lunes, 12 de noviembre de 2012

¿POR QUÉ NOS CUESTA TANTO APRENDER A HABLAR INGLÉS?

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Por Carlos A. Trevisi 
Fundación Emilia Mª Trevisi
 
La necesidad tan manifiesta de saber inglés no se corresponde con los recursos que contamos para que se imparta la LENGUA. Normalmente nuestros esfuerzos se orientan más bien a enseñar los “cómos” del IDIOMA – conocimiento de la GRAMÁTICA- que al dominio del HABLA –ADQUISICIÓN DEL REFLEJO LINGÜÍSTICO.
 
Poco o nada se ha hecho en el ámbito profesional en cuanto a una actualización metodológica  que apunte al habla, al extremo de que una gran mayoría de profesores a cargo de la materia en centros primarios e institutos no tienen dominio de la lengua, aunque sí del idioma, ámbito en el cual se prodigan impartiendo una gramática cuyos contenidos aplican al manejo de traducciones y estructuras desencajadas de la realidad como nos hace ver Savater en “La Nación” de Buenos Aires del 15 de octubre de 1989 :  “cuando pienso en una lectura educativa me imagino uno de esos diálogos becketianos recomendados por los oligofrénicos profesionales para aprender idiomas, “Es su padre torero o posee una casa en las afueras”, “Mi vecino me ama y tiene una bufanda”, agregando que puede asegurar que aprendió a leer inglés gracias a “The Lord of the Rings”, dos diccionarios y un maravillosamente largo mes de agosto”. (1)
El principal problema radica en el hecho de que los profesores que imparten inglés no tienen la formación académica mínima imprescindible para abordar la complejidad de la tarea. Saber inglés en términos de lo que se aprende en la universidad estudiando filología no es suficiente.
Un profesor de inglés necesita conocimientos que nuestras carreras de filología no imparten. No es momento de abundar en carencias, pero básicamente se podría destacar que nuestros profesores tendrían que abordar una currícula que contemplara MÍNIMAMENTE dos años completos de FONÉTICA – un primer curso de SONIDOS y un segundo curso de ENTONACIÓN; dos años completos de LABORATORIO DE LENGUAS-algo tan fácil hoy día aprovechando las ventajas que ofrecen las tecnologías digitales; PEDAGOGÍA (una año); DIDÁCTICA (un año) y PRÁCTICA DE LA ENSEÑANZA al frente de un curso (un año) y algunas materias de apoyo que, tal cual sucede con nuestras filologías adentren al profesor en el ámbito de la cultura de la especialidad.  
Esta nueva modalidad no tendría porqué excluir los contenidos que hoy día se imparten en filología pero habría que hacer una revisión acabada de los objetivos que se persiguen en función de las metas a alcanzar y crear una nueva carrera –un PROFESORADO de INGLÉS- que contemplara todas las necesidades que tendría que abordar un profesional de la enseñanza de la lengua. (2)
No sería necesario “inventar” lo que acabamos de exponer. En la Argentina hace décadas que existen este tipo de profesorados y si algo ha caracterizado en materia de enseñanza del inglés a la Argentina es la calidad de los egresados de estos centros universitarios de estudio. Reúnen todas las características de nuestra filología inglesa pero además agregan todo lo específico para la impartición de la enseñanza de la lengua. (3)
Referencias
 
1. Ver TRADUZCA INGLÉS, Biblos, 1992. Argentina, del autor de la presente.
 
2. 
para abundar en el tema, v er.
3.Recomendamos incursionar por


sábado, 29 de septiembre de 2012

OBAMA SURGES AHEAD AMONG CATHOLIC VOTERS

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Poll: Obama surges ahead among Catholic voters
Sep. 27, 2012, By Daniel Burke, Religion News Service

