Easter in Ordinary

Image courtesy of PingNews.com  (CC 2.0) Throughout the media, I have been reading retrospectives on the "Financial Crisis of 2008," occasioned by the 10-year anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers. It strikes me as odd that the touchstone event is so removed from those most adversely affected by the calamity. While I did not know it at the time, the seeds were sown many years prior. The first harvest of destruction was felt by America's vulnerable communities long before the earthquake on Wall Street. Beginning in 2001, I was an associate pastor at St. Stephen Parish in South Bend, IN. Fr. David Porterfield, C.S.C. and I had great hopes for how we could serve South Bend's west side. Gregorio Chavez approached me about opportunities to acquire abandoned properties adjacent to the parish through the county tax sale. Properties that had fallen behind on taxes were available through auction. Year by year, the lists became longer, growing as a many-paged su

When purchasing, I have often had my suspicions about online reviews of items. Now, I have a front-row seat for the scams associated. Opening my email this morning, Amazon sent me 20 "Thank you" emails for products that I have never purchased nor reviewed. All the reviews were written for relatively new products on the Amazon website. All the reviews were written between 2:14 a.m. and 2:46 a.m. (Central Time) when I was fast asleep. I have notified Amazon. The customer service agent said that the information was relayed "to the team trained to handle this scenario." The agent indicated that I should hear back in one to two business days. If a customer cannot trust the reviews (likely instigated by unscrupulous vendors), how can a customer trust a product? I will continue to update this post based on the actions taken by Amazon. Update #1: So far, Amazon's customer service is not living up to my previous experiences of them. A process was undertaken that

Wrestling with inequality shapes much of current political discourse, it seems, at home and abroad. If you pay attention, you have heard a great deal about growing pay and wealth disparities, the Gini coefficient , and other sundry items, in a growing number of articles and books. The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die by Professor Keith Payne of UNC-Chapel Hill is an important contribution to this growing bundle of literature. Angus Deaton's The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality  established a powerful set of insights around income and life-expectancy, that health and wealth are two measures of quality of life, from the perspective of the economic sciences. Payne adds immense depth from his personal research and that of others in the field of psychology and neuroscience. Both Deaton (a Nobel Prize-winner) and Payne are fine scholars, and these two books are both eminently readable. Both have important scholarly ci

It's a phrase of Mexican origin, I'm told:  " Más sabe el diablo por viejo que por diablo ." It translates to "The devil knows more because he is old than because he is the devil." Often, proverbs in our native tongue do not surprise us as they are so common. We may not think twice about an expression like "The apple does not fall far from the tree," but its use in another language requires an explanation of what the phrase implies. Because a phrase is well-known to us, it may not captures us quite the way that one from a second language might. Sometimes expressions are so particular that they only can be understood in a particular context. [Another wonderful Mexican phrase, " No me cae el veinte ," refers to a 20 peso coin getting stuck in a pay phone. The adage is a means of expressing that the speaker does not understand a concept that the other has shared-- just as the coin is stuck in the payphone and one cannot yet proceed with

Friends, I wrote for Catholic Relief Service's ethical trade blog earlier this week on the anniversary of the Rana Plaza disaster. The text is very much in keeping with the spirit of this blog site. The post on CRS is entitled:   That We May Know Easter Joy: Lament for Rana Plaza . It brings together authentically, I believe, my personal spirituality with that of my work at The Human Thread campaign. Please, feel free to comment here about the writing.

Between now and Black Friday (Nov. 25), The Human Thread calls for sending postcards to the CEOs of Macy’s and Kohl’s in support of a living wage at the sites where our clothes are made. I'd be grateful for your help. When we visit a supermarket, we can purchase organic and fair trade items. When we visit an auto dealer, we can buy a hybrid. Some chains build their identity and customer base by offering those options. We know that the hybrid and the organic, fair trade items may cost us a bit more, but we are willing to pay for them for a broader benefit. Except for a few niche clothing items sold in a few boutiques, as of yet, no major chain sells clothing sourced in other countries that is fair trade. But we know that most of it comes from places we read on our labels: Bangladesh, China, India, Vietnam, Honduras, Mexico. Pope Francis has called the wages paid those workers: “slave labor.” Given the woeful wages in garment-producing countries, did the workers who made