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By James L. Connor, S.J.
[Woodstock Report, October 1997, No. 51]
Copyright © 1997 Woodstock Theological Center
All rights reserved
Woodstock has a "where," of course,--space, place, and location. We rent a corridor in the Jesuit community residence at Georgetown University and have 10 offices, a conference room, a receptionist area, and a work room. We also have a row house two blocks from the campus as a residence for the seven Jesuits who make up about 40 percent of the Woodstock staff, the rest being lay persons and diocesan priests. As we continue to grow, we're going to need more space. Figuring out where and how to do this is one of the worrisome questions looming on the Woodstock horizon.
But, for all that, Woodstock is really not a "where." It's a "way"--in at least two senses.
The first sense in which Woodstock is a "way" is the process we use in our different projects, a method of "theological reflection," the unfolding pattern of discovery, discernment, decision making, and doing laid out in the "Spiritual Exercises" of St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order. The late Jesuit theologian Bernard Lonergan has helped us to identify and explore these unfolding steps in the dynamic Ignatian process in our own actual experience, so that, understanding it as well as possible, we can help others to do it well. When you know, quite consciously and accurately, what it is you are doing, you can improve upon it, make corrections, and become really proficient--with God's grace, of course.Woodstock is a "way" of involving and engaging the experience, the expertise, and the energy of an enormous number and variety of people who want to join others in addressing current problems in society and working for their remedy.I described this process or "way" in a previous issue of the Woodstock Report a few years ago (December 1992).
But Woodstock is a "way" or process in another sense. It is a "way" of involving and engaging the experience, the expertise, and the energy of an enormous number and variety of people who want to join others in addressing current problems in society and working for their remedy. Woodstock attracts such collaborators and channels their energies and talent into current projects on contemporary issues.
There's been a recent and notable increase in this kind of collaboration, and it is wonderful. Something providential is going on here. Let me give a few concrete examples.
Milan (Mike) Miskovsky is currently coordinating a major conference in business ethics being held in Prague, November 6 to 8, for business executives from eastern and central Europe. "Faculty" for this conference will consist of three Woodstock fellows and three Georgetown University professors, as well as a professor from Charles University in Prague. This two and a half day training session will move 60 plus participants through the personal experience of the Ignatian process of discovery, discernment, and decision making about the appropriate ethical action in concrete business and economic cases. They will do their work individually and in groups, large and small.
In the planning, recruiting, and coordinating of this conference, Mike Miskovsky has been the indispensable leader. He has made three trips to Prague, set up and staffed an office there, and met with all the people involved. Mike has recently retired from the law firm of Kirkland and Ellis where he specialized in corporate, international, and banking law. Concern for social issues is not new for Mike. He has been director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights under Law, he was U.S. delegate to form the Asian Development Bank, and he has just recently retired as the president of the Federal Association of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.
Mike has been a board member of the Woodstock Center for several years, has progressively become more and more involved and familiar with its work, and has just been elected chair of the board. A father of six and a grandfather of thirteen, Mike has been indispensable to this new international expansion of the work Woodstock has been doing in business ethics for several years.
Another Woodstock program with an explicitly international orientation probes the role of forgiveness in politics. Two major conferences have already gathered experienced foreign service officers, conflict resolution specialists, participants in peacemaking efforts, and social analysts: the first a consultation in the practicality of forgiveness in political and social conflicts and the second on the efforts to reach peace in Northern Ireland. Three more conferences will study the possible meaning and function of forgiveness in resolving conflict in Bosnia, racial relations in the United States, and truth commissions in South Africa, El Salvador, Argentina, and elsewhere. Working papers will come out of each session, and a final publication will summarize the principal insights from the entire process, analyze them for deeper understanding, and offer action recommendations which have emerged from analysis.
