Being way overdue to get on with weeding my neglected garden, I'll recommend what Sr. Simone Campbell had to say in the Global Sisters Report as a good thing to contemplate.
Campbell said politicians and voters — after informing their consciences — need to make "prudential judgments" about how to apply the church's teaching to politics. So do sisters.
For example, Network recently came out in support of the Equality Act, which would strengthen bans on discrimination against LGBT people by adding "sexual orientation" and "gender identity" to the definition of "sex" in federal civil rights laws. The bishops opposed the bill.
Network also disagreed with the U.S. bishops' conference on the Affordable Care Act, arguing that the bill adequately forbade federal funding of abortion, a position the bishops later adopted when they opposed repeal of the law.
"We've always been here," she said, adding that many progressives have "ceded ground" to the religious right by not publicly connecting their faith and politics. She said some Democrats are "nervous" about religion because they associate it with conservatism.
"Now, what we're having to do is claw back what was always there and claim it in the public space," she said, noting that 2020 presidential candidate and mayor of South Bend Pete Buttigieg, with whom she met while in town, does a good job of talking about religious values.
The biggest issue facing the country, she said, is economic justice.
"Income and wealth disparity is sucking the life out of our nation," she said. "And right now, the approach of the Republican Party is to shift as much money to the top as possible."
Still, Campbell said she believes many voters for President Donald Trump may feel their values are being "pushed out" of the cultural conversation, and she strives for "radical acceptance" of those with whom she disagrees politically.
"If I'm at odds with the God in them, I'm at odds with the God in me," she said.
Update:
And more practically, the article continues with this useful advice.
Contemplative lobbying
In two presentations during the three-day event, Campbell shared how her own contemplative practice of daily meditation helps her in the sometimes-discouraging work of advocating for social justice in U.S. policies. She suggested that contemplation is essential to build "prophetic communities" that can work for the common good.
For her, political lobbying is contemplative because it involves "listening deeply, being curious and asking questions" as well as "being willing to risk my preconceptions."
The contemplative life "opens me up to other people's suffering," Campbell said. "And the openness to suffering is where the heart springs into action."
"It is only in community that we can bear the pain of the world," Campbell added, noting that her religious community helps her to stay grounded and able to see how she is "only a piece of the whole."
Such communities that "nurture the prophetic imagination" allow people to "touch the pain of the world as real" and be with that pain without immediately trying to fix it, she said, drawing on work by Protestant theologian Walter Brueggemann.
The practical, what will sustain you and keep you going is of infinite value as the theoretical is almost always useless, except to get you esteem in the do-nothing world of academia and scribbleage.
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