Home Page of George Griener

George E. Griener  ggriener@jstb.edu
Associate Professor of Historical/Systematic Theology
Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley http://www.jstb.edu    

Academic issues, including course syllabi, are posted under the ACADEMIC button above; more personal and pastoral topics appear under PERSONAL. 

According to the Mission Statement of the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, a key goal of our academic work is "reverent and critical service of the faith that does justice."   Translating faith into justice for the world in which we live is a precarious but unavoidable task.  It presupposes reflection on the events which take place around us as a believing people or as a political body.

Monday June 23, 2008

Las Vegas Casinos and Airport Departure Lounges

“Jeremiah said: ‘I hear the whispering of many: Terror on every side.’” That was the opening line of today’s [June 22nd] first reading from the Prophet Jeremiah.  And the Gospel opens: “Jesus said, fear no one.” Readings from the 12th Sunday of the year.

Like the barely audible background noise one hears in Las Vegas casinos, generated to provoke players into more reckless gambling patterns, airports continue to replay again and again a message from Homeland Security that the current threat level has been raised to orange.   Of course, it was raised to orange five years ago, in 2003, with precious little evidence since then that we are surrounded by terror.  But the deliberate endless repetition strategically generates a subtle and sustained atmosphere of fear, which allows us acquiesce to policies and practices which, in our right minds, we would never countenance and which we would recognize as at odds with the deepest held principles that made us a nation.

Wednesday December 19, 2007

An Unlikely Axis

The governments of the United States, Iran, Myanmar, Pakistan, China, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Iraq....share at least this in common: opposing a United Nations General Assembly sponsored moratorium on the use of the death penalty.  The vote -- 104 for, 54 against, 29 abstaining --  came Tuesday.  There is hope: the day before, New Jersey formally abolished the death penalty.

Tuesday November 27, 2007

Complex 2030--Nuclear weapons for the new century

Ten years ago, in 1998,  the 105 U.S. Bishop members of Pax Christi USA issued a statement rejecting nuclear deterrence and appealing for a treaty to outlaw nuclear weapons, as biological and chemical weapons have been outlawed.  This was in response to a U.S. government program, Science-Based Stockpile Stewardship and Management Program to upgrade the nation's arsenal of nuclear weapons.  

Now, a decade later, the U.S. Administration is pushing for a new investment of some $150 Billion in nuclear weapons, a project titled Complex 2030.  The Department of Energy (DOE) has opened a second "comment phase" to hear public opinion about the project.  

For information on Complex 2030, see the World Policy Institute's study, COMPLEX 2030: The Costs and Consequences of the Plan to Build a New Generation of Nuclear Weapons.  Click here.

For links to Pax Christi USA, Click here.

        George E. Griener 11.27.07

Thursday November 16, 2006

17th Anniversary of the deaths of Elba Ramos, Celina Ramos, Ignacio Ellacuria, Ignacio Martin Baro, Segundo Montes, Amando Lopez, Juan Moreno, and Joaquin Lopez y Lopez on the grounds of the Central University of America in San Salvador, El Salvador at the hands of soldiers of the Salvadoran Military, some of whom who had been trained at the School of the Americas in Ft. Benning, GA.

Monday November 5, 2006

Vatican official says death penalty for Saddam would be wrong

November 5, 2006:  VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- The head of the Vatican's justice and peace office and an editor of a Vatican-approved Jesuit journal said it would be wrong to carry out the death penalty against Saddam Hussein.   The former Iraqi president was sentenced to death by hanging Nov. 5 in a case involving the deaths of 148 Iraqis in 1982.

Cardinal Renato Martino, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, said, "For me, to punish a crime with another crime, such as killing out of vengeance, means that we are still at the stage of 'an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.'"   

In a Nov. 5 interview with ANSA, the Italian news agency, the cardinal said both Pope John Paul II's 1995 encyclical, "Evangelium Vitae" ("The Gospel of Life"), and the Catechism of the Catholic Church teach that modern societies have the means to protect citizens from the threat of a murderer without resorting to execution.

"God has given us life, and only can God take it away," the cardinal said, adding, "the death sentence is not a natural death."   "Life is a gift that the Lord has given us, and we must protect it from conception until natural death," he said.   "Unfortunately," he said, "Iraq is among the few countries that has not yet made the choice of civility by abolishing the death penalty."

Jesuit Father Michele Simone, assistant director of La Civilta Cattolica, a Vatican-reviewed magazine, told Vatican Radio the sentence "certainly would not resolve the situation in Iraq."   "In a situation like that of Iraq, where hundreds are, in fact, condemned to death each day" by the ongoing violence, "adding one more does not help anything," he said.

Father Simone said if Saddam had not been condemned to death, most Iraqis probably would have questioned the integrity of the trial "because death has become the order of the day. But to save a life -- which does not mean accepting what Saddam Hussein did -- is always positive."   The Jesuit said the Iraqi government must find a political solution to promote and protect the lives of all its citizens and the value of human life in general.   [By Cindy Wooden, Catholic News Service]

"Shake and Bake" and "we never torture prisoners...."

While the Bush Administration expresses dismay at reports of prisoners being tortured at an Iraqi Interior Ministry prison in a Baghdad suburb, news continues to circulate of the "Shake and Bake" operation in which U.S. forces used white phosphorous weapons in Fallujah in November 2004, and that the U.S. government lied to its British allies when it denied using MK77 Napalm-like weaponry during the invasion of Iraq.  The 1st Marine Expeditionary Force is cited as having used this horrific device.    Moreover, the President and Vice-President continue to object to Senate proposed limits to the use of torture by the Central Intelligence Agency.    November 15, 2005

Reformation Sunday October 30, 2005

News Services this weekend carried U.S. Pentagon estimates of Iraqi civilian casualties at the hands of insurgency forces since early 2004.  The figure is close to 25,000.  A sad, tragic commentary on the violence which has wracked Iraq in the last two years.

However, a Johns Hopkins University study, the Lancet Study, of Iraqi civilian deaths as a result of U.S. and allied forces between January 2002 and September 2004 generated a figure close to 100,000 greater than expected. For details, cf. www.thelancet.com.  

November is frequently a time for remembering those who have died.  In addition to mourning the 2,00 U.S. military personnel who have died in Iraq, it might be well to recall the 100,000 Iraqi civilians who perished as "collateral damage" in a war whose rationale and justification appear to have been fabricated by the government of the United States.