Interfaith Public Health Network

I am excited to share the launch of the Interfaith Public Health Network website! 

Faith communities offer a wealth of tradition and wisdom that transforms hearts and minds, which supports people in addressing social injustices in their midst. 

The public health community, which has as a core value the commitment to addressing root causes of poor health outcomes and inequities, too often overlooks the profound potential of faith communities to contribute to meaningful and substantial public health practice and policy changes. 

The Interfaith Public Health Network seeks to change that, lifting up the moral voices from faith communities and their expanding their contribution to vital, transformative changes to society and the world. 

Join us! 

www.iphnetwork.org 

Mindful Eating for the Beloved Community

What is the Beloved Community?  Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. described the triple evils of racism, militarization, and economic exploitation. The Beloved Community is free of these three evils: it is anti-racist, practices active non-violence, and reconciles historical economic injustices. But it also values the positive attributes that all communities should be able to enjoy, ones that rejuvenate the earth and people’s health and wholeness.  Ones that regenerate the soils by sequestering carbon back into the ground, and value people over profits, allowing humans to simply consume foods with nutrients that promote health. Instead, foods are processed and packaged with toxins, additives, and an imbalance of nutrients that do not match the level of physical activity undertaken by most people in today’s society.  We have industrialized food systems that have been built through systemic racism, on the backs of slave labor - fertilized with chemicals produced for warfare - that degrade health and impoverish soil, people and planet.  While 1.5 billion acres of land was stolen from Indigenous nations in the U.S. between 1776 and 1887[1], today, “white people own 98 percent of all farmland, or about 50 times the number of acres owned by people of color.”[2]  Meanwhile, “over 60 percent of farmworkers are people of color, largely Latinx.”[3]  1.34% of farmers in the United States are Black, while the Black population across the country is around 13.4%.”[4] Of the 139 Black farmers among the over 57,000 farmers in New York State, as of the 2017 USDA Census of Agriculture, Black farmers earned a total net cash farm income of -$906, while white farmers earned $42,875.[5]  

The Beloved Community is one that supports Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) in owning and farming land that allows them to produce wealth and grow food that can be used to nourish communities. It is one that supports Black people in reclaiming their African roots and allows us to share across cultures without assuming that the privileged with education, food, and racist cultural practices should dominate society.

We achieve the Beloved Community by abiding by the King Philosophy. The King Philosophy includes the Triple Evils, Six Principles of Nonviolence, Six Steps of Nonviolent Social Change and the Beloved Community.[6]  We also acknowledge the steps for anti-racist practices outlined by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi in “How to Be an Anti-Racist.”

Mindful Eating for the Beloved Community, then, is a way of eating conscientiously. It entails understanding and recognizing our interconnectedness and relationships at a profoundly deep level, so much so that we see the food we eat and the systems that food comes from is tied to the well-being of our brothers and sisters of different ethnic and economic backgrounds than our own, in different parts of our country and different countries altogether.  It is a way of eating that starts with gratitude for the food in front of us - but does not stop there. It acknowledges that people have access to food of differing nutrient quality depending on their level of privilege, which leads to different health outcomes among different populations.  It acknowledges that companies that own the land and production resources have the most control over the wealth and health of communities. It acknowledges that people of color have less access to the resources that would enable them to own and lead companies, and are often relegated to positions that the privileged do not want, such as harvesting the food in dangerous working conditions, without being provided adequate wages or healthcare benefits.  Mindful Eating for the Beloved Community entails considering all of these factors mindfully as we eat the food in front of us, but then going a step further to use the nourishment from the food eaten to sustain us in actualizing systemic changes to correct these injustices.

