anonymous homilies on ominous anomalies

2010-04-05T20:26:00.000Z

2009-06-11T11:57:00.003Z

A friend of mine was interviewed this morning by the BBC to debate the employment of the OLPC in Africa, following these comments in a recent interview:

"If I had the money, I would not spend it on laptops," Hollow told SciDev.Net. "It will cost about US$3 billion dollars to give every [Ethiopian] child a laptop. And as a proportion of the national budget for education, that's just ridiculous."
The approach "doesn't actually empower people in the way that we'd like. It just undermines the teacher ... It's impossible to integrate it".

While Dave says only his least favorable statements about the laptop were used in the article, he does agree that the laptops are an inappropriate use of funds for a country as poor as Ethiopia, especially for primary school students. While the debate has not yet been placed on the BBC website, this piece also talks about the laptops, and more generally, how children are using technology too much.

While to some extent my interest in OLPC has waned, Iam starting to think about other things I would like to learn more about, particularly as I think about my possible master's in Education, Health Promotion, and International Development at the IOE starting this fall. What possibilities are there for leveraging technology for Public Health in International Development? Though I swear I was thinking of it first, the latest issue of the Economist, was clearly a step ahead of me in their technology quarterly. One of the innovative ideas was following up on patients to make sure they take their TB drugs:

"TAKING your medicine even for a week is a drag. Taking it every day for six months is a real nuisance. Yet that is what is asked of those being treated for tuberculosis (TB). They need to pop their pills for half a year if they are to eliminate the bacteria that cause the infection and combat the emergence of antibiotic-resistant strains. But the actual symptoms of infection tend to go away after just two months of taking the medicine, so the incentive to carry on is negligible. Worse, the drugs themselves produce unpleasant symptoms, including nausea, diarrhoea, headaches and insomnia. Indeed, one common anti-TB drug, rifampicin, also has the unnerving side effect of turning people’s tears, sweat and urine a shade of reddish orange.
Every cloud, however, has a silver lining, for it was this strange (if harmless) side effect that gave a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) their crucial idea: stamp-sized patches, much like litmus paper, that change colour when exposed to the urine of people with traces of medicine in their systems. The crucial trick of XoutTB, as the system built around these patches is known, is that the change in colour reveals a code that a patient can send by text-message to a number which rewards him with free airtime minutes on his mobile phone. Patients thus have a daily incentive to take their terrible pills."

...somehow the idea of incentivizing health like that doesn't seem entirely sustainable - shouldn't good health practices be enough of a reward in and of themselves? In fact I think these sort of ideas can be leveraged within a business model, and not just for free, not to mention paying patients to do what is good for them. The article mentions later that this idea could be extended further to other illnesses:

"If XoutTB does work, the team has ambitions to extend it. Other drugs can also be a nuisance to remember. The anti-retrovirals used to combat AIDS, for example, have to be taken for the rest of a patient’s life. And taking medicines for non-infectious conditions such as diabetes and high blood pressure is also a chore. Find the right “litmus test”, though, and what is now being done with TB drugs could succeed with any of these as well. Taking your medicine could, at last, become a truly rewarding experience. "

Another article was about using the location element in phones to track the spread of public health issues:

The sender’s location is determined for each of the messages, which pop up as conversation threads on an interactive map that can be called up on the web. Clicking on this map allows text messages to be sent back to users in the field from the control centre. InSTEDD says this service, called GeoChat, enables “geospatial ground-truthing, as your mobile team works to confirm, refute, or update data”.
Automating the reporting of titbits from remote clinics has already had a profound impact, says Eric Rasmussen, InSTEDD’s chief executive. Instead of recording information on scraps of paper, which would sometimes take days to reach higher-ups and trigger an alarm, the cycle-time has been reduced to days or even hours. GeoChat has been officially adopted by the six countries which share a border in the Mekong Basin, including Myanmar and Yunnan province in China, establishing a flow of real-time disease data from villages in the region to each country’s health ministry. Authorities can then choose to share this information with international bodies such as America’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) or the World Health Organisation. The aim is to enable a quick response to any outbreak of avian flu, cholera, malaria or dengue fever. InSTEDD is helping aid organisations and government agencies deploy its free tools in other countries, including Bangladesh, Peru and Tanzania.

InSTEDD mentions on their blog 10 pitfalls in public health development with Mobiles:

Pitfalls of an architectural approach
These pitfalls are not inherent to any and all architecture efforts, rather, they are risks that can be managed and mitigated. I am sharing them because I’ve seen these sap energy out of what otherwise could have been a great contribution:

1. One Size Fits All / Blueprints with no context: I’ve seen architecture efforts fail because they create blueprints that don’t consider the target context. Think about why a city apartment is different from a beach house, even if they have a lot in common. mHealth solutions will vary country to country due to factors such as different mobile penetration, language and literacy, cultural factors, population distributions. A good architectural approach would consider context as a first-class citizen. A great investment would be to evolve pattern languages for the eHealth/mHealth space, because they inherently bring in context to the equation. This is tough, however, because understanding context requires experience and on-the-ground presence which is expensive, and requires time, and takes away the illusory charm of cookie cutter answers.

2. “Best practices” advertised while the paint is still wet: There is a huge hunger for best practices. In a new field as mHealth, things that work once get a lot of press. I always recommend focusing on proven practices rather than best practices, and evaluating on impact metrics (e.g. birth complications averted) rather than proxy measures such as adoption or usage metrics (“30 users”) or satisfaction (“so-and-so is thrilled”). The latter is especially tough because impact metrics may take months or years to budge, and while subjective evaluation is critical, many organizations work heavily with per diems that distort the value proposition of an effort (For those of you not familiar with the term, a per-diem boils down to compensation as in “If you come and [work with my project] for a day we’ll pay your staff $5 each”. Everyone would agree it’s hard to design compensation for ‘customers’ that doesn’t create conflicts of interest). A good catalog of solutions would be transparent about the impact metrics and evaluation timeframes (it ran for a week, it ran for a year) of implementations or pilots (unfortunately there are a lot of systemic disincentives on all parties involved to publish this information raw).

3. Star charts for the high priests it is common to see an architecture effort devolve into a debate about frameworks, representation and notation, a debate with language and artifacts that only ‘a chosen few’ can understand. Be wary if you see UML diagrams with OCL expressions, or diagrams that claim code generation as a goal. Notations are only useful if they help comprehension. And don’t be fooled – UML and any specialized notation has been used many times to hide bad thinking behind a veneer of formality. A good architecture effort would communicate in a language and notation that is simple even if not formal. Even better, it would provide a reference architecture and reference implementations as a starting point for common scenarios (“Show me”. Heck, you could even have virtual machines with things deployed and running). In my experience a good set of documents outlining tradeoffs and decision points go a long ways helping implementation, more than a complete Zachman or TOGAF analysis or detailed BPEL workflow.

4. Shipping technology versus building capacity a good effort would specify the relevant skills and communities needed to implement technologies, and pointers on how to get those skills, not just to consulting organizations who can drop-ship products that do the job. For an effort to be sustainable, your users have to understand the goals that the technology supports, and your IT staff needs to understand the technology better than superficially. National or regional labs like InSTEDD innovation labs would be a great asset to the ecosystem of eHealth initiatives.

5. Architecture antipatterns. "an anti-pattern is something that looks like a good idea, but which backfires badly when applied." (Jim Coplien). Sounds obvious one should avoid them but some antipatterns are like flypaper, one keeps getting stuck on them, and they aren’t well documented. Architecture efforts that rely on heavy top-down prescription are very prone to recommending antipatterns as they don’t have immediate feedback loops. To discover these troublemakers early and nip them in the bud, watch out for designs that make sense to engineers but don’t make as much sense to user; or ‘grafting’ that work in other contexts. e.g. A common antipattern is recommending single-master centralized data repositories for information that spans many sectors or agencies. Another one is assuming a process or technology that works for 2 weeks for 20 people can scale to a national rollout. Good architecture guidance would have appropriate risks associated with each capability, validated by real case studies.

6. The Master Data Model (capitalization required). This is a common antipattern, but it deserves its own bullet. The pitfall is assuming you can model the data of a domain a priori, share it across organizations and applications, and then implement software following that model. (e.g. A patient has a first name, a last name, date of birth…) It is possible but very inefficient to do things this way. Creating master data models is a huge temptation amongst folks who have reductionist/mechanist perspectives (and not much enterprise-scale software deployment experience). History has shown that small, flexible standards that can be used together tend to survive longer than larger, holistic standards that cover too much. Think microformats, on standard protocols. Model the interoperability that emerges on the internet, not in large companies. Empower your users to evolve their data models and workflows without having to call coders (if that is too hard, at least make sure local, in-country developers can change and deploy the software)

7. Filtering innovation out The desire to rationalize efforts to save resources can lead to de-duplication initiatives. Reducing duplication can save waste but can also stifle innovation by reducing the chances of discovering new ways of doing things. Many great innovations are recombinations and integrations of things that existed before. A good architecture effort should celebrate multiplicity of approaches and implementations– a better gene pool is more likely to succeed. People shouldn’t be as worried about duplication of effort as they should be about lack of interoperability between projects. That said, the amount of tech efforts in the field that I’ve seen that are funded to be duplicative from day one is staggering, but only depressing when you consider how many don’t interoperate with much at all (sometimes even on purpose).

8. The “open clique” Any architecture is a like a small language, and any architecture creates an asymmetry, of those who know about it, understand it and are behind it and those who don’t know about it or aren’t quite up to speed. The health and humanitarian space is small and cliques form much more easily than in the commercial space. An honest architectural approach would be open, and would allow critique, revision and aggregation by parties not involved in creating the original architecture documents. I like the Health Metric Network’s approach to this.

9. Forgetting about your users For a project to be successful you need to understand user priorities and how they experience technology. How many technologies have been inflicted on users because they have the right technical specifications with little regards for the user experience? How many of these technologies that users don’t like have succeeded? With mobile applications, there are many many settings and kinds of users for technology. Making things user-friendly takes more work, especially in the field. User Experience (UX) design plays a critical role in determining how technology can help the users achieve their goals. Yet I have always been amazed how most enterprise architecture frameworks miss user experience and design (or confuse it with usability and requirements gathering). Most arch frameworks are evolutions of mainframe- and client/server- era learnings generalized and repackaged for the slowly changing architectural and organizational styles used in enterprises. Consider that enterprises can afford to inflict badly designed technologies on their users much more than a ministry of health in a developing country, so I think they are a terrible role model for this particular aspect.

10. Forgetting it’s about community health the health space is littered with technologies and standards that evolved from secondary goals of the industry, that happened to be better funded for IT. E.g. standards for medical record exchange that evolved out of billing reports needed for insurance, or auditing systems that track liabilities of health care organizations but not patients or doctors. Keep the end goal in mind! A good architecture effort would make sure the outcomes and impact are correctly placed. Standards would be chosen based on how well they fit a problem, and catalogued as an implementation choice.

I hope this doesn’t sound as complaining. Rather, I am proactively sharing experience for which I have first-hand scars, after having worked in the enterprise architecture space for many years. Actually I’ve been coming back and again the idea of drafting a book on technology patterns for developing countries to share this, but would like to make it a collaborative effort. It is simpler to point out pitfalls than to steer a course that avoids them, but that was not the point of this post. Also, any architecture is a starting point, not an endgame that does the decision-making job for you: it is place from which to begin the conversations. Even with the best architecture efforts, the responsibility of coming up with the right solutions is with the implementers.

2008-10-02T12:34:00.003Z

Why is everyone afraid of inner city violence?

Classicist that I am, I link it to the old Roman ideal of farming the land embodied in the benevolent dictator Cincinnatus:

In 457 BC, the Romans were fighting a tribe known as the Aequians, who lived near Rome. The consul Minucius Esquilinus had led an army to fight the Aequians. However, Minucius' army had been trapped by the Aequians in the Alban Hills, and was attempting to fight off a siege. A few Roman horsemen escaped, and returned to Rome to tell the senate what had happened. The senate fell into a panic. As such, they authorized the other consul for the year, Horatius Pulvillus, to nominate a dictator. Horatius nominated Cincinnatus for a dictatorial term of six months.

A group of senators was sent to tell Cincinnatus that he had been nominated dictator. According to Livy, the senators found Cincinnatus while he was plowing on his farm. They said to Cincinnatus that they hoped "It might turn out well for both him and his country", and then they asked him to put on his senatorial toga and hear the mandate of the senate. Cincinnatus cried out "Is everything all right?" He called out to his wife, telling her to bring him his toga from their cottage.

When he put on his toga, the senatorial delegation hailed him as dictator, and told him to come to the city. The delegation told him of the situation. Cincinnatus knew that his departure might mean starvation for his family if the crops went unsown in his absence. But he assented to the request anyway. He then crossed the Tiber river in a boat provided by the senate, as his farm was on the far side of the river. When he reached the other side of the Tiber, he was greeted by his three sons and most of the senators. Several lictors were given to him for protection.

