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Friday, August 31, 2007
The U.S. has a massive shortage of affordable housing, but there are some glimmers of hope. Check out Faith Fuels Affordable Housing, an informative page put together by the Religion Newswriters Foundation about the housing crisis – and some of the things people of faith are doing about it.
A few highlights:
According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, a person working full time at minimum wage can no longer afford the local fair-market rent for a two-bedroom apartment anywhere in the country.
The faith community can't solve the shortage of affordable housing, but most observers say congregations and religious organizations are having a significant impact in some areas and that they are poised to play an even larger role.
The U.S. House of Representatives is now considering the National Affordable Housing Trust Fund Act .… The bill moved out of committee July 31, and the House is expected to vote on it after the August recess.
Elizabeth Palmberg is an assistant editor for Sojourners.
Remember this, O Lord, how the enemy scoffs, and an impious people reviles your name. Do not deliver the soul of your dove to the wild animals; do not forget the life of your poor forever. Have regard for your covenant, for the dark places of the land are full of the haunts of violence. Do not let the downtrodden be put to shame; let the poor and needy praise your name.
- Psalms 74:18-21
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Reading is the food, light, lamp, refuge, solace of the soul, the spice of all natural flavors. It feeds the hungry, gives light to the one sitting in darkness, offers bread to the one fleeing shipwreck or war, comforts the contrite heart.
- Peter of Celle
Quoted in Essential Monastic Wisdom, by Hugh Feiss
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Thursday, August 30, 2007
 Yesterday our nation marked the solemn anniversary of Hurricane Katrina with news coverage highlighting the lack of progress made since the winds and water washed away so many hopes and dreams. For many Americans, the images from Katrina may feel like distant memory, even though the arduous process of rebuilding continues at a painstaking pace. I believed and hoped that Katrina would be a watershed moment that awakened national outrage over the sleeping and all-too-invisible giants of inequality and poverty.
It seems almost providential timing that at the same moment we commemorate Katrina, the Census Bureau releases its annual statistics on poverty. The Census report provides almost a national CAT skan of our nation’s health. This year’s report offers a glimmer of good news in that the number of people living in poverty declined last year by 500,000. However, this decrease represents a modest one at best and shouldn’t obscure the shameful reality that 12.3% of Americans still live in the quicksand of poverty. Even more alarming is that the number of families living in poverty actually increased from 7.6 to 7.7 million, as did the number of people without health insurance--from 46.6 to 47 million.
Katrina held up a mirror to our nation, forcing us to ask the basic and penetrating questions, Are we really our brother or sister's keeper? What kind of nation do we aspire to be? How would we want to be cared for in the midst of a national tragedy that shipwrecks lives? What are our responsibilities to and for each other, particularly toward the weakest and most vulnerable? These are fundamentally biblical questions echoed by the scathing indictments of the biblical prophets, and by Jesus’ judgment in Mathew 25 that "Just as you did to the least of these, you also did unto me." Katrina tests our nation’s compassion, mercy, and commitment to justice, and demonstrated the urgent and unparalleled need for good and effective government.
But the government response at all levels has been at best a disappointment and at worst an unconscionable failure. We have seen an abundance of bureaucratic red tape, a cycle of inter-governmental blame, and a deficit of bold leadership. The evidence is in post-Katrina conditions and statistics that are heartbreaking. An estimated 66% of residents have returned to the city but only 10% of residents have from the now infamous Lower Ninth Ward. New Orleans suffers from the highest crime rate in the country, and an estimated 20% of the city suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. Ten of the 23 major hospitals and medical facilities remain closed, creating a severe health care crisis.
I traveled to New Orleans in February to attend the Samuel DeWitt Proctor conference. The trip was like beholding two separate cities in one. In the French quarter it felt like the best of times, with tourists returning for revelry, while the worst of times are still being felt just miles away in entire neighborhoods and parishes struggling to rebuild from the waterlogged ashes. While the waters have receded, pain and trauma remain indelible. Where the government has failed, civil society has triumphed with an outpouring of charity and volunteerism, arguably providing the greatest engine behind the progress made so far.
I pray that the week of August 29 becomes a week of national repentance for the indifference we have so often shown toward our most vulnerable brothers and sisters. The week can also be a time for national redemption as we rededicate ourselves to the work of uplifting and empowering those Americans whose lives are circumscribed by inequality and destitution. There are Lower Ninth Wards across our country, both in urban and rural settings, whose social levies remain fragile and broken. On this anniversary I hope you will redouble your efforts to support the rebuilding efforts in the Gulf Coast and deepen your commitment to redress the root causes of poverty in our nation.
Adam Taylor is director of campaigns and organizing for Sojourners/Call to Renewal.
We are approaching the 11th hour in the fight to expand health care for our nation's most vulnerable children. During the last year Sojourners has been working with you to move three legislative priorities: immigration reform, the Farm Bill, and the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Of these three priorities, SCHIP represents our greatest hope for a legislative win this year, with a bill recently passed by the Senate and House expanding SCHIP funding and coverage—one that will have a profound impact on the welfare of our children. President Bush has threatened to veto any expansion of SCHIP, however, based on the misleading argument that it would encourage children already on private health care to shift to public care.
Nothing speaks more persuasively to this shortsighted leadership than the testimony of those directly affected. Susan Molina is a courageous mother and leader in our partner organization PICO, which has been leading a grassroots campaign to extend SCHIP coverage to all children in need. She offered this testimony earlier this year to the House Energy and Commerce committee.
We pray that her story will inspire you to take action. If you're a clergy person, we urge you to sign on to PICO’s petitions to Congress and President Bush. If not, please send a message to your pastor asking him or her to do so.
—Adam Taylor is director of campaigns and organizing for Sojourners/Call to Renewal.
I am here as a mother to speak on behalf of my two children, Bernadette (age 14) and Joseph (age 10). I am also speaking for the tens of thousands of parents in the PICO network who lack coverage for their children.
Almost all uninsured children (83%) live in families where at least one parent works. I am a single mom who works. I am uninsured. … I was married at the age of 17 and I had two children. My husband was a very abusive man who walked out on us when my oldest was 5. I worked very hard so that I would not become a burden to my parents. Sometimes I worked two jobs. … I say all that to say this: As a single mother who has worked to be where I am now, it's hard to know that my kids don't have health care. Somehow we are punished for bettering our lives.
When my daughter was 4 she needed a lot of dental work. I was working two part-time jobs that paid $8-9 an hour and none of us had health coverage. I remember going to the welfare department and asking to enroll in Medicaid. I told them I did not need welfare or food stamps or anything else, just help with the dental work that my daughter needed. After I did the paperwork the caseworker told me I didn't qualify unless I quit one of my jobs or had another baby.
When SCHIP became available, I was able to enroll my children in the Colorado Child Health Plus Plan and get my children health coverage. And like most kids, they needed it. While they were on SCHIP, both my children sprained their ankles, my son broke his arm, and my daughter had a bad burn. Both received good care that kept them from any permanent harm and allowed them to go back to school and allowed me to go back to work. I was not worried about how much these accidents were going to put us in debt. I just knew they were going to get the care they needed.
All that changed when we lost our coverage in September, because my new job paid slightly above the 200 percent [of the poverty level] cutoff to qualify for SCHIP in Colorado.
We talk about 9 million uninsured children. Behind these numbers are real children who go to school, have accidents, and get sick. And real parents like me, who work hard to meet their families' needs.
When insurance prices are outrageously high, as a parent I have to decide whether to put food on the table or buy health insurance. I cannot afford to pay the hundreds of dollars each month that it would cost me to buy health insurance for my children.
I worry that when my children, God forbid, have an accident or get sick I will not have the means to pay for the medical attention they need.
Both of my kids were home sick last week for a number of days. The first night I felt very sad that I couldn't just take my son to the doctor because we don't have health insurance anymore. He was running a fever, and as I drove to the store to buy him some medicine, I began to cry. I felt like a failure. My kids needed something I couldn't provide. As a parent you work to make sure they have what they need. I went into the store and picked up the generic brand of chest rub and some Motrin for the fever. As I got back into the car I felt the need to tell someone that of course I would take my children to the doctor if I felt it was an emergency. I wouldn't care if I had to pay hundreds of dollars later.
I called my friend and told her. She just heard me cry for a while, and she said that it was important that I tell this in my story so that you would know that parents go through this helpless feeling every day. She was right, and I hope you do. … Thank you for the opportunity to tell you one parent's story, on behalf of millions of parents throughout our country.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
 Many students will groan when I point out these inevitable signs of the times, and an equally inevitable conclusion. August is upon us. Summer is quickly winding down. And this can only mean one thing: school is just around the corner!
I was reminded of this fact yesterday as I sent off my book order for the course I’m teaching at Harvard Divinity School this fall. If you’re looking for some late-summer reading, consider the following titles:
H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture
John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus
E.J. Dionne Jr., One Electorate Under God?
Susannah Heschel (ed), Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays
Richard Land, The Divided States of America? What Liberals AND Conservatives are missing in the God-and-country shouting match!
Reza Aslan, No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Failing America's Faithful: How Today's Churches Are Mixing God with Politics and Losing Their Way
Donald Dayton, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage
Randall Balmer, Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America
David Kuo, Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction
Michael Gerson, Heroic Conservatism: Why Republicans Need to Embrace America's Ideals (And Why They Deserve to Fail If They Don't)
Ronald Thiemann, Religion in Public Life: A Dilemma For Democracy
Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan
[Y]ou cannot judge the value of an action based on whether or not it brings success. You have to judge the value of an action in relation to the action itself.... I think we may fail in our attempt to do things, yet we may succeed in the correct action when the action is authentically nonviolent, based on understanding, based on love.
- Thich Nhat Hanh
Interview by Catherine Ingram, In the Footsteps of Gandhi
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Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Here are some key quotes from a Christianity Today interview with "Beirut-based journalist Rami Khouri, a Palestinian-Jordanian Christian. ... An American citizen, he is editor-at-large of The Daily Star, the largest English-language newspaper in the Middle East. He is also director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut."
American Christians could look at Christian Palestinians or Christian Arabs as a potential window into the minds of millions of Muslim Arabs. You would find that what Christian Arabs are feeling is very similar to what Muslim Arabs are feeling. So the real issues at play, in Lebanon and throughout the Middle East, are not religious but political. People may call on their religious vocabulary and metaphors and iconography, but we should look beyond the surface manifestations of those religious symbols to the political realities.
I'd add some nuance to the somewhat categorical assertion that the "real issues" are "not religious but political"--at least some of the real issues are religious. But I will take every opportunity I can to relay the views of Middle Eastern Christians to their brothers and sisters in the U.S.
Khouri also makes some interesting observations on the role of the church--and all religious leaders--in resolving political conflicts:
Sometimes, it's not just about getting the ear of politicians. Sometimes, the church needs to shame politicians. Go over their heads. The vast majority of people in the Middle East want the same thing. But the politicians are the problem in many ways. So it would be good if various religious leaderships together explored a way to make the moral values of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism more pertinent to the resolution of political conflict. Political leaders need to affirm the relevance of moral and faith values and somehow get them to underpin the political process and negotiations. One way to do that is to get these religious leaders together to explicitly talk about political issues.
This was exactly the goal of Sojourners' participation in efforts to prevent war with Iran.
Ryan Rodrick Beiler is the Web editor for Sojourners/Call to Renewal.
 Cities of Light: The Rise and Fall of Islamic Spain aired this week on PBS in my viewing area. The film, which looks at the period of "Moorish" rule in European history when religious diversity was accommodated within a social and political system, and culture among Muslims, Christians, and Jews thrived, is part of a renaissance movement to reclaim the history of religious tolerance in Islam.
The Unity Production Foundation, producers of Cities of Light, is a nonprofit educational foundation that works through the media to produce films and documentaries that serve the cause of peace and understanding. Many of UPF's current projects focus on creating greater understanding about Muslims and Islam. (See American Muslim Teens Talk and Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet.)
Additionally, An Esoteric Quest for the Golden Age of Andulusia is a conference to be held this September in Granada, Spain. Theologians, authors, artists, poets, and others will come together to examine the extraordinary culture of religious tolerance in medieval Spain that produced works of enduring spiritual and artistic genius—such as the mystical traditions in Judaism and the writings of Spanish Christian mystics St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross. (Sojourners writer Mirabai Starr will be making a presentation on both these saints. See her article, A Garden of Righteousness, in the August 2005 issue.)
According to Irshad Manji, author of The New York Times' bestseller The Trouble with Islam Today, many Muslims are attempting to restore in Islam the spirit of ijtihad (pronounced ij-tee-had), Islam's own tradition of creative reasoning. "As globalization persists and pluralism spreads," writes Manji in her column On Faith, "both Muslims and non-Muslims need to know that Islam offers a positive alternative to the tribal mentality.
"Ijtihad has a history of achievement. In the early centuries of Islam, 135 schools of interpretation flourished. In Muslim Spain, scholars would teach their students to abandon 'expert' opinions about the Qur'an if their conversations with the living, breathing Qur'an produced better evidence for their peaceful ideas. And Cordoba, one of the most sophisticated cities in Muslim Spain, housed 70 libraries. That rivals the number of public libraries in most cosmopolitan cities today!
