On Religion and Public Policy: Pope Leo on Dumping

The Terra dei Fuochi, or “land of fires,” is a region in southern Italy where “decades of illegal dumping, burying and burning of waste” had been devastating by the time Pope Leo paid Acerra a visit in May, 2026.[1] Lest visual images of hell’s fires reminiscent of Jonathan Edwards’ sermons come to mind, the devastation was squarely in the this-worldly domain of public policy. The pope’s speech can thus be viewed as an over-reach from the standpoint of his native fauna—the sui generis domain of religion, whose referent transcends not only the limits of cognition, perception, and sensibility (emotion), but also Creation itself![2]

Departing from religion as transcendent experience, the pope “called for a rethink of current economic and social models, urging those present to try to rediscover values centered on solidarity and respect for the land.”[3] As I, like that pope, was born and raised in the Midwest (both of us in northern Illinois, in neighboring regions), I can perhaps be too direct, even blunt, in stating that all of the theological education in the world does not include expertise in socio-economic models. Accordingly, liberation theology is open to criticism for dogmatically reducing the kingdom of God to one economic model. Similarly, Arthur Rich’s attempt to apply seven criteria of justice based on Karl Barth’s theology of creation—even though Christology is much more salient in Barth’s writings—to economic systems warrants a suspicious eye, especially as he, a German, concluded that the social-market economy of Germany to be the most just. Bad air! Yet another of Nietzsche’s expressions also comes to mind: human, all too human. For a theologian or cleric to jaunt over to political economy as if one were an expert in that field of knowledge can indeed be said to be human, all too human. 

Even basing a call for respect for the land on a Creation theology (i.e., God created the land) may be a stretch. To the extent that God orders by separating as the Creator, we too, who are in the image of God, separate uses of land. Just as it is not possible, even in the best of all possible worlds, for everyone to be above average, so consuming organic beings such as humans must lay waste, though of course there is a limit to everything and responsibility can reasonably be inferred. The Biblical Book of Genesis can be interpreted as including Yahweh ordering rather than merely as creating ex nihilo. To be sure, “God created the heavens and the earth,” but the emphasis in chapter 1 extends to separating, and thus on distinguishing. Even creating the heavens and the earth implies that the two are distinguished. Furthermore, in Genesis we read, “God separated the light from the darkness,” created a sky that separated “the waters from the waters,” and “let dry land appear” such that the seas were separated. Accordingly, we can separate lands from lands as per different uses. Furthermore, theological concept of Logos, which refers to God’s rational activity in creating, is more applicable to distinguishing than to making something out of nothing (other than the initial decision to make at all, rather than continue to be self-complacent). Accordingly, we can apply reason to stewardship of the land. Even though stewardship of the land follows from even such an expansive interpretation of Creation as including ordering, the specificity of the pope can be viewed as dogmatic, even ideological, and thus better categorized under public policy. For example, the pope applauded “broad awareness of the seriousness of the criminal activity and the indifference that has left room for these crimes.”[4] He was undoubtedly referring to illegal dumping of chemical waste. I submit that a broad theological argument against such waste as criminal is a stretch.

Similarly, even though the social principle of solidarity, which is a political principle that is widely valued in the E.U. (but not in the U.S.!), can be related to Paul’s writings on Christians being of one spiritual body in Christ Jesus, the tight link between solidarity and social policy, such as affordable housing for the poor, puts the word solidarity firmly in the domain of politics rather than religion. Jesus’ conception of neighbor-love, or benevolentia universalis, in interpersonal in nature, rather than communal, as in the solidarity of a people. Likewise, the Gospels’ espousal of “love thy neighbor” would lose its flavor if put in terms of the political concept of the common good. “Let us learn, then,” the pope said on his visit, “to be rich in a different way: more attentive to relationships, more intent on fostering the common good, more attached to the local area, more grateful in welcoming and integrating those who come to live among us.”[5] In reference to land, the common good harkens back to land that towns separated off from private property for public use. Your horse could feed on the grass there, but not in your neighbor’s front yard! This is a civic rather than a theological distinction.