The next morning, Cincinnatus went to the forum, and nominated Lucius Tarquitius Master of the Horse (his chief deputy). Tarquitius was considered to be one of the finest soldiers in Rome. Cincinnatus then went to the popular assembly, and issued an order. He ordered everyone of military age to report to the Campus Martius (Field of Mars) by the end of the day.

Once the army assembled, Cincinnatus took them to fight the Aequi. Cincinnatus led the infantry in person, while Tarquitius led the cavalry. The Aequi were surprised by the double attack, and were soon cut to pieces. The commanders of the Aequi begged Cincinnatus not to slaughter them all.

Cincinnatus did not want to cause any unnecessary bloodshed. He told the Aequi that he would let them live if they submitted to him. He said that their general, Gracchus Cloelius, as well as his officers, would have to be brought to him in chains. When this occurred, a yoke was set up. The yoke was made up of three spears, and the Aequi had to pass under it, while confessing that they had been conquered. Once this occurred, the war ended, and Cincinnatus disbanded his army. He then resigned his dictatorship and returned to his farm, a mere sixteen days after he had been nominated dictator.

His immediate resignation of his absolute authority with the end of the crisis has often been cited as an example of good leadership, service to the public good, civic virtue, and modesty. He came out of retirement again during his second term as dictator (439 BC) to put down a revolt by the plebeians. After the war Cincinnatus left the job and picked back up where he left off, working at a farm.

This sort of ideal reared its head again in the american exodus to suburbia, which is now being reversed once again... seems to go in waves.

2008-08-16T21:09:00.002Z

despite promising several months ago to get back in the blogging swing of things I haven't - I suppose I wasn't really comfortable introducing my thought life to the proposed new audience electronically, so I have been sticking to personal contact... which I think is better. I just had a friend visit last night who more or less despises the internet and e-mail, and in a random conversation with a street musician, he got started on internet conspiracy theories. He is a philosophy PhD student who focuses on Nietzsche's philosophy of education, and particularly writes about how that leads to Christ (rather indirectly). He had a crise de conscience some time ago that led him to begin a revolution - mostly personal in nature, but with implications for his students and writings. That choice to be a revolutionary has led him to a romantic desire to lead a life that is more in touch with nature and God's creation, and less with technology. It started with him walking 5 miles to school, and wearing a uniform (generally jeans and a corduroy jacket), and waking up to his senses. But how is that really so revolutionary, rather than living in denial of the present age? I question the logic of such romanticism, as someone who went through a stage of being a purist, and a naturalist - I made furniture out of wood, and not content with that, decided I need to find and dry fresh wood to make things with (including carving my own spoons), and pushing further decided I should make my own tools and only use techniques from the 18th century (thanks to the New Yankee workshop). At a certain point I just realized that it was ridiculous escapism, and a denial of the world we live in. How is it inherently better to glamorize the antiquated? I think there is something exciting and liberating about knowing how everything works within our massively complex system of the world and not just trusting in "the magic of electricity" - that lights turn on when you flip switches; but I think a pragmatic approach is much more tenable. I could live a completely self-sustaining (or maybe I should say internally enclosed) life with nomads in the desert, minding herds, and I do for a few weeks at a time perhaps, but different places suggest different modes of life. Ironically I think the urban poor are assumed to have both simplicity and access to variety/opportunities, when in reality they have neither. The simplicity of an internally enclosed life is so appealing to the complexity of industrialized peoples, but it's frequent result is poverty and lack of variety. This is why the rural poor come to mega-slums, but when they arrive, the difficulty of work constricts their choices, while the vastness of the social webs lays unexpected traps, and unforeseeable disasters, which are know conceivably resolvable but ever out of reach. But for those who "live among the poor" is it not too easy to take that fraction more of disposable income we have and spend it to keep both sides in reach? Is it not too easy to reach for a nice fresh mango lassi with one hand and a wireless connection with the other? Don't we thus invalidate the true identification with the poor, by clinging to the romantic simplicity of knowing the farmer whose cow produced this milk, and keeping hold of that medical insurance in case anything should go wrong? How then can we truly identify with the urban poor, when we are not geographically circumscribed to simplicity as we would be in a rural area, nor are we woefully shut out of the access and opportunities that cities afford. It takes a more conscious choice to say no to what is within reach in order to identify with those for whom it is always just out of reach...

2008-04-19T21:43:00.003Z

I had kind of given up on this blog, because I started a new one primarily about languages while in Darfur (only a little more than a year after first discovering the whole linguistic blog phenomenon). But I am no longer in quite so interesting a linguistic environment as Darfur, and I thought I might need a forum for some people to become acquainted with the thought life of yours truly... strange and convoluted as it may be. So I will write some things from time to time. First I'd like to write about some of my thoughts from Tristes Tropiques, by Claude Lévi-Strauss (no, nothing to do with jeans), which some consider the ethnographer's bible. I would also like to comment on some of my developping photographic aesthetic, and how it is shaped by the relative advantages of film vs. digital photography. But I already realized that it is too late to get into either of these tonight, so I will leave them for another time...

2007-10-07T21:07:00.000Z

Death in Darfur

2007-04-04T02:55:00.000Z

Sami al-Hajj

A cameraman from Al-Jazeera was arrested in 2001 trying to enter Afghanistan with completely valid papers. BBC ran a story based on letters he has written during his imprisonment back in September, and he still has not even faced a trial or official charges. This has led him and some others to go on a hunger strike recently which has now extended to a couple months...
Apparently he just received a letter, which appeared on Al-Jazeera TV, from Sudanese children wanting to encourage and stand in solidarity with him in his suffering and unjust imprisonment. The letter, as you can see, contains an image of a crucifixion, which seems to be labeled with names and descriptions that are hard to make out at this resolution, but the name above the Christ figure definitely says "Sami al-Hajj." So what does this mean? Hopefully it can somehow shed some light on the shady oppression that is going on over there at Guantanamo. "Life in Guantanamo Bay is like the fires of hell." - Sami El-Hajj

2007-03-06T00:17:00.000Z

Malaria Pills Without Profit

The big pharmaceutical companies are rightly criticized for concentrating on the development and marketing of drugs that sell for high prices in the industrialized world while neglecting to produce medications that could save millions of lives in the poorest countries. So it came as especially welcome news last week that Paris-based Sanofi-Aventis, the world’s fourth-largest drug company, working in collaboration with a nonprofit drug-development organization pioneered by Doctors Without Borders, will soon introduce a cheap and easy-to-use pill to combat malaria in sub-Saharan Africa.

The pill combines two drugs that are already in use into a single medication that can be taken once a day for three days by young children and twice a day for three days by adults to cure the infection.

The course of treatment is notably cheap — less than 50 cents for children and less than $1 for adults. Sanofi will make no profit on sales to public health agencies and international institutions that typically serve poor people. But it will also produce a branded version to be sold in the private markets of developing countries at three or four times the public price.

To its additional credit, the company has agreed not to seek a patent on the one-pill formulation so that generic companies, like those in India, can produce the pills cheaply and add to the quantities of medicine needed to treat many millions of malaria victims around the world.

Now that Sanofi has shown, in the words of one executive, that “we are not nasty people working against poor countries and seeking only profits,” let us hope that many other big drug companies feel the same humanitarian impulse.

(3/5/7, New York Times)

2007-03-01T17:29:00.000Z

From the Encyclopedia for North American Indians
(or as I would say North American Autochthons)

Recent archaeological studies suggest that Indians inhabited the area along the Lumber River (the Indian name for the river was Lumbee) as long as fourteen thousand years ago. Because of the lack of written evidence, however, the actual precontact history of the Lumbees is somewhat shrouded in mystery. For over a hundred years, historians and other scholars have been examining the question of Lumbee origin. Although there have been many explanations and conjectures, two theories persist. In 1885, Hamilton McMillan, a local historian and state legislator, proposed the "Lost Colony" theory. Based upon oral tradition among the Lumbees and what he deemed as strong circumstantial evidence, McMillan posited a connection between the Lumbees and the early English colonists who settled on Roanoke Island in 1587 and the Algonquian tribes who inhabited coastal North Carolina at the same time. According to historical accounts, the colonists mysteriously disappeared soon after they settled, leaving little evidence of their destination or fate. McMillan's hypothesis, which was also supported by the historian Stephen Weeks, contends that the colonists migrated with the Indians toward the interior of North Carolina, and by 1650 had settled along the banks of the Lumber. It is suggested the present-day Lumbees are the descendants of these two groups.

Other scholars believe the Lumbees to be descended from an eastern Siouan group called the Cheraws. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a number of Siouan-speaking tribes occupied southeastern North Carolina. John R. Swanton, a pioneering ethnologist at the Smithsonian Institution, wrote in 1938 that the Lumbees were probably of Cheraw descent but were also genealogically influenced by other Siouan tribes in the area. Contemporary historians such as James Merrell and William Sturtevant confirm this theory by suggesting that the Cheraws, along with survivors of other tribes whose populations had been devastated by warfare and disease, found refuge from both aggressive settlers and hostile tribes in the Robeson County swamps in eastern North Carolina.

There are other theories as well, one suggesting that the Lumbees are an amalgamation of both Siouan and Algonquian tribes. Yet despite the lack of a definitive explanation of their historical tribal ancestry, the Lumbees have always affirmed both their Indian and tribal identities.

Sustained contact with Europeans did not occur for the Lumbees until the late 1700s with the settlement of Scottish Highlanders in the area. Prior to this intrusion, the Lumbees had been self-sufficient, living a life of apparent deliberate isolation in the swamps and bottomlands of the Lumber River. Despite this solitude, it was evident that the Lumbees had been significantly influenced by Europeans. By the early eighteenth century the Lumbees, having lost their native language, were speaking an idiomatic form of Elizabethan English and had adopted much of an English lifestyle. Yet the land the Lumbees occupied was held in common. It was not until white settlement that the Lumbees realized that if they wanted to hold on to their land they would have to have legal documentation supporting their claims. As a result of this new knowledge, individual Lumbees arranged to receive land grants from King George II of England. This willingness to accept the idea of private ownership of land and the Lumbees' adoption of many European habits temporarily allowed for a degree of peaceful relations between the tribe and its new neighbors. However, as the settlers' demand for land increased, tensions between the Lumbees and their white neighbors began to mount...

In 1885 and 1887, under the leadership of state legislator Hamilton McMillan and a local Indian minister, W. L. Moore, the assembly enacted laws acknowledging the Lumbees as an Indian tribe-the Croatans-and establishing a separate school system for them. (Since 1885 the Lumbees have been known under several names. In 1911 their name was changed from Croatan to Indians of Robeson County, and in 1913 to Cherokee Indians of Robeson County. Finally, in 1953, at the request of the tribe, they were officially recognized as Lumbee.) The 1887 legislation created the Croatan Normal School under the direction of an all-Indian school board, with the objective of training local Indians to teach their own children in their own schools. Initially, both the Lumbees and state officials were skeptical about the school's potential for success. Still, realizing the dire need for some type of formal education for the Lumbees, tribal leaders persisted in their efforts to support the Indian schools. The creation of the Indian school system resulted in a unique triracial arrangement for the area. Until the Brown decision in 1954, which ended school segregation, the state of North Carolina supported three legally separate school systems in Robeson County-one for whites, one for blacks, and one for Indians...

To the Lumbees, however, one of their most important accomplishments is not just the founding of the Croatan Normal School but its eventual evolution into Pembroke State University, one of the sixteen constituent campuses of the University of North Carolina. Although the student body is now multicultural, from 1940 to 1953 Pembroke State University (then Pembroke State College for Indians) was the only state-supported four-year college for Indians in the United States.

In 1885, when the Lumbees were recognized by the state as a tribal entity, they began a century-long process to extend state recognition into federal recognition, and thereby establish a government-to-government relationship between their tribe and the federal government. During the 1930s their goal almost became a reality when a group of Lumbee leaders attempted to get the Lumbees organized and consequently recognized under the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act. The recognition plan, developed in conjunction with Bureau of Indian Affairs officials, actually received support from the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. However, because of BIA budget restraints, adverse departmental policies, and factionalism within the Indian community, the plan was never implemented, and attempts at federal recognition by the Lumbees failed.

Even though the Lumbees were unsuccessful in this struggle, they did not disappear from sight. In 1958, the Lumbees saw themselves thrust into the public spotlight in an armed confrontation with the Ku Klux Klan. On the cold winter night of January 18, 1958, the Lumbees came head-to-head with white supremacists. Both oral and written accounts indicate that, a week prior to the conflict, the Klan had burned crosses in the yards of two Indian families in an attempt to put an end to race-mixing. Adding insult to injury, the Klan also had planned a rally in a field a few miles from Pembroke, the center of the Lumbee community. After years of suffering the indignations of prejudice and racism, the Lumbees were quick to take action. Hundreds of armed Lumbees charged the rally that night, shot out the lights, and sent the Klan scrambling. The incident, which received national and international news coverage, brought responses from many tribal groups offering to assist the Lumbees with their fight. The rout of the Klan that January night strengthened the Lumbees' determination to protect and preserve their rights as a people and as a tribe.

