The following is an interview with Abigail Disney, producer of the documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which recently won the award for best documentary feature at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival.

What sparked your interest in wanting to make a documentary about Liberia?

The fact that the newly elected president of Liberia was a woman was notable, especially since the continent had had so few women in leadership, and that women had been so peculiarly and sadistically targeted during their war. I knew there had to be a backstory. She hadn't just arisen spontaneously.

How were Christian and Muslim women able to come together for a common cause?

They were all so completely fed up with war that they were willing to overcome their reluctance. There was some mistrust at first, but the longer they spent time together in prayer and fasting the more they came to understand and empathize with each other. Friendships were forged on the field that will exist for a long time—it is quite possible that the nature of the relationship between Christian and Muslim was forever changed in Liberia.

Elaborate on the role that religious leaders played in helping to bring about peace to Liberia.

While it may seem unlikely, the fact is that the warlords and even Charles Taylor were quite religious. Religious leaders therefore were among the only people who could influence them, even in the chaotic atmosphere of war. But women were dissatisfied with the limited way in which the religious leaders wielded that influence. So the campaign really began with the women bringing pressure on the leaders via their religious confidants. This pressure ultimately was one of the reasons Taylor and the rebels decided to come to peace talks in Ghana.

How did prayer inform these women's social justice actions?

All of the women in this film were deeply, deeply religious and believed with all of their hearts and minds in the power of prayer to influence events and people. This was a critical aspect of their plan, and a big part of what made them so tenacious and persistent in their protests. But more than this, prayer was a source of personal strength to each of the women. They gained strength through their individual practice of prayer, but also the communal practice of prayer was an extraordinary glue that held the group together in spite of all kinds of pressures to pull them apart.

Explain the significance of the Lutheran church that you filmed for this documentary.

St. Peter's Lutheran Church was the scene of the first organizing meeting for the Christian Women's Peace Initiative, early in the film. In 1989, however, that church was also the scene of one of the most horrific massacres in the pre-war period. Samuel Doe's army, in anticipation of Charles Taylor's assault on Monrovia, went into the church and slaughtered more than 600 members of a rival ethnic group in a single night. The candlelight vigil in the middle of the film takes place on the church compound on top of the mass grave that contains most of those bodies. The church was and still is the church that Leymah Gbowee attended, and a source of great strength and counsel to her. It was also through the Lutheran Church that WIPNET, her organization, got offices and also got its first international donations.

Why is Leymah Gbowee the focal character of your story?

Everyone acknowledged her to be the leader and the face of the peace movement. But more than this, Leymah was so clearly charismatic, articulate, and genuine that I knew that a film with her at the center could not fail to be compelling. She is one of the most gifted people I have ever met.

What can we do to enable this change to continue without imposing our Western values on this culture?

I think you are precisely right here. Why do we insist on imposing "solutions" that are always at best temporary, and at worst impractical and even disrespectful to indigenous cultures? I think at heart we are sometimes deeply mistrustful of the competence of indigenous cultures to find their own answers. And when we impose programs, very often we do so in such a manner as to set them hunting for external money that is scarce, inadequate, and hard to get. The answer is to do some better listening. As people coming in from the global North we need to arrive in places with a little less confidence in our "answers" and a little more confidence in the people we are there to serve. People aren't poor because they don't have values, don't have smarts, don't have gumption—people are poor because they don't have money. We need to recognize that most of the "resources" needed to fight the world's problems are also the victims of those problems.

What's been the response when you've shown this film?

The response has been overwhelmingly emotional, connected, and positive. And this is not just from people in the U.S. We have already shown the film in many countries to women's groups and the response has been so moving. Women in Iraq wept when they saw it, and immediately asked how many copies they could make so as to make sure that it is shown in people's homes all over the country. Women from Sudan e-mailed us to say that they felt sure that lives were being changed by the dialogues the film had sparked. In Tblisi, Georgia, women sat down immediately after the film and wrote up a Peace Agenda that is now making its way around the country for women's signatures. What is remarkable is the way that so many women were already poised to work together for peace—all the film does is remind them how powerful they are when they work together. It is a spark of faith in dark times.

What are the future plans for this documentary and how can interested churches and nonprofits arrange for showings of this film?

We hope to work with churches and other religious organizations along with youth groups, women's organizations, and other interested partners to get the film seen far and wide. At the moment we are still forming distribution plans, but churches that are interested in seeing the film should go to our Web site and give us their information so that when we are set up for distribution we can get in touch with them.

Becky Garrison will be featured in the upcoming documentary The Ordinary Radicals, directed by Jamie Moffett, co-founder of The Simple Way.

"Arise, then, women of this day!" goes the Mother's Day proclamation. But this is not your wake-up call to french toast and flowers. Instead, this phrase was the rallying cry for the first "Mother's Day of Peace" back in 1870—back before the day became laden with Hallmark and guilt. Julia Ward Howe, the creator of Mother's Day, pleaded with women to speak out against war, not only for the sake of their sons, but for the sons of mothers across the globe. Today, mothers must not only seek peace for their sons, but for themselves.