To be sure, the pope was on firmer ground in referring to interpersonal relationships and even on marginalizing certain people, for “neighbor-love” exists between persons, and Jesus in the Gospels advocates compassion to the marginalized, even a prostitute (which is not Mary Magdalene). So the pope spoke closer to home (i.e., the religious domain) in a specifically Christian motif in observing that the “name ‘Terra dei Fuochi’ refers to the fires lit on the edges of cities, sometimes by small, rejected and marginalized minorities of brothers and sisters whom few know or value.”[6] Compassionately reaching out to the human needs of another person, especially when doing so is inconvenient because of dislike or even hatred, is the very substance of the kingdom of God, according to the American theologian, Samuel Hopkins, who was Jonathan Edwards’ protégé. So Jesus of the Gospels would be proud of the pope for saying, “Marginalization always breeds insecurity: the steep path s to combat marginalization, not the marginalized, to break the entire chain, not to strike only its last link.”[7] But the Christian way of breaking the entire chain is not through public policy, but, rather, one person at a time, through compassionate reaching out to value even as others are repudiating and distancing. Put another way, the Way into the kingdom of Heaven within is not through public policy or even urging solidarity for the common good. To be sure, it is easy to get sidetracked.

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1. Fortunato Pinto, “Pope Leo XIV Visits Southern Italy’s ‘Land of Fires’,” Euronews.com, 23 May, 2026.
2. I am borrowing here from Pseudo-Dionysius, a sixth-century Christian theologian, who wrote on what I would call God’s radical transcendence. Relatedly, God has been thought of as being wholly other. In both of these characterizations, it follows that the domain of religion is not only distinct from every other domain, but also unique.
3. Pinto, “Pope Leo XIV Visits Southern Italy’s ‘Land of Fires’.”
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.

Selfishness and Damnation on the Boston Subway

Imagine a crowded, standing-room-only subway car during rush hour in Boston, Massachusetts. Even though many riders are standing, a seated passenger keeps his backpack on the seat next to his own seat. It would be difficult upon seeing such a blatant display of selfishness not make certain assumptions about the man’s values and character. I did, twice on Boston subway trains, as I stood looking at one young man, and then another on another train about a month later who was doing the same thing. Because many of the train operators in Boston ignore their training by slapping the brake lever backwards all at once rather than gradually just before abruptly stopping at a station-stop, standing can be perilous. Once I found myself running through half of a trolley car to re-establish my balance because the driver had applied the brakes too abruptly.  The inconsiderateness for the riders could easily be inferred, and from that, we could say that the reckless employees suffered from the vice of selfishness. The same can be said of the drivers’ supervisors, for whom the word accountability was not in the English dictionary. With so much selfishness delimiting intending benefits to others that are intended by one’s decisions and actions, moreover, a dysfunctional organization and even an enabling society can be inferred. Some Christian theologians have sought to relate the ethical vice of selfishness to the religious sin of self-love, which as Pierre Nicole made clear in the seventeenth century, is mutually exclusive with Christian love from compassion. Even amid such clear relationships, the ethical and religious or theological domains should not be fused as if the two domains were actually one. To view selfishness self-love as containing both ethical and theological implications and yet hold that the two domains are qualitatively different—each having its own unique aspects—is the goal.

Selfishness is the manifestation of self-love that is oriented teleologically to the person’s exclusive benefit (i.e., private benefit). Although other people may benefit too, that is not within the selfish person’s purview. Typically, selfishness cuts off benefits going to other people and even a society as a whole. The vice is thus at odds with compassion, which fuels benevolence, because even if other people benefit, that byproduct is not motivated by a selfish person. Only such benefits as are in the self-interest, and thus  benefit, of a selfish person fall within one’s intentionality. That is not compassion.