Since the turn of the century, the Lumbees have become increasingly involved in national, state, and local political activities. Determined to control their own tribal identity, they successfully lobbied for state recognition as the Lumbee tribe in 1953 and received limited federal recognition as an Indian tribe in 1956. Since the 1970s, however, their political focus has been on gaining full federal recognition, thereby acquiring status comparable to that of other federally recognized tribes in the country. A petition for acknowledgment, substantiated by ten years of research, was submitted by the Lumbees to the Department of the Interior in 1987. In 1989, the Interior Department advised the Lumbees that it was unable to process the tribe's petition in light of the restrictive language of the 1956 act. Additionally, the Lumbees have been active in trying to obtain full federal recognition through an act of Congress. No matter what the outcome of these efforts may be, however, the Lumbees are determined to maintain their cultural and tribal identity. For it is this legacy that they say they will continue to pass on to their children to ensure the survival of their people for generations to come.

Dial, Adolph L., The Lumbee (New York: Chelsea House, 1993) Evans, W. McKee, To Die Game: The Story of the Lowry Band, Indian Guerillas of Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971) Sider, Gerald M., Lumbee Indian Histories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

2007-03-01T17:26:00.000Z

2007-02-26T18:40:00.000Z

Louis Farrakhan, the departing leader of the Nation of Islam, gave what was billed as his last major public address here on Sunday, with his extended illness throwing into sharp focus the question of whether the group will shift toward more mainstream Islamic teachings to survive once it loses its central charismatic figure... (for more from the NYTimes)

The Nation of Islam is sometimes seen as black supremacism thinly disguised as Islam and justified through revisionist history, but its influence in America has historically been fairly influential, starting from the time of Elijah Muhammad, who wrote their statement of beliefs in "Message to the Blackman in America" (published in 1965):

1. We believe in the One God whose proper Name is Allah.

2. We believe in the Holy Qur'an and in the Scriptures of all the Prophets of God.

3. We believe in the truth of the Bible, but we believe that it has been tampered with and must be reinterpreted so that mankind will not be snared by the falsehoods that have been added to it.

4. We believe in Allah's Prophets and the Scriptures they brought to the people.

5. We believe in the resurrection of the dead--not in physical resurrection--but in mental resurrection. We believe that the so-called Negroes are most in need of mental resurrection; therefore they will be resurrected first.

Furthermore, we believe we are the people of God's choice, as it has been written, that God would choose the rejected and the despised. We can find no other persons fitting this description in these last days more than the so-called Negroes in America. We believe in the resurrection of the righteous...

10. We believe that we who declare ourselves to be righteous Muslims, should not participate in wars which take the lives of humans. We do not believe this nation should force us to take part in such wars, for we have nothing to gain from it unless America agrees to give us the necessary territory wherein we may have something to fight for.

11. We believe our women should be respected and protected as the women of other nationalities are respected and protected.

12. We believe that Allah (God) appeared in the Person of Master W. Fard Muhammad, July, 1930; the long-awaited "Messiah" of the Christians and the "Mahdi" of the Muslims.

We believe further and lastly that Allah is God and besides HIM there is no god and He will bring about a universal government of peace wherein we all can live in peace together.

ok, so maybe the messianic claims toward the end are a little crazy, but some of those statements did have some compelling social commentary...

The movement has always relied on a charismatic leader - first W.D. Fard, then his disciple Elijah Muhammad, and Malcolm X (whose conversion to orthodox Islam, and subsequent denouncement of Elijah Muhammad, then subsequent assassination by the Nation of Islam). When Elijah Muhammad died in 1975 and his son, Wallace Muhammad, took over, the group drifted toward orthodox Sunni Islam and dissolved until Louis Farrakhan rebuilt the group in 1978...

So now with the impending death of the demagogue, will they become Orthodox Muslims again? It could lead to some interesting changes in the demographics of Islam in America, and could help lead to the forging of an "American Muslim identity."

2007-02-02T04:06:00.000Z

Bomb Scare in Boston...

pardon the profanity of these jokers, this was the first video I found that highlighted how stupid this whole incident was...
It is hard to believe such a stupid overreaction could occur...
here's what the NY Times had to say about it:
Two men charged with placing electronic advertisements for a cartoon around Boston, sending the city into a panic when people feared they were bombs, pleaded not guilty on Thursday, responding to the charges with grins.

The men, Peter Berdovsky, 27, and Sean Stevens, 28, had been hired by a marketing firm, Interference Inc., which had been hired by Turner Broadcasting. They placed 38 of the devices on buildings, under bridges and in other spots around the city, and each earned $300. The devices, featured flashing lights in the shape of a character from the cartoon show “Aqua Teen Hunger Force.”

The men, whose lawyer called them performance artists, were cheered on by supporters, many of whom said that the city had overreacted and that the men were being made scapegoats for the actions of the companies that hired them. They were arrested Wednesday night and charged with placing a hoax device in a way that causes panic, and disorderly conduct.

c'mon... seriously.

I think Kobe is the only person who has been dropping bombs in Boston recently:

!!!!! OMG !!!!!

...at another point in the game the announcer bemoaned, "Celtics-Lakers just isn't the matchup it used to be." Yeah Boston b-ball has become a disgrace - where have you gone Larry?

2007-02-01T02:45:00.000Z

In Connecticut, World’s Oldest Woman Dies at 114
JAN 30 2007

EAST HARTFORD, Conn., Jan. 29 — To say Emma Faust Tillman lived a full life would be an epic understatement.

Left, the Tillman family via Hartford Courant; Right, Marc-Yves Regis I/Hartford Courant

Emma Faust Tillman in her 20s, and upon turning 114 in Connecticut last fall.

She was one of 23 children born to former slaves in North Carolina, and one of only 15 who lived to adulthood. She was the first black student to graduate from Glastonbury High School, just a few miles south of here, and voted in the first election in which women were allowed to do so. Discrimination prevented her finding a job as a secretary, so she began catering, eventually baking cakes for Katharine Hepburn’s father and Jackie Robinson.

Mrs. Tillman, who died Sunday, was known as the “mother” of the Metropolitan A.M.E. Zion Church in Hartford, where she sang in the choir for more than 70 years.

And last Wednesday she was declared the oldest person in the world, at 114 years, 63 days and counting.

Whether she ever knew she received the title is unclear. When the television news cameras crowded into the lobby of her nursing home here, Mrs. Tillman acknowledged them but was unable to speak, her head hanging down, a blank look on her face.

By the time they left, she was exhausted and returned to the bedroom she moved to in 2003, after decades of living independently. She went to sleep and never woke up again.

The title of “world’s oldest person” is now apparently passed to Yone Minagawa of Japan, who was born within weeks of Mrs. Tillman and turned 114 this month.

And though it is perhaps impolite to mention, recent history suggests that Ms. Minagawa may not hold the crown for long. In the last month alone, the title of oldest person has changed hands three times, according to the Gerontology Research Group, an authority on the matter.

“The Guinness Book of World Records will not be able to keep up,” said Dr. L. Stephen Coles of the University of California, Los Angeles, the executive director of the group. “This has been a pretty volatile time. Usually we’ve had a more stable No. 1 position.”

On average, Dr. Coles said, the “oldest person” retains the title for about eight months. But since August, there have been five. Dr. Coles said that this was nothing more than a statistical anomaly.

Even among those who age gracefully, few live long enough to become supercentenarians, the term given to those older than 110. With the death of Mrs. Tillman, the gerontology group has records of 84 such people in the world: 6 men and 78 women.

Dr. Coles acknowledged, though, that it is likely that the list, which relies on notification from relatives or neighbors, vastly underestimates the number.

For those who are known to be in that select circle, life as a very old person can become quite a public affair. Mrs. Tillman, for her part, did not shy away from the attention, happy to take in the birthday parties for her at the convalescent home.

On her 113th birthday in 2005, Mrs. Tillman received 113 long-stem red roses from a much younger man — Donald Pitkin, a member of the East Hartford Town Council, who at the time was 84. “My, my, what a lot of beautiful flowers,” those who were present recall her saying. “It makes a woman think she might want to get married again.”

Mrs. Tillman’s husband died in 1939, before the United States entered World War II. She outlived countless other relatives, including one of her two daughters. But of the four siblings who moved north with Mrs. Tillman at the turn of the 20th century, all lived past age 100.

There is no consensus on what allows certain people to live so long, but there is wide agreement that good genes are the best predictor of a long life. It probably helped, too, that Mrs. Tillman neither smoked nor drank.

She also did not drive. But with the exception of relying on others for rides, Mrs. Tillman lived quite independently. After first voting in 1920, she cast a ballot in every election until 2006. She attended church weekly until her 114th birthday, on Nov. 22.

That day, Mrs. Tillman was quite subdued, but she perked up when the choir sang two of her favorite songs, “In the Garden” and “Passing Through,” said John Stewart Jr., one of her great-nephews, who attended the service with her.

It was the last time Mrs. Tillman would leave her home, he said. He recalled her remarking on the milestone: “I’m 114. It’s enough now,” she said. “I’ll go whenever the man upstairs calls me home.”

Mrs. Tillman is survived by her 80-year-old daughter, Majorie. But the large extended family is something of a complicated clan: the funeral program will list 7 grandchildren, 36 great-grandchildren, 16 great-great-grandchildren and 16 great-great-great-grandchildren.

“She was the glue that held us all together,” said Mr. Stewart, the family historian and a former chief of the Hartford Fire Department — the first African-American fire chief in New England. “She has served the good Lord, she has served the church, she has served us. What better legacy can she leave?”

Once it became clear on Friday that Mrs. Tillman was entering her final days, family members filed into her room. They quickly decided they would not attach her to a feeding tube or other machines, preferring to let her die in what doctors said would be a matter of days.

By Sunday evening, Mr. Stewart said, she looked as though she had more color in her face, and a smile seemed to have appeared on her lips.

2007-01-24T03:34:00.000Z

There was recently a television series in the UK where a reporter went undercover into some prominent mosques where Islamic preachers were saying some things that could easily sound inflammatory. It has been taken up by a number of different people, with a wide variety of responses from Tony Blair, the Australian Government, and western Muslims.

Here is the 1st part in the original showing:

The response by the Australian Government is here at BBC

And here is a response to the series, from a Muslim professor at Yale, Yasir Qadhi:

2007-01-23T15:27:00.000Z

I am undocumented. Like an illegal immigrant. Actually, I am trying to get all the paperwork settled for me to be a visiting fellow at Yale this semester, and it just isn't working smoothly and to be honest I feel like an illegal immigrant. My previous employment, health insurance, etc. is being called into question, and I have little familiarity with the system which I am trying to work. Fortunately, I do have a few people advocating on my behalf, and I do speak the language and look like I fit in to some extent, so I get away with most things I do, but I still kind of feel like a refugee here: I don't have an ID card, I have been shunned from some classes, I live kind of far from campus... I am not complaining; on the contrary, I am really happy to be here on whatever the terms may be, but it is interesting to get even an infinitesimal taste of what it feels like to be an undocumented immigrant or refugee.

Imagine what Jesus and Mary and Joseph must have felt like when they were refugees in Egypt. It is remarkable that God could first become a "refugee" in incarnating his eternal Word in the form of Jesus, and then (as if that's not enough) Jesus became a refugee within that system, lived homeless, and received his daily bread by the kindness and mercy of others. Hey they could make an action figure of Jesus as a refugee and call it "Refujesus..." it might make a lot of money.

2007-01-21T20:54:00.000Z

Mauritania Holds Senate Election in Post-Coup Process

The large sparsely populated desert country of West Africa, Mauritania, has held a senate election as part of a post-coup process to bring about civilian rule. VOA's Nico Colombant reports from our regional bureau in Dakar.

Nearly 3,700 municipal councilors voted to select a 56-seat senate Sunday, with results expected in the coming days.

This was the latest step in an electoral process that will culminate with a presidential election in March.

Local political analyst Racine Sy says Mauritanians are pleased with all the elections.

"It is something that is new, and during a lot of years they did not think that something like this could happen in this country to have free and democratic elections like this," said Racine Sy.

A regional observer, Bob LaGamma, with the U.S.-based group Council for the Community of Democracies, says democratic progress in Mauritania could spur similar advancement elsewhere.

"Mauritania is very significant in the broader context of democratization in Africa because it is kind of a border country that embraces both North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa," added LaGamma.

He expects the senate vote to be very competitive, like the legislative elections last year.

"One would reasonably expect that there would be a number of parties competing for power, no one of which will dominate and therefore compromise and coalitions may be in the future of Mauritania," continued LaGamma.

Political leaders Ahmed Ould Daddah and Mohamed Khouna Ould Haidallah both have parties which did reasonably well in the legislative election, and expect good scores in the senatorial vote.

They are also two of the main presidential candidates, in a crowded field.

A recent entry is Messaoud Ould Boulkheir, a descendant of former slaves. Slavery is still practiced in parts of Mauritania. Analyst Sy says Boulkheir will spur interest, but he does not believe he has an overall chance.