"From the 8th to the 12th centuries, the 'gates of ijtihad' - of discussion, debate and dissent - remained wide open. This is also when Islamic civilization led the world in ingenuity. If ever we Muslims needed to renew our commitment to ijtihad, it is now. From the emerging generation, I continually hear this question: 'Is there a way to reconcile our faith with freedom of thought?'"
Manji's own organization, Project Ijtihad, is an international network of reform-minded Muslims who want to work with Christian and Jewish allies in promoting religious diversity and a renewal of the creative, life-promoting Spirit that is the original impulse of our faiths.
In the midst of extreme religious intolerance and violence, celebrating the richness of the arts together is one way to move beyond simply "religious tolerance" or "interfaith understanding" to deep enjoyment and savoring of the flowering imaginations in our shared and diverse heritages and traditions.
Rose Marie Berger, associate editor of Sojourners, is a Catholic peace activist and poet.
the latest news on poverty, Iran, Canada, Gonzales resignation, Iraq, arms security, South Korean hostages, Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine, Saudi private security, Darfur, and select features and opinion articles
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Study is hard work. It is so much easier to find something else to do in its place than to stay at the grind of it. We have excuses aplenty for avoiding the dull, hard, daily attempt to learn. There is always something so much more important to do than reading. There is always some excuse for not stretching our souls with new ideas and insights now or yet or ever.
- Joan Chittister
Quoted in Essential Monastic Wisdom, by Hugh Feiss
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You have heard that it was said, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." But I say to you, do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.
- Matthew 5:38-42
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Monday, August 27, 2007
 Here's a collection of quotes about Gonzales' resignation from the AP. A few to start with:
"Al Gonzales is a man of integrity, decency and principle. ... After months of unfair treatment that has created a harmful distraction at the Justice Department, Judge Gonzales decided to resign his position and I accept his decision. It's sad that ... his good name was dragged through the mud for political reasons." — President Bush.
"The rampant politicization of federal law enforcement that occurred under his tenure seriously eroded public confidence in our justice system. The president must now restore credibility to the office of the attorney general." — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
"Alberto Gonzales was never the right man for this job. He lacked independence, he lacked judgment, and he lacked the spine to say no to Karl Rove. This resignation is not the end of the story. Congress must get to the bottom of this mess and follow the facts where they lead, into the White House." — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada.
"It is my hope that whomever President Bush selects as the next attorney general, he or she is not subjected to the same poisonous partisanship that we've sadly grown accustomed to over the past eight months." — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky.
"I have said for a long time that I thought the president would be best served if the attorney general resigned so I think it's the right thing to do." — Sen. John McCain of Arizona.
"His mistake was underestimating the ferocity of relentless partisan attacks and not preparing more to address them." — Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas.
"This is a great, great development. ... The next attorney general has to understand that his primary loyalty is to the Constitution and the rule of law and that sometimes he has to tell the president no." Former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias of New Mexico, one of the fired U.S. prosecutors.
 I sat with Elvira Arellano at a press conference last weekend with representatives of our sanctuary families in Los Angeles. Several of the reporters asked her if she believed that she was the Rosa Parks of the immigrant rights movement. Her response was simple and clear – “I am Elvira Arrellano, just a mother who does not want to be separated from my child nor to take him away from his country.”
Of course, she is now deported and has to face the terrible choice of being apart from her son or keeping him from all of the benefits and opportunities that are his birthright as an American citizen.
Why did Elvira risk deportation by leaving sanctuary? Elvira’s stated purpose in risking deportation was to renew attention to the plight of the hundreds of thousands of families like hers – families that are facing the threat of being broken by a broken immigration system – and to issue an urgent call for comprehensive immigration reform.
We have been asked repeatedly about the impact of Elvira’s arrest on the New Sanctuary Movement. Across the country, the impact is consistent. We are saddened by her arrest, and we know that many immigrant families are experiencing greater trauma and fear as a result. However, her courage is also inspiring the families in sanctuary and their allies to strengthen our efforts to make visible the unjust suffering of children and their families.
We are committed to continue and to expand the New Sanctuary Movement because we believe that true immigration reform will require that many more native-born Americans and immigrants across the nation understand the contribution of immigrants to our society, the path to a humane and effective immigration system, and the current suffering of families.
We believe that this understanding will only come when non-immigrants know immigrant families personally as members of the same human family, beloved by God.
We believe that by continuing to make visible the faces and stories of immigrant families facing deportation, in the light of spiritual principles and moral values, we will, in God’s time: - Change the hearts and minds of those who currently want to deport immigrant workers and their families.
- Inspire supportive community members to active and ongoing civic participation.
- Heal immigrant workers and their families who are traumatized by the current waves of hatred and rejection and enable them to participate actively in education and advocacy.
Rev. Alexia Salvatierra is the executive director of CLUE (Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice), an organization of religious leaders in Los Angeles county who support low-wage workers in their struggle for a living wage, health insurance, fair working conditions, and a voice in the decisions that affect them.
I consider a room without reading to be a hell without consolation, an instrument of torture without relief, a prison without light, a tomb without ventilation, a ditch swarming with worms, a strangling noose, the empty house of which the Gospel speaks.
- Peter of Celle
Quoted in Essential Monastic Wisdom, by Hugh Feiss
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When you make your neighbor a loan of any kind, ... If the person is poor, you shall not sleep in the garment given you as the pledge. You shall give the pledge back by sunset, so that your neighbor may sleep in the cloak and bless you; and it will be to your credit before the Lord your God.
- Deuteronomy 24:10-13
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Friday, August 24, 2007
 More Bible passages ignored by the Left Behind books.
It's particularly ironic that the judgment scene in Kingdom Come, the 16th Left Behind book, quotes verbatim from Matthew 25, in which Christ sends those who do not help the hungry, the naked, the sick, or the stranger to hell. A priority on helping the sick was nowhere in evidence, say, when protagonist Buck was responding to the huge cataclysms featured earlier. After the giant earthquake, for example, Buck makes a very brief attempt to help one victim, then decides to be a Bad Samaritan, keeping "his eyes straight ahead as despairing, wounded people waved or screamed out to him" for help (and never repenting of this later).
With regard to the hungry, the Left Behind protagonists also flout Matthew 25:
"... the Bible predicts inflation and famine - the black horse. As the rich get richer, the poor starve to death ..."
"So if we survive the war, we need to stockpile food?"
Bruce nodded. "I would."
In other words, if you see your neighbor hungry, build yourself bigger barns. Later, authorial mouthpiece character Tsion Ben-Judah offers his huge flock "practical suggestions for storing goods." The image of middle-class Christians stockpiling while the poor starve is all too close to today's ugly reality – so the storyline avoids the problem by skipping virtually any mention of famine (in sharp contrast to the other three horsemen).
The Left Behind books do make a big deal of a threat that can fit into their paranoia about government: the economic boycott of those without the mark of the beast. But this boycott isn't so literal either: when I left off reading the books, the heroes were planning to circumvent it by creating a food co-op selling to "a market of millions of saints," from which they would take "a reasonable percentage, and finance the work of the Tribulation Force." It's hard not to see this as a thinly veiled metaphor for the Left Behind franchise itself - and even harder to see this as having anything to do with Matthew 25.
Worse still, the body of Christ is not just seen as a market, but reduced to an audience. TheLeft Behind books I've read have surprisingly little use for church except as a place for one-way transmission of information. And, after the giant earthquake at the end of book three destroys the sanctuary of Buck and Rayford's church, the church community just disappears from the story, without explanation (they can't all be dead)! So much for meeting together to encourage one another, all the more as we see the Day approaching (Hebrews 10:25).
Instead of group worship, we get the image of Ben-Judah, hiding in an underground shelter, beaming his prophetic interpretation out via a Web site that grows to be "ten times more popular than any other in history." "Pretty much every … believer in the world" logs on – apparently, if folks in the global South, or poor neighborhoods near you, can't afford DSL, they might as well not exist.
The novel repeatedly shows the protagonists exulting as the Web site's visit counter registers higher and higher numbers - a perfect image of the Body of Christ reduced to an impersonal mass market. Later, the antichrist inexplicably lets Ben-Judah MC a huge conference in a stadium, broadcast to "the biggest TV audience in history." But, while you focus on those onstage, there's no need to relate to the brother or sister next to you. Even at the last judgment, in Kingdom Come, God stage-manages things so that you only hear the "well done, good and faithful servant" of biblical celebrities and your personal friends, not "strangers."
So go ahead, Left Behind, be literal: tell me to dig up the lawn (if I had one) because Revelation 8:7 says all grass will be burnt up, even though grass still exists in Revelation 9:4. But don't tell me that, because Jesus is coming soon, I should act arrogant, hoard belongings, and ditch my local church community. That's just literally unbelievable.
Elizabeth Palmberg, assistant editor of Sojourners, recommends Sojourners' discussion guide on apocalypse and the other contents of www.sojo.net - but definitely not as a substitute for participation in your local faith community..
 In an attempt to scare off support for a military exit from Iraq, President Bush in a recent speech made the false claim that U.S. disengagement from Vietnam caused the killing fields in Cambodia. The price of American withdrawal, the president said, was paid in the agonies of millions of innocent people.
What actually happened in Cambodia was this: President Nixon spread the Vietnam War into Cambodia. He ordered the so-called "secret bombing" of Cambodia, in which U.S. B-52 bombers pounded the countryside for years. In March 1970 the U.S. supported the military overthrow of the government of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who had tried to keep his country out of the war. In late April of that year Nixon ordered an "incursion" of U.S. troops into Cambodia, which touched off furious protests here in the U.S. (in which students were killed at Kent State and Jackson State universities).
The military coup and U.S. attacks in Cambodia resulted in widespread violence and chaos, especially in the countryside. Resistance to the military regime increased, which gave impetus to the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot, who steadily built their power. By 1975 they controlled the entire country and overran the government. The Khmer Rouge emptied Phnom Penh and instituted their reign of terror by claiming that the U.S. was going to bomb.
The killing fields were the tragic result of the Nixon administration's misguided policies of military escalation. If the United States had not bombed and invaded Cambodia, and if we had let Sihanouk alone, Cambodia would not have suffered its horrible fate.
David Cortright is a board member of Sojourners/Call to Renewal. He is research fellow at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame and president of the Fourth Freedom Forum.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
 Last week's announcement that the Bush administration is seeking to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a foreign terrorist organization is the latest drumbeat in an intensifying confrontation that could lead to war.
In an interview with The New York Times, former Iranian deputy defense minister, Alireza Akbari warned that the measure could cause instability in the region. "If they [the U.S. government] put pressure on the security apparatus of a country, they should expect a similar reaction."
As sabers continue to rattle, it's still unclear whether these latest developments will translate into a military confrontation in the near future. For more than a year now, rumors of war between the U.S. and Iran have ebbed and flowed. Officials within Vice President Dick Cheney's office have advocated for military intervention, whereas the State Department and the Secretary of Defense have made public statements favoring a diplomatic approach. Current presidential candidates have largely refused to take any option off the table to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
With war still raging in Iraq, many of us are hungry for a sign of hope that the tensions between the U.S. and Iran will not evolve into military confrontation. While it's hard to see hope in the daily headlines, an ecumenical delegation to Iran found signs that the tensions between our two nations can indeed be mediated.
Last February, 13 representatives of national religious groups and denominations, led by the Mennonite Central Committee and the American Friends Service Committee, journeyed to Iran in an effort to build bridges of understanding between our two nations. Rather than approaching Iran as the "axis of evil," they met with Muslim and Christian leaders, government officials, and Iranians from many walks of life. Through listening and sharing their own stories, they returned from Tehran with new hope for an easing of tensions between Iran and the U.S. Specifically, they call on the two countries to take the following steps:
- immediately engage in direct, face-to-face talks;
- cease using language that defines the other using "enemy" images; and
- promote more people-to-people exchanges, including among religious leaders, members of Parliament/Congress, and civil society.
While in Iran with the ecumenical delegation, Sojourners/Call to Renewal representative Jeff Carr was struck by the dramatically different narratives Iranians and Americans told of the history between the two nations: the CIA's overthrow of Iran's democratically elected leader, the installation of the shah, the 1979 revolution, the ensuing hostage crisis, and the current nuclear standoff.
Since the delegation's trip to Iran, we've received numerous requests for information about the current conflict between the U.S. and Iran from Americans who also wish to understand the roots of tension between our governments.
To meet this need, Sojourners/Call to Renewal and Faithful Security have collaborated to produce a Words, Not War Study and Action Guide. The study guide includes fact sheets, stories from the ecumenical delegation, suggestions of ways to advocate for Words, Not War, and a study guide that serves as a companion piece to the PBS "NOW" program "Talking to Iran."
The first step to reconciling the tension between the U.S. and Iran is to learn one another's stories. Through the Words , Not War Study and Action Guide and the PBS program "Talking to Iran," you'll be able to learn more about the delegation's experience in Iran and the roots of the tension between the two nations. Our hope is that based on this information, you will feel led to make a public witness for the need for a diplomatic solution to the current standoff between the U.S. and Iran.
