Paradigm Shift 2013 in corporate social responsibility

An email I received today from a certain Mayanja Dani:

We are organizing an international conference on the paradigm shift 2013 in corporate social responsibility. I have looked at your cv and feel that you could be resourceful at dispensation of the following themes:
1. From Religion to Spiritual Wholesomeness; Doing Good and Healing the World. The paper should be all round covering problems of    Environment, Poverty, Corruption etc. and proposing the way forward for the world.
2. Corporate Social Responsibility paradigm shift for "The New Economic Order".
The Conference shall be held in Uganda in February-March, 2013 at an International facility called Mweya Safari Lodge within the Queen Elizabeth National Park. We would be happy if we could network together for Corporate and Academia participation in the Conference both from India and other parts of the World. Could this be a chance for us to cause a paradigm shift to save human kind?  Waiting for your urgent reply.

What to make of this? I don't know.

But the topic is certainly interesting from a Lonergan point of view.

What comes to mind is:

1. The economics.
2. The basic belief in the Healing that has been given. [The invitation mentions, in fact, Doing Good and Healing the World. The slightly negative element is "From Religion to Spiritual Wholeness."] The economics would form part of the Creating component in the Healing and Creating. [The New Economic Order will be based on an attempt to truly understand the basic processes, before attempting to give solutions. A slogan can be: let us hear all parties. Let us not ignore possible Wisdom.]
3. Some matter from The Apostolate of the Jesuit in the Modern World, which I used for the article on the priesthood.

The whole point will be to do what we can while not lamenting the world. The not lamenting comes from the fact that we believe, or else we make, a basic option that Healing has been given.

Part of Healing will be faith, hope, charity. Charity involves forgiveness - the element that was missing in Shimon Peres' speech on 31 Dec 2012. Forgiveness as global strategy. We have great examples before us: Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr, Mandela, King Hussein of Jordan. Make use of the work also of Yoder.

One of the tasks will be to work out a strategy that will take into account personal and group biases (which include national interests as well as those of multinational corporations), while trying to handle and circumvent the general bias of common sense.

From my paper, "Priesthood and Identity in the Secular World":

Bernard Lonergan has an article containing a very interesting proposal for the ministry of the Jesuit priest in the modern world.[1] A principal duty of priests, Lonergan says, is to lead and teach the people of God. But all leadership and teaching takes place in the context of one’s times, and the times – Lonergan is writing some 40 years ago – are marked by modernity, secularism and self-destructiveness. The modern Jesuit, Lonergan goes on, has to (1) overcome vestiges of his classicist upbringing; (2) discerningly accept the gains of modernity; and (3) work out strategies for dealing with secularist views on religion and with concomitant distortions in our notion of human knowledge, our apprehension of human reality, and our organization of human affairs. Just how such strategies are to be worked out is an enormous question, but Lonergan offers the following hints: such a strategy will be a creative project emerging from an understanding of a situation and a grasp of what can be done about it; it will not be a static project set forth once and for all, but an ongoing one, constantly revised in the light of feedback from its implementation; it will be not a single ongoing project but a set of ongoing processes, “constantly reported to some central clearinghouse.” This central clearinghouse will have the twofold function of drawing attention to conflicts between separate parts; and keeping all parts informed both of what has been achieved elsewhere and of what has been tried and found wanting.[2]

Lonergan's thoughts here will have to be completed / corrected / qualified with what he says in Method in Theology, esp. in the last chapter. 

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[1] B. Lonergan, "The Response of the Jesuit as Priest and Apostle in the Modern World," A Second Collection, ed. William F.J. Ryan and Bernard J. Tyrrell (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1974) 165-214.

[2] Lonergan 183-187.

A philosophical Christology?

Marchesi, Giovanni. "Il Cristo dei filosofi: E' possibile una cristologia filosofica?" La Civilta' Cattolica (1991) II, quaderno 3384, 571-583. [I have copied only the first page. The volume is in the Ratisbonne Library.]

The critical problem

Encyclopedias and dictionaries of philosophy do not usually contain any item under the heading 'critical problem.' Here, below, however, is a review of a book on the Critical Problem as handled by various professors in the Roman ecclesiastical universities in the 1980s.

Shardella, A. Review of The Critical Problem of Knowledge, ed. Giovanni Blandino and Aniceto Molinaro. Rome: Herder / Pontifical Lateran University, 1989. La Civiltà Cattolica Anno 142, III, quaderni 3385-3390 (1991) 325-326.  

Interpretation, violence and gift

Heidegger's phrase keeps coming to mind this morning: "Man is the violent in the midst of the overpowering." I think the phrase is from What is Metaphysics? and the context is interpretation. Interpretation - or understanding - is an act of violence, and the Overpowering here is Being. There seems to be a double violence here, or at the very least, Being does not seem benevolent.

Lonergan would, of course, think of the event of understanding as a happening, a pati, something not completely under our control, something that cannot be commanded by an act of will, though it can certainly be made more or less probable by what we do or fail to do. Understanding and interpretation here is, therefore, something that we are gifted with, something we receive, something that we are not masters of. A quite different approach, though one that certainly finds echoes in Heidegger's lifelong efforts to decentre the subject and to pinpoint or evoke the complex way in which the human being exists and acts.

Gift is emerging as a great theme in the contemporary West, thanks to the work of Marcel Mauss, but also thanks to John Paul II's stress on oblative self-sacrificing love. If life is gift, then the deepest meaning of being is self-giving. (I need to check the Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology for other echoes.)

But is there a streak of violence in proportionate being at least? Nature red in tooth and claw, as someone has said?

And is there a way of connecting gift with freedom, the type of freedom that John of the Cross talks about when he says, Ni temer las fieras, ni coher las flores? The freedom that characterizes Jesus, walking tall in the midst of the pains and the joys of human life? 

Note taking

Sertillanges: don't take too many notes, jot down the essentials. 

Driving it underground

"rationalism did not destroy myth but drove it underground, degraded it from Paradise Lost to South Pacific, from Aphrodite to the pin-up girl." [Lonergan 1964 Georgetown PB 355 6.]

This is related to the previous blog entry on pinning things down in words, images and affectivity. The human need for myth going underground - into the psyche. Contemporary advertisement as a new form of myth. 

Pinning things down in words

An amazing and not very well known sentence from Lonergan:

"It would seem that the human psyche floats with the weightlessness of images on the caprices of affectivity and aggressivity until it can pin things down in words." [Lonergan 1964 Georgetown PB 355 5.]

The significance then of language: from elemental meaning which is diffuse and vague, to clarity ... But also to loss of power compensated by gain in a certain control ...