Studies are showing that warfare brings significantly increased incidents of rape and domestic violence. Soldiers are taught violence in war and that violence is then turned upon innocent civilians in the country of conflict, fellow soldiers during wartime, or it returns home in the form of spousal and child abuse. Think the war is taking place thousands of miles away? Think again. Wartime violence is happening in living rooms across the country.

Americans may remember the four women murdered by their military husbands within a six-week period at Fort Bragg army base in North Carolina near the beginning of the Afghanistan invasion. While this caught the media's eye for a brief time, the violence at the hands of military personnel continues to rise.

A 2003 study financed by the Department of Defense found that nearly one-third of female veterans who sought health care through the Veterans Affairs reported that during their military service they experienced rape or attempted rape. Another set of figures from 2004 and 2005 showed a 40% increase in the number of sexual assaults reported by female soldiers—which may mean women feel safer in reporting the attacks or that the numbers are on the rise.

60 Minutes did research in the 1990s that found that domestic violence was five times more common in U.S. military families than civilian families. And that was during "peace time." During war, the numbers become far more gruesome. During the Rwandan genocide, UNICEF estimates 150,000 women were raped in the 100 days of conflict. Today, the remnants of that violence have ventured into the Congo and 27,000 sexual assaults were reported there by the United Nations -- in just one year, in just one province.

So, arise, then, women of this day! Forget the french toast. Forget the flowers. Arise and speak out against war. Spend this Mother's Day writing letters, calling congress, or finding another way to help stop the war. It is just a few hours of your life. And you might just end up saving one.

Nicole Sotelo is author of Women Healing from Abuse: Meditations for Finding Peace (Paulist Press) and is a contributor to Weep Not for Your Children: Essays on Religion and Violence, edited by Rosemary Radford Ruether and Lisa Isherwood (forthcoming from Equinox Publishing). She holds a master's degree from Harvard Divinity School and does workshops and retreats for Christian women healing from abuse. To learn more, visit www.womenhealing.com

Today is the commemoration of Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Memorial Day)in the modern Jewish calendar. The date was originally enacted by the Israeli Parliament in 1953, but has now become a commemoration by the international Jewish community and friends.

It is a day to commemorate the more than 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis from 1938-1945. It is a day to reflect on the fact that when the rest of the world knew what was happening, too little was done to stop it. And, it is a day to reflect on contemporary genocides, such as Darfur, and redouble our efforts to ensure that "never again" becomes a reality.

Several years ago, the Conservative Jewish movement produced the first formal liturgy for the day, titled " Megillat Hashoah"--"The Scroll of the Holocaust." The scroll is described as

… built largely around first-person testimonies. After an opening chapter that gives a searing overview of the victims' suffering, it offers composite sketches of a Christian journalist observing life in the Warsaw Ghetto, a Jewish woman in a work camp, and a Jewish youth who was forced to pull out the teeth from his brother's corpse and shove other dead bodies into ovens. A fifth chapter consists of a eulogy for those who died in the Holocaust; the final chapter recounts the efforts to rebuild Jewish life after the war ended.

It is also intended to address some of the theological questions raised by the Holocaust.

The overriding theological message of the Megillah [Scroll] is that human beings have a right to question the divine, but they cannot expect answers --and that even without answers, the Jewish faith in God endures. The Megillah ends with the exhortation: "Do not mourn too much, but do not sink into the forgetfulness of apathy. Do not allow days of darkness to return; weep, but wipe the tears away. Do not absolve and do not exonerate, do not attempt to understand. Learn to live without an answer. Through our blood, live!"

Today, we remember, we mourn, we reflect, but we will not "sink into the forgetfulness of apathy." We renew the vow, Never Again.

Duane Shank is the senior policy adviser at Sojourners.

A couple of days before Christmas 1993, I was sitting in my parent's living room watching a football game when I got a call from my uncle in Baghdad. After a very quick hello, he jumped right into asking if my father was home. I told him no, so he quickly gave me a flight number for a plane that was coming into Dallas the next day. After twice telling me that it was very important to be at the airport tomorrow, he told me to give his love to my mom and hung up. The next day we went to the airport and met my cousin and his wife, who had just spent the last several weeks sneaking out of a war-decimated Iraq. When Saddam Hussein ruled Baghdad, his government kept very close tabs on the people. In order to make an overseas phone call, one had to go to what used to be a post office and wait in line. Why? Because the government had agents who listened to all outgoing phone calls. Whenever my family would call, all hell could be going on around them, but they said nothing: "Oh, everything is just fine! Nothing to report here. How are you?" So intimidated by this reality, my father would never say a thing about Iraq or family during phone calls that took place entirely in the United States.

