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Keith Douglass Warner OFM's
Research and Education Website
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I was a migrant farmworker from the age of 19 to 24, picking apples, pears and peaches on the farmworker trail of California, Oregon and Washington. This was part of my experience with the informal Christian lay community and its communitarian economics. These pictures are of me in 1980 near Lake Chelan, in Washington. I described this formative experience in my life in Taking Nature Seriously: Nature Mysticism, Franciscan Spirituality, and Environmental Advocacy. |
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 I was always interested in the impact that the farmworker movement had on my own (West Coast) province of Franciscans, so I conducted oral history with people who observed this process, and wrote about it in The Farmworkers and the Franciscans: Reverse Evangelization as Social Prompt for Conversion in Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality, Volume 9, Number 1, Spring 2009, pp. 69-88. From 2004-2008 I taught The Moral Vision of Cesar Chavez (Here is the syllabus for Spring 2008) As part of that work I helped create a Farm To Church project in Salinas and San Jose with my Faith, Ethics & Vocation Project interns. Alba's Farm to Church Stand
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Since there are more than a billion farmers in the world, and many of them are very poor, I think ensuring access to seeds for them is very important. That is why I wrote Are Patents on Life Ethical? Conflict Between Catholic Social Teaching and Agricultural Biotechnology's Patent Regime, which was published in the Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics. |
Original poster by Matthew Klemanski, SCU '06
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Economic Justice for All (US Catholic Bishops’ Pastoral Letter on the Economy) from 1986 (we are still working on economic justice issues!). Cesar Chavez gave speech shortly afterward at Commonwealth Club
For some pictures: Farmworker movement photo gallery and the UFW photo gallery
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