U.S. President Barack Obama accepts the 2012 U.S Democratic presidential nomination during the final session of Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., Sept. 6. (CNS/Reuters/Jim Young)
President Barack Obama's support among Catholic voters has surged since June, according to a new poll, despite a summer that included the Catholic bishops' religious freedom campaign and the naming of Rep. Paul Ryan, a Catholic, as the GOP's vice-presidential candidate.
On June 17, Obama held a slight edge over Mitt Romney among Catholics (49percent to 47 percent), according to the Pew Research Center. Since then, Obama has surged ahead, and now leads 54 percent to 39 percent, according to a Pew poll conducted Sept. 16.
Among all registered voters, Obama leads Romney 51 percent to 42 percent, according to Pew.
Obama and Romney are essentially tied among white Catholics, which some pollsters call the ultimate swing group.
On Monday, Romney unveiled his Catholics for Romney Coalition, which includes numerous politicians, beer magnate Pete Coors and Princeton University intellectual Robert P. George. The Obama campaign also has a Catholic coalition.
From June 21 to July 4, the U.S. Catholic bishops held a "Fortnight for Freedom," with Masses, prayer groups and presentations in dozens of dioceses nationwide. The campaign was directed in part against an Obama administration mandate that requires some religious institutions, such as colleges and hospitals, to provide cost-free contraception coverage to employees.
John C. Green, an expert on religion and politics at the University of Akron in Ohio, said Obama's surge among Catholic voters does not mean the bishops' campaign was ineffective. But religious freedom is not the most salient issue for Catholics during an election dominated by economic concerns, he said.
"It's not the issue that most middle-of-the-road Catholics are responding to," Green said.
In mid-August, Romney named Ryan, a congressman from Wisconsin and lifelong Catholic, as his vice-presidential nominee. While many conservative Catholics cheered the move, Romney received no "Catholic bounce" from selecting Ryan, according to the Pew poll. Obama's vice-presidential running mate, Joe Biden, is also Catholic.
Liberal Catholics have chastised Ryan for using his Catholic faith to defend his GOP budget plan, which lowers taxes on the wealthy while cutting programs for the poor.
Among white evangelicals (they do not accept Jesus as the Messiah, they are expecting the Messiah still to come, most probably Romney is their Messiah, the one who will abolish the middle class and deprive the poor of food, shelter, assistance etc, all that is necessary to live: this is their PROLIFE POSITION)), another crucial religious constituency, Romney's support has inched up since July, from 69 percent to 74 percent, according to the Pew poll, while Obama's percentage declined.
Despite concerns that Obama's support for same-sex marriage would alienate African-American Protestants, 95 percent still back Obama over Romney.
Obama also leads among Americans with no religious affiliation, 65 percent to 27 percent. Romney leads among Americans who attend worship services at least weekly, 51percent to 42 percent.
The margin of error for the September survey of Catholic voters is plus or minus 5.1 percentage points, according to Pew.

miércoles, 12 de septiembre de 2012

THE FUN THEY HAD

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The Fun They Had
por Isaac Asimov

Margie even wrote about it that night in her diary. On the page headed May 17, 2157, she wrote, "Today, Tommy found a real book!"
It was a very old book. Margie's grandfather once said that when he was a little boy his grandfather told him that there was a time when all stories were printed on paper.
They turned the pages, which were yellow and crinkly, and it was awfully funny to read words that stood still instead of moving the way they were supposed to--on a screen, you know. And then, when they turned back to the page before, it had the same words on it that it had had when they read it the first time.

"Gee," said Tommy, "what a waste. When you're through with the book, you just throw it away, I guess. Our television screen must have had a million books on it and it's good for plenty more. I wouldn't throw it away."
"Same with mine," said Margie. She was eleven and hadn't seen as many telebooks as Tommy had. He was thirteen. She said, "Where did you find it?"
"In my house." He pointed without looking, because he was busy reading. "In the attic." "What's it about?" "School."
 
Margie was scornful. "School? What's there to write about school? I hate school."
Margie always hated school, but now she hated it more than ever. The mechanical teacher had been giving her test after test in geography and she had been doing worse and worse until her mother had shaken her head sorrowfully and sent for the County Inspector.

He was a round little man with a red face and a whole box of tools with dials and wires. He smiled at Margie and gave her an apple, then took the teacher apart. Margie had hoped he wouldn't know how to put it together again, but he knew how all right, and, after an hour or so, there it was again, large and black and ugly, with a big screen on which all the lessons were shown and the questions were asked. That wasn't so bad. The part Margie hated most was the slot where she had to put homework and test papers. She always had to write them out in a punch code they made her learn when she was six years old, and the mechanical teacher calculated the mark in no time.