In the words of Jeff Carr, "May God help both our nations and peoples to begin the healing and reconciliation process so that we may avoid war and build that lasting peace."
Jessica Wilbanks staffs Faithful Security: the National Religious Partnership on the Nuclear Weapons Danger. She lives in Taos, New Mexico.
 I wrote here a few weeks ago about the new Die Hard film, and especially how I felt it represented a disturbing advance in the portrayal of heroes as violent men whose main purpose is to uphold materialism. Among other things, Bruce Willis' character, John McClane, kicks a woman half to death, then drops an SUV on her head for good measure, and we're supposed to applaud. Surprisingly enough, the comments on this blog were mostly critical of what I said – which is of course perfectly fine, given the freedom of discourse that exists on this site. But it was ironic to find that the very point I was making – that we have become inured to violence in the real world by its portrayal on screen – appeared to be borne out by many of the comments.
So it was with a sense of trepidation that I approached The Bourne Ultimatum, another film marketed as a violent revenge fantasy in which another American hero fights his way to freedom from the bottom up. I had enjoyed its predecessors, but not enough to be excited about this second sequel in the story of a CIA operative who is brainwashed into carrying out murder missions for his handlers, and who now wants his identity back.
On the surface, this is an exceptionally good action film – there are undeniably exciting sequences, filmed as if the camera was attached to Matt Damon's belt. The plot rattles along at a heckuva pace, and the story centers on a thoughtful question: what happens to people who realise that the secrets they keep for the sake of someone else's idea of "national security" are not worth the price of their soul?
The central character is obviously not a typical action hero. He has doubts about the meaning of what he has done for president and country; he has loved and lost; he fears that he has passed the point of redemption. Also, unlike the John McClanes of this world, he fights because he hasto, not just because the director sees yet another opportunity to titillate the audience's desire to see metal things being blown up. Jason Bourne comes to a self-understanding in this film that there are some things not worth doing even for the sake of your country. He is horrified by his past; he wants his identity back because he recognises it's the most important thing – perhaps the only realthing - he has. The philosopher Simone Weil once wrote that the most important possession we have is the ability to say 'I' – to take responsibility for acting in the world. In this, she echoed Rudyard Kipling's adage that each of us "should strive for the privilege of owning one's life." The Bourne Ultimatum provocatively reminds us that an uncritical approach to, for instance, defense, or economics, or prison, or immigration policy involves ceding ownership of one's life to "the authorities"; doing it "just because they say so." All too often, refusing to ask questions about the status quo only serves to keep injustice in its perfect equilibirum. Unthinking patriotism or ideology of the kind that allows secret sins – whether of deceit, or conspiracy, or killing - to be carried out in our name because "the country" depends on it meets its match in Jason Bourne.
The Bourne Ultimatum is directed by Paul Greengrass, the British film-maker responsible for last year's recreation of what may have happened on United 93. That film was a stirring and moving reminder of the horror of 9/11, but it managed to take a sober enough view that it tended to inspire mourning rather than feelings of vengeance. Greengrass' intelligent treatment of violence continues at the climax of The Bourne Ultimatum, when the protagonist looks into the eyes of a would-be assassin and asks, "Do you even know why you're supposed to kill me?" Even though this film still derives much of its entertainment value from violent action sequences, it is at least honest enough to affirm the fact that those who live by the sword still have a pretty good chance of dying by it. It underlines Edmund Burke's statement about the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is that good people do nothing. I'm glad that in a summer beset by exploding robots, women with machine guns for legs, and Bruce Willis killing people with cars for our pleasure, at least one action film is attempting to tell the truth about violence. To Bourne's final question I would add, "Do we even know why we are entertained by men and women killing each other?"
 Gareth Higgins is a Christian writer and activist in Belfast, Northern Ireland. For the past decade he was the founder/director of the zero28 project, an initiative addressing questions of peace, justice, and culture. He is the author of the insightful How Movies Helped Save My Soul and blogs at www.godisnotelsewhere.blogspot.com
Then Jesus said to his disciples, "Truly I tell you, it will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God." When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astounded and said, "Then who can be saved?" But Jesus looked at them and said, "For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible."
- Matthew 19:23-26
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One cannot go in for silence in a big way, make a pile and then retire. It would be better to settle for a more modest undertaking so that one could stay in business and keep at it. Otherwise the profits soon dry up.
- Morton T. Kelsey
from The Other Side of Silence
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Wednesday, August 22, 2007
 At the close of the 16th and final Left Behind book, which was perched on the best-seller list a couple months ago, Tim LaHaye yet again emphasizes his claim to "tak[e] the Bible literally wherever possible." I don't get how anyone who'd ever paid attention to the Psalms could imply that the Bible speaks less powerfully when it chooses to speak in symbolic images.
But what I really object to, having plowed through the first five and the last one of the Left Behind books, are the number of Bible passages that the series doesn't take seriously - passages that give clear instructions about how people should act.
For example, consider the third Left Behind book's take on Matthew 10:27-28's call to proclaim God's word openly. Protagonist Buck, realizing that his late pastor Bruce had hooked up the church's small tribulation-fallout shelter to the Internet via a satellite dish on the steeple, quotes the "proclaim from the housetops" passage verbatim, then enthuses, "Wasn't it just like Bruce to take the Bible literally?"
I do not think that word means what they think it means. At this very moment, our hero Buck is hiding his faith in order to work for the Antichrist. (Yes, he's doing it to spy on the Antichrist. No, it's not clear how anyone familiar with Revelation could think anything excused working for the Antichrist).
Nor does Buck's father-in-law, Rayford (also employed by the Antichrist), seem very serious or literal about scripture when counseling a new convert (employed by … you guessed it) to hide his faith:
"...if I were you, I wouldn't be quick to declare myself a new believer. ..."
"Yeah, but what about that verse about confessing with your mouth?"
"I have no idea. Do the rules still stand at a time like this?"
Yes. Yes, they do.
Nor does the series take literally 1 Peter 3's encouragement to always be ready to tell others about our hope "with gentleness and reverence." In the Left Behind novels, Rayford and Buck sometimes stop playing with spy gadgets long enough to join secondary characters in telling others about God. They get this half right: they repeatedly describe their own faith journeys - but they often have an ungentle, even arrogant refusal to speak in terms relevant to others.
In the most spectacular example, Rayford opens by telling one potential convert, "You understand I don't care what you think of me, don't you?" But really, not having to care what others think is, from the Left Behind novels' point of view, the main payoff of global cataclysms:
Rayford leaned close and spoke louder. "What you think of me would have been hugely important a few weeks ago [before "the rapture"] …"
Where Revelation was written to reassure genuinely oppressed believers that God was more powerful than the state and culture that persecuted them, Left Behind appears to be written to relieve its audience, which enjoys immense wealth and civil liberties by world standards, of the burden of having faith in things unseen, or of connecting to others who have a different worldview. Forget all that stuff about people knowing you are Christians by your love – about which, more in the second installment of this review.
Elizabeth Palmberg is assistant editor of Sojourners, and a big fan of Sojourners' discussion guide on apocalypse.
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Tuesday, August 21, 2007
 But for three hiatuses for school, I've lived my whole life in the Twin Cities, and my heritage and skin tone match the Lake Wobegon image of my city and state. I'm the descendant of German, Norwegian, Welsh, and British immigrants. I've even been known to utter "you betcha" on occasion. But the new faces of Minnesota have been on display in the wake of the I-35W bridge collapse on August 1. Yesterday, nearly three weeks after the collapse, the remains of the final victim, Greg Jolstad, were recovered. The list of victims tells a tale of today's Minnesota. There's the very Scandinavian last name Engebretsen, which belonged to a middle-aged mom who worked for Thrivent Financial for Lutherans. But alongside the victims who were of Northern European descent (Hausmann, Holmes, Sathers, and Eickstadt) are surnames from around the globe: Trinidad-Mena (Mexican), Sacorafas (Greek), Sahal (Somalian), Peck and Chit (Asian), as well as Native American: Blackhawk (Winnebago). They were white-collar and blue-collar, Protestant, Catholic, and Muslim, married dads, and single moms. The oldest was 60, the youngest was 2. One was pregnant. One had Down syndrome. Their pictures are a mosaic of diversity. Pollsters tell us that our quaint land here in the Upper Midwest is changing, that immigration is reshaping Lake Wobegon. But in the information age, those macro-polls are often lost on us. However, when a bridge collapses during rush hour, it takes a tragic snapshot of just who lives around us. "Who is my neighbor?" a questioner asked Jesus. The bridge collapse gave me a new answer to that question.
Tony Jones is the national coordinator for Emergent Village.
The Church should proclaim its concept of God, as it has come to know God through Christ, to all people in society, including Muslims and Jews. This should be done unashamedly and uncompromisingly. The Church should insist on what God is really like - not in a spirit of superiority or condescension, but in humility and love. The Church must be conscious of its own failure in not living up to the responsibility of the knowledge of God that it has been given. It has not attained perfection, but still seeks a deeper understanding of God in Christ. It is not so much the Church that possesses the truth; rather, the truth in Christ has possessed the Church.
- Naim Ateek
from Justice, and Only Justice: A Palestinian Theology of Liberation
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But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.
- Luke 6:24-26
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Monday, August 20, 2007
Jim Wallis on the BBC Radio program "Reporting Religion," talking on July 30 about faith, politics, and Gordon Brown.
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Elvira Arellano, the young mother who sparked the New Sanctuary Movement and appears prominently in the current issue of Sojourners magazine, was arrested Sunday afternoon in Los Angeles and was deported to Tijuana, Mexico, within hours of her arrest. Arellano left her physical sanctuary in a Chicago church last week in order to make a more public case against the raids and deportations that are threatening to separate undocumented immigrants from their citizen children.
From the Chicago Tribune:
Federal authorities Sunday arrested Elvira Arellano on a downtown city street, ending a yearlong standoff that intensified recently after the illegal Mexican immigrant began what was to be a nationwide campaign to push for new immigration reforms.
Patty Kupfer is the Christians for Comprehensive Immigration Reform campaign coordinator at Sojourners/Call to Renewal.
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I used to feel hatred toward the gringo soldiers. Why should they be in our country, with all their guns and all their dollars, making life even more difficult for us? But now I know that these poor gringos are just ignorant; they really don’t know why they’re here or what this struggle is all about.... They’ve just been sent here by their government. So it’s really not their fault; it’s the fault of the people who sent them here.
- Elvia Alvarado
from Don’t Be Afraid Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart
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Friday, August 17, 2007
 John Howard Yoder, a Mennonite theologian and significant influence on Sojourners, used to say that the world often helps the church remember what it means to be church. The observations of those outside often serve to return the church to its roots.
Recently, church leaders and faith based organizations have gotten a lot of flack over their outspoken support of comprehensive immigration reform. In light of Yoder, I've been mulling over the criticisms from Lou Dobbs and others, wondering if there are any lessons for us.
It took me awhile, but I think I found one. Dobbs loves to point out the "schism between the leadership of churches and religious organizations and their followers and members" over the issue of immigration. While the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the National Council of Churches, and even the National Association of Evangelicals call for compassionate policies, many Christians express support for harsh, enforcement-only measures like last year's Sensenbrenner bill. Dobbs is right: Our leaders call for inclusion, while the rest of us say "kick 'em out!"
Clearly there is a communication breakdown, one that I think runs much deeper than failing to educate the people in the pews about immigration polices. Rather, I think this gap demonstrates the failure of church leadership to instill in its people a deeper understanding of their Christian identity.
I recently sat in on a Christians for Comprehensive Immigration Reform strategy session. Krista Zimmerman, who works for the Mennonite Central Committee, often travels to churches to discuss immigration. She lamented how many white churches fail to see the crisis as their problem, and how the discussion often breaks down into "us" and "them," even when talking about members of the same church body. She said we have failed to help the church realize it is an "us."
Theologically, she is exactly right. The church is to be our first family and primary allegiance, and we are to find our identity together in Christ above everything else. Being part of the church is to be a more determinative identity than any of the other ones we carry with us: nationality, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, etc. It is "more real" than anything else about us. When we hold something about us to be more important than our Christian identity (i.e., our American citizenship), we are practicing idolatry and deceiving ourselves. It seems the church in the U.S. has largely forgotten this.
Sociologically, Zimmerman was spot-on as well. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, 78 percent of undocumented immigrants (around 9.4 million people) currently in the United States came from Mexico or Central America. In another survey, Pew found that 87 percent of Latinos self-identify as Catholic or Protestant. This means that there are over 8.1 million Christians in the U.S. who are undocumented immigrants. The body of Christ, it seems, does not have all its papers.
With the collapse of the comprehensive reform bill in the Senate, it now seems that it will have to wait a little longer to get those papers, and many of our brothers and sisters will suffer and be deported in the meantime. This is to be lamented. At the same time, the government's callous inaction provides us with a new opportunity to be the body of Christ. The New Sanctuary Movement is one way churches are siding with our undocumented sisters and brothers, and boldly challenging our nation's inhumane immigration laws.