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[1] Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust https://nefoclandtrust.org/our-work

[2] Civil Eats https://civileats.com/2020/02/24/an-enormous-land-transition-is-underway-heres-how-to-make-it-just/

[3] Civil Eats https://civileats.com/2020/02/24/an-enormous-land-transition-is-underway-heres-how-to-make-it-just/

[4] Black Farmer Fund https://www.blackfarmerfund.org/ourstory

[5] Black Farmer Fund https://www.blackfarmerfund.org/ourstory

[6] The King Center https://thekingcenter.org/king-philosophy/

For the Love of Neighbor

Catholics held a Day of Action for Migrant Children on Wednesday.  We wrote prayers for the children on strips of fabric and tied them to a metal fence representing the cages that kids are being kept in at the immigrant detention centers. Jean Stokan from the Sisters of Mercy spoke about the hypocrisy of the U.S. government, funding and fueling so much of the violence outbreaking in Central America, meanwhile we won’t even let migrants escaping the violence to find refuge in the U.S. without putting them in cages, without proper hygiene, food or water, and keeping them separated from their parents.  “Child detention is illegal under international law and causes serious mental, physical, and emotional health complications.”

The American Academy of Pediatrics and many other public health organizations have declared the policies towards immigrants a public health crisis. Immigrant policing has been found to negatively impact trust of government health information including vaccination of children.  The children are experiencing psychological trauma and may experience long-term mental health effects due to the detention and separation.  “The experiences may also exacerbate prior exposure to traumas in the home country (eg, violence) and during migration (eg, extortion).”  The children are not getting appropriate medical care; are forced to be in situations of poor sanitation and living conditions, and sit through long detention periods without the stimulation necessary to promote healthy child development. AAP past-president, Dr. Colleen Kraft, said “Separating parents from their kids at the border contradicts everything we know about children's welfare.”   

Indeed, any human rights crisis is a public health crisis, when people are not provided with the means by which they need to live dignified lives with nourishing food, clean water, clean air, shelter, clothing, bodily autonomy, and anything else they need to maintain hygiene and safety. 

Meanwhile, the public health community is also fighting for Child Nutrition Reauthorization, and ensuring the future of school wellness in New York State.  Almost 90% of school districts in New York State are missing at least one element of a comprehensive school wellness policy, as measured by the WELLSAT tool from the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity.  New York City school wellness advocates are trying to tackle support for school wellness, better school food and nutrition education at the city, state, and federal levels right now.   At the state level through the WELL Campaign, we want to see a model state school wellness policy that incorporates mental health and social and emotional learning alongside standards for school food, nutrition education, physical activity and physical education.   

And yet, the battle against inhumane immigration policies towards children seems totally disconnected from the battle for child health and well-being in schools.  Why can’t we see these efforts for the dignity & well-being of children as all connected, and work on them together?  Surely the faith community knows that public health advocates working on child nutrition also don’t want to see kids in cages, right?

Perhaps you think that nutrition education is not as important as immigration policies and ending child detention. (I for one have not seen many Catholic organizations promoting nutrition education, with exceptions including Altagracia Faith & Justice works in Northern Manhattan and the Mercy Center in the South Bronx - organizations serving immigrant communities while also protesting the root causes that cause people to have to flee their countries in the first place.) 

We cannot forget that everything is connected.  The Amazon and other rainforest areas are being destroyed to clear land for cattle that is used to produce fast food, palm trees to create an unhealthy oil which is used as a stabilizer for processed foods, and other consumer products such as paper, furniture and clothing which our consumeristic society is so dependent on.  If we do not each take a serious look at our lifestyles and examine how they are contributing to the destruction of human livelihoods and lives, and teach children to do the same, we will continue to perpetuate the crises in front of us. We live in an interconnected world and all our actions have consequences. We are called to co-create with our Creator, not destroy.  Youth are striking for the climate, some every Friday through the Fridays for Future movement, and some are just gearing up specifically for September 20.  

There are ways these youth can take action in their own schools though; we need to be proactive in our actions, not just resistant.  The Tisch Center for Food, Education and Policy at Teachers College, Columbia University has created a handout about what youth can do to demand more sustainability solutions in their schools. This could take the form of starting a school garden, participating in Meatless Mondays, campaigning for a Green Team, advocating for food and nutrition education, or decreasing food waste from school lunch. 

