{"id":1176,"date":"2014-09-14T09:00:14","date_gmt":"2014-09-14T14:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/?p=1176"},"modified":"2016-12-01T11:00:38","modified_gmt":"2016-12-01T16:00:38","slug":"read-this-book-september-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/2014\/09\/read-this-book-september-2014\/","title":{"rendered":"READ THIS BOOK! September 2014"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Each month, we ask a member of the Vanderbilt Divinity School faculty to recommend a book they are currently reading. Our September recommendation is offered by Paul Lim, <\/em>Associate Professor of the History of Christianity, <\/em>Associate Professor of Religious Studies, <\/em>Affiliate Professor, Department of History.<\/em><\/p>\n

This summer past was an immensely packed season of travel\u2014teaching and research\u2014for me, with destinations to England, the Netherlands, Belgium, India, and Korea for global sites, and Philadelphia, New York, and Boston within the States.\u00a0 Two books were in my backpack most of the summer, and it is these that I want to recommend to you the Reader!\u00a0 Siddarth Kara\u2019s Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery <\/em>(Columbia, 2009) and Amartya Sen\u2019s Development as Freedom <\/em>(Knopf, 1999).<\/p>\n

First of all, why would a scholar of Reformation- and post-Reformation England with particular focus on religious and intellectual history be reading books with words such as \u201csex trafficking\u201d and \u201cdevelopment\u201d economics on the title?\u00a0 Well, that is because there are subjects that I care deeply about, teach, and am writing on in addition to controversies surrounding the doctrine of the Trinity in early modern Europe!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Professor Paul Lim<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I have been teaching a course called \u201cHistory of Theodicy in Christian Traditions\u201d here at VDS and in my last institution, for I am convinced that for Theology to be anywhere near being the \u201cQueen of the Sciences,\u201d it has to grapple with Lived Reality, the quotidian interstices of life where the theological rubber meets the meandering roads.\u00a0 It is taught historically and genealogically.\u00a0 As both Nietzsche and a well-known contemporary geneticist have declared, all our intellectual endeavors (must) have genealogical orientation, offering a narratival\/historical arc to where we are and how we have gotten here.<\/p>\n

The two new books that I will be drawing heavily from for this semester\u2019s Theodicy Seminar are the aforementioned books by Kara and Sen.\u00a0 Now then, firstly about Sen\u2019s Development as Freedom, <\/em>for it might require a bit more of justification, followed by Kara\u2019s Sex Trafficking<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I drank from Sen\u2019s well deeply and that\u2014hopefully\u2014to good effect. For this erstwhile professor of economics at LSE, Calcutta, Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvard, economic development of whatever persuasion and perspective ought to have \u201cfreedom\u201d as its ultimate telos<\/em>.\u00a0 As a Nobel Prize winner in Economics, Professor Sen\u2019s writings have profoundly shaped and fundamentally altered the way one approaches development economics.\u00a0 Sen anchors his economic theory in historical analysis, ranging from the American Civil War to Marx\u2019s Das Kapital<\/em>, and his conclusions are as interdisciplinary and yet astoundingly incisive and lucid.\u00a0 His core inquiry can be summarized in this way: \u201cIf there are conflicts and if we could only choose one option, would we choose the method that optimizes \u2018the growth of output per head\u2019 or one that commits itself to and focuses on \u201cexpanding human freedom\u2019\u201d?\u00a0 [pp. 290-91]\u00a0 His book defies facile dichotomizations; both fiscally conservative theorists as well as those who are on the left edge of the economic policy spectrum will find Sen\u2019s Development as Freedom <\/em>stirring and challenging.\u00a0 Both the Occupy Wall St., proponents as well as the more ethically oriented (I believe there are some) hedge fund managers will have to grapple with this.<\/p>\n

So you ask: what\u2019s the payoff for a VDS student, alumna, alumnus, staff, and even faculty?\u00a0 My simple (but I am hopeful not simplistic) response is this: economics is an all-pervasive reality, whether one thinks about paying the tuition bill, saving for retirement, buying putatively ethically sourced coffee, or deciding on what car to buy and drive (WWJD? What Would Jesus Drive?), you get the point.\u00a0 Less facetiously, as we are swimming in the sea of a hyper-globalizing world, one has to think critically and charitably (dare I even say confessionally, whatever your (ir)religious confessions might be?) about the issue of freedom and economic development.\u00a0 Sen is ultimately concerned about using economics as a tool, <\/em>not telos<\/em>, of human flourishing and to that end, I highly recommend Development as Freedom<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The other book I am including on the Reading List for the Theodicy Seminar is Siddarth Kara\u2019s Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery. <\/em>I was in Kolkata and Delhi, India this summer, researching for my next book on Global Christianity and Human Trafficking: interviewing freedom business owners, NGO heads and staff, human rights activists.\u00a0 And everyone was talking about this book!\u00a0 Kara directs the program on Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery at Harvard\u2019s Kennedy School of Government, and his book is global in its scope and orientation, as he sought to understand the further twist in the way de-humanization occurs in this immorally lucrative trafficking of human beings for the purpose of procuring sexual pleasure, that at someone\u2019s expense.\u00a0 I could not put the book down, so much so that after reading Kara\u2019s account, I chose to use this instead of another more updated text (one that I had used last time) because of the narratival force.\u00a0 It\u2019s not merely stats and geographical distribution of the business of sexual slavery, although it surely has that galore.\u00a0 After offering a compelling survey of Sex Trafficking, Kara takes the reader through India, Nepal, Italy, Western Europe, Moldova, and the former USSR, Albania, and the Balkans, Thailand, the US, thereby completing a world tour of the state of the art of human trafficking.\u00a0 What I found at least equally compelling was Chapter Eight, \u201cA Framework for Abolition: Risk and Demand,\u201d in which he throws down his gauntlet and tells us what we should <\/em>be doing, both from the policy standpoint and from the moral-ethical activism standpoint.\u00a0 After arguing that a \u201cbusiness analysis of the sex trafficking industry would reveal its vulnerable points,\u201d Kara declares that to \u201censure that the business of sex trafficking and other forms of modern slavery are eradicated in the long term, the primary conditions that first gave rise to these crimes\u2014poverty and the destructive asymmetries of economic globalization\u2014must also be addressed.\u201d [pp. 200-1].\u00a0 Inasmuch as I loved this book, I found that something might <\/em>be amiss.\u00a0 If we, as global agents of justice, mercy and love, end up addressing all the economic and systemic fissures that let the cisterns of water of life to leak out, would that be sufficient?\u00a0 Imagine a world with no poverty, no asymmetric economic distribution, would that equity be a sufficient condition to keep the wheel of human production and flourishing going?\u00a0 Here, I find myself an accidental Augustinian!\u00a0 Augustine came to a simultaneously painful and joyful (painful in that he came to realize that he was not the ultimate source of solution; joyful in that it was precisely in that realization he found freedom) realization that all our educational, aesthetic, and economic endeavors without rectifying the ethical compass would leave the human condition with some gap.<\/p>\n

This recognition of a gap is where students and alums of VDS can engage with both Sen and Kara\u2019s texts to great benefit and offer a robust critique while deeply appreciating their insights.\u00a0 Tolle lege <\/em>indeed!<\/p>\n

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