Book Review: essays by William Sloane Coffin
I had been looking for a romance and I finally found it.
"The Heart is a Little to the Left" is a series of sermons and essays "on public morality" given by William Sloane Coffin in the 90's. The thrust of the book is to focus more on justice for the needy, to love like Christ loved, to remember "if you want peace, work for justice."
I'm really intrigued by the concept of "justice". Sometimes he means "if you wouldn't throw a man out of the army for falling in love with a woman, don't throw him out for falling in love with a man." Equal rights without reference to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation: that makes sense to me. I can get behind that.
But then he gets into the "social justice" angle, where he bemoans that 26% of people on welfare have learning disabilities, which he phrases with an implication that they would be fixable with enough money. I'd bet that 26% have (largely hereditary) substance abuse problems and another 26% were brought up without a decent work ethic through no fault of their own, too. His solution is a bit nebulous, I wasn't sure I got it, but I think he wants more money spent on education and drug treatment programs and more job training, too, to help keep people out of prison. As lenses go, this one is covered in vaseline. It's all very romantic. He quotes Saint Paul quite a lot: "Now abide faith, hope, love, these three: and the greatest of these is love." and "Make love your aim."
As I said, I'm intrigued. I believe in the politics of unity with diversity. I think the particular group we belong to is subsumed by the fact that we're first of all Human. All God's children, if you will. I like the idea of treating people justly, which for me includes not buying things at Wal*mart because the people who produce those goods are getting an exploitive wage and the externalities of pollution and resource depletion are not adequately priced into the goods.
But I wonder: what does it mean to "give" people "good jobs"? I've just got done analyzing whether it makes sense to pay a receptionist - a person who is pure overhead - more than $13/hour. If the work she produces is not of value to anyone at the price she is charging, who is supposed to be "giving" her this "good job"?
William Sloane Coffin's father was a landlord in NYC in the Depression who kindly did not collect rents from tenants who could not pay. He "gave them" a decent place to live. Very heart-warming. Except then he accidentally dropped dead in 1933, leaving a wife and two young children without the resources to support themselves anymore. I'm not saying the Dad should have hoarded his wealth for his own children, but just that the burden of "giving" fell accidentally more on his family than he intended. That's sort of the way of these things, actually: I find it difficult to stop giving when people have come to expect me to give, too. The endless hunger for someone to give them more can never be sated. There is no "enough".
This is what Christ expected: the rich should give up everything and follow them. He means it literally, too: the fishermen in Galilee should drop their nets and let their families starve to follow Christ.
But I know about double-entry bookkeeping, and Newtonian physics, and basic macro-economics, too. I know that for every action there is a reaction; the money spent in one place is not spent in another, the people leaving to go serve Christ are not doing something else that might have served Christ better, the people being "given" a good job are keeping people who would have EARNED a good job from doing it.
Social justice is a pretty thorny issue. But at least I finally got to read my romance.
"The Heart is a Little to the Left" is a series of sermons and essays "on public morality" given by William Sloane Coffin in the 90's. The thrust of the book is to focus more on justice for the needy, to love like Christ loved, to remember "if you want peace, work for justice."
I'm really intrigued by the concept of "justice". Sometimes he means "if you wouldn't throw a man out of the army for falling in love with a woman, don't throw him out for falling in love with a man." Equal rights without reference to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation: that makes sense to me. I can get behind that.
But then he gets into the "social justice" angle, where he bemoans that 26% of people on welfare have learning disabilities, which he phrases with an implication that they would be fixable with enough money. I'd bet that 26% have (largely hereditary) substance abuse problems and another 26% were brought up without a decent work ethic through no fault of their own, too. His solution is a bit nebulous, I wasn't sure I got it, but I think he wants more money spent on education and drug treatment programs and more job training, too, to help keep people out of prison. As lenses go, this one is covered in vaseline. It's all very romantic. He quotes Saint Paul quite a lot: "Now abide faith, hope, love, these three: and the greatest of these is love." and "Make love your aim."
As I said, I'm intrigued. I believe in the politics of unity with diversity. I think the particular group we belong to is subsumed by the fact that we're first of all Human. All God's children, if you will. I like the idea of treating people justly, which for me includes not buying things at Wal*mart because the people who produce those goods are getting an exploitive wage and the externalities of pollution and resource depletion are not adequately priced into the goods.
But I wonder: what does it mean to "give" people "good jobs"? I've just got done analyzing whether it makes sense to pay a receptionist - a person who is pure overhead - more than $13/hour. If the work she produces is not of value to anyone at the price she is charging, who is supposed to be "giving" her this "good job"?
William Sloane Coffin's father was a landlord in NYC in the Depression who kindly did not collect rents from tenants who could not pay. He "gave them" a decent place to live. Very heart-warming. Except then he accidentally dropped dead in 1933, leaving a wife and two young children without the resources to support themselves anymore. I'm not saying the Dad should have hoarded his wealth for his own children, but just that the burden of "giving" fell accidentally more on his family than he intended. That's sort of the way of these things, actually: I find it difficult to stop giving when people have come to expect me to give, too. The endless hunger for someone to give them more can never be sated. There is no "enough".
This is what Christ expected: the rich should give up everything and follow them. He means it literally, too: the fishermen in Galilee should drop their nets and let their families starve to follow Christ.
But I know about double-entry bookkeeping, and Newtonian physics, and basic macro-economics, too. I know that for every action there is a reaction; the money spent in one place is not spent in another, the people leaving to go serve Christ are not doing something else that might have served Christ better, the people being "given" a good job are keeping people who would have EARNED a good job from doing it.
Social justice is a pretty thorny issue. But at least I finally got to read my romance.