At the end of a “Climate Emergency and the Green New Deal” event at Riverside Church, a Fridays for Future climate strike march video was played with a backdrop of music from the song Bella Ciao which was used to protest the Nazis (re-written with lyrics to protest climate change), followed by the audience singing along. This was a chilling reminder of the connection between genocide and environmental destruction, which is all too close to home in the United States, with the founding of this country being at the expense of so many Native American lives, and too timely, with the killing of indigenous peoples in the Amazon and in other rainforests where the native peoples rely on the rainforests for their livelihoods.  

I have been encouraged to see youth leadership in promoting peace and living in harmony with creation, such as the Interfaith Youth Forum for Environment & Peace organized by JPIC Franciscans Africa.  However, the work of JPIC Franciscans Africa and the work of many other religious groups across the world are doing to promote this harmony is deeply underfunded.  For now, I have created a Go Fund Me page for JPIC Franciscans Africa, with hope and prayers that sufficient funds can be raised by the time of their 2019 youth forum which will be held during the Global Climate Strike on 20 September and World Peace Day on 21 September. The report about my trip to Kenya for the Laudato Si Generation conference, which I wrote about recently, has been translated into Spanish, French and Italian by the International Council of the Secular Franciscan Order.   

Recognizing the divide and silos between the public health community and faith-rooted social justice advocates, who seem to rarely work together for the same causes, several colleagues and I have decided to start the Interfaith Public Health Network, which seeks to engage and mobilize faith communities to improve population health, by addressing the underlying determinants of health (social, commercial, environmental, and political) through connecting, convening, cultivating, and catalyzing.  We want to bring the voices of healthcare advocates and the faith community together to advocate for things such as reduced emissions which lead to child asthma, promote agroecology projects and appreciation of plant-based meals which support the health of environment and people, support mental health services for people in need, and improve gun violence prevention measures.  

During a visit to New York by Olivier van Beeman from the Netherlands, author of the book “Heineken in Africa” the Interfaith Public Health Network organized an event with Olivier van Beeman along with Minister Onleilove Alston and Dr. Nicholas Freudenberg at the CUNY School of Public Health. We brought together the faith and public health communities to learn about the insidious practices of a multinational corporation that takes advantage of government tax loopholes in order to make its profits at the expense of the African community.  Some governments are even intertwined with the company, such as in Burundi.  This is the type of issue the Interfaith Public Health Network wants to raise awareness about: as Minister Onleilove Alston pointed out, in her religious tradition, it’s not a sin to drink, but it’s a sin to commit injustice.  And these injustices, involving government collusion with multinational companies, is what’s contributing to poverty, violence, despair and migration of our neighbors in many countries throughout the world, our common home. 

The Ruler's Church, the People's Church, and Lessons from the Franciscan Tradition

The Church today is a divided church – some say the hour on Sunday morning when people are at church is the most segregated hour of the week.  Joe Barndt’s book “Becoming an Anti-Racist Church” is enlightening me about the history of how this came to be. The Church split into the Ruler's Church and the People's Church originally when Constantine declared Christianity to be an officially sanctioned religion of the Roman Empire in 313 A.D. The Protestant Reformation did not fix the problem but divided the Church further. The divide of the Ruler's Church and the People's Church still persists and exists among both the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, though it can be complex to see.  There was not unanimity among the Church when the Ruler’s Church in Europe set out on its conquest of colonization – closely tied to the conception of superiority of the white race and the perpetuation of slavery. However, in general The Ruler's Church has a triumphal theology, “thanking God for blessing colonial enterprises with success, security, and material possessions” and is quick to “view poverty and other expressions of human suffering…as temporary conditions that could be overcome by individual effort, or responded to with charitable assistance,” while the People's Church uses the theology of the cross and identifies with suffering and oppression.

Francis and Clare of Assisi and Agnes of Prague, meanwhile, helped to heal the divide even before the Protestant Reformation, and did so without leaving the Roman Catholic Church.