A continuum from the ethical domain to that of religion may seem easily constructed; people of bad character are likely to go to hell rather than heaven. If the kingdom of God preached by Jesus in the Gospels is entered in this life by heartfelt acts of compassion to one’s neighbors and detractors alike, then people who are only concerned about themselves benefitting will not enter that spiritual state. As solid as this argument is, it is also vital not to constrain God’s omniscience (knowledge) and omnipotence (power) to fit within our ethical principles and theories. A figure such as Abraham might take a decision that is the inverse of compassionate—attempted murder of his only son—because God has decreed that Abraham sacrifice Isaac. To be sure, Abraham’s intent to make the sacrifice could hardly be considered selfish, but at the same time it is harmful rather than compassionate. God’s knowledge and power so surpass our own that we should take care in judging a selfish person soteriologically; salvation is up to God, not us.

John Calvin, a Protestant reformer in the sixteenth century, held that by absolute sovereignty, God has predestined an elect who are saved. Although he viewed wealth as a sign of God’s approval of the elect, it was not until the next century that Calvinists considered industriousness to be a Christian virtue.[1] Being rich could be an indication that, whether one is selfish or not, one is already saved among God’s elect. All this contradicts Jesus’s statement in the Gospels to the rich man that unless he gives up his fortune, he would not enter the kingdom of God; it would be easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle. Furthermore, wealth as a sign of divine favor leaves out the divine favor that could be supposed to be lavished on monks such as Cuthbert and Godric of Finchale, who lived intentionally impoverished lives so to be worthy of being saved. Wealth as a sign of divine favor also flies in the face of the preachments of such religious notables as St. Francis of Assisi and Luther, both of whom can be interpreted as attempting to apply brakes to the emerging and maturating Christian pro-wealth paradigm in their respective times.[2] As a species of selfishness, greed—the desire for one’s own gain—is difficult to reconcile with neighbor-love as compassionate benevolence. A greedy, selfish person who claims to be saved by the blood of Christ on the Cross because Jesus died for mankind as if the person’s debt to God is already paid flies in the face of the claim made both by Paul and Augustine that God is love. To be in union with God thus requires that a person loves, and selflessly (agape) at that. In short, free-will must voluntarily chose compassionate love for a person to be among the elect. In fact, Samuel Hopkins, who was a protégé of the New England theologian and philosopher, Jonathan Edwards, claims in his book on holiness that the essence of the kingdom of God is kindness and acts of compassion oriented to the humanity of people who dislike one or whom one dislikes.[3] Such humane compassion is two degrees of separation from selfishness.

Even so, self-love and selfishness can be distinguished. Not only is the former term theological whereas the latter is of the domain of ethics; self-love, unlike selfishness, can include the intention and effort that benefits be extended to other people without instantiating compassion. In his book on virtue, Edwards himself distinguishes selfishness from “compounded self-love,” which differs from simple self-love because benefits are intentionally extended to other people rather than limited to oneself.[4] Similarly, Pierre Nicole, a seventeenth-century Jansenist Catholic priest and theologian, claims that the inherently sinful self-love can nonetheless be cleverly manifested as courtesy—but not interior kindness!—to other people because more can be gotten from laying out honey than from the stinginess of selfishness. Had the subway passengers moved their respective backpacks so someone standing could sit down to withstand the primitive, inconsiderate operation of the trains, perhaps a person who might have been useful might have sat in the suddenly empty seat. To clear off a seat with the intention of benefitting can be distinguished from having compassion for a passenger trying not to fall over or even be thrown forward in the train-car at the next station-stop. Hopkins, Edwards, and Nicole were all very clear in averring that even if self-love can have intentional beneficial consequences for other people, which are of course in the acting person's self-interest, the root is still a sin, and a sin is not identical to a vice or any unethical decision or action. Sin is utterly incompatible with compassion that resonates either from love directed to God (i.e., caritas) or selfless love (i.e., agape).  Self-interest, which is selfishness oriented to a goal, and is based in ethics rather than theology, is incompatible only with the second type of Christian love, agape. Even so, exercising such (wholly religious) agape love can be very unethical. In the religious (but not ethical) domain, ethical scruples should not get in the way of obeying a divine command.  