The Inspector had smiled after he was finished and patted Margie's head. He said to her mother, "It's not the little girl's fault, Mrs. Jones. I think the geography sector was geared a little too quick. Those things happen sometimes. I've slowed it up to an average ten-year level. Actually, the over-all pattern of her progress is quite satisfactory." And he parted Margie's head again.
Margie was disappointed. She had been hoping they would take the teacher away altogether. They had once taken Tommy's teacher away for nearly a month because the history sector had blanked out completely.
So she said to Tommy, "Why would anyone write about school?"
Tommy looked at her with very superior eyes. "Because it's not our kind of school, stupid. This is the old kind of school that they had hundreds and hundreds of years ago." He added loftily, pronouncing the word carefully, "Centuries ago."

Margie was hurt. "Well, I don't know what kind of school they had all that time ago." She read the book over his shoulder for a while, then said, "Anyway, they had a teacher."
"Sure they had a teacher, but it wasn't a regular teacher. It was a man." "A man? How could a man be a teacher?" "Well, he just told the boys and girls things and gave them homework and asked them questions." "A man isn't smart enough." "Sure he is. My father knows as much as my teacher." "He can't. A man can't know as much as a teacher." "He knows almost as much, I betcha."
Margie wasn't prepared to dispute that. She said, "1 wouldn't want a strange man in my house to teach me."
Tommy screamed with laughter. "You don't know much, Margie. The teachers didn't live in the house. They had a special building and all the kids went there." "And all the kids learned the same thing?" "Sure, if they were the same age."
"But my mother says a teacher has to be adjusted to fit the mind of each boy and girl it teaches and that each kid has to be taught differently."
"Just the same they didn't do it that way then. If you don't like it, you don't have to read the book."
"I didn't say I didn't like it," Margie said quickly. She wanted to read about those funny schools.
They weren't even half-finished when Margie's mother called, "Margie! School!" Margie looked up. "Not yet, Mamma."
"Now!" said Mrs. Jones. "And it's probably time for Tommy, too."

Margie said to Tommy, "Can I read the book some more with you after school?"
"Maybe," he said nonchalantly. He walked away whistling, the dusty old book tucked beneath his arm.
Margie went into the schoolroom. It was right next to her bedroom, and the mechanical teacher was on and waiting for her. It was always on at the same time every day except Saturday and Sunday, because her mother said little girls learned better if they learned at regular hours.
The screen was lit up, and it said: "Today's arithmetic lesson is on the addition of proper fractions. Please insert yesterday's homework in the proper slot."
Margie did so with a sigh. She was thinking about the old schools they had when her grandfather's grandfather was a little boy. All the kids from the whole neighborhood came, laughing and shouting in the schoolyard, sitting together in the schoolroom, going home together at the end of the day. They learned the same things, so they could help one another on the homework and talk about it.
And the teachers were people...
The mechanical teacher was flashing on the screen: "When we add the fractions 1/2 and 1/4..."
Margie was thinking about how the kids must have loved it in the old days. She was thinking about the fun they had.
-----------------------------
Written in 1951 for a syndicated newspaper page, 'The Fun They Had' was later published in Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine.
The Fun they Had : http://users.aber.ac.uk/dgc/funtheyhad.html 

 


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GRAMÁTICA INGLESA INTERACTIVA  (CD)
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martes, 11 de septiembre de 2012

GOOD NEWS (VI)

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GOOD NEWS!,  nuestro periódico en inglés   
 Números  I -  II - III - IV - V


GOOD NEWS! (VI)
              
AN INTERACTIVE MONTHLY PAPER FOR  RAINY DAYS
TO BE READ, SCRIBBLED ON, ENJOYED  AND THROWN AWAY

Carlos A. Trevisi,  Editor-in-Chief

JULY / AUGUST / SEPTEMBER  2012
    

NEWSPAPERS 

The Washington Post

Breaking News, World, US, DC News & Analysis 

 

CNN.com

 Breaking News, U.S., World, Weather, Entertainment



The Aesthetics of Decay 
(New York: Peter Lang, 2006)

 Dylan Trigg confronts the remnants from the fallout of post-industrialism and postmodernism. Through a considered analysis of memory, place, and nostalgia, Trigg argues that the decline of reason enables a critique of progress to emerge. In this ambitious work, Trigg aims to reassess the direction of progress by situating it in a spatial context. In doing so, he applies his critique of rationality to modern ruins. The derelict factory, abandoned asylum, and urban alleyway all become allies in Trigg's attack on a fixed image of temporality and progress. The Aesthetics of Decay offers a model of post-rational aesthetics in which spatial order is challenged by an affirmative  ethics of ruin.

