health and wellbeing of (especially) the marginalized and disenfranchised in our midst. In these liaisons and conversations, she more than once heard the story I tell in this chapter. In 1950, the year of my birth, the harbour of my Catholic home community of St Mary’s was full of dories, punts, and skiffs offloading boatloads of cod at the local wharves. A little further out the bay, homeward-bound fishing schooners riding low in the water trimmed their sails to round the point and land cod galore. Thirty years later, I was looking at skeletal fish shacks foundering at their beams and a few small boats lying idle on the naked beaches. No longer were shorelines packed with mothers, sons, and daughters cutting out cod tongues, gutting, salting, and placing cod on flakes to dry in the sun. The sail-driven fishing schooner had been replaced by big, diesel-powered draggers and trawlers. Fewer and fewer cod were swimming close to shore.

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In 1986, I was invited to serve as executive director of the Newfoundland Inshore Fisheries Association (niFa). The beginning was a little disconcerting. I was the only woman among many men, but I was made to feel welcome and soon settled into my new job. For the next three years, we campaigned up and down the coast warning that our principal renewable resource and primary industry, the cod fishery, was being destroyed. Job opportunities were very scarce. Thus, in 1989, I left the province with the offer of secure work and a decent wage. In this chapter, I examine the impact of the destruction of the cod on a maritime society, economy, and culture in three parts: the outmigration from coastal communities; the impediment imposed on the human right to work; and, in these post-fishery years, the summons of the local Catholic faith community to honour its own social teachings and advocate for struggling fishing communities. However, I begin by framing the context in which the eradication of the cod stocks in the late twentieth century threatened the way of life and very existence of these fishing communities.

Setting the SCene In August 1986, under niFa co-chairs Petty Harbour fisherman Tom Best and Southern Shore inshore fish plant owner Martin O’Brien, inshore fishers, plant owners, plant workers, and concerned citizens joined to address their common problem – no fish. For the next six years, this rare coalition of merchants and fishers waged a province-wide conservation and public awareness campaign to Save the Inshore. niFa members warned that their staple,1 their primary food source and leading export, was greatly endangered. The world’s richest cod fishery, the northern cod abounding in the ice-cold waters off the northeast coast of Newfoundland, designated the 2j3K3L naFo (North Atlantic Fishing Organization) fishing zone, was depleting rapidly.2 niFa contended that, although European factory freezer trawlers were overfishing the cod stocks, the main exploiters were Canadian offshore draggers and trawlers, with their highfunctioning fishing gear and 300,000-pound below-deck storage capacity.3 The at-home pillage followed the 1976 International Law of the Sea Convention held in Geneva, Switzerland. The convention granted Canada sovereignty over its territorial waters extending two hundred miles out to sea. The two-hundred-mile limit was negotiated on the grounds that, if the level of foreign fishing persisted, it would destroy not only the cod stocks but also the small coastal communities dotting the province’s coastline. For five hundred years, these small

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outports had been almost solely dependent on the inshore fishery for a living.4 The inshore sector, seemingly rescued by this decision, soon encountered a similar danger at home. In 1982, the federally mandated Kirby Commission of Inquiry recommended restructuring the fisheries with the formation of two major companies  – Fisheries Products International and National Sea Products Ltd.5 While the seasonal inshore sector employed the greatest percentage of workers, it was much less financially profitable than the modern offshore trawler fleet. These gigantic vessels, dragging their huge nets across the ocean floor, not only caught fish in unprecedented quantity but also scraped and abraded the flora and fauna from the ocean bottom.6 Inshore fishers with their fixed gear,7 operating near the shore from late spring to early fall, could not compete with the year-round offshore effort. Despite niFa’s tireless campaign, both federal and provincial governments, the Newfoundland Fishermen’s Food and Allied Workers Union (nFFaWU), and the Catholic faith community largely stayed on the sidelines. Membership in nFFaWU included both inshore and offshore fishers and plant workers. Both levels of government represented all citizens from onshore to inshore to offshore. And in local churches, inshore and offshore congregants shared the same pews. Fisheries and Oceans Canada (dFo) continued to award generous quotas to the offshore conglomerates. When Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949, the terms of union granted the federal government wide-ranging jurisdiction over all its coastal waters, including setting fish quotas. During the 1980s, the total allowable catch hovered around 250,000 metric tons, with preference given to the well-to-do offshore fleet. Offshore companies could afford to hire lobbyists to persuade elected officials to support their clients’ interests. Inshore fishers had neither the means nor the wherewithal to gain similar access. Poverty submits to silence; it hinders dialogue and chances of effective mediation between conflicting interests. Humiliated and marginalized, these able-bodied mariners left their homes in droves to secure work elsewhere.8 Even when the cod crisis was recognized, dFo relied only on the data provided by its own scientists, who determined there was no decline in the stocks. Federal decision makers did not take into consideration the findings of the 1986 niFa-commissioned scientific Keats Report, which saw serious shrinkage in cod populations. Keats recommended lowering the cod quotas to 185,000 metric tons; dFo set the quota for 1987 at 256,000 metric tons.9 niFa especially contested offshore fishing during the January–March spawning season when the northern cod gathered to spawn in the shallow offshore waters. At the break of spring, having increased and

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multiplied, they migrated near to the shore. Here, local fishers caught them with simple hook and line in small boats.10 By the mid-1980s, cod were so scarce that it was futile to try to catch them even with a baited hook. Not until July 1992, when the trawler nets lay empty in the water for weeks at a stretch, did dFo admit its blunders and impose a moratorium on fishing all cod in the waters off the northeast coast of Newfoundland. The destructive exploitation consigned some forty thousand fishers, plant, and support workers to joblessness.11 The collapse of the northern cod stocks not only signalled the largest layoff in Canadian history12 – it also rewrote the future of hundreds of five-hundred-year-old fishing communities. Many residents, especially young people, were forced to seek employment far from the places they called home.

oUtMigration: LoSS oF WaY oF LiFe By the beginning of the millennium, rural populations had dropped by 8.4 per cent, of which 4.9 per cent were young people in their late teens and early twenties.13 Based on the 2019 Statistics Canada projections for the next twenty-four years, CBC News reporter Malone Mullins estimates that, by mid-century, the population will drop by ninety thousand people – about one-fifth of its current number.14 An editorial in the local Telegram reported that “the worst case scenario puts the 2043 population of the province at 429,400, more than 100,000 fewer residents than the province had in 2018.”15 Memories are short-lived; painful memories are often suppressed or denied. While these reports cite low birth rates, aging populations, and fewer job prospects to explain the decline,16 they do not mention the loss of the fisheries as a reason for the unprecedented outmigration. People, especially young people, need work. So they seek work in better-off economies, like the Alberta tar sands. No fish for the past thirty years has meant less revenue, no way to earn a living, no way to provide for family and self, and no reason to stay. For the first time since settlement days, the outport is depopulating in record numbers. These people left their homes by the sea, where they talked, ate, breathed, and dreamt fish. They left their fields of homegrown crops, root cellars full of vegetables, houses heated by wood stoves, and barns sheltering cows, sheep, horses, and chickens. The collapse of the fishery not only all but bankrupted their economy, it also sabotaged their self-sufficient way of life.

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When fishers beached their small boats and set aside their fishing gear, they also forfeited their right to their inherited berths on the fishing grounds. Since settlement days, a man fished with his brothers and sons on their berth or ocean property, passed down from his ancestors;17 no one ever really owned these berths. When Newfoundland first joined Canada in 1949, these inshore fishing berths continued to be respected. But as the larger vessels began to displace the small boat effort, these berths gradually fell under federal jurisdiction; they became controlled by regional allocations of fishing quotas, with deference given to the wealthy offshore conglomerates. The production machine replaced the human specialist; the traditional fishing grounds became a purposeless, un-functioning commons. Rather than suffer the indignity of joblessness, these skilled workers relocated to places like Fort McMurray, Alberta. They brought with them their skills and occupations as mariners, navigators, naval architects, marine engineers, carpenters, boat builders, net makers, sail makers, farmers, foresters, and builders of houses as well as parish and public buildings. Their expertise and proficiencies were no longer bequeathed to their home communities. Their highly sought after hands-on knowhow would come to benefit more prosperous economies of less familiar societies and cultures.

WorK: a hUMan right Fishing is not simply a job; nor are fishers mere commodities to be bought and sold at a price. Fishing is a meaningful way of life. Fishing at sea requires high degrees of independence, self-reliance, autonomy, risk taking, and the willingness to challenge the volatility of nature.18 Fishing is neither individualistic nor self-centred. It is a communal type of work. On the water, fishers breathe the same salty air and pursue the same fish species. In fog or sunshine or storm, they face the perils of the unpredictable North Atlantic. They share the same respect for the health and viability of the fish habitat. Their methods of harvesting and producing ensure the sustainability of this renewable resource. Self-employed inshore fishers are also skilled businesspeople. They procure, preserve, and market fish; there is dignity and pride in doing what they do. Created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), through their work they co-create in God’s kingdom (John 14:12–14) for their own good and the common good. Within the official canon of Catholic social teachings, work and worker are distinguished as indispensable to the common good. At the

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end of the nineteenth century, Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (rn), considered the first of the social encyclicals, extols the value and integrity of human labour. rn recognizes the mutual dependency between work, worker, and employer – all are essential to the interests of community, state, and the good of all.19 While the church, before and since rn, has advocated for respect for human dignity, the value and dignity of work, and justice and equality for all, for the sake of brevity, I select only certain papal documents that appeared in the lead up to the fisheries crisis. Five years prior to the niFa campaign, Pope John Paul II’s Laborem Exercens emphasized work as creative, productive, an essential human activity, as bearing “the particular mark of a person operating within a community of persons; the vehicle through which communities and a person’s creativity can prosper … a fundamental dimension of human existence on earth.”20 Ten years later, on the centenary of rn and one year before the collapse of the fisheries, Pope John Paul’s Centesimus Annus, while expounding on human rights and social and economic justice, calls for the protection of the worker from the mercilessness of unemployment.21 Two years before, Jesuit theologian David Hollenbach had asserted that no person should be prevented from engaging in productive employment. Idleness is anti-social, an impediment not only to the dignity and self-worth of the person but also to the good of the community as a whole.22 Newfoundland fishers, diminished by chronic unemployment, suffer an impoverished sense of self-worth. In time, their generations of fishing expertise and skills become eroded. In 1970, sixteen years before the crisis in the fisheries, Bishop Remi De Roo, of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB), warned that unemployment was morally wrong.23 Hollenbach elaborates: “One can hardly think of a more effective way to deny people active participation in the economic life of society than to leave them facing unemployment for years, even over generations … The extent of their suffering shows how far we are from being a community at all.”24 A community without work is a community in crisis. When the Catholic faith community in Newfoundland failed to affirm its own social teachings and protect the dignity of fishers by honouring their work as a human right, and the fishery as God’s resource, they broke bonds with one another and the overall citizenry. Today, the breakdown in community life especially resonates in the gathered community.

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the gathered CoMMUnitY: PUBLiC and ProPhetiC Living on the North Atlantic coast need not be idealized, romanticized, or sentimentalized. Life there has its challenges  – coping with the unpredictability of nature and an ocean vacillating between generosity and parsimoniousness. To live, work, and survive in this environment requires neither human exceptionalism nor rugged individualism. The very fabric of these fishing communities is made up of variations in personality and outlook, proficiencies, and abilities. In small communities, people are forced into relationships that can ultimately develop a community spirit capable of weathering the many challenges marking a life given to land and sea. In reviewing the events leading to the collapse of the cod fishery, a conspicuous shortcoming of past and existing populations can be seen to be assuming that its deliverance, survival, and future depends on power elites. In the same way, federal government decisions had favoured the conglomerates. Money counts in the halls and antechambers where many decisions are made, and there was no effective mediation between competing and conflicting interests. This deficiency is evident in the Catholic community of believers who gather together to worship. Despite the spirit of renewal proclaimed at Vatican II, distinguishing the church as “the people of God,” the church at the time of the fisheries crisis was still understood as the monopoly of the ordained clergy; it had hardly moved beyond the sanctuary, sacristy, and confessional. This community of believers was not sufficiently informed in its own social teachings to accept the summons of the council to “read the signs of the times” and engage in active agency for their own sake and the sake of the common good.25 This hierarchical notion of church kerbed the faith community from living the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:1–12) and advocating against the ecological destruction affecting its own socio-economic-cultural well-being. The largely muted relation of the church to the crisis, while politically expedient, was spiritually and morally deficient. By ignoring the commissioning of their own faith tradition and vast corpus of social teachings, this people of God permitted the exploitation of their human and natural resource. Another rationale offered for the muted response of church leaders is the division between church and state. The church addresses the spiritual realm, the state the economic-political. Yet the church is called to seek mutual relationship with all of creation and the upholding

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of the dignity of every person. For the church-local and the CCCB to distance themselves from raging inshore-offshore tensions because of boundaries between church and state raises many questions, as does the selective way in which the leadership acted. The church was willing to encroach on the boundaries of the state on such deemed moral issues as abortion, euthanasia, and same-sex marriage. Pope John Paul II, in his 1984 address to the Newfoundland fishing community, challenged church-state jurisdictions when he urged fishers to rise up and organize themselves against this foreseeable fisheries catastrophe.26 For the next eight years, however, this papal appeal met with silence in the local ecclesia. Not until two months after the cod moratorium in 1992 did the Newfoundland bishops flare political flames. In their belated letter to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, they condemned the exploitation of the fishery by corporate magnates, demanding that “the fishery crisis be seen as an ecological issue, and justice be served for the present generation and generations to come.”27 Had these bishops intervened to the dissenting sides in the conflict, and followed the commissioning of their own spiritual leader and their own Catholic social teachings, the outcome may have been different. Another reason offered for the church’s lack of response is the eruption of sexual abuse scandals in the province in 1988. True, these scandals largely discredited the church with regard to engaging in public advocacy. The public revelation of an endangered cod fishery, however, predated by two years the exposure of clerical abuse of minors. Moreover, these scandals did not deter the church’s passionate involvement in the debate over the dismantling of the denominational education system, which gained momentum over the 1980s. While education was undoubtedly close to the heart of Catholic Newfoundlanders, fish could hardly be sidelined as secondary to schooling and learning. When John Cabot reached the North Atlantic off Newfoundland in 1497, the ocean was teeming with cod; they could be caught by lowering fishing baskets in the water.28 Five hundred years later and within fifty years of Confederation, Ottawa, through sheer mismanagement, rendered these waters lifeless. Its reparation: federal compensation packages  – namely, the Northern Cod Adjustment and Recovery Program (nCarP) based on average unemployment insurance earnings from 1989 to 1991, followed by the Atlantic Groundfish Strategy (tagS), which required retraining for work in other fields or accepting retirement packages. These recompenses offered only band-aid solutions.29 Federal government subsidies merely dodged the blame for putting a major food supply in jeopardy and the breakdown of a local-regional

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economy. These programs show a lack of respect for the knowledge of what really works in a locality; they thrive on the ill-advised principle that what works for one works for all; and they fail to protect the common good.

ConCLUSion: the hoMeCoMing Today, an aging population for the most part defines the demographic of places like St Mary’s, where I grew up. Residents largely consist of retired schoolteachers, fishers, civil servants, health care workers, and skilled tradespeople. In the post-fishery years, many in the local congregations are active in the ecclesial, educational, social, and civic life of the community. They serve as lectors and Eucharistic ministers and sit on parish councils; they console the dying, comfort the grieving, care for the elderly, help in school activities, and hold elected municipal office. They are living proof that one can be a good Catholic and at the same time a good citizen. At the level of official doctrine and teaching, the church continues to uphold the common good. In Laudato Si’, Pope Francis develops an integral human-natural ecology.30 Rather than accepting their lot in life as one of fate, rural people can feel reassured of the support, goodwill, and compassion of Pope Francis who, in his concern for such endangered cultures as the Amazon, warns: “The globalized economy shamelessly damages human, social and cultural richness. The disintegration of families that comes about as a result of forced migrations affects the transmission of values, for the family is and has always been the social institution that has most contributed to keeping our cultures alive.”31 In 2017, the CCCB stated in a letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau: “It is up to all of us – government, corporations, investors, local authorities, workers and consumers – to change our attitudes and practices if we are to live in a world in which the creation of wealth from the fruits of the earth does not blind us to the origin and purpose of these goods, which is to advance the conditions of life.”32 But to cultivate right relations with the fruits of the Earth requires naming and owning our own mistreatment of our common home. Even those of us who live away are ever dogged by memories of exploitation and mismanagement of our fisheries, haunting reminders that we surrendered our good, the good we hold in common, to the greed and acquisitiveness of industrial capitalism. Yet prospects of once again living on the Rock are still conceivable. The province continues to be blessed with an abundance of rich,

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unspoiled, and fertile land, and thriving bird and animal populations. There is a remarkable and widely recognized flowering of arts and culture and a thriving tourism industry. Community-based initiatives are restoring life to small communities. The Miawpukek First Nation restorative project,33 the Fogo Island Cooperative Society and Shorefast Project,34 and the Petty Harbour Fisherman’s Cooperative are three prime examples.35 Today, across the province, members of the laity actively committed to the everyday spiritual, social, and public life of their communities are actually preparing a place of welcome for the homecoming. Newfoundlanders and Labradorians living away are now feeling the pinch of the current economic downturn, marked by increasing layoffs, for-sale signs on heavy equipment, and a significant drop in real estate prices. They still identify with and love these places with the ocean heaving across the shores. In every harbour on this rocky coast, there is a “holdin’ ground,” a secure place to drop anchor.36

noteS 1 Harold Innes, The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 386–92. 2 The 2j3K3L naFo fishing zone stretches from Hopedale in southern Labrador to the northern part of the Grand Banks. See “North Atlantic Fisheries Management Divisions,” https://www.library.mun.ca/cns/cod/map. 3 Thomas E. Best, “Address to the Newfoundland Inshore Fisheries Association and All Concerned Citizens,” St Kevin’s School, Goulds, Newfoundland, 24 August 1986, 1, Newfoundland Archives, Memorial University of Newfoundland. See also Fred Mason, “Newfoundland Cod Stock Collapse: A Review and Analysis of Social Factors,” Electronic Green Journal 17 (London: School of Kinesiology, University of Western Ontario, December 2002), https://escholarship.org/uc/item/19p7z78s; Bertha Marie Yetman, “The Crisis of the Fisheries in Newfoundland and Labrador and the Notion of the Common Good in David Hollenbach” (PhD diss., University of St Michael’s College, 2017), 45–50. 4 Cabot Martin, constitutional lawyer and executive member of niFa, was with the Canadian delegation at the Geneva Convention in 1976. 5 Michael J. Kirby, Chair, Navigating Troubled Waters: A New Policy for the Atlantic Fisheries (Ottawa: Ministry of Supply and Services, 1982). See Yetman, “Crisis of the Fisheries,” 43–4. 6 Yetman, “Crisis of the Fisheries,” 41–64.

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7 Fixed gear: fishing nets and lines fixed in place in the ocean, as opposed to trawlers that drag their nets through schools of fish. The fish come to the stationary gear, which is checked and emptied frequently. Gill nets, cod traps, and longlines are all fixed gear. 8 Yetman, “Crisis of the Fisheries,” 43–50. 9 Derek Keats, D.H. Steele, and J.M. Green, A Review of the Recent Status of the Northern Cod Stock nafo Divisions 2J, 3k and 3l: A Report to the Newfoundland Inshore Fisheries Association on Scientific Problems in the Northern Cod Controversy (St John’s: Memorial University of Newfoundland, 11 December 1986), 29. dFo minister Tom Siddon called the Keats Report “stimulating and worthwhile” and said it would be “taken into account” in setting the quota for 1987. In December 1986, the taC for the coming year was set at 256,000 mt, allowing overfishing of the stock by some 70,000 mt, or 140 million pounds. See also “Open Letter to All Supporters of the Newfoundland Inshore Fisheries Association,” St John’s, August 1986, photocopy, Newfoundland Archives, Memorial University of Newfoundland. 10 See Yetman, “Crisis of the Fisheries,” 28–105. 11 Joseph Gough, Managing the Canadian Fisheries: From Early Days to the Year 2000 (Ottawa: Minister of Public Works and Services Canada, 2006), 419. 12 Ibid. 13 Matthew Lau and Marco Navarro-Genie, “Dearth of Opportunity: Tax Burden,” aims: Atlantic Institute for Marketing Studies in Atlantic Canada (Halifax, November 2018), https://www.aims.ca/wp-content/ uploads/2018/12/AIMS-18006_DearthOpportunity_NV3018_F2.pdf. 14 Statistics Canada, “Section 3: Results at the Provincial and Territorial Levels,” 2018 to 2043. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/91-520-x/2019001/ sect03-nl-eng.htm. See also Malone Mullins, CBC News, 20 September 2019, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/nl-populationprojection-1.5289419. 15 Editorial, “Newfoundland’s Projected Population Decline Worth Heeding,” Telegram, St John’s, 20 September 2019, https://www.thetelegram.com/ opinion/local-perspectives/editorial-newfoundlands-projected-populationdecline-worth-heeding-354295. 16 In 1993, Statistics Canada recorded a population of 580,000 in the province. This number declined steadily through to 2008. Not until 2020 did the population projections report draw a parallel between increased outmigration and the collapse of the cod fishery. Additional causes for the decline are noted: an aging population, high death rates, and low birth rates. From 2008 to 2017, the economic benefits of offshore oil and gas exploration led to a population increase. Since then, the drop in demand for oil and natural gas and the Saudi-Russian price wars have had a negative

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19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26

27 28

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impact on the economy and, accordingly, on population growth. Today sixty thousand fewer people reside in Newfoundland and Labrador than in 1993. See “Newfoundland and Labrador Population Projections,” https://www.gov. nl.ca/fin/economics/pop-overview. The gender reference is male as women rarely if ever owned fishing boats and fished the ocean. See James R. McGoodwin, Understanding the Cultures of Fishing Communities, section 2: “Cultural Characteristics of Small-Scale Fishing Communities, sub-section 2.5: “Occupational Pride, Tenacity and Cultural Identity,” http:// www.fao.org/3/Y1290E/y1290e05.htm#bm05.5. Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum: On Capital and Labour (Rome: Vatican, May 1891), nos. 31 and 56. Pope John Paul II, Laborem Exercens: On Human Work (Rome: Vatican, 14 September 1981), “Blessing” and no. 4. Pope John Paul II, Centesimus Annus (Rome: Vatican, 1 May 1991), nos. 8 and 15. David Hollenbach, Justice, Peace and Human Rights: American Catholic Social Ethics in a Pluralistic World (New York: Crossroads, 1989), 62. See Bishop Remi De Roo, Cries of Victims: Voice of God (Ottawa: Novalis, 1986), and “Ethical Reflections in Social Justice,” Catholic New Times 27 (3 February 2003), 11. Hollenbach, “The Common Good in a Divided Society,” in Santa Clara Lectures (Santa Clara, Ca: Santa Clara University, 1999), 9. Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes: Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World (Rome: Vatican, 7 December 1965), nos. 3–4. Pope John Paul II, Address to the Members of the Fishing Community,” Flatrock, Newfoundland, 12 September 1984, nos. 1–5. Apostolic Visit to Canada, https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/speeches/1984/ september/documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_19840912_pescatori-terranova.html. Larry Dohey, “Crisis in the Fishery Addressed by Canadian Bishops,” Monitor 59, no. 7: 1. Peter Firstbrook, The Voyage of the Matthew: John Cabot and the Discovery of North America (San Francisco: Bay Books and Tapes, 1997), 128–92; Yetman, “Crisis of the Fisheries,” 30–1. Jenny Higgins, “Economic Impacts of the Cod Moratorium,” Heritage: Newfoundland and Labrador, https://www.heritage.nf.ca/articles/economy/ moratorium-impacts.php. Pope Francis I, Laudato Si’ (Rome: Vatican, 24 May 2015), no. 5. Cf. Address at the Meeting with Indigenous People of Amazonia, 19 January 2018, aaS 110 (2018), 301. Pope Francis I, Querida Amazonia (Rome: Vatican, 2 February 2020), no. 39.

