“[The U.S. economy has] just become horribly unequal, unfair … and marked by a lot of selfishness and greed,” said Jeffrey Sachs, Ph.D., a well-known Columbia University economist focused on sustainability, at the first conference session on Oct. 5. “We need a guiding hand of values … And we’ve lost that a little bit in the United States over [the past few]decades.” 

The conference is centered around the Economy of Communion, a global movement inspired by the Roman Catholic Church that seeks to have people live and work in an integrated way, overcoming the gap between rich and poor by using business profits for the greater good. In an hour-long Zoom conversation, Sachs and fellow scholar Luigino Bruni, Ph.D., professor of economics at the Lumsa University in Rome and editor-in-chief of the International Review of Economics journal, discussed how U.S. businesses can spur social healing with the Economy of Communion as a guiding principle. 

For decades, the U.S. market has been steadily putting wealth into the pockets of the top 1%, including entrepreneurs like Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, said Sachs. The market has become unequal for many reasons, such as monopolization and the evolution of technology, which favors people with higher education and skills. 

To help combat the wealth gap, business leaders should ask themselves four key questions, said Sachs: Are their products unhealthy and/or addictive? Are their goods and services produced in a sustainable manner? Is their supply chain ethically and ecologically sound? Does their company pay their taxes? 

Sachs said that business leaders, especially those whose companies are doing financially well, should also accept higher corporation taxes that can provide basic resources for the poor. 

“This is the basic principle of the church, the universal destination of goods, that the Earth belongs to everybody, not just to the rich,” Sachs said. “That’s the Economy of Communion—that we understand that our community, which is very rich right now, is for everybody. And we shouldn’t stand in the way of ensuring that everybody can benefit. It is not an economy that’s made for a few multi gazillionaires to have all the wealth at the top and the rest of the people to be struggling.” 

This economic model is not socialism, said Bruni. 

“The Bible is very clear that all wealth belongs to God, and we are just managers, administrators of the common good,” Bruni said. 

The Economy of Communion was born in the Catholic tradition, but it is also a universal idea that can resonate with other faiths, said Bruni. He cited two iconic figures—Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.—who had an immeasurable impact on millions of people across the world. Even though they had different identities, what bonded them was their universal message and way of understanding life, he said. 

“The economy is a basis for very rich dialogue. It’s a matter of life, it’s a matter of everyday things,” Bruni said. “It’s a beautiful place for deep, interreligious and intercultural dialogue.” 

The conference “The Economy of Communion as Stakeholder Capitalism: Exploring Religion’s Evolving Influence on Business” is co-hosted by the Fordham School of Law and the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding. The month-long event will feature three more one-hour sessions each Tuesday, as well as two Thursday sessions for reflection and networking. The full schedule can be viewed here.

Herman, the first Rabin-Shvidler Joint Post-Doctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies, delivered his talk, “Legal Theory and Revelation: Jewish Law in an Islamic Milieu,” at the Lincoln Center campus.

He explored the competing philosophies of two of the most influential Jewish jurists and philosophers of the Middle Ages, Seʿadya ben Joseph Gaon and Moses Maimonides. The two, though living in different centuries and in different locations, engaged in a raging debate about whether laws should be interpreted strictly as they were revealed in the Torah, or whether they should be open to debate by contemporary leaders (known as Rabbinic tradition). In Western terms, Seʿadya’s philosophy would be aligned with originalist thinking, while Maimonides would interpret laws as a ‘living document.’

Both men permeated their writings with contemporary Islamic legal trends.

Seʿadya, Herman said, reconciled differences in tradition by drawing on techniques developed by early Muslims. Like his Muslim contemporaries, Seʿadya suggested that disagreements among friends were not genuine disputes. Instead, they reflected temporary misunderstandings, incomplete transmission, or even a misinterpretation on the part of future scholars.

One of Seʿadya’s students, for example, proposed that in the future, a rule that Jews pray three times on weekdays, four on the Sabbath, and five on the day of atonement might be misinterpreted to mean one need only pray three times a day (regardless of the day).

For his part, Maimonides asserted that God charged each generation with a dual responsibility. First they must faithfully transmit revealed laws, such as those handed down to the Jewish people by Moses, alongside man-made norms of earlier jurists. Then they must draw on both categories to produce new norms. Early scholars of Islam were likewise debating the words that Muhammad had received and had written in the Koran.

“Maimonides defined this activity as Qiyas, using the exact Arabic term that Seʿadya had associated with improper derivations from divine law [that Seʿadya had]associated with charism,” Herman said.

To Seʿadya, the Talmud constituted received tradition; to Maimonides, it was meant to be a subject of debate.

Some of the two jurist’s differences undoubtedly stemmed from the eras they lived in, said Herman. Seʿadya lived from 882-942 C.E. in Baghdad, where he headed an ancient Jewish academy, while Maimonides lived from 1138-1204 C.E. Each of them would have been influenced by their institutional positions, too. Given Seʿadya’s position in Baghdad, it is no surprise that he upheld the continuity of tradition. Conversely, Maimonides, who lived in what is now Spain, undertook to defend his independence from rabbinic authorities in Baghdad.