In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard distinguishes the universally-accessible moral domain from that of the divine command that only Abraham receives.  What is attempted murder (of Abraham’s son, Isaac) in moral (and legal) terms is a sacrifice in religious terms. Both domains are valid in themselves and their respective meanings, and they relate to each other, as in the story of Abraham, but attempted murder and religious sacrifice are qualitatively different. This point is also clear in the Book of Job, as Job is a righteous man and thus does not deserve to be made to suffer by the devil even as a test sanctioned by the Old Testament deity. Abstractly stated, divine omnipotence (i.e., all-powerful) means that divine command cannot be constrained by human ethical principles. Regarding the five Commandments that have ethical conduct, it is explicitly based on divine command, and thus on divine will, and thus is not a constraint on the deity. This does not mean that the ethical itself is theological in nature.

So, while it is tempting to relegate a selfish person to hell as a sordid reprobate, especially as selfishness is antithetical to benevolentia universalis, which in turn is a manifestation of “God is love” in Christianity, both our own finite nature as judges and the distinction between acting unethically and obeying a divine command, and, moreover, being saved, mitigate against making such a hasty and wholly convenient category mistake that superimposes that of the creature onto the Creator. It could be that the man on a crowded subway train puts his backpack on the seat next to him because suffers from PTSD or is autistic. Even such a simple justification, which separates our ethical verdict from God’s judgment on the man’s selfishness, can easily pass by mere creatures such as homo sapiens.  

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1. Skip Worden, God’s Gold: Beneath the Shifting Sands of Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth. See also the author’s related academic treatise, Godliness and Greed: Shifting Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010). The first text is of the non-fiction genre for the general educated reader, whereas the second text is of the academic genre. Ironically, God’s Gold not only contains additional chapters, but is also an ideational improvement on God’s Gold, especially concerning the concluding chapter of both books. A Christian apologist, for instance, would prefer the conclusion of God’s Gold, which hinges on the Logos in answering a critique of anthropomorphism from David Hume’s Natural History of Religion. Sometimes better ideas reach a general readership rather than cloistered, over-specialized academia.

2. Ibid.

3. Samuel Hopkins, An Enquiry into the Nature of Holiness (New York: William Durell, 1710).

4. Jonathan Edwards, The Nature of True Virtue (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1960).

Selfishness and Damnation on a Subway

Imagine, if you will, a crowded, standing-room only subway car during rush hour. Even though people are standing, a seated passenger keeps his backpack on the seat next to his. It would be difficult upon seeing such a sordid display of selfishness not to reflect on the person’s values and character. The flipside of selfishness would be obvious: an indifference towards other people, including that which might benefit them. Instead, selfishness, which is self-love that is oriented teleologically to the person’s own benefit (i.e., private benefit) at the expense of benefits to other people and even a society as a whole. The shift from the ethical domain to that of religion may seem easily done—people of bad character are likely to go to hell rather than heaven—but not so fast, lest we presume to be omniscient (i.e., all-knowing) and capable of promulgating divine justice. It is indeed very tempting to relegate selfish people to hell.

John Calvin, a Protestant reformer in the sixteenth century, held that by absolute sovereignty, God has predestined an elect who are saved. Although he viewed wealth as a sign of God’s approval of the elect, it was not until the next century that Calvinists considered industriousness to be a Christian virtue.[1] All this contradicts Jesus’s statement in the Gospels to the rich man that unless he gives up his fortune, he would not enter the kingdom of God; it would be easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle. Furthermore, wealth as a sign of divine favor leaves out the divine favor that could be supposed to be lavished on monks such as Cuthbert and Godric of Finchale, who lived intentionally impoverished lives so to be worthy of being saved. Wealth as a sign of divine favor also flies in the face of the preachments of such religious notables as St. Francis of Assisi and Luther, both of whom can be interpreted as attempting to apply brakes to the emerging and maturating Christian pro-wealth paradigm of their respective times.[2]

