MD Litonjua

In 1901, before the official end of the Philippine-American War, the United States sent about 600 public schoolteachers to the Philippines aboard the US Army Transport Thomas to establish the Philippine educational system, patterned after that of the United States, with English as the medium of instruction. More teachers followed totaling about a thousand. Today, they are called in Philippine history the "Thomasites." The purpose was to bring the fruits of civilization to a nation benighted by 350 years of Catholic Spanish colonialism. My parents, born around the same time, benefited from the educational system established by the Americans. My father became an accountant, my mother a pharmacist and her two sisters an elementary school teacher and a high school teacher. An uncle who lived with them also became a high school teacher. So, it was very surprising to me when, as I started teaching in the 1980s, students would come to me tell me that they were the first in their families to attend college. There was at home a whole bookshelf of books and textbooks used by my aunts that I loved to peruse growing up.

I received my June-August 2024 issue of Brown Alumni Magazine, and I cursorily turned the pages as usual. But then an article, "Affirmative Action for Rich Kids," by Noble Brigham '24 and Jack Brook '19 caught my attention. They write: The Ivy League and its brethren-the highly selective private institutions known as Ivyplus-have always had the reputation of catering to the wealthy. But a 2023 study by Brown Economic Chair John H. Friedman reveals just how much of an advantage rich kids are likely to get when they apply to one of the eight Ivies or to Stanford, MIT, Duke, or the University of Chicago.. .. Friedman and his colleagues at the Opportunity Insights lab, Harvard's Raj Chetty and David J. Deming, found that children from very wealthy families are getting a clear admissions boost. The net effect: Ivy-plus schools are effective at ensuring rich and powerful families stay that way since leadership roles in the U.S. are disproportionately filled by their graduates.. .. And the study makes it clear that these rich kids are not more academically prepared. They're getting accepted because they have an edge in three key indices: legacy preferences, athletic recruitment, and nonacademic credentials like extracurricular and recommendation letters-none of which predict how well students do afterward. .. The research was based on tax records, standardized test scores, and anonymized internal admissions records from Ivy-plus schools. Participating universities were promised anonymity, and the study does not give findings for any schools individually.. ..

American democracy, it is now repeatedly pointed out, is fraying. Two political parties that can no longer work together, with one, the Republican Party, simply bent on opposing and destroying the other. The American voting population whose political affiliation has become their political identity, is also bent on following their party in opposing and destroying the other. The country is impossibly polarized, with one significant part riven by hatred, resentment, retribution. Above all else, the Republican Party has been completely captured by a nowconvicted fraudster and felon, who incessantly spews lies and conspiracies to hold the loyalty of his rabid followers.

There have been two great developments in Catholic Social Teaching: the preferential option for the poor and the idea of social sin. The preferential option of the poor is the vital lens through which to see social ills as primarily affecting the poor, and what it sees are not only personal sins, but sins embedded in social structures that inevitably affect individuals, especially the poor.

I arrived at Brown University in 1978 to earn a Ph.D. in Sociology. In the 1980 U.S. presidential election, one of our professors invited his classes to his house to watch the results of the election. I did not go, but my roommate, a fellow graduate student from Sudan, went. He returned after midnight, and I asked him what happened. Reagan won, he said, but why were some of the students crying? I do not know, I said. Next morning, I went to see the professor to say, "sorry I was not able to come," and to ask, "why were some students crying?" Because, he said, "half of them will not be retuning for the next semester."

My claim is not merely that violence breeds violence, but that a more sinister sort of symbiosis is at work here. Each party to such conflicts insists with great conviction that its opponents' actions are truly evil, while its own are merely expedient. It's a simple failure, but one that will cause no end of misery as long as each side is certain that the other embodies evil at its core.. . .

The ideology of neoliberalism has ruled the globe for more than forty years now. But what exactly is neoliberalism? What is the essence of neoliberalism, if you will? What is its core element that it spreads across the globe? For me and for many others, neoliberalism is the ideology of free markets propagated by Milton Friedman, which was embraced by Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom as they decried government and intended to free the market and let its magic work. Neoliberalism became globalized and reach its peak under Bill Clinton, after the fall of the Soviet Union, marking, it was asserted, the triumph of capitalism and the demise of socialism. It was the "Washington Consensus" for the global economy as corporations became its main economic actors, superintended by the international organizations of the IMF, the World Bank, and the World Trade organization. But it failed and reached a crisis in creating the financial crisis and the Great Recession of 2008, causing banks and companies to bankrupt, families to suffer the loss of their homes, and workers to be fired and lose their incomes. In the wake of the Great Recession, Gary Gerstle (2022), professor of American history at the University of Cambridge, has announced the fall of the neoliberal order, analogous to what he and Steve Fraser (1990) edited to show the end of the New Deal Order. But I now agree with Wendy Brown (2015, 2019), who teaches political science at the University of California, Berkeley, who argues that neoliberalism is not primarily about markets and economics, nor about anti-politics and anti-democracy. In the ruins of the stealth revolution that neoliberalism has undertaken is a form of rationality that has invaded all forms of human activity-economic, social, political, cultural, and even religious-the reduction of everything into commodities that have a price, and that, therefore, can be bought and sold, although she focuses on the undoing of the demos and the rise of antidemocratic politics in the ruins of neoliberalism.