"I do not think he has a lot of chance to be a winner because you have two tendencies here, we have independent candidates, and we have also the traditional parties of the opposition," said Sy.

Leaders of a military junta that overthrew former strongman Maaouiya Ould Taya in August 2005 have pledged not to run. The deposed former leader remains in exile. His supporters have been competitive in the elections.

2007-01-20T14:43:00.000Z

"The Immigration Debate"
+
Autochthony

And to think Ben Franklin wanted to make the wild turkey our national bird instead of stoned eagles...

seriously, though, this brings up the question of the European oppression and decimation of the pre-Columbian inhabitants of America, a more concise name for whom is still in dispute. Probably, "Native American" is most widely accepted in the US, though Canadians prefer "First Nations," which though grammatically more ambiguous (can one use a noun phrase as an adjective, i.e. "I am 'First Nations'" or "I am a 'First Nations' person" [or member?]) strips the imperialist marginalizing or alterizing connotation completely from the nomenclature. Though, interestingly, "aboriginal peoples" is used interchangeably, and seemingly considered more general, and more sensitive than "First Nations" (which seems to be understood as a specifically Canadian term, though some may want it to gain wider acceptance); this strikes me, because "aboriginal," like "native," is ultimately a retronym. Only an outsider coming in after could call a previous group of people "aboriginal," or "native," and these terms were often synonymous with clearly derogatory appellations such as "savage," or "redskin." I really like the French-Canadian term used instead of aboriginal, which is autochtone or autochthonous in English, which comes from the Greek αυτο-χθονες meaning self - earth (i.e. their identity is from the earth), but connoting "sprung from the earth," from some early Greek myth about Atlantis. I feel like autochthonous reflects the relationship that Algonquian, Navajo, Cherokee, etc. peoples have with the land, and also refrains from validating the power structure which upholds the oppressive ordering of peoples (first is the worst, second is the best, third is the one with the treasure chest... funny how that works out, eh? : First Nations people are clinging to their existence and identity, trying to survive, and be recognized as a people with agency and rights; Spanish speaking people (though probably most of them share little more than a language with the early conquistadors) are arguably the most unjustly treated minority group in the US (economic and educational disparities are greater than any other minority of comparable "critical mass") and then third came the white northern- and western-europeans, who have dominated economically since the 17th century). Certainly the idea (from sympathizers of the autochthonous inhabitants) is that aboriginal, native, or indigenous have a right to the land because they were there first, but this still validates the same power structure of "primacy," and "rights," and the paradigm that the land can be owned (which does not originate from the thoughts of the autochthons but of usurpation of the invaders). The term "autochthonous" suggests that the empirical fact of the people group's attachment to, understanding of, and love for the land is what gives them the "right" (I use the term to avoid a differance, because of the incompatibility of the paradigms of proprietary and non-proprietary land use systems) to live there.

It is quite striking that, on the contrary, toponyms often retain the local linguistic flavor - just think of how many states take their names from the original local languages: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Ohio, Alabama, Minnesota... actually 25-28 (depending on how you count/judge) of the states are from the place names in the local autochthonous languages. How astounding, shameful even, then, that we take little to no regard for the names of the people who lived on and named these lands according to their own conventions. Unfortunately due to the deleterious, and identity-erasing wholesale nature of American oppression and genocide of the autochthonous inhabitants of America, these distinctions are no longer always clear, or significant given the absolute numbers of each group, and their identity relative to one another and the majority.
It seems as though Canadians and First Nations people tend to have a more co-operative and integrated relationship than Americans and "Native Americans," but I think the whole continent has a long, long way to go in terms of reconciling with the autochthonous inhabitants, and I would like to profile some other places in the next week that have a different relationship with their autochthonous inhabitants. First New Zealand and the Maori people, then North Africa and the Imazighen ... stay tuned, and chime in with your thoughts, comments, etc...

"what are you... like, a wookie?"

2007-01-19T05:22:00.000Z

Color Theory

There is a new bug in town, and it's white. Really white...

A beetle with scales as pale as a ghost could help engineers come up with super-thin, paper-white paints, new research shows.

In recent years, many scientists have looked to nature for new engineering designs, developing such materials as adhesives based on geckos' foot pads and easy-clean fibers inspired by tiny bumps on lotus leaves.

Vukusic decided to focus on color-manipulation and color-flow structures that nature developed, "since it surely must have come up with some really good ideas. We know structural color in butterflies dates back at least 50 million years," he told LiveScience.

Most color in animals often comes from pigments, which absorb specific wavelengths of light and reflect others.

Other colors in animals come from minute structures they possess that make incoming wavelengths of light interact with each other, causing some to emerge weakened and others strengthened.

Familiar examples of structural color are seen with soap bubbles and peacock feathers.

Vukusic explored nature for a structure that generated the color white since it is relatively uncommon in animals. The colors that creatures adopt often help protect them by serving as camouflage.

"White backgrounds are not generally found in, say, savannahs," Vukusic said.

A simple Internet search helped Vukusic arrive at the Cyphochilus beetle.

"The brilliant white of the beetle was just striking to me," he recalled. "I know images can be doctored, but it seemed as if this could be very special. So I just ordered a few for $1.50 each."

He noted that the beetle's whiteness might have evolved to help it blend in with local white fungi.

Beetle-scale balance

In order to appear white, a substance has to scatter all colors of light randomly at the same time. Using electron microscopes, Vukusic and his colleagues found that the scales of the Cyphochilus beetle possess structures made of randomly oriented filaments.

The beetle's scales carefully balance the size of the filaments and spaces between them. This means these structures scatter light far more efficiently than, say, a milk tooth from collaborator Benny Hallam's son, enabling the scales to generate a brilliant white even when very thin — in this case, five millionths of a meter.

Future research could help devise extraordinarily bright white synthetic materials. These could, for instance, help reflect light, replacing the bulky glass mirrors at times found in flat-panel displays, Vukusic said.
This question about the nature of color has got to be one of the trippiest, most counter-intuitive things I have ever encountered. The first time I came across the idea that the color of an object was somehow just a property of its surface texture in high school physics I tried to wrap my head around it, and I just pondered the whole thing until I got a headache. I have tried to avoid thinking about it since then, but when I do encounter the idea it really makes me appreciate the mystery of the mundane things around us. Here is a little more in-depth look at it:

Color of objects

Setting aside illuminant adaptation and contextual effects, surfaces appear to have the color of the light leaving them in the direction of the eye. Since the composition of this light may depend on the orientation of the surface and lighting conditions, the perceived color of an object also depends on these factors. However, some generalizations can be drawn.

Light arriving at an opaque surface is either reflected "specularly" (that is, in the manner of a mirror), scattered (that is, reflected with diffuse scattering), or absorbed – or some combination of these.

Opaque objects that do not reflect specularly (which tend to have rough surfaces) have their color determined by which wavelengths of light they scatter more and which they scatter less (with the light that is not scattered being absorbed). If objects scatter all wavelengths, they appear white. If they absorb all wavelengths, they appear black.

Opaque objects that specularly reflect light of different wavelengths with different efficiencies look like mirrors tinted with colors determined by those differences. An object that reflects some fraction of impinging light and absorbs the rest may look black but also be faintly reflective; examples are black objects coated with layers of enamel or lacquer.

Objects that transmit light are either translucent (scattering the transmitted light) or transparent (not scattering the transmitted light). If they also absorb (or reflect) light of varying wavelengths differentially, they appear tinted with a color determined by the nature of that absorption (or that reflectance).

Objects may emit light that they generate themselves, rather than merely reflecting or transmitting light. They may do so because of their elevated temperature (they are then said to be incandescent), as a result of certain chemical reactions (a phenomenon called chemoluminescence), or for other reasons (see the articles Phosphorescence and List of light sources).

Objects may absorb light and then as a consequence emit light that has different properties. They are then called fluorescent (if light is emitted only while light is absorbed) or phosphorescent (if light is emitted even after light ceases to be absorbed; this term is also sometimes loosely applied to light emitted due to chemical reactions).

To summarize, the color of an object is a complex result of its surface properties, its transmission properties, and its emission properties, all of which factors contribute to the mix of wavelengths in the light leaving the surface of the object. The perceived color is then further conditioned by the nature of the ambient illumination, and by the color properties of other objects nearby (see the article Color constancy); and finally, by the permanent and transient characteristics of the perceiving eye and brain.

... now contrast that with "structural color" which is the deal with the white beetle:

Structural color

Structural colors are colors which are caused by interference effects rather than pigment. Colors are produced when a material is scored with fine parallel lines, formed of one or more thin parallel layers, or otherwise composed of microstructures on the scale of the color's wavelength. If the microstructures are spaced randomly, light of shorter wavelengths will be scattered preferentially to produce Tyndall effect colors: the blue of the sky, aerogel of opals, and the blue of human irises. If the microstructures are aligned in arrays, for example the array of pits in a CD, they behave as a diffraction grating, the grating reflects different wavelengths in different directions due to interference phenomena, separating white light into colors. If the structure is one or more thin layers then it will reflect some wavelengths and transmit others, depending on the thickness of the layer(s).

Structural color is responsible for the blues and greens of many bird feathers (example, blue jay feathers) as well as certain butterfly wings and beetle shells. Variations in the pattern's spacing often give rise to an iridescent effect, as seen in peacock feathers, soap bubbles, films of oil, and mother of pearl, because the reflected color depends upon the viewing angle.

Structural color is studied in the field of thin-film optics. A layman's term that describes particularly the most ordered structural colors is iridescence.

aren't colors amazing!!!
I am going to have a hard time thinking about anything else today!
(I guess theoretically this could have some pretty interesting ramifications for race and identity too, based on whether one's skin color is "structural color" or "pigment..." and maybe can help diffuse the tension from a situation like the following (which is purely fictional, and meant only to inspire humor):

Monique: ...so what did you do for the holidays, Heather?
Heather: I went home and did the whole Christmas thing with my family - I got 2 sweaters from J. Crew, a new pair of jeans from Abercrombie, and a bunch of other stuff... how about you - did you celebrate Kwanzaa?
Monique: Kwanzaa!? Damn, Heather, why do you always have to act so white?
Heather: (quizzical look) ...well at least I'm not as white as the Cyphochilus beetle...
Monique: well, I guess that's true... I mean it's not like your skin color is structural or anything... ha! well I'm sorry... I guess we can still be friends.

2006-12-23T03:00:00.000Z

more evidence that demands a verdict...

2006-12-12T21:40:00.000Z

From The New York Times today...
Justin Lee believes that the Virgin birth was real, that there is a heaven and a hell, that salvation comes through Christ alone and that he, the 29-year-old son of Southern Baptists, is an evangelical Christian.

Justin Lee set up a Web site about being a gay evangelical Christian.

Just as he is certain about the tenets of his faith, Mr. Lee also knows he is gay, that he did not choose it and cannot change it.

To many people, Mr. Lee is a walking contradiction, and most evangelicals and gay people alike consider Christians like him horribly deluded about their faith. “I’ve gotten hate mail from both sides,” said Mr. Lee, who runs gaychristian.net, a Web site with 4,700 registered users that mostly attracts gay evangelicals.

The difficulty some evangelicals have in coping with same-sex attraction was thrown into relief on Sunday when the pastor of a Denver megachurch, the Rev. Paul Barnes, resigned after confessing to having sex with men. Mr. Barnes said he had often cried himself to sleep, begging God to end his attraction to men.

His departure followed by only a few weeks that of the Rev. Ted Haggard, then the president of the National Association of Evangelicals and the pastor of a Colorado Springs megachurch, after a male prostitute said Mr. Haggard had had a relationship with him for three years.

Though he did not publicly admit to the relationship, in a letter to his congregation, Mr. Haggard said that he was “guilty of sexual immorality” and that he had struggled all his life with impulses he called “repulsive and dark.”

While debates over homosexuality have upset many Christian and Jewish congregations, gay evangelicals come from a tradition whose leaders have led the fight against greater acceptance of homosexuals.

Gay evangelicals seem to have few paths carved out for them: they can leave religion behind; they can turn to theologically liberal congregations that often differ from the tradition they grew up in; or they can enter programs to try to change their behavior, even their orientation, through prayer and support.

But as gay men and lesbians grapple with their sexuality and an evangelical upbringing they cherish, some have come to accept both. And like other Christians who are trying to broaden the definition of evangelical to include other, though less charged, concerns like the environment and AIDS, gay evangelicals are trying to expand the understanding of evangelical to include them, too.

“A lot of people are freaked out because their only exposure to evangelicalism was a bad one, and a lot ask, ‘Why would you want to be part of a group that doesn’t like you very much?’ ” Mr. Lee said. “But it’s not about membership in groups. It’s about what I believe. Just because some people who believe the same things I do aren’t very loving doesn’t mean I stop believing what I do.”

The most well-known gay evangelical may be the Rev. Mel White, a former seminary professor and ghostwriter for the Rev. Jerry Falwell. Mr. White, who came out publicly in 1993, helped found Soulforce, a group that challenges Christian denominations and other institutions regarding their stance on homosexuality.