When I created my blog I attached a site meter, which basically tells me how many people visit the site. One of the features of the site meter is that it will tell you from which city, state, and country a visit originated. It does not tell you the IP address of the computer, just the location and company of the server the visit was routed from.

For example, whenever my mom checks out the site, it registers: Verizon.com: Dallas, Texas.

Since we moved, whenever my wife or I log in, the site meter registers: Cox.net: Fayetteville, Arkansas.

This past fall, at the start of the Muslim fast of Ramadan, I sent a very small e-mail to my father's side of the family all over the world. In three sentences I told them that the move had gone well, gave them our new address, and signed the message with "Happy Ramadan."

The next day I noticed a change in the site meter. Whenever I logged into the blog, it no longer came up as being routed through Fayetteville, Arkansas. Instead, our Internet traffic was being routed through: Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana.

Huh?

So I ran a little experiment. I took my laptop up to the chapel office where I work and logged in using the router there. It registered Fayetteville, Arkansas. I went back home and logged in using our neighbor's router. Again, it registered Fayetteville, Arkansas. But sure enough, when I logged back in using our router, it let us know that we were being routed through Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana. I tried the same experiment with my wife's laptop. Same result.

I called our provider. The first guy I talked to laughed uncomfortably and said, "I don't know why it is routing through an Air Force base, but I have a pretty good idea." He sent me up the chain of command, but they could not tell me why everyone in my apartment complex was being routed through their local server, but I was being routed through an Air Force base.

A week later my wife and I got tickets to the Kentucky-Arkansas football game. The singing of the National Anthem was punctuated with a flyover by an Air Force B-2 Stealth Bomber. As the black sliver approached from the north, the crowd began to whip itself into a frenzy. But over the cheers I heard the public address announcer state that this very bomber was part of the initial invasion of Baghdad during Operation "Iraqi Freedom."

The flyover was impressive. I have never seen a stealth bomber in person. Those suckers are big, loud, and very intimidating. And as the plane passed right above us, with its roaring engines completely drowning out the roaring crowd, I couldn't help but think of the irony:

This very Air Force plane dropped bombs over Baghdad to "liberate" the Iraqis from an oppressive government that monitored their own citizens' communications. And now that very same Air Force seems to be monitoring mine.

Rev. Omar Hamid Al-Rikabi is a campus minister at the University of Arkansas Wesley Foundation. He is the son of a Muslim father from Iraq and a Christian mother from Texas. He shares his stories on his blog at www.firstbornstories.com

The Philippines Armed Forces have been implicated in most of the recent human rights abuses that have occurred in that country (almost 800 unlawful executions since 2001). Journalists, activists, pastors, and lawyers have been kidnapped, tortured, or even gunned down in public for daring to advocate on behalf of the economic, social, and civil rights of the poor.

But since 9/11, the U.S. government has given the Philippines army $245.6 million for "foreign military financing," "anti-terrorism," and "international military education and training." This is more military funding than any other country in Asia receives. As American taxpayers, we should be outraged that the U.S., through massive military funding, extends carte blanche to a government that cannot control and discipline its own national army –an army that carries out personal vendettas and hit lists en masse. As members of the body of Christ, we should lament when our brothers and sisters are cut down in the mission field – especially when we helped to bankroll it.

In my previous blog post about the disappearance of Jonas Burgos, I mentioned that the Farmers' Alliance he volunteered for had been labeled an "enemy of the state" organization. The military did this to justify the half-hearted investigation conducted on his disappearance. This and other incidents have alarmed the United Nations Human Rights Council, especially since the Philippines has (strangely) just been granted a seat on the committee. In keeping with the strictures of committee membership, the Philippines is set to undergo a kind of human rights audit called the "Universal Periodic Review" on April 11, 2008.

After Ecumenical Advocacy Days, Edita Tronqued Burgos planned to tour the U.S. to speak to Filipino-American communities about the things going on back home. In her increasingly hopeless search for her activist son, she has stumbled upon a new mission: to put American taxpayers and citizens in contact with their U.S. congresspersons about the issue. The work of Edita and others like her have made the extrajudicial killings a more high-profile issue, and there were even hearings in the U.S. Congress about it last year. Still, positive change seems elusive in 2008 as military aid to the Philippines increased by "a few million," with $2 million earmarked for human rights issues. Seems to me like we're trusting foxes to guard the henhouse here.

To read more about American military funding to the Philippines, click here. 

Anna Almendrala is the marketing and circulation assistant for Sojourners.

Imagine you're eating at a shopping mall food court when you suddenly hear shouting and see a group of uniformed men (neither police nor army) drag a young man from his lunch a few tables away. "I'm just an activist! I haven't done anything wrong!" he shouts as they cuff him and take him to a waiting van outside. What would Christ-followers do? What would you do?