Most of us aren't there yet, though, as Lou Dobbs pointed out. Later in the meeting, Bill Medford of the United Methodist Church said what most churches need isn't political organizers as much as we need party planners—people who will bring white and immigrant churches together for fellowship. Out of this sharing, eating, and singing will grow a sense of unity and shared calling. Then when the homes of our brothers and sisters are raided, or they are threatened with deportation, we won't hesitate to act on their behalf ... because it's really our behalf.
Ultimately, how the church in the United States responds to the immigration crisis is less a matter of legislation and more a question of Christian identity and test of our discipleship.
Will our actions legitimize false differences? Or will we stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters of faith, together as the undocumented body of Christ?
Tim Kumfer is the executive assistant at Sojourners/Call to Renewal.
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Thursday, August 16, 2007
While vacationing in northern Minnesota, we take an early morning walk down a country road. We note changing weather, the sound of birds, an eagle flying high, the beauty of a leaping dear across the field. After just about a mile, we turn around at a well-cared-for cemetery, a reminder to make the most of each day. We've been reading Herbert Brokering's book, I Will to You: Leaving a Legacy for Those You Love, a whimsical calling forth of the words, memories, and traits that we want to pass on to our loved ones.
We reflect after breakfast of homemade whole wheat bread and Swedish coffee on what's going on in the world, what's important, the family. This summer spot is also the final resting place of our parents, reminding us of their legacy of care for others and God's creation shared in words and lives.
Mom, so concerned about nuclear proliferation and America's violent responses, at the age of 78 stepped into a boat with my brother in the chilly Puget Sound, protesting against the Trident nuclear submarine. "It's because I love my country that I want to correct her," she said to a journalist. When they arrested her on those waters and brought her to court, reporters asked, "Why did you, an American Mother of the Year, commit civil disobedience?" Without a moment's hesitation, mom said, "I did it for the children of the world."
Several years later, a doctor informed her of a fast-growing malignant tumor. She was just finishing her last book, A Grandma's Letter to God. She shared this response:
Now I want to witness to what it means to trust you (God) in such a time, with such a problem. I want to tell the world what freedom there is in being able to say, "Whether I live or die, I am the Lord's." I love life, Lord, and if you should give me more time, I want to be about your business. I want to challenge my beloved country to put its trust in you, not in nuclear bombs. I want to challenge people everywhere to be stewards of what you've given them—and for those of us who have been given so much to share our skills and resources and love with those who have so little. What a world that would be—the kind you meant it to be! But, God, if this is the time you tap me on the shoulder, what anticipations are mine!
What a legacy. Each of us will leave some kind of legacy. Makes me want to use the time and opportunities I have left to be about God's work of justice and community.
 Mary Nelson is president emeritus of Bethel New Life, a faith-based community development corporation on the west side of Chicago. She is also a board member of Sojourners/Call to Renewal.
In the beginning, there is struggle and a lot of work for those who come near to God. But after that, there is indescribable joy. It is just like building a fire: at first it’s smoky and your eyes water, but later you get the desired result. Thus we ought to light the divine fire in ourselves with tears and effort.
- Amma Syncletica
from 'Desert Sayings' quoted in How Shall We Live by Joan Chittister, OSB.
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Wednesday, August 15, 2007
 In his July 20 commentary, James W. Skillen of the Center for Public
Justice struck a non-partisan note of honesty and
balance that I wish I heard more often.
He summarized the basic narrative of the Iraq War that both our
president and his party and many Democrats seem to share:
... first, America liberated Iraq from Saddam Hussein; second, we returned
sovereignty to the Iraqi people; third, sectarian violence tragically
increased; and now, in the fourth phase, we are "deploying
reinforcements and launching new operations to help Iraqis bring
security to their people."
The elegant word Skillen chooses to describe this narrative is "delusional."
He counters:
U.S. forces did not liberate Iraq; they wiped out its
government, and the Bush administration then failed to exercise
American responsibility to govern the country so it could be rebuilt
and eventually governed by Iraqis themselves. We opened the floodgates
to chaos, civil war, the death or flight of tens of thousands of Iraqi
civilians, and a continuing influx of terrorists whom our 'war' was
supposed to destroy. That is not liberation.
He follows with a withering critique of both the "stay the course"
proposal of the executive branch and the quick withdrawal plans
increasingly popular in Congress. Both lines of reasoning, he says,
lay the blame for our dilemma on "the nearly powerless Iraqi
government for not climbing out fast enough from the hole we dug for
it." We may well criticize the Iraqi government for taking a long
summer vacation in the midst of its crisis, but that doesn't negate
our culpability for them being in this particular crisis in the first
place.
He chooses another elegant word to describe a nation that creates a
crisis and then blames the victims for it: "immoral."
Delusional and immoral are strong words. Whether you believe the
invasion was an ill-conceived and badly-planned mistake or you believe
that the invasion was justifiable
but the problems have been in the execution, either way, we're in a
mess. We need a way out.
A friend of mine says that we're only as sick as our reactivity. If
our reactivity to Sept. 11 played a part in getting us into this terrible
situation, we will not be well served by reacting to the status quo
with still more reactive behavior.
For those of us who supported the war, and for those of us who opposed
it but failed to stand up and speak up strongly enough, this is not a
time for reactive behavior. It's an opportunity, as Senator Obama
recently said, to be as careful in planning our next steps as we were
careless in planning our steps in the past. With more foresight and
forethought, with less blame-gaming and partisanship and more
deliberate collaboration, we can take the next steps—whatever they
will be—with more honor, intelligence, sanity, and responsibility,
and less reactivity than we have employed so far. Voices like
Skillens' can slow us down to indulge in second and third thoughts,
perhaps breaking the cycle of unwise and destructive reactivity into
which we have plunged the Iraqis and ourselves.
 Brian McLaren (brianmclaren.net) serves as board chair for Sojourners/Call to Renewal. His next book, Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope, will be released in October.
I guess we suspected it all along, but now we have proof: Jim Wallis is a left-wing, anti-capitalist.
That’s the apparent message behind the dismissal of Andrew Paquin from the faculty of Colorado Christian University. Until Monday, Paquin was a professor of global studies who also is executive director of something called the 10/10 Project, a Colorado-based international advocacy organization that promotes development in Africa. Last year, Paquin, a popular teacher, had been named “faculty member of the year.”
His crime? According to the Rocky Mountain News, the school’s president, Bill Armstrong, former U.S. senator from Colorado, fired Paquin “amid concerns that his lessons were too radical and undermined the school’s commitment to the free enterprise system.” Specifically, Paquin had the temerity to ask his students to read books by Peter Singer, the animal-rights ethicist at Princeton University, and by our friend Jim Wallis.
This whole episode could be a reprise of the Nixon-era “enemies list,” when people who did not make the list sent condolence notes to one another. In this case, if your book didn’t appear on Paquin’s reading list, somehow it missed the mark.
I guess I wasn’t aware that capitalism was under siege – what with the collapse of the Soviet empire and China’s headlong rush into a market-based economy. But the president of Colorado Christian University apparently feels otherwise. Capitalism, in fact, appears to be Jesus’ preferred economic system.
“I don’t think there is another system that is more consistent with the teachings of Jesus Christ,” Armstrong told the Rocky Mountain News. “What the university stands for, among other things, is free markets.”
Armstrong didn’t specify exactly how the writings of Singer or Wallis contradicted his beloved free-market ideology. Paquin's own non-profit actually offers mirco-loans to help Africans start small businesses, and he has plenty of nice things to say about capitalism. "But," he told the Rocky Mountain News, "I'd stop short of deifying it."
Colorado Christian University, based in Lakewood, Colorado, adopted a set of “strategic objectives” last year, one of which was the desire to “impact our culture in support of traditional family values, sanctity of life, compassion for the poor, biblical view of human nature, limited government, personal freedom, free markets, natural law, original intent of the Constitution and Western civilization.”
Armstrong told the Rocky Mountain News that he was “probably” part of the Religious Right.
Trust me, Bill. You qualify.
Randall Balmer is professor of American religious history at Barnard College, Columbia University and a visiting professor at Yale Divinity School. He very much hopes that his book, Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America, was on Andrew Paquin’s reading list. His latest book, God in the White House: A History, will be released in January.
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Tuesday, August 14, 2007
 Last week I received an interesting package in the mail from Sweet Beginnings LLC, a Chicago-based neighborhood non-profit "committed to training and employing residents who are often locked out of the traditional labor market due to past criminal records and other barriers to employment."
Opening the large cardboard box, I discovered two of their signature "beeline" products: homemade beeswax body cream and lip balm. I met Brenda Palms Barber, the CEO of this remarkable organization, at the Aspen Ideas Festival last month.
The Sweet Beginnings story is one worth sharing—an example of success against some pretty incredible odds.
North Lawndale, a neighborhood on Chicago's west side (where the organization is based), has seen its share of challenging circumstances in decades past. With six in 10 residents having been in trouble with the law and one in four currently unemployed, the community faces some of the most troubling realities confronting urban America.
Experiencing an alarming rate of "white flight" in the years following World War II as government housing policies favoring white Americans incentivized mass migration into new suburban communities, North Lawndale saw its white population drop from 87,000 to 11,000 between 1950 and 1960, while its African American population increased sharply, from 13,000 to over 113,000, during that same time.
Moreover, "the next two decades [saw] a series of economic and social disasters for this increasingly isolated, segregated community. Riots followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, destroying many of the stores … accelerating a decline that lead to a loss of 75 percent of the businesses in the community by 1970," according to the Steans Family Foundation—the Lawndale-focused foundation enabling Sweet Beginnings to get off the ground in 1999.
Confronting the twin challenges of rampant unemployment and the difficulty of finding work for individuals with a criminal record, Sweet Beginnings provides job opportunities for once-incarcerated community members while equipping them with the skills, experiences, and hope necessary to sustain and pursue work in the future.
As I've often said before, "Work works," but only when it empowers people to meet their needs while affirming their dignity as image-bearers of God. When people are given the right information, the right education, and sufficient economic opportunity they are far more likely to make good choices.
For more information, please check out the Sweet Beginnings Web site here.
Additionally, Sweet Beginnings and their Beeline products were featured on the CBS Evening News awhile back. Check out the story here.
Better just to smell a flower in the garden...than to have an unauthentic experience of a much higher value. Better to honestly enjoy the sunshine or some light reading than to claim to be in contact with something that one is not in contact with at all.
- Thomas Merton
Quoted in Essential Monastic Wisdom, by Hugh Feiss
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Sojourners' August issue highlights the problem of the crushing debt burden borne by many poor countries. While the global Jubilee movement has won some significant victories, some of this progress has been threatened by a new trend: "vulture funds," private companies that buy heavily discounted debt and then sue impoverished nations for the full face value. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has called vulture funds "morally outrageous," but last June's G-8 meeting of wealthy nations did nothing to change the international legal framework that vulture funds exploit. Below, Muyatwa Sitali, of the Jesuit Center for Theological Reflection in Zambia, describes how one such vulture swooped in not long after creditor nations and institutions such as the IMF had cancelled over 80 percent of Zambia's debt to them.
Zambia was just beginning to benefit from the debt cancellation initiatives of rich countries and multilateral financial institutions [such as the IMF]. Then Donegal International, a commercial debt collector headed by Michael Sheehan and registered in the U.S. but nominally based in the British Virgin Islands, sued Zambia for $55 million in a London court; Donegal had bought the loan from Romania in 1999 for only $3.3 million. By the time of the litigation in 2005, Zambia had already paid Donegal a total of $14 million.
Mr. Sheehan and his company have joined the ranks of vulture funds because of their insatiable appetite for money—money that would have otherwise helped alleviate the disease and poverty that affect close to 7 million people in Zambia.
Such activities of commercial creditors, and the apparent lack of legislation in countries that host such companies and their proprietors, make it hard to forsee a global partnership [to fight poverty], such as that envisaged by the Millennium Development Goals.
In April, a London court ordered Zambia to pay Donegal International over $15 million, even though the judge highlighted immoral conduct by Mr. Sheehan and his accomplices. This means that some projects aimed at alleviating poverty will not be undertaken this year. With meager reserves at the Central Bank, Zambia's ability to sustain its debt burden is threatened, and the prospects of meeting the Millennium Development Goals are at risk. For Zambia, $15 million translates to over 60 million Zambian Kwacha, which would be enough to facilitate 3 private manufacturers of animal-drawn plows and other equipment appropriate to and affordable for small-scale farmers (to complement the tractors for which Zambia originally got the 1979 loan from Romania).
Donegal International's profiteering stands in the way of national development. Its "vulture fund" activities need to be curtailed.
Muyatwa Sitali is acting coordinator of the Debt and Trade Project at the Jesuit Center for Theological Reflection in Lusaka, Zambia.