But over the last 30 years, rather than push for change, gay evangelicals have mostly created organizations where they are accepted.

Members of Evangelicals Concerned, founded in 1975 by a therapist from New York, Ralph Blair, worship in cities including Denver, New York and Seattle. Web sites have emerged, like Christianlesbians.com and Mr. Lee’s gaychristian.net, whose members include gay people struggling with coming out, those who lead celibate lives and those in relationships.

Justin Cannon, 22, a seminarian who grew up in a conservative Episcopal parish in Michigan, started two Web sites, including an Internet dating site for gay Christians.

“About 90 percent of the profiles say ‘Looking for someone with whom I can share my faith and that it would be a central part of our relationship,’ ” Mr. Cannon said, “so not just a life partner but someone with whom they can connect spiritually.”

But for most evangelicals, gay men and lesbians cannot truly be considered Christian, let alone evangelical.

“If by gay evangelical is meant someone who claims both to abide by the authority of Scripture and to engage in a self-affirming manner in homosexual unions, then the concept gay evangelical is a contradiction,” Robert A. J. Gagnon, associate professor of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, said in an e-mail message.

“Scripture clearly, pervasively, strongly, absolutely and counterculturally opposes all homosexual practice,” Dr. Gagnon said. “I trust that gay evangelicals would argue otherwise, but Christian proponents of homosexual practice have not made their case from Scripture.”

In fact, both sides look to Scripture. The debate is largely over seven passages in the Bible about same-sex couplings. Mr. Gagnon and other traditionalists say those passages unequivocally condemn same-sex couplings.

Those who advocate acceptance of gay people assert that the passages have to do with acts in the context of idolatry, prostitution or violence. The Bible, they argue, says nothing about homosexuality as it is largely understood today as an enduring orientation, or about committed long-term, same-sex relationships.
For some gay evangelicals, their faith in God helped them override the biblical restrictions people preached to them. One lesbian who attends Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh said she grew up in a devout Southern Baptist family and still has what she calls the “faith of a child.” When she figured out at 13 that she was gay, she believed there must have been something wrong with the Bible for condemning her.

“I always knew my own heart: that I loved the Lord, I loved Jesus, loved the church and felt the Spirit move through me when we sang,” said the woman, who declined to be identified to protect her partner’s privacy. “I felt that if God created me, how is that wrong?”

But most evangelicals struggle profoundly with reconciling their faith and homosexuality, and they write to people like Mr. Lee.

There is the 65-year-old minister who is a married father and gay. There are the teenagers considering suicide because they have been taught that gay people are an abomination. There are those who have tried the evangelical “ex-gay” therapies and never became straight.

Mr. Lee said he and his family, who live in Raleigh, have been through almost all of it. His faith was central to his life from an early age, he said. He got the nickname Godboy in high school. But because of his attraction to other boys, he wept at night and begged God to change him. He was certain God would, but when that did not happen, he said, it called everything into question.

He knew no one who was gay who could help, and he could not turn to his church. So for a year, Mr. Lee went to the library almost every day with a notebook and the bright blue leather-bound Bible his parents had given him. He set up his Web site to tell his friends what he was learning through his readings, but e-mail rolled in from strangers, because, he says, other gay evangelicals came to understand they were not alone.

“I told them I don’t have the answers,” Mr. Lee said, “but we can pray together and see where God takes us.”

But even when they accept themselves, gay evangelicals often have difficulty finding a community. They are too Christian for many gay people, with the evangelical rock they listen to and their talk of loving God. Mr. Lee plans to remain sexually abstinent until he is in a long-term, religiously blessed relationship, which would make him a curiosity in straight and gay circles alike.

Gay evangelicals seldom find churches that fit. Congregations and denominations that are open to gay people are often too liberal theologically for evangelicals. Yet those congregations whose preaching is familiar do not welcome gay members, those evangelicals said.

Clyde Zuber, 49, and Martin Fowler, 55, remember sitting on the curb outside Lakeview Baptist Church in Grand Prairie, Tex., almost 20 years ago, Sunday after Sunday, reading the Bible together, after the pastor told them they were not welcome inside. The men met at a Dallas church and have been together 23 years. In Durham, N.C., they attend an Episcopal church and hold a Bible study for gay evangelicals every Friday night at their home.

“Our faith is the basis of our lives,” said Mr. Fowler, a soft-spoken professor of philosophy. “It means that Jesus is the Lord of our household, that we resolve differences peacefully and through love.”

Their lives seem a testament to all that is changing and all that holds fast among evangelicals. Their parents came to their commitment ceremony 20 years ago, their decision ultimately an act of loyalty to their sons, Mr. Zuber said.

But Mr. Zuber’s sister and brother-in-law in Virginia remain convinced that the couple is sinning. “They’re worried we’re going to hell,” Mr. Zuber said. “They say, ‘We love you, but we’re concerned.’ ”

2006-12-09T18:51:00.000Z

Proof that Microsoft really is trying to take over the world...

I thought Windows Vista was pretty silly, but when I saw this, I knew it was true that the Windows empire had reached new levels of desperation. It is no different from the ghetto corner store which is doing so bad that they start trying to diversify by selling unsanitary cooked food, renting videos (bootlegged of course), and telling fortunes. Windows potato chips is just the beginning down the slippery slope which will end in the ultimate demise of Bill Gates' empire...
He even tried to hijack the One-Laptop-Per-Child project recently by getting Windows XP to run on the machines... Unfortunately it is just too obese of an OS for such a streamlined efficient machine.The harbingers of Microsoft's fate are making their presence felt, and we have a new world order emerging... we are entering an open source world:
There is something we call intellectual property, that is that one can own an idea, a thought... This idea is gradually eroding not by some ideological force - though there are some who oppose the concept of owning a thought altogether – but from the sheer weight of populist force... there is a sort of silent Marxist revolution presenting itself around the globe, and coming not just from the working class, but from the consuming class (if one can use such a term), that is by the exceeding weight of the world population over against the few legislators/power brokers. We are entering an “open-source” world – an informationally non-proprietary world where the value of knowledge is not determined or controlled at all by the producers, but by the consumers. The implications of this are on the one hand unthinkable, and on the other hand inevitable... the power shift from the nation-state to the multi-national mega-corporation that Lyotard describes in the Post-Modern Condition is further diffused to a populist “common grounds” ownership. Some of the most obvious examples are Wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube, Mozilla Firefox, and Linux, such that the empires/institutions of the proprietary encyclopedia (Brittanica, Encarta), the phone directory, television, and Microsoft (and most other software companies) will be toppled and rendered obsolete. These are all dependent to quite a large degree on the Internet, which of itself is a more or less non-proprietary resource of information of unrivaled vastness. It already has in large part but the major turning point will be the downfall of Microsoft, which has been thrust upon the world by the power of money, and timeliness. Clearly the corporation’s products are not without their merits, and their founder is not without a conscience, but the reality of the future of software is that open-source is the only way for the developing world to fully exploit the technological potential of the networked computer. What is not necessarily obvious, however, is the fact that the majority of computer users will soon be (if they are not already) in the developing world not the developed world, as the OLPC project introduces millions of laptops to developing nations (with Linux, and open-source software already on them) and the frenetic mobility of the west pushes more people away from personal computer use towards the use of mobile technologies (Blackberries, etc). Computing will be outsourced to the developing world, and the open-source savvy will be able to produce results that the others can’t. Corporate America will be forced to bend to the will and the reality of the masses. At the same time we must face the reality that printed books, radio, and television will not be replaced completely by non-proprietary sources of written, audio, and video information distribution – these are already entrenched in world societies to so deep an extent that to dispose of them entirely would be loss of cultural heritage in many cases. The nature of the cultural paradigm shift which is already underway, and is soon to reach a tipping point, is such that the primary means of communication and information exchange for the millennial generation will be through non-proprietary avenues, which has profound implications for the nature of knowledge, property, and society at large.

2006-12-08T15:26:00.000Z

Mauritanian tea shots

In Mauritania, one of the cultural institutions is drinking tea (known locally as atai). Several times a day, men and women will sit around and drink heavily sweetened green tea with fresh mint, in 3 rounds. It is poured from little round tea pots into what look like shot glasses, and poured back and forth between the glasses until a head of foam builds up. Being an Islamic Republic, Mauritania forbids alcohol, but the tea glasses just beg the question: what would a Mauritanian tea shot taste like? This is a question I have been wanting to answer for a long time, and finally, having left RIM, I have the opportunity.
Certainly a Mauritanian tea shot requires some tea, which is a rather unusual cutter for a mixed drink, but we are entering into new territory here, so we must explore every possibility.

Starting with a fine Stolichnaya Russian vodka, I mix about half and half with the sweetened tea. I am not a connoisseur of mixed drinks, but the first thing I think that it reminds my palate of is a subdued scotch... now, granted I have only had scotch once, and it didn’t have much of the “smoky” taste I associate with scotch (I described it as drinking a cigar), but it did remind me of the subdued sweetness and dull bite. After tasting a bit, I cut it some more to see how a different proportion of the two elements tastes. This time it tastes almost like what I guess a Long Island Iced tea would taste like, though I’ve never had one, so that probably doesn’t tell you much.

Next I reach for the Jack Daniels; I am told that scotch is a form of whiskey, so I expect it to taste even more like a scotch, and lamenting the fact that I already used up my scotch reference. But Jack Daniels is Sour Mash Whiskey, and it turns out reminding me of a grains nobles wine, though not quite as sweet. It tastes like somebody tried to salvage some rotten fruit first by trying to sweeten and thin it, but then decided to overpower it with something hard.

The idea of a variation on ‘gin and juice’ (as made famous by the Snoop Dogg song) tempts me to reach for the bottle of gin next. Well, actually, "My homey Dr. Dre came through with a gang of tanqueray..." At first it tastes simply like mouthwash, accentuating the mint taste in the tea, as I mix the tea 60/40 with the London dry gin on the rocks filling a tumbler halfway. But I decide to change course, waiting till morning for the Listerine, and topping off my drink with a tonic. Before getting into the taste, I have to ask myself what this invention should be called: atai and tonic, gin and tonic tea, teatonic gin? The gin on the rocks is really a good match with the mint tea, and the tonic (which seems to have a hint of lime) really rounds it out, giving the whole combination a taste of an atomic breathmint, which is incredibly refreshing. Unfortunately, this one can not be served in a tea glass, therefore it has to be disqualified.

Finally we have to try the Absolut Atai, tea and Absolut vodka over one ice cube. Like the first vodka mix, this one has that dark taste, but with the ice cube it doesn’t feel like a brooding drink to be nursed by the fire, but a social, playful cocktail to enjoy at the clubhouse. The increased mint is salient again, but the overall taste is like an ice tea that packs punch.
All that remains is for you, dear readers, to vote on your favorite type of Mauritanian tea shots - or experiment yourselves with other variations... the possibilities are endless!! So long for now...

2006-12-02T20:45:00.000Z

BBC's take on the Pope's visit to Turkey

"In Istanbul, we have, I believe, witnessed some defining moments of the papacy of Benedict XVI. He reached out to Muslims by praying facing towards Mecca in a famous mosque... Pope Benedict followed up on promises he had previously made at the Vatican with some very striking and eloquent gestures. The Pope won the praise of Turkey's former religious affairs director Mehmet Nuri Yilmaz for facing Mecca when he prayed in silence inside Istanbul's Blue Mosque."

The ongoing saga of the pope's relationship with the Muslim world, ignited by his comments a couple months ago continues with his trip to Turkey, seen by most as a conciliatory gesture (which many Turks have said was just a hollow going through the motions - notice the pink dye in the grey hair of the latter woman). He capped it off by praying in the famous Blue Mosque which, incidentally is not really very blue any more since they took off the blue paint (because it was not original) from the interior, so let's get used to calling it by it's real name, the Sultan Ahmed Mosque. The fact that he prayed facing Mecca would seem to stir up all kinds of turmoil among his followers, but I haven't come across any - maybe he did become a muslim!

Now that the dust has settled, some fairly articulate responses to the Pope's original comment have come to light, including an open letter from 38 top Muslim leaders inviting further dialogue, particularly concerning the relation of faith and reason, the topic of Ratzinger's address at Regensburg.

But one of the most important Islamic leaders, Sheikh Dr. Muhammad Sayyid Tantawy of Al-Azhar University had a slightly harsher response in THIS IS ISLAM: A Quiet Dialogue With his Holiness, the Pope of Vatican : "We kindly blame his Holiness the Pope of Vatican since he mentioned what Tudor Khory [Theodore Khoury] said in his book, and what the mad emperor spoke about Islam and Prophet Muhamed, may the blessings and peace of Allah be upon him, without commenting or proving his deny to [denial of?] such evil words."

