A Time to Care

Cathleen Kaveny’s “Teach Us to Care…” (February) was a welcome short take that will engage my students, who are preparing for health-care careers. Although I bristled at the subtitle, “...and not to care,” the piece raises a question that begs to be asked in our contemporary equivalent of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Valley of Ashes, in Kaveny’s words, “a desolate, dry place inhabited by the souls left behind by uncontrolled capitalism.” What does it mean to care? As Kaveny notes, the answer isn’t as simple as we might think or like, but she’s willing to make a start: care involves the interplay of reason and emotion; the legal duty to care presupposes that other people’s lives are as important as ours are to us; the emotional component of care can be egocentric, as illustrated by the Gatsby characters; the pioneering work of Carol Gilligan and other feminist thinkers added affective engagement with others as essential to care, but invited criticism for its potential to gender and reduce care to women’s work. Due to the critiques that highlighted problems attendant upon any care ethic, Kaveny’s turn to Margaret Farley’s idea of “compassionate respect” (compassion as “feeling with a suffering human being” plus respect as seeing “the other as a person who is equal to but distinct from us”) provides a helpful move forward, one aimed at deterring egocentric care and the projection of caregiver beliefs, desires, and needs onto the sufferer.

Appreciative though I am of Kaveny’s article, I don’t share her view that “the word ‘compassion’ is much more helpful than ‘care.’” Granted, Farley’s “compassionate respect” is an essential component of care, but care involves more than the components of compassionate respect. For my students preparing for professions in health care and social work, the “good Samaritan” of Luke 10:29–37 serves as the model. Like Jesus throughout the Gospel of Luke, the Samaritan sees a sufferer (apparently he’s paying attention, not looking at a screen), is moved by compassion, then provides care for the man’s needs: bandaging his wounds, pouring wine and oil on them, carrying him on his beast to an inn. Attention moves the Samaritan to compassion, then beyond it to acts of care.

Because we speak so often of health care, child care, elder care, veterinary care, and creation care, the word “care” calls for ongoing attention and clarification, especially given the linguistic trend of reconfiguring care professions as “industries” akin to the steel or automotive industries. Should any of these care needs be treated as simply another commodity to be purchased on the market? That we are in the midst of a serious care crisis—and should name it as such—is amply evident, raising still more questions: Why the crisis? What’s the cause? Do we care about care? Fortunately, scholars from an array of fields—sociology, political science, gender studies, philosophy, economy, geography—have turned their attention to the care crisis, exposing the impact of neoliberal principles and institutions on caretaking practices and policies. Political scientist Joan Tronto and other care ethicists argue that the care crisis is not unrelated to our democracy crisis (Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality, and Justice; also Who Cares? How To Reshape a Democratic Politics). Similarly, in his Caring for Souls in a Neoliberal Age, psychotherapist and theologian Bruce Rogers-Vaughn asserts, based on his three decades of practice, “Neoliberalism has become so encompassing and powerful that it is now the most significant factor in shaping how, why, and to what degree human beings suffer.”

Here in the midst of a deepening care crisis, I’m grateful that Kaveny’s short take turns our attention to an urgent need—“teach us to care” with “compassionate respect.” Timely indeed, that is, in the kairos-time inaugurated by Jesus’ mission (Mark 1:14–15). Using a Gospel lens, it is time for those of us in faith communities to engage the work of scholars who, in their critical attention to the care crisis, expose its roots. We find those roots in an “attention economy” of disordered desire, a digital economy that has set, according to Antón Barba-Kay, “the attention trap.” As the parable of the good Samaritan attests, care requires that persons pay attention to need. This is no small challenge in the twenty-first century “roaring twenties” that have produced our neoliberal Valley of Ashes at the southern border and elsewhere.

Susan Calef
Creighton University
Omaha, Nebr.

Inheritance and Legacy

Thank you for the preview you gave us of Paul Elie’s forthcoming book, The Last Supper, which promises to be a fascinating read (“Controverted to the Core,” May). The notion of crypto-religion brings to mind the phenomenon long-known in Jewish contexts of the medieval and early modern Spanish and Portuguese conversos, who converted to Christianity under pressure while secretly retaining ties to their ancestral Judaism. Some of these found true spiritual homes in a kind of Erasmian Catholicism, while others, having suffered under the burden of their dualism, returned to Judaism when they could. Their legacy, though, for Jews and Christians, is a sometimes startling syncretism between the two religions that, pondered now, can simultaneously disturb and deepen the life of faith, however labelled. Paul Elie found perfect words for it: “[I]nheritance and legacy, underworld and promised land.”

Ernest Rubinstein
New York, N.Y.