Call for Justice

From Practice to Theory and Back

Kurt Ver Beek, Nicholas P. Wolterstorff

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781532692215
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Christians around the world are awakening to the Biblical call to "Do Justice"--but what does that look like in practice? Through a series of compelling and illuminating letters, a renowned philosopher and the founder of a ground-breaking Honduran justice organization draw on decades of personal experience to discuss theology, politics, human nature, and the messiness of making government systems work to defend rights and uphold justice.

Part 1

The Founding of ASJ
and How It Works

1

A First Letter

Dear Kurt,

On my initial visit to Honduras to observe firsthand the work of ASJ, I was both moved and struck by many things. We will get to them later. But what especially struck me was the fact that ASJ was very definitely a justice organization—not a relief or development organization. Of course, I should have realized that ASJ was a justice organization from the fact that “justice” is in its name. But it hadn’t really sunk in—probably because most of the work that American Christians support overseas is either traditional mission work or relief or development work. Relatively little is devoted to social justice.

For me, the clearest indicator that ASJ was doing justice work was that what it was doing was dangerous—very dangerous. I learned that around five years earlier Dionisio Díaz García, a lawyer for ASJ, had been killed by two hit ­men on a motorcycle as he was headed for court.

A rather good rule of thumb is that if an organization is working to improve the condition of some segment of the populace and in doing so, stirs up hostility on the part of those who have something to lose, the work it is doing is probably justice work. That’s because, when struggling to correct some injustice, one has to point fingers at those who are perpetrating the injustice, accuse them, and try to get them to stop. And they don’t like being accused and don’t want to stop—no surprise there! Relief and development work, while important and necessary, do not often result in threats of violence because they do not, as such, require pointing accusing fingers.

So here’s my first question for you, Kurt: how did it happen that you co-founded a justice organization, and how did it happen that you co-founded the organization in Honduras? I have heard pieces of the story, but never the whole story. As I recall, your graduate school training was in development work, and you initially went to Honduras to work for a relief organization. If that is correct, what led you to start working for justice? And what led you to found ASJ?

Your friend,

Nick

2

The Founding of ASJ

Dear Nick,

I remember your first trip to Honduras very well. You may have left Honduras with a new sense of what justice work could look like, but our rich conversations during that week left me equally inspired. I felt you gave me new language to express the vision that ASJ had long been implementing.

The path that led to the organization that you saw in 2010, and in your subsequent trips, was not a clear one. I certainly never imagined the breadth or scope of work that we would be doing. Jo Ann and I moved to Honduras just months after we graduated from college, and for six years we worked in community development. Those were formative years for us—we were living alongside people in poverty, digging deeply into the culture and language, and learning about development, even if sometimes through trial and error. But the longer we worked on these health, agriculture, and microfinance projects, the more we felt something was missing. We wanted our work to help the most vulnerable people in Honduras, but increasingly we understood that their problems were deeper than training and loans could fix.

In the 1990s, I decided to get my PhD in Development Sociology at Cornell, and I was very focused on learning more about community development. When I graduated, Jo Ann and I wanted to start a practical, hands-­on semester in Honduras for college students—teaching them all the things we wished we had known when we started working internationally. I remember several occasions when professors asked me if I wasn’t more interested in looking at things from a structural level, and I always said no. We had loved our experience of community development and wanted to be with the people, in the community.

Even before I finished my doctorate, we sent a proposal for a semester in Honduras to a number of colleges. Calvin College, our alma mater, responded quickly and hired Jo Ann and me to start the program.

When our first group came down in 1996, we designed three course-­sections for them. We started out teaching them everything we knew about Honduras—its history, culture, economics, and politics.

The second section was all about community development—both the most common problems a poor community faces, and practical solutions to alleviate those problems. I would draw a matrix on the board and together we would fill it in—what are the problems Honduras faces at a community level? What are some solutions? Which organizations are working on those solutions? We talked about local health and sanitation issues, education, agriculture, microenterprise—all the things on the community development palette at the time. Between the students and me, we always came up with dozens of organizations, both Christian and secular, that were working on those community development issues.

Our third course focused on national and international issues facing Honduras—immigration, debt, trade, violence, and government corruption. I would put the same matrix on the board, and again it was easy to think through problems, and even propose some solutions and their pros and cons. But when we got to the column identifying who was working in these areas, we couldn’t think of any organizations doing this work. Even after my ten years in Honduras, I knew of very few organizations working on macro issues like violence and corruption, and almost none of them were Christian.

