Career
Prior to his 2002 - 2006 White House service, Towey was employed for 12 years as a U.S. legal counsel to Mother Teresa of Calcutta. As her attorney, he helped to ensure people were not using Mother Teresa's name to raise money without her permission, assisted in establishing AIDS clinics and homeless shelters, and coordinated immigration matters for her nuns. In the 1980s Towey lived as a full-time volunteer in Mother Teresa's home for people with AIDS in Washington, D.C.
Towey has said that the experience of working with Mother Teresa motivated him to establish the non-profit organization Aging with Dignity in 1996. The Five Wishes booklet and additional resources on CD help people express how they want to be treated if they are seriously ill and unable to speak for themselves. Over 12 million copies of the group's Five Wishes document, called "the living will with a heart and soul", have been distributed worldwide by more than 15,000 organizations.
During his 2002 - 2006 service as Faith Czar, (the informal name for Towey's White House position of Director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives), Towey decried "militant secularism"; the view that religious considerations should be excluded from government affairs and public education.
Towey also served as senior adviser to U.S. Sen. Mark Hatfield (R-Oregon) for ten years, and as director of Florida's health and human services agency under Gov. Lawton Chiles (D).
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Famous quotes containing the word career:
“Like the old soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye.”
—Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)