Later on in his exchange of letters with Pope Ratzinger, Tantawy, addresses some of the issues of faith and reason:
"Your Holiness mentioned that the Professor Khoury quoted a statement of the noted French Islamicist R. Arnaldez, who pointed out that Ibn Hazm went so far as to state God is not bound even by His own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will we would even have to practice idolatry.
It could be understood from the above mentioned statements that some of the theologies questioning God is necessary and rational from Christian perspectives. Your Holiness supports this rational attitude in order to face the other pessimistic thought; they say God does not exist.
On the other hand, some of the theologians believe that seeking God through rationality is unnecessary and unproductive... I will clarify for your Holiness the conception of the doctrine in Islamic Shari'a and the status of rationality in Islam which follows:
Doctrine is a description of faith that encapsulates the pillars, principles and values of the religion which melt in the heart and become an integrated part of the human entity that urges him to defend it as he defends himself.
It is often said, as one thinks, so he believes and supports his belief. This means faith and belief are synonyms... Religious creed is of dire need in Human Nature. Mankind can not live a normal life without it. Those who claim they have liberated themselves from religion are decieved because in their inner selves they believe in myths and superstitions. They follow their egos. Out of their ignorance, they think that they are right and others are wrong.
In this regard, the well-known writer Abbas Mahmoud al-Akad, in his valuable book "Allah" said that in human nature there is a hunger to believe just as the physical body gets hungry. Therefore the soul seeks for its food like the physical body does... In summary the religious creed is a psychological necessity in human nature. It overwhelms our thinking, feeling, and conscience because it satisfies our normal desires. If creed is not available it will be invented. That is why every human has his creed that he defends even if it is false and contradicts rationality and reasonability...
As for the term "rationalism," in the Arabic language, it means understanding and perceiving. Reason is given as a tool for thinking, contemplation, dialogue, and judging the affairs of daily life. It forbids the human being from doing wrong. It is the most precious gift given by Allah to his servants so they may differentiate between good and evil, truth and error, virtue and vice... Islam considers rationality as the basis for moral responsibility, however this rationality has its limits and can not explain unseen issues."

Finally a paper presented by a prominent Egyptian intellectual at Columbia recently, included the following assessment of Pope Ratzinger's original comments at Regensburg:

After reading the text, I found out that the main idea was that reason is at the basis of faith.
This idea had been completely ignored by the media, while they concentrated on the quotation from the dialogue between a Byzantine Emperor and a Persian Muslim. This quotation was hurtful to Muslims feelings.
I found myself reacting with two opposite feelings. Happiness for the elevation of reasons’s value in religion, and sadness that Islam was accused as being evil and violent. To react to the speech out of these emotions would be to judge the speech while taking it out of its original context, and to judge it with prejudices. Because of this most of the people who were writing about the Pope’s speech were either against or in agreement with the speech, and thought he was either correct or wrong. However the main problem with this response was that no one was asking why he actually made these comments. To answer the question why, we must put the speech in it’s proper context, and in doing so we find out the following:
Firstly we can’t reject the accusation that Islam spread over the world through using the sword, while at the same time praising the colonial wars led by medieval emperors and call them “holy wars” for the propagation of faith. But those wars were far away from religion.
The Byzantine Emperor said this speech while the capital city of his empire was under the siege of Ottoman armies, that used religion as an instrument to build the Ottoman Empire. So in order not to be accused of not saying the truth, I’ll quote to you the text of a letter sent by the ottoman emperor Selim 1st to the egyptian muslim governor Toman Bey:
"From my sublime abode I inform you, rebel slave, that God revealed to my glorious person that I own Egypt from the east to the west. If you want to escape my power go and engrave my name on your coins. If you don't do this and you don't obey us, I'll invade Egypt in order to destroy its fortresses and to kill even foetuses in their mothers' bellies."
Any Muslim (who) believes that this sultan undertook a war in the name of Islam, has no right to ask the other to look at his history with fairness, because in this way he himself accuses Islam of having spread through using the sword.
The reason which we're speaking of can't be considered with duplicity. Unfortunately Muslims, while celebrating their history, don't look at the way by which Islam spread over South-East Asia without violence and without wars through the spiritual sufi movements and the commercial relations.
So when we speak of the relationship between Islam and Reason or Islam and violence in history or in the present moment, we must distinguish this from three different levels:
1st level: Islam as a religious theory.
2nd level: The interpretation of Islam in a specific historical moment.
3rd level: the practice of Islam today, in everyday life.
At the first level, we don't find any texts against thought and reason.
However, at the second level, in the interpretation of Islam in specific historical contexts, we find a lot of thoughts and principles against reason and against the Islamic religion itself. Here I will quote what the Muslim philosopher of the 9th century al-Kindi said, because he explains to us when the interpretation of Islam is against reason and religion altogether:
“Those are the ones who went away from truth, and nourish feelings of hostility towards philosophy to defend the positions they occupied without being worthy of them, but to excel and to trade with religion. But they have no religion because who trades with something, sells it, who sells something doesn't own it anymore, so who sells religion has no religion and it’s right to deprive of religion those who are against (philosophy) and called it misbelief.”
Some centuries after al-Kindi, Averroes came to repeat the same words.
At the 3rd level, in the actual practice of Islam, we can clearly see the scientific and economic backwardness, and the political corruption in which Muslims live today. This backwardness controls and affects their practice of Islam. Today we have two Islams: the first Islam is the ideal Islam that we believe in, and the second one is the Islam that we actually live and practise in everyday life, which oftentimes belongs to medieval interpretations more than to the reality of the Holy Scriptures themselves.
So, I conclude that I don't find any contradiction between what the Pope said – that reason is at the basis of faith and faith is opposite to violence – and my belief that Islam is a religion of love and mercy."

2006-12-02T10:01:00.000Z

The last 3 weeks have been so crazy sleeping in a different place every night...I don't have time to write down how the whole journey was now, but I do have a story written down of some travels last year in October which were similarly adventurous (I had to write this recently to be considered for a job writing for The Rough Guides)

The Dakar-Bamako "Express"
There are rumors of a train that zips 1,200 kilometers across French
West Africa, connecting two of its most important capitals – Dakar,
Senegal and Bamako, Mali. And when we think of trains, usually we
conceive of the timely and orderly running of huge machines with
incredible precision. A friend in Bamako, upon hearing that I would
be taking this route to come visit him, warned me that in fact I
should expect quite the opposite by saying with no shortage of sarcasm
– Oh, you're taking the Bamako " " "Express" " " - with crooked
fingers: quote, unquote. The train leaves from Dakar twice a week, on
Saturdays, and Wednesdays and one must arrive plenty early to get a
seat unless willing to fork over the "big bucks" for a first-class
guaranteed seat. The latter will cost you 50 grand – CFA that is.
[Francs CFA (pronounced seh-fa, meaning Communauté Financière
Africaine – African Financial community) used throughout French West
Africa and are fixed to the French franc... which of course doesn't
exist anymore, so they are fixed to the Euro at 656 francs CFA to 1
Euro – though in Dakar you'll be lucky to buy CFA at 645/Euro on the
street (big bills are preferable for black-market transactions), and
not likely get more than 630-635/Euro in a bank.] The second-class
tickets run about half that, which is only a little more than the
travel method which has recently overtaken the "Express" in popularity
on this trajectory: coach buses running at 15,000 CFA. Though large
sections of the road are unpaved, most notably between Mali's second
biggest city, Kayes, in the northwest, and Bamako. This stretch has
relied on the railway for decades, but since the government began work
on a graded road, which they are covering with blacktop bit by bit,
automobiles without four-wheel drive are finally able to make the trek
in about the same time, pushing the price down. Given that it is
still at best a mediocre road, and given the condition of most cars in
West Africa (barely running), plus the extent to which such vehicles
are overloaded, one would think only those with an irrational phobia
of trains would bother. But this doesn't seem to be the case. I came
to the train station in Dakar on Friday morning to get tickets, having
heard that it leaves each Saturday. After asking everyone in the
station for information on the "Express," I was directed to the chief,
who, smoking and drinking coffee in his office on the second floor
behind the station's clock, overlooking from a large window the
arrivals and departures of all the trains, was chatting with his
co-workers when I interrupted. He met my petition with an abrupt,
"There is no train. Come back tomorrow." Mystified, I probed for
more information, met with mumbles of repairs, problems, and then a
glib reassurance that "There are no problems. Tomorrow, if God wills
it." Spending the rest of the day seeing Dakar, I found respite from
the hounding street-hawkers only as the speakers of the mosques began
to blare, "God is great! God is great! There is no God but God! Come
to prayer!" from every corner in a cacophonously ironic disunity,
calling Muslims (94% of Senegal's population) to the one prayer time
that unites Muslims of all different sects observant and
non-observant. The mosques burst at the seams, and worshipers spread
their prayer rugs on the streets; even my taxi driver stops suddenly,
explaining "Just a minute."
Wandering a little further, I find myself at "Point E," (pronounced pwant euh) the largest transportation terminus in the city, where you can get a car to anywhere. It doubles as a garage for the myriad repairs and tweakings that need doing to get the vehicles up and running before venturing on a long trip into the interior, and I ran across one young man whose grease-covered shirt prompted me to burst out laughing - "Don't tourist me, I'm on vacation." Here was this teenager, working himself to the bone, to the extent that his shirt, once white, had turned entirely black with car grease and filth, and I, living the easy life on vacation – I had to do something... and I had to get that shirt. Luckily, in Senegal, everything is for sale –
charms that immunize against snake bites, democratic votes, people (even small children!) - so buying a shirt off of someone's back is not as hard as it sounds. So for the mere price of a brand new bright
red soccer jersey, (more than it should have been, since I needed it
quick from the nearest store) I got my shirt, and hopefully lightened
the grinding burden of work for that young man at least temporarily.
The next day at the train station, the boss informs me the train
leaves tomorrow. From Bamako. Maybe it will arrive Wednesday. Or
Thursday. So, venturing not far beyond the station, I see a bus line,
but before getting there a man accosts me to ask if I want a ticket
for a bus to Bamako. My suspicion only increases as, leading me into
the office he describes the air conditioning, the reclining seats of
the state of the art coach bus, and then quotes off the price while
tearing off a ticket for me. The fact that the ticket has the price
of 15,000 CFA printed on it is no reassurance, and I insist on seeing
the bus I will be taking. Still wary, I apologetically tell them I
will pay when I board the bus, telling them that I have to go to the
ATM (though I already have enough cash).
The converted school bus is crowded and hot, but the intense heat of
the day subsides with the setting sun. Long land journeys in West
Africa almost always begin at sunset to avoid the heat of the day for
as long as possible. We zip past Senegal's Sahelian flora, which is
not so dry as the Sahara, but not so green as tropical sub-Saharan
Africa, where a surprising number of the passengers - Nigerians,
Ghanaians, Ivorians – were headed after Bamako. Each police check
required a little palm greasing from those who did not have the
correct identity papers or visas, which, in a bus of 40 or so people,
ends up being enough to take a long time. Always on the lookout for
bizarre things, I spot a man wearing a t-shirt emblazoned "Hug
Therapist," with a teddy bear hugging himself. At first I try to
ignore it, but after three different stops on each side of the border:
Kidira, Senegal and Diboli, Mali - police, gendarmes, customs,
finally I decide I need to add to my t-shirt collection. I strike up
a conversation with him as the police inspect his wares – he is a
trader from Nigeria; I start to bring up the subject of his shirt –
what is a rugged man of commerce like him doing wearing a shirt that
is so "sensitive," anyways? I compliment his shirt, which is actually
a backhanded way of saying "I want your shirt," in fact you may be
stopped on numerous occasions by people who you don't know saying
"give me your watch" - they often don't actually expect your watch,
that is just a culturally accepted way of complimenting the owner. A
quick and clever rejoinder, such as, "Yes, but only if you give me
your wrist so I can still tell the time" is the right way to play
along with the game, rather than becoming irate and yelling at the
unconscionable request. My inversion of the formula has not yet
succeeded in procuring me a shirt, and it looks like our bus may be
moving on soon, so I try the more direct approach: I'll give you
another shirt, which is much nicer, if you give me that t-shirt. He
laughs; I rifle through my pack for a decent collared shirt; the deal
is done. Welcome to Mali.
The first major city in the West of Mali is Kayes, the hottest
continuously-inhabited city in Africa – fortunately we arrive with
the sun down, though it is still steamy and humid. Our "quick stop"
turns into a decision that the bus will pass the night in Kayes,
though it is only just after sunset now. Not acceptable – I am on the
"Express" after all, and I need to get to Bamako as quickly as
possible; besides who wants to sleep at a dusty bus stop in Kayes with
a bunch of strangers? So I start walking on the road that leads to
Bamako, hoping to catch a vehicle that is continuing on through the
night. A generous offer of a free ride to the police post at the
edge of town gets me on a good start, and once there I explain to the
police that I need to go to Bamako, and he agrees to get me on
anything on wheels going that way, though he says there won't be much,
since the curfew in Kayes means that no cars can leave there after
8pm. So I wait. I sit, and chat, hoping each passing sound will be a
ride for me. It is peanut season, so a branch with peanuts happens to
be at the side of the road, so I pick up and start eating, having
missed lunch because of the border checkpoints, and having forgotten
to get dinner in Kayes. As midnight approaches, the friendly police
officer finds a fold out army-cot to sleep on, with the assumption
that no other cars will pass through, and of course just as I lay
down, a truck comes up, on its way to Bamako. I jump into the cab
behind the driver, thanking him profusely, and thanking the police
officer as well; apparently having noticed me scrounging at the
groundnuts, he presses 5,000 CFA into my hand, and tells me to get
myself something to eat. Shocked, I insist he should keep the money,
but he insists still harder, with a fatherly smile, "Just, keep it
son."
The truck is by far more comfortable than the bus was, though the
driver's taste in music leaves me mystified. It sounds familiar, as
far as the tune, but the words are strange; having spent quite a bit
of time in West Africa, I recognize that the language is not any I
have heard. It resembles most closely a Bollywood-style musical,
surprisingly enough – though these are actually quite popular in West
Africa, to the extent that one local Fulani dialect has borrowed a
word for key (chabi) from Hindi because of its use in Indian films.
The unmistakable strains of "Thriller" dispel any doubt – these are in
fact Hindi covers of American pop songs, being played in a 20-ton
truck on its way to Bamako, Mali. The sweet sounds of familiarity
lull me to sleep.
I awake in the morning to a flat tire. The driver says the wheel
is damaged beyond what he can repair, and reluctantly I flag down
other vehicles going past on the red-dust road, hoping they have
space. Finally, I find a small car that will take me, but he insists
on an unreasonable price; I haggle, but he is firm. He comes down by
half, but still not what I know it should cost less. I walk off, and
he drives away; finally convinced that I am serious, he gives in.
Five hours later we pull into Bamako. It has been 44 hours, three
vehicles, and 1,200 kilometers. But no "Express."