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32 Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, “Letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau,” 9 August 2017, https://www.cidse.org/wp-content/ uploads/2017/08/Letter_to_PM_re_Canadian_Mining_Practices_in_ Latin_America_-_EN.pdf. 33 See Miawpukek First Nation (Conne River), https://ccednet-rcdec.ca/ files/ccednet/Gerard_Joe.pdf. 34 See Shorefast, https://shorefast.org/about-fogo-island. See also Reimagining Fogo Island: Zeta Cobb’s Inspirational Journey, https://newsroom.carleton. ca/story/zita-cobb-fogo-island, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= CRTjJUleAHk. 35 See Cooperatives in Newfoundland and Labrador, parts 1 and 2, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRTjJUleAHk. See also https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=ehz8qFMGrqc. 36 The term “holdin’ ground” is commonly used in fishing communities to denote a secure place in the bottom of the harbour to anchor a boat. This is personified in Ted Russel’s The Holdin’ Ground: A Radio Play (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1972).

Pa r t t h r e e

Human Rights

15 A Not So Gay World Confronting Religious-Based Discrimination Brent Hawkes and Kimberley Vance-Mubanga

We recognize at the outset that lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LgBt+) persons are not a homogeneous group. They have multiple and intersecting identities, and do not all experience what we may think of as “development” in the same way. In this chapter, we discuss what appear to be general trends and developments in addressing discrimination. But understanding the nuance and complexity, especially between concepts of sexual orientation and gender identity and expression, is extremely important. And we do not, in this chapter, address a new development within global movements to include intersex persons within a broader LgBt+ umbrella and, by extension, to include an intersectional analysis around the concept of “sex characteristics.”

doMeStiC LegaL/LegiSLative deveLoPMentS While domestic laws that affect people based on their sexual orientation are sometimes, but not always, linked to and/or overlap with laws around gender identity and expression, domestic law should be assessed through at least these two different lenses. Leading global organizations are tracking data on legal/legislative developments in this way. The International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (iLga World) has produced a series of state-sponsored homophobia reports (latest in 2019) and trans legal mapping reports (latest in 2017). The most recent State-Sponsored Homophobia Report tracks the laws in force in all 193 Un member states and other non-Un member jurisdictions under four categories: criminalization, restriction, protection, and recognition. “Criminalization” covers the provisions that criminalize consensual same-sex sexual intercourse or other kinds of same-sex

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sexual acts (usually captured under vague terms such as “indecency” or “immoral acts”). “Restriction” tracks the laws that impose legal barriers on freedom of expression of sexual orientation and gender identity (Sogi) issues and freedom of association (registration or operation of sexual orientation-related [Sor] civil society organizations). Under “Protection,” the report lists countries under six categories related to protection from discrimination at different levels (constitutional protection, broad protection and employment, criminal liability for offences committed on the basis of sexual orientation, prohibition of incitement to hatred, discrimination or violence based on sexual orientation, and bans on “conversion therapies”).1 We address conversion therapies in a separate section of this chapter. Finally, under “Recognition,” the report lists countries under four categories: same-sex marriage, partnership recognition for same-sex couples, joint adoption by same-sex couples, and second parent adoption by same-sex couples. For the most part, in just over a decade, the arc towards decriminalization has been a positive one. Currently, consensual same-sex activity is illegal in 35 per cent of Un member states (sixty-eight countries). In 2007, that number stood at around 44 per cent (no less than eighty-five countries). That said, as we see more progress in this regard, we also see more backlash. In Chad and Gabon, in 2019, we have seen the enactments of new penal codes with specific provisions for criminalizing consensual same-sex acts. We have also seen challenges and appeals to decisions that have previously repealed criminal laws. Unfortunately, religious organizations often fuel this. In Belize, the Roman Catholic Church had appealed the 2016 judicial decision that decriminalized consensual same-sex sexual acts but later withdrew, and the decision to decriminalize was ultimately upheld by the Court of Appeal in 2020. However, the Equal Opportunity Bill, which was being debated in 2020 and which would have protected LgBt+ people from discrimination, was dropped by the government after protests, including anti-LgBt+ church members burning tires. The Trans Legal Mapping Report is a research project of iLga World’s Gender Identity and Gender Expression Programme. First released in 2016, the report is a compilation of laws, administrative procedures, and processes setting out the ability and limits of trans and genderdiverse people around the world to change their sex/gender markers and names on official identity documents. It focuses on these two aspects because they are often what trans and gender-diverse people first seek to change in order to gain access to other rights and services in their everyday lives.2 It is also important to investigate both the law and the administration of the law because often countries that

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allow gender marker change do so with conditions that violate a trans or gender-diverse person’s bodily integrity by requiring sterilization and extensive, multiple surgeries to conform to how a “real man” or “real woman” should look and sexually function. Sterilization requirements violate other laws and breach the right to freedom from torture and cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment. No less seriously, many countries around the world require multiple psychiatric evaluations, relying on definitions of “gender identity disorders” and “gender dysphoria.” States may also ask for the person to be unmarried or, if married, to divorce their spouse, all in order to avoid the threat of gay marriage. Another common requirement is that of not having dependent children. These particular requirements breach the rights of a person to privacy and to found a family. This is a clear example of some of the intersections between sexual orientation and gender identity in terms of legal developments. The report also shows best practice and/or progressive examples, such as in Argentina, Colombia, Denmark, Ireland, Malta, Mexico City, and Norway. As a region, the European section of this report is the longest as almost all of the forty-nine countries have some provision for either legal gender recognition or a facility for changing one’s name. It is important to note that the incidence of gender-recognition law in the region has been greatly influenced by the strong regional human rights jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights. Its landmark judgment on Goodwin and I v. United Kingdom in 2002 prompted many members of the Council of Europe to update their statute books to provide for gender recognition in order to remain compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights.3

internationaL LegaL deveLoPMentS Building on the power of regional instruments and mechanisms, international law has also been a powerful tool to influence developments on behalf of LgBt+ persons around the globe. In 2006, in response to well-documented patterns of abuse, a distinguished group of international human rights experts met in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, to outline a set of international principles relating to sexual orientation and gender identity. The result was the Yogyakarta Principles, a universal guide to human rights that affirms binding international legal standards with which all states must comply. Since their adoption in 2006, these principles have developed into an authoritative statement of the human rights of persons of “diverse sexual orientations and gender identities.” The period since then saw

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significant developments both in the field of international human rights law and in the understanding of violations affecting persons of “diverse sexual orientations and gender identities,” as well as a recognition of the often distinct violations affecting persons on grounds of “gender expression” and “sex characteristics.”4 In November 2017, another group of experts met in Geneva to develop the Yogyakarta Principles Plus 10 (YP+10), which aimed to document and elaborate a decade of developments through a set of Additional Principles and State Obligations. Together, these documents provide an authoritative, expert exposition of international human rights law as it currently applies to the grounds of sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, and sex characteristics. These principles have a unique relationship to Canada. Louise Arbour, the then newly appointed Un high commissioner for human rights and a former Canadian Supreme Court justice, initiated their development during an international dialogue on gender and sexuality held in Geneva in 2005 and organized by arC International. arC International, a Canadian-based international human rights organization working on LgBt+ issues, became a key player in the work to convene the experts in 2006 and was also the main co-sponsor of the process to develop the YP+10 in 2017. The range of impact of the YP and YP+10 is difficult to quantify but can be understood qualitatively through the example of India, where these principles have been used in Supreme Court decisions around criminalization and the rights of trans people. The court has found that “the ‘Yogyakarta Principles on the Application of International Law in Relation to Issues of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity’ should be applied as a part of Indian law.”5

deveLoPMentS at the United nationS LgBt+ movements and their allies have demanded a voice in global governance at least as far back as the 1975 International Women’s Year Conference in Mexico City. These groups have also worked diligently to build alliances with other human rights organizations to ensure that their issues are mainstreamed throughout a human rights discourse and agenda within the Un system. And while it is true that the United Nations has offered space and given strength to sexual rights advocacy, these same venues and international conferences have been used by other sectors, with opposing interests, to build the most unlikely alliances. For example, Christian and Islamic fundamentalists and other traditionalists have formed strong unions to defend nationalism,

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religion, and traditional values in these spaces. They have seen the claim of human rights to universalism, women‘s reproductive freedom, and sexual orientation and gender identity as common enemies and as a direct attack on the traditional values, cultures, and religious beliefs of the majority of people.6 Despite being a focal point for pitched battles, much like the global progress in domestic law, there has been an incremental arc towards  progress within the Un system. In September 2016, history was made at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UnhrC) in Geneva when it appointed the first independent expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on Sogi. Despite a process of amendments to the resolution creating the mandate, a close vote on the resolution itself, and an attempt to undermine the entire appointment during the subsequent United Nations General Assembly (Unga) meeting in New York, the first appointed independent expert, Vitit Muntarbhorn, began work on his mandate in November 2016 and delivered his first reports to the UnhrC in June 2017 and Unga in October 2017.7 The passing of the resolution has ensured sustained and systematic attention by a major organ of the United Nations to human rights violations on grounds of Sogi. The work of the independent expert has given greater depth to the notion that violations on grounds of Sogi are human rights violations that should be taken seriously. While the struggles around the creation of this mandate demonstrated that no region in the world has a consensus on either support or opposition to these concepts, it did highlight some areas of opposition that have remained deeply entrenched for over a decade. An analysis of the actions by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (oiC) highlights its strategy to propose hostile amendments, with the aim of derailing the resolution from its stated intent and purpose. Pakistan, on behalf of all oiC states (other than Albania), proposed eleven amendments to the text of the mandate resolution and was quite explicit about their intention, stating: “At a time when the Council needs to return to its foundational principles of cooperation and mutual respect for each other’s cultural and religious particularities, this draft resolution, we believe, will create further mistrust within the Council which should be avoided.”8 For Pakistan and the oiC, this position had not changed since they first began making statements against Brazil’s proposed resolution on sexual orientation, which was brought before the Un Commission on Human Rights in 2003–04 but was ultimately withdrawn. In that instance, a letter circulated by Pakistan on behalf of the oiC stated: “In

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our perspective sexual orientation is not a human rights issue. Instead it is related to social values and cultural norms. Individual countries need to deal with this issue within the parameters of their own social and legal systems … The draft resolution directly contradicts the tenets of Islam and other religions. Its adoption would be considered as a direct insult to the 1.2 billion Muslims around the world.”9 In addition, while not entirely consistent or predictable, the Holy See’s interventions within the Un over the past two decades have also revealed a desire to prevent LgBt+ people from achieving protection under the law and freedom from violence and discrimination. In recent years, the Holy See has formed a particularly strong alliance with Russia, which has thrust itself into the leadership of a “traditional values” global agenda that has been most effectively shaped by its development of anti-LgBt+ “propaganda” laws.10

deveLoPMentS aroUnd harMFUL PraCtiCeS: the CaSe oF ConverSion theraPY One particular development deserves a closer look because it sits squarely at the intersection of human rights, pathologization, and faith. The term “conversion therapy” is most widely used to describe a process of attempting to change, suppress, or divert one’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. It is rarely a singular event and involves a range of interventions that attack the core of a person’s understanding of who they are and how they relate to others. The term implies that treatment is needed for a disorder and that people can be converted to cisgender heterosexuality through such “treatment.”11 All scientific literature to date suggests that, regardless of religious, cultural, or traditional norms and contexts, these harmful practices never work, and they often cause deep, lasting trauma to an individual and those around them. Two recent landmark reports shine a particular spotlight on this issue, one released in 2019 and written by Outright Action International, and the second released in 2020 and written by the Un independent expert on Sogi. Up until these two reports, no research had been undertaken to characterize the nature and extent of these harmful and degrading practices on a global level, even though they’ve been well documented in certain regions, like North America, for instance. The drivers of this process are varied, but, as the Outright report notes: Religion, broadly, is the reason most frequently cited, although there are some regional variations. In Africa, religion, combined with family and cultural pressures, seems to fuel the practice

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of “conversion therapy.” In Latin America and the Caribbean, family and religious pressure also appear to be the main drivers of “conversion therapy,” with perpetrators largely being either religious personnel or private mental health providers. By contrast, in Asia, the data suggest that family “honor” and culture, more than religion, drive families and LgBt+ people themselves to seek out “conversion therapy,” primarily through private and public medical and mental health clinics, where it appears that physically abusive methods such as aversion therapy are predominantly used.12 The report of the Un independent expert indicates that practices of conversion therapy occur in at least sixty-eight countries and in all regions of the world. The Outright report also notes that efforts to either curtail these practices through official policies, or ban practices altogether, appear to be minimal, or at least minimally known, and that only four countries actually ban Sogi change practices. The independent expert calls for a global ban on practices of “conversion therapy,” a process that must include clearly defining the prohibited practices; ensuring that public funds are not used to support them; banning advertisements; establishing punishments for noncompliance and investigating respective claims; and creating mechanisms to provide access to all forms of reparation to victims, including the right to rehabilitation.13

rainBoW Faith and FreedoM All major world religions share compassion as a foundational value. Despite this, many religious leaders and communities openly discriminate against LgBt+ people. Although religion is not the only source of homophobia and transphobia, which exists in every segment of society, activists from many parts of the world consistently identify religious-based discrimination as one of the main sources of opposition to LgBt+ human rights and social inclusion.14 As religious leaders, organizations, and communities who believe in the importance of compassion, it is reasonable to hold ourselves to a higher standard. In short, we need to practise what we preach. Rainbow Faith and Freedom (rFF), founded by the Rev. Dr Brent Hawkes in 2018, has responded to the call to live compassionately. rFF is committed to changing the hearts and minds of people of faith who are opposed to LgBt+ human rights and inclusion because of religious-based teaching. It was created to mobilize spirituality and social justice to eliminate religious-based discrimination against LgBt+ people and their allies.

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Testing the Case Brent’s experiences as the senior pastor of the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) of Toronto for over forty years, guided by a commitment to LgBt+ human rights that continues to motivate him in his retirement, have shown him that the vision for rFF is timely. The many LgBt+ human rights and religious conferences he has attended and the many organizations with whom he has engaged over the past five years have highlighted the crucial change that rFF can engender across the globe. In 2015, while on sabbatical, Brent visited LgBt+ international organizations, allied organizations, and individual activists in New York, Washington, and Geneva to discuss the state of LgBt+ rights internationally, especially related to religious-based LgBt+ discrimination. He met with the International Lesbian and Gay Association (iLga), Human Rights Watch, arC International, the World Council of Churches, the Global Justice Institute, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (iLghrC), the Council for Global Equality, Soulforce, Center for Social and Information Initiatives Action, European Forum of LgBt+ Christian Groups, and Franciscans International. Most of these organizations stated they were proudly secular. When asked whether they were specifically involved with LgBt+ Christians, Muslims, or Jews in the struggle for human rights, the answer was usually “no.” Often, the individuals he met reported that there was very little activism coordinated to support LgBt+ people of faith. These interviews inspired Brent’s plan to start an international organization to combat religious-based LgBt+ discrimination. With the overwhelming support of many groups and individuals, Brent developed the concept for a new organization.15 After retiring in 2018, he formed a steering committee that has drafted the vision, mission, three key pillars, manifesto, and values for the organization. The name Rainbow Faith and Freedom was chosen and an organization was born with the aim to eliminate religious-based LgBt+ discrimination.

Coming Together rFF had its first success at a major international event. rFF was one of the 120 organizations participating at the Parliament of the World’s Religions (PWr) Conference in Toronto in November 2018. Doug Kerr, the executive director of the Dignity Network, and Brent thought that PWr would be a perfect opportunity to gather people from around the world to inspire progressive thinking and behaviour. In the past

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the parliament had no LgBt+ content in its official program. Doug Kerr and Brent approached the parliament’s head office in Chicago and expressed the opinion that it was long overdue, especially because the theme for this parliament was “Love and Inclusion.” PWr enthusiastically invited them to submit names for speakers and to suggest workshops and panels. With the endorsement of other LgBt+ religious organizations, PWr programmed nineteen workshops with LgBt+-supportive content to be included in the official program. The panels included “Creating a Different Future: Building Faith Communities Inclusive of LgBt+ People from Muslim and Christian Perspectives” and “Sacred Knowledge: Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity in Sacred Texts and Other Teachings.” In “The Global Inter-faith Movement for Human Rights of LgBt+ People” panel, Brent handed out brochures describing rFF and collected seventy names and e-mails from people across the globe.16 PWr also invited Brent and Doug to offer a free LgBt+ hospitality space for the conference, which they called the Rainbow Lounge. It was decorated with large panels depicting LgBt+ couples and some photos of members of the local LgBt+ mosque. They opened the lounge, with a special reception, to a full room. History was made with the first PWr LgBt+ event! There was a constant flow of conference delegates dropping by to talk about coming out, raising LgBt+ children, how to influence their faiths to be more LgBt+-positive, and so on. Brent’s husband John made three hundred rainbow ribbons, all of which were taken and worn. A minister from the Unity Movement asked Brent if a young couple could use the Rainbow Lounge to celebrate an engagement ceremony. They were, of course, honoured to host them and their celebration. After a very moving ceremony, this young gay couple walked around proudly holding hands for the rest of the conference. On the final evening of the PWr, the lounge was packed for a celebration of the great beginning that this PWr represented for LgBt+ human rights and social inclusion. The organizers pledged to build on this foundation for an even better PWr in three years’ time. Many signed up to help plan the LgBt+ programming for the next meeting. At the parliament’s closing ceremony, the chair of the board of trustees put up on the screen the pictures of the engagement ceremony, described it as an example of the success of the parliament, and indicated his support for LgBt+ inclusion, clearly signalling that the time had come to be more inclusive of LgBt+ people in faith communities. This conference was a significant breakthrough and laid the groundwork for rFF to improve the lives of LgBt+ people around the world by ensuring that religious-based discrimination is addressed and diminished.