On a Franciscan retreat last weekend, I learned from Sister Kathy Osbelt about Agnes of Prague’s communication with Clare of Assisi in the 13th century.  Agnes of Prague was set to marry a king, and then an emperor, and she declined both to join Clare’s order, the Poor Ladies as they were known at the time.  Her cousin was Elizabeth of Hungary (the patron saint of the Secular Franciscans).  Clare wrote letters to Agnes, who was eventually given the “privilege of poverty” after her brother, King Wenceslaus I, wrote to Pope Gregory IX asking him to give her what she was asking for if he wanted to maintain good relations with the kingdom. The Pope had not wanted to lose the land her material privilege afforded the church, but acquiesced.

The privilege of poverty made it harder for Francis and Clare and their followers to live a life of comfort, but made it easier to live as true brothers and sisters to all.  As Jesus said, “my yoke is easy, and my burden light” (Mtw 11:30). Fraternal life is supposed to break down socioeconomic barriers to full participation in communal life. The Franciscan myths of inclusion, dignity and beauty which Fr. David Couturier describes, are an antidote to the metaphor that the current political administration uses of the United States as “a fortress nation in peril” and “immigrants as ‘danger,’ ‘disease’ and ‘criminals.’”

How can we take history together with Franciscan idealism to build a more inclusive world?  If the Ruler’s Church recognizes the value of Christ’s message, can it agree to partner with the People’s Church to truly triumph over the evils of oppression?

Breaking Bread and the Franciscan Solidarity Tables

I would like to share two of Fr. Richard Rohr’s daily meditations from this weekend, as I think they are particularly relevant to the Franciscan Action Network’s efforts to build Franciscan Solidarity Tables in cities across the United States.  I have shared some commentary in between as well.

Fr. Richard Rohr shared in his daily meditation on July 21^st: 

Again and again, Jesus demonstrated one of the simplest, surest ways to connect with others across differences: share a meal. Somehow in eating together our barriers lower. We sit across from and beside one another, at the same level. Perhaps we recognize the familiar in each other, the universal need to be fed.

He encourages us to “participate in some form of breaking bread… as a contemplative practice, a way to open your heart and be deeply present to someone else.”  He then shares,

The People’s Supper, a nonprofit “building community through better conversations,” offers a helpful framework for purposeful meals. Their goal is “to repair the breach in our interpersonal relationships across political, ideological, and identity differences, leading to more civil discourse. And, we plan to do it in the most nourishing way we know—over supper!”

This isn’t about a political party, or what is or isn’t happening in Washington. It’s about us, and our relationship to one another. Too often, we exist in echo chambers and see each other as monoliths: one-sided stereotypes who can be reduced to a single word or phrase.

Instead, we want to go beneath the headlines, to see each other as real people with real struggles, real fears, real hopes, and real dreams.

Suppers are a place where we can come together over one of humanity’s most ancient and simple rituals. A place where we can share meaningful stories, good food, and a sense of community. A place where we can build understanding and trust.

We invite you to pull up a chair. 

The People's Supper helps hosts create a safe, comfortable space. You don't have to be a professional chef!  Potlucks - where everyone brings something to share - are the best way to build community. 

This is precisely what the Franciscan Action Network is working to build: Franciscan Solidarity Tables where all are welcome and we can build understanding and trust and work for justice for the marginalized.  This frequently means engaging on political issues, which Fr. Richard quotes Peter Armstrong in saying that this is necessary to do for us as Christians to be able to claim we “have anything to do with Jesus.”

We need not seek division and further polarization; however, we can continue to engage in tough debate and conversation across dividing lines, expressing our own deeply held convictions and being willing to be changed by our encounter with the other, because that is the way that Jesus engaged with others.

He also quotes Parker Palmer on the topic:

When we forget that politics is about weaving a fabric of compassion and justice on which everyone can depend, the first to suffer are the most vulnerable among us—our children, our elderly, our mentally ill, our poor, and our homeless. As they suffer, so does the integrity of our democracy.

On July 22 in his daily meditation, Fr. Richard discusses “The Shape of the Table.”  He starts with the Eucharist’s relevance to the conversation about bringing people together around a table in today’s context: “the Eucharist is an invitation to socially experience the shared presence of God, and to be present in an embodied way.”