Much less problematic is the attribution by observing selfishness of someone not being among the elect saved by the shedding of blood by the Son of God, for, as Paul and Augustine both claimed, God is love and it emanates not only in a person’s love directed to God, but also to one’s neighbors in benevolentia universalis. Intentionally depriving another subway passenger on a crowded train of a seat by taking one up with one’s backpack is antipodal to benevolence, which manifests divine love according to Christianity.

In fact, Samuel Hopkins, who was a protégé of the New England theologian and philosopher, Jonathan Edwards, claims in his book on holiness that the essence of the kingdom of God is kindness and acts of compassion oriented to the humanity of people who dislike one or whom one dislikes.[3] Literally “rubbing shoulders” with another passenger on a subway car is much less inconvenient than being charitable towards adversaries. The root of the word charity is love rather than philanthropy.

In his book on virtue, Edwards himself distinguishes selfishness from “compounded self-love,” which differs from simple self-love because benefits are intentionally extended to other people rather than limited to oneself.[4] Similarly, Pierre Nicole, a seventeenth-century Jansenist Catholic priest and theologian, claims that the inherently sinful self-love can nonetheless be cleverly manifested as courtesy—but not interior kindness!—to other people because more can be gotten from laying out honey than from the stinginess of selfishness. Had the subway passenger moved his backpack, who knows, perhaps a person who might have been useful might have sat in the suddenly empty seat? 

Nevertheless, Hopkins, Edwards, and Nicole were all very clear in that even if self-love can have intentional beneficial consequences, which are in a person's self-interest, the root is still a sin. Needless to say, this point applies to the naked underlying narrow selfishness of the baker and the consumer in Adam Smith's theory of a competitive market, where not even moral sentiments can be assumed to be in the calculus of either participant. In relying on market-level unintended beneficial consequences of selfish economic pursuits by the crucially price-based impersonal mechanism of the proverbial "invisible hand," Smith does not even acknowledge or rely on intentional benefits for others from the enlightened or "compound" self-interest of market participants. Smith's view of human nature in the economic domain is thus relatively pessimistic. I submit that the business world empirically bears this out, as evinced, for example, by how corporations market their marketing under the subterfuge of "corporate social responsibility." Even attempts to reconcile organizational and societal norms are not ethical in nature, given Hume's notion of the naturalistic fallacy, which states that ethical principles are necessary to get from "is" to "ought." I submit that still another fallacy is instantiated by conflating the ethical and theological domains. In short, God transcends and thus is not limited to "ought." The profane world of business greed is oceans of time from the realm of godliness. 

As preferable as damning selfishness is to reckoning a rich person as being favored by God, distinguishing the ethical domain from that of salvation is important because the two domains are, I submit, qualitatively different even though they do interrelate. Hence Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling distinguishes the universally-accessible moral domain from that of the divine command that only Abraham receives.  What is attempted murder (of Abraham’s son, Isaac) in moral (and legal) terms is a sacrifice in religious terms. Both domains are valid in themselves and their respective meanings, and they relate to each other, as in the story of Abraham, but attempted murder and religious sacrifice are qualitatively different. This point is also clear in the Book of Job, as Job is a righteous man and thus does not deserve to be made to suffer by the devil even as a test sanctioned by the Old Testament deity. Abstractly stated, divine omnipotence (i.e., all-powerful) means that divine command cannot be constrained by human ethical principles. Regarding the five Commandments that have ethical conduct, it is explicitly based on divine command, and thus on divine will, and thus is not a constraint on the deity. This does not mean that the ethical itself is theological in nature.