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Subsequent Consultations Following the PWr, rFF hosted a one-day symposium, organized in conjunction with egaLe Canada Human Rights Trust, to hear from twenty-five activists from Canada, the United States, Jamaica, the Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, Eastern Europe, India, South Africa, Nigeria, Colombia, and the Philippines. They spoke about the impact of religious-based discrimination against the LgBt+ community and effective ways to counteract it. The group included the first openly gay imam in North America, the first openly gay Orthodox rabbi, representatives from the United Church of Canada and Metropolitan Community churches, theology professors, activists, and more. rFF presented an outline of its vision and strategies and invited attendees to give their perspectives on the founding principles of the organization. The input was extremely helpful and the symposium exceeded what was hoped for. Additional consultations were held in 2019, focusing on two areas. The first was the values that would guide the work and culture of rFF, both locally and internationally. The second concerned how rFF could effectively and ethically inspire change through its international work. Since activists from North America too often get involved in international advocacy in ways that are counterproductive, imperialistic, and colonial, rFF brought together a dozen people who had experience in activism abroad to teach rFF how to create change ethically and respectfully. Once again, this consultation proved valuable. Having clarified its vision at the original symposium, and now learning how to do its work appropriately, rFF was positioned to make a valuable and effective contribution to LgBt+ safety and inclusion worldwide. In order to do this, rFF established three overlapping but distinct pillars: the Canadian Pillar, the Resource Pillar, and the International Pillar. The Canadian Pillar will transform equality in law into equality in practice through focused engagement with different sectors and institutions, such as faith-based organizations, health care settings, and educational environments, which commonly perpetuate religious-based discrimination against LgBt+ people. The Resource Pillar will offer multi-faith resources through an online portal to help drive community awareness, increase access to information, encourage inclusivity, and facilitate progressive social change for people and communities in Canada and abroad. The International Pillar will be based on a twenty-year strategic plan in which rFF will partner with activists and organizations in selected countries to eliminate religiousbased discrimination and establish full inclusion and equality for LgBt+ people. These three pillars will support an overall organizational

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structure currently being built to change the hearts and minds of communities here in Canada and abroad in an effort to eliminate religious-based LgBt+ discrimination around the world. In summary, faith-based discrimination has been a significant factor in the development of anti-LgBt+ legislation, discrimination, and violence targeted towards the LgBt+ community. This has led to an increase in state-sponsored murder, legislative discrimination, increased rates of suicide, and a general attack on the health and well-being of LgBt+ people and their families. While evangelical Christianity, particularly in the United States, is mainly responsible for exporting homophobic and transphobic hatred around the world, homophobia and transphobia are no respecters of national boundaries, nor does any particular faith escape their impact. Religious-based discrimination is a major part of the problem and religions now need to play a bigger role in leading us to a solution. This solution would mean that LgBt+ people could live their lives without fear and, if they so choose, within the loving embrace of faith communities.

noteS 1 Lucas Ramon Mendos, “State-Sponsored Homophobia 2019: Global Legislation Overview Update,” iLga World, December 2019, https://ilga.org/ downloads/ILGA_World_State_Sponsored_Homophobia_report_global_ legislation_overview_update_December_2019.pdf. 2 Zhan Chiam, Sandra Duffy, Matilda González Gil, Lara Goodwin, and Nigel Timothy Mpemba Patel, “Trans Legal Mapping Report 2019: Recognition before the Law,” iLga World, 2020, https://ilga.org/trans-legal-mapping-report. 3 Daniel Ottosson, “State-Sponsored Homophobia: A World Survey of Laws Prohibiting Same Sex Activity between Consenting Adults,” iLga World, September 2007, https://ilga.org/sites/default/files/ILGA_State_Sponsored_ Homophobia_2007.pdf. 4 The Yogyakarta Principles, http://yogyakartaprinciples.org. 5 Phil Lynch, “India: Application of Yogyakarta Principles under National Law a Major Step for Transgender Rights,” International Service for Human Rights (iShr), 17 April 2014, https://www.ishr.ch/news/india-applicationyogyakarta-principles-under-national-law-major-step-transgender-rights. 6 M. Mbaru, M. Tabengwa, and K. Vance, “Cultural Discourse in Africa and the Promise of Human Rights Based on Non-Normative Sexuality and/or Gender Expression: Exploring the Intersections, Challenges and Opportunities,” in Envisioning Global lgbt Human Rights: (Neo)colonialism, Neoliberalism, Resistance and Hope, ed. N. Nicol, A. Jjuuko, R. Lusimbo,

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N. Mulé, S. Ursel, A. Wahab, and P. Waugh (London: University of London, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 2018), 177–204. K. Vance, N.J. Mulé, M. Khan, and C. McKenzie, “The Rise of Sogi: Human Rights for LgBt People at the United Nations,” in N. Nicol et al., Envisioning Global lgbt Human Rights, 223–46. “Appointing an Independent Expert on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity: An Analysis of Process, Results and Implications,” arC International, 32nd session of the Human Rights Council, 13 June–1 July 2016, http://arcinternational.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/HRC32-final-report-EN.pdf. Kimberly Vance, “Raising Our Voices: Opening Global Spaces for Sexual and Gender Minorities,” arC International, Global Democracy Paper, February 2015, http://arc-international.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/GlobalDemocracy-paper-ARC.pdf. “Report on the Holy See at the United Nations,” Catholics for Human Rights Report, 14 March 2019, https://www.waterwomensalliance.org/wp-content/ uploads/Catholics-for-Human-Rights-Report-English.pdf. “Cisgender” is the appropriate term for describing individuals whose gender identity aligns with the social expectations associated with the sex they were assigned at birth. See “Glossary of Terms,” egaLe Canada Human Rights Trust, https://egale.ca/awareness/glossary-of-terms. Amie Bishop, “Harmful Treatment: The Global Reach of So-Called Conversion Therapy,” Outright Action International, 2019, https:// outrightinternational.org/sites/default/files/ConversionFINAL_1.pdf. Independent Expert on Protection against Violence and Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, Report on Conversion Therapy, United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, May 2020, https://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/SexualOrientationGender/ Pages/ReportOnConversiontherapy.aspx. Research conducted by Outright Action International suggests that opposition to LgBt+ inclusion in faith-based communities exists in almost every part of the world, a statistic that is echoed by human rights activists. Hawkes also travelled internationally in 2019, including to Geneva (sponsored by Global Affairs Canada) where he participated in a side panel with the Un Human Rights Commission and made a presentation to the Permanent Mission of Canada in Geneva (embassy). The members of the embassy staff were very supportive of the vision for rFF. He also attended the Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom in Washington, dC. As a side event, he hosted a dinner for ten people from rFF, the Global Justice Institute, and the Global Interfaith Network out of South Africa, so that the three organizations could talk about what makes each organization unique and how they might work together – a great start for an exciting cooperative relationship.

16 The Global Women’s Movement Gently Holding Each Other Up Aruna Gnanadason

I write this article in honour of my mentor and dear friend Lois Wilson, with great joy and gratitude for the influence she has had on my life. Writing this gave me the opportunity to remember several moments when our lives have come together, beginning in the late 1970s when she visited the churches in India and stayed for a period at the Ecumenical Christian Centre in Whitefield, outside Bangalore in South India, where I worked and lived at that time. I was then a newcomer to the ecumenical movement. I had been active in the Student Christian Movement, which had played a pivotal role in my ecumenical formation. Meeting Lois was my first encounter with the larger ecumenical movement and my first contact with the global women’s movement. From the moment we met we gelled, and through all my years in the World Council of Churches (WCC) and after, we have maintained a strong relationship and bond. She has been a constant ally in dealing with tricky situations in the work I was to do globally in the WCC when I moved to Geneva in 1991. The power of the women’s movement has been an inspiration to me from those early times. As a small symbol of this I begin with a success story concerning women-power in India. The #ifwedonotrise campaign was launched in September 2020 in India and witnessed an unprecedented uprising of over six hundred groups, from the women’s, LgBt+, Dalit, and Indigenous People’s movements to human rights groups, trade unions, farmers, and environmentalist groups, as well as like-minded people from every corner of India. We marked 5 September 2020 as a day of resistance. We proclaimed the slogan “If we do not rise” to underline the urgent need for the people of India to rise and speak out; to act so as to protect the secular, democratic fabric of the

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Indian Constitution; to protect free speech and justice for the weakest in society from the onslaught of a nationalist government that was working in collaboration with Indian-bred crony capitalists and those bleeding the poor, the middle classes, and others. The restlessness of the people for justice and freedom poured out in this strong campaign in the midst of the raging Covid-19 pandemic, which has been grossly mismanaged. At the time of writing, India had the second highest number of virus-infected people in the world. The mainline media, which have been captured by big business houses, have been stifled. Hence the nationwide campaign could use only social media as its medium – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram – with small congregations of peaceful protest in different parts of the country (in keeping with Covid-19 safety rules). The campaign united us, as the people of India, and gave fresh energy to the women’s movement. We are divided by class, caste, ethnicity, language, and religion; therefore, a common agenda and commitment to resist the fascist, nationalist, and neoliberal government in power brought us together in unity. I started with this small example from India to speak of the commitment, the energy, of women courageously speaking out, sometimes in words and actions but also through art, music, poetry, and dance; through posters; through telling the saga of resistance; by refusing to be silenced, by remaining determined to overcome differences. The struggle continues. It is also important to acknowledge that the women’s movement in India has gained a great deal from its links with feminist movements all over the world. We have been inspired by the courage of women everywhere, and we have learned from their successes as well as their mistakes. One form of resistance has been to join with other women globally in publicly declaring that, as women, we share a commitment to end our common oppression. On a corner of one of the busiest roads in Bangalore, South India, a group of women, along with a few men, all wearing black, stand in silent protest, carrying placards indicating their commitment to the Thursdays in Black movement against rape and violence.1 This sort of scene is visible in many parts of the world as women join hands to condemn all forms of violence. Indian women have participated in other global movements, such as the One Billion Women Rising movement, the sixteen days of activism against violence movement, the Occupy movement, and other such protests. Additionally, Indian women have benefitted from the writings of women globally and have drawn from feminist theories from across the world. In cooperation with women elsewhere, Indian women have made an impact on global processes and have influenced the Un’s contributions to the status of women, particularly through informed

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participation in the Commission on the Status of Women and other Un processes. There is a creative interplay between local and global forms of women’s resistance. When I took up my work with the World Council of Churches in 1991, I went with a passion, believing that global sisterhood is possible and must be achieved. Symbolic acts of solidarity are not enough; global sisterhood is not to be taken for granted. It is something to be worked for; it requires some conscious political and theological choices.

eMBraCing diFFerenCeS deMandS the CoUrage to LooK into eaCh other’S eYeS People all over the world live with a frightening sense of insecurity. Fear due to wars and conflicts; fear due to occupation; fear because of the easy availability and abuse of guns; fear because of ruthless security forces and border controls; fear of forced displacements, indiscriminate firing, and disappearances; fear because of a crippling global economy in which millions of people live in the grip of hardship and poverty; the fears of a debt crisis in country after country; fear because of the loss of jobs, of homes, of lands; fear of not being able to live your sexual identity or sexual preference in the face of threats from the law, from society, and even from families; fear in the home, where women and children face violence (this last has been aggravated during the Covid-19 pandemic by aggressive lockdowns, literally locking women into small homes with violent spouses in India and elsewhere). This atmosphere of fear and of violence seems to strike millions of people in our world. As Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist, writes, “the established order, with its relations of domination, its rights and prerogatives, privileges and injustices, ultimately perpetuates itself so easily, apart from a few historical accidents, that the most intolerable conditions of existence can so often be perceived as acceptable and even natural.”2 While his focus here is on how masculine privilege is formed, I would say that his analysis rings true for all forms of domination and discrimination. I believe it is this psychology that undergirds the neoliberal mindset of those who have control of governments, the military, the economy, the  banks and other financial establishments (through capitalism and  the free market), education, and religion. This is at the root of what sustains caste and racial supremacy, heteronormativity and male power, ensuring that some have the licence to abuse power and destroy people and the Earth itself. This has become the normal, the natural thing to do – as the inherent right of some!

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We see emerging in our world a new political language. George Orwell once wrote: “Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”3 The manipulation of language for political advantage is not new, and its consequences are neither necessarily benign nor motivated by public interest. In recent times, “collateral damage” has been used to describe civilians killed in military attacks; “war on terror” is used to brand many as “terrorists”; and “enhanced interrogation” and “extraordinary rendition” are words for torture and custodial deaths. The consequences of the changes in discourse are significant; alterations to language and thought have the potential to change the course of history. The more one reads about the way globalization is becoming institutionalized and is widening the gap between and within nations, the more one is filled with a deep rage, and it becomes difficult to encounter each other across our nations with compassion. What is worrying is that there are attempts being made by those who benefit from globalization to claim that there is “good” in it. Those who promote such an ideology, in both the North and the South, are those who benefit from the free market and policies of liberalization and protectionism, as well as from the trade deals made with total disregard for people and the Earth. Some predict that the rich will grow richer in this period of “economic slowdown,” in the midst of devastating poverty. A small but significant percentage of people whose consumerist lifestyles are sustained by an economy that cushions them are in fact becoming richer.4 Tragically, this includes those who benefit from drugs, vaccines, and medical equipment related to Covid-19 virus care. And to add to this, if the “differences” engendered by globalization are based on the systematic and deliberate exclusion of millions of women, then how can they be ignored if our dream of building a women’s movement in the world is to materialize?

BUiLding a gLoBaL MoveMent deMandS reCognizing CoMPLexitY What most concerns many women in the South is the colonization of minds, which is even more insidious than the takeover of our economies and cultures. Today, universalism based on inherited value systems or systems imposed by colonial powers on Indigenous value systems is the norm, and, in a globalizing world, all are expected to conform to one dominant worldview. Any attempt to affirm plurality and cultural diversity is viewed with suspicion, and those who do so are accused of cultural

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relativism. Larry Rasmussen, the famed ethicist, challenges universalism and calls it an Enlightenment project that claims “the universally human as some core that can be stripped of particularity and exist independently of differences generated by race, gender, class and culture.”5 Those who claim the universality of human values impose on us a very limited understanding of human rights, which is certainly gender blind but does not respect the demand for the communal and collective rights of peoples or take into account the  wisdom of ethnic identities, race, or caste. A global women’s movement must affirm the integrity of particular experiences of women, each within her own context. This is to take seriously what women in different places are raising as important issues and to respect them for doing that, even if their concerns are different from ours. While the philosopher Michel Foucault does not usually refer to women’s experiences, he does state that the women’s liberation movement is one of the few genuinely transformative forms of political expression.6 It is this transformative power of the women’s movement that, as women, we need to address in the global movement of women. To do this requires us to be self-critical: we need to keep mutual challenge and correction front and centre. There is a danger in speaking of all women as one category, as we have done too often. Essentialism tends to make some women’s historical subordination to men, and their subordination to other women, seem like a natural fact rather than a cultural, religious, economic, and political product. Among us there are divisions based on race/ caste, ethnicity and class, sexual identity, and history. Ignoring this would not do justice to the contributions the women’s movement can make to challenging the complex power dynamics of patriarchal power as it destroys human life in general and women’s lives in particular: “overemphasis on individualistic female subjectivity may sometimes overshadow other power dynamics.”7 I add here an issue that the women’s movement has found difficult to address  – the role of religion, particularly of Islam. Women have themselves seen the veil as a symbol of oppression of women. Regarding this, Maleiha Malik, a lecturer in law at King’s College London, wrote this comment in the Guardian: “By attacking the veil – as in the colonial past – they may strengthen many Muslim women’s commitment to it and make it more difficult for Muslims to have a much needed debate on women and Islam.”8 This comment draws attention to the need to keep open the debate among women about the role religion plays in our lives and how one person’s understanding of liberation is not necessarily the same as another’s. The point the author is making

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is important: she is challenging us to define oppression and liberation in more holistic ways. External expressions of religion, such as the veil, cannot constitute a way of defining oppression. In an anonymous blog, another Muslim woman writes: Problematic is the naive assumption that Muslim women need to be and desire to be saved from Islam and Muslim men. Salvation rhetoric simplistically portrays Muslim women and Muslim men as fixed and opposite caricatures. Muslim women are voiceless, oppressed, and in need of rescue; Muslim men are oppressive, violent, and opposed to egalitarianism. The saving of Muslim women therefore is seen as releasing women from the supposed twin “prisons” of Muslim men and Islam. Muslim women continuously navigate these multiple tensions in our pursuits of equality, egalitarianism, and justice. We do this without forfeiting our diverse and deep connections with the tradition; through critical challenges to sources, interpretations and laws of the tradition; with creative and constructive visions of the tradition; and without succumbing to Islamophobic and anti-Muslim rhetoric.9 Therefore, emphasizing the intersectional nature of issues, and thus of analyses and responses, is crucial at this time, especially when so many efforts are made to devalue the struggles for justice and dignity in many parts of the world. Women of the Global South are criticized and told that we are being reductionist and elitist when we speak up for women when there are so many “bigger” issues that ought to preoccupy us. Mercy Amba Oduyoye speaks of how “African men insisted that liberation as applied to the African woman was a foreign importation. Some even called it an imperialist trap that would do Africa no good.”10 We are told that poverty, national liberation, racism, casteism, and so on must come first and that we betray our traditions and cultures when we speak of the liberation of women. It is urgent therefore for us to hold together all movements and all struggles that would challenge patriarchy and its deep links with histories of colonialism and imperialism as well as of the church. Our consciousness about “shared victimization” can nurture real solidarity among us. Then, sisterhood takes on a deeper meaning than simply supporting the “weaker” among us or a “pretend union” among us. Sisterhood is built on the bulwark of genuine dialogue and solidarity, which enables us to develop together strategies for a better world for all.

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We need an alternate vision that would stress our global interdependence. Together we can stand in solidarity with each other: solidarity is a good way to embrace our differences. Mercy Amba Oduyoye continues: In Africa, the move by women to seek more humane conditions for themselves was simply denied. When it was detected, it was assigned to the cracked pot of Western decadence, unbecoming to Young Africa. The deriding voices were mostly those of men … African men preened themselves on how well behaved and docile and content their African women were. They crowed loudly to the world: “See! We told you, our women are different. Of course, there are a few bad eggs under the influence of decadent women of the West, but these deviants we can ignore.” However, the Nairobi women’s meeting [the 1975 launch of the Un Decade for Women in Nairobi] made a difference; though its full impact is yet to be felt, it seems to me that Africa must get ready for more “deviants.”11

to WhoM doeS FeMiniSM BeLong? The word “feminism” was first used in Europe and North America in the late 1960s to describe the second stage of an earlier women’s movement for emancipation, for women workers’ rights, and for suffrage. This second phase of the women’s movement exposed the predicaments of a patriarchal world order and raised awareness of the disastrous effects of traditional dualisms, such as woman/nature and man/intellect. The impact of a male-dominated society was exposed, and women began to organize themselves separately, as women, so as to give voice and political backing to their own interests – not necessarily as movements against men but as expressions of women’s longings for a new world of justice. Sexism was recognized as a category of discrimination, as were classism and racism.12 This definition tends to speak of sexism as a system of injustice parallel with classism and racism. At this phase of global feminist discourse this definition is no longer adequate. Because of its revolutionary potential for all women in the context of the political vacuum created by globalization and the unipolar world in which we live, feminist theory has to become more inclusive. We need to keep central our focus on the viability and power of feminism as a revolutionary movement that is of critical importance to all women, to all men, and, in fact, to the future of the world. Feminism’s power (however we name

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it in our own contexts) as a politically, socially, and culturally alternative paradigm cannot be underestimated. I have often asked myself why the many forms of “feminism” that exist in the Third World are not easily recognized as “feminist.” Is it perhaps because burqa- or sari- or kanga cloth-clad feminists do not fit into the normal definitions or understandings of who a feminist is? Is it because the questions and the methodologies we employ to achieve liberation are different, thus rendering our brand of feminist consciousness unrecognizable to dominant feminist theory? Can we not simply acknowledge the existence of many “feminisms” in our world, all pioneered by women passionately committed to justice and dignity for women? Women from the Third World caution against sweeping generalizations and urge recognition of the many forms of feminism as they exist in many countries. Generalizations only aggravate tensions between women, not only along North-South lines but also along lines of class, race, and sexual orientation. The question to be addressed is simple: To whom does feminism belong? Is there one way to be a “good” feminist, a universal feminist paradigm to which all must conform? Attempts to exclude the experience of any group of women force that group to reject feminism outright. (Have we not heard women say, “I am for the liberation of women, but I am not a feminist”?) Some women feel they need to describe themselves differently (e.g., as womanist or as mujerista) in order to ensure that their own legitimate struggles are taken into account. While it is imperative and good that we define ourselves and our struggles in whatever way is most appropriate to our context, it is not helpful if this requires us to divide ourselves and to fault each other. After all, we are all in the process of developing alternative political paradigms for the transformation of our societies. This is the ultimate goal of all forms of women’s movements. bell hooks writes, “Feminist theory would have much to offer if it showed women ways in which racism and sexism are immutably connected rather than pitting one struggle against the other or blatantly dismissing racism.” Her focus is on racism as a “central feminist issue … because it is so inter-connected with sexist oppression.” To her, “the philosophical foundations of racist and sexist ideology are similar.”13 She  asks that classism be acknowledged as it, too, causes divisions among women. Speaking from her own context, she says: “Until women accept the need for redistribution of wealth and resources [in the United States] and work towards the achievement of that end, there will be no bonding between women that transcends class.”14

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Laura E. Donaldson explores similar challenges in her book Decolonizing Feminisms: Race, Gender and Empire Building. She includes the impact of colonialism in her analytical frame “and attempts to counter white feminism’s imperialist tendency to dive deep and surface with a single hermeneutic truth,” as well as “white feminism’s ‘discursive’ colonization of the ‘Third World’ woman.” She writes: “As we have seen, many feminist discussions overlook the material specificity of gender and assign women’s place within gender ideology according to the machinations of an a-historical patriarchy. If Marxism ignores the gender-saturated nature of all class-relations, then feminism ignores the racially saturated nature of all gender relations.”15 For many women the concern is that the “potential for violence within feminist criticism’s denial of the diverse experiences and genders of the global community of women threatens the continued viability of feminism as a revolutionary movement.”16

the ChaLLenge oF Moving to a neW SPaCe A holistic and inclusive image of God and of society challenges us to move to a new space that will provide a word of hope and of challenge to all women. In a world of violence and disunity, Jesus, as we understand him, offers us a word of hope. Most feminist biblical scholars now acknowledge that patriarchal oppression is a complex network comprising factors such as gender, race, class, religion, and culture. But does their analysis go far enough? According to Musa Dube: “On the issue of race, and subsequently culture, it seems there is no acknowledgement that those groups that are usually characterized as belonging to ‘privileged classes’ were not born privileged. Rather, these groups acquired their identities through constructing themselves as superior to other races in order to validate their colonial projects at some point in their histories or foundation theologies.” She further writes: “The planting and uprooting of power and powerlessness is not  at all a smooth, sequential plot. Colonizing and imperializing powers, as we know, have a chameleonlike capacity for persistence. Decolonization and liberation are, therefore, not a given, nor a finished business. Similarly, many feminist victories have been won, but patriarchy and its institutions have not fully yielded to women’s demands. To be in the struggle for justice and liberation is, therefore, to be in a luta continua, the struggle that always continues.”17 In the task of reinterpreting gender relations and of discovering the potential of a new community of women and men, it is imperative

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that people from all parts of the globe recognize that such claims have legitimized the denial of the dignity and value of diversity. Perhaps most challenging for all of us is recognizing that none of us holds the final truth – but in a common quest we can move towards it. We need to stay in dialogue with each other as Christian women and men along with people of other faiths. We should do this with the awareness that all our faith traditions have in-built patriarchal biases and have, in one way or the other, been used to legitimize violence against women. Our religious traditions have been at the heart of forms of untold discrimination and exclusion, such as the fear of women’s sexuality, the abhorrent caste system in India, racism, cultural superiority, and politically and militaristically motivated attitudes of imperialism. But, at the same time, such a critical dialogical journey will provide us the creative space to discover the liberatory potential of all religions and the potential for the ecumenical movement to free us from fatuous claims of exclusivity so that we can seek new forms of community, of shared power, and of violence-free forms of partnership among women and between women and men.

noteS 1 Thursdays in Black is a movement announced by the World Council of Churches in the early 1990s to protest the rape of women as a weapon of war, as occurred in the Yugoslav Wars. The call by Serbian and Croatian women was shared with women and men all over the world. At the same time, Thursdays in Black was chosen as a way of honouring the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, who marched every Thursday to draw attention to their disappeared husbands, children, and family members during the time of the dictatorship. The Thursdays in Black movement was recently revived by the WCC. 2 Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 1. 3 George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” in Collected Essays (London: Penguin, [1946] 2013), 359. 4 https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/coronavirus-pandemicbillionaires-wealth-unemployment-6480380. 5 Larry Rasmussen, Earth Community, Earth Ethics (New York: Orbis Books and Geneva: WCC Publications, 1996), 94. 6 Sharon D. Welch, quoting Michel Foucault, in A Feminist Ethic of Risk, rev. ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 146.

