Structural Evil Research Articles

Structural evil or individual deficiency? The construction of poverty in the Finnish Parliament

This article examines the political standpoints and arguments related to poverty by asking how Finnish politicians understand poverty as a social problem, how they construct the poor as a group, and what policy recommendations they propose to fight poverty. Qualitative content analysis was used to examine minutiae from the interpellation debate on the increasing inequality in Finland in November 2017. Despite an increase in austerity policies and a right-wing government, the poverty discourse remained in alignment with a predominantly structural nature, showcasing the strength of ideological and contextual continuity in terms of poverty policy development.

Powerlessness, Structural Evil, and A Theology of Power

This research calls attention to the powerlessness of everyday people in the Philippines, by discovering what kind of power is in play, how the fallen powers can be named and made visible, and then ultimately the ways through which power should be restored. First, this paper traces back to Pre-Hispanic times and the Spanish colonial rule period in the Filipino history to investigate the foundation of contemporary power structures of the Philippines, Second, the distinctive traits of power structures in the modern Philippines are explored, with a focus on how structural evil has been situated in the system through the patron–client relation, elitism, and oligarchy, and how it causes and perpetuates the powerlessness of everyday people in the Philippines. Then, a theology of power and the church are presented as the ultimate ways through which power should be restored.

COVID-19 and Health Disparities: Structural Evil Unmasked.

Background:Incidence and mortality from COVID-19 are starkly elevated in poor, minority and marginalized communities. These differences reflect longstanding disparities in income, housing, air quality, preexisting health status, legal protections, and access to health care. The COVID-19 pandemic and its economic consequences have made these ancient disparities plainly visible.Methodology:As scholars in Catholic research universities committed to advancing both scientific knowledge and social justice, we examined these disparities through the lenses of both epidemiology and ethics.Findings:We see these widening disparities as not only as threats to human health, societal stability, and planetary health, but also as moral wrongs - outward manifestations of unrecognized privilege and greed. They are the concrete consequences of policies that promote structural violence and institutionalize racism.Recommendations:We encourage governments to take the following three scientific and ethical justified actions to reduce disparities, prevent future pandemics, and advance the common good: (1) Invest in public health systems; (2) Reduce economic inequities by making health care affordable to all; providing education, including early education, to all children; strengthening environmental and occupational safeguards; and creating more just tax structures; and (3) Preserve our Common Home, the small blue planet on which we all live.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Unwanted Pregnancy, Mercy, and Solidarity

AbstractOver the last half century, United States debates about abortion focused at first on the question whether the fetus is a person with rights and later on whether involuntary conception—for instance, as a consequence of sexual assault—might mitigate a woman’s responsibilities toward the fetus she carries. This article argues that, whatever one’s position on these two questions, a third, morally salient dimension of most US women’s experiences of unwanted pregnancy deserves more attention: both abortion and birth burden women with their inevitable moral failure to fulfill their responsibilities to persons who frequently have de facto last‐resort and unavoidable claims on them. Using Lisa Tessman’s work on moral failure and Pope Francis’s interventions on abortion and mercy, I argue that this moral anguish is not a simple emotional remainder. Structural evil, not necessity, is the primary driver of forced pregnancy choices that injure women and their children both materially and morally. Consequently, whether they abort or carry to term, women with unwanted pregnancies need mercy or forgiveness. But they also need compassionate solidarity: prophetic, active efforts to transform the social structures that make material harm and moral failure, and consequent moral anguish and moral injury, inevitable for many pregnant women.

Feminist practical theology and (un)making structural violence against immigrant women and families

A key thesis of this essay is that exploration of the construct of structural violence—especially as iterated in Johan Galtung’s notion of the triangle of violence—can help elucidate the theological concept of systemic or social sin, and thereby help Christians generate a more adequate ethical response to issues and dilemmas in immigration debates in the U.S. today. The notion of structural evil and sin can proffer insight into the reality of complex webs and entanglements in structural violence that enshrouds the lives and journeys of unauthorized Latino/a immigrants into the United States, and into the role of U.S. citizens in perpetuating such violence. Structural violence, seen theologically as social sin, is a conceptual key to “critical seeing” of political, social, legal, and economic structures and policies that drive forced economic immigration in the first place, and also to exposing the moral oblivion and blindness that thwarts the church from offering hospitality and justice to unauthorized immigrants. I argue that because structural violence originates in the vastly unequal distribution of power and privilege among human agents, which systematically advantages elite power brokers at the expense of people on the lowest rungs of society, then repentance from structural violence must entail collective efforts toward redistributing power, and ensuring more equitable access to resources needed for human flourishing. The primary practice and discipline dedicated to this radical task is faith-based community organizing.

Analysis of Gender Stereotyping in the Case of Karen Vertido

This article examines gender stereotyping as a form of structural evil or, in theological language, a form of structural sin. Using the celebrated case of Vertido vs. Custodio, the paper exposes the undercurrents of gender stereotyping. It also provides a cultural analysis of Vertido’s case as it traces the root cause of gender stereotyping. A high-context reading of the events that led to CEDAW to intervene in Vertido’s case enables the author to use feministtheological principles to denounce and dismantle the structures of inequality and hegemony that still permeate the Filipino psyche. 
 References
 Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991
 Bourdieu, Pierre. Masculine Domination. Stanford, California: Stanford CaliforniaPress, 2001.
 Bigler, R. R., & L. Liben. :Cognitive mechanisms in children’s gender stereotyping:Theoretical and educational implications of a cognitive-based intervention.”Child Development 63 (1992): 1351–1363.
 Dagmang, Ferdinand D. “Structures and Structural Sin,” Hapág 2/11 (2005): 77-112.
 Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development,Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.
 Raphael, Melissa. Female Face of God in Auschwitz. New York, Routledge, 2003.
 Regional Trial Court Davao City, the Philippines, The People of the Philippinesv Jose B. Custodio, Criminal Case No 37,921^96, 11 April 2005. GenderStereotyping in Rape Cases 331.
 Ruble, D., & Martin, C. Gender development. In W. Damon (Ed.), Handbook ofchild psychology 5th ed., pp. 933–1016, New York: Wiley, 1998.
 Wandinger, Nikolaus. “Where should one Search for “Original Sin”? Dialoguebetween Theology, Philosophy, and Science,” http://theol.uibk.ac.at/leseraum/artikel/342.html.