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Monday, August 13, 2007
 A little film called Once has been winning the hearts of cinemagoers for a couple of months now, with even Steven Spielberg saying that it has given him "enough inspiration to last the whole year." I finally saw it earlier this week and was moved and entertained by a beautiful little story of love and music on the streets of Dublin. But beyond the pleasure of watching natural performances, hearing great songs, and feeling connected to two lonely people trying to find happiness, Once also tells a story of economic injustice. The central characters are a vacuum repairman with a profound song-writing style, and a Czech immigrant worker who sells roses to tourists on the city streets and plays the piano and sings with heartbreaking fragility. She lives in a house with other immigrants, sharing one room for recreation, cooking, and sleeping, and is used to being treated with disdain. Once is one of the first films to take seriously the condition of the people known as the "new Irish"—the immigrants (primarily from Eastern Europe and Africa) who have made their way to the land of saints and scholars in the hope of being able to send money home to their relatives, or to make a new life for themselves.
It is rare to see these people portrayed as honestly as Once does—this is a humanized vision of people who I often walk past in my own hometown of Belfast. Artists and lovers disguised as rose sellers, manual laborers, and street-magazine hawkers. My conscience was challenged by this movie—to imagine the lives of others beyond the stereotypes that the powers that be tend to reinforce. The day after seeing Once I found myself on an inter-city bus in California and was further reminded of the often-difficult situations of those whose economic circumstances make reliance on public transportation a necessity. A journey that takes three hours by car eventually took nearly four times as long. It included very uncomfortable conditions, intimidating conversations, extremely long delays, and no accurate information for customers, many who were already feeling tired and more than a little powerless. One example should suffice to illustrate this: While in transit I met a woman who had traveled from Canada to visit her ailing brother, and partly due to the chronic tardiness of the bus company, she did not arrive in time to say goodbye. Insult piled on injury on her return trip, as she had to stand in line for several hours to ensure a place on a bus that finally left Los Angeles two hours late.
I contacted the media representatives of the bus company (which I’ll not name, but let’s just say it’s a big one, and has a picture of a fast-moving canine on the side of its vehicles) to raise questions about the way their customers appeared to be treated like cattle. They told me that they train their employees to provide information and assistance as necessary, and that they inform customers when delays are to be expected. Yet neither of these things happened on Tuesday; other customers told me that this was their all-too-common experience. The fact that this company has a near-monopoly on transporting the poor in America may mean that it does not feel the need to do much to respond to complaints. There are many comments on consumer affairs Web sites by people who have never received a response to the questions they addressed to this company. It is not difficult to believe that if everyone with a complaint told the company that they were writing an article about its service they might receive a better standard, one that at least comes close to offering more than a modicum of human dignity to passengers and employees alike. I came away from this encounter thinking that to deny dialogue to disrespected customers is only one of the ways in which the poor are downtrodden in our society. The poor are easy to ignore when they are made invisible to the powerful; it’s for this reason that I recommend that everyone should both take an inter-city bus trip (and tell the company what they think about the service), and watch Once, for it is not just a beguiling love story, but a powerful reminder of how easy it is to hide from poverty if we want to ignore it.
Gareth Higgins is a Christian writer and activist in Belfast, Northern Ireland. For the past decade he was the founder/director of the zero28 project, an initiative addressing questions of peace, justice, and culture. He is the author of the insightful How Movies Helped Save My Soul and blogs at www.godisnotelsewhere.blogspot.com
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Friday, August 10, 2007
My foot had been sore for a couple of weeks and it wasn’t getting better. I usually would ignore that, but we were about to leave on a two week vacation with my wife Joy’s parents to celebrate both of our big anniversaries (their 50th and our 10th). Then I have to fly to Singapore for the World Vision triennial conference. So I wouldn’t be back home for many weeks and my Washington, D.C., health care provider (over the phone) strongly urged me to see a doctor in London before we left.
I realized then that I was about to have my first encounter with SOCIALIZED MEDICINE! Now it’s one thing to advocate health care reform in America and even to be politically sympathetic to the idea of a single-payer government-supported system like they have in most of the world’s developed and civilized countries (such as Canada, Germany, and Great Britain). But it was another thing to actually go to the emergency room (or ER, but in the U.K. they call it Accident and Emergency) of a hospital in the British National Health Service. After all, I had heard the horror stories—long waits in incompetent, dirty, and substandard medical facilities; bad doctors and faulty diagnoses; and, of course, incredible bureaucracies like everything in “socialist systems.” Rush Limbaugh and every other conservative pundit have warned us all in America about the horrific practices of British socialized medicine.
So I prepared myself. I brought a big novel to read, along with my eyeglasses, a bottle of water (no telling what they would not have in socialized medicine), and emotionally steeled myself for the ordeal. Ann Stevens, the Anglican vicar with whom we stay in London (she’s my son Luke’s godmother and Joy’s old pal) took me to St. George’s hospital, dropped me off at “A and E,” and wished me luck at 9 a.m. Hoping I would be home that night for dinner, I took a deep breath, walked across the street, and made my way into socialized medicine.
The waiting room was actually quite peaceful and not crowded, I noticed, as I walked up to reception. The woman at the reception desk smiled. I didn’t expect that. “Can I help you?” “Yes,” I replied, “you see, I am an American—I guess you can tell—and I’m visiting family here—my wife is British—and we’re staying with our friend the vicar, and I have a sore foot, which I normally wouldn’t worry about but we’re going away for several weeks on vacation, and I called my health care provider in the U.S., and they told me to come in here, and thought I should get an X-ray or something.” (I wondered for a moment if it would help to tell them that I was a friend of the prime minister, but decided not.) “What do you need from me?” I asked hesitantly. “Just your name and address,” she replied with another smile. “Oh …OK.” She told me it would be about 10 minutes to see the nurse. “Yeah right,” I thought to myself.
I settled into the waiting room chair, looked around at all the people who didn’t seem to be in any distress, and opened my book for a good long read. It was five minutes before the nurse called me in to a little office adjacent to the waiting area, which seemed to be an intake room. She was pleasant and professional as she asked me what was wrong, and how long I had felt the soreness. She gently examined my foot and then told me I would be called in to see a doctor in about 10 minutes. “Sure thing,” I thought. So I went back out to the waiting room and settled in again to read my novel.
It was five minutes before a young woman appeared and called my name, “Mr. Wallis?” She was a young Asian doctor named Dr. Gillian Kyei. She was also very pleasant and professional, taking time to ask me lots of questions about how I might have hurt my foot, etc. She examined the injured foot carefully, told me that it didn’t necessarily look broken, but that we should get an X-ray to make sure. I waited in her examining room for a couple of minutes while she called down to the X-ray department to say that I was on the way. Then she came back and escorted me herself.
When I got to X-Ray, I checked in by just saying my name and took a seat in the waiting area. Finally, I was going to get to read my book! But five minutes later, the technician came out to bring me in. She took her time with me, taking several different angles of my foot. When I was done, she sent me back to my young doctor, with another smile.
This time the wait was a full ten minutes because, I later learned, Dr. Kyei was reading the results of my X-ray, which had already been sent to her computer. She showed me what looked to her like a fracture of my fourth metatarsal bone, but said she wanted to consult with the orthopedic specialist. I waited about ten minutes more while she did that and so got a few more pages read.
Dr. Kyei then came back with the definitive diagnosis—my fourth metatarsal bone was indeed fractured. She went over their preferred treatments and my options with me. Normally, if this injury had just happened, they would put me in a cast to hold the broken bone in place and give me crutches. They were still happy to do that now. But since I had been already walking on it for over a week and the bone was still in the right place, I could also have the option to just using a therapeutic soft boot to keep the weight on my heel and off my fourth and fifth metatarsals. While the fracture was at the base of the fourth metatarsal, as she carefully explained and showed me on the X-ray, the pain was being felt lower down—across both my fourth and fifth metatarsals area. If I chose the boot, I could still swim with my kids and get around a little easier, but I would have to really try to keep my weight off the injured area. I chose the boot and she told me she would be back in a minute.
It was actually about two minutes before she got back, and I was getting nowhere with this novel. She handed me a very stylish black boot (so much better than other colors for fashion coordination), and gave me my final instructions—be very cautious about the foot, try to stay off it as much as possible but keep it mobile and flex it so the blood circulates, get another X-ray as soon as I get home and, of course, then consult with my home physician. Then she wrote me a nice long letter for my home doctor, describing their diagnosis and treatment. Dr. Gillian Kyei then wished me the best of luck, hoped I would have a great vacation despite my foot, smiled, and sent me back to the front desk.
“How can I call a cab?” I asked. “Oh, I’ll do that for you,” she said. “Just take a seat over their and the cab will be here in about 10 minutes.” As I sat there, I realized something. Nobody had ever asked me to pay. Everything was FREE, including my nice new boot. How about that? They think health care is a right for all citizens, and even foreign visitors like me. Amazing.
The cab came in 5 minutes. I thought I would tell him some horror stories about my experiences in the American health care system, but decided not to. I was back at Ann’s in just over an hour from when I left—with my letter, my boot, and my tale of smiling, pleasant, and efficient health care workers. And somehow I began to believe that back in America we weren’t being given the whole truth. And guess what? Ann tells me that David Beckham and Wayne Rooney, the biggest British soccer (football) stars, have had metatarsal bone fractures, just like mine. In about six weeks, I too will be back on the field, thanks to socialized medicine! And in the meantime, I will keep my foot up … and maybe get that novel read.
I'm not friendly with the white-shirted drug dealers who work the corners near my house yet, but at least they acknowledge me as a neighbor now, instead of looking me over as a prospective buyer or an undercover cop. It's not fear that keeps me away from them, I think, but rather cold, hard realism. Until they fall, those hardcore guys simply are not "get-able" for anything less viscerally exciting than street life. I hate to break it to all those Christian rappers out there, but loving God and loving people does not qualify in that category.
The fact that I don't walk up to those guys doesn't mean that I don't keep them in mind or pray for them when I walk by. On the contrary, I am fascinated by what goes on, and careful to notice if and when the kids we know start hanging around with the wrong people. And I am always on the lookout for Shareef.
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Issues related to immigration are in the news this week. A new study finds that immigrants from Mexico and Central America are now "living under a dramatically increased sense of siege." A poll reported in the study found that "More than one-third of Central Americans and 30 percent of Mexicans said their biggest problem in the United States was discrimination, compared with single-digit responses for similar questions in 2004, and 83 percent of Mexicans and 79 percent of Central Americans said this year that discrimination was rising."
The McClatchy Newspapers report quoted Sergio Bendixen, founder of the Miami-based Bendixen & Associates, who conducted the study: "What I have found is both ugly and sad. There are millions of Latin American immigrants, especially those living in the deep South and the upper Midwest, whose lives have been made miserable by the anti-immigrant sentiment that is now so prevalent in so many geographic areas."
As a result of Congress' failure to pass comprehensive immigration reform, that sentiment is now playing out with states and local jurisdictions passing harsh anti-immigrant legislation. The Los Angeles Times reports that nearly 200 state laws have been passed so far in 2007, with the trend being toward more restrictive measures. But, as Tamar Jacoby, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute said: "The problem is these local measures are not going to deliver control. It's probably not going to work, but it will make life miserable for a lot of people." Not only have these restrictive measures been proven consistently unconstitutional, but the enforcement of such a patchwork of conflicting local ordinances would be unpractical and create increasingly divided communities.
Not to be outdone, the federal Department of Homeland Security is planning tough new rules on the hiring of illegal immigrants. And according to The New York Times, "Officials said the rules would be backed up by stepped-up raids on workplaces across the country that employ illegal immigrants." A spokesman for DHS added, "We are tough and we are going to be even tougher."
Ugly, sad, and tougher. With the failure of Congress to enact a fair and just immigration system, that's what we've come to. More raids on workplace and more families separated. It's time to remember and act on our fundamental beliefs as people of faith, as the Statement of Principles of Christians for Comprehensive Immigration Reform puts it:
- We believe that all people, regardless of national origin, are made in the "image of God" and deserve to be treated with dignity and respect (Genesis 1:26-27, 9:6).
- We believe there is an undeniable biblical responsibility to love and show compassion for the stranger among us (Deuteronomy 10:18-19, Leviticus 19:33-34, Matthew 25:31-46).
- We believe that immigrants are our neighbors, both literally and figuratively, and we are to love our neighbors as ourselves and show mercy to neighbors in need (Leviticus 19:18, Mark 12:31, Luke 10:25-37).
- We believe in the rule of law, but we also believe that we are to oppose unjust laws and systems that harm and oppress people made in God's image, especially the vulnerable (Isaiah 10:1-4, Jeremiah 7:1-7, Acts 5:29, Romans 13:1-7).
The questioner from a D.C. think tank was confused. Costa Rican politician Ottón Solís had just told an audience of D.C. journalists and policy thinkers how his homeland has a 120-year tradition of democracy, strong respect for human rights, and by far the best economy, lowest poverty and illiteracy rates, and highest life expectancy in its region.
In other words, it's exactly the kind of country that backers of the Central America Free Trade Agreement think is well positioned to "reap the gains" from CAFTA. Yet it's the only potential member that has so far not ratified the agreement; in an October referendum Costa Ricans will vote whether to join CAFTA, and Solís is urging a "no" vote.