Both, however, would have been heavily influenced by Muhammad ibn Idrīs al-Shāfiʿī, a Palestinian-Arab Muslim theologian, writer, and scholar, who lived from 767 to 820 A.D. Shāfiʿī insisted that only revealed text, such as the Koran or certain oral traditions, constituted acceptable legal sources.

“By putting Seʿadya and Maimonides in dialogue with Islamic legal thought, we can better understand their theories on their own terms, why their assertions were compelling to them and their immediate readers, and why later readers often struggled with their ideas,” Herman said.

Herman’s fellowship was made possible by the Stanley A. and Barbara B. Rabin Postdoctoral Fellowship Fund at Columbia University and the Eugene Shvidler Gift Fund at Fordham.

Additionally, the event was a joint effort, between Fordham’s Jewish Studies program, the Institute on Religion, Law & Lawyers’ Work at Fordham School of Law and the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University.

Herman was joined by Fordham faculty members Kathryn Kueny, Ph.D., professor of theology, and Jed Shugerman, professor of law, who provided responses to the talk.

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When it comes to sexual abuse, the Catholic Church is no different, said Nuala Patricia Kenny, MD, SCH.

“I love the church. I do not love when members of the church have not been witnesses to the healing and reconciling mission of Jesus, especially in relation to the protection of children,” said Sister Kenny, who spoke on March 10 at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus.

“I’ve met so many Catholics who still don’t want to talk about this, who believe that any conversation about this is disloyal,” she said. “Ridiculous. When you see evil, you have to in fact begin to grapple with it if you are going to turn it towards good.”

Her talk, “Healing the Church: Some Systemic, Cultural and Legal Considerations” was sponsored by Fordham Law School’s Institute on Religion, Law & Lawyer’s Work.

It relied on many of the revelations she shared in her book, Healing the Church: Diagnosing and Treating the Clergy Sexual Abuse Scandal (Novalis, 2012), but with updates to reflect developments such as the Oscar-winning film Spotlight.

Sister Kenny’s experience with sexual abuse in the clergy dates back to 1989, when an extensive pattern of abuse was revealed at the Mt. Cashel Orphanage in St. John’s, Newfoundland. A pediatrician by training, she called her involvement with the official investigation more painful than the end-of-life care she’d done with children.

In some ways, the movies Doubt and Spotlight exemplify the ways society has shifted from denial of the problem to focusing on the individual to focusing on the systematic failures of church hierarchy. She divided the modern day phenomenon in the United States into three categories dating back to 1984, while noting that the issue is has never been a new one.

“You can’t say this is a recent event when it was addressed at the Council of Elvira in 306. The first council of the church in which there is a discussion about the morality of clerics involving themselves with young boys,” she said.

“You don’t like that one? How about the Book of Gomorrah, written by St. Peter Damian in 1051. Sodom and Gomorrah. Sodom. Sodomy.”

Sister Kenny laid some of the blame for the denial, minimization, secrecy, marginalization of whistle blowers, and protection of offenders on church leaders’ misdirected priorities. Although the word scandal is associated with a loss of reputation, the Greek word scandalon actually refers to an obstacle. In the Bible, creating a scandal means putting an obstacle in someone’s way to God.

“Many of these victims were never able, are never able, and will never be able to turn to God. For whatever other reasons people lose faith, this trauma has spiritual abuse at its heart,” she said.

Sister Kenny said that church leaders deferred too much to experts in medicine when they allowed the priests to return to parishes after as little as six-month stays at “Houses of Affirmation.” This showed how out of step society was at the time when it came to sexual abuse—and it was hardly confined to Roman Catholic circles.

These offending priests became “what Phillip Jenkins has called an example of moral panic—that is, the offenses committed by priests became a moral scapegoat of sorts, so that if we focus on pedophile priests, then we don’t have to focus on the societal issues,” she said. “Of course, the reality is, it’s both in the church and in society that we need to deal with the issue.”

Lawsuits by lawyers brought the scandal to light, brought compensation for victims, focused on institutional failure, and spurred action from both law enforcement and from church officials, she said. On the other hand, there is now more fear of disclosure because of the threat of litigation, and there has been immeasurable damage to innocent priests’ reputations.

“Priests will tell me they will not wear their collar in places because if they wear their collar, they see people walking away,” she said. “These are the good guys, the men who are trying to be men of god.”

Defense lawyers deserve blame too, for promoting interpretations of the law that completely contradicted bishops’ pastoral responsibilities. She suggested lawyers examine how a 1917 Canon Law was updated in 1983 to make it harder to remove a priest from his post.

“The empirical research I know on the dynamics of sexual abuse and on the crisis as it unraveled in the West, identifies both individual risks and systemic and cultural beliefs and practices,” she said.

“It’s about the way we think and act about truth, obedience, silence, and sexuality. The way we think about these things all plays a part in abuse.”