This is the scene that plays in Edita Tronqued Burgos' mind over and over again as she worries about her missing son. On April 28, 2007, Jonas Burgos was eating lunch in a crowded mall in downtown Manila, Philippines, when four to eight unidentified men abducted him. During her presentation at Ecumenical Advocacy Days a few weeks ago, she mused that if the people in that crowded mall had done "the Christian thing," maybe her son wouldn't have disappeared into the ether that weekend.

After one or two strange, groggy phone conversations with his family, all trace of Jonas Burgos disappeared for good. Now Jonas' family tries to act on every lead that comes in, and investigate every rumor and sighting. Edita once traveled hours after receiving word of a bound, heavily tortured corpse found in the countryside. It wasn't him.

Why was Jonas abducted and disappeared like this? What had Jonas done to merit such brutality? The son of activist-journalists persecuted under the Marcos dictatorship, Jonas had gotten a degree in agriculture, then moved to the provinces to teach organic farming techniques to the peasants. Soon after he arrived, he became distraught at how impoverished the farmers were, in part because of the Philippines' economic policies (aimed at hyper-development through corporate foreign investment). He became a volunteer for a farmers' rights organization called Alyansa ng Magsasaka sa Bulacan (Alliance of Farmers at Bulacan). But in the Philippines, advocacy and activism on behalf of poor farmers can draw the ire of the military, which branded Alyansa an "enemy of the state."

Jonas' disappearance is just one of hundreds of cases in which activists, journalists, and artists in the Philippines are kidnapped, tortured, or murdered by unidentified men in uniform. Their deaths are often unrecorded or unverifiable for lack of a body, and the police seldom investigate. This is called an "extrajudicial killing," an execution committed beyond the boundaries of the legal process.

In Jonas' case, as it became clearer that the military was about to be implicated in his disappearance, the Philippines Armed Forces launched a smear campaign claiming that Jonas was a member of the Communist Army of the People of the Philippines. They asserted that Jonas had been caught embezzling money, and the "communist terrorists" killed him to punish him for stealing. This statement released by the national military was a shocking, hurtful lie, as was obvious to anyone who even remotely knew Burgos.

Edita Tronqued Burgos ended her presentation by emphasizing that no one should be beyond the protection of the law. Even if he had been guilty of a crime (rather than of economic advocacy), that would not justify kidnapping and disappearance. In typically outspoken Filipino style, Edita pleaded, "even a child molester caught in the act gets his day in court to defend himself. Why shouldn't my son deserve the same right?"

Anna Almendrala is the marketing and circulation assistant for Sojourners.

Friday morning I posted about Bush legalizing waterboarding. That evening, Bill Moyers' Journal had a compelling and disturbing segment on the use of torture by U.S. forces. It was about the Oscar-nominated documentary film, Taxi to the Dark Side, directed by Alex Gibney who made Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. The Moyers segment includes excerpts from the film and testimony of prisoners falsely accused and tortured in Afghanistan and Iraq. Watch it.

Key quote:

Despite Rumsfeld's and Cheney's and President Bush's allegations that these guys are the worst of the worst, that they were all captured on the battlefield, recent studies of the whole compendium of the government's documents show that only five percent of these people were picked up by the United States. Only eight percent of them are accused of being members of the Al Qaeda. Over 90 percent of them were picked up by Northern Alliance or Pakistani forces in exchange for bounties.

Ryan Rodrick Beiler is the Web editor for Sojourners.

Uncertainty about the consistency of conservative convictions was part of what killed the campaign of Mitt "Double Guantanamo" Romney, and it was coverage of the "suspension" of his campaign that nearly drowned out another important story yesterday.

Contrast that criticism of Romney with a familiar defense of George W. Bush: "Well, you might disagree with him, but at least you know where he stands." Though this faint praise could be applied to any number of universally condemned leaders throughout history, I keep running into people that sincerely mean it as a compliment, as if sincerity made up for bad choices--something I would think most conservatives would disagree with.

Well, if you want to torture this logic any further, know that waterboarding--or as the Spanish Inquisition called it, water torture--is legal according to the Bush White House. Under certain circumstances. Such as, whenever the president says so. The L.A. Times reports:

... in remarks that were greeted with disbelief by some members of Congress and human rights groups, White House spokesman Tony Fratto said that waterboarding was a legal technique that could be employed again "under certain circumstances."

Fratto said the nation's top intelligence officials "didn't rule anything out" during congressional testimony Tuesday on CIA interrogation methods, and he indicated that Bush might consider reauthorizing waterboarding or other harsh techniques in extreme cases ....

I've always assumed that our clandestine forces used torture either directly or by proxy--because of history that's well documented in places like Guatemala, Colombia, Vietnam, and elsewhere. What I don't usually expect is official admissions of torture. Perhaps a wink and a nod as plausible deniability is established. Perhaps official consternation when the underlings get caught operating outside of conventions that high officials themselves have called "quaint." What's especially troubling is that history demonstrates that with official sanction or not, whatever these forces are actually doing is often several degrees worse than official admissions--and viciously specific in contrast to the vague official pronouncements about "harsh techniques." So if they're legalizing actual torture techniques now, I'm even more concerned about what's actually going on in the cells and chambers that we're never meant to know about. For national security. Because our enemies hate our freedom.