This program on forgiveness in politics is directed by Ambassador Robert T. Hennemeyer, who is retired from government service in the State Department as a foreign service officer. Bob was U.S. Ambassador to the Gambia, Consul General in the U.S. Embassy in Munich, Germany, and deputy chief of mission in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. In more recent years he served as director of the Office of International Justice and Peace at the U.S. Catholic Conference. Bob spends several days a week at Woodstock, designing the steps in our forgiveness in politics program, consulting with his eight member steering committee, contacting and firming up participants in the consultations, editing transcripts from each major conference, and writing introductions and conclusions of the fundamental insights and convictions about the reality and role of forgiveness in the various situations we consider, all in consultation with others.
Without Bob, the life experience he brings, the range of professional contacts he has, his finely honed diplomatic skills, and, especially, his faith perspective which joins hard reality with Christian hope, this project simply could not go forward.
Woodstock's modus operandi, distinctive "way of proceeding," is not simply "interdisciplinary"--a term that gives too academic an impression--it is, we might say, "inter-experiential" or "inter-expertise," or some such word. If you are investigating and trying to understand a conflict resolution situation, for instance, you need the people with solid experience in the field, who know how it really works, how it feels, tastes, and smells, what is possibly feasible and what is off the wall. Similarly, in our projects in business ethics, we need people who are actually doing business. And the same is true if you are looking at journalism, telecommunications, ethics in government, Third World development, or any of the other arenas in which Woodstock mounts its projects.
A good example of a Woodstock project that is being shaped by people who have "been there and done that" is in the area of ethics in government and public policy. There is currently a three-person team developing this program area, each bringing special and outstanding expertise to the task: Philip Lacovara, Tom Reese, and Michael McCarthy. Of the three only Tom Reese is a full-time Woodstock fellow, but the program just couldn't succeed without the other two.
Philip A. Lacovara has been a friend of Woodstock for many years, receiving our newsletter and other publications, and supporting our work financially. This past year, just when we were beginning to work on setting focus in the area of public policy, Phil came forward to volunteer time, expertise, and energy, quite coincidentally expressing interest in just this area we were thinking about. After a long conversation with me, he went home and drafted a comprehensive concept paper on which there have been several consequent consultations. He is currently collaborating with Tom and Michael to set a sharper focus on this area and to agree upon a specific project which will launch this newly defined program area.
Phil remains, of course, a partner in the law firm of Mayer, Brown & Platt, but will contribute a substantial segment of his time to this Woodstock project. Given his background and expertise, the program will be qualitatively different and better. Among the variety of positions he has held, Phil was managing director and general counsel of Morgan Stanley & Company, vice president and senior counsel for litigation and legal policy for General Electric Company, counsel to the special prosecutor in the Watergate Special Prosecutor's Office, and deputy solicitor general in the Office of the Solicitor General. So Phil knows both business, finance, and the federal government from firsthand experience.
Rounding out the planning committee with Phil Lacovara are Thomas J. Reese, S.J., and Michael H. McCarthy, both of whom you have already met in these pages. Tom, a Jesuit and a long-term Woodstocker, is a political scientist and is best known for the three books he has written on the church, local, national, and international (Vatican). But he first came to Washington in the '70s to be a lobbyist for tax reform, a subject on which he wrote his first book. Michael McCarthy was a visiting fellow at Woodstock last semester, is a philosophy professor at Vassar College, and will continue permanently with Woodstock as an associate fellow. His principal area of expertise is political philosophy, especially in its ethical aspects. Phil, Tom, and Michael, as a team, exemplify how Woodstock is not primarily a "where" but a "how," not a place but a way of engaging the talents of a rich variety of people who are deeply concerned to address contemporary social issues. I believe that in time their efforts will make an enormously influential difference.
Again on the international level, a new Woodstock project on the impact of the globalization of the free market economy will be qualitatively different and better by reason of the contribution of Argentinian Juan B. Floriani, an economist, who just recently retired after 25 years of service at the Inter-American Development Bank. Juan studied economics at the University of Chicago as a Ford Foundation fellow, and in Argentina he worked for the finance minister before moving into his post at the Inter-American Development Bank.