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7 Serene Jones, Feminist Theory and Christian Theology: Cartographies of Grace (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 29 8 Maleiha Malik, Guardian (London), 19 October 2006. 9 Jerusha Tanner Lamptrey, “Unbenownst to Richard Dawkins, the Feminist Revolution in Islam Has Already Begun,” https://religiondispatches.org/ unbeknownst-to-richard-dawkins-the-feminist-revolution-in-islam-hasalready-begun. 10 Mercy Amba Oduyoye, Daughters of Anowa: African Women and Patriarchy (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1995), 3. 11 Ibid., 3. 12 Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel and Melanie A. May, “Feminism,” in Dictionary of the Ecumenical Movement, ed. Nicholas Lossky, José Miguez Bonino, John Pobee, Tom F. Stranskee, Geoffrey Wainwright, and Pauline Webb (Geneva: WCC Publications, 2002), 471. 13 bell hooks, Feminist Theory from Margin to Center (Boston: Southend Press, 1984), 51–2. 14 Ibid, 58. 15 Laura E. Donaldson, Decolonizing Feminisms: Race, Gender and Empire Building (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 193, 7. 16 Ibid., 1, 2. 17 Musa Dube, Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible (St Louis: Chalice Press, 2000), 183, 197.

17 Human Rights The Fallacy of “Cancel Culture” and the Power of Solidarity Noa Mendelsohn Aviv

introdUCtion I am honoured to have written this chapter in celebration of Lois Wilson, a brilliant and fierce fighter for human rights. Lois was a longterm director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, an advocate, educator, and ally on the association’s behalf. Solidarity among human rights activists is necessary in a democratic system where there is power in numbers, in intellectual and moral cohesion, and in the ability to engage and influence society and its decision makers. The idea of solidarity is embedded philosophically in the very essence of human rights as inherent, inalienable, fundamental, and universal.1 The need for solidarity among human rights advocates is heightened at a time of increasing populism whose power comes from, not despite, explicit and thinly veiled xenophobic, racist, and misogynistic platforms. And yet, popular media are infused with fantastical tales of divisions between progressives – divisions seemingly grounded in political, moral, and philosophical reasoning. This chapter explores some of the real divisions among progressives while providing some context to show how these divisions have been grossly exaggerated and, in some cases, fabricated by the media and by anti-rights elements. A particularly popular vehicle for this exaggeration and fabrication involves the co-optation and subversion of the term “cancel culture,” a concept that originated among Black Twitter users as a way of holding powerful individuals responsible for their wrongdoings while demanding representation of marginalized groups, intersectionality, and inclusion. The term “cancel culture” has since been co-opted primarily by those who would denigrate the project of calling people out and demanding justice. While

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the detractors of cancel culture have created a media circus around it, many human rights activists have moved on to the language of “call-in culture” or “accountability culture,” which can be a more effective form of communication, aimed at restoration and reform.2 All the while, in the trenches, human rights advocates have not lost sight of the real sources of harm and oppression and, generally, work together to end them. As I show through various cases, this pragmatic solidarity has proven effective in courts and legislative bodies, and has only been enhanced by the project of accountability.

eMPoWerMent, SoLidaritY, and CanCeL CULtUre If the project of social justice and equality is best served by solidarity, mass engagement, and mobilization, there is also a critical need for marginalized individuals and groups to speak in their own voices about issues of deepest concern to each community. Movements like Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, and activism against global climate change (as well as Idle No More, Occupy, and #MeToo) have achieved significant successes both in amplifying the voices of marginalized communities and in educating and drawing in allies from the broader society to create communities of solidarity. At the heart of many of these movements is a demand not just for an end to gender discrimination, sexual abuse, white supremacy, state violence against Black, Indigenous, and other racialized people, and other forms of oppression but also for deep-seated social reform that requires inclusion, intersectional approaches, and representation of the most marginalized. One of the ways in which these movements and their members have taken action, in particular on the internet, in response to situations where there is little to no accountability is through criticizing individuals or ideas.3 This is the origin of cancel culture as first conceived. It generally involves the dismissal, rejection, withdrawal of support from, and decision not to boost or amplify a public figure or body (or an idea) who has said or done something objectionable or offensive (or that is objectionable and offensive) often because of racism, sexism, homophobia, or transphobia. As such, cancel culture has been referred to as a form of “cultural boycott” and “an expression of agency” that allows the powerless (the young, a minority, LgBtqi2S+ groups, etc.) to take back their power and hold the powerful to account.4 Given the extraordinary successes of #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and some of the other mass movements, it is no wonder that their detractors have generated a backlash. The term “cancel culture” was swiftly co-opted and subverted by anti-rights advocates and used as an accusation intended to raise the spectre of “online mobs” policing

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individuals’ tweets and old statements for conformity,5 thought police, McCarthyism, and even fascist regimes – which is ironic considering that the powerless have no police, regime, or authority – save the moral authority to boycott. This backlash also saw the term “cancel culture” harnessed in an attempt to delegitimize these movements and sow divisions, or seeming divisions, among rights advocates. Enter the Harper’s Letter.

the harper’s Letter and the “diviSion” over Free SPeeCh On 7 July 2020, a group of prominent writers, academics, and others published “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” in Harper’s Magazine,6 decrying what they saw as a new dogma that stifles expression, ideas, and debate on important issues. Many of the 153 signatories are well known not only for their art and scholarship but also for their progressive politics. The list includes J.K. Rowling, Gloria Steinem, Michael Ignatieff, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, and Noam Chomsky. The letter has the benefit of being authored by some of the world’s best English-language writers so, rather than paraphrase, I include some of its key passages here: Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity. As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second … resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion … The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty … The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power

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and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away.7 Three days after the publication of the Harper’s letter, over 150 writers and scholars produced a reply entitled “A More Specific Letter on Justice and Open Debate.” This response letter rejects the notion that the current debate is about free expression, pointing out that the first letter’s signatories are powerful and have massive platforms.8 The response letter also details how some of the Harper’s signatories have used their platforms to specifically target the free speech of those who disagreed with them and failed to support the voices of those more marginalized.9 In particular, the response letter calls out two of the Harper’s letter signatories for their anti-trans rhetoric and efforts that deny trans people the right to exist, and for platforming violent, antitrans speakers. More generally, the response letter also addresses the disproportionate power, salaries, and indeed platforms for expression of white cis authors, journalists, editors, and academics, and contrasts this to the silencing and marginalization of Black, other racialized, and trans voices. None of this is to ignore the fact that perhaps less powerful writers and thinkers (those who did not make it on the Harper’s list) may in fact feel chilled from engaging difficult issues and may worry about making mistakes. The response letter acknowledges that overblown reactions to speech have occurred; however, it does not justify them. It simply argues that this is not the trend and that, as a rule, where individuals have faced consequences, it is not (exclusively) because of differences of opinions over fundamental rights but is, rather, a function of professional competence. For example, one editor was indeed fired for approving an opinion piece that called for using the military against Black protestors  – but this was in relation to a piece that he, as the approving editor, had not read.10 For the most part, as the “More Specific” letter and later writers demonstrate, the concept of “cancelling” is a misnomer. When marginalized groups call out powerful individuals, the former are not censors, nor do they have political power. What they are doing is playing by the rules set out by the free speech advocates themselves and gathering to collectively exercise their right to counter-speech. Or, as Osita Nwanevu explains, cancel culture in its original sense is nothing more than the disempowered exercising their own freedom of expression against the powerful, who don’t like it. And the powerful (the Harper’s signatories in this case), in reaction, have “set about scolding us about

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scolds, whining about whiners, and complaining about complaints.”11 As such, it appears that the “free speech debate” in the Harper’s letter is simply a red herring, a form of “backlash clothed as free speech.”12

hoW reaL are other diviSionS? That said, there are some real, painful, difficult issues at play in the Harper’s letter and among individuals who consider themselves human rights advocates or progressives – issues that have unfortunately divided certain individuals and groups who could be allies in the pursuit of justice and equality. As real as some are, many if not most divisions are based on stereotypes, are illusory, or can in fact be reconciled. And often, it is an intersectional lens that makes this apparent. One division underlying the Harper’s letter is that between advocates for trans rights and a very small group of feminists, in particular trans-exclusionary radical feminists (terFs), who deny the very existence of trans people, or who would deny trans women their rights. terFs and other anti-trans feminist advocates, including J.K. Rowling, a signatory of the Harper’s letter, justify their anti-trans positions by focusing on the vulnerability of cis women to sexual violence, despite the fact that there is no factual connection between the two. They also raise concerns about women’s erasure. Yet they ignore the reality that, among women, it is trans women who are statistically far more vulnerable to violence, murder, and erasure,13 in particular Black, Latina, and other racialized trans women. It should also be noted, however, that there are countless feminists who in fact support and stand alongside trans activists and vice versa. A well-established intersectional analysis has no difficulty understanding issues of misogyny, patriarchy, and transphobia (among others) as deeply interrelated. As Krista Scott-Dixon explains, “Gender, then, is not just about gender … Individual gender expression is embedded in systems and structures of power that include colonialism, capitalism and intersecting oppressions.”14 These forms of oppression include patriarchy, racism, and transphobia. In other words, at a theoretical level, there is no need for division between trans advocates and feminists. And at a practical level, human rights advocacy against sexual violence can and should include the experiences of racialized trans women, while messaging around certain women’s issues, like reproductive justice, can both maintain visibility for women and girls and also include trans individuals. Another division that periodically makes for headlines – and painful rifts – involves women in the West who consider themselves feminists and who support bans on the hijab and the niqab, religious headscarves

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and face coverings worn by some Muslim women. In this case, the language of women’s equality is used by individuals who try to justify depriving other women not only of the freedom to dress and express themselves religiously as they choose but also to move about in society or work wherever the ban exists. Those who support such bans may do so based on stereotypes and ignorance as to why women choose to wear such symbols or, as above, based on a version of feminism that excludes intersectionality. Either way, individuals who support a ban on Muslim women’s religious symbols fail to acknowledge that restricting the opportunities of Muslim women is itself a form of oppression that can affect the livelihood, the freedom, and the equality rights of women from a minority religion, many of whom may be racialized and come from immigrant communities. Another source of real division among progressives has been in relation to a kind of “confusion of anti-Semitism with legitimate criticism of current Israeli politics.”15 This issue has had various iterations, including around the leadership of the Women’s March, a progressive event intended to address women’s oppression through an inclusive and intersectional lens. The first Women’s March was planned for January 2017, following Trump’s election. One of the leaders and organizers of the American march, Tamika Mallory, an African American woman, posted a picture of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan with the acronym goat (greatest of all time). She later attended a Nation of Islam rally where Farrakhan made explicitly anti-Semitic, homophobic, and transphobic statements.16 For Mallory, the issue is complex. While most people outside the Black community know of Farrakhan because of his anti-Semitic screeds, many members of the Black community know the Nation of Islam for its work in impoverished Black neighbourhoods, including patrolling rough streets, working with incarcerated men and women, and promoting a sense of self-respect with people and communities that governments have neglected and brutalized.17 Mallory herself has refused to denounce Farrakhan or the Nation of Islam, with whom she has done anti-violence work for decades, but has taken the public position that, “as historically oppressed people, Blacks, Jews, Muslims and all people must stand together to fight racism, antiSemitism and Islamophobia.”18 As for the march itself, those comprising its leadership did ultimately clarify their “values and commitment to fighting anti-Semitism,”19 and  they dissociated from Farrakhan’s “statements about Jewish, queer, and trans people” that “are not aligned with the Women’s March Unity Principles.”20 Women and men, including American Jewish women, ultimately came together in a strong showing of solidarity for the important issues at stake: reproductive justice, LgBtqi2S+ rights,

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racial justice, immigrant rights, the environment, and voting rights.21 While it is important to acknowledge the difficult rifts that exist among and within people who claim to be part of the human rights community – not infrequently among women and feminists – these divisions are limited, and there is far more solidarity among feminists and other human rights advocates, even if some limited, painful philosophical or tactical differences remain.

FaBriCationS and exaggerationS The idea that progressives are at war with each other has nonetheless dominated the airwaves. This is a sensational message for media, and a helpful message for anti-rights forces. A disproportionate emphasis on tensions between progressives can internally sow division and silence dissent.22 Externally, it implies that there is no one authority on human rights and no philosophical cohesion to this project, leaving the door open to nefarious interpretations and misuses of human rights language. Moreover, by implying that human rights proponents are in constant battle, it portrays them as a disparate bunch of self-interested players rather than as a multifaceted, intersectional array of complex individuals who share a great deal in their vision of justice and equality. As to the tensions between women and feminists, Carol Gillian observes, “Once suffrage has been won, women are a voting majority, which may be a clue to the investment of some in fomenting dissension among women.”23 Some of that fomenting is part of a carefully wrought, deliberate plan, and some terF activity is far from being an organic, grassroots enterprise. The Alliance Defending Freedom (adF), an influential Christian, right-wing, anti-LgBtqi2S+, anti-trans organization,24 is directly responsible for supporting anti-trans feminists. For example, according to researcher Heron Greenesmith, the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) openly partners with the adF and other Christian rightwing organizations. WoLF receives funding from right-wing bodies, is supported by media and political platforms from these groups, and engages with them in joint litigation endeavours to oppose laws and policies promoting justice and equality for trans people in the United States.25 And this partnership, although to date not very successful in the courts, according to Greenesmith, has been effective in justifying anti-trans advocacy by the Christian Right.26 What is confounding about this arrangement is that WoLF is a genuinely radical feminist organization that supports marriage equality, reproductive sovereignty, and gay rights.27 At the same time, it is at least in part a proxy for

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anti-rights bodies doing anti-trans work. As such, it is questionable to what extent a division represented by WoLF is really a struggle between two equally progressive elements.

red herringS The brouhaha over cancel culture is reminiscent of an older variation on this theme: the backlash against a co-opted and subverted idea of “political correctness.” When the term “political correctness” came into popular usage around 1990, racist, sexist, and other pejorative humour, language, and slurs were commonplace and were considered unremarkable. However, a new ethos was emerging on the basic premise that people should avoid using pejorative language and giving needless offence to one another,28 a concept that has since taken hold among many in the mainstream. In response to this, the accusation of “political correctness was used as a form of backlash, dredging up concerns about a non-existent thought police, fascistic coercion, and an attack on freedom of expression.”29 Then as now, rights opponents generated this red herring to distract from the real issues at play. It is reminiscent as well of a technique known as the Gish Gallop, “named after creationist Duane Gish, who would argue for creationism with a barrage of arguments, regardless of their veracity or provability, with the express intention of forcing his opponents to take time to address each of his absurd claims, diverting the focus from the real conversation.”30 And the real issues, in this case, are intersecting forms of oppression and the mass movements that are taking them on.

CaLL-in CULtUre There is yet another misleading component to the subverted concept of cancel culture. It suggests an intractable dichotomy and distracts from the fact that not only are many divisions reconcilable but also that many individuals are interested in learning, rectifying their mistakes, and coming together. Some social justice advocates bent on reform are less interested in calling people out (a public, performative act based on notions of moral superiority and an assumption of malice on the part of the speaker) and more interested in calling-in (a private, compassionate teaching moment).31 Being called in allows those who work together for social reform to be reminded of their “values as a community member.”32 While such a reminder could be disagreeable to someone who did not share these values, it is not coercive. Calling in, and even calling out, is

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an expression of disfavour that the criticized individual has the power to ignore, and it is a far cry from state coercion or censorship. In the best of worlds, calling-in is a form that may be welcomed by individuals who would like to make amends and treat their subject matter with the appropriate sensitivity. Thus, for example, author Amélie Wen Zhao responded to criticism of her book Blood Heir by apologizing, withdrawing the book, and thanking critics for speaking up about its themes. The book is still going to be published,33 presumably with some careful rewrites. Black feminist activist Loretta Ross goes still further, extolling the virtues of calling someone in as a form of calling out “with love,” with respect, and with a view to constructive healing and restoration.34 Calling in, as prescribed by Ross, is not a sign that progressives are tearing each other apart. It is, rather, a private conversation aimed at building relationships and ally-ships in a manner that enhances healing and restoration. In this way it enhances solidarity. After all, as Ross reminds us, social justice movements in a pluralistic democracy will necessarily include conflicts over coalition building, candidates, and policies – and that is a good thing.35 If done well, calling-in can foster diversity, intersectionality, and representation of the most marginalized within a mass movement.

PragMatiC SoLidaritY in aCtion Human rights activists in Canada have been working side by side for years against real human rights violations in the spirit of what I would call “pragmatic solidarity.” This process is often peaceful. But even the most fraught and painful debates can resolve in favour of inclusivity and intersectionality. In 2016, Pride Toronto named Black Lives Matter (BLM) as the Honoured Group for the annual Pride parade. Unfortunately, Pride Toronto did not adequately engage with the Black community to address anti-Black racism within Pride. BLM responded by leading a thirty-minute sit-in at the parade until Pride’s executive director signed a list of demands, including more funding for and better representation for racialized communities, and the exclusion of police officers from marching in uniform or full regalia or carrying guns at the parade.36 Later that summer, Pride’s board issued the following statement: “Pride Toronto wants to begin by apologizing emphatically and unreservedly for its role in deepening the divisions in our community, for a history of anti-blackness and repeated marginalization of the marginalized within our community that our organization has continued.”37 This

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apology marks a clear step towards intersectionality, inclusivity, and accountability. These sentiments, however, were not shared by everyone at Pride. Rinaldo Walcott described the fallout the following summer as a vicious, raging “Queer Civil War.” Pride is supposed to be for all queer people, yet for Black and Indigenous queer people, police represent a “clear and present danger” due to police discrimination and brutality. What is at issue for white queer individuals, wrote Walcott, is a symbol of progress. For Black and Indigenous queer people, it is “a repudiation of our very lives.”38 Three years later, intersectionality still prevailed. In 2019, Pride voted by a narrow margin (163 to 161) to bar uniformed police indefinitely from participating in Toronto’s Pride Parade.39 In other areas, there are many examples in Canada of organizations fighting peacefully for human rights alongside each other in the spirit of pragmatic solidarity. When the Supreme Court was asked to review potential legislation aimed at granting legal recognition to same-sex marriage, there were many groups who opposed it, but there was also a long list of groups who joined the litigation as intervenors to support same-sex marriage recognition. Their advocacy brought a variety of different professional, political, religious, and secular perspectives to the court. These groups included the Canadian and several provincial human rights commissions, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, the Canadian Bar Association, the United Church of Canada, the Canadian Unitarian Council, the Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto, egaLe Canada, the Canadian Coalition of Liberal Rabbis, and the Mouvement laïque québécois. In a recent Supreme Court of Canada appeal involving an arbitrary police entry into a private backyard to question four Black young men and one Asian young man, a long list of organizations intervened to confront this blatant act of racial profiling and to ask the court to address it from an intersectional lens. Here, too, the groups brought multiple different perspectives to this debate. They included  the Canadian Muslim Lawyers Association; Canada Without Poverty; the Canadian Mental Health Association; the Aboriginal Council of Winnipeg, Inc.; End Homelessness Winnipeg, Inc.; the Federation of  Asian Canadian Lawyers; the Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic; the Canadian Civil Liberties Association; Justice for Children and Youth; and the Urban Alliance on Race Relations. And in a case concerning a sexual assault complainant who had been required by the trial judge to remove her niqab in order to testify against two family members she said had assaulted her, a variety of organizations intervened to support her right to freedom of religion

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and her right to accuse her attackers without removing her niqab. Those supporting organizations included the Ontario Human Rights Commission; the Muslim Canadian Congress; the South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario; the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations; the Canadian Civil Liberties Association; the Barbra Schlifer Commemorative Clinic, which assists women experiencing violence; and Canada’s leading feminist legal organization, the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LeaF). Evidence of intersectional thinking and alliance building can be found among human rights groups across Canada. egaLe, Canada’s leading LgBtqi2S organization, emphasizes diversity and collaboration among its core values. And this organization recently launched a special campaign in advance of International Women’s Day aimed at “broadening the dialogue of gender equality in a way that supports cis-women, trans women (and trans men), non-binary people, Two Spirit people, as well as gender-fluid, gender non-conforming and gender-diverse folks.”40 Similarly, Canada’s leading feminist organization, LeaF, whose mandate emphasizes equality and the rights of women and girls, supported a bill (C–389) that sought to redress and eliminate discrimination against trans people. LeaF’s website explains that “sexual and transgendered persons” are “a group in Canadian society which has been subjected to hatred and discrimination for not conforming to socially constructed gendered norms.”41

ConCLUSion: PragMatiC SoLidaritY With aCCoUntaBiLitY Solidarity is alive and well among human rights organizations and advocates, in Canada and beyond. It is true that not all divisions and conflicts can be resolved, and some remain painful. But many are illusory, resolvable, or at least reconcilable through the process of accountability, as was the case with the American Women’s March and with Pride Toronto Where there are issues and differences, an intersectional analysis allows organizations to recognize commonalities and to work together for justice and equality. A unified approach among diverse groups and individuals should not come at the expense of the most marginalized. Intersectionality and an accountability culture can enhance the work of human rights in solidarity by: allowing for growth and a restorative approach, allowing for the powerless to demand representation and inclusion, allowing for greater and more diverse participation, and allowing for the amplification of marginalized voices within human rights movements.