And if you think it's only "bad people" who get tortured, listen to the testimony of survivors.

Ryan Rodrick Beiler is Web editor for Sojourners.

Yesterday I had the chance to attend a compelling panel hosted by the Center for American Progress Action Fund and Penn Press titled "Human Rights and the 2008 Presidential Campaign." The panel discussed a report released by CAPAF about the prominence (or lack thereof) of human rights issues in the 2008 presidential campaign.

The report's findings show that of the 2,253 questions that were asked in the Republican and Democratic debates through Dec. 27, only 5.1% of the questions posed to candidates dealt with human rights issues (CAPAF called their definition of what constituted a human rights issue "a generous interpretation" -- it included topics such as Darfur, torture, genocide in Iraq, and promoting democracy). This was in contrast to the 8.6% of questions about immigration, 10.7% on moral issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage, and 18.1% about general personal politics and party values.

In the report, William F. Schulz, a CAPAF senior fellow and former executive director of Amnesty International, offers a possible explanation for this marginal attention:

Human rights issues have rarely, if ever, been a principal focus of political campaigns for President or even for Congress. This reflects the fact that human rights are often perceived to be matters involving people far away whose needs and interests have very little relevance to our own.

However, he argues that human rights issues, such as the genocide in Darfur and military torture, do in fact have an impact on us here in the U.S. and should be a more prominent focus in the current presidential campaign:

Many U.S. actions have colored the attitude of the international community toward America and thereby implicated U.S. national interests quite directly: the "unsigning" of the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court; the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; the denial of habeas corpus to certain prisoners; revelations regarding U.S. use of torture. Moreover, the continuing saga of unstaunched death and destruction in Darfur, Sudan, has cast a pall over the reputation of every country that has failed to stop it.

One might assume that human rights would have been more central to the 2008 presidential campaigns to this point than in years past given the relationship of human rights controversies to U.S. policy and interests—the fact, for example, that how the world regards this country can have a very direct impact on America's national security, and the need, in light of Iraq and Darfur, to clarify when in the future the U.S. should commit its blood and treasure to countering regimes that abuse human rights.

Here at Sojourners, human rights issues, such as the genocide in Darfur and human trafficking, are incredibly important. They are not issues that "have little relevance to our own;" instead, they are central to our mission as people of faith to follow Christ's example of fighting for and working with the poor, rejected, and forgotten.

Despite the disheartening findings of the CAPAF report, I think change IS happening. This shift in values, the desire to focus on ending and eradicating these huge moral issues of our time, is happening. As a member of the progressive faith community, I hear a lot of discourse about this movement that we see happening all across the country, this "great awakening," this spiritual revival that is sparking a social movement.

But you don't have to take our word for it. All of the panelists at the CAPAF event yesterday affirmed that change is happening, and that a lot of progress has been made just in recent months to make these human rights issues compelling national values. In fact, two of the panelists, Gary Haugen, president of the International Justice Mission, and Gayle Smith, co-founder of the ENOUGH! Project, specifically singled out people of faith as being leaders in bringing about this change.

"We're seeing some shift in terms of what values are all about, from values as a matter of personal choice to values as an expression of solidarity and global citizenship," Smith said. "There is the beginning in the faith community of a translation of values from, again, within the four walls of our homes to the far reaches of the globe." Smith cited the increase in attention to the genocide in Darfur as one tangible example.

Haugen agreed, saying that the religious community has contributed to "a broadening of issues to include human rights and international human rights" in the national conversation. He also talked directly about the impact faith had in the abolition and civil rights movements, and how the spiritual foundation of those movements provided a "very profound motivator for sustaining a prolonged, successful fight."

"Religion can be a conviction to force us to act on hard, painful issues. It is a very powerful, sustaining, motivating force," Haugen continued. A force that is having a clear effect again now, he said.

It's true that issues such as genocide and global poverty are big and seemingly insurmountable. But, as the event reaffirmed for me yesterday, ultimately we have the conviction and force to win this fight.

(You can watch the full panel discussion here).

Kaitlin Hasseler is the media assistant for Sojourners.

The eighth and final entry in a series of posts by Bob Massey, a Los Angeles screenwriter who traveled to India with a team from Ecclesia Hollywood. + Click here to read previous posts

Our final stop is Mussoorie, an hour's harrowing taxi ride up into the Himalayan foothills from Dehradun. And it's dazzling. The town spreads across the hilltops, often seeming to float above the clouds. A short walk over the hillcrest reveals a 180-degree view of snowcapped Himalayas. Beyond them lies Tibet.