Cavanaugh and Grimes on Structural Evils of Violence and Race: Overcoming Conflicts in Contemporary Social Ethics

Social theory can help Christian ethics respond to structural evil, both by accurately naming what is there and by precisely specifying what to do. William Cavanaugh and Katie Grimes, representing distinct neo-Franciscan and Junian approaches, draw extensively on social theory to confront structural evils of nation-state violence and racism. Yet they fall short of an adequate account of how social structures and individual agency interact. Their works obscure the actual mechanisms of social change, call for overly heroic actions, and offer rival formulations of the church–world relationship. I use critical realist social theory to offer an alternative approach that better accounts for the interaction of structure and agency needed for effective Christian responses.

"This Is the Year": Narratives of Structural Evil

The 2016 American presidential campaign raised awareness of structural evil among segments of the population whose privilege has protected this knowledge, both making them self-conscious of their vulnerability as persons and revealing the role that the liberal narrative of progress has played in establishing and perpetuating structural evil. This moment of opportunity to shift both the political and the theological narrative demands liberal conversion: overcoming the temptations of anger, denial, and paralysis to embrace solidarity in vulnerability and power. An early liberationist narrative that embraces utopian praxis rather than utopian ideology is both more theologically honest and more effective than the liberal narrative of progress.

Epistemological Crises Made Stone: Confederate Monuments and the End of Memory

For many in the United States, an important step in dismantling the structural evil of racism would be the total removal of Confederate monuments from the southern landscape. While the motivation behind this recommendation is laudable, such a move may also serve to assuage white guilt while leaving the structures of white privilege basically untouched. This essay uses recent work in theology and memory to assess these monuments as well as calls for their removal, and suggests that at least some should remain standing as signs of a crisis that remains with us, bent toward the goal of justice by means of remembering a devastating history under the aspect of God's judgment. The upshot is that Christians have a strong theological warrant to support calls to add markers around certain Confederate monuments in order to contextualize and fill out the untruthful story they currently tell.

‘A Caravan of Solidarity’

The globalizing economy is not only offering affluence to the elite but also a form of idolatry, in which the idol is ‘the golden calf of global capitalism’. In this article I attempt to inquire a God-talk which engages the challenge of global greed and stimulates solidarity for the people who make up the base of the economic pyramid — ‘a triune economy of gift’. I propose an Asian perspective of Trinitarian economy which explicates fragility, frugality, and solidarity as divine characteristics. In so doing, I explore some ecumenical documents and four different voices from Asia which assess structural evil: the theology of ajur-ajer of Father Mangunwijaya, the public theology of Felix Wilfred, the theology of God’s life and emancipation of Paul S. Chung, and the theology of multitude of Kwok Pui-lan. In this, I hope to contribute to global liberation theology.

Cynthia D. Moe-Lobeda: Resisting Structural Evil: Love as Ecological-Economic Vocation

Cynthia D. Moe-Lobeda: Resisting Structural Evil: Love as Ecological-Economic Vocation

Ecology and structural violence: The South African reception of Lutheran voices from North America

This review essay offers an assessment of two recent monographs by Larry Rasmussen and Cynthia Moe-Lobeda in the field of ecotheology. It focuses on the category of moral vision that both authors employ. It shows how the notion of critical moral vision helps to identify and assess the root causes of economic inequalities and ecological destruction in terms of structural violence, structural evil and the very nature of sin. It also explains why such moral vision forms the key but by itself remains insufficient for social transformation. The influence of such insights in the South African context is illustrated with reference to teaching and research done at the University of the Western Cape and, more specifically, the category of transfiguration in Desmond Tutu’s theology.

Book Review: Resisting Structural Evil: Love as Ecological-Economic Vocation

Book Review: Resisting Structural Evil: Love as Ecological-Economic Vocation

Resisting Structural Evil: Love as Ecological-Economic Vocation by Cynthia Moe-Lobeda

Resisting Structural Evil: Love as Ecological-Economic Vocation by Cynthia Moe-Lobeda

Resisting Structural Evil: Love as Ecological-Economic Vocation by Cynthia D. Moe-Lobeda

Resisting Structural Evil: Love as Ecological-Economic Vocation <i>by Cynthia D. Moe-Lobeda</i>

Resisting structural evil: love as ecological-economic vocation

Resisting structural evil: love as ecological-economic vocation

Confronting evils: terrorism, torture, genocide

Part I. The Concept of Evil: 1. Inexcusable wrongs 2. Between good and evil 3. Complicity in structural evils 4. To whom (or to what?) can evils be done? Part II. Terrorism, Torture, Genocide: 5. Counterterrorism 6. Low-profile terrorism 7. Conscientious torture? 8. Ordinary torture 9. Genocide is social death 10. Genocide by forced impregnation Bibliography Filmography Websites Index.