Vocabulary
remnants: vestigio del pasado / fallout: caída/  derelict: en  ruinas / alleyway: travesía, callejón/ DICTIONARY: http://www.wordreference.com

A joke
 
The Aldi Doctor...

One day, in line at the company cafeteria, Joe says to Mike, "My elbow hurts like hell. I guess I'd better see a doctor."
"Listen, you don't have to spend that kind of money," Mike replies.
"There's a diagnostic computer down at Aldi's. Just give it a urine sample and the computer will tell you what's wrong and what to do about It.
It takes ten seconds and costs ten dollars. A lot cheaper than a doctor."
So, Joe deposits a urine sample in a small jar and takes it to Aldi's.
He deposits ten dollars and the computer lights up and asks for the urine sample. He pours the sample into the slot and waits.
Ten seconds later, the computer ejects a printout:
"You have tennis elbow. Soak your arm in warm water and avoid heavy activity. It will improve in two weeks. Thank you for shopping at Aldi's."
That evening, while thinking how amazing this new technology was, Joe began wondering if the computer could be fooled.
He mixed some tap water, a stool sample from his dog, urine samples from his wife and daughter, and a sperm sample from himself for good measure.
Joe hurries back to Aldi's, eager to check the results. He deposits ten dollars, pours in his concoction, and awaits the results.

The computer prints the following:
1. Your tap water is too hard. Get a water softener.
2. Your dog has ringworm. Bathe him with anti-fungal shampoo.
3. Your daughter has a cocaine habit. Get her into rehab.
4. Your wife is pregnant. Twins. They aren't yours. Get a lawyer.
5. If you don't stop playing with yourself, your elbow will never get better.
VOCABULARY: Concoction: Menjunje / ringworm: tiña 

 ETHIOPIA
Ethiopia, is a landlocked country located in the Horn of Africa. It is bordered by Eritrea to the north, Djibouti and Somalia to the east, Sudan andSouth Sudan to the west, and Kenya to the south. Ethiopia is the second most populous nation on the continent, with over 84,320,000 inhabitants, and the tenth largest by area, occupying 1,100,000 km2. With its capital at Addis Ababa, it is also the most populouslandlocked nation in the world. Ethiopia is one of the oldest sites of human existence known to scientists.[5] It may be the region from which Homo sapiens first set out for the Middle East. Despite being the major source of the Nile river, Ethiopia underwent a series of famines in the 1980s, exacerbated by adverse geopolitics and civil wars. The country has begun to recover, and it now has one of the biggest economies by GDP in East Africa and Central Africa.

THE HAPPY SINGERS


         The Happy Singers” are a group of popular singers. At present they are visiting all parts of the country. They will be arriving here tomorrow. They will be coming by train and many people will be waiting for them at the station. They will be staying for five days. As usual the police will have a difficult time trying to keep order. They will go back to London next week

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ARGENTINA´S BAD HABITS
Roughly 200 years ago, two countries in the Americas declared their independence from their colonial masters. Both had abundant land, natural resources, good ports, a temperate climate - seemingly all the makings of a great nation.
Two centuries later, the United States was the richest country in the history of the world, while Argentina was setting records with the three largest defaults in history - roughly $100 billion to its foreign creditors, and billions more to the World Bank and the IMF. Its banking system in ruins, its economy devastated, its credit rating destroyed, the government was fighting to keep the poverty rate below 50%.
Neither bad luck nor destiny drove Argentina from crisis to crisis; bad government did. Commodity wealth made Argentina one of the richest countries in the world until well into the 20th century.  
Argentina: Governnance in CrisisPaul Alexander Haslam, FOCAL Senior Analyst Executive
Summary Although the origins of the crisis were to be found in poor economic policy decisions that led to a chaotic devaluation, its dramatic denouement in December 2001 and subsequent development over the course of 2002 were deeply conditioned by political factors. The Argentine crisis was and remains a crisis of governance in the most profound sense.
DICTIONARY
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LA FUNDACIÓN EMILIA MARIA TREVISI NO NECESARIAMENTE COINCIDE CON LAS OPINIONES DE TERCEROS CUYOS ARTÍCULOS EDITA GOOD NEWS
 

sábado, 25 de agosto de 2012

DO ELITE UNIVERSITY Ph.s. LAND JOBS?