Mussoorie is the opposite of Mumbai: serene, beautiful, quiet. Though we all loved our time in the cities this comes as a relief. There's a well-regarded Hindi-language school here, so the town hosts a lot of expats. (It also hosts a lot of monkeys, who tend to swoop down and steal the expats' food off the café table.) Some of them (the expats) attend the tiny church run by our friends, a couple we'll call Fred and Ethel.

Fred grew up in one of the villages that lie in the shadows of those aforementioned Himalayas. No power, running water, or driveable roads, if I remember correctly. His family's faith, while technically Hindu, might be more accurately described as animist. They worshipped household gods. They kept homemade idols.

As a teenager Fred was recruited by some missionaries to assist at a school and it was there that he came to believe in Jesus. (They thought he was already a believer. Oh, that wacky cross-cultural communication thing….) Though he'd never finished the equivalent of high school, Fred went on to get three master's degrees. Along the way he met and married Ethel, also the recipient of advanced degrees. And they felt called to Mussoorie.

If you believe in Jesus and the stuff he said, then the earthly pursuit of justice emerges from Jesus himself. It's Jesus who demands justice and it's Jesus who fulfills it, ultimately. That's a little thing they call the gospel, and what Fred and Ethel do is train guys to walk out to those inaccessible villages in the mountains and tell people about this gospel thing in their own language and cultural context. It's a job that Western folks couldn't do correctly, nor even folks from the cities in India. The villages are too isolated and their language too idiosyncratic for non-natives.

The young guys they train come from those villages and they walk for days to get back to them. Much like Paul, Timothy, and Barnabas. It's pretty grueling work. But these dudes are just filled with energy and joy, and if you ask them to dance (as we did on our final day), they throw down, Garhwali-style.

And at Fred and Ethel's church the songs are mostly in Hindi. It's a real homegrown service but the non-natives in the room are mostly trying to learn Hindi anyway, so it works out.

We had the privilege of driving out to a couple of nearby villages with Fred, Ethel, their three kids, and a few of the guys they train. Imagine unpaved one-lane roads without rails, winding above sheer drops.

Folks out in those mountains and valleys are mostly shepherds and farmers. The farming happens on terraces that stair-step the mountainsides. At one point we climbed to a peak about 12,000 feet up, which is pretty exhausting for lowlanders used to the thick air around sea level. We met a kid up there who was tending some cattle. And when he wasn't herding, he was doing his studies in a little booklet. But the place we met him had a 360-degree view of Himalayan peaks, which would be a little distracting to me if I were trying to study.

Up top there was a little shrine to some unnamed god. People had climbed up and left coins, combs, scraps of cloth and such. Halfway up we'd met a family known to Fred who had some adorable little pigtailed girls. We noticed a number of burn scars on the girls, which Fred had to explain to us. Evidently the local superstition holds that it's bad spirits that make babies cry, so you drive out the spirits with a hot brand. Some of Fred's trainees showed us their own childhood scars. One had been branded as late as age 12. The consensus was that there's pretty much no way to feel culturally open-minded about that. Yeah, don't burn kids: that's a superior idea.

But we gave the kids lollipops while Fred checked in with the parents, all of us aware that it's a long process, this spreading of good news. Note: lollipops help.

Bob's Top 5 Answers to Questions About India:

5. Yes, and don't hit the cow or you'll go to jail.

4. Every day. But Indians don't think of it as "Indian food."

3. Yogurt. Immodium.

2. Like when a ballgame lets out and everyone's fighting to leave the parking lot. But with colorful saris everywhere.

1. Once you get used to the dance numbers, they're probably no sillier than your average Bruce Willis movie.

Video production by Kaitlin Hasseler, Sojourners media assistant, Anna Almendrala, Sojourners Marketing/Circulation assistant and Matt Hildreth, Sojourners web assistant.

While volunteering in a legal clinic in my sophomore year of college, interviewing people applying for political asylum in the U.S., I heard a lot of people describe how they had had to leave everything behind and flee into the jungle, carrying children on their backs.

I interviewed lots of people and read the personal statements of cases already filed, and all the stories were sickeningly similar. The basic skeleton of their stories was this: one day, a group of "communist/insurgent/fill in the blank" guerillas passed by my village begging for food. A few weeks later, a military group from the national army stormed the community, accusing us of being part of a rebellion. After enduring the military's accusations/threats/rapes/beatings/murder attempts, we survivors melted into the surrounding mountains and jungles. We walked for weeks, living like fugitives in foreign countries until we finally collapsed within the border of California.

It was always the same story, the same timeline of events. The only deviations from the testimony were in those grisly details: "all the men in my village were shot in the head," or "all teens were forced to join the army," or "all the ladies and girls were violated." Once I interviewed a client who remembers soldiers kicking his pregnant mother in the abdomen. She gave birth in the jungle, three days later, to a stillborn baby. Another time a child returned from farming to find his entire community shot dead in the center of the village. Once, a man came into our clinic seeking help on his asylum case, and when he told about how he had helped the army gather up all the leaders of the village into a church and set it on fire, we turned him away.

