Justice Class 19 | Tuesday/Friday, October 11 & 14, 2016

Justice Class 19 | Tuesday/Friday, October 11 & 14, 2016

• What? 
• Introduce the Spiral of Violence
• Introduce Semester Project: Envisioning Justice
• Why? A turn to systems, corporate evil, structure injustice, etc. How to identify and respond.

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Always check HAIKU for work & grades, this BLOG for what we do in class. Contact me if you need help.
Always keep all work in your shared Theology folder. 

DUE TODAY: N/A

DUE NEXT CLASS: 

• EDPuzzle Part I, Spiral of Violence. Due for Periods C/D before class on Thursday 10/13/16; For Period G before class on Friday 10/14/16. 
• Answer all questions.
• Part II will be assigned before the weekend. 

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ARTICLE OF INTEREST:

• 2016-OCT-01 | NYT Kristof | When Whites Just Don’t Get It, Part 7
• 2016-OCT-05 | NYT | Can Women Be Trusted on Abortion?
• Articles may be done as a Justice In The News work. See Haiku for information about how to do this...

Espacio: Living life from the inside-out.

• Today, most of us try to find personal and individual freedom even as we remain inside of structural boxes and a system of consumption that we are then unable or unwilling to critique. Our mortgages, luxuries, and privileged lifestyles control our whole future. Whoever is paying our bills and giving us security and status determines what we can and cannot say or even think. Self-serving institutions that give us our security, status, or identity are considered “too big to fail” and are invariably beyond judgment from the vast majority of people. Evil can hide in systems much more readily than in individuals. [1]
• When Jesus and John’s Gospel used the term “the world,” they did not mean the earth, creation, or civilization, which Jesus clearly came to love and save (see John 12:47). They were referring to idolatrous systems and institutions that are invariably self-referential and “always passing away” (see 1 Corinthians 7:31). Francis and Clare showed us it is possible to change the system not by negative attacks (which tend to inflate the ego), but simply by quietly moving to the side and doing it better!
• References: [1] See Richard Rohr, Spiral of Violence: The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (CAC: 2008), CD and MP3 download.

RESPECT LIFE ESSAY CONTEST: See Handout from Mr. O'Connor

SENIOR FORMAL DIPLOMA NAMES: SEE LIST. Please update/add your name now!

SPRIAL OF VIOLENCE: INTRODUCTION OF CONCEPT [10 minutes]

• PERSPECTIVE (More from Rohr)


• Jesus’ teachings seem to have been understood rather clearly during the first few hundred years after his death and resurrection. Values like non-participation in war, simple living, and love of enemies were common among his early followers. For example, the Didache, written around AD 90, calls readers to “share all things with your brother; and do not say that they are your own. For if you are sharers in what is imperishable, how much more in things which perish.” [1] At this time, Christianity was countercultural, untouched by empire, rationalization, and compromise.
• However, when the imperial edict of AD 313 elevated Christianity to a privileged position in the Roman Empire, the church increasingly accepted, and even defended, the dominant social order, especially concerning war, money, and class. Morality became individualized and largely sexual. Formal Christianity slowly lost its free and alternative vantage point, which is probably why what we now call “religious life” began, and flourished, after 313. People went to the edges of the church and took vows of poverty, living in satellites that became “little churches,” without ever formally leaving the big church.
• If you look at texts in the hundred years preceding 313, it was unthinkable that a Christian would fight in the army. The army was killing Christians; Christians were being persecuted. By the year 400, the entire army had become Christian, and Christians were killing the “pagans.” In a two-hundred-year period, we went from being complete outsiders to directing the inside! Once you are inside, you have to defend your power and your privilege.
• It is during this transition that people like St. Anthony of the Desert, John Cassian, Evagrius Ponticus, and the early monks went off to Egypt, Syria, and the deserts of Palestine. They critiqued the self-protective, privileged lifestyle of mainline Christianity by utterly leaving it! Soon they learned and taught a different way of seeing called “contemplation.” From that point through the modern period, most governments assumed that Christian monks and priests could not, or should not, wage war or kill others.
• Why this split between two brands of Christianity? Why were some expected to take the Sermon on the Mount seriously, while the rest were exempt?  Even as recently as the Vietnam War, laity could kill, while the clergy could not. As a Franciscan, I received an immediate draft deferment in the 1960s. When the Gospel is heard and understood at its deepest level, Christians cannot and will not kill or wage war
• References:
• [1] Didache: The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, Chapter 4.8.
• Adapted from Richard Rohr, Dancing Standing Still: Healing the World from a Place of Prayer (Paulist Press: 2014), 47-51.

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CLASS ACTIVITY [15 minutes]

• FOR PERIODS C & D
• Google search the term, "Spiral of Violence"
• Find a unique image & statement. No duplicates. Work must be serious and contribute to understanding the theme.
• Take what you found and place it in your assigned Google Presentation Slide


• PERIOD C PRESENTATION
• PERIOD D PRESENTATION

• FOR PORIOD G
• Google search Bob Dylan's song lyrics.
• Find a song that examines some social issue. Each person should find a different song.
• Read the song lyrics and find those lines that best express the social issue he is addressing. Write those verses into your Google Presentation Slide
• Also note the year the song was written
• Include the links you used.

• PERIOD G PRESENTATION

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ENVISIONING JUSTICE PROJECT | LINK

• Introduce Project 
• TUESDAY 10/11/16 & FRIDAY 10/14/16: 
• Create a Google Document. What do you title it? 
• START writing your definition of justice and include the 
• Direct quotes & Parenthetical Citations to class readings, 
• Service Internships, 
• Goals & Criteria, and 
• Your election year proposition/ballot initiative... 
• Progress will be graded on Monday 10/17 & Tuesday 10/18/16.

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OPPORTUNITY for PREIOD G

SF Film society is screening the Senegalese film Black Girl on Friday 11/4 at 11am. Including travel time, students would miss part of F period, Advisory, and lunch, returning during G period. I'd love to offer this to as many students as possible across grade levels and schools. Do you see any potential conflicts?

Interested in collaborating? Themes that the film raises include immigration, racism, classism, colonialism. Students are also able to view related art at the museum. Read on for the plot of the film.

Ms. Heather Wells
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This year's presentation will take place in collaboration with SFMOMA as part of the Modern Cinema Series. We will be screening Black Girl, by Ousmane Sembène. Along with providing an opportunity for students to practice their listening and comprehension skills, we also felt it would be a perfect film to help your students explore the current immigration climate of France. After the screening, school groups will be able to explore the museum exhibits. We will have some specific pieces from French artists to seek out as well as study guide materials.

In Black Girl, Sembène transforms a deceptively simple plot-about a young Senegalese woman who moves to France to work for a wealthy white couple and finds that life in their small apartment becomes a figurative and literal prison-into a complex, layered critique on the lingering colonialist mindset of a supposedly postcolonial world. Featuring a moving central performance by Mbissine Thérèse Diop, Black Girl is a harrowing human drama as well as a radical political statement-and one of the essential films of the 1960s.

Program Runtime: 65 min for film + any additional time spent in the galleries
Program Note: very brief nudity and brief scene of suicide attempt
Recommended Grades: 8th - 12th
Suggested Subjects: African Studies, Arts/Media, French