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The Myth of Ivy Advantage
August 22, 2012 - 3:00am, By Karen Kelsky
Some months back I wrote a column in The Chronicle of Higher Education called "Graduate School is a Means to a Job." The column began with issues a prospective graduate student should consider before entering graduate school at all. I wrote:
"Go to the highest-ranked graduate department you can get into — so long as it funds you fully….. [But] never assume that the elite, Ivy League departments are the highest-ranked or have the best placement rates. Some of the worst-prepared job candidates with whom I've worked have been from humanities departments at Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. Do not be dazzled by abstract institutional reputations. Ask steely-eyed questions about individual advisers and their actual (not illusory) placement rates in recent years."
The column received a lot of generally positive commentary. But my remarks about the Ivy League elicited one comment in particular:
"I think this is a very good article, but I think the dismissive approach to the Ivy schools is unfair. I am an administrator of a humanities Ph.D. program at one of those schools and 90 percent of our grads get TT jobs. I do a lot of counseling about how to go about making sure they are ready to go on the market from the time they enter the program. Their faculty members are incredible mentors not only during their time in the program but well beyond commencement."
Ninety percent of grads get tenure-track jobs? That’s an impressive figure. Is it true? Well, who knows. The commenter declined to provide us with any additional information, even when pressed by fellow commenters, who inquired as to the location of his department, in order to direct students to it. He merely replied huffily, "I am not comfortable publicly announcing where I work, but Google is a great tool."
I bring up this exchange to raise the enduring myth that Ivy League job candidates have an inherent and indisputable advantage on the tenure track job market. They do not. This is a myth.
Let me be clear — I am not making a statistical, quantitative argument, and I am not offering percentages (like the dubious 90 percent above). I am making an argument based on my experiences as a job seeker in my generation of job seekers, my time on many search committees, my observations as a practicing academic in my fields of anthropology and East Asian studies, and lastly, my recent work as an academic career coach in my business, The Professor Is In, in which capacity I’ve worked with approximately 800 job seekers in the past year.
Based on observations gleaned from these experiences, Ivy League job seekers (and of course this category could be stretched to include another four or five top private universities) do not have an inherent and indisputable advantage on the tenure-track job market. Many of them have a great deal of trouble finding tenure-track jobs, and a significant proportion of them fail, just as do Ph.D.s from other schools. 
I do believe there are some advantages enjoyed by Ivy Leagues candidates, and I’ll mention those, but they are far fewer than people both inside and outside the Ivies seem to believe (and as I shall show, not without their own attendant pitfalls). Yet the myth prevails. 
This myth is particularly important to me to address, because it is debilitating to both those tenure-track job seekers who have (or are getting) Ivy League Ph.D.s, and those who do (are) not. In the first case, because in the desperate conditions of the current job market complacency is deadly. And in the second because misplaced jealousy and an unwarranted sense of inadequacy are debilitating in candidates who are in fact entirely competitive on the market.
I wrote in the column that "Some of the worst-prepared job candidates with whom I've worked have been from humanities departments at Yale, Harvard, and Princeton," and this was not idle rhetoric, or grandstanding. When I served on search committees some of the most unprofessional application packages we received were from Ivy League candidates. Now as an academic career coach I observe that Ivy League clients often present some of the most ill-conceived first drafts of their job documents.
The question, of course, is why.
I believe it’s the complacency factor. Not necessarily in the job seekers themselves, who tell me that many of their peers have failed to find work, and who are anxious indeed. It’s the complacency of their advisers and departments, who, according to my clients, offer little or no professionalization training, because it is not viewed as necessary.
And indeed, in earlier times, it probably wasn’t.
But these days, institutional name, and indeed, individual superstar faculty name, are no longer sufficient to get a candidate through to the end of a brutal selection process. Especially at the lower-tier schools where, increasingly, all Ph.D.s are competing for jobs,  the elite pedigree can sometimes be greeted with skepticism.
This is not to say institutional status plays no role. As one client told me, "the faculty do absolutely nothing to prepare us for the market. But if one of us does get shortlisted, they  mobilize the X University network, and they seriously work the phones." Remember the Old Boys' Network? That would be this, minus the gender. It should never be underestimated.
But getting shortlisted in the first place? That comes from the length and depth of a candidate’s C.V., and the brilliance of her job materials. Institutional name or reputation alone is not enough, not now, not at this point in time.
The brutality of the job market has had an interesting, inadvertent meritocratizing effect. Because neoliberal logic has ravaged the notion of the ivory tower, and reduced the university system of value to the same quantifiable standards of productivity that prevail in other industries, any candidate who presents a C.V. filled with quantities of published work will compete handily with one who brings primarily name status. 
The quality of training at Ivy League universities with regard to these frantic (and unapologetically bourgeois) standards of accomplishment is the question. To the extent that "striving" is considered alien to the ethos of the graduate program, job market preparation will inevitably be lacking.
In my work with Ivy League job seekers, I have been struck by the abundance of their financial support. What they do not do, during their years of graduate school, is scramble.
Scramble in that unseemly and desperate manner that consumes their peers in less plentifully endowed programs. That rich funding is an advantage in many ways — money above all buys time to think and research and write, and do it well. But it also puts these job seekers out of step with the zeitgeist of the moment, and of the market. This zeitgeist revolves around scarcity. The successful job seeker will be adept at knowing how to talk about making something from nothing when called upon to do so. 
Any job seeker who doesn’t understand the scarcity model of the academy at the present moment is a job seeker out of step with the prevailing (although generally unacknowledged) ethos of search committees and administrators. Great thoughts, if they are not published in high-ranking peer reviewed journals, and accompanied by a record of successful grant funding, do not make the cut. 
Networks,  name allure, and abundant funding are not small things. But they are also not inherent or indisputable advantages for a tenure track placement, and they do not replace a consistent record of evidence of productivity and achievement. There is no free pass on the market in this day and age. As much as we might deplore the defunding of higher education, it has made some of the terms of competition more stark, and less mysterious (and mystified).


Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2012/08/22/essay-assumption-only-elite-university-phds-land-jobs#ixzz24Yo88h7X
Inside Higher Ed 

sábado, 18 de agosto de 2012

IS THIS THE CHURCH CATHOLICS WANT?

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Is there any good reason for the Church to return to those baptized into Christ?

LCWR Leadership Award Schneiders

LCWR has nearly 1500 members who are elected leaders of their religious orders, representing approximately 57,000 Catholic sisters. The conference develops leadership, promotes collaboration within church and society, and serves as a voice for systemic change. Pegado de <http://www.enewspf.com/latest-news/human-interest/35518-catholic-sisters-assembly-decides-next-steps-in-response-to-vatican-assessment.html>



August 10, 2012
St. Louis, Missouri
ACCEPTANCE ADDRESS

I can find no words to adequately express my appreciation to the Leadership Conference of Women Religious for their choice to associate me in this special way with their extraordinary ministry of leadership not only to women Religious, but to the whole Church, and to the world to which the Church is missioned. Wonderful as this occasion is, however, it would be disingenuous to pretend that this year’s meeting of LCWR is simply an “annual event.” As its president, Sister Pat Farrell, said in opening the meeting, “this is a meeting like no other.” It was only a couple weeks after I received the call from Janet Mock telling me of this award that the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith launched a staggering assault on LCWR that stunned its leaders and members and shocked many in the larger Church and beyond.

I do not want to minimize the seriousness and even danger of the distressing situation with which our leaders have been dealing over these past days, much less whitewash the genuine scandal it has caused. But in the context of this evening’s gathering which, despite everything, is meant to celebrate the remarkable history, the current life and vigor, and the free and hopeful future of this wonderful organization, I want to focus on something that I think is both more

important for our present and our future, and infinitely more worthy of our attention. Without negating the very real sociological, psychological, and political issues involved, to which our attention has been called over these past months by the analyses of various professionals, I would like to focus, in this golden jubilee year of Vatican II, on the theological issue at the heart of this struggle and of others that are stressing our Church at this time: that of ecclesial leadership in the context of the theology of Vatican II.

The leitmotif of the Council was the nature and mission of the Church. The Council recognized that if the Church was to be for the modern world what it is called to be, the Body of Christ at the service of the world that God so loved as to give God’s only Son for its salvation, the Church’s self-understanding, structures, procedures, and relationships required thoroughgoing aggiornamento, both reform and renewal. The most important documents that emerged from the Council concerned divine revelation [Dei Verbum] which is the ground of the Church and its life and whose mediation into the world is the Church’s primary vocation and responsibility; the nature of the Church [Lumen Gentium] expressed and celebrated in the liturgy [Sacrosanctum Concilium] and lived in its mission to the modern world [Gaudium et Spes]; freedom of conscience [Dignitatis Humanae] which enables people to personally engage revelation, to participate in the Church’s internal life, and to take responsibility for its mission as adult human beings called to share in God’s life; and the promoting of the Church’s relationship in mutuality with all people including non-Catholic Christians, people of other spiritual TRADITIONS[Unitatis Redintegratio, Nostra Aetate] , and even non-believers. I want to concentrate for a moment, then, on the theology of the Church, its identity and mission, in order to raise the issue of what kind of leadership the Church needs in this time of crisis.