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noteS 1 United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948, preamble. The idea of universal human rights is widely, but not universally, accepted. 2 Freya A. Woods and Janet B. Ruscher, “‘Calling-Out’ vs. ‘Calling-In’ Prejudice: Confrontation Style Affects Inferred Motive and Expected Outcomes,” British Journal of Social Psychology, July 2020, https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12405. 3 Osita Nwanevu, “The ‘Cancel Culture’ Con,” New Republic, 23 September 2019, https://newrepublic.com/article/155141. 4 Jonah Bromwich, “Everyone Is Canceled,” New York Times, 28 June 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/28/style/is-it-canceled.html. 5 Sarah Ellison and Elahe Izadi, “The Harper’s ‘Letter,’ Cancel Culture, and the Summer That Drove a Lot of Smart People Mad,” Washington Post, 23 July 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-harpersletter-cancel-culture-and-the-summer-that-drove-a-lot-of-smart-peoplemad/2020/07/23/9df5d6e4-c84c-11ea-b037-f9711f89ee46_story.html. 6 A Letter on Justice and Open Debate, 7 July 2020, Harper’s Magazine, https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate. 7 Ibid. 8 “A More Specific Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” The Objective, 10 July 2020, https://www.objectivejournalism.org/p/a-more-specific-letter-on-justice. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Nwanevu, “The ‘Cancel Culture’ Con.” Nwanevu concludes that, in any event, cancel culture does not cancel anyone since the powerful and famous continue to prosper, work, perform, be published, and heard. 12 Jill Abramson, former executive editor of the New York Times, explaining why she did not sign the Harper’s letter, in Ellison, “Harper’s Letter.” 13 The American Medical Association recognized violence against trans women as an epidemic. Melissa Gira Grant, “Fixating on ‘Cancel Culture’ in an Age of Transphobia,” New Republic, 6 November 2019, https://newrepublic.com/ article/155606. 14 Krista Scott-Dixon, “Introduction,” in Krista Scott-Dixon, ed., Trans/Forming Feminisms: Trans-Feminist Voices Speak Out (Toronto: Sumach Press, 2006), 19. 15 Carol Gilligan, “Discord in the Ranks: The Women’s March and the Jewish Question” (New York: Bronfman Center), 5. 16 Ibid. 17 Adam Serwer, “Why Tamika Mallory Won’t Condemn Farrakhan,” Atlantic, 11 March 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/nationof-islam/555332. 18 Ibid. 19 Allison Kaplan Sommer, “As Women’s March Kicks Off, a Look at How It Lost so Much Jewish Support,” Haaretz, 19 January 2019, https://www.

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haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-as-women-s-march-kicks-off-a-look-at-how-itlost-so-much-jewish-support-1.6851349. Serwer, “Why Tamika Mallory Won’t Condemn Farrakhan.” Sommer, “As Women’s March Kicks Off.” Gilligan, “Discord in the Ranks,” 6. Ibid., 19. “Alliance Defending Freedom,” Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/alliancedefending-freedom. Heron Greenesmith, “A Room of Their Own: How Anti-Trans Feminists Are Complicit in Christian Right Anti-Trans Advocacy,” Political Research Associates, 14 July 2020, http://www.politicalresearch.org/2020/07/14/roomtheir-own. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 8. Moira Weigel, “Political Correctness: How the Right Invented a Phantom Enemy,” Guardian, 30 November 2016. Ibid. Greenesmith, “Room of Their Own,” 18. Woods and Ruscher, “‘Calling-Out’ vs. ‘Calling-In,’ ” 1–2. Waldman, cited in Nwanevu, “‘Cancel Culture’ Con.” Ibid. Loretta Ross, “I’m a Black Feminist: I Think Call-Out Culture Is Toxic,” New York Times, 17 August 2019. Ibid. Rinaldo Walcott, “Black Lives Matter, Police and Pride: Toronto Activists Spark a Movement,” 2017, https://theconversation.com/black-lives-matterpolice-and-pride-toronto-activists-spark-a-movement-79089. David Shum, “Pride Toronto ‘Regrets’ Black Lives Matter Toronto Parade Protest Flip-Flop,” 2016, https://globalnews.ca/news/2951045/pride-torontoregrets-black-lives-matter-toronto-parade-protest-flip-flop. Walcott, “Black Lives Matter, Police and Pride.” Liam Casey, “Pride Toronto Members Won’t Allow Uniformed Police to March in the Parade,” 2019, https://globalnews.ca/news/4877398/pridetoronto-police-uniformed. egaLe, #eachforInclusion, https://egale.ca/egale-in-action/iwd2020eachforinclusion. LeaF, “LeaF Supports Bill C–389 and Calls on Government to also Protect Women from Hate Speech,” https://www.leaf.ca/news/leaf-supports-bill-c-389.

18 Resurgent Global Authoritarianism, Democratic Backsliding, and the Assault on Media Freedom Through the Looking Glass of Political Prisoners Irwin Cotler

I write at an important historical inflection moment, when we are witnessing a resurgent global authoritarianism  – the backsliding of democracies and global assault on media freedom – the whole as seen through the pain and plight of political prisoners. Accordingly, I examine five major case studies, with the cases and causes of political prisoners as the looking glass through which we can appreciate not only the pain and plight of the political prisoners themselves but also the global political pandemic, the impunity that underpins it, and its impact on democracy and human rights. The five case studies are Mohammed bin Salman’s Saudi Arabia as seen through the looking glass of political prisoner Raif Badawi; Khamenei’s Iran as seen through the looking glass of political prisoners (such as environmentalists) and Nasrin Sotoudeh; Maduro’s Venezuela as seen through the looking glass of the leader of the democratic opposition, Leopoldo López, and the imprisonment of Judge Maria Lourdes Afiuni; Putin’s Russia as seen through the looking glass of Anastasia Shevchenko; and finally, Xi Jinping’s China as seen through the looking glass of imprisoned Dr Wang Bingzhang.

SaUdi araBia: the CaSe and CaUSe oF raiF BadaWi In 2018, then Canadian foreign minister Chrystia Freeland called for the release of imprisoned Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, who has been in prison for over eight years for saying what Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman himself says today – namely, that a more open Saudi Arabia and a more moderate Islam is called for. Freeland also called for the

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release of Raif’s sister, Samar Badawi, who had been imprisoned for calling for the right of women to drive – a reform that Mohammed bin Salman, to his credit, instituted. But then he imprisoned the very woman who called for that reform. After Chrystia Freeland tweeted her call for the release of the Badawis, the authorities in Saudi Arabia erupted with fury. They recalled their own ambassador from Canada, ejected the Canadian ambassador from Saudi Arabia, suspended all trade and investment with Canada,  and recalled some fifteen thousand Saudi students studying in Canada, along with senior medical fellows. In effect, this was an initiative as selfdefeating as it was rights-violating. What happened after that, however, and what relates to our theme, was most disturbing. Not one democracy came to Canada’s defence. Indeed, the silence of the democracies may be said to have led us down the road to the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi some two months later. In other words, the silence of the democracies only served to embolden the Saudi leadership to believe that it could continue to behave with impunity. The brutal murder of Khashoggi on 2 October 2018 finally served, however belatedly, as a wake-up call for the international community. Following visits from the Raoul Wallenberg Foundation’s legal team with Raif Badawi’s wife, Ensaf Haidar (who, along with their three children, are citizens of Canada), to engage in advocacy in Washington, dC, and Brussels, condemnatory resolutions were passed in the US House and Senate and the European Parliament. In some respect, however, international admonition began to abate. Although the United Nations special rapporteur for extrajudicial execution, Agnès Callamard, found that there was credible evidence that the senior leadership in Saudi Arabia was responsible for the brutal murder of Khashoggi, Saudi Arabia was elected to chair the Group of 20. Canada continued with its sale of light-armoured vehicles to the Saudi government, even after the Saudi response to Foreign Minister Freeland’s appeals on behalf of Mr Badawi. Saudi Arabia’s military engagement against Houthi forces in Yemen, as well as its continual aerial and naval blockade of that country, have led to numerous violations of international law, as well as thousands of deaths, not only due to deadly attacks on population centres but also due to restrictions in the flow of lifesaving materials.1 So rather than being held accountable, Saudi Arabia was effectively rewarded for the imprisonment of the Badawis and women human rights defenders. Despite its desire to project an image of reform, Saudi Arabia’s human rights record under Prince Mohammed bin Salman remains repressive. Saudi Arabia is today the fourth leading jailer of journalists globally,

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and leading women human rights defenders continue to languish in prison. In 2019, Saudi Arabia set a record for executions, carrying out thirty-seven on 23 April alone, most of whom were convicted after being tortured and some of whom had been imprisoned for over a year. The lives of human rights activists are continually at risk, as evidenced by the death of Abdullah al-Hamid, architect of a decades-long movement for freedom and democracy, who was repeatedly arrested and tortured before being imprisoned in 2013. According to the World Organization Against Torture, he died after slipping into a coma after having been denied a life-saving heart operation for months. Even former members of the Saudi government’s inner circle are no longer safe, even internationally, as evidenced by a 2020 plot to assassinate Saad Alijabri, a former top intelligence chief, while he was in Canada – a plan that sources have said emanated from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.2 All this underscores the threat to journalists, human rights activists, dissenters, and others who are targeted by the Saudi government. One cannot ignore Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s culture of criminality under the pretense of reform; rather, we need to combat the culture of impunity that surrounds the Saudi government and hold its leadership to account.

KhaMenei’S iran: the CaSe and CaUSe oF naSrin SotoUdeh This brings me now to Khamenei’s Iran. And I here use the term “Khamenei’s Iran” to distinguish it from the people and publics in Iran who are the targets of mass domestic repression. In December 2018, our Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights released a report called Realizing Rights over Repression in Iran, which sought to detail and document the assault on human rights in that nation in 2018, which Amnesty International and others referred to as a “year of shame.” It was a year of almost unprecedented assault on women’s rights, environmentalists’ rights, journalists, trade union leaders, and peaceful protesters – all those engaged in the larger struggle for human rights in Iran. The result was the arrests, imprisonment, torture, detention, and sometimes execution of a broad spectrum of human rights defenders. As I write, this relentless assault on human rights has not only continued but intensified. For example, in August of 2019 alone nine women were sentenced to 109 years in prison for doing nothing more than seeking to remove their hijab. This was a fundamental assault on women’s rights and women’s choice, and it is underpinned by Iran’s

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continuing legalized gender apartheid. The women’s rights movement in Iran has emerged as a leader in the heroic struggle for human rights, and it is the target of increased state-orchestrated repression. As well, eight leading members of the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation, an environmental protection group in Iran, continue to languish in prison. Some of them have been tortured in detention for doing nothing more than seeking to protect ancient species and the environment. This has resulted in their conviction on false and absurd charges, and some now even risk execution. Nasrin Sotoudeh is the embodiment of the struggle for human rights in Iran, and her persecution and prosecution are emblematic of the criminalization of human rights in this nation. This iconic human rights lawyer – known as the Mandela of Iran – did everything she could for women’s rights, for juveniles destined for execution, for journalists exercising free speech, for religious minorities such as the Bahai, for other lawyers who have been imprisoned, and for other political prisoners, and then she herself became a political prisoner. After a nearly fifty-day hunger strike on behalf of other political prisoners whose lives are at risk, she herself faced a life-threatening situation. Only after being hospitalized with heart complications and difficulty breathing did Ms Sotoudeh end her hunger strike. At the hospital, her family had to witness the twenty-four-hour security team manhandle Ms Sotoudeh in a wheelchair and intimidate medical personnel. A number of these guards later tested positive for Covid-19. Ms Sotoudeh was returned to an isolated cell, in a prison suffering a coronavirus outbreak, without receiving the urgent heart-related medical procedure she required. Iranian doctors considered her transfer back to prison “a deliberate attempt to put her life in danger.”3 Moreover, in yet another cruel and mocking assault on her rights, Ms Sotoudeh was falsely advised that she was being sent to the hospital for urgent medical care, only to discover that she was being transferred to Qarchak prison, known in Iran as “the end of the world.” Un experts called Ms  Sotoudeh’s return to prison “unfathomable,” adding that the “evidence suggests Ms Sotoudeh’s imprisonment, both now and in the past, is state retaliation for her tireless work defending human rights.” In a prison notorious for its overcrowding and highly unsanitary conditions, Ms Sotoudeh contracted Covid-19 while unjustly detained. Ms Sotoudeh, now 57, is serving a virtual death sentence of 38 years in prison and 148 lashes for this work, most recently for representing activists who participated in the movement against the compulsory hijab. The authorities have even gone after her family, arresting her twenty-year-old daughter Mehraveh in August and her husband, Reza

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Khandan, in 2018; freezing her bank accounts earlier this year; and subjecting the family to continuing harassment. Her only crime is courageously advocating for the rights of others. Canada should build on the recent supportive statements from the European Union, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, President Emmanuel Macron of France, and US president Joe Biden calling for Ms Sotoudeh’s release and it should join its allies in confronting Iranian diplomats in a coordinated protest against the crackdown on Iranian human-rights defenders. Moreover, it is past time that Canada imposed Magnitsky sanctions on the Iranian architects of repression, including Chief Justice Ebrahim Raisi and the head of Evin Prison. Raisi is the new judiciary chief and was a member of the 1988 death squads that executed thousands of Iranian dissidents and later presided over Ms Sotoudeh’s case. Rather than being held to account for his crimes, Mr Raisi was rewarded by being appointed attorney-general and now chief justice. Violators in the international arena must be named and shamed. Nasrin Sotoudeh’s freedom must be demanded at every bilateral and multilateral opportunity. Otherwise, our silence will endorse the impunity of Khameini’s Iran – something that she is risking her life to challenge.

MadUro’S venezUeLa: the CaSe and CaUSe oF LeoPoLdo LóPez and jUdge aFiUni In 2018, I was one of three jurists appointed to an international panel of independent legal experts to look into whether there are reasonable grounds to believe that crimes against humanity are being committed in Venezuela. After a sustained inquiry on our part, investigating the documentary evidence and witness testimony, we came to the determination that seven major crimes against humanity were being committed – multiple murders, thousands of cases of arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, torture, disappearances, persecution on political grounds, and, perhaps worst of all, state-orchestrated humanitarian suffering  – the weaponization of food and medicine. There was a dramatic increase of 60 per cent in maternal mortality and 30 per cent in infant mortality, and the reappearance of diseases long ago eradicated, such as diphtheria, tuberculosis, and the like. And here, too, all this happened amidst a culture of impunity. The tragic erosion of the rule of law in Venezuela is illustrated through the looking glass of the case of Judge Maria Lourdes Afiuni, who, on 21 March 2019, was sentenced to five years imprisonment on the ludicrous charge of “spiritual corruption.” She is the first person

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in Venezuelan history to be convicted of this offence, which had only recently been invented. Judge Afiuni was first arrested in 2009, moments after issuing the release of then political prisoner Eligio Cedeño, which resulted in her being sent to prison, where she was subjected to brutal torture and sexual violence that resulted in a miscarriage and emergency surgery. This harassment, targeting Judge Afiuni and her family and involving almost one hundred trial delays, has continued for eleven years now. As Latin America is wracked by the global pandemic and Venezuela’s courts are closed, Judge Afiuni continues to languish in prison. Judge Afiuni’s case is a particularly ominous illustration of the corruption and malevolence of the Maduro regime. While Nicholas Maduro’s assaults on democratic institutions and the rule of law within Venezuela continue, Judge Afiuni’s case has been used to further erode the independence of Venezuela’s courts as it is used to coerce other judges into issuing warrants against prominent opposition leaders, such as Leopoldo López. During our hearings, we bore witness to this state-sanctioned assault on human rights, the rule of law, and the independence of the courts, among many other abuses. Ralenis Tovar, who escaped from Venezuela to Canada to seek refugee status, testified how she had been ordered by the Maduro regime to issue a false arrest warrant against the then democratic leader of the opposition of Venezuela, Leopoldo López. The prosecutor in López’s case, Franklin Nieves, himself an escapee from Maduro’s Venezuela, appeared before our commission of inquiry, testifying that he had been ordered to levy trumped-up criminal charges against Leopoldo López. We heard from witnesses who further testified that they were tortured for the purposes of issuing false confessions against López. Mr López spent years in and out of jail on fabricated charges and was then placed under house arrest before he took refuge inside the Spanish Embassy in Caracas in the wake of the 2019 Venezuelan Uprising. Leopoldo López escaped to Spain in October 2020, where he remains an indefatigable champion for the restoration of democracy and the rule of law in Venezuela. The testimonials of these witnesses are emblematic of the pain and plight of political prisoners in Venezuela, reflecting and representing the wholesale assault on human rights, the rule of law, and crimes against humanity that continue as of this writing. In late 2020, the General Secretariat of the Organization of American States confirmed the report of the International Fact-Finding Mission on the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela conducted by the Un Human Rights Council, and it reaffirmed that its findings were consistent with our report: the

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Maduro regime has knowingly and systemically committed crimes against humanity. Canada has been a leader in holding the Maduro regime accountable, convening a group of nations in establishing the first-ever collective referral of a charge of crimes against humanity to the International Criminal Court (iCC). Yet, two years later, an investigation by the iCC has yet to begin, and the state-orchestrated crimes against humanity are tragically continuing, with the people of Venezuela being the victims. We are now witnessing the largest exodus of refugees in the history of Latin American, as over four million have left Venezuela. This, too, has contributed to destabilizing fallout in such neighbouring countries as Colombia.

rUSSia: the CaSe and CaUSe oF anaStaSia ShevChenKo I now turn to Putin’s Russia. While the assaults of President Vladimir Putin on democracies abroad are infamous, less known outside Russia are his repeated violations of the liberty and human rights of ordinary Russians. Since 2014 there has been a sixfold increase in political prisoners in Russia, coupled with the systemic criminalization of fundamental freedoms in Russia – freedom of speech, of assembly, and of association. Dissenters have frequently been targeted for assassination, sometimes successfully. Perhaps one of the best-known cases was that of the assassination of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov in 2015 not far from the Kremlin. Nemtsov had been considered by many a potential challenger to Vladimir Putin, and he had played a critical role in the passage of the Magnitsky Act in the US Congress.4 Democracy itself is criminalized in Putin’s Russia, as exemplified by Russia’s foreign registration law, which criminalizes participation in pro-democracy movements like Open Russia, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the European Platform for Elections. The law’s first political prisoner, Anastasia Shevchenko, was an active member of Open Russia and was arrested for “participating in the activities of a foreign undesirable organization,”5 despite the fact that Open Russia was founded by Russians and is operated by pro-democracy activists in Russia. As of early 2019, fifty-three activists have been charged with violation of the law. Ms Shevchenko was sentenced to house arrest pending trial and was unable to visit her daughter, a special needs child living in a care facility. She has since repeatedly had her house arrest extended and is routinely monitored, forbidden to use the phone or internet, and forced to wear an electronic tag. Russia’s Parliament also

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passed a bill in 2019 that criminalizes “administrative disrespect” for the government, the first such bill prosecuting anti-government speech since the Soviet era.6 According to Memorial, a leading Russian human rights group, as of 2019 there are 267 political prisoners in Russia, though this list may be incomplete. Among them are filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, a Crimean who protested Russia’s annexation; Alexei Pichugin, Russia’s longest-serving political prisoner; Memorial members Oyub Titiev and Yuri Dmitriev; pro-democracy activist Anastasia Shevchenko; and a myriad of journalists, human rights activists, and religious leaders.7 Accusations of treason are a typical practice in Russia today, as the Russian government frequently characterizes opposition parties as agents of foreign powers. In 2019, Russia’s chief of armed forces, General Valery Gerasimov, stated that the US Department of Defense was using “the potential protest of the ‘fifth column’ to ‘destabilize’ Russia,” and Putin claimed that the government had located hundreds of foreign spies domestically, urging security services into “increasing the security of national information services.” That same year, the Russian legislature approved a bill that would isolate Russia’s internet services from the rest of the world, similar to what is being done in China (the legislation was proposed by Andrei Lugovi, who is wanted by British police for the 2006 death of Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko by radioactive poisoning).8 Putin continued his assault on democratic institutions within Russia when, in 2020, the government prevented several opposition candidates from running in Moscow’s municipal elections, sparking mass protests inside the nation’s capital. That same year, President Putin proposed twenty-two amendments to the Russian Constitution (which passed the Duma 432 votes to 0, with no abstentions) that would place restrictions on eligibility for elected office and drastically expand the powers of the previously irrelevant State Council, which critics have said would allow for President Putin to run the country after his current term expires.9 In the summer of 2020 a national plebiscite was held (the integrity of which is highly dubious – tallies were published even before the vote had ended) that abolished Putin’s presidential term limits, allowing the sixty-eight-yearold Putin to remain president of Russia until 2036.10 Prominent journalists, human rights activists, and dissenters are the frequent targets of poisoning, among them Vladimir Kara-Murza, prominent journalist, politician, and senior fellow at the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights. He was twice poisoned (in 2015 and 2017, respectively) and both times was told by doctors that he had a 5 per cent chance of surviving. Thankfully, he remains alive today and is as engaged as ever in the fight to end impunity inside Putin’s Russia.

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Others who have been targets of suspected poisoning are journalist Anna Politkovskaya, performance artist Pyotr Verzilov – and myself.11 In the summer of 2020, opposition politician and anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny was poisoned while canvassing in local elections in Siberia. He has since recovered, and his party later had a good showing in local elections. It is critical that the impunity that the Russian government has enjoyed in its prosecution of pro-democracy activists, journalists, religious leaders, and other human rights defenders end. We have at our disposal the Magnitsky Act, which was passed by the US Congress and was named in honour of Sergei Magnitsky, who died in prison following his exposure of massive corruption within the Russian state. The Magnitsky Act has since been applied to the perpetrators of Magnitsky’s death as well as, in 2019, to five individuals for the murder of Boris Nemtsov and its subsequent cover up. Among those involved in this crime was Major Ruslan Geremeyev, an officer in Russia’s Interior Ministry.12 Oleg Stensov, who conducted a 145-day hunger strike on behalf of Ukrainian hostages, was freed in September 2019 following an international campaign.13 These cases illustrate how sustained international action can bring about some progress in combating the culture of impunity in Putin’s Russia. Yet, as the cases of Anastasia Shevchenko, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Alexei Navalny, and countless others demonstrate, the causes of freedom of expression, assembly, and association call for maintaining the conscientious outrage of the world and sustained global action.