First, let me share some context. In Jesus’ time, the dominant institution was the kinship system: the family, the private home. That’s why early Christians gathered in house churches, much different from the typical parish today. In Matthew’s Gospel the word house is used many times. Jesus is always going in and out of houses (as in 8:14, 9:10). What happened around the tables in those houses shaped and named the social order. Table friendship ends up defining how we see friendship in general.

Jesus often used domestic settings to rearrange the social order. Nowhere was that truer than with the meal—with whom, where, and what he ate. This is still true today, more than we might imagine. (Another example of Jesus changing the social order is in the relationship between employers and workers.) Jesus’ constant use of table relationships is perhaps his most central re-ritualization of what family means. Note that he is always trying to broaden the circle (see Luke 14:7-24 for three good examples). Jesus brought this all to fullness in his “last supper” with “the twelve.” This was not to emphasize male fellowship, but the full quorum of the twelve tribes of Israel. (I know it does not look that way to us now, but the Eucharistic meal was from the very beginning a gathering of both women and men, which shows how Christians understood equality.)

Jesus didn’t want his community to have a social ethic; he wanted it to be a social ethic. Their very way of eating and organizing themselves was to be an affront to the system of dominance and power. They were to live in a new symbolic universe, especially symbolized by what we now call open table fellowship.

This has a particular relevance to food justice and climate change:

In all cultures, sharing food is a complex interaction that symbolizes social relationships and defines social boundaries almost more than any other daily event. Whom you eat with defines whom you don’t eat with. Certain groups of people eat certain kinds of food. Through our choices and behavior at table, we name and identify ourselves.

…today a vegetarian (or even vegan) diet has become a conscious choice for many because they’ve studied the politics of food: who eats meat and who can’t eat meat; what eating meat is doing not only to our health but even to the planet. Researchers surmise that the meat-heavy Western diet contributes to one-fifth of global emissions on our planet.  Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh writes: “As a spiritual family and a human family, we can all help avert climate change with the practice of mindful eating. Going vegetarian may be the most effective way to stop climate change.”

(While overall there are climate benefits to eating less meat, there are also health implications to consider in going completely vegetarian, and it is not something everyone should do.  However, the majority of people could eat less meat and adopt a “reducetarian” diet for climate and health benefits.  There also a host of complex economic, cultural, and social factors to consider to be able to answer the question, “Who sits at my table?” with integrity….to be covered in future dialogue.)

Another element of breaking bread together speaks to the statement that eating together makes about immigration policies: when citizens and immigrant families eat together, we are working to keep families together rather than break them apart. This is the essence of the movement “Break Bread Not Families.”  Breaking bread together with immigrant families not only allows us to get to know different peoples’ cultures and cuisines, but also gives us an opportunity to learn about the stories of what brought people to immigrate in the first place. Were they seeking refuge or asylum, escaping tyrant governments or violent gangs in their home communities?  Were they forced off of their land because multinational companies started pillaging the land so they could make a profit off of its resources, thereby leaving the families without a means to grow food, access clean water, and make a living?  Coming together around the table allows us to hear stories from our immigrant brothers and sisters and then see if there is anything we can do to help, both in their current situation such as with food, shelter, or healthcare, as well as the situations of their home countries, such as through working with Franciscans International and engaging at the United Nations.

In September 2017 when the New York City Franciscan Solidarity Table preliminarily began meeting, three of the topic areas people expressed interest in engaging on were immigration, health/food justice, and climate change.  There is certainly overlap between each of these issues; coming together around a table allows us to discuss the areas of overlap as well as how we can make progress on achieving justice and continue bringing more people to the table and building community.  

Kelly Moltzen, OFS, MPH, RD is a board member of the Franciscan Action Network, program manager of Bronx Health REACH, and 2015 Re:Generate Fellow of the Food, Health and Ecological Well-Being Program of Wake Forest University’s School of Divinity.