I have paid keen interest to this current presidential race. Being from another country, the whole process is quite fascinating and emotive, as gifted rhetoric and track records are flaunted for the public eye and reflection.

However, as much as the presidential race and electoral process in North America is capturing and intense, a person who is listening closely to the issues and policies presented will find him or herself quite confused by the arguments that are presented by candidates and speakers from both the Republican Party and Democratic Party.

In South Africa there are several political parties, whilst for most U.S. citizens there are only three choices. I have views and beliefs and I am sure that every other person has a thought or viewpoint about the way life should operate. But, amidst all the viewpoints and perspectives there must be a call for a celebrating of the other, whoever the other may be.

This past July, my wife and I facilitated our third delegation of project Heita South Africa on an experiential learning assignment. The assignment involved learning related to inclusivity, diversity, justice, and reconciliation. Delegates from Bethel University and networking partners within the Twin Cities over the last three years have been journeying on an experiential learning adventure.

Author Charles Marsh, in Reclaiming Dietrich Bonhoeffer, explains:

Bonhoeffer argues that the integrity of the other, the other's irreducibility to the I -- "to my thoughts and possessions" -- can only be realized in a social, ethical dynamic. When I am encountered by the dialogical other in ethical action, I am arrested in my own attempts to master the world; for in responding to the call of the Thou, I am taken out of myself and repositioned in relation with the other. I no longer control the other, nor does the other control me, but we both discover our individual and social identities in the place of our difference" (1994, p. 69).

Marsh's description of people engaging the difference in each other is very much what has transpired with our delegates journeying to South Africa. Differences are engaged between fellow delegates as well as people across the oceans in South Africa. As learners, project Heita South Africa delegates have been thrust into a place that called each person out of their comfort zones, out of grounded foundationalist thinking, into the wondrous arena of engaging the other, where as Marsh explains, one is encountered by the dialogical other in ethical action.

This notion of entering into dialogue with people who think and operate differently must not be taken for granted, for it is seldom put to practice and rarely becomes a reality. In this current presidential race and election fever, may people amidst all the politics seek to enter the dialogical space, where we see and understand that our humanity is bound up in one another.

Seth Naicker is an activist for justice and reconciliation from South Africa. He is currently studying and working at Bethel University, in St. Paul, Minnesota, as the program and projects director for the Office of Reconciliation Studies. He can be reached at seth-naicker@bethel.edu or smnaick@hotmail.com

Coinciding with the visit of a dear friend who's spent the past few years working in Afghanistan for both development NGOs and (non-U.S.) government agencies, the DVD of Charlie Wilson's War recently arrived from Netflix. My friend recommends it. Also, I [heart] Philip Seymour Hoffman. And I can tolerate Tom Hanks in appropriate doses. But an op-ed by the real-life Charlie Wilson in yesterday's Washington Post makes me even more eager to watch it soon. He writes:

In a scene near the end of the movie "Charlie Wilson's War," after the mujaheddin victory over the invading Soviet military, congressional appropriators turn down my request for funds to rebuild Afghanistan's schools, roads and economy. If we had done the right thing in Afghanistan then -- following up our military support with the necessary investments in diplomacy and development assistance -- we would have better secured our own country's future, as well as peace and stability in the region. ...

[I]nstead of intensifying our diplomatic and humanitarian efforts to help the Afghans meet their postwar challenges, we simply walked away -- leaving a destroyed country that lacked roads, schools, and any plan or hope for rebuilding. Into this void marched the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, and we all know what happened after that.

Whenever I'm reminded of our support for the likes of the mujahadeen, Saddam Hussein's war against Iran, and Manuel Noriega in Panama, I can't help but wonder -- what future enemy are we currently arming and training? Where are we currently focusing on military aid when a more comprehensive approach is needed to create real security? (Pakistan, I'm looking in your direction ...)

Wilson issues this warning:

We simply cannot make the same mistake. The lesson here is about more than the good manners of reciprocating a favor. It takes much more to make America safe than winning on the battlefield. Had we remained engaged in Afghanistan, investing in education, health and economic development, the world would be a very different place today. The aftermath of a congressional committee's decision so long ago has turned out to be a warning that America is not immune to the problems of the very poorest countries. In today's world, any person's well-being -- whether he or she is in Kandahar, Kigali or Kansas -- is connected to the well-being of others.