I gradually felt convicted. I knew that if I talked to my neighbors and asked them about their priorities, few of them would talk about microloans. The issues that kept them up at night were deeper. Will the hospital have medicine for me? Will the gangs kill my son as they killed his father? My neighbors’ problems were not just the lack of some material good. The fragility of their lives was a direct effect of a government that was failing to protect its most vulnerable people.

Jo Ann and I decided to hold a meeting with some of our friends in Tegucigalpa in order to share a vision of an organization that would address some of these serious structural issues that Honduras faced. Four of our friends, all Honduran, decided to join us, and we ended that meeting by naming the first board of directors of La Asociación para una Sociedad más Justa, or ASJ. One of those founding members was Carlos Hernández, a young school principal and community leader. I didn’t know him very well at the time, but he would soon become one of my best friends, and a lifelong partner in working for justice.

Those early years with ASJ felt a little bit like our first years in community development—a lot of trial and error. All of us on the board of directors chipped in to rent our first office—the garage behind someone’s apartment—and we hired a friend part-time to help us figure out what we were going to do.

I’m proud of the victories we achieved in the first few years, such as helping communities get legal title to their homes and protecting the labor rights of vulnerable workers. But those victories felt at times like many different stabs at this nebulous “cloud” of injustice. One of our biggest goals was to expose corruption, something we thought would be relatively easy, because Honduran elites seemed to break and abuse laws so blatantly. We quickly learned it wasn’t as easy as we thought.

One of our first big cases began when community leaders from a marginalized settlement came to us to report that they were being forced to buy their land twice—once from the city, and once from a lawyer who claimed that he was the rightful owner of the settlement land. After six months of searching through complex, unorganized property registrations, we were able to prove that the community was, in fact, situated on city land, and that the lawyer had no right to it. Convincing a judge of this would take many more months of tireless work. But though this work wasn’t easy, we quickly learned how far-­reaching a victory could be.

In the process of fighting for this one community, we were able not only to clear the way for more than 20,000 residents to get their land titles, but also to draft and help pass legislation that would change the way all land disputes in Honduras were settled—thereby helping to protect hundreds of thousands of poor Hondurans whose homes were threatened by unscrupulous opportunists. The diligence and activism of our staff resulted in government systems working better, which, in turn, affected lives across the entire country.

As we began to see these results, the purpose of ASJ as a “justice organization” really began to crystalize. Our work in education wouldn’t just focus on a few schools; it would target the Ministry of Education who administered over 22,000 schools. Our work in health wouldn’t focus on local clinics or medical brigades; it would analyze the multimillion-­dollar medicines budget being mishandled by the Ministry of Health. Even our work in community violence wasn’t intended just to lower homicide rates in our target communities but to model for the rest of the country what effective violence prevention could look like.

Twenty years later, Jo Ann and I still run our study-­abroad program every year, and we still try to teach students all the things we wish we had known when we started doing this work. We teach them that systemic problems require a systemic solution. We teach them that development work needs to intersect with justice work, challenging inequalities and injustices built into government and legal systems. And when we draw those matrices, showing who’s working in those areas, I’m pleased that ASJ makes that list.

Thinking about how ASJ started makes me wonder about your own interest in justice. You have spent much of your life pursuing justice in practice, and much of your academic career thinking and writing about justice; your reflections on the philosophical and spiritual nature of justice span several books. With all the lines of inquiry open to a philosopher, what led you to think and write about justice, particularly the Christian approach to justice?

Your friend,

Kurt

3

Apartheid and Palestine:
Awakening to the Call for Social Justice

Dear Kurt,

That was a very interesting letter, spelling out how you got interested in justice issues in Honduras and why it was that you and others founded ASJ. What you write suggests a number of questions that I would like to put to you. But before we get to those, I’ll answer your question as to how I, a philosopher, got interested in issues of social justice.

It happened quite differently from how it happened in your case. In your case, it ha...

Table of contents

• Foreword, by Ruth Padilla DeBorst
• Acknowledgments
• About this book
• Prologue
• Part 1 The Founding of ASJ and How It Works
• Part 2 Justice, Love, and Forgiveness
• Part 3 Justice, Coalitions, and Keeping the Vision Alive
• Part 4 ASJ as a Christian Organization
• Part 5 Applying the ASJ Model Elsewhere
• Epilogue
• Six Questions for Doing Justice
• Further Reading