Joint Ventures

“Joint Venture/s” is a term used in the business world to describe two or more business enterprises that join hands and consolidate their management, operations, and labor force to increase their productivity, to offer a more diversified array of products, to increase their profitability, and be a more successful business enterprise in service to their employees and society at large. But it is not simply a matter of joining economic forces and resources. There has to be synergy, compatibility and complementarity in corporate strengths and weaknesses, in corporate missions and cultures, in corporate objectives and strategies such that the joint venture/s result/s in something greater that the mere sum of their parts. The concept of joint venture/s is diametrically opposed to the wave of mergers, acquisitions, and hostile takeovers that swept through the economy of the United States from the 1990s on. In the latter case, size determined strategy, size made profits, and size resulted in outrageous salaries. This was especially true of the size of the financial sector that grew much faster than did the amount of capital for nonfinancial businesses, which was supposed to be its main function. But the gigantic house of financial cards, built on Wall Street greed, unchecked by Washington regulators, and promoted by an unregulated market ideology, collapsed in 2008 to cause the most severe recession since the Great Depression. Jobs were lost, incomes disappeared, houses were foreclosed, the economy shrunk, and people suffered irreparable losses. This is true of joint venture/s in the academic world. Interdisciplinary studies are not mere combinations of academic courses. They are, or should be, the mutual enrichment and mutual correction of disciplines. They can be, and are, about expanding the horizons of a discipline beyond its narrow confines and/or correcting the constricting assumptions, values, and prescriptions of doctrinaire theoretical viewpoints. These have been the basic assumption and the goal, the working framework and agenda behind the essays gathered here, as they were in my earlier collections, Critical Intersections (2006) and Creative Fractures (2011). In my teaching and writing, I seek to bring to bear insights and perspectives from religious studies and the social sciences, their critical intersections, their creative fractures, and their joint ventures to elucidate discussions, controversies, and explanations. In retirement, I decided to focus my attention on several controversial topics that have always been at the back of my mind, residing there uneasily because unresolved, but which I never had the extended time to study due to the responsibilities and exigencies of academic life. I wanted to research the topics, read different views and perspectives on them, and not only the official and so-called orthodox positions, to think through them, and come to my own personal conclusions, without any consideration of the possibility of publishing them or of courting criticism and condemnation. This I did with regard to the historical Jesus in Creative Fractures, and this I do in this collection with the subjects of religious pluralism, the politics of abortion and gay mariage, colonialism and imperialism in Christian theology, atonement and sacrifice in the Eucharist, theology, and spirituality, as well as, with some outstanding issues of the development project for and in the Third World/Global South, which has been going, without much success, for more than a half century now. These are my personal thoughts on them, and I offer them for the personal consideration of others.