Patiently, Solís repeated his point: Costa Rica is already benefiting from trade (its exports last year grew four times faster than in 2005, far better than neighboring countries who had implemented CAFTA). Joining CAFTA would only undermine "precisely … some of those institutions that you and I are praising": The universal health care system would be bankrupted by new rules favoring pharmaceutical companies, environmental laws could be challenged in closed-door trade tribunals, and the government-run electric and telephone companies, losing their monopoly, would no longer be able to offer the low prices and wide coverage that are "basic for social mobility."
Bookish-looking, vocally pro-business and pro-U.S., and armed with a statistics-laden PowerPoint presentation, Solís is as far as you can get from a populist firebrand like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. In response to the anecdote-based pro-CAFTA claims of his debating partner from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Solís got spirited, but in a courteous and polysyllabic way:
Why is the U.S.A. building a wall [on its southern border]? If this CAFTA is for us such a magic machine of employment generation and small entrepreneurship strengthening, then the U.S.A.—with all of Central America, practically, and Mexico in free trade agreements—would have been eliminating visa requirements. They are making them more stringent, and building a wall, because the U.S.A. knows very well what's going on here in our countries [including, in Mexico, the NAFTA-induced] disappearance of 1.3 million farmers. … In these deals, you cannot survive if you are small.
And small- and medium- sized landowners, Solís pointed out, have been "the very basis of [Costa Rica's] democratic development" and prosperity.
Faced with a media that (not unlike the U.S.'s) offers only pro-CAFTA messages, Solís is leading a group of volunteers going door-to-door to urge his countrymen to vote no to CAFTA in October's referendum. With 600 people each knocking on a thousand doors (so far Solís has hit 683), they figure they'll hit half the nation's households, all on a budget of less than $20,000 (used to print brochures). The anti-CAFTA speakers have found that church doors, unlike television studios or the halls of government, are often open to their presentations.
"I have seen very many instances in history in which hearts, passion, conviction, have defeated money [and] power," says Solís. "And I hope that this is going to be another case."
Elizabeth Palmberg is assistant editor of Sojourners. Ottón Solís spoke recently in Washington, D.C., at a forum hosted by the Global Policy Network.
When the oppressor is no more, and destruction has ceased, and marauders have vanished from the land, then a throne shall be established in steadfast love in the tent of David, and on it shall sit in faithfulness a ruler who seeks justice and is swift to do what is right.
- Isaiah 16:4-5
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We have a consoler, our Lord Jesus Christ. Although we cannot see him with bodily eyes, we keep in written form in the Gospels the things he did and taught while he was bodily among us. If we take care to hear, read, and confer with each other about these things, which need to be preserved in our hearts and bodies, we will certainly conquer the obstacles of this age as surely as if the Lord were always standing by us and consoling us.
- Bede Bede
Quoted in Essential Monastic Wisdom, by Hugh Feiss
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Thursday, August 09, 2007
 I am in the U.K. for a family holiday. We're celebrating the 50th wedding anniversary of my wife Joy's parents, and our 10th anniversary, in her home country. Everyone here is quite impressed with Gordon Brown's first few weeks in office and the leadership he has shown around the terrorist attack that came just days after he took office, the domestic crisis of flooding, another outbreak of foot and mouth disease among cattle, and his first visit to the United States since becoming the British prime minister. The British press reported how professional Brown was with President Bush, affirming the U.K./U.S. relationship for the long term while keeping the American president suitably at arms length—a great relief for the British people, who almost universally feel that former Prime Minister Tony Blair was much too close to Bush and his policies in Iraq. That Brown made his visit to the U.N. Secretary General in New York the highlight of his trip, and not his time with Bush in Washington, pleased the British public.
In his speech at the U.N., Brown helped to make some real breakthroughs on both Darfur and global poverty. The British newspaper The Guardian reported his description of the situation in Darfur as the "greatest humanitarian disaster" the world faces today, and his announcement that the U.K., France, and the U.S. would submit a resolution to the Security Council mandating a peacekeeping force. The resolution was passed later that same day.
But the heart of his speech was global poverty and the challenge of meeting the Millennium Development Goals. In the text of his speech, Brown said that after seven years "it is already clear that our pace is too slow; our direction too uncertain; our vision at risk. … We cannot allow our promises that became pledges to descend into just aspirations, and then wishful thinking, and then only words that symbolize broken promises."
He then challenged his audience:
And so my argument is simple: The greatest of evils that touches the deepest places of conscience demands the greatest of endeavor. The greatest of challenges now demands the boldest of initiatives. To address the worst of poverty we urgently need to summon up the best efforts of humanity.
I want to summon into existence the greatest coalition of conscience in pursuit of the greatest of causes. And I firmly believe that if we can discover common purpose there is no failing in today's world that cannot be addressed by mobilizing our strengths, no individual struggle that drags people down that cannot benefit from a renewed public purpose that can lift people up.
To find that common purpose, he said:
Our objectives cannot be achieved by governments alone, however well-intentioned; or private sector alone, however generous; or NGOs or faith groups alone, however well-meaning or determined—it can only be achieved in a genuine partnership together.
After addressing governments and businesses, the prime minister went on:
Let me say to faith groups and NGOs—your moral outrage at avoidable poverty has led you to work for the greatest of causes, the highest of ideals, and become the leaders of the campaign to make poverty history. Imagine what more you can accomplish if the energy to oppose and expose harnessed to the energy to propose and inspire is given more support by the rest of us—businesses, citizens, and governments.
It was a challenging and inspiring speech. I think we may have a real leader here in the U.K.
 Franz Jagerstatter, Austrian peasant and church janitor, is honored on August 9, the day he was executed in 1943 for his refusal to fight in Hitler's army. As a Roman Catholic he has been declared a "martyr of the faith" and is expected to be "beatified" this October. Franz lived the gospel that the church proclaims. He is a solitary witness of nonviolence from whom the community can learn.
Today we also remember the people of Nagasaki—victims of U.S. Weapons of Mass Destruction. We recall that city turned to ash and rubble. In Iraq, cities are also turned to radioactive rubble and ash, by the U.S. invasion and continuing occupation.
My city of Detroit is under military assault. Its resources are stripped by a war that has cost the citizens of Michigan $12 billion, and city residents $767 million in tax dollars. Why is money lacking for schools, clinics, community developments?
Moreover, the young people of our city are conscripted into the military by false promises, outright lies, and an economic draft which seems to offer no alternative living. We recall that the first soldier killed in Iraq was Marine Lance Cpl. Jose Gutierrez, a 28-year-old undocumented immigrant who was posthumously awarded U.S. citizenship.
We offer this prayer:
To the church we say:
Speak out and act against this war, from the pulpits (especially on August 1-19), from offices high and low. Read and live the gospel.
Lift up nonviolence; Honor Jagerstatter; remember the victims; repent our silence.
To the Pentagon and its recruiters we say:
End this war now. Obey international law. Leave our young people alone.
To the young people of our city we say:
There is hope in the communities of this city.
There is a future, economic and social, but we must make it ourselves.
We need one another; we need you here in the struggle for life and community.
To the dead of Nagasaki we say:
Forgive us even now. We commit ourselves to putting an end to these weapons.
To the people of Iraq, we say:
Forgive our silence and our complicity. Forgive our submission to these leaders.
We pledge to end this war. Refuse to pay for it. Refuse to fight in it.
Bill Wylie-Kellermann, a United Methodist pastor, is currently serving at St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Detroit, Mich. He is author of Seasons of Faith and Conscience (Orbis), which explores the biblical and theological bases for nonviolent resistance and "liturgical direct action," and has edited an anthology, A Keeper of the Word: Selected Writings of William Stringfellow (Eerdmans).
 An interview with Brian Steidle, a former American military observer in Darfur and the subject of the documentary film and book The Devil Came on Horseback.
Briefly explain why you were in Darfur.
I had been in Sudan for seven months prior going to Darfur. Even though I was in Sudan, I had very little idea what was going on in Darfur. At the time, I was looking for adventure and a job that paid well.
How did your experience in the military inform your work in Darfur?
All my colleagues who served with me in the military did so because we wanted to protect people who couldn't protect themselves from an oppressor. As I was a military contractor observing the cease-fire, we were neutral military observers. We thought we were doing a good job monitoring the cease-fire but in reality that wasn't the case. It became very frustrating and I quit the job because you couldn't do anything but count dead bodies and watch people's lives being destroyed in front of us.
Why do you say your camera was not nearly enough to cover what you saw?
I took pictures but that was it. I didn't have the capability to stop the fact that 400,000 people - and counting - are dead as a result of a government killing them because of who they are.
What's happened in Iraq has caused the U.S. to lose a lot of moral ground. Apparently, the Sudanese government is cooperating with us regarding intelligence on al Qaeda. Our government continues to appease them. The only way to trump that is to have the American people stand up and say "Hey, we want this to stop."
What led you to create the documentary The Devil Came on Horseback and the book?
I always planned on writing a book that described my journey. Originally, I wanted to do a documentary about the women in the compound but it changed into telling the story of Darfur through my eyes.
When I saw The Devil Came on Horseback at the Tribeca Film Festival, the pictures were so gripping and surreal I thought I was watching a fictional movie.
I was there and I can't believe what I saw. When people see the over 2,000 images I've taken, I hope they're going to be motivated to get involved in this crisis.
What's your reaction to the faith community's response to this situation?
I've spoken at numerous churches and synagogues. In particular, the response I've gotten from the Jewish community has been tremendous. While Christian organizations are very supportive of our work in Darfur, many of them are not as supportive as they were with the campaign against genocide in the South. There the battle was between Christians and Muslims. Since the Darfur situation pits Muslims against each other, I don't see the urgency from some very powerful Christian groups. I'd like to see them step up to the plate this time.
How can religious organizations such as Evangelicals for Darfur have a positive impact on this situation?
Too much lecturing can drive people away. I run into people every day who don't know what Darfur is. We can reach them through events where there are tables and information available about the situation but where there are also activities going on. Everyone is enjoying themselves as they learn. I was involved with Young Life and we did a lot of really fun events along with our teaching.
What organizations are you currently involved with and why?
I work with Hope Artists: Helping Other People Everywhere (HOPE). This is an advocacy movement targeted to youth between 18 and 30. The money raised through cultural and arts events will go to Global Grassroots (www.globalgrassroots.org), which is working to rebuild the lives of the genocide survivors. We want people to have hope that Darfur can be a hopeful situation. Hollywood movies portray Africa at its lowest point in history, but there's another side of the story. For example, Rwanda is now the Silicon Valley of Africa. Liberia just elected the first women president in the continent. Even the diamond trade in Sierra Leone is starting to get regulated. We need to inform and educate people but also give them a sense of hope that change is indeed possible.
Becky Garrison's publications include the forthcoming Rising from the Ashes: Rethinking Church (Seabury Books, October 2007). She will be speaking at Greenbelt Festival 2007 and Soularize.
At our best, we become Sabbath for one another. We are the emptiness, the day of rest. We become space, that our loved ones, the lost and sorrowful, may find rest in us.
--Wayne Muller
From "Sabbath" quoted in How Shall We Live by Joan Chittister, OSB.
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For where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peacable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits without a trace of partiality or hypocricy. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace.
- James 3:16-18
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Wednesday, August 08, 2007
 In August, 1945, Fr. George Zabelka, a Catholic chaplain with the U.S. Army Air Forces, was stationed on Tinian Island in the South Pacific. He served as priest and pastor for the airmen who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was discharged in l946. During the next 20 years he gradually began to realize that what he had done and believed during the war was wrong, and that the only way he could be a Christian was to be a pacifist. He was deeply influenced in this process by the civil rights movement and the works of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi.
In 1972 he met Charles C. McCarthy, a theologian, lawyer, and father of 10. McCarthy, who founded the Center for the Study of Nonviolence at the University of Notre Dame, was leading a workshop on nonviolence at Zabelka's church. The two men fell into the first of several conversations about the issues raised by the workshop. Some time later, Zabelka reached the conclusion that the use of violence under any circumstances was incompatible with his understanding of the gospel of Christ. When this article appeared in Sojourners in August 1980, Fr. Zabelka was retired, gave workshops on nonviolence and assisted in diocesan work in Lansing, Michigan.—The Editors of Sojourners
Charles McCarthy: Father Zabelka, what is your relationship to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945?
Fr. Zabelka: During the summer of 1945, July, August, and September, I was assigned as Catholic chaplain to the 509th Composite Group on Tinian Island. The 509th was the atomic bomb group.
McCarthy: What were your duties in relationship to these men? Zabelka: The usual. I said mass on Sunday and during the week. Heard confessions. Talked with the boys, etc. Nothing significantly different from what any other chaplain did during the war.
McCarthy: Did you know that the 509th was preparing to drop an atomic bomb?
Zabelka: No. We knew that they were preparing to drop a bomb substantially different from and more powerful than even the "blockbusters" used over Europe, but we never called it an atomic bomb and never really knew what it was before August 6, 1945. Before that time we just referred to it as the "gimmick" bomb.
