Word: movement
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...says the burgeoning field of employee engagement, a movement that aims to quantify what, exactly, a company gets when it puts money into bonding with its workers. Consultancies such as Towers Perrin, Watson Wyatt, Hewitt Associates and the Gallup Organization measure how "engaged" workers are and then counsel companies on how to ratchet up those scores. The result is a slew of initiatives--like frequently telling workers how they generate value and offering them free retraining to move from one division to another--that go far beyond the rudimentary concept of motivating people with pay to get them to work...
This is partly because the animal rights movement has proven so uninviting to Christians. Peter Singer, whose 1975 book “Animal Liberation” began the modern movement, is an outspoken atheist and proponent of euthanasia. And People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ traveling trailer featuring a model of a vegetarian Jesus seated at the last supper with notable vegetarian “disciples” Paul McCartney and Cesar Chavez didn’t make a great impression when it pulled up at the Southern Baptist Convention last June...
Indeed, the modern animal protection movement began with Christian reformers in 19th century England. After attacking the abuses of slavery and child labor, reformers like William Wilberforce, Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, and Anglican Priest Arthur Broome turned their efforts to man’s sins against animals, co-founding the SPCA in 1824. In part, they were responding to the concerns of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, who had found “a plausible objection against the justice of God, in suffering numberless creatures that had never sinned to be so severely punished...
Belatedly, the animal protection movement is remembering this noble legacy. In 2002, Matthew Scully, a devout Catholic and senior speech writer to President Bush, published Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy, an elegant moral tome against animal abuse. Today, volunteers of the Christian Vegetarian Association hand out leaflets entitled “Are We Good Stewards of God’s Creation?” at mega-churches and Christian rock concerts across the nation...
With “creation care” a growing environmental movement in American congregations, animal protection will hopefully gain religious notice. In the meantime, Catholic priests can look to the words of Pope Benedict XV, the current Pontiff’s namesake, who in 1915 enjoined priests to support the Italian SPCA, “that they may offer to the animals refuge from every suspicion of roughness, cruelty, or barbarism, and lead men to understand from the beauty of creation something of the infinite perfection of their Creator.” Lewis E. Bollard...