2006-11-08T21:21:00.000Z

RUMSFELD

Another one bites the dust...

but maybe the joke is on us, for being in the least surprised...

The president made it quite clear at a news conference after the election that he had decided beforehand that a "fresh perspective" was needed at the Pentagon.

This means that, win or lose the election, Mr Bush had decided that things were going badly enough to remove one of the architects of the war. (BBC)

"a reporter for AP who had spoken to Bush last week noted that Bush had told him Rumsfeld was there for the long haul, and that this was clearly not true and Bush had known it was not true.

Bush's response was that he didn't want to announce a major shift in thinking toward the end of a campaign, and that he wanted the reporter to go on to the next question. So in other words, in order to win the election for the Republicans, he lied to the reporter." (Daily KOS)

He was determined to break what he saw as the old guard and to get control of policy himself, which he felt was too much in the hands of the generals and admirals.
He wanted a slimmer, more mobile military, one more capable of waging war on international terrorists and governments that supported them and less concentrated on the massive weapons systems that were being developed as if the Cold War had not ended.
Donald Rumsfeld felt himself to be the right man, in the right place, at the right time.
His direct, irascible, sometimes even folksy style appealed to many when things were going well. His famous dictum about there being "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns", made pre-Iraq, was seen as quirky and "Rummy" at his most idiosyncratic.
In a resignation appearance with President Bush and his own successor in the Oval Office, Mr Rumsfeld referred. almost as if he had not been appreciated, to "this little understood, unfamiliar war, the first war of the 21st century... It is not well known, it was not well understood, it is complex for people to comprehend." (BBC)

And who will replace him?

Mr Bush said he was appointing Robert Gates, 63, to take over as defence secretary. Mr Gates served as CIA director for just over a year in the early 1990s, during the presidency of Mr Bush's father, former President George Bush. He is a member of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which is tasked with recommending ways of tackling the problems the US faces in Iraq. Correspondents say Mr Gates is widely respected by both Democrats and Republicans, which will help gain Senate confirmation even if the Republicans lose their majority. (BBC)

wait, so who has the last laugh here? This was clearly premeditated...not just recently, but for quite a while... like maybe when there was the big hullabaloo about Rumsfeld resigning back a few months ago, they were just thinking to themselves "just wait a few months, so we can through the Democrats a bone after they trounce us in the midterm elections, to make it seem as though we are listening to the voters wishes..."

And, sure, Rumsfeld might feel like kind of a jerk, cause everyone is acknowledging that he screwed up, even the people on his own side, but y'know he's got plenty to fall back on. I'm sure.

2006-11-08T12:56:00.000Z

The big news for today of course is that in the midterm congressional elections, it seems as though the Democrats have taken control over the House, but the Senate will be split. But as the pajamistas have it - it was more of a GOP loss than a Democratic gain, and it seems not even that great of a gain - not even a loss for conservatism, but a loss for Bush's style of republicanism... in the words of my new earpiece:
You try to vote and participate in the government
And the muh'f-in' Democrats is actin' like Republicans
in Kweli's The Beautiful Struggle (the song will only be available on this link for 7 days so get it fast ;)
Nonetheless it was a pretty noteworthy election in some other ways, including the first election of a Muslim to Congress and of course Massachusetts historic and landslide election of Deval Patrick (below from The Globe):
"Patrick's election marks a watershed for Massachusetts, which has only once before elected a black man to statewide office. Voters elected Republican Edward W. Brooke attorney general in 1962 and US senator in 1966 and 1972. Patrick is the second African-American to be elected governor in the United States since Reconstruction; L. Douglas Wilder served a term as Virginia's governor from 1990 to 1994."
Is nobody else totally shocked, disgusted, and appalled by this? only 2 governors (not to mention only 2 Senators) from the African-American community since the Reconstruction?!?! Doesn't that sound regressive? I mean sure there have been lots of black mayors and not a few state representatives, but, let's be serious - everybody knows that it is the Senators and Governors that are in line for the presidency... the fact that these five candidates were up for these positions is a step in the right direction, maybe:

Michael Steele: US Senate - MD
Deval Patrick: Gov. of Massachusetts
Harold Ford Jr: US Senate - TN
Lynn Swann: Gov. of Pennsylvania
Ken Blackwell: Gov. of Ohio

But the fact that almost half of them were running on the GOP ticket is sort of surprising...

Cobb gives some good analysis of the changing face of black politics:

"Clearly, black folks are not united behind black candidates. The voices are clear who are saying that there should be different standards by which black candidates are judged and rewarded, and those voices are coming from the black electorate. That voice is saying, forget your America, deal with my America - the America of inner-city dysfunction. But the ghetto is not black America. That's a sad place for black political demands to be tied, especially considering that the majority of African Americans are already in the mainstream of the middle class. Apparently, there's not quite enough pride in that accomplishment, which is why folks like Lamell McMorris speak as they do - to remind black candidates, with a black voice, that the ghetto calls.

Civil Rights is done. Voting Rights are guaranteed. If anyone should know it, it is Deval Patrick who is not running for Civil Rights Commissioner, but Governor. He's already been in the Civil Rights business under Clinton. And now that Harvard lawyer has moved on. Shouldn't the rest of the black electorate?

There is a time and a place for everything under the sun. According to some blackfolks, the time for African American candidates to lead the country will not come until the ghetto is no more. Instead of being championed as leaders in the greatest nation on Earth, these candidates are rejected for not playing ghetto games. I think blackfolks will all come to regret the day in November 2006 when so many sat home pouting in antipathy to the uppity Negroes who dared to be great. "

Strong words from a black conservative, but at the end of the day, it is only Patrick who was elected, despite some shocking last-ditch efforts by Ford to get some attention from...the very people he wants to distance himself most from (whistlin'-dixie confederates)?!? Who knows, maybe, as Baratunde Thurston puts "I'll be a black conservative for $240,000..."

2006-11-06T01:09:00.000Z

Some different views as the Ted Haggard drama unfolds...
from Macky Alston (on beliefnet.com) :

Whatever is playing itself out in the news around the Rev. Ted Haggard and Mike Jones, the man he paid for drugs and to be fondled by if for nothing else, it is unlikely to benefit lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people in America on the eve of a critical roster of votes for us. We are not fighting for fondling for money. We are not fighting to legalize methamphetamines. We are fighting for the legal right to be steady with our spouses and to have our own five children if we so choose. Who is leading the moral course here?

Until the last two days, I have never had compassion for the Rev. Ted Haggard, president of the 30 million-member National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), the largest evangelical group in America, and senior pastor of the 14,000-member New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Until yesterday, Haggard was just my oppressor – opponent of the rights that I believe God intends me and all his other children to possess. I am a gay American deprived of the right to marry my partner of 14 years and co-parent of my two children. Until yesterday, Haggard told untruths - that the most beautiful aspect of my life was abominable. Today, Haggard’s story tells truths – that life and all who live it are more complicated than fundamentalists want us to believe.

I am the son of a minister. I attended a Christian seminary for four years. One of the few things that I know for sure is that clergy are as human as the rest of us. The debacle that Ted Haggard walked into yesterday is an opportunity for us to awaken to the gritty human realities that are everyone’s to grapple with. I don’t care what leads people like Bill Clinton, Mark Foley and Ted Haggard to do the very thing that is certain to ruin their careers. Perhaps it is the narcotic of power. Perhaps it is a society that requires its leaders to be less imperfect than the rest of us. All I know is that the combination of intolerance and hypocrisy from podiums and pulpits of power will never achieve the goals that the religious right hope to meet. I believe it is a time to remember that Jesus identified with the poor, the oppressed and the marginalized. It is they, not himself, that he came to set free.

We are all tempted all the time to fall short of who we aim to be and there are social systems designed to undergird our best nature. Institutions of religion and marriage are at best two such systems and ought to be available and open to all, so that all of us, regardless of race, class, sex, or sexual orientation, may become our best selves. Although Haggard has had a lifetime of access to both religion and marriage, still he falls. So he’s human. I hope he fares better in the next chapter of his personal growth. I have not been so lucky. A gay Christian, I was born into a church that refuses to grant me equality and a country that withholds the age-old tradition (complete with economic and social benefits) that might in fact enable me to live into my best self.

From Haggard's wife, Gayle:

What I want you to know is that I love my husband, Ted Haggard, with all my heart. I am committed to him until death "do us part". We started this journey together and with the grace of God, we will finish together.

If I were standing before you today, I would not change one iota of what I have been teaching the women of our church. For those of you who have been concerned that my marriage was so perfect I could not possibly relate to the women who are facing great difficulties, know that this will never again be the case. My test has begun; watch me. I will try to prove myself faithful...

As you try to make sense of these past few days, know that Ted believes with all his heart and soul everything he has ever taught you, those things you are putting into practice.

And from the Baptist Press (I thought this was a joke or a parody when I first started reading it, but it's not):

I love hypocrites.
So many of them are good people who need God’s love, such as hypocrites like Ted Haggard and, uh, hypocrites like me and perhaps you.
Haggard, as you know, has been accused by a male prostitute of purchasing methamphetamine for use during their alleged encounters the past couple of years. Haggard, who has acknowledged purchasing the methamphetamine but denied ever using it or ever engaging in homosexual relations, now is on a leave of absence as pastor of a prominent Colorado Springs church and has resigned as president of the National Association of Evangelicals.
The prostitute, a Denver man by the name of Mike Jones, has defended going public with the allegations by saying, “I think I had to do the moral thing in my mind, and that is expose someone who is preaching one thing and doing the opposite behind everybody’s back.”
No doubt, there are hypocrites, imperfect people and even addicts of all kinds within the Christian community.
To their credit, however, these individuals have the courage to embrace a faith that challenges their sin and seeks to redeem their lives.
Sadly, people outside the faith have no such resource. Hypocrites, imperfect people and addicts who lack the transforming dynamic of Christian faith have only the frailty of human will and manmade psychology/psychiatry upon which to build lives of integrity.
Rarely are addictions to various forms of depravity easily broken. A relationship with Jesus always will prove to be an uplifting, precious addition to a believer’s life, and some believers may see their weaknesses and addictions quickly fall away. But, for others, struggles with the inner churnings of sin may continue to exist after they have turned to Jesus for salvation. Some believers may find that their earlier addictions remain ever-ready to erupt. It may be months or years before all of their sinful habits and inclinations are eradicated.
And so, it is entirely possible for a believer to be what the world calls a “hypocrite,” to believe with all of his or her heart that such-and-such a behavior is sinful yet, in a weak moment, commit that sin.
An accusatory type of guilt often sweeps over believers throughout these struggles. Whether quietly nagging at their souls or aggressively pounding against their minds and even their bodies, the guilt seems to have a demonic energy, demanding an answer to such taunts as “You’re despicable. How can someone like you call yourself a Christian?”
This guilt is not confined to Christians. Open-hearted nonbelievers likewise are beaten down after various episodes of sin by the roar of such taunts as “You’re a hopeless mess. How can someone like you ever think of knowing God?”
By God’s supernatural grace, we gain the opportunity to become as fresh as the first day He entered our lives, poised to venture forth again in ever-more-rejuvenating faith.
If you have not yet embraced God’s gift of salvation, know that it is the most wholesome, healthiest experience a person can have this side of heaven. There is not a reason in this world to spend a minute longer separated from God.
Just pray.
Ask God to forgive your sins.
Ask Jesus to come into your heart.
Trust Him with every facet of your life from this day forward.
Begin reading the Bible regularly to grasp more and more of the glory of new birth. And begin searching out a Christ-centered, Bible-believing church where, even if you’re a hypocrite at times, you can worship God and become involved in sharing this life-saving faith with all who need a rescue from their sins.