McCarthy: So since you did not know that an atomic bomb was going to be dropped you had no reason to counsel the men in private or preach in public about the morality of such a bombing?
Zabelka: Well, that is true enough; I never did speak against it, nor could I have spoken against it since I, like practically everyone else on Tinian, was ignorant of what was being prepared. And I guess I will go to my God with that as my defense. But on Judgment Day I think I am going to need to seek more mercy than justice in this matter.
Click here to read the rest of the Sojourners interview with Fr. George Zabelka.
To speak out against the nuclear weapons build-up and sign on to a "Statement from Religious Americans Opposing the Complex 2030 Plan," click here.
The latest news on Iraq-war, immigration, early childhood education, Iraq-politics, Darfur, Israel, Asian poverty, Kenyan women, Dem debate, Giuliani, Evangelicals and global warming, and select editorials and op-eds.
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There is to be acceptance of people who come from very different places (using this metaphorically as well as literally). There is to be willingness to hear "reasonable criticisms or observations" and to learn from the example of others…. In a world that builds barriers, puts up walls, keeps the other out, and is looking for certainty, we turn to the Rule [of Benedict] and find a man who insists on balance, mutual respect, reciprocity, openness. [Benedict] refused to live with a closed mind.
-Esther De Waal
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Tuesday, August 07, 2007
 Like Joel Hunter, I was skeptical of the meeting on the "Green Gospels." “Oh, no. Another group that believes all you have to do is convince Christians that the Bible says to care for creation, and they will do it.” I guess, after working in this field for the past decade, I was wary.
But the meeting was fascinating. Martin Palmer had convened a similar event earlier this year in the U.K. He invited atheists, non-believers, and others not familiar with the Bible. Apparently they were eager to explore what the gospels might reveal about our relationship with the natural world. It took them only 10 minutes to become immersed in the gospel of Mark, sifting out what it might have meant for Jesus to ride on an unbroken colt. It took us all morning to begin. Perhaps it is because we who are so steeped in the Bible, who have explored it for years, need more than inspiration. We need examples, to see that other people have put their beliefs into practice. One of the goals of the Green Gospels is to draw together these types of stories, both from 2000 years of Christian history, and modern efforts. It was amazing to seriously consider what the story of Jesus and the colt or Jesus and the fig tree say about Him, His relationship to the natural world, and how it affects us.
Martin Palmer surprised me with a comment that the U.K had experienced three environmental collapses within historical times. I usually think of these as future events we need to avoid. One collapse coincided with a huge volcanic eruption, blocking sunlight for several years. This was about the time the builders of Stonehenge stopped their work. The third event was the fall of the Roman Empire. The Benedictine Order of monks was active at this time. Benedict taught that a monk’s life had three priorities: prayer, study, and work. They were to go into the most wasted places and rebuild the ecology. They changed a devastated Europe by planting trees, digging new steams and lakes, restoring forests, composting and reviving the vitality of the soil. I looked around the table and there were modern Benedictines. Not monks, but people who were putting their beliefs into practice. Bring on the green gospels. We need these stories. We need to steep ourselves in scripture until it flows out into deeds.
Ginny Vroblesky is the former national coordinator of A Rocha USA.
From September 6 - October 15, individuals and congregations will commit to fasting for a day or more in order to call for debt cancellation for desperately poor nations, joining Jubilee USA in supporting the Jubilee Act, H.R. 2634. (See Sojourners' August issue for coverage of the debt crisis.)
Rev. David Duncombe will be fasting, praying, and lobbying for all six weeks of the Jubilee USA fast. In 1999 and again in 2000, he engaged in 45-day lobbying fasts, part of an effort that helped to bring about Congress' authorization of $435 million to forgive some debts owed to the United States. Here, Duncombe reflects on what it's like to fast for justice while offering a prophetic—and pastoral—voice on Capitol Hill.
A typical day in the sixth week of my water-only fast would find me hobbling down the corridor of the House office building, leaning into my walker and headed for the office of a Republican member of the Financial Services Committee. Today I had with me a published statement on debt cancellation by the bishop of the congressman's church—which I hoped he would read.
This would perhaps be my fourth visit to his office. Although I had yet to meet him personally, I'd gotten to know his chief of staff and some of his front-office people. We'd talked of how foreign debt is crushing impoverished third world nations and how Jubilee's bill (H.R. 2634) proposed to cancel most of it. (I'd also done some informal marriage counseling with their harried receptionist.)
I'd been up since three this morning, in prayer and preparation for the six or seven office visits I'd make today if my strength held out. Each day it was harder to make my rounds down these long corridors. Yet often when I felt at the end of my rope, a refreshing surge of new energy came and I hobbled on.
As I grew thinner and weaker, office staff would ask, "How's it going today, Reverend?" Some began to worry about me. With a smile, I told them I was doing better than most of the 50,000 or so who starved to death that day (and whose plight I hoped to symbolize by my wasted body).
If my upcoming fast goes like my previous two extended fasts for debt cancellation in Washington, its effectiveness will depend not so much on what I say on my office visits, but on what is said by the fast itself—the day-to-day silent witness of a body growing visibly weaker. In a sense, a fast like this takes on a life of its own apart from me. There is something of a sacramental quality to the fast, something that carries its own grace and power. I am simply a vehicle for a fasting body, the sight of which seems to touch the souls of others.
Rev. David Duncombe, a retired campus minister and social activist, lives in White Salmon, Washington.
Biblically speaking, to repent doesn't mean to feel sorry about, to regret. It means to turn, to turn around 180 degrees. It means to undergo a complete change of mind, heart, direction. Turn away from madness, cruelty, shallowness, blindness. Turn toward the tolerance, compassion, sanity, hope, justice that we all have in us at our best.
- Frederick Buechner
from Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons
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Monday, August 06, 2007
 I first heard about the letter of the evangelical leaders through an e-mail from Professor Ron Sider, who used to teach at Messiah College, where I graduated. It was a gift from heaven after so many bad statements by evangelicals justifying killings, occupation, and the pillage of our land using so-called biblical interpretations. I tried to get the letter to as many media outlets as I know, especially some of the major newspapers and satellite TV stations like al Jazzera and Al Arrabiyeh. I wanted people in our part of the world to know that there are other Christian evangelicals from America who think and speak differently than the Pat Robertsons, Jerry Fallwells and other Christian Zionists.
The same day, my family and I were invited to the home of the pastor of the local Christian Alliance Church in Amman. Reverend Yousef Hashweh and his wife are long-time friends of my parents and my wife's family. My father-in-law was an Alliance pastor in Jerusalem between 1957 and 1975. They had invited us for a good-bye dinner as we were about to travel to the U.S. I have been asked to teach a course at Princeton University on the topic of new media in the Arab world.
When I told them about the letter and that one of the signatories was the president of the Christian & Missionary Alliance, they rushed to their computer and made a print out of the letter. They were checking to be sure that Gary M. Benedict, president of the Christian & Missionary Alliance, had in fact signed a letter calling for a Palestinian state.
We spent the evening trading stories of the many false predictions (spoken as if they were true prophecies) made by Christian evangelicals about our part over the years. I told them my favorite story of seeing Pat Robertson in 1982 opening his Bible while speaking on the 700 Club, stating that the invasion of Israel to Lebanon was specifically detailed in the Old Testament and that PLO leader Yasser Arafat was none other than the anti-Christ. And then 12 years later the same Pat Robertson was taking a photo opportunity with none other than the former anti-Christ, Yasser Arafat, at his Gaza residency as Robertson was giving a donation of milk for Palestinian children.
The letter of the 34 evangelical leaders certainly was a pleasant surprise to many of us Christians in the Middle East who were beginning to doubt our own understanding of our faith in light of so many televangelists throwing themselves blindly behind the Israeli military. Hopefully these voices of sanity will continue and we will hear the true voice of an evangelical community who believes in justice and human rights. Liberty and freedom apply both to the spiritual as well as to the worldly needs of humankind. The sooner the evangelicals of the world embrace that, the sooner this will be a better world for all of us.
 Daoud Kuttab is a Palestinian journalist and the director of the Institute of Modern Media at Al Quds University and the founder of the Arab world's first internet radio station, ammannet. His e-mail is info@daoudkuttab.com.
 This sermon was preached by Ginny Earnest at a Hiroshima-Nagasaki Memorial Service hosted by Sojourners Community on August 6, 1987. For Hiroshima-Nagasaki memorial service resources, please go to Faithful Security (National Religious Partnership on the Nuclear Weapons Danger).
Most Americans first heard about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the way our government ended the second world war. That is true whether you were alive at the time or born since 1945—we were taught and most of us believed that the choice to use the atomic bomb saved the lives of thousands of U.S. soldiers—our fathers, our uncles, our husbands, our friends.
Something that happened to an unknown people, a great distance from us, a long time ago, prevented a tragedy in our own families and neighborhoods. The bombs were used as a part of military stategy by the experts who were supposed to know about such things. It was another terrible necessity in a time of war.
For many there is only the image of the mushroom cloud and the massive display of power, viewed from other cities of military planes, viewed at a safe distance.
But we know that what happened on this day, 41 years ago, was so much more than an abstract symbol of a strategic choice. We must attempt to understand the meaning of the events of those days from a different vantage point—up close and through the eyes of compassion, where it will affect us.
For many of us, commemorating the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a part of our yearly liturgical calendar and, like Good Friday, it is an evening of facing into pain, opening up old wounds, retelling a sad story because we know that it continues to hold meaning for our lives and for the world.
What is at the heart of this sad and terrible story? How do we open ourselves to listen again?
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I've gotta admit, it hasn't been easy being a Christian Arab-American, much less in the evangelical church. How many times can you explain that Jesus wasn't baptized in the Rio Grande, that there are tens of thousands of indigenous Palestinian Christians still living in the Holy Land, and that loving Jewish people and "blessing Israel" (as is oft cited from scripture) doesn't mean giving the modern (and mind you, secular) nation-state of Israel a carte blanche on foreign policy or grant it some sort of biblical immunity from criticism? For too long, such criticism has been deemed by my fellow American evangelical brothers and sisters as not only unbiblical but sometimes even -- yes, anti-semitic. (Notwithstanding the fact that Arabs are also Semites), the idea that Palestinians had any right to any part of the Holy Land has long been considered anathema by too many of my American kinfolk.
So you can only imagine how tickled I was to read about a letter to President Bush signed by evangelical leaders across America, encouraging a two-state solution. Read the letter published by The New York Times here.
We also write to correct a serious misperception among some people including some U.S. policymakers that all American evangelicals are opposed to a two-state solution and creation of a new Palestinian state that includes the vast majority of the West Bank. Nothing could be further from the truth.
What I appreciated even more about this letter was some of the theology they included to counter the notion that "blessing Israel" somehow means "letting Israel do anything Israel wants to.":
As evangelical Christians, we embrace the biblical promise to Abraham: 'I will bless those who bless you.' (Genesis 12:3). And precisely as evangelical Christians committed to the full teaching of the Scriptures, we know that blessing and loving people (including Jews and the present State of Israel) does not mean withholding criticism when it is warranted. Genuine love and genuine blessing means acting in ways that promote the genuine and long-term well being of our neighbors.
Are my American evangelical brethren coming around? Hallelujah.
I hope through our efforts for peace, God will bless Israelis, Palestinians, and everyone else. Let's just be careful not to define "bless" too narrowly.
Deanna Murshed is director of integrated marketing for Sojourners/Call to Renewal.
When Martin Luther got up in the morning and put water on his face, he would say, "I am baptized!" It was a way of reminding himself that living out his baptism was a key to discipleship ... For us as well as for Martin Luther, the baptismal covenant is to be lived out in daily discipleship. The call to discipleship is a call to be part of a community of faith. When a traveling rabbi in the first century said: "Come, follow me," it was not only an invitation to respond personally but to become a part of the "school of disciples" following that rabbi.
- Dwight Vogel
from By Water and the Spirit
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But as for me, I am filled with power, with the spirit of the Lord, and with justice and might, to declare to Jacob his transgression and to Israel his sin. Hear this, you rulers of the house of Jacob and chiefs of the house of Israel, who abhor justice and pervert all equity, who build Zion with blood and Jerusalem with wrong!
- Micah 3:8-10
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Friday, August 03, 2007
When Saddam Hussein's regime executed someone, it required the victim's family to pay for the bullets used. An appalling practice - but one which, Iraqis in the Jubilee Iraq campaign say, bears all too much resemblance to present-day demands that Iraq's people pay debts Hussein racked up during the Iran-Iraq war, which devastated the country and claimed around a million lives.
Western, Soviet and Arab creditors effectively bankrolled the Iran-Iraq war, and then in 2003 demanded that the Iraqi people take responsibility for the $130 billion debt. Since then, the Iraqi debt has been partially relieved, but only on the condition that the government reduce subsidies in the economically devastated country and pass a controversial oil law which could enable foreign companies to control much of Iraq's oil wealth.