This project on globalization is under the coordination of Gasper (Gap) Lo Biondo, S.J., long-term and full-time Woodstock fellow whose training and expertise are in the economics of development. Over the past few years we have been sounding out the international Jesuit network (thank God for the web and e-mail!) to discover whether the worldwide spread of a new kind and shape of free market economy, a process called "globalization," is of interest and concern to Jesuits and those with whom they collaborate in the various countries and regions around the world in which they serve. The feedback to date has been a resounding, "Yes." And this response is from well developed industrial countries as well as from economically underdeveloped countries. Globalization is having a profound influence on cultures and social institutions, peoples and life-styles, manners and morals, as well as, of course, the distribution of wealth and the provision of goods and services worldwide. There is an urgent need, therefore, for "theological reflection" on this topic.
But you can't do theological reflection in thin air or on the basis of idealistic aspirations. You've got to know the facts; you've got to know current economic policy and theory; you've got to know the motives and the opportunities that are driving commerce. You've got, in other words, to get into the nitty-gritty real world of business, commerce, and financial transactions in order to have the hard data on which to reflect if the outcome is to have any accuracy at all.
Enter Juan Floriani. Juan is working closely with Gap to trace the history of business and business culture, how it was developed and how it has been managed. He is pulling together a bibliography of all the available literature that is relevant to the international consultation on globalization. But Juan's most valuable contribution is yet to come. At the Inter-American Development Bank, Juan ran a series of international seminars, one of which was entitled, "Ethics, Economics, and the Social Question." His expertise in planning, coordinating, and running seminars on an international level on issues like this will be of inestimable assistance to this Woodstock project on the globalization of the free market economy.
Two other people who deserve a much fuller introduction to our Woodstock Report readers and who will receive one in time, I promise, are James F. Salmon, S.J., and Nicole Marie Schmitz-Moormann. They have just joined the Woodstock team, Jim as a fellow and Nicole as a research assistant, collaborating on a project that will explore and explain "noogenesis" in the thought of the late Jesuit paleontologist and theologian, Teilhard de Chardin. "Noogenesis" means the development of mind or psychic state. As a paleontologist, Teilhard traced the evolution of human consciousness, freedom, and information, key requirements for the growth of society, culture, and community. This effort to ground scientifically the material process of social, political, and religious progress will contribute to Woodstock's ongoing work in society, culture, and religion. Nicole has edited and translated over a dozen scientific and theological works by Teilhard. Her focus now is on the diaries, retreat notes, and other personal writings of Teilhard which shed extraordinary new light on many of the themes he developed in his formal publications. Of special interest is his understanding of the evolution and development of human consciousness in its implications for the origins and destiny of human community. Nicole has already transposed Teilhard's handwritten diaries onto diskettes, which when printed, amount to more than five thousand typewritten pages.
Father Jim Salmon brings to this project not only his theological training, but also his professional background in science and technology. His undergraduate degree before joining the Jesuits was in mechanical engineering from Stevens Institute. After becoming a Jesuit, he earned a doctoral degree from the University of Pennsylvania in physical inorganic chemistry.
He was one of the founders and an original member of the board of directors of the National Association for Science, Technology, and Society, and he continues to be the director of an annual conference entitled "Cosmos and Creation." He is especially interested and involved in the relationship between science and religion.
The work that a scientist like Jim Salmon and a very well informed authority on Teilhardian literary material like Nicole Schmitz-Moormann will produce as members of the Woodstock team, will add an extraordinarily valuable complement to the work other fellows are pursuing at Woodstock on issues of social, cultural, economic, or political concern.
You can see from these few people and programs an illustration of the exciting new development we are seeing at Woodstock. Woodstock is emerging as a "way," in the sense that many different people from many different backgrounds are coming and bringing their experience, expertise, and interest to bear on issues of great importance within society today. There is enormous promise here for the quality, the breadth, and the influence at home and abroad of the work Woodstock does. It is a development worth watching--with deep gratitude and lively hope.