Samuel Huntington (1991), professor of political science at Harvard University, discerned three waves of democracy in the late twentieth century. He defined a democratic wave as "a group of transitions from nondemocratic to democratic regimes that occur within a specific period of time and that significantly outnumber transitions in the opposite direction during that period of time."

As we near the end of the eleventh year of Pope Francis' papacy, and perhaps also near the end of his papacy, ecclesiastical vultures have begun circling around ready to pick on and shred his legacy. I (Litonjua 2024) have written several articles on Pope Francis. From those articles, I want to make clear for myself what the important contents of that legacy are. Vatican II.

University, for me, has written the most insightful, provocative, and challenging book, Christ Divided: Antiblackness as Corporate Vice, to confront the evil of white supremacy. Her first main contention is that the core of white supremacy-the ideas and ideologies, the attitudes and dispositions, the actions and practices, both collective and individual, that positions white people as intellectually, morally, and culturally superior persons-is

Being for or against Democrats or Republicans, is no longer just a political affiliation, but has become a political identity, such that parents, it is said, see to it that their children marry spouses with the same political identity. This is the main reason, according to Ezra Klein (2020: xiv), for our increasing toxic polarization, making our politics and political institutions dysfunctional, and ultimately threatening our democracy. "We are so locked into our political identities that there is virtually no candidate, no information, no condition, that can force us to change our minds. We will justify almost anything or anyone so long as it helps our side, and the result is a politics devoid of guardrails, standards, persuasion, or accountability." But a couple of points first:

I have been asked what I, as a Catholic theologian, thought of abortion. In the first place, I usually start to answer, I do not consider myself a professional theologian. Although I have a Licentiate in Sacred Theology, I am mostly interested in Catholic theology, I have an avocation for it, often reading and sometimes writing on theological matters. That said, I answered that I am a male, never been pregnant, never carried a fetus in my womb for nine months, never gave birth to a baby, never took care of a baby in the crucial first years of his or her life. So I usually say that it has to be the decision of the woman, in consultation with her doctor and her husband/partner, if available. In another context, Pope Francis said, "Who am I to judge?" In this context, I also say, "Who am I to judge?" I can only wonder at the difficult circumstances that lead a woman to terminate a pregnancy. An abortion, for me, is always a human tragedy. I agree with Bill Clinton, although he was later pilloried for it, that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. The topic of abortion came back to mind, when the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated Roe v. Wade, but more persistently when women across the nation let out an outcry against the decision. I live in Ohio which has become more and more conservative, more and more Republican, and more and more Trumpian. Republican candidates for elective office glory in claiming that they have been endorsed by Trump, and it has become a successful gambit. JD Vance whom Senator Mitt Romney stated he least respected, I suppose, for his complete turnaround in regard to Trump, is a case in point. Vance was last among Republican candidates, but after Trump endorsed him, he was elected senator. Contrary to what Lt. Provenza of TV's Major Crimes said, he kissed ass and the ass kissed back.

Justin Mclellan (2024) reports in La Croix International that Cardinal Raniero Cantalamessa, preacher of the papal household, offered a Lenten meditation for members of the Roman Curia and Vatican officials, in which he lamented that "Western theology risks becoming an abstract and rationalized conversation among academics rather than a tool for nourishing the faith of God's people. Theology, above all in the West, has increasingly moved away from the power of the Spirit to rely on human wisdom. Modern rationalism has demanded that Christianity presents its message dialectically, subjecting it modern research and discussion that are philosophically acceptable. But the danger inherent in this approach to theology is that God becomes objectified, he becomes an object which we talk about, not a subject with whom and in whose presence we talk. A purely rationalistic form of theology makes it become more and more a dialogue with the academic elite of the moment and less and less nourishment for the faith of God's people."

The evangelist St. Matthew (28: 16-20) ends his Gospel with the Great Commission: "The eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which [the risen] Jesus had ordered them. When they saw him, they worshiped, but they doubted. Then Jesus approached and said to them, 'All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.'"