The Council took us back to the roots of ecclesiology in the Old Testament, to the theology of the Church as the Pilgrim -- that is, the not-yet-arrived -- People of God, created in God’s own image as male and female who are (CO) equal partners with each other participating in God’s own responsibility for creation itself, including the human family, on it historical way through this world to the New Jerusalem. In the New Testament that Chosen People was called deeper into the mystery of God, called to become not only a “light to the nations” (see, Is.42:1-9; Lk. 2:29-32; Mt. 12:15-21; Acts 26:18-23) but the very Body of Christ, the presence of the Risen Jesus, acting in the world for its salvation (see, Eph. 4 and Rom. 12:3-8). God, in the person of Jesus, acted out for us what that salvific work should look like. In Jesus we contemplate the paradoxical relationship of God, the all powerful Creator, to power. Jesus did not come to exercise coercive power over recalcitrant sinners, to forcibly mold them according to some abstract divine plan of moral perfection. Jesus did not even found a family of which he would have been, in his culture, the patriarchal head and absolute authority. He neither sought nor accepted any office or position of authority or power in his religious community of Israel. He was called to be a prophet (see Lk. 4:16-21), to exercise a spiritual ministry that was not guaranteed by any official appointment, conferred no office, and gave him no institutional leverage. As a prophet he exerted only the influence of truth and love, the authority of his own integrity in witnessing to the God who sent him. Jesus never resorted to violence, thought-control or loyalty oaths, intimidation through shaming or threats of rejection, expulsion from the covenant community, execution, or eternal damnation. Rather, Jesus taught by world-subverting parables, challenging questions, insistent dialogue, by patient persuasion, repeated invitation, probing argument, and especially by his original and arresting interpretations of Scripture which were sometimes startling in their radicality because Jesus favored people and their needs over the requirements of even the most sacred laws (see, e.g., Mt. 12:1-8). He questioned and challenged both the ordinary people he dealt with and the authorities of his religious tradition. He, though divine by nature, refused to be made complicit in anyone’s program of playing God (THOUGH HE WAS GOD HIMSELF)in relation to others (see Jn. 8:1-11). But he also allowed himself to be challenged, for example, in regard to his sense of the exclusivity of Israel’s vocation (see, Mk. 7:24-28). But finally, when he was rejected by the leaders of his religious community and sentenced to death by the powers of the Roman Empire, he accepted death rather than change or suppress the message he had come to offer: the radical, almost unbelievable, message of God’s absolute and unconditional love for every human being, a love that would not be withheld from or defeated by even the most serious sinner. God raised the executed Jesus from the dead and restored him to his followers, whom he then empowered to continue to be his saving presence in the world, warning them that they would face the same fate he had if they remained faithful to his “scandalous” message of God’s all-inclusive, law-relativizing love. This is the nature and mission of the community called Church, the Body of Christ in this world.

The spirituality of Christian leadership is determined by the kind of community the Church is and the kind of mission with which it is charged. The Church that Jesus formed around himself is not an imitation of any secular model of community and therefore its leadership cannot and must not mimic (or copy) the exercise of authority of secular power structures. The Church is not a divine right monarchy in which some individual person is vested by God with absolute divine power over all the members. Nor is it a one-person-one-vote democracy in which truth or even policy is decided by a majority, leaving the minority to fend for itself. It is not an oligarchy or rule by the powerful few whether they be titled nobles, or military officers, or corporation moguls, or vested clergy. It is not a plutocracy or rule of the very wealthy, nor a totalitarian dictatorship in which truth is decided and right is established by the brute force of the most powerful. It is not even that probably best form of secular government we humans have devised so far, the republic in which power is vested in, and exercised representatively by, the governed. (ALL AUTHORITY COMES DIRECTLY FROM GOD)

The Church is a unique kind of community, the union of those baptized into Christ, formed by his Word which is not bound (see 2 Tim. 2:8-9) -- never fully grasped nor controlled by anyone -- gathered around the table where we share Christ’s Body in order to become his Body for the world. It is a community in which there is no slave or master, no national or ethnic superiorities, no gender domination, no inequality that is theologically or spiritually significant except holiness, and in which even distinctions of role and function are not titles to power but differences which must serve the unity of the whole. It is a community in which all vie for the lowest place, wash one another’s feet, lift rather than impose burdens, and dwell among their sisters and brothers as those who serve.