China: the CaSe and CaUSe oF dr Wang Bingzhang Dr Wang Bingzhang was a Chinese doctor who came to Canada in 1979 and received his degree in 1982. His parents, siblings, and daughter Ti-Anna – born in 1989 and named after the Tiananmen uprisings – are all Canadian citizens. Dr Bingzhang decided to forego a medical career in order, as he put it, to “advance democracy in China,” and he founded the US-based Chinese democracy movement. In 2002, while on a visit to Vietnam, he was abducted and taken back to China, where, in a sham and secret trial, he was convicted on charges of treason and terrorism and sentenced to life imprisonment in solitary confinement. He remains one of the longest-serving political prisoners in China today. I became counsel to Dr Bingzhang in 2003 and petitioned the Un Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which ruled that his detention

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was “illegal,” and called for his release. While Wang Bingzhang has had all-party parliamentary support, including all-party press conferences with his family members, ongoing calls for his release, and representations that I made to the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa, the Canadian government’s action has been rather muted in his case, contrasting sharply with its involvement on behalf of Soviet political prisoners. There have been no public government calls for his release, no public representations of his case and cause, no public demarche to Chinese authorities. During his imprisonment, he suffered a series of debilitating strokes, while his daughter Ti-Anna was repeatedly denied visas to visit him. Finally, when, after a decade of requests, she was given a visa, she was detained with her infant daughter upon arrival in China and deported back to Canada – a continuation of cruel and inhumane treatment on the part of Chinese authorities. Recently, the student Wallenberg Advocacy group at McGill University has taken up his case and has produced a white paper documenting Chinese violations under international and domestic law. It has also arranged for the signing of a public letter by six former Canadian ministers calling for his release. This would be the first concerted and public governmental action.

ConCLUSion: ConStitUtionaL deMoCraCY Under StreSS Systemic problems have a way of discouraging people from addressing them, particularly if they are on the other side of the world. It is for us who are fortunate enough to live in parts of the world where the rule of law, independence of the courts, and human rights are upheld to remember that the repressiveness of authoritarian-minded regimes is meant to evoke the pretense that action in the face of evil is impossible, or at least too difficult to be realistically achieved. And so, we are confronted with the question: What can democracies under stress do? Our first responsibility is to oppose resurgent authoritarianism through combatting the cultures of criminality and corruption, and the impunity that underpins them, holding human rights violators to account. The most effective means of doing this is through the imposition of Magnitsky sanctions on human rights violators, which includes the banning of visas and the freezing of assets. This would protect Canada from complicity and hold violators accountable for the criminality committed in their respective countries. Our second responsibility is to promote and protect the values and institutions of our own democratic systems. As the Prague Declaration

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on Democratic Renewal puts it: “Democracies everywhere are under threat and all of us who care about democracy must come to its defense.” The declaration further describes how democracies are threatened from without and from within, and indicates that we need to stand up for the values and the institutions of democracy, both in its promotion and protection. Our third responsibility is to stand up on behalf of political prisoners whose pain and plight I’ve sought to briefly summarize here, to stand in solidarity with those who have been putting their lives on the line for the sake of the values that we seek to universally embrace. It is they who are the vanguard for democratic values, who endure imprisonment, torture, and executions because their fundamental freedoms have been criminalized by their own governments. Our fourth responsibility is to ensure the promotion and protection of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Our former chief justice of the Supreme Court, Antonio Lamer, said on the tenth anniversary of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was a revolutionary act. No less revolutionary, as he put it, than the discoveries of Pasteur. If it is a revolutionary act on behalf of our rights and freedoms, then we have to be engaged in our democracy when it is under stress – threatened from without and from within – to promote and protect these fundamental freedoms. Among these is the fundamental freedom of expression, which is a pillar of our constitutional democracy. Ultimately, as part of our promotion and protection of fundamental rights, we must stand with those who are seeking to support freedom of expression – a pillar of our democracy. And it is the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that underpins our democracy and that must anchor our actions. It thus behooves us all to be the promoters and protectors of democracies under stress, both from within and from without, to hold the resurgent global authoritarians to account. Accordingly, we should stand together with the Badawis in Saudi Arabia, the Nasrin Sotoudehs in Iran, the Leopoldo Lópezes and Maria Lourdes Afiunis of Venezuela, the Anastasia Shevchenkos of Russia, and the Wang Bingzhangs of China. We must let them know that they are not alone and that we will be relentless in our advocacy for their release, as they have been relentless in their advocacy for the promotion and protection of democratic freedoms.

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noteS 1 “World Report 2020: Rights Trends in Saudi Arabia,” Human Rights Watch, 14 January 2020, https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2020/country-chapters/ saudi-arabia. 2 Robert Fife and Steven Chase, “Former Saudi Intelligence Chief Faces New Death Threat,” Globe and Mail, 7 August 2020, https://www.theglobeandmail. com/politics/article-former-saudi-intelligence-chief-faces-new-death-threat. 3 “Nasrin Sotoudeh Transferred to Notorious Qarchak Prison,” Center for Human Rights in Iran, 20 October 2020, https://iranhumanrights. org/2020/10/nasrin-sotoudeh-transferred-to-notorious-gharchak-prison. 4 Vladimir Kara-Murza, “It’s Been Four Years since the Murder of Boris Nemtsov: Russians Haven’t Forgotten,” Washington Post, 6 March 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/03/06/its-been-four-yearssince-murder-boris-nemtsov-russians-havent-forgotten. 5 Amnesty International, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2021/02/ russia-prisoner-of-conscience-anastasia-shevchenko-convicted-givensuspended-prison-sentence. 6 Vladimir Kara-Murza, “The Kremlin Deploys Its New Law against ‘Undesirables,’” Washington Post, 25 January 2019, https://www. washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/25/kremlin-deploys-its-new-lawagainst-undesirables. 7 Vladimir Kara-Murza, “Where’s the Accountability for a Regime That Imprisons People for Their Thoughts?,” Washington Post, 9 May 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/05/09/wheresaccountability-regime-that-imprisons-people-their-thoughts. 8 Vladimir Kara-Murza, “Putin’s Russia Feels Increasingly like a Fortress under Siege,” Washington Post, 9 April 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ opinions/2019/04/08/putins-russia-feels-increasingly-like-fortress-under-siege. 9 Vladimir Kara-Murza, “Vladimir Putin’s Latest Trick for Making Russia Look Like a Democracy,” Washington Post, 11 June 2020, https://www. washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/11/vladimir-putins-latest-trickmaking-russia-look-like-democracy. 10 Vladimir Kara-Murza, “Putin Finally Sheds All Democratic Appearances,” Washington Post, 6 June 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ opinions/2020/07/06/putin-finally-sheds-all-democratic-appearances. 11 Vladimir Kara-Murza, “The World Must Pay Attention to the Suspected Poisoning of Alexei Navalny. My Own Case Shows Why,” Washington Post, 21 August 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/08/21/ world-must-pay-attention-suspected-poisoning-alexei-navalny-my-own-caseshows-why.

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12 Vladimir Kara-Murza, “The US Sanctions a Key Organizer of the Murder of Boris Nemtsov,” Washington Post, 17 May 2019, https://www.washingtonpost. com/opinions/2019/05/17/us-sanctions-key-organizer-murder-boris-nemtsov. 13 Vladimir Kara-Murza, “A Political Prisoner in Russia Gains His Freedom. Too Many Others Are Still Waiting,” Washington Post, 10 October 2019, https:// www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/10/political-prisoner-russiagains-his-freedom-too-many-others-are-still-waiting.

Afterword Michael Blair

Each generation must translate faith and action for its own particular context. The earlier chapters of this book illustrate how Lois Wilson engaged her context from the perspective of her faith. Her ministry exemplifies the ethos of the 1997 statement of the United Church on whole world ecumenism (Mending the World), which urges us “to work with people of good will for the sake of mending the world.” The legacy of Lois Wilson’s fierce engagement with her time, culture, and place continues in the hands of a new generation of ecumenists, activists, and human rights defenders. I had the privilege of meeting Lois in 2004 while I was serving as the executive director of the Toronto Christian Resource Centre (now CrC/Fred Victor). Three things stand out for me from our ministry together. First is Lois’s understanding that our social ministry is a critical expression of church, and that partnering with people in the struggle for fullness of life is what it means to live the gospel. Second is the importance of naming and attending to the structural barriers that prevent people from experiencing their full dignity and humanity. And third is the importance of building ecumenical and interfaith partnerships and alliances to work for justice. Since then, Lois has become a significant friend, mentor, and elder who has accompanied me in my leadership journey within the national church and in my involvement in global ecumenical institutions such as the World Council of Churches and the World Communion of Reformed Churches. The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted some major fissures in the structures of societies around the globe and in Canada, reminding us that we live in the intersection of various forms of injustice. Apart from the challenges of the significant global inequities, the economic

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vulnerability of a large part of Canadian society became evident. In addition, the realities of systemic racism were unmasked. These two themes – a guaranteed basic income and Black Lives Matter – provide an opportunity to see what we can learn from Lois. While she is actively engaged with the former, we are invited to draw on her example as we confront the latter.

gUaranteed BaSiC inCoMe The response of the government of Canada to the economic challenges faced by Canadians due to the measures taken to manage the Covid-19 pandemic has provided an opportunity to reintroduce the conversation on guaranteed basic (livable) income/universal basic income. Since the early 1960s the United Church of Canada has been calling for this to be implemented in Canada. Over the years, there have been numerous proponents of such a policy, including the Honourable David McDonald, a United Church minister and member of parliament, and Hugh Segal, retired senator and former principal of Massy College. In 2016–17, Senator Art Eggleton and Senator Kim Pate began advocating for the government to introduce a national basic income program. In the 1970s there was an experiment in Dauphin, Manitoba. There have been other pilot projects in Ontario. In 2020, the conversation was raised in the House of Commons in a debate on supporting Canadians through the pandemic. The Anglican Church of Canada, the Lutheran Church, and the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops began a conversation to support the increasing demands for a universal basic income. The United Church of Canada accepted the invitation to join this ecumenical conversation. A group of advocates, including Lois, was invited to give leadership to this effort. Lois took up the call with her usual energy and enthusiasm. She immediately pointed to resources; initiated contact with Hugh Segal and Senator Pate, two of the champions of a national guaranteed income initiative; and encouraged a plan that would see members of congregations, their families and friends, begin a campaign of writing letters to their members of parliament. She read and researched, made calls to generate interest and to network with others who supported the initiative, nudged religious and political leaders, strategized approaches to encourage a groundswell of action, and dreamed of a just world in which a form of a guaranteed livable income would be a concrete reality. We are reminded that when faced with the call to respond to a pressing social issue, it is important to have adequate knowledge of the breadth, complexity, and challenges of the issue, to build strategic

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alliances, and to act. Yes, there continues to be disagreement on what such a program would be called  – universal basic income, universal livable income, guaranteed livable income, or national basic income. There is much debate on how it would be administered. There is the reality of the political risk. There is no absolute common agreement, yet the principle of providing a system that allows people to thrive, and at the same time reduces stigmatization, marginalization, and victimization, is critical. And that is what motivates and colours Lois’s dream, a dream shaped by the regular affirmation found in the United Church of Canada’s New Creed (1968): “we are called to be the church, to love and serve others … to seek justice and resist evil.”

BLaCK LiveS Matter In May 2020, George Floyd, a forty-five-year-old Black man, was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer who held his knee on Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds. The act was captured on video and went viral. It unleashed a global movement highlighting the realities of anti-Black racism. In many cities across the world, people took to the streets demanding an end to the forces of marginalization and violence that affect Black people and calling especially for a change in policing. The United Nations Human Rights Council was asked by a number of African states to investigate the policing practices relating to the Black population in the United States of America. In Canada, the  significant call is for the defunding of the police and a change to the policing practices related to persons with mental health issues. Ironically, George Floyd’s death and the outcry it sparked took place in the context of the United Nations Decade for People of African Descent (2015–24). The decade provides an opportunity to address the ongoing impact of the transatlantic slave trade on people of African descent. The decade has a threefold focus: recognition, justice, and development. It provides a global, national, and local framework to address the challenges faced by people of African descent, and a context for addressing anti-Black racism. In 2018, the Canadian government officially recognized the International Decade. The government budgeted $9 million over three years to address issues related to Black youth and $10 million over three years to address mental health services for the Black community. An additional $25 million over five years was also budgeted in 2019 to help build the resilience of Black communities. The World Council of Churches, through its Commission on International Affairs, has been working with member churches to

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engage the International Decade. The United Church of Canada has partnered with the United Church of Christ (USa) to work jointly on ways to seek justice and reparation, with the possibility of both denominations offering an apology for historical benefits from the transatlantic slave trade. In addition, the Anglican Church of Canada, the Lutheran Church in Canada, and the United Church of Canada are working together and have invited the Canadian Council of Churches to participate in the initiatives of the International Decade in the hope of addressing anti-Black racism and the exclusion of Blacks from the full life of the Canadian ecumenical family. In partnership with the World Council of Churches, the United Church has made interventions to the United Nations. This includes engaging with the United Nations Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent and the special rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance. Black Lives Matter is a political and social movement, a platform, a space, and a network. It was originally formed in the United States in 2013 in response to the violence experienced by Black bodies at the hands of police forces and it is now a global movement. As a movement, it is committed to liberation and justice for Blacks, the eradication of white supremacy, valuing and affirming the dignity of Black bodies, and “creating space for Black imagination” (https://blacklivesmatter. com/about). The movement draws on Martin Luther King Jr’s notion of the “Beloved Community” and seeks to address the systemic barriers to the fulfillment of his “I Have a Dream” speech. In almost every sector of society, conversations are ongoing around racism in general, anti-Black racism in particular, and white privilege. Governments, businesses, and religious and educational institutions have been committing themselves to addressing the issues of systemic anti-Black racism. Commitments include examining employment practices, working towards becoming anti-racist institutions and organizations, and removing barriers. There have been numerous book clubs and book studies on the themes of “whiteness” and white privilege. The United Church, in response, has committed itself to be an anti-racist institution and is working to live into that reality. As I am writing this, I realize that Lois and I have not had a conversation specifically about race, racism, or the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement. I am not quite sure why we have not had such a conversation. I do know that, through her leadership roles in both the United Church and the World Council of Churches, she has been directly involved with the historic challenges of the apartheid system in South Africa and the civil society coalitions and religious communities’

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advocacy for the dismantling of that oppressive system. As well, she has championed the civil rights struggle, particularly in the United States, under the leadership of the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Since the murder of George Floyd, many provincial and municipal governments have also made commitments and developed action plans to address anti-Black racism. Those plans involve removing barriers to inclusion, creating opportunities for engagement, and funding social and economic initiatives and programs. In the Canadian context, Blacks are disproportionately represented in the prison system. They also continue to face significant unemployment and under-employment in the workplace and are at significant risk for mental health breakdown and over-policing. These are but a few of the challenges. In this new context, Lois would invite us to work at building partnerships and to focus on making sure that there are policies in place to address the systemic barriers. She would remind us to be strategic at holding decision makers accountable. She would celebrate the ecumenical initiatives. Lois understood her ministry as partnering with God and others of good will to be co-creators of a just and equitable world in which all would thrive. And although she has not explicitly taken up the mantle on Black Lives Matter, she has shown us how to engage. Lois once told me that, in addition to seeing themselves as community developers, clergy need also to see themselves as teaching rabbis, so that the rich faith tradition we have is communicated to new generations. Lois has modelled both and has passed on a rich heritage to the generations yet to come. The words of the prophet Isaiah (58:12) come to mind: Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in.

Contributors

BetSY anderSon is a writer, researcher, and active layperson in the church. She and Lois Wilson share roots in the Student Christian Movement (SCM) of Canada, an organization that has shaped their ministries in both the United Church and the ecumenical movement. A theological graduate of Emmanuel College, Anderson planned and implemented the college’s continuing education program (2009–17). As a McGeachy Senior Scholar, she researched and wrote “The Story of Howland House,” an SCM co-operative in Toronto (1953–75). She has published numerous articles on the role of laity. the hon. LoUiSe arBoUr, CC, goq, has served as judge of the Supreme Court of Canada and the Ontario Court of Appeal, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and United Nations high commissioner for human rights. She is former special representative of the Un secretary for international migration, currently conducting a review of the Canadian Armed Forces. the hon. LLoYd axWorthY is active in academia, politics, and international affairs. As a member of parliament from Manitoba, he served in the cabinets of three prime ministers. As minister of foreign affairs in the cabinet of Jean Chrétien, he was instrumental in the work of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997. He is currently chair of the World Refugee and Migration Council.

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A retired New Democratic Party politician and United Church minister, the hon. BiLL BLaiKie, oC, served as the member of parliament for successive ridings in northeast Winnipeg from 1979 to 2008, and from 2006 to 2008 as deputy speaker of the House of Commons. He is a member of the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada. Blaikie is the author of The Blaikie Report: An Insider’s Look at Faith and Politics (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 2011). After serving as the executive minister in the Church in Mission Unit of the United Church of Canada, the rev. MiChaeL BLair was appointed general secretary of the United Church of Canada in September 2020. He has also been a congregational minister in Baptist churches in Toronto and St Catherine’s and the executive director of the Christian Resource Centre in Regent Park. the hon. irWin CotLer is the chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, an emeritus professor of law at McGill University, former minister of justice and attorney general of Canada and long-time member of parliament, and an international human rights lawyer who has acted as counsel for political prisoners around the world. dr diana L. eCK is professor of comparative religion and Indian studies and Fredric Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society at Harvard University. Since 1991, she has led a research team at Harvard – the Pluralism Project  – to explore the new religious diversity of the United States and its meaning for the American pluralist experiment. Eck is a member of the United Methodist Church, USa, and is active in the World Council of Churches. She received a National Humanities Award from President Bill Clinton for her work on American pluralism. Currently general secretary of the World Communion of Reformed Churches, located in Hannover, Germany, the rev. ChriS FergUSon has worked extensively with the United Church of Canada in global and ecumenical affairs. From 2002 to 2004 he was World Council of Churches representative at the United Nations and, from 2004 to 2006, WCC representative at the Un in New York. the rev. aLexa giLMoUr is presently serving as the minister at Windermere United Church, Toronto, where she and the congregation founded the Stone Soup Network, a program that connects donors offering either products (e.g., meals, household items) or services (e.g., haircuts, legal advice) with “social connectors,” such as religious leaders and

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social workers, who have clients with specific needs. She is a member the Canadian Sanctuary Movement, Toronto’s Faith in the City, and a volunteer with Repairers of the Breach. In 2020, Gilmour was awarded a McGeachy Senior Scholarship. A member of the Church of South India, dr arUna gnanadaSon joined the staff of the World Council of Churches in 1991 after working for the National Council of Churches of India. She has been an advocate for women in many venues, for example, heading the WCC’s Ecumenical Decade of Churches in Solidarity with Women in Church and Society (1988–98). As an academic, she is a member of the Global Institute of Theology (2017) and has edited and authored several books, including With Courage and Compassion: Women in the Ecumenical Movement (2020). the rev. dr Brent haWKeS, CM, onB, is a social activist and human rights advocate. In addition to his support of gay rights, Hawkes has also participated in anti-racist and anti-poverty initiatives and defended the ordination of women to the priesthood. He served as the senior pastor of Metropolitan Community Church, Toronto – a congregation that openly welcomes LgBt+ people – from 1977 to 2018. He founded and continues to work with the human rights organization Rainbow Faith and Freedom. After a long career as a professional social worker in Ontario, aLia hogBen, CM, served as a founding member and then executive director of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women. The CCMW works to empower Muslim women in Canadian society and to promote an understanding of Islam that is humane, egalitarian, and equality-driven. It successfully opposed the application of religious family laws in Ontario. Hogben writes a monthly column in the Kingston Whig Standard. dr MarY jo LeddY, CM, has had a varied career as a theologian, academic, journalist, social activist, and author of several articles and books, most recently Why Are We here? A Meditation on Canada. She is best known for her work with Romero House, a community and charitable organization that welcomes and supports refugee claimants. the verY rev. Stan MCKaY is a United Church minister and former moderator of the United Church of Canada. He is a member of the Fisher River Cree Nation in Manitoba. He advocated for the United Church’s apology for its role in residential schools and the cultural oppression of First Nations Peoples (1982–87), and, as co-director of

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Contributors

the Jessie Saulteaux Centre (now Sandy-Saultaux Spiritual Centre) and in other settings, he has worked tirelessly for truth and reconciliation. He was also a representative at the WCC from 1986 to 1996, having been active in its Program to Combat Racism.  dr noa MendeLSohn aviv studied law at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and York University, Toronto. She is now director of the Equality Program for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLa). Since 2012, she has directed work for LgBtqi2S rights, refugee protection, and freedom of religion and expression, as well as coordinating many CCLa interventions in a variety of venues, including the Supreme Court of Canada and Human Rights Tribunals. the rev. Canon Kate MerriMan is an Anglican priest serving as honorary assistant at the Cathedral Church of St James, Toronto, and a freelance editor specializing in scholarly and academic publishing. She has extensive experience in the areas of affordable housing and refugee sponsorship. dr Sean MULrooneY, a philosophy professor at St Augustine’s Seminary and sessional lecturer at Regis College, University of Toronto, shares Wilson’s view that art enriches and deepens our perceptions. Since 2017 Mulrooney has been a volunteer with the Ignatian Spirituality Project, a program that provides retreats for people with complex histories of homelessness and addiction. the rev. dr aLLan SaUnderS served United Church of Canada pastorates in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia. He founded the annual Epiphany Explorations conference and is currently minister emeritus at First Metropolitan United Church, Victoria. He and Lois Wilson have shared a forty-year friendship. He is familiar with her parental home, her Christian formation in the Student Christian Movement in Winnipeg, her major emphases in theology and ministry, and her subsequent activities. dr StePhen Bede SCharPer is associate professor in the School of Environment and Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. His work focuses on climate change and how theological reflection can offer new perspectives and guide policies. He was recently appointed director of the Integrated Sustainability Initiative at Trinity College, Toronto.