Iraq isn't an isolated case. When rich countries cancel poor countries' debts they usually count this as charity, offset it against their aid budgets, and even require the recipients to implement often-harmful IMF economic conditions. They never consider whether they were wrong to make the loans in the first place.Around the world there are hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of examples, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, where loans poured into the corrupt dictator Mobutu's personal accounts, and the Philippines, where a ridiculous, unusable nuclear power station was built on a geological fault line.
These are examples of the illegitimate or "odious" debt, an idea in international law that is gaining ground. The doctrine of odious debts would force creditors to behave responsibly when they make loans, ensuring there is genuine economic benefit to the recipient countries, and not simply handing out cash and credit to further political objectives or support exporting companies within the lender nation.
Momentum is building on odious debt, with campaigns being run by Jubilee Debt Campaign in the UK, Jubilee USA, CADTM and Eurodad in Europe, and Jubilee South representing people in debtor countries. Recently, Norway wrote off $80 million owed by Ecuador and others for ships exported on credit in the 1970s, admitting that the ships were "a development policy failure" and that therefore the seller "shares part of the responsibility for the resulting debts."
Creditors have tried for many years to ridicule the concept of odious debt as impractical, and handle debt relief on their own unjust terms. Now the tide is changing and 2007 is a critical year to add your voice to the debate - so check out the groups above, write to your representatives and demand that the chains of odious debt be broken, once and for all.
 Justin Alexander is the coordinator of Jubilee Iraq. For more about odious debt and other problems with the current international debt regime, read Christina Cobourn Herman's article in the August issue of Sojourners magazine.
 Film buffs began this week greeting the news that two of our greatest artists had died. Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni lived to be 89 and 94, respectively, and were still making films until a couple of years ago. Their work had exerted such an influence over world cinema for over half a century that it is impossible to imagine film culture without them. Antonioni and Bergman made films about the human interior journey – the travels and travails of the soul. They were sometimes preoccupied with the fear that life had no meaning, and at times seemed desperate to produce cinema because the making of the films themselves were part of their own struggle for enlightenment.
Antonioni explored relationships and their impact on the soul – and he had an ultra-romantic view of women, who often appear as tempting goddesses in his work. His 1975 film The Passenger, starring Jack Nicholson (who pronounced it the greatest adventure he has ever had in filmmaking), is an observation of what happens when a man who seems to have a successful life decides to abandon it all in search of something different.
Bergman was more consciously religious – his most famous film is probably The Seventh Seal, in which a knight of the crusades is pursued by Death; they eventually play chess together in the ultimate existential competition. Bergman had a reputation for being pessimistic, once saying that he hoped not to die on a sunny day – a comment to which his greatest fan, Woody Allen, responded on hearing the news of his passing that he hoped the weather didn’t let him down. I think, however, that the charges leveled against Bergman miss the point – it is difficult to imagine that a person so committed to the investigation of what gives life meaning actually just wants it to be over.
It’s tempting to suggest that the deaths of Bergman and Antonioni represent the end of a certain kind of art film, perhaps the end of an era. We imagine the past producing a different type of movie, a different type of politics, a different type of celebrity and power. We don’t revere our great artists or public figures in the same way today partly because it’s much easier to become famous than it used to be. The bar of quality is set so much lower because we’ve all been told that we can too can be famous. Neither Ingmar Bergman nor Michelangelo Antonioni seemed happy to be publicly known. They just wanted to follow their vocation to make films, and get on with their lives.
There’s a lesson here for those of us who want to make a difference in the world but are striving to balance activism and the spiritual search. One of Antonioni’s last films, Beyond the Clouds, was a European pilgrimage made by a filmmaker played by John Malkovich, delicately shot to a soundtrack by U2 and Van Morrison, among others. It’s clear in this film that Antonioni had come to believe, and I imagine Bergman would agree, that for him the search for meaning in life, and the process of making a truthful work of art, amounted to the same thing. In this regard, Antonioni and Bergman’s legacy may seem obvious, but it’s a deeply important lesson: It is possible to do something great at the same time as not knowing all the answers.
Gareth Higgins is a Christian writer and activist in Belfast, Northern Ireland. For the past decade he was the founder/director of the zero28 project, an initiative addressing questions of peace, justice, and culture. He is the author of the insightful How Movies Helped Save My Soul and blogs at www.godisnotelsewhere.blogspot.com
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These are the things that you shall do: Speak the truth to one another, render in your gates judgments that are true and make for peace, do not devise evil in your hearts against one another, and love no false oath; for all these are things that I hate, says the Lord.
- Zechariah 8:16-17
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The function of prayer is not to establish a routine; it is to establish a relationship with God who is in relationship with us always.... The function of prayer is to bring us into touch with ourselves, as well. To the ancients, "tears of compunction" were the sign of a soul that knew its limits, faced its sins, accepted its needs, and lived in hope.
- Joan Chittister
Quoted in Essential Monastic Wisdom, by Hugh Feiss
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Thursday, August 02, 2007
Our voices are being heard! Yesterday the House passed a bill to enlarge the State Children’s Health Insurance Program by $47 billion over five years to extend coverage to an additional 5 million children.
The Senate will be debating a similar measure to expand the highly successful program by $35 billion over five years, adding 3 million children. Despite President Bush’s ideologically-driven and mean-spirited threat of a veto, we are approaching a veto-proof majority of 70 votes in the Senate. In order to secure 70 votes we need a continuous barrage of phone calls from faith advocates from across the country adding their voices to a growing chorus that calls for a healthier future for our nation’s most vulnerable and disadvantaged children.
Call your senators today at (877) 367-5235, a free number set up by our friends at PICO National Network. Tell them that people of faith are counting on them to stand up for the millions of uninsured children in the U.S.
Adam Taylor is director of campaigns and organizing for Sojourners/Call to Renewal.
Mitsuyoshi Toge, born in Hiroshima in 1917, was a Catholic and a poet. He was in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped on the city on August 6, 1945, when he was 24 years old. Toge died at the age of thirty-six. His first hand experience of the bomb, his passion for peace, and his realistic insight into the event made him a leading poet in Hiroshima. This poem is from Hiroshima-Nagasaki: A Pictorial Record of the Atomic Destruction (1978).
How could I ever forget that flash of light!
In a moment, thirty thousand people ceased to be,
The cries of fifty thousand killed
At the bottom of crushing darkness;
Through yellow smoke whirling into light,
Buildings split, bridges collapsed,
Crowded trams burnt as they rolled about
Hiroshima , all full of boundless heaps of embers.
Soon after, skin dangling like rags;
With hands on breasts;
Treading upon the broken brains;
Wearing shreds of burn cloth round their loins;
There came numberless lines of the naked,
all crying.
Bodies on the parade ground, scattered like
jumbled stone images of Jizo;
Crowds in piles by the river banks,
loaded upon rafts fastened to the shore,
Turned by and by into corpses
under the scorching sun;
in the midst of flame
tossing against the evening sky,
Round about the street where mother and
brother were trapped alive under the fallen house
The fire-flood shifted on.
On beds of filth along the Armory floor,
Heaps, and God knew who they were …
Heaps of schoolgirls lying in refuse
Pot-bellied, one-eyed, with half their skin peeled
off bald.
The sun shone, and nothing moved
But the buzzing flies in the metal basins
Reeking with stagnant ordure.
How can I forget that stillness
Prevailing over the city of three hundred thousands?
Amidst that calm,
How can I forget the entreaties
Of departed wife and child
Through their orbs of eyes,
Cutting through our minds and souls?
For Hiroshima-Nagasaki memorial service resources, please go to Faithful Security (National Religious Partnership on the Nuclear Weapons Danger).
 Last Friday the House passed a 741-page Farm Bill, largely keeping intact the existing system of subsidies for commercial farmers while adding billions of dollars for conservation, nutrition, and new agricultural sectors. While Democratic leaders will call this a success, the bill demonstrates the brokenness of our politics in which the common good is so often sacrificed to political expediency and powerful corporate interests.
The Farm Bill is a massive, complicated piece of legislation that addresses everything from nutrition programs to commodity subsidies to rural development. It symbolizes the crisis facing American farmers, who are captive to a rhetoric-filled battle over how best to preserve their livelihoods. However, rather than protecting the livelihoods of small farmers, this current bill goes to even greater lengths to provide a form of corporate welfare to large commercial farms and agribusinesses.
Late Friday morning, House lawmakers defeated an amendment sponsored by Representatives Kind (D-Wis.) and Flake (R-Ariz.), which provided desperately needed reforms to this deeply flawed bill. The Kind/Flake Amendment would have made crucial reforms by denying subsidies to large commercial farmers with an average adjusted gross income greater than $500,000 and limiting annual subsidies to $250,000 per person. The savings would be redirected to fight hunger, protect the environment, and help poor farmers.
Instead, billions of dollars of price support subsidies will go to commodities such as wheat, soybeans, and cotton, resulting in one of the greatest heresies in the religion of free trade, let alone fair trade. These subsidies lead to overproduction and distort prices on the international market, making it almost impossible for poor farmers across the developing world to compete and earn their way out of poverty. Ironically, the interests of the small cotton farmer in South Carolina are much more aligned with poor farmers in Africa than with the agribusinesses and large commercial farms that keep winning the lion's share of Farm Bill benefits.
In order to win sufficient support, the Agriculture Committee loaded the bill with billions of dollars for nutrition programs, conservation, black farmers, and Florida and California fruit and vegetable industries. However, Democratic leaders were unwilling to defy corporate pressure and overhaul the corporate welfare of commodity subsidies.
The Farm Bill exposes a clash between the pragmatic politics of compromise and incremental change with the prophetic politics of the common good. Congress was caught between advocates for reform, including a broad faith-based coalition, and the heavily financed commercial farms whose power in 20 congressional districts dominates the debate. This outcome in the House illustrates the brokenness of a political process in which corporate interests too often drown out the voices of faith-based and civic advocates. It also demonstrates the urgent need to reclaim our democracy on behalf of the common good.
Prophets such as Amos, Isaiah, and Ezekiel didn’t mince words or withhold prophetic judgment when leaders advanced the interests of the strong over the welfare of the weak. With our pastoral side we can sympathize with elected officials who are trying to do the right thing—balancing the interests of multiple stakeholders while facing real and perceived constraints around what’s politically possible. However, our prophetic vocation calls us to hold elected officials to a higher standard and change the very parameters within which these policy decisions are made, one that privileges and protects the interests of the weak and dispossessed—in this case, small farmers at home and abroad.
Fortunately, the debate around the Farm Bill now moves to the Senate, giving us another chance to fight for the common good. But senators must believe there’s a real political cost to preserving the status quo, and the prophetic voice must overpower the voice of lobbyists representing commercial farms and agribusinesses.
Adam Taylor is director of campaigns and organizing for Sojourners/Call to Renewal.
The contemplative life should liberate and purify the imagination which passively absorbs all kinds of things without our realizing it; liberate and purify it from the influence of so much violence done by the bombardment of social images.... The training of the imagination implies a certain freedom and this freedom implies a certain capacity to choose and to find its own appropriate nourishment. Thus in the interior life there should be moments of relaxation, freedom, and "browsing." Perhaps the best way to do this is in the midst of nature, but also in literature. Perhaps also a certain amount of art is necessary and music.
- Thomas Merton
Quoted in Essential Monastic Wisdom, by Hugh Feiss
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Wednesday, August 01, 2007
 Highly suspicious. That’s what I was.
I was invited to a meeting whose participants were considering proposing something along the line of “Green Gospels.” After all, I am an evangelical, and being involved in anything that has to do with treating the scriptures with a particular perspective carries with it the danger of perverting the original intent.
Pleasantly surprised. That’s what I was when I attended the meeting with Christians of impeccable spiritual and intellectual character. Under the able leadership – and delightful English wit and accent – of Martin Palmer (secretary general – that title always sounds like an oxymoron to me – of the Alliance of Religions and Conservation), the panel outlined the task. We were to provide a commentary that would feature the centuries-old writings of Christian teachers, leaders, and poets as they thought through the relationship of God and creation. We also could uncover the context within which Jesus taught and the gospel writers wrote.
The emphasis on environmental appreciation is a recent one, you say? Au contraire! We who care about learning what scriptures have to do with nature are part of a long line of theological and intellectual contemplatives.
Just last week someone stopped me in church and said, “Pastor, our small group wanted to do a study on what the Bible says about protecting the environment. But I looked under my topical index and could only find one passage!” Ah, there’s the rub. There is so much historic context (much of it Jewish writings) that underlie the scriptures we have that most of us are unaware of how often the created world is referenced in the Bible.
And the problem is not just a denotative, analytic ignorance. It is a lack of passionate engagement. The gospels are not just concerned with creation as a background fact; creation is a source of inspiration. Therefore, who better to add to the commentaries than poets and mystics rather than just technical biblical scholars?
So we will see this project through. Maybe Christians won't be the only ones inspired by learning more about the scriptures we have. Maybe those more interested in reading about the environment will be inspired to know its Creator.
Rev. Joel C. Hunter is the senior pastor of Northland church in Longwood, Florida. The "Green Gospels" gathering was hosted by Conservation International.
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