CST Solidarity and Care for Creation Test Outline

CST Solidarity and Care for Creation Test Outline

Solidarity:

- General teachings of the Church on the theme

- Prejudice and stereotyping and when it becomes negative

- Forms of prejudice: Antilocution, Avoidance and Discrimination

- Vocabulary and different types of discrimination: Ageism, Sexism, Racism, Economic discrimination, gender discrimination.

- Why and how prejudice develops

- Recommended strategies for how to combat prejudice

Care for Creation:

- Church teaching on Care for Creation

- The Church's view on the environment as God's creation

- Information from the article "Top Ten Takeaways from Laudato Si."

CST Theme 5 Solidarity

- This theme is about being able to see past the differences in people and recognize that we are all part of the same human community.

- Differences among people show the great love and creativity of God. St. Therese of Lisieux used the analogy of humanity being like a garden with many different flowers. All of them are not the same but are essential to making the garden look beautiful. If all the flowers were exactly the same they wouldn’t look as nice. -

- Although all people are equally loved by God, people don’t have equal gifts

- Prejudiced people tend to be against multiple groups of people, not just one particular group.

- Prejudice is not something that people are naturally born with. Studies have shown that it is learned behavior that people acquire from their communities.

- Stereotype - means “set image.” It’s when a person forms a fixed picture of a group usually based on incomplete or false information.

- Not all stereotypes are bad. Some can be neutral or even positive.

- Negative prejudice is sinful and violates human dignity. There are three conditions for it:

1) Prejudice is wrong when it threatens people’s rights and what they are properly owed.

2) Its wrong when it is illogical. Many stereotypes are based on generalizations people make about a group of people from meeting only one or a few people of that group.

3) Its wrong when a person is unwilling to listen to new information or is unwilling to change his or her mind when they hear new information.

3 Different forms of Prejudice

Antilocution: Negative speech against a group. Often times this is subconscious and heard in cliche’d expressions and jokes. Ethnic prejudice is one of the most common forms of anti locution.

Avoidance: Occurs when people actively avoid members of the

disliked group. Although avoidance isn’t directly harmful to members of a group, it still can be hurtful and is dehumanizing. It also limits the personal experience the prejudiced person could have with a different group.

Discrimination: Harmful actions against disliked people of a group. It often occurs in these ways: - denying people jobs, excluding people from communities, restricting people’s educational or recreational opportunities, excluding people from joining social groups, segregating people in communities

Social Justice - Solidarity

Attempting to Explain Prejudice: Why do people develop prejudiced attitudes and hold on to them? Psychological and sociological studies have revealed a few reasons:

- People are too lazy to think for themselves. Prejudice can develop from an oversimplification like saying “Poor people are lazy,” instead of looking for all the reasons why poverty exists.

- People use prejudice as a way of dealing with negative emotions. Prejudice can be a way that people take out their frustrations instead of dealing with real problems.

- Prejudice makes people feel superior. People often identify themselves as part of the “in” or good “group,” where the “out” group is seen as negative.

- Prejudice can help the group in power feel better psychologically and profit financially so that group can stay in power.

- Although nobody is born prejudiced, prejudice develops most strongly in home life during childhood years. Children learn to view relationships in terms of power instead of sharing or a cooperative give and take.

- Schools, churches, and community groups can reinforce prejudice when they focus too much on competition with other groups.

Combatting Prejudice

Here are some different ways that people can work prevent prejudice:

- Interact and work with people who are part of a different group.

- Learn more about experiences of people in other groups and try to use role reversal - “putting ourselves in there shoes.”

- Avoid using racial, sexist or ethnic slurs. Negative speech can breed negative thinking.

- Reflect on our values and attitudes to see if we are acting unbiased - not favoring one particular side and being fair.