Cynthia L. Cameron is the Patrick and Barbara Keenan Chair of Religious Education and Associate Professor of Religious Education at the Regis St. Michael’s Faculty of Theology. Her research focuses on adolescents, particularly female adolescents, in developmental psychology, Catholic theological anthropology, and practices of Catholic schooling. Among her recent work is Nobody’s Perfect: Adolescents, Mistake-Making, and Christian Religious Education, co-edited with Lakisha Lockhart-Rusch and Emily Peck (Fortress Press, 2025) and“Genders, Sexualities, and Catholic Schools: Towards a Theological Anthropology of Adolescent Flourishing,” published in the British Journal of Religious Education. Prior to coming to Regis St. Michael’s in 2021, she taught at the undergraduate and graduate levels in the United States and had a nearly 20-year career as a teacher and administrator in Catholic high schools.
In 2021, I accepted the offer of a faculty position at the University of St. Michael’s College’s Faculty of Theology (now the Regis St. Michael’s Faculty of Theology) and moved from the Boston area in the United States to Toronto. And I am very grateful that I did. I love the work that I do and the people I get to do it with. I have also been delighted to find myself living in Canada, in Toronto particularly.
In recent weeks, since the presidential inauguration in the United States, I have found my delight to be tempered. This is not to say that I am any less grateful to be living in Canada. But witnessing the drastic upheaval of the federal government under the new administration, a profound reminder of the fragility of our democratic institutions, makes me deeply sad. I am angry and disappointed, too; but sadness is the overwhelming emotional response that I am sitting with these days.
In his helpful and now-classic exploration of what it means for the Christian church to be prophetic, the biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann calls us to nurture an alternative vision of the world, one that critiques and challenges the dominant culture. Particularly helpful in Brueggemann’s analysis is his naming of two parts to the church’s prophetic task. Lament and hope. What I find helpful in Brueggemann’s approach is his acknowledgment that lament is an important part of the prophetic task of the Christian church. As a community of people striving to live more and more into the Reign of God, we need to attend to the sadness and grief that people experience in the face of injustice, oppression, and death. Lament then can lead to an energizing hope, one that is critical and realistic, but only if we first acknowledge our grief. So, what’s helpful for me in Brueggemann’s work is the affirmation that sadness (and anger and disappointment) are appropriate responses to the kinds of social disruption that I am seeing.
It is also profoundly weird to be both an insider and an outsider to these events. As a U.S. citizen, I am impacted by and participating in the upheaval. I know LGBTQ kids who are now living in fear for their lives. A friend who lived out their Christian vocation to provide food for the hungry has lost their job with USAID. I am no longer certain that my 87-year-old father will get his social security check each month. I assume that my financial and tax information has been accessed by unauthorized actors. At the same time, I am living in Canada, where things like pensions in old age, the protection of LGBTQ rights, and the care for the poor are still happening. Certainly, in imperfect ways and in ways that could (and should) be improved. The state of things in the U.S., however, is a reminder to me of how quickly we can lose the institutions that we thought could protect people.
But the basic assumption that a society has a responsibility to care for the vulnerable amongst us still seems to be a value in Canada. In Catholic Social Teaching, this assumption that we have a responsibility to attend to the needs of our vulnerable siblings is named as the preferential option for the poor. It is the insistence that the creation of a more just society requires the prioritizing of the needs of those most at the margins of that society. It is the affirmation that we cannot live into the Reign of God – or, better, the kin-dom of God, as the theologian Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz puts it – unless we are prepared to place the poor and vulnerable at the center of our attention.
This commitment to the vulnerable amongst us is something that I still find in Canada. And, while my sadness (and anger and disappointment) at what is happening in the U.S. remains, Canada does give me hope. And, for that, I am deeply grateful.
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