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Health & Fitness

Spirituality and Ethics: Creating "Caring and Compassionate Community"

San Marin resident Dr. Laura Stivers tells Annan about her spiritual and ethical work in creating caring and compassionate community.

For more than 15 years my community work in Novato has brought me into contact with a rich and diverse group of colleagues, neighbors and friends. As a blogger for Novato Patch, I want to share some of the incredible life experiences I've come to know as a worker, volunteer and advocate in town.  

Through my recent work with Stand Up For Neighborly Novato and Live Local Novato Leaders,  I've had the opportunity to meet residents who know first hand the importance and value of housing options in our town. One of them is Laura Stivers, a Dominican University professor and San Marin resident.

“A goal of my teaching, writing, mentoring, and advocacy work has been, as Christian ethicist Traci West so aptly puts it, to build ‘just and compassionate relationships within and across our differing communities.’" 

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So begins Dr. Stiver’s book “Disrupting Homelessness: Alternative Christian Approaches” published in 2011 by Fortress Press. A single mom who recently moved to the San Marin neighborhood from North Carolina with her two daughters, she dedicates the book to them: “May they support hospitality, compassion, and justice and be at home in God’s inclusive community.”

In an interview in her comfortable living room near , she relates how growing up in New York City and attending school in Harlem left an impression on her. Her family then moved to Washington state, and she remembers the stark difference between the two places, inspiring her work in social justice and public policy regarding poverty and housing. She studied abroad as a college student, living in four countries: India, Egypt, Taiwan and Japan, and she found herself asking: Why is world set up this way with its disparities in the human condition?  

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Raised in the Presbyterian Church, it is clear that her faith is intertwined with her research and studies as a “theological ethicist." She holds the position of Associate Professor of Ethics and Chair of the Philosophy and Religion Department at Dominican University in San Rafael.

She reflects: “For me spirituality is in relationship. How we are spiritually — with the divine, with others, with the natural world — is in our relationships. Spirituality is also how we create a caring and compassionate community.”

Her work has led her to two key theses that drive her research and writing:

1. To address homelessness, we must address poverty in our society, with the need for jobs and affordable rentals as key to equitable communities; and 

2. What we do to create solutions must not stereotype the “deserving poor” from the “undeserving poor.”

She is also a supporter of good government policies. Her research has led her to understand that we can’t expect private churches and religious institutions, nor nonprofits, to do it all in preventing and ending poverty.  Solutions also include the government and policies that are equitable and inclusive for all income levels and needs in a community.

Laura is an avid swimmer and devoted mother who enjoys the beauty and tranquility of her new Novato home.  As a professor and resident, she continues her work to make our town, and world, a place where all will have opportunity.

The final sentences in her book read:  “Embracing a Christian approach ... entails working with others both to challenge oppression and inequality and to advocate and organize strategically for social and economic policies that create a home for all. In solidarity with the poor and homeless, we can create and participate in communities that foster physical and spiritual wholeness.”

You can find Dr. Stivers’ book at our Marin County Public Library, by ordering it at a local bookstore or on Amazon.com.

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