Using interviews with activists and Lisa Sowle Cahill's concept of participatory discourse, this article examines how the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization (GBIO) built solidarity for the 2006 Massachusetts health care reform law. The analysis explores the morally formative connections between GBIO's activist strategies and its public liturgy for reform. The solidarity generated through this interfaith coalition's activities and religious arguments contrasts with two standard types of policy discourse, economics and liberalism. Arguments for health care reform based on economic efficiency or (...) positive rights are hampered by the lack of solidarity in U.S. political culture. GBIO's congregation-based organizing offers a performative model of public argumentation for religious groups committed to achieving affordable, quality health care for all Americans. (shrink)

THE CIVIL RIGHTS PROTESTS OF THE 1950S AND 1960S WERE AS MUCH about challenging normative conceptions of good desire as they were about claiming individual rights. Staged as rituals, these protests dramatized the social borders and sentiments existing in American society, and they performed a transforming vision of the desires and purposes appropriate to democratic citizens and institutions. This analysis of the reason-giving potential of ritual challenges John Rawls's criterion of "reciprocity" as the constraint on public reason and democratic legitimacy. (...) Social activists sometimes have to revise public norms through asymmetrical appeals to religious ideals or moral convictions that other citizens may staunchly oppose. An expanded model of public reasoning teaches the importance and the difficulties of incorporating the arguments of ritual into other rights movements, including the movement for same-sex marriage. (shrink)

The public responsibilities of nonprofit hospitals have been contested since the advent of the 1969 community benefit standard. The distance between the standard's legal language and its implementation has grown so large that the Internal Revenue Service issued a new reporting form for 2008 that is modeled on the Catholic Health Association's guidelines for its member hospitals. This article analyzes the appearance of an emerging moral consensus about community benefits to argue against a strict charity care mandate and in favor (...) of directing efficient care delivery and healthy community initiatives to underserved populations. The analysis turns on three moral conceptions of community benefits, the social contract model of hospital critics and the common good and covenantal models of Catholic and Jewish hospitals. (shrink)

USING QUALITATIVE INTERVIEWS AT CATHOLIC AND JEWISH HOSPITAL organizations, this essay contrasts the market-driven reforms of consumer-directed health care and physician entrepreneurship with the mission-driven structures of religious nonprofits. A structural analysis of values in health care makes a convoluted system more transparent. It also demonstrates the limitations of market reforms to the extent that they erode organizational structures of solidarity, which are needed to pool risks, shift costs, and maintain safety nets in a complex and expensive health economy.

John Milbank appropriates John Ruskin as part of his "Augustinian" tradition. Milbank's selective reading, however, omits Ruskin's fixed hierarchies as well as his acknowledgment of conflict in economic life. Neither of these ideas fits the social aesthetics of harmony and difference that Milbank claims is unique to Christian theology. While Milbank's strictly theoretical portrait of theology gains critical force from Ruskin's robust account of social practices and just exchange, Milbank lacks effective historical and institutional responses to the problems in Ruskin's (...) corpus. This deficiency undermines Milbank's dichotomy between theology and secular reason. (shrink)