So while it is tempting to relegate a selfish person to hell as a sordid reprobate, especially as selfishness is antithetical to benevolentia universalis, which is a manifestation of “God is love” in Christianity, both our own finite nature as judges and the distinction between acting unethically and being saved or damned mitigate against making such a hasty and wholly convenient category mistake as superimposes stuff of our realm onto God. It could be, for example, that the man on the subway suffers from PTSD and thus God has mercy on such a trifling thing as the man taking up an extra seat. Furthermore, it could be that the man was on his way to care for his sick grandmother and triggering his social anxiety on the train would compromise the care he could give.

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1. Skip Worden, God’s Gold: Beneath the Shifting Sands of Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth. See also the author’s related academic treatise, Godliness and Greed: Shifting Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010). The first text is of the non-fiction genre for the general educated reader, whereas the second text is of the academic genre. Ironically, God’s Gold not only contains additional chapters, but is also an ideational improvement on God’s Gold, especially concerning the concluding chapter of both books. A Christian apologist, for instance, would prefer the conclusion of God’s Gold, which hinges on the Logos in answering a critique of anthropomorphism from David Hume’s Natural History of Religion. Sometimes better ideas reach a general readership rather than cloistered, over-specialized academia.

2. Ibid.

3. Samuel Hopkins, An Eenquiry into the Nature of Holiness (New York: William Durell, 1710).

4. Jonathan Edwards, The Nature of True Virtue (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1960).

Spirituality in the Workplace: Hindu and Christian Strategies

Mohan Vilas, a Hindu monk at Govardha Ecovillage, spoke at Harvard’s Bhakti Yoga Conference in 2025. He had gone from the world of financial derivatives to worshipping Krishna. Once he had fulfilled his “lower needs,” he looked for more. After obtaining a M.B.A. and while working in finance, he was hungry for knowledge beyond the world of business. So he studied ancient Vedic culture. His talk at the conference was on being an idealist surrounded by strategists. He addressed the question of whether the world allows individuals to practice virtue. Even when a person is not in a dysfunctional workplace or in a hostile society, the human mind struggles, Vilas said, to apply ethical virtues. Plato’s dictum that to know the good is enough do the good, and thus to be good, may be wildly optimistic, considering the instinctual force of urges in our nature to act immorally, even though other people are harmed as a result. It is even more difficult to get into a habit of doing good while “swimming upstream” in an ethically compromised workplace or an aggressive societal culture. An ethical Russian or Israeli soldier in the mid-2020s, for example, would have a lot of trouble refusing to bomb hospitals in Ukraine and Gaza, respectively, and, moreover, invading another country and withholding food so to starve an occupied group. Such a soldier would be intolerable to both Putin and Netanyahu, respectively. Vilas’s question is the following: What happens when a person who is good is put into a selfish society? Must an ethical person finally inevitably exit a culture that rewards narrow selfishness, passive-aggression and deception?

Dostoevsky wrote when Russia was in crisis. In The Idiot, Prince Myshkin is an idealist who refuses to corrupt himself. It comes with a price: isolation.  If a society rejects moral purity, then what is valued? Myshkin is surrounded by schemers, but he is good nonetheless. His mere existence exposes the hypocrisy of those who are around him. He is identified as a problem by the corrupt. He is upsetting the balance in the social setting. He is viewed an active disturbance to be destroyed. If this sounds familiar, Jesus in the Gospel narratives is in the same dynamic. The very presence of an idealist is intolerable to sordid people who are used to manipulating other people. Being good is not beneficial in a dysfunctional societal (or organizational) culture in which cunningness is valued. Those who play fairly have a disadvantage relative to the corrupt manipulators because the latter have made the rules.