What kind of leadership is possible and appropriate in such a community, in the Pilgrim People of God called to be the Body of Christ in this world? What is the spirituality of leadership that Jesus modeled and taught among the somewhat ragtag group of very ordinary women and men whom he formed into the first Christian community? What does such leadership look like on the ground, in our day and age, in our post-modern culture? Let me make three suggestions about what, minimally, Gospel leadership would look like. First, the leaders would emerge from the community rather than imposing themselves or being imposed upon it. They would be chosen because they share, incarnate, model, and articulate the faith and hope and commitments of the group. Several times since the mandate of the CDF was imposed on the LCWR the bishops in charge have insisted that they have no problem with the Sisters whom they love and admire. It is only their leaders who are problematic. But, unlike clerical leaders who are regularly imposed, without consultation, on communities to whom they have no relationship, because of the loyalty of the appointee to the higher authority rather than to the community to whom he is sent, the leaders of Religious Congregations are freely elected by the members precisely because they do represent the best hopes and commitments of the community. Leaders of Religious communities are chosen from the community, for the community, (by the community) and when they complete their term of service they will not move up to a higher post in a power structure but will resume their place in the community,

Leaders in Religious communities are and remain fundamentally equals of their sisters or brothers. They are not called or empowered or sent to dominate or lord it over the community, to take the first place in the assembly or dress in finery or give themselves honorific titles or demand obsequious marks of respect, but to be the servants of all, even to the laying down of their lives in various ways for those they serve. Secondly, the leader of a Gospel community, a community with a mission to the whole world which God so loved, would, like Jesus who prepared his disciples for what lay ahead, exercise what Pat Farrell in her recent National Public Radio interview called “anticipatory leadership.” Anticipatory leadership is not just crisis management, or shop-tending, or status quo preservation, and certainly not a channeling of abstract absolutes from without. It is an active fostering of discernment about what is coming toward us from the future and how we can be prepared (and trained), like good stewards drawing on treasures both old and new (see Mt. 13:52), to meet those new challenges with the riches of the Gospel tradition but also with the best contemporary resources and communal reflection. Third, the leaders of a genuinely Christian community must be capable of leading that community not only to do what is needed in this world but also to be what is needed by this world, not only to act efficaciously but to live with integrity. It is not enough that leaders themselves not abuse or dominate the members of the community but, like the Good Shepherd who does not abandon the flock when it is in danger (see Jn. 10:11-13), they must resist and energize the community to resist whatever threatens its integrity (and fidelity), whether such threats come from within or without, whether they are spiritual or societal or ecclesiastical. To incarnate, promote, and above all witness to the freedom of the Gospel in the face of interlocking domination systems, both secular and religious, is a primary task of the Christian community, the Body of Christ in this world, and we have been made very aware in the past six months of just how urgently the Church, and even people outside the Church’s formal boundaries, are looking to Religious communities for leadership, for a witness to integrity, for a living model of what it means to be Church in these difficult times.

Given the project that is Religious Life it is not at all surprising that this lifeform has genereated, and is still developing, a form of Gospel leadership which is increasingly emerging into public view as a genuine alternative to ecclesiastical or secular leadership defined as dominative power. This, for me, and I think for people all over this country and beyond, is what LCWR kin. This kind of servant leadership in this kind of Gospel community is as baffling to those in power today as was Jesus’ mode of leadership to the Temple hierarchy and the Roman Empire of his time. Those in power only wanted to know, under penalty of death, whether in fact, Jesus was a king, a dangerous challenger subverting their domination systems. But Jesus replied, “You are the ones who are talking about power. For this have I come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Those who are of the truth hear my voice” (cf. Jn. 18:37). It is that witness which I have so long admired not only in the leadership of my own Religious congregation, the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, which is, in an important sense, the real recipient of tonight’s award, but also in the courageous and visionary leadership of those gathered in this room and their predecessors. Thank you for this honor, but most of all, thank you for your service and witness to all of us, your Sisters, and to the Church and world we serve.



Sandra M. Schneiders, IHM
Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University
Berkeley, California