Never miss a chance for an altar call. Never. Even on the internet... Some Baptists never change ;)

So, it seems there are three issues here: 1) the deceptive nature of Haggard's actions, which essential seems to have constituted a double life, 2) the homosexual nature of those acts, 3) the political significance of same-sex marriage in the conservative agenda

I think most people will agree that what Haggard did a la 1) was wrong. I think many people would say though, that somehow 3) had an undue influence on the secretiveness about the 2)ness of the actions. But I think this whole scandal is going to go a long way towards convincing people that the 2)ness of the actions is not as bad as the 3)ness of allowing politics to commndeer how we think about matters theologically and spiritually. Even Dobson said in reaction to the confession, "all sexual sin, whether heterosexual or homosexual, is serious." A bit of compassion is being forced upon the religious right now in regards to same-sex marriages and homosexuality in general. Now, if Haggard emerges from this with an attitude of "Yes, this deceptive double-life I led was wrong and very hurtful, but somehow my conscience can not accept that the homosexual urge, which I have felt my whole life, was wrong, and that the repression of that urge, over the course of more than 30 years, was right. Furthermore, my politicization of this issue, to the extent of protesting and lobbying congress for amendments against gay marriage strikes me as a hypocrisy against self and conscience which I can no longer accept." That would re-open the debate about what attitude evangelicalism is going to take towards homosexuality, in a very interesting way. Or maybe he'll take his wife's advice...

2006-11-03T21:57:00.000Z

These words remind me of the good old days of "The Dictionary Game" - the real, non-institutionalized version of what some people now call "Balderdash." I don't remember the words, just the definitions and the family members crying, rolling, choking with laughter as they tried to read: "The stench of fried limburger cheese..." or "The silent sound of icebergs slipping gracefully into the sea..." (the latter of course after a 2-hour long slide-show presentation of my grandmother's vacation to Alaska...)

Once again, The Washington Post has published the winning submissions to its yearly contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words.

The winners are:
1. Coffee (n.) the person upon whom one coughs.
2. Flabbergasted (adj.) appalled over how much weight you have gained.
3. Abdicate (v.) to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.
4. Esplanade (v.) to attempt an explanation while drunk.
5. Willy-nilly (adj.) impotent.
6. Negligent (adj) describes a condition in which you absent-mindedly answer the door in your nightgown.
7. Lymph (v.) to walk with a lisp.
8. Gargoyle (n.) olive-flavored mouthwash.
9. Flatulence (n.) emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are run over by a steamroller.
10. Balderdash (n.) a rapidly receding hairline.
11. Testicle (n.) a humorous question on an exam.
12. Rectitude (n.) the formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.
13. Pokemon (n) a Rastafarian proctologist.
14. Oyster (n.) a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.
15. Frisbeetarianism (n.) (back by popular demand): The belief that, when you die, your Soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.
16. Circumvent (n.) an opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men.

The Washington Post's Style Invitational once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. Here are this year's winners:

1. Bozone (n.) The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.
2. Cashtration (n.) The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.
3. Giraffiti (n) Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.
4. Sarchasm (n) The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit! and the person who doesn't get it.
5 Inoculatte (v) To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.
6. Hipatitis (n) Terminal coolness.
7. Osteopornosis (n) A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)
8. Karmageddon (n) It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.
9. Decafalon (n.) The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.
10. Glibido (v) All talk and no action.
11. Dopelar effect (n) The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
12. Arachnoleptic fit (n.) The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.
13. Beelzebug (n.) Satan in the form of a mosquito that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.
14. Caterpallor (n.) The color you turn after finding half a grub in the fruit you're eating.

And the pick of the literature:
Ignoranus (n): A person who's both stupid and an asshole.

Despite (or maybe in confirmation of?) the claims of some, only about 7 of the 30 employ some sort of dirty/potty/sexual double entendre...

2006-11-03T13:25:00.000Z

(CNN) -- The president of the National Association of Evangelicals resigned Thursday after denying an accusation by a male prostitute that the pastor paid him for sex over three years.

The Rev. Ted Haggard said he is also temporarily stepping aside from the pulpit of his church in Colorado Springs, Colorado, pending an internal investigation by the church...

(KTTV - Colorado)
A sudden about-face in the scandal facing New Life Church's pastor.

After Pastor Ted Haggard went public Wednesday night denying allegations of a homosexual affair, senior church officials told KKTV 11News Thursday evening, Pastor Ted Haggard has admitted to some of the claims made by a former male escort. The church's Acting Senior Pastor, Ross Parsley, tells KKTV 11 News that Pastor Haggard has admitted to some of the indiscretions claimed by Mike Jones, but not all of them.s

Right now, the situation is under investigation by an independent panel of leaders from four outside churches. The leaders are from Colorado Springs, Larkspur, Westminster and Louisiana. The panel's role is to decide if Haggard will be exonerated, released from his duties or restored to his pastorship.

Earlier Thursday, Haggard resigned as President of the National Association of Evangelicals, and placed himself on administrative leave as head of New Life Church. New Life Church has an estimated 14,000 members, while the NAE claims roughly 30 million members.

This is kind of a Big Deal... I wonder when the last time there was so prominent an evangelical leader toppled by scandal... oh wait it sounds like there are a couple of them going on even now... even your favorite healer Benny Hinn. This hearkens back to the days of the late 80's when the televangelists started dropping like flies... Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, and Oral Roberts (whose school Haggard went to, incidentally). Well they found the sex scandal, now the question is "Where is the financial scandal?" they always come together...

2006-11-02T18:04:00.000Z

Talib Kweli's "Listen"

Friends, Romans, countrymen lend me your ear
Start repenting 'cause the ending is near
But don't panic, you can't function if you living in fear
Pay attention, you gotta listen to hear
Who the fuck you think you talkin' to?
Put you on hold, get a specialist to walk you through
Kweli, the flow captain of fast and slow rappin'
I'm so crackin', you ain't heard, your shit appear like closed captions
King of the bars and I'm goin' hard, pause
All my confidence comes from knowin' God's laws
Bangin' on the system, fightin' my kinda war
Loud as a whisper, quiet as a lion's roar

Talib Kweli--Listen!!!

2006-10-28T14:35:00.000Z

BOSTON

I think it is a pretty safe assumption that Boston is the best city in the world - and I am not the only person to think that. But let's see what the first Pilgrims had to say...

John Smith, 1614 on map title: "The Paradise of New England"

Phineas Pratt, 1623 leader of Wessagussett community (now Weymouth) in his diary, concerning Myles Standish: "After a rousing speech, and invocation of our great and victorious God, General Standish went to the observation post to scout the position of the enemy, whereupon two Natives standing below were heard libelling him thusly: So short a man as he will not be able to catch us for where we go into the rivers or marshy lands up to our ankles, he will be mired to the waist."

William Blackstone, 1625 Upon arrival in a letter to his mother: "Mother Dearest, It is a fine land I have chanced upon, rather swampy in parts, rocky in others. I daresay it rather resembles the consistency of your porridge."

Wetawaumet, 1627 Indian leader assassinated by Myles Standish: "This land brings nothing but sickness to those who enter. Beware of the dirty waters."

Wetawaumet, later in 1627 after all the colonists except Blackstone die or leave: "Told you so."

Blackstone, 1630 : "Dear Mother, I regret any insult I mentioned of your porridge - I am quite sure now this land is much worse. Believe me I have tried. Please send some porridge as soon as possible."

Edward Winslow, 1632: "There on that glorious sunset evening in the commons of Boston we searched for a birch to which the church could hitch the witch who cursed the clergy. Unfortunately the birch did not support her weight, and she claimed it was a sign from God of her innocence. And we agreed that God had indeed blessed her with a prodigious corpulence, as none could deny. And as she walked off into the sunset, vindicated, she eclipsed the sun..."

2006-10-18T14:54:00.000Z

Assymetric Warfare

as 10 Americans died today in Iraq - one of the highest single-day totals, I thought I would post this intersting article from the dKosopedia of The Daily Kos fame...

Flies vs. Hammers: How Asymmetric Warfare Works
Watching the coverage of the Israel/Hezbollah conflict and the reactions of the American public, I've been struck by how poorly most Americans - and even most of the so-called experts - understand asymmetric warfare. This is a disastrous bit of ignorance, because unless and until China becomes a Soviet-style threat, all of America's wars will be asymmetric.
Let's start with the more familiar notion: Symmetric warfare is when both sides have more or less the same weapons and tactics. In World War II, for example, the German tanks, planes, and machine guns battled the Allied tanks, planes, and machine guns. In the American Civil War, blue and grey alike had cannons and rifles and cavalry. In a conventional symmetric war, armies take and hold territory, there's a front line, and it's not too hard to tell the difference between soldiers and civilians.
Brutal and destructive as it can be, symmetric warfare has become (to a certain extent) civilized. There are rules. Soldiers wear uniforms so that you can tell who they are rather than shooting everything that moves. When soldiers surrender, a whole set of gentlemen's agreements come into play. Soldiers are like chess pieces; once captured they are removed from the board and kept safe until the end of the game. International agreements also proscribe the use of indiscriminate weapons like poison gas or disease.
These rules developed over centuries when warfare in Europe really was a kind of game. Wars centered on issues of little consequence to the average person: which brother would be king, whether your town sent tribute payments to Paris or to Vienna, and so on. If you were a civilian, you kept your head down, waited for the dust to settle, and then paid your taxes to the winner. Even soldiers were playing a kind of game. Some were mercenaries who fought under many different flags in the course of a career. Others (like my Alsatian ancestors) came from border provinces, and so owed their allegiance to whichever king had won the previous war. You did your job, but after the outcome was clear there was no sense getting yourself killed.
When wars were fought over something that struck deeper - like the Crusades or the Catholic/Protestant wars of the 1600's - rules went out the window. The Thirty Years War, for example, depopulated entire regions of central Europe.
When Losers Don't Quit
Asymmetric warfare happens when it's obvious who the winner of a symmetric war would be - maybe a symmetric war has already been fought and decisively won - but some core group on the losing side is not willing to give up and get on with life. Replaying the game of civilized symmetric warfare would just get them slaughtered to no purpose, but the issues of the war are so important that they cannot simply accept defeat. And so they fight on - outside the game, outside the rules.
Asymmetric warriors don't wear uniforms and fight pitched battles. Rather than defending territory, they accept that the opposing force can go where it wants, killing and destroying at will. They hide among civilians, they hit and run, and they attack whatever targets their enemy values but has left undefended. Often those targets are non-combatants.
To the winners of the symmetric war (and all others who remain locked into the game mentality of symmetric warfare) the asymmetric warriors just look like sore losers. If the asymmetric warriors were civilized and honorable, they would wear uniforms and face their opponents' soldiers on a battlefield - and get slaughtered like vermin. The asymmetric tactics - attacking civilians and running away from soldiers - look cowardly, even when they lead to certain death. And because the decisive war is already supposed to be over, an asymmetric attack looks like pointless destruction, killing for the sake of killing.
And it would be, if not for one fact: Sometimes the asymmetric warriors win. How on Earth does that happen?
How Insurgents Win
Asymmetric warfare works in a very specific situation: The winner of the symmetric war wants to govern the region (or hand it off to a local client government) at a finite cost. If the asymmetric warriors - in this setting let's call them insurgents and their opponents occupiers - can make the territory ungovernable and establish themselves in such a way that they cannot be crushed within the cost parameters of the occupiers, then eventually the occupiers will have to give them at least part of what they want.
In other words, insurgents win by not losing. If the occupiers find the status quo unacceptable, but have no acceptable way to bring the insurgency to an end, then it is only a matter of time before they realize their goals cannot be achieved. It's up to the occupiers to decide when to stop the bleeding and admit defeat, but they have lost. This is the story of the Americans in Vietnam, the Soviets in Afghanistan, and white settler governments in various parts of Africa. It is arguably the story of the Americans in Iraq as well.
(It is worth noting why this is not - at least not yet - the story of Israel in the West Bank and Gaza. The difference is that the Israeli level of commitment very nearly matches that of its opponents. Israel is unable to crush the Palestinian insurgency, but seems ready to bleed at this level into the indefinite future.)
Americans have a hard time grasping this basic fact: Right up to the day the occupying power admits defeat and pulls out, it continues to wield overwhelming force. It may never lose a pitched battle. It may - right up to the end - be able to go where it wants, killing and destroying at will.
That doesn't mean it's not losing.
The Recruitment Pipeline
If insurgents win by not losing, then the question shifts: How do they lose?
They lose by wasting away. Their numbers diminish by death, captivity, or discouragement and they are unable to replenish themselves with new recruits. Recruiting is an essential part of any insurgency, because the occupiers will always appear