So, an idealist may be tempted to be a savvy Machiavellian strategist. Machiavelli wrote The Prince for rulers in a harsh international context. Not many people realize that his History of Florence includes the element of morality. Similarly, Adam Smith wrote not only The Wealth of Nations, but also The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the latter in which the professor of moral philosophy based his ethical theory founded on impartial sentiments in making moral judgments. However, Smith does not maintain that participants in a marketplace should be expected to act according to how others impartially feel about business conduct. Instead, the amoral and impersonal mechanism of “the invisible hand” gives aggregated self-interests of participants the unintended societal benefit of people working and obtaining goods and services. Smith accepts that market participants are self-seeking economic agents engaged in buying and selling rather than in being concerned for the economic welfare of others. That the invisible hand efficiently allocates goods and services in a competitive marketplace, which is a benefit of self-interests interacting, does not institute ethical business conduct by participants. In spite of the empirical studies claiming that acting ethically in business pays off financially, imperfect information can enable the unscrupulous to thrive.

Historically, Quakers in Europe and North America were known to be honest in business, and so they enjoyed trustworthy reputations.  This is not something that Smith counted on in writing about market competition in Wealth of Nations.

Even if Christianity had to some extend fostered ethical conduct, I submit that the advent of secularity in the West meant that the voluntary adoption of religious ethics in business could be less and less relied on. In India, I doubt that many Hindu merchants mimic the lack of concern for consequences in doing one’s caste’s duties that Krishna advocates to Arjuna concerning fighting in a military battle in the Bhagavad-Gita. A merchant could well protest that ignoring consequences in managing a business is a recipe for how to go out of business, in which case no one could get the goods or services provided by the business. It is more realistic to urge that the compassion enjoined by Krishna be practiced in the workplace, even if the workplace culture is toxic, and towards customers. Similarly, compassion to one’s detractors, as preached by Jesus in the Gospels, could gradually detoxify a dysfunctional organizational culture. Much stronger medicine, however, is expounded by Samuel Hopkins, who was a protégé of the Christian theologian of New England, Jonathan Edwards, in a book on holiness. Whereas Edwards, in his sermon, “The Portion of the Righteous,” maintains that the elect are to enter the kingdom of God only after the Last Judgment (i.e., Christ’s Second Coming), Hopkins interprets the kingdom of God as being accessible to a person before physical death in so far as one is kind and compassionately helpful to people who dislike one and whom one dislikes.  This version goes beyond the benevolentia universalis of generalized “neighbor-love,” and can be much more powerful spiritually in turning around a passive-aggressive organizational culture. Inconvenient compassion issuing out in acts of kindness takes much more effort, as the internal resistance is more, but, if done, the spiritual and psychological dynamic between two or more people can be utterly transformed.

Realistically, however, good-hearted idealists can be all-too-easily “eaten up” by sharks that thrive in hostile, back-stabbing organizational cultures. Sometimes it is best to vote with one’s feet kick off the dirt from one’s sandals, and find another workplace in which to work. Life is too short to stay where one is hated and otherwise where too many people are hateful. In this regard, I found Yale and New Haven, Connecticut to be beyond repair in 2025. That the university’s police chief, who was Christian minister and alumnus of Yale’s divinity school, had accepted the invitation of the FBI to show Yale’s private police unit how to use counter-terrorism tactics on students, post-doctoral researchers, faculty and presumably even alumni back auditing a course, and that security guards were regularly spying on students on campus was enough for me to pull the plug. I even asked if it was possible to refuse a degree already granted. This was greeted with a passive-aggressive refusal to reply to my email. So, I voted with my feet and returned to Harvard. Better to vote on principle than stay and be inflicted with passive-aggression sans organizational accountability.

Regarding employees of organizations, whether private, governmental, or non-profit, walking away, if done by more people in dysfunctional organizations, could have an “Adam Smith” kind of impact whereby organizations having toxic workplaces go under while healthy organizations prosper. Voting with one’s feet in employment is utilized too seldomly because of the financial uncertainty involved, especially in cases in which an employee quits one job before having secured another. Even if doing one’s duty by performing functions of one’s caste, including that of merchants, is valued, this does not mean that a Hindu is duty-bound to remain working in a dysfunctional company. A person need not choose between Shankara’s method of total renunciation and staying in a toxic organization. A person can both remain employed and exercise enough initiative to get out of a bad working situation and into a healthy organization.