In the study of what was then called the Third World, the first insight was to recognize that countries of the Third World-the underdeveloped countries of Latin America, Asia and Africa, with the exception of a few, like Thailand, then called Siam-shared a common history of colonialism. Because of colonialism, these undeveloped countries became underdeveloped. Over and above everything else, therefore, it was of the highest importance that we examine what colonialism did to these countries. First, colonialism was a rule by force and the colonized country also responded with force. Colonial histories are studded with violence and terrorism by both colonizers and colonized. Second, the social structures of the colonized countryeconomic, political, and cultural-were restructured to serve the needs of the colonizer at the expense of the colonized. Their economies exported their products, their politics were populated by collaborators, and their cultures were degraded. Third, following the insights of the evolutionary sciences, at independence, the formerly colonized countries were deformed at birth, their cultures damaged, because their institutions were created in colonial environments to which they were made to adapt through colonial selection. It would be a long time before they could own their histories, their societies, and their future. In fact, colonialism, the key destructive force of their peoples, has continued to wreak havoc on them up to the present.

Lumen Gentium, Vatican II's Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, stipulated the definition and mission of the Church as the People of God, definition ad intra, and as the sacrament-sign and instrument-of the Reign of God in society and the world, a reign of justice, love, and peace, mission ad extra. My concern (Litonjua 2022a) was to say that the Catholic family, the Catholic school, the Catholic college or university, the Catholic hospital, the Catholic charitable organization, and any Catholic institution are portions of God's people and are charged with being sacraments in their own ways and within their own purviews of the Reign of God of justice, love, and peace in their societies. This is the standard against which the Catholicity of any institution that bears the name Catholic should be measured and judged. Richard R. Gaillardetz takes a different tack. He was professor of Catholic Systematic Theology at Boston College and, to my mind, was in the process of inheriting the mantle of Richard P. Mcbrien as the foremost American Catholic ecclesiologist before his untimely death at age 65 from pancreatic cancer in 2023.

Church. "I had to sit on the very same chair that Galileo (1564-1642) and Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) had sat on," Boff (Pongratz-Lippitt 2017) recalled, "and I was put through a proper canonical and juridical process." This is surprising given the fact that Ratzinger and Boff were together at Munich where Boff received his doctorate, and Ratzinger financially helped Boff publish his dissertation. Boff eventually left his Franciscan religious order and the priestly ministry. But he continued to teach and write prolifically. I went back to reread Church: Charism and Power, because I heard echoes of Boff's book, while I was reading the Synthesis Report, A Synodal Church in Mission, of the First Session of the Extraordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, held at the Vatican, October 4 to 29, 2023. Church: Charism and Power The English edition of Boff's book (New York: Crossroad, 1985) I have, has an editor's note about the controversy surrounding it. On May 15, 1984, it notes, Boff received a letter from Ratzinger summoning him to Rome for an interview regarding his book. Then on September 3, Ratzinger released "Instruction on Certain Aspects of Liberation Theology," whose purpose was "to draw attention. .. to deviations, and risks of deviations, damaging to the faith and to Christian living, that are brought about by certain forms of liberation theology which use, in an insufficiently critical manner, concepts borrowed from various currents of Marxist thought." Ratzinger's bete noire.

Social structures and culture are the two emergent phenomena of group behavior. They are called "emergent phenomena," in the same manner that wetness is the emergent phenomenon of the combination H 2 O. By themselves, hydrogen and oxygen are gases; the combination H 2 O is liquid, and therefore has the property of being wet. In other words, a group-not a mere collection of people, but a collection of people who interact with each other on the basis of common norms-is not only the sum of the individuals who make up the group. The group is more than the individuals who make up the group. That more is social structure and culture. Social structures are the statuses, roles, hierarchical organizations, and bureaucracies that groups develop to achieve the ends they set up for themselves. Culture refers to the language, norms, worldviews, and stories of origin and destiny that characterize their group life. Social structures make societies similar to each other, while cultures render societies different from each other. For example, the social institution of marriage and the family are found in all societies. But marriage in the West, when romantic love became its basis, is monogamous, one partner to another at one time, either for a lifetime or serially, because of divorce. Marriage among Muslims allows four wives for one husband, called polygyny, which originated in the desire to adopt and care for the many orphans during Muhammad's and his wife's lifetime. Marriage among the Nyinbas is fraternal polyandry, one woman with several brothers (Levine 1988 and Goldstein 1987), primarily to preserve the ownership of agricultural land in the dire and harsh conditions on the border of Tibet and Nepal. While no society practices group marriage as a cultural norm, the most famous was the sexual code of the Oneida Community in 19 th century New York (Klaw 1993) in imitation of the first communities of Christians who shared everything that they had (Acts 2:44).