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As the former president of egaLe Canada and executive director and co-founder of arC International for seventeen years, KiMBerLeY vanCe-MUBanga has advanced human rights for LgBt+ persons in various Un spaces and collaborated with civil society groups around the globe. Under her leadership, arC International grew from a Canadianbased organization with two co-directors to an international ngo with a staff team and consultants in many countries around the world. As a specialist in human rights and humanitarian assistance, eriCh Weingartner was the first Canadian and the first ngo representative to achieve resident status in North Korea. From 1997 to 1999 he lived in Pyongyang as head of the Food Aid Liaison Unit, an independent unit of the World Food Program of the Un. In September 2000, he was a member of a Canadian federal government ngo delegation to North Korea, preliminary to the establishment of diplomatic relationships with North Korea. He is the author of several articles, papers, and books on the role of the church in human rights and peace advocacy. dr Bertha YetMan was the executive director of the Newfoundland Inshore Fisheries Association from 1986 to 1989. After moving to Toronto, she became a secondary school teacher in the York Catholic District School Board and pursued theological studies. She completed her doctoral studies in theology and social ethics at Regis College and the University of St Michael’s College, University of Toronto. Yetman is active across a wide range of social justice organizations, through which she met and befriended Lois Wilson.

Index

The initials lw refer to Lois Wilson. The letter f following a page number denotes a figure. Aboriginal Council of Winnipeg, 217 Aboriginal Peoples. See Indigenous Peoples abortion, 20, 91, 176 Abou El Fadl, Khaled, 71 acceptance, sense of, 8, 15 accountability, 217; accountability culture, 209, 218; pragmatic solidarity with, 209, 218 Accra Confession, 33–4 Adler, Margot, 54 Afiuni, Maria Lourdes, 221 African Union, 141 Agnes of Prague, 79 Ali Hosseini Khamenei, Sayyid, 221, 223 Alijabri, Saad, 223 Allaayan family, 116 Allen, David, 103 Alliance Defending Freedom, 214 “all my relations” teaching, 161–7 Al Rashid Mosque (Edmonton), 66 Ammah, Rabiatu, 53 Amnesty International, 15, 101, 140, 223 Anderson, Betsy, 9, 12, 112–22

Anglican Church of Canada, 16, 31–2, 35, 36, 236, 238 Anglican Consultative Council, 36 Annan, Kofi, 142 anti-Semitism, 213 Appiah, Kwame, 72 Arbitration Act (Ontario), 71 Arbour, Louise, 188 Archbishop of Canterbury, 53 L’Arche Daybreak community, 83–4 arC International, 188, 192 Argentina, 15, 19, 187; Mothers of May Square, 21, 206n1 Arizona Sanctuary Network, 125 art and spirituality, 76, 83–4 Assim, Regep, 67 Assisi Day of Prayer (1986), 54 Atlantic Avenue United Church (Winnipeg), 9, 134, 135 Atlantic Groundfish Strategy, 176 Atwood, Margaret, 210 authoritarianism, global, 221–31 Axworthy, Lloyd, 5–6, 9, 11, 47, 134–45 Badawi, Raif, 221–2, 231 Badawi, Samar, 222 Bakhtiar, Laleh, 70 Bangalore (South India): See Thursdays in Black Bangladesh flood plain, 136, 154–5

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Index

Baquaqua, Mohammah, 65 Barbra Schlifer Commemorative Clinic, 218 Bathurst Street United Church (Toronto), 115 Baum, Gregory, 90, 151 Beales, Dorothy (later Dorothy Wyman), 115 Beecham, Walter, 42 Beloved Community, 238 Benedict XVI, pope, 20 Benedictine order, 78–9 Berry, Thomas, 81, 149, 151, 154, 156 Berton, Pierre, 100 Best, Tom, 170 Beyond the Sanctuary, 4 Bible study and scripture: for children, 16; feminist biblical scholars, 205; LW’s focus on scripture, 16–18, 90–1; portrayed in icons, 77; radical Magnificat and women of the Bible, 19; revolution of interpretation, 55–6 Biden, Joe: supportive statement for Nasrin Sotoudeh, 225 Big Shift, 137–8 Black Lives Matter, 11, 101, 209, 216, 236, 237–9 Blaikie, Bill, 8, 11, 89–99 Blair, Michael, 11, 113, 235–9 Boff, Leonardo, 155 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 38 Boorstein, Sylvia, 54, 59 borders and boundaries: as blessings, 9; crossed in trust and faith, 127–8; exclusion and inclusion, 132–3; gratitude and responsibility, 9, 124; guides along, 124–6; as places of joy, 133; summons to cross, 128–30. See also refugees, migrants, and displaced persons Bourdieu, Pierre, 199 Brazil, 53, 151, 155, 189 Brent, Charles, 31 Brief, Fredelle, 59

British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, 217 Broadbent, Ed, 5 Broitman, Caryn, 57 Brown, John Seely, 137 Buck, Tim, 16 Buddhists and Buddhism: BuddhistCatholic Dialogue on Climate Change, 150; learning about, 20; as tradition-in-process, 55; in women’s interfaith dialogue, 52–8, 61, 63 Burrows, Matthew, 144 Cabot, John, 176 Callamard, Agnès, 222 call-in culture, 209, 215–16 Campagnolo, Iona, 22 Campi, Sitta, 56–7 Canada: Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, 92, 94, 95; Department of Indian Affairs, 160–1; missionaries in Korea, 40; policy on North Korea, 47–9; and political prisoners held by authoritarian regimes, 221–31; postwar “righteous institutions,” 93–4; recognition of Un Decade for People of African Descent, 237 Canada Without Poverty, 217 Canadian Bar Association, 217 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 11, 67, 73, 231 Canadian Civil Liberties Association, 5, 6, 12, 217, 218 Canadian Coalition of Liberal Rabbis, 216 Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, 174, 176, 177, 236 Canadian Council on AmericanIslamic Relations, 218 Canadian Council of Churches, 4, 5, 20, 238 Canadian Council of Muslim Women, 8, 53, 66–8, 69, 70–1, 72 Canadian Human Rights Mission to Sri Lanka, 5

Index Canadian Institute for Peace and Security, 5 Canadian Mental Health Association, 217 Canadian Muslim Lawyers Association, 217 Canadian Sanctuary Movement, 125 Canadian Unitarian Council, 217 cancel culture, 208–10, 211, 215, 219n11 capitalism, 8, 11, 92, 93, 212 Caron, Joseph, 48 Carson, Rachel, 152 Carthusian order, 78, 79 Cedeño, Eligio, 226 Center for Social and Information Initiatives Action, 192 Central American migrants, 125, 136 Central American Monitoring Group to El Salvador and Guatemala, 5 Chad, 140, 186 Chapman, Sarah, 120 China: Uighurs, 73; under Xi Jinping, 221, 228, 229–30, 231 China Christian Council, 4, 25n6 Choe Su Hon, 47 Chomsky, Noam, 210 Chrétien, Jean, 5, 141 Christian Conference of Asia, 43 Christian Federation (North Korea), 43, 44, 45–6, 48–9 Christian formation. See vocational or Christian formation Christian Resource Centre (Toronto), 11 Christian Socialism, 98 Chun Doo Whan, 42 churches and church congregations: body of Christ, 101, 108, 112, 121; building use on weekdays, 109; characteristics and traits, 121–2; clergy and staff, 102, 175–6; death and resurrection, 100–1, 104, 109, 117, 119; discernment process, 104–5; financial viability, 102, 116; interchurch coalitions, 91; left

249

versus conservative views, 89–90; lively and spiritual, 121–2; outreach programs, 101–4; as places of acceptance, 8, 15; role in public policy discussions, 94–5; urban spirituality, 121. See also laity church signs, 107–8 Clare of Assisi, saint, 76, 79 Clendening, Jane, 104 Climate Action Task Force (of Parliament of World’s Religions), 150 Climate Commitments Project, 150 climate concerns. See ecology and environmental concerns Cobb, John, 95 Colborne Street United Church (Brantford), 114 Cold War era, 41, 142 Colombia, 187, 194, 227 colonialism, 205–6, 212 common good: being versus doing good, 128–9; of the community, 101, 175; defined, 7, 11–12; expanding reach of, 5; impediments to, 169–78; for the planet, 96; protection of, 177; work and workers for, 173 conservatism, religious or theological, 8, 40, 89–90 conversion therapy, 190–1 Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, 92, 94, 95 Corbett, Jim (goat walker), 125, 126, 127 Cornille, Catherine, 63 cosmopolitanism, 72–3 Cotler, Irwin, 5–6, 10–11, 22, 221–31 Council for Global Equality, 192 Council of Muslim Communities of Canada, 68 Council for World Mission, 119–20 Covid-19 pandemic: churches’ responses to, 100, 102, 109; and class, 113; with climate crisis and mass migration, 140; economic

250

Index

impacts, 160, 236; events prevented by, 49; and globalization, 200; as great revealer, 37; humanitarianism versus nativism, 136–7; impact on Indigenous Peoples, 160; impact on refugee women, 134–6; impact on vulnerable, 6, 7; love in the time of, 12; in Saudi prison, 224; sheltering from, 112; societal fissures highlighted by, 235; systemic racism unmasked by, 236; violence during, 199; women leaders dealing with, 144 Cressey, Jill, 54 Crete, 20 crimes against humanity, 225–6, 227 criminalization: of democracy and human rights, 224, 227–8, 231; of sexual orientation, 185–6 cultural genocide, 164, 166 culture church, 102 Cunningham, Hilary, 124–5 Daly, Hermann, 95 Das, Lalitha, 54 Dauphin (Manitoba), 236 Davison, Lang, 137 democratic governments, 221, 222, 230–1 Denmark, 144, 187 De Roo, Remi, bishop, 174 Dietrich, Suzanne de, 4 Dignity Network, 192 discernment: acting for good, 129–30; for congregations, 104–5; opportunities for, 90; personal and political, 129–30, 132 discipleship: of congregations, 101, 108; transformative, 37; in the twenty-first century, 113, 114, 118 displaced persons. See refugees, migrants, and displaced persons diversity: in Canada, 62–3, 65, 74; and ecumenism, 206; embracing differences, 199–200 Dmitriev, Yuri, 228

Doctrine of Justification, 36 Donaldson, Laura E., 205 Dube, Musa, 205 Eastern Church, 76, 77 Eck, Diana, 8, 11, 52–63 ecology and environmental concerns: climate change, 150–5; climate refugees, 138, 140; creation change, 157; ecology and ecumenism, 8, 9, 32–3; environmental ethics, 152–3; environmentalists as political prisoners, 221; Interfaith Rainforest Initiative, 150; offerings from faith groups, 148 Economic Community of West African States, 141 Ecumenical Christian Centre (Whitefield, India), 10, 197 Ecumenical Decade of Churches in Solidarity with Women, 18–19 Ecumenical Forum, 4 Ecumenical Forum for Korea, 48–9 Ecumenical Network on Korea, 45 ecumenism and the ecumenical movement: creative tensions within, 34–5; dialogue and diversity, 206; ecumenical formation, 197; in Korea, 40–51; Lund Principle, 122; LW’s ministry, 20, 49, 90–1, 197; roots and formation, 8, 30, 31–2, 38; transformative ecumenism, 8, 29–38, 235; and Visio Divina, 85; and the whole inhabited world, 4, 7, 29–30, 32–3; whole people of God, 9, 112–22. See also World Council of Churches (WCC) Edmonton, 53, 66, 67–8 egaLe Canada, 194, 217, 218 Eggleton, Art, 236 Eglinton–St George’s United Church (Toronto), 120 Egnell, Helene, 63 Eisley, Loren, 152 El Salvador, 21 Elwell, Sue Levi, 63

Index Emmanuel College. See Toronto School of Theology encyclicals: Francis I, Laudato Si, 34, 36, 156, 177; John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, 174; John Paul II, Ut Unum Sint, 77; Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, 173 End Homelessness Winnipeg, Inc., 217 European Convention on Human Rights, 187 European Court of Human Rights, 187 European Forum of LgBt+ Christian Groups, 192 European Platform for Elections, 227 European Union: policies on refugees, 137; supportive statements for Nasrin Sotoudeh, 224 Evin Prison (Iran), 225 Fahlman, Lila, 53, 67–8 faith: and anti-faith, 92; and ecological policy, 147–57; and public policy, 8, 89, 91–2 Faith in the City (Toronto), 105 Faith for Earth Initiative, 149 Faith and Order Movement, 31–2 Falwell, Jerry, 89 Farrakhan, Louis, 213 Feaver, Ignatius, brother, 81 Federation of Asian Canadian Lawyers, 217 feminism and feminist theory: biblical scholars, 205; and collaboration, 19, 25n21; diverse forms of, 204; LW’s feminist blessing, 18; LW’s interpretation, 18–19, 25n21; Mothers of May Square (Argentina), 21, 206n1; and Muslim women’s religious symbols, 212–13; radical Magnificat and women of the Bible, 19; and trans activists, 212, 213; women’s tensions with, 214. See also global women’s movement; women Ferguson, Chris, 7, 11, 29–38

251

First Church United (Fort William), 4 First Place (Hamilton), 17 Fisheries and Oceans Canada, 171 Fisher River Cree Nation (Manitoba), 150, 160 Five Oaks Christian Workers Education Centre (Paris, Ontario), 114, 118–19 Floyd, George, 237, 239 Fogo Island Fish Producers Cooperative and Shorefast Project, 178 fortress church, 102 Fort William (now Thunder Bay, Ontario), 4 Forum on Religion and Ecology (Yale), 149 Foucault, Michel, 201 Fox, Selena, 54 Francis I, pope: Laudato Si, 34, 36, 156, 177 Francis of Assisi, saint, 79 Franciscan order, 79 Franciscans International, 192 freedom: freedom of religion, 217–18; free speech, 210–12; for political prisoners, 231 Freeland, Chrystia, 221–2 FreeLulu Multifaith Coalition, 105 Freeman, E.G.D. (Gard), father, 3, 7, 9, 15–16, 159 Freeman, Minnie Ada, mother, 3, 7, 15, 16, 159 free trade agreements, 94–5 Freidan, Betty, 18 Fuchs Kreimer, Nancy, 63 Gaber, Tammy, 70 Garcia Márquez, Gabriel, 12 gathered church, 100, 102, 103, 108–9. See also scattered (missional) church gathered community, 175–7 gender equity. See LgBt+/LgBtqi2S issues Gender Identity and Gender Expression Programme, 186–97

252

Index

Gerasimov, Valeray, 228 Geremeyev, Ruslan, 229 Gillespie, Dizzy, 24 Gillian, Carol, 214 Gilmour, Alexa, 9, 12, 100–9, 116 Gish, Duane, and Gish Gallop, 215 Glion meetings (Switzerland), 44–5, 47 global authoritarianism, 221–31 Global Christian Forum, 36 global communications network, 126 global economy and globalization, 94–6, 100, 125–6, 199–200 Global Independent Refugee Women Leaders network, 135, 136 Global Institute of Theology, 34 Global Interfaith Network, 196n16 Global Justice Institute, 192, 196n16 global women’s movement, 10, 197–206; complexity of, 200–3; decolonization and liberation, 205–6; diversity and dialogue, 206; divisions in, 201–3; embracing differences in, 199–200; #ifwedonotrise campaign, 197–8; One Billion Women Rising, 198; Thursdays in Black, 198. See also feminism and feminist theory; women Gnanadason, Aruna, 10, 11, 197–206 goat walker (Jim Corbett), 125, 126, 127 God’s mission (Missio Dei), 7, 29–30, 32–4, 35, 38 Goldman, Emma, 155 Go Project, 120 grace, 148, 151–2, 157 Grandi, Filippo, 138 Grant, John Webster, 90 gratitude: lessons in, 9, 130–1; offered by faith groups, 148, 152–3, 157 Greenesmith, Heron, 214 Gregory IX, pope, 79 Grim, John, 149 Gross, Rita, 63 Group of 20 (G20), 222 guaranteed basic income, 96, 236–7

Guatemala, 5, 18, 21 Guigo II, prior of Grand Chartreuse, 78 Gupta, Saroj, 53 Hadith, 56, 69, 72, 74 Hafiz (fourteenth-century Persian poet), 23–4 Haidar, Ensaf, 222 Hall, John Douglas, 115, 117–18 Halliday, Adele, 120 Hallman, David, 154 Hamdani, Daood, 66 Hamid, Abdullah al-, 223 Hamilton (Ontario), 17, 19, 20 Harper, Stephen, 73 Harper’s letter, 210–12 Harrington, Michael, 92 Harris, Kamala, 144 Harvard Divinity School, 18–19, 56 Harvard Pluralism Project, 8, 61–3 Harvard University: Jim Corbett at, 125 Hassan, Riffat, 56 Havel, John, III, 137 Hawkes, Brent, 10, 12, 35, 185–95, 196n14 Helen David, Sister, 84 Heschel, Abraham, 29 Hidayatullah, Aysha, 63 Hill Fletcher, Jennine, 63 Hillhurst United Church (Calgary), 117 Hinchcliffe, Susan, 101, 105 Hitchens, Christopher, 89 Hogben, Alia, 8, 12, 65–74 “holdin’ ground,” 178, 181n36 Hollenbach, David, 174 homosexuality. See LgBt+/LgBtqi2S issues hooks, bell, 204 Howland House (SCM co-op, Toronto), 9, 115 Hsu, Victor, 43 human rights: global human rights and reconciliation, 17, 21–3,

Index 73, 74; Muslim women working for, 74; solidarity and divisions among advocates, 208–18; work and employment, 173–4. See also United Nations Human Rights Watch, 192 ibn Abd al-Wahhab, Muhammad, 69 Ibrahim, Salma, 111n24 icons (Eastern Church), 76, 77, 84 idols: in Buddhism, 57; in Christendom, 101; financial market as, 37, 97; and icons, 77; ideologies as, 41 #ifwedonotrise campaign, 197–8 Ignatieff, Michael, 210 Im Su-Kyong, 46 inclusion and inclusivity: and exclusion, 132–3; inclusive secularization, 91–2; and intersectionality, 216–18; of language, 54, 55 India: Ecumenical Christian Centre (Whitefield, India), 10, 20, 197; Muslim immigrants from, 66, 73; women’s movement in, 197–9, 206 Indian Act (Canada), 167n2 Indigenous Peoples: circle ceremony of prayer, 161–7, 163f; Creation and interdependence, 161–2, 166–7; Indian Act, 167n2; land claims, 95; LW’s Senate address on, 22; residential schools, 91, 160–1, 167–8n2, 168n6; semi-nomadic lifestyle, 160–1; spirituality and life philosophies, 162–4; sweat lodge ceremonies, 161–2; and WCC Assembly in Vancouver (1983), 52 interfaith dialogue: in communities, 60; as dialogues of life, 54; emerging revolutions, 55–8; following 9/11 attacks, 63, 105, 128; interdependence ethic, 60; interfaith centres, 119; interfaith vigils, 105–6; learning from, 20; and Visio Divina, 85; women’s meeting

253

in Toronto (1988), 8, 52–63; and world ecumenism, 34–5 Interfaith Rainforest Initiative, 150 International Centre for Human Rights and Development, 5 International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (1999), 142–3 International Criminal Court, 227 International Fact-Finding Mission on the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, 226–7 International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, 192 international law, 141, 187 International Law of the Sea Convention (Geneva, 1976), 170 International Lesbian and Gay Association, 192 International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association, 185, 186–97 International Peace Institute Global Observatory, 140, 150 International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation, 222 International Women’s Day, 218 International Women’s Year Conference (1975, Mexico City), 188 intersectional analysis and approach, 208, 209, 212–13, 216–18 Iona Community (Scotland), 118–19 Iran: under Khamenei, 221, 223–5, 231 Iraq: Yazidi refugees, 135–6 Islam: learning through dialogue, 20; literal interpretations, 69–70; mosques, 66, 70, 193; Ramadan, 128; sharia and fiqh, 71–2; teachings and practices of patriarchy, 8; women scholars and leaders, 70; women’s roles and religious symbols, 66, 201–2, 212–13, 217–18. See also Muslim communities in Canada Islamophobia, 8, 68–9, 73, 213

254

Index

Japan: Glion Four conference (Kyoto, 1995), 47; occupation and annexation of Korea, 40; Tozanso meeting, 43 Jerusalem, 20 John Paul II, pope, 53, 77, 176; Centesimus Annus, 174; Laborem Exercens, 174 Johnson, Lyndon B., 61 Josiah’s reform, 97 joy: at borders, 133; offered by faith groups, 148, 155–6, 157 Judaism and Jewish traditions: activists on intellectual left, 93; anti-Semitism, 213; dialogue with Muslim neighbours, 128; and LgBt+ people of faith, 192, 213; prayers, 18; Tikkum Olam, 30; vigils and sanctuary for, 105; in women’s interfaith dialogue, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57–8, 62, 69 justice: and knowledge of God, 154; offered by faith groups, 148, 154–5, 157; and peace, 29, 38, 42, 45 Justice for Children and Youth, 217 Justice in the World (World Synod of Catholic Bishops, 1971), 154 Kabilsingh, Chatsumarn, 55, 56, 60 KairoS, 91 Kandan, Reza, 225 Kara-Murza, Vladimir, 228, 229 Karpoche, Bhutila, 107 Kassam, Zayn, 63 Keats, Derek, and Keats Report, 171, 179n9 Kerr, Doug, 192–3 Khamenei. See Iran Khan, Aisha, 55 Khandan, Reza, 224–5 Khashoggi, Jamal, 222 Khera, Amarjit, 54 Kim Dae-Jong, 21, 42, 47 Kim Il-Sung, 46 Kim John Il, 47 Kim Jong-Un, 49

King, Martin Luther, Jr, 105, 110n16, 238, 239 King, Ursula, 63 Kirby, Michael J., and Kirby Commission of Inquiry (1982), 171 Klein, Anne, 63 Knaus, Maggie, 108 Korea: Christian communities, 40–51; Declaration of the Churches of Korea on National Reunification and Peace (1988), 40–1, 45; ecumenical efforts, 50–1; famine, 47, 48; ideological division, 40–3; Japanese occupation and annexation, 40; Korean War (1950–53), 41; North-South summit (2000), 47; peace and reconciliation, 40–51; WCC member churches in, 43; Year of Jubilee for Unification (1995), 45, 47. See also North Korea (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea); South Korea (Republic of Korea) Korean Catholic Association, 46 Korean Central Intelligence Agency, 43 Korean Christian Federation (North Korea), 44, 45–6, 48–9 Koshy, Ninan, 44 Kraemer, Hendrik, 113 Kurdi, Alan, 116 Kwon Ho-Kyung, 46 laity: church of the world, 9, 112; diaconical ministry, 118; in Newfoundland communities, 178; as royal priesthood, 113; spiritual gifts, 120; vocation, 112–21. See also churches and church congregations Lakehead University (Thunder Bay), 17 Lake Winnipeg, 160 Lake of the Woods (Ontario/Manitoba border), 159 Lamer, Antonio, 231 Lasch, Christopher, 132–3 Laurence, Margaret, 17 Lebanon, 66, 135 Lectio Divina, 76, 78–9