It wasn't even until a few weeks into the volunteer work that someone told me about the United States' involvement in the massacres. The military dictators and officers that created the structures and protocols for combating "communism" in the 1980s and 1990s attended military training programs in the United States. Their armies are funded generously by our government. Some were politically supported in the world arena when they staged their coup d'etats against democratically elected administrations. I know that if the people of the United States heard even a few of the stories from people that had miraculously survived village massacres, they would be in Fort Benning every year en masse, protesting the School of Americas with us.

Anna Almendrala is the marketing and circulation assistant for Sojourners.

In the spirit of tradition and solidarity, the Sojourners interns once again traveled to the annual SOA Watch protest and vigil this past weekend to close the U.S. Army School of the Americas. Officially named the "Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation", the school provides combat training for Latin American soldiers at Ft. Benning in Columbus, Georgia. Graduates of the school have committed atrocities against their own people in countries like El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, and others. This year, more than 25,000 people made the trek to the gates of the SOA/WHISC to call for the complete closure of the school and an end to the repressive policies it embodies. Two busy days of uplifting music, speakers, teach-ins, and activist networking ended with a solemn mock funeral procession honoring by name the thousands of victims who died at the hands of SOA-trained military personnel. White wooden crosses inscribed with the names and ages of martyrs were placed at the heavily secured gate on the base. The atmosphere of the vigil was saturated with holy respect for those who had gone before us in the work of peace and justice. Although the school still remains open, the ongoing work of raising awareness and political pressure are complimented by this large-scale demonstration of defiance and dissent.

The majority of our group had never attended an SOA protest, and experiencing a powerful event of this size and intensity was a bonding experience for us. In our many hours in the van, we debated issues of U.S. militarism, our nation's corrupt foreign policy with regard to Latin America, and the very nature of democracy. We also spent time evaluating what it meant for us, individually and collectively, to be present at such an event. As Sojourners, we are called to do direct social justice work from a perspective of faith, even if results are difficult to see. As Christians, we stand in solidarity with fellow believers in Latin America who were and continue to be persecuted because of their beliefs in a gospel of liberation, justice, and freedom from direct violence and structural poverty. As people of faith, we stand with the rest of the world in calling for peaceful solutions and an end to the violence taught by our military institutions. As individuals, however, we vary in our own religious traditions and perspectives.

Allison Johnson is the policy and organizing assistant for Sojourners.

Here's the good news about Darfur: we know it is doable to force the regime in Khartoum to back away from its genocidal divide-and-conquer strategies. We know this because the U.S. helped do it once already: it led international pressure that forced Khartoum to a peace accord and power-sharing agreement with southern Sudan in 2005. If we want to preserve the peace in the south, stop the genocide in Darfur, and prevent Genocide Round Three from happening in Sudan's eastern Beja region, we need to remember the lessons of the last seven years.

Here's the genocidal strategy Khartoum has repeatedly employed: when rebel groups form in Sudan's provincial areas – an understandable reaction to a government that takes callous disregard for its countrymen to new depths – it arms ethnically or regionally-based militias and turns them loose to rape and kill civilian populations, forcing millions to flee their homes. It aims to create as many splinter groups as it can, in order to keep its enemies weak.

Then, when it has managed to stir up widespread violence and human rights abuses, it cynically tries to bill the whole thing as an internal ethnic conflict, hoping to pass off genocide as anarchy. But to buy this line would be to blame the spark of pre-existing ethnic tension, rather than the truckload of gasoline which the Khartoum regime systematically poured on.

They did this in southern Sudan, against Christian and animist populations, for decades. The tide began to change just before the turn of the millennium, when the New Sudan Council of Churches initiated a people-to-people peace process (focusing on traditional leaders and civilians rather than rebel commanders) which did hard, painstaking work to heal ethnic and regional divisions within southern Sudan – divisions which had prevented the region from negotiating from a position of strength. At the same time, a wide outcry from diverse groups in the U.S., including conservative Christians and human rights advocates, motivated the Bush administration to initiate a full-court diplomatic and economic press. After a range of delaying tactics, Khartoum signed onto a peace agreement in 2005.

By that time, they were already into round two of the genocidal strategy, in Darfur: this time arming the Janjaweed militias, drawn largely from groups that consider themselves Arab, against populations that consider themselves ethnically African.

Khartoum didn't think we'd care if they slaughtered Muslims. It is a good and hopeful thing that they were wrong.

But we need not just to care, but also to remember the lessons of the last seven years. So far Darfur peace efforts have consisted of sporadic, drive-by diplomacy which has allowed Khartoum to continue fanning the violence in Darfur, while putting off the international community with false promises of reform, mixed with belligerent bluster. Exhibit A is the failed 2006 Darfur Peace Agreement, which got the buy-in of only one rebel group and gave no seat at the table to civil society.

Peace talks are re-convening in December – read this excellent, concise analysis and let your government know you want us to get our diplomatic act together, now.

Elizabeth Palmberg is an assistant editor of Sojourners.

At its board meeting last month, the National Association of Evangelicals formally named Leith Anderson as its president. Anderson is senior pastor of Wooddale Church in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, and has been serving as interim president of the NAE for the past year.

I've had the opportunity to spend some time with Leith Anderson. I believe he is the kind of leader most needed these days, both for the NAE and for the wider evangelical community. He has both the heart of a pastor and the passion of a prophet, and he finds ways to be true to his convictions and be committed to bridge-building.

In a recent interview with Christianity Today, Anderson spoke of the NAE and public policy,

There is no shortage of evangelicals that have passion about every topic in contemporary life. The challenge here is not to find people who are interested. There are plenty of people who are interested. It's, How do we unite evangelicals in understanding what the issues are and having a moral perspective in how we approach them?

And, in developing that moral perspective, he noted

We have a document that is called "For the Health of the Nation." They are seven priorities that the NAE organizes around in terms of being a public voice.

[The document] relates to religious freedom, sanctity of human life, human rights, and creation care. It was first issued in 2003 and then reaffirmed by the NAE in March of this year. What we're doing is organizing many of the activities of the Washington office and the association around each one. These are big topics like justice and compassion for the poor and the vulnerable.

On immigration reform, one of the most controversial issues in America today, Anderson said,

I'm hoping that in the future we are also going to be able to engage more on the issue of immigration in America. It's a pressing issue that the country needs to unite around. We need to have a biblical voice. We need to recognize this is a high concern for the Hispanic community, which has a large numbers of evangelicals within it. Hispanic churches are the fastest growing in the nation and immigration is a top priority. Up to this point, NAE has not made any formal statements on it. I just anticipate this will be a growing priority and concern which fits under the topic of justice.

I congratulate Leigh Anderson on his new position, and look forward to working with him.

Overheard at the lunch table:

If Mukasey can't tell whether waterboarding is torture or not, maybe he should have someone do it to him, and then see what he thinks.

I'll have to respectfully disagree. Torture that doesn't leave any physical marks but can still cause permanent psychological damage is still torture. Therefore I oppose waterboarding for anyone - including presidential appointees and Fox News correspondents who after a few dunks think it's no big deal. They deserve the human dignity that comes with being created in the image of God. Them and everyone else.

Ryan Rodrick Beiler is the web editor for Sojourners.

One more reason to take up dumpster diving: I've been finding lots of bananas lately, many of them from Chiquita, and many of them from Colombia. I've been aware of Chiquita's entanglements with right-wing paramilitaries, but at least I can eat the fruit with a clean conscience since none of my dollars have made their way up the corporate food chain and back down to Colombian death squads.

A recent USA Today article summarized the scandal well. This was my quote of the week for SojoMail today:

Chiquita's money helped buy weapons and ammunition used to kill innocent victims of terrorism. Simply put, defendant Chiquita funded terrorism.

That's the U.S. Justice Department, in court filings last month against Chiquita for paying off right-wing paramilitaries in Colombia. Here's the rest of the story, Harpers Index-style:

• $1.7 million - amount Chiquita paid the Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, AUC), a right-wing paramilitary organziation responsible for the majority of human rights abuses in Colombia's armed conflict
• $25 million - amount Chiquita was fined after pleading guilty of paying money to a terrorist organization
• $49.4 million - profits reaped by Chiquita from its Colombian operations between Sept. 10, 2001, when the AUC was designated a terrorist group, and January 2004, when its payments stopped. That's a number to keep in mind when Chiquita protests that it was merely trying to protect its workers.
• 173 - Colombians allegedly murdered and in some cases tortured by right-wing militias that received payments from Chiquita, whose families are now suing the company.
• 4,000 - number of people killed in the Uraba banana-growing region during the period when Chiquita admits to paying the AUC.
• 1989 until 1997 - years during which Chiquita paid left-wing guerillas before the region in which they operated was taken over by the AUC

And if this makes you not want to eat Chiquita bananas, here's some more bad news:

A spreading investigation in Colombia into what is being called the "para-politics" scandal may ensnare other corporate targets. Former AUC leader Salvatore Mancuso in May told the newspaper El Tiempo in Bogota that all banana producers had paid for protection, including Dole and Del Monte. Mancuso, who was jailed after turning himself in as part of an ongoing government-backed demobilization, said his group received 1 cent for every dollar of bananas exported. "All of the banana companies paid us. Every one of them," Mancuso told the newspaper.

And one more closing thought:

"It may be true (that) you could not operate in these areas without paying the AUC. If it were al-Qaeda, that wouldn't be a defense," says Terry Collingsworth, an attorney with the International Labor Rights Fund, which has filed lawsuits against several corporations, including Chiquita, over their activities in Colombia.

Ryan Rodrick Beiler is the web editor for Sojourners. He traveled to Colombia in 2003.