Orbis Books recently came out with the 50 th anniversary edition of A Theology of Liberation by Gustavo Gutierrez, which published its first English edition in 1973, the original in Spanish appearing in 1971, and its second 15 th anniversary edition in 1988, with emendations by Gutierrez himself. Michael E. Lee, professor of theology at Fordham University with affiliation in Fordham's Latin American and Latino Studies, has a long and helpful introduction to the 50 th anniversary edition in which he revisits liberation, theology, the emergence of the book, and its legacy which includes Joseph Ratzinger's investigation of Gutierrez work. He does not elaborate, however, on Ratzinger's efforts to persuade the bishops of Peru to issue a

The title of the book and my review of it comes from Hannah Arendt's Men in Dark Times (1968), "dark times" itself being originally from Bertolt Brecht, in which she expresses her belief that "Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination may come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time-span that was given them on earth." Among the men and women in their lives and works she discussed were Angelo

Liberal democracy, we are told, is under attack. Liberal democracy is in crisis. Wherein lies the crisis? In democracy or in liberalism. Can there be an illiberal democracy, or an undemocratic liberalism? Democracy is majority rule, but the majority cannot do whatever it pleases. It is circumscribed by liberalism which is the defense of inalienable human rights. Because the majority achieved electoral victory, it cannot, for example, reestablish segregation, abrogate women's right of suffrage, or treat migrants inhumanly and inhumanely. Liberalism made democratic rule more egalitarian, granting the rights of suffrage to men without property, to women, to former slaves. Thus, we enjoy and glory in liberal democracy. The danger to liberal democracy comes from two fronts: from the imperfections, limitations, and perversions of both democracy and liberalism, from a populism that emerges, not from the bottom-up, from the concerns, complaints, and grievances of the public, but originates with those at the top, whose aim is to mobilize the masses to conserve and augment their elite privileges, and from a neoliberalism that has extolled an unfettered market without any juridical guardrails as the prime organizer of individual consumerist lives, of marriage and family choices, of societies in their economic, social, and political aspects. Populism leads to authoritarian rule, and neoliberalism creates tremendous inequality.

attempting conversion to pharmaceuticals and whose company had formulated a tobacco-based "dietary supplement." He wanted McDonnell to have his pills undergo clinical trials, which McDonnell tried to do all the while he and his wife were receiving gifts, cash, loans, vacations, and other luxuries.

The greatest charge against Pope Francis coming from the conservative and traditionalist wings of the Catholic Church is that not only does he not emphasize enough the traditional teachings on morality, such as abortion and homosexuality, but that he is changing the Church's teachings that have been constantly taught as consistent with Scripture and with longstanding Catholic tradition, like the indissolubility of marriage and the morality of capital punishment. Such criticisms encouraged me to look into what I found to be the constant dialectically dynamic magisterium of Pope Francis. John XXIII In his allocution opening Vatican II which has come to be known by its first three words,

The prominent Catholic moral theologian, Charles E. Curran (2016), in his initial reaction to the papacy of Francis, latches on two ideas emphasized and since then reiterated by Pope Francis, the first Jesuit pope and the first pope to hail from the Third World/Global South: poverty and mercy. Pope Francis wants a poor Church for the poor characterized by mercy. For a long time, the name of God was fear: God is a judge who rewards the good and punishes evil. Thus, Catholicism came to be associated with sin and guilt. Then, the name of God became love: God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten Son. Now, according to Pope Francis (2016), the name of God is mercy: Go and sin no more. Thus, Curran (2016: 264-66) writes: "Pope Francis sees the good news of God's love for us primarily in terms of God's mercy.. . .

The End of Power (Basic Books, 2013), in which he examined the way power was decaying across a while range of human institutions. Technology, demography, urbanization, information, economic and political change, globalization, and changed mindsets conspired to fragment and dilute power, making it easier to gain but harder to use and easier to lose. In other words, the form of power-limited in scope, accountable to the people, and based on a spirit of lawful competition-which was at the center of the great expansion in prosperity and security the world saw after the end of World War II was in decay. At the turn of the century, unsettling transformations began to shake that postwar settlement.

A dictatorship, in the Roman Republic, where the term originated, meant a temporary grant of absolute power to a leader to handle an emergency. Today, the term is used to refer to any nondemocratic government; it has become synonymous with authoritarianism and autocracy. It is rule by one person over society.