Nandini Gunewardena – författare

In Capitalizing on Catastrophe an international group of scholars and professionals critically examine how local communities around the world have prepared for and responded to recent cataclysms. The book's principal focus is the increasing trend to rely on the private sector to deal with natural disasters and other forms of large-scale devastation, from hurricanes and tsunamis to civil wars and industrial accidents. Called 'disaster capitalism' by its critics, the tendency to contract private interests to solve massive, urgent public problems may be inevitable but is extremely problematic_especially with respect to peoples who need help the most. Can private relief groups give the highest priority to potential and actual victims of large disasters, for example, if that means devoting fewer resources to protecting tourism and other profitable industries? The high-profile contributors to this volume straightforwardly tackle such timely and difficult questions of great public concern.

This biography of the late Rev. Fr. Michael Rodrigo, OMI (1930-1987) of Sri Lanka, chronicles a life fearlessly devoted to the service of the poor, efforts to witness Christ to the poor through an innovative interfaith dialogue, and a collaboration for their social and economic empowerment. As a Catholic priest whose life parallels that of the recently martyred Oscar Romero of El Salvador, also assassinated for exposing the exploitation and marginalization of the poor, Fr. Michael was engaged in a selfless journey for justice. The volume analyzes the driving force of his quest to forge a healing bridge between the Christian and Buddhist populations of Sri Lanka through his spiritual grounding in Catholic social teaching and his unique formulation of an interreligious dialogue. It documents the indelible imprint of interfaith understanding he forged up to his untimely death. Interwoven with ethnographic methodology, the book offers a window for understanding the class and religious ruptures stemming from Sri Lanka''s colonial history, contextualized in the social realities of poverty in rural Sri Lanka, the political and economic forces implicated in deepening poverty, the resistance struggle by oppressed youth, and Fr. Mike''s legacy of justice through peace.