Index Leddy, Mary Jo, 7, 12, 104, 124–33 Lee, Hee-Ho, 42 Lee, Sang-Chul, 14, 43, 47 Leo XIII, pope: Rerum Novarum, 174 Leopold, Aldo, 152–3, 156 Lewis, David, 93, 95 LgBt+/LgBtqi2S issues: cisgender issues, 190, 196n11, 212, 218; conversion therapy, 190–1; egaLe Canada, 194, 217, 218; gender apartheid, 224; gender equity, 22, 34, 35–6; gender recognition issues and legislation, 187; homophobia, 209; homosexuality, 91; human rights for, 10, 35–6, 212; in India, 197; legal developments, 185–8; LW on sexual orientation, 22; mosques, 70, 193; Rainbow Faith and Freedom, 12, 191–5, 196nn15–16; same-sex marriage, 217; sexism as discrimination, 203–4; Sogi (sexual orientation and gender identity) issues, 22, 187–8, 189; State-Sponsored Homophobia Report, 185–6; sterilization requirements, 187; trans-exclusionary radical feminists, 212, 214; Trans Legal Mapping Report, 186–7; transphobia and anti-trans rhetoric, 209, 211; trans rights, 212; and Yogyakarta Principles, 187–8 liberation: and decolonization, 205–6; diverse understandings of, 201–2; of Namibia, 24 liberation theology, 154–5 Life and Work movement, 32 Littell, Franklin, 102 Litvinenko, Alexander, 228 Lloyd, Barbara, 121–2 Lochnan, Katharine, 76 López, Leopoldo, 221, 225–6, 231 Love, Agnes, 65 Love, James, 65 Loyola, Ignatius, 81 Lugovi, Andrei, 228 Lund Principle, 122

255

Luther, Martin, 117 Lutheran Church, 4, 80, 236, 238 Lutheran World Federation, 36 Lyons, Oren, 152 McDonald, David, 236 McDonnell, Maureen, 81 McKay, Stan, 9–10, 12, 159–67 Macron, Emmanuel, 225 Maduro, Nicolás, 221, 225–7, 231 Magnitsky, Sergei, and Magnitsky Act (2015), 227, 229 Magnitsky sanctions, 225, 230 Mahmassani, Maher S., 71 Mahmoud, Ghidey, 126–8, 130 Malik, Abdul-Rehman, 119 Malik, Maleiha, 201 Mallory, Tamika, 213 Mandana, Jaji, 54 Mandela, Nelson, 5 Manson, Kate, 103, 108 Marx, Karl, 80–1 Massey College (University of Toronto), 9, 12 Maurice, F.D., 98 Maury, Philippe, 3 Memorial (Russian human rights group), 228 Menchú, Rigoberta, 18, 21 Mendelsohn Aviv, Noa, 10, 12, 208–18 Mending the World (1997), 29–30, 235 Merkel, Angela, 137, 144 Merriman, Kate, 3–12 Mescalero Apache Nation, 53, 54 Methodist Church, 31, 36, 53, 92, 101, 134 #MeToo, 209 Metropolitan Community Church (Toronto), 192, 194, 217 Mexico, 125, 187, 188 Miawpukek First Nation, 178 migrants. See refugees, migrants, and displaced persons Mihevc, Joe, 121 Miller, Bob, 115 Miller, Lex, 114–15, 120

256

Index

Missio Dei. See God’s mission missional church. See scattered (missional) church missionaries and missionary movement, 31, 113; and colonialism, 164; in Korea, 23, 40, 42 Mohammed bin Salman, 221–3 Mohawk, John, 152 Moon Ik-Hwan, 46 Moon Jae-In, 49 Moore, Arthur B.B., 15 moral majority, 89 mosques, 66, 70, 193 Mott, John R., 4, 31 Mouvement laïque québécois, 217 Mulroney, Brian, 176 Mulrooney, Sean, 8, 11, 76–85 multiculturalism, 61–3 Multiculturalism Act (Canada), 67, 73 Muslim Canadian Congress, 218 Muslim communities in Canada, 119; adaptation and adjustment, 66–7; contributions of, 72–4; history of, 65–7; living in trust with refugees, 127–8; as peddlers and shop keepers, 66, 67; radicalization of youth, 69; religious laws, 70–2. See also Islam Namibia: liberation of, 24 Narayanan, Vasudha, 53, 55 Naropa Buddhist University (Colorado), 53 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USa, 45 National Council of Churches in Korea, 44–6, 48, 49; Declaration of the Churches of Korea on National Reunification and Peace (1988), 40, 45 National Endowment for Democracy, 227 National Film Board of Canada: women’s film studio, 52 Nation of Islam, 213 Naudé, Beyers, 15 Navalny, Alexei, 229

Neighbours Helping Neighbours (Covid response project), 102, 109 Nemtsov, Boris, 227, 229 neoliberalism and neoliberal agenda, 94–6 New Democratic Party, 8, 92, 94, 169–78 Newfoundland: Catholic church and communities, 12, 174–7; destruction of cod fishery, 10, 169–78; inshore (fixed gear) fishers, 10, 170–1, 179n7; Miawpukek First Nation, 178; outmigration and population decline, 170, 172–3, 177, 179–80n16 Newfoundland Fishermen’s Food and Allied Workers Union, 171 Newfoundland Inshore Fisheries Association, 10, 170, 171, 174 New Sanctuary Movement (Europe), 125 Nicholls, Linda, 35 Nieves, Franklin, 226 Nogales (Arizona), 124 non-refoulement principle, 140 Noor Cultural Centre (Toronto), 70 North Atlantic Fishing Organization, 170, 178n2 Northcott, Michael, 155 Northern Cod Adjustment and Recovery Program, 176 North Korea (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea): Canadian delegation to, 8, 23, 41–50, 135; Christian communities and church buildings, 43–4, 46; creation, 41; diplomatic relations with Canada, 47–8; under Kim Jong Il, 47; under Kim Jong Un, 49; as a nuclear power, 48–9. See also Korea Nouwen, Henri, and Henri Nouwen Society, 83–4, 113 nuclear fuel waste management, 4, 5, 22 nuclear weapons, 48–9, 91 Nwanevu, Osita, 211, 219n11

Index Oaten, Bev, 114 Obama, Barack, 90 O’Brien, Martin, 170 Occupy movement, 96, 103, 110n13, 198, 209 Oduyoy, Mercy Amba, 202–3 oikoumene (“the whole inhabited world”): meaning of, 4; tradition of, 29–38 Oldham, Joseph, 31 One Billion Women Rising, 198 O’Neill, Maura, 63 Ontario Human Rights Commission, 218 Open Russia, 227 Organization of American States, 226 Organization of Islamic Cooperation, 189–90 Orthodox Church, 20, 31, 32, 36, 77 Orwell, George, 200 Ottawa Process model, 141–2 Out of the Cold programs, 101 Outright Action International, 190–1, 196n14 Oxford Global Forum (1988), 53 Pakistan, 67, 189 Paris Climate Accord, 96, 162, 168n4 Park Chung Hee, 42 Parliament of the World’s Religions, 150, 192–4 Parvey, Connie, 55–6 Pate, Kim, 236 patriarchy, 8, 35, 68, 69, 74, 205 Pearson Peace Medal, 5 Peltier, Autumn, 152 Pentland, John, 117 Perez Esquivel, Adolfo, 21 Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation, 224 Petty Harbour Fisherman’s Cooperative, 178 Phipps, Bill, 117 Pichugin, Aleixi, 228 Platonism, 78 Pluralism Project, 8, 61–3

257

political correctness, 215 political elite, 94, 97, 99 political language, 200 political prisoners: in China, 229–30; in Iran, 223–5; in Russia, 227–9; in Saudi Arabia, 224–5; in Venezuela, 225–7 Politkovskaya, Anna, 229 polygamy, 69–70, 71 Port Arthur (now Thunder Bay, Ontario), 4 Potter, Phillip, 17 pragmatic solidarity, 209, 216–18 Prague Declaration on Democratic Renewal, 230–1 prayer: Assisi Day of Prayer (1986), 53; circle ceremony of prayer, 161–7 Pride Toronto, 216–17, 218 privatization, 94–5 prophetic tradition, 3, 98, 152 Protestant Reformation, 80, 113, 117 Prove, Peter, 49 public policy. See faith Pusuma family (Jozef, Timea, and Lulu), 104–6 Putin, Vladimir, 221, 227–9 Putnam, Robert, 73 Queen’s Theological College (Kingston), 20 Queer Civil War (Toronto), 217 Quran, 69, 70, 71, 74 racism and racial profiling, 90, 209, 212, 213, 217, 237–9 radical gratitude, 130 Rainbow Faith and Freedom, 12, 191–5, 196nn15–16 Raiser, Konrad, 33, 36 Raisi, Ebrahim, 225 Ram, Augustine Ralla, 4 Ramadan, 128 Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, 223, 228; International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation, 222 Rasmussen, Larry, 33, 201

258

Index

Ratzinger, Joseph (later Benedict XVI), 20 Rauschenbusch, Walter, 8, 92–4, 96–7, 99, 148 reconciliation: conditions and processes for, 50–1; and global human rights, 17, 21–3, 73, 74; and prophecy of the four winds, 162; Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Calls to Action, 65, 162, 172 Reformation, Protestant Reformation, 80, 113, 117 Reformed Ecumenical Council, 35 refugees, migrants, and displaced persons: Axworthy’s work with, 9; climate refugees, 140; definitions and criteria, 139–40; exclusion and inclusion, 132–3; forced to cross borders, 126; funding for refugee system, 139; “last in the queue,” 134–45; from Latin America, 227; learning from, 126–8; migrants, 101, 136, 137, 139; non-refoulement principle, 140; sanctuary for, 104–6; as security threats, 137; as spiritual guides, 126, 127; sponsorship for, 101, 116; vulnerability, 135–6. See also borders and boundaries Refugee Status Advisory Committee, 22 Regal Heights Resident’s Organization (Toronto), 116 Regis College. See Toronto School of Theology religious art, 77–80 Religious Leadership in Secular Society (conference in Jerusalem), 20 Rembrandt, 76, 84 residential schools, 91, 160–1, 167–8n2, 168n6 Responsibility to Protect, 142–4 Reuther, Rosemary Radford, 63 righteous institutions, 92–4, 96 Robinson, Marilynne, 138

Rock, Allan, 143 Rohingyas, 73, 136 Roman Catholic Church: and fishery crisis in Newfoundland, 12, 169, 170–1, 174–7; sex abuse scandals (Newfoundland, 1988), 176; views on LgBt+ issues, 91, 186, 190; views on work and unemployment, 173– 4. See also Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops; encyclicals; Roman Catholic Pontifical Council for Promoting Unity; World Synod of Catholic Bishops Roman Catholic Pontifical Council for Promoting Unity, 36 Romero House (Toronto), 9, 104, 124, 128 Ross, Loretta, 216 Rowling, J.K., 210, 212 royal priesthood, 100, 113 Rublev, Andrei, 77 Russia, 190, 221, 227–9 Sahhel and Lake Chad Regions (Africa), 140–1 St Mary’s (Newfoundland), 169–78 St Matthew’s United Church (Toronto), 116 same-sex marriage. See LgBt+/ LgBtqi2S issues sanctuary churches, 101, 104–6, 117, 138 Sancturary Movement, 124–5, 132 Saudi Arabia, 69, 221–3, 231 Saulteaux and Swampy Cree peoples, 167n1 Saunders, Allan, 5, 7, 11, 14–24 scattered (missional) church, 100, 102, 103, 108–9, 113. See also gathered church Scharper, Stephen Bede, 9, 11, 148–57 Schuetze, Kate, 140 Scott, Frank, 95 Scott, Ted, 16 Scott-Dixon, Krista, 212 scripture. See Bible study and scripture

Index secularization: and gratitude, 130; inclusive, 91–2; process of, 130 Segal, Hugh, 236 Sentsov, Oleg, 228, 229 sexual orientation. See LgBt+/ LgBtqi2S issues Shenandoah, Audrey, 152 Shevchenko, Anastasia, 221, 227–9, 231 Shewburg, Michael, 119 Siddon, Tom, 179n9 Simmer-Brown, Judith, 53 Simons, John and Martha, 65 Smith, Evan, 103 social capital, 73 Social Gospel: Axworthy’s engagement with, 101, 134–5; LW’s engagement with, 3, 7, 16–17, 148; Rauschenbusch’s understanding of, 8, 9, 92–3, 97; tradition in Winnipeg, 134–5. See also United Church of Canada social ministry, 235 Söderblom, Nathan, 32 Soelle, Dorothy, 21 solidarity: and accountability, 218; political ethic of, 91–2; pragmatic solidarity, 208–9, 213–14, 216–18 Sonora Desert, 125 Sotoudeh, Nasrin, 221, 223–5, 231 Soulforce, 192 South Africa: human rights in, 20; LW’s engagement with, 5, 15, 21, 22, 24, 238; WCC work in, 166 South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario, 218 South Korea (Republic of Korea): creation, 41; under Kim Dae-Jung, 43, 47; Kwangju massacre (South Korea), 5, 14, 42, 47; military dictatorships and National Security Law, 41–2, 43, 46; under Moon JaeIn, 49. See also Korea Southside Presbyterian Church (Tucson, Arizona), 125. Springsteen, Bruce, 155 Steinem, Gloria, 210

259

Stewart, Yvonne, 117 Stone Soup Network, 106–7, 109 Student Christian Movement: co-op houses, 9, 115; LW’s involvement with, 3–4, 16, 115, 197; precursor to ecumenical movement, 31, 113–14, 197; work camps, 113–15 Student Volunteer Movement for Christian Missions, 31, 115 Sudan: LW’s work in, 5, 23, 135; women from, 57, 58 Sutherland, Anne Shirley, 102 Taha, Asma, 57, 58 Taiwan, 21 Talamantez, Inez, 54, 58 Taylor, Charles, 91–2, 145 Teitiota, Ioane, 140 theologia crucis (theology of the cross), 117–18 theology of the lawn, 108 Third World Missionary Conference (Edinburgh, 1910), 31 thriving church, 100, 102 Thunberg, Greta, 152, 153 Thunder Bay (Ontario), 4, 17, 159 Thursdays in Black, 198, 206n1 Tikkun Olam, 30 Tillich, Paul, 15 Tindal, Mardi, 104 Ting, K.H., 4, 16, 18, 25n6 Titievand, Oyub, 228 Toronto Christian Resource Centre (now CrC/Fred Victor), 235 Toronto Occupy Protest Chaplains, 103 Toronto School of Theology: Ecumenist in Residence at, 20; Emmanuel College, 9, 20, 90, 112, 225; Regis College, 8, 10, 76, 81, 169 Tovar, Ralenis, 226 Town Talk (Thunder Bay), 4, 17 Tozanso meetings and process, 43–6, 47, 48–50 Training in Mission Programme, 119–20

260

Index

trans activists. See LgBt+/LgBtqi2S issues transformative ecumenism, 29–38 Treaty Five, 160, 167n1 Trinity–St Paul’s United Church (Toronto), 117 Trump, Donald, 49, 90, 96, 138, 213 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 65, 172; Calls to Action, 162 Tucker, Mary Evelyn, 149 Tucson (Arizona): sanctuary in, 24 Tutu, Desmond, 21, 24 Uganda, 20 Uighurs, 73 United Church of Canada: creed, 23; formation (1925), 32, 101; on guaranteed basic income, 236; LW’s leadership roles, 3, 14, 18, 20, 42, 52, 238; Mending the World (1997), 29–30, 235; residential schools, 168n6; on same-sex marriage, 36, 217; whole world (transformative) ecumenism, 8, 29–38, 235. See also Social Gospel United Church of Christ (USa), 238 United College (Winnipeg, now University of Winnipeg): Axworthy at, 135; E.G.D. Freeman at, 9, 15, 159; LW at, 3–4, 16–17; McKay at, 9, 159 United Nations: Commission on the Status of Women, 199; Convention relating to the Status of Refugees (1951), 139; Decade for People of African Descent (2015–24), 237; Decade for Women (1976–85), 35, 203; Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 96; Framework Convention on Climate Change, 168n5; Human Rights Commission, 196n15; Human Rights Committee, 140; Human Rights Council, 139–40, 189, 190–1, 226–7, 237; rapporteur

for extrajudicial execution, 222; role in North–South Korean conflict, 41, 49; Sustainable Development Goals, 149; United Nations Environmental Program, 149; Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 22; voice for LgBt + movements, 188–90; Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, 238; Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, 229–30 United Neighbours (Toronto), 116 United States of America: immigration and diversity, 61–3; policies on Korea, 40, 41, 49; resolutions on murder of Jamal Khashoggi, 222; sanctuary for Central Americans in, 125; Trump’s presidency, 49, 90, 96, 138, 213 United States of America legislation: Civil Rights Act (1965), 61; Immigration and Nationality Act (1965), 61; Magnitsky Act (2015), 227, 229; Voting Rights Act (1965), 61 Unity Mosque (Toronto), 70 Unity Movement, 193 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 22 universalism: diversity and complexity within, 10, 200–3 University of Winnipeg, 115, 135 Urban Alliance on Race relations, 217 Uruguay, 19 Vallejo, Rafael, 103 Vance-Mubanga, Kimberley, 10, 12, 35, 185–95 Van Gogh, Vincent, 76, 84 Vatican II, 17, 32, 175 Venezuela, 221, 225–7, 231 Verzilov, Pyotr, 229 Victoria College, University of Toronto, 15, 52 Virani, Arif, 101

Index Visio Divina (holy seeing), 8; antecedents of, 76, 77–9; changing views and practices, 79–81; effectiveness and implications, 84–5; five steps of, 82–3; Nouwen’s practice, 83–4; seeing versus hearing, 7 vocational or Christian formation, 108, 113–14, 117, 119–21 vocation of the laity. See laity Volf, Miroslav, 132 Walcott, Rinaldo, 217 Wallenberg Advocacy group (McGill University), 230 Wang Bingzhang, 221, 229–30, 231 Wang Ti-Anna, 229, 230 Weingartner, Erich, 8, 12, 40–51 Weissman, Deborah, 59, 60 Wen Zhao, Amélie, 216 Wesley College (Winnipeg), 135 White, Lynn, 152 Whitehead, Rhea, 43, 47 whole inhabited world. See ecumenism and the ecumenical movement Wiccan tradition, 53, 54, 60 Wilson, Lois Miriam (née Freeman): on common good, 11–12; divinity thesis (1969), 103; on feminism, 18–19, 25n21; on God’s love of the world, 122; grounding in nature, 16, 159, 167; on guaranteed basic income, 236–7; leadership roles, 238; on learning through dialogue, 20; legacy, 11; on life, death and afterlife, 23–4; marriage, 4, 7; mentors, 21; ministry, 3–4, 112, 113, 121, 235; ordination (1965), 4, 18; on prayer and scripture, 17–18; at St Matthew’s United Church, 116; as a Senator, 5, 6, 22, 47, 112, 135; visit to Crete, 20; visits to Korea, 42, 43, 47–8, 135; years in Winnipeg, 134; youth and education, 3–4, 15–16, 159

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Wilson, Roy, 4, 7, 16–17, 18, 22, 134 Windermere United Church (Toronto), 100–9, 116–17 women: Canadian Muslim women, 65–74; interfaith dialogue in Toronto (1988), 52–63; and peace process in Korea, 42, 48, 51; as political leaders, 144–5; in Saudi Arabia, 223–4; vulnerability of trans women, 212. See also feminism and feminist theory; global women’s movement Women Living Under Muslim Family Laws (network), 70 Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund, 218 Women’s Liberation Front, 214–15 Women’s Marches, 213, 218 Women’s Mosque (Toronto), 70 Women’s Refugee Advocacy Group (Vancouver), 135 Women Transcending Boundaries, 63 Woodsworth, J.S., 92 work camps, 114 work as a human right, 173–4 World Alliance for Promoting Friendship among the Churches, 32 World Alliance of Reformed Churches, 34 World Communion of Reformed Churches, 7–8, 34–5, 36, 38, 235 World Conference of Life and Work (Stockholm, 1925), 32 World Council of Churches (WCC): anti-apartheid work in Namibia, 24; Chinese churches withdrawal from, 41; Commission of the Churches on International Affairs, 43, 44, 45, 49, 237–8; Commission on World Mission and Evangelism, 36; Dialogue with People of Living Faiths and Ideologies, 52; Ecumenical Decade of Churches in Solidarity with Women, 18–19, 35; Faith and Order Commission, 32; formation, 31, 32, 112; general

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secretaries, 17, 36; and Global Christian Forum, 36; Gnanadson’s work with, 197, 199; “Guidelines on Dialogue,” 60; Hallman’s work on global warming, 154; Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation initiative, 154; Lund Principle, 122; LW as president (1983–91), 4, 20, 42, 52, 238; oikoumene (motto), 4; Programme to Combat Racism, 22; role in Korean peace and reunification, 41–6, 49–50, 56; Thursdays in Black, 198, 206n1. See also ecumenism and the ecumenical movement; World Council of Churches assemblies World Council of Churches assemblies: in Busan, South Korea (2013), 49; in Canberra, 45; in Evanston (1954), 112; in Vancouver (1983), 42, 52 World Environment Day 2020, 150 World Evangelical Alliance, 36 World Federalist Association, 6, 26n28 World Health Organization, 136

World Methodist Council, 36 World Organization against Torture, 223 World Peace Award, 5 World Pentecostal Fellowship, 36 World Refugee and Migration Council, 135–45 World Student Christian Federation, 31, 114 World Synod of Catholic Bishops: Justice in the World, 154 Xi Jinping, 221 Yale University: Forum on Religion and Ecology, 149; Nouwen at, 83–4 Yamashita, Akiko, 54, 59 Yazidi refugees, 135–6 Yemen: Houthi forces in, 222 Yetman, Bertha, 3–12, 169–72 Yogyakarta Principles, 187–8 Young Men’s Christian Association, 31, 43, 114 Zaru, Jean, 59, 60