And he offers this simple advice, to which the military-industrial complex is so well innoculated: 

We can avoid the need to spend so much on our military -- and put so many of our soldiers in harm's way -- simply by investing more in saving lives, creating stable societies and building economic opportunity.

Ryan Rodrick Beiler is the Web editor for Sojourners.

The "cake" vs. "crumbs" power-sharing struggle continues in Zimbabwe. One of the reasons for the breakdown in the talks is that the government (ZANU-PF) wants the "whole power cake" and wants to give the opposition "crumbs." The intention of negotiations was to divide the "power cake" evenly so that a transitional government could be installed to stabilize the country and pave the way for fresh elections in two years. The memorandum of agreement signed by all parties agreed to this statement:

The parties shall not, during the subsistence of the dialogue, take any decisions or measures that have a bearing on the agenda of the dialogue, save by consensus. Such decisions or measures include, but are not limited to the convening of Parliament or the formation of a new government.

By unilaterally convening parliament, the government violated the agreement. Another intriguing development has been the defection by one wing of the opposition party to join the government. The opposition party Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) is comprised of two factions, one led by Mutambara (smaller faction) and the other by Tswangirai (larger faction). Mutambara defected to join ZANU-PF in an attempt to isolate Tswangirai.

So on Monday, August 25, Parliament was convened and one of the tasks was to vote for the speaker of Parliament. This is a powerful position. To everyone's surprise, the candidate who received the most votes was from MDC Tswangirai! There was spontaneous dancing and celebration in Parliament by the opposition, which was screened live on TV! There have been few occasions for rejoicing in the past few months. But the road ahead is still uncertain and foreboding. Please continue to journey with us through your support and prayers. This is greatly appreciated. Our prayers are with your nation as you prepare for elections.

Nontando Hadebe, a former Sojourners intern, is originally from Zimbabwe and is now pursuing graduate studies in theology in South Africa.

What have you heard about the paramilitary leaders extradited to the U.S. on drug trafficking charges? As formally demobilized paramilitary, they were being processed under what is known as the "justice and peace law" and were in the midst of hearings. Their confessions of macabre acts, partial at best, evolved to include naming ties with the Colombian government and international corporations. Testimonies revealed strategies, intellectual authors of crimes, and kingpins of paramilitary structures. These truths fed the "para-politics" scandal, and, at that moment, the Uribe administration effectively cut off the hearings by allowing the U.S. to whisk them off to be processed for drug trafficking. It left me sputtering, "What!?" As the paramilitary leaders are now under U.S. jurisdiction, they are only being tried for drug charges and not for the countless instances of torture, homicides, and other war crimes committed.  

But they may not even be the big "winners." As the notorious paramilitary leader from northwestern Colombia, Ever Veloza Garcia -- alias "HH" -- said in a radio interview last week,

the only ones that won are the rich of this country. The ones who invested in the war, who paid money for us to kill. ... The majority of the people who died in this war are innocent.

In another radio interview, he shared "how the security forces coordinated the movement of troops and helped us move weapons. We paid them to give information and cooperate."

One victim of the paramilitary exclaimed at church recently, "I feel like I'm being whitewashed from history. But look, touch me, I do exist!"

Janna Hunter-Bowman works for Mennonite Central Committee in Bogotá, Colombia, as the coordinator of the Documentation and Advocacy Program for Justapaz.

One of the stories I first heard on my recent visit to Australia was about what helped swing the vote last November to Kevin Rudd, the new Labor prime minister. I read some new political data by veteran pollster and researcher John Black, who is respected across Australia's political spectrum. Black reported that the pivotal swing vote to Labor this time was among evangelicals and Pentecostals, especially in some key seats in the states of Queensland and South Australia.

That was especially surprising and significant in a very secular country. The Labor Party here, like parties of the left elsewhere, has not been known as "religion friendly," and the Liberal Party (the conservatives in Australia) has had much of the religious vote by tradition and default. But this time was different for a number of reasons.

First, Kevin Rudd was a new kind of Labor candidate who speaks openly and comfortably about his faith. Rudd -- a Catholic who attends an Anglican church -- is theologically articulate, and even likes to write articles about German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Even more important, the evangelical/Pentecostal swing vote was due to how the agenda is changing in those faith communities. In the past, as in the U.S., issues such as abortion, homosexuality, and cloning seemed to be the primary concerns among the religious. But now the “religious agenda” includes global poverty, climate change, and the rights of Aboriginal people, especially among a new generation of Australian believers.

Christian organizations, such as World Vision, are among the leading voices on poverty, the environment, and the trafficking of women and children in economic and sexual slavery. The university events at which I spoke last week were led by “Vision Generation,” a youth movement sparked by World Vision that is leading a campaign to challenge the chocolate industry's use of child workers in West Africa, where 70 percent of the world's cocoa is harvested. The venues were packed. And everywhere I went, the protection of the earth and the threat of global warming was front and center.

Rudd’s clear Christian faith and his embrace of the new agenda of social justice and environmental stewardship seemed to be the big reasons why the evangelical and Pentecostal vote shifted this time. And that swing made a crucial electoral difference.

As I reported in my last post, I met with Kevin Rudd over dinner one night and had a long conversation about all these issues. But I also met with the leading Independent senator, Nick Xenophon, who may represent the balance of power in the new political configuration. He is from the Greek Orthodox Church and is also an articulate Christian on social justice. And on my last day in the country, I was also able to chat briefly with the opposition conservative leader, Brendan Nelson, who told me he meets regularly with faith leaders in Australia, and has also read my books. All the media interviews I did during the week were eager to explore the issues of faith and politics, both in the U.S. and in Australia. For a "secular" country, the social and political impact of faith seems to have become a hot topic.

Last weekend in Australia, I had the opportunity to have a four-hour dinner conversation with Kevin Rudd, the new prime minister. I have written about Kevin as a new-style Labor political leader who talks openly about his faith in a secular country.

I asked him about the "apology" he made to the Aboriginal people of Australia as his first act of government. "It is the thing I am most proud of," he told me. Just days before, the newspapers all carried a front-page picture of Rudd and his cabinet ministers lined up on chairs in a meeting with Aboriginal elders at an Indigenous community in the Northern Territory (the heart of the Aboriginal homeland). They were there to discuss how to narrow the gap between the health and life expectancy, education, income, and a whole range of other key indicators between the white and Aboriginal populations of Australia.

During the day we met for dinner, Rudd had been on the Great Barrier Reef, inspecting the "bleaching" of the spectacular Australian treasure due to global warming. He told me that environmental protection and climate change were issues on which he wanted Australia to lead.

Rudd is a Catholic and the first time we had dinner a couple of years ago, he told me he had been a longtime reader of Sojourners and my books. He is indeed well-read theologically, and we had a very good discussion of Catholic social teaching, church history, spirituality, faith, and politics in both the U.S. and Australia, and the power of revival to spark social change -- the theme of my latest book.

He has a special fascination for and attraction to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who helped lead the "confessing churches'" resistance to Hitler. I must confess how unusual and enjoyable it is to discuss Bonhoeffer with a prime minister; he has even written about the theologian in one of Australia's leading magazines -- an article that could easily have been in Sojourners. What most draws Rudd to Bonhoeffer, he writes in the article, was his insistence that the vocation of the church is to be "a voice for the voiceless" and "to speak truth to power." I've always thought there was no better description of the role of the church in the world.

I encouraged the young prime minister not to underestimate the influence of middle-sized countries, like Australia, in providing global leadership on some of the most important issues of our time. I heard Rudd's assessment of his first G8 meeting this spring, of the U.S. image in the world, of our presidential candidates whom he is eager to get to know better. Rudd is very committed to addressing global poverty and climate change, and to making Australia a leader on both.

We sat for several hours at a lovely outdoor restaurant up in Cairns, the tropical northeast corner of the country. Security was certainly much lighter than a similar meeting with a U.S. president is, and I enjoyed how ordinary people would come up with their children to meet the prime minister. Every time, the Australian head of state would extend his hand and a warm smile to say "Hi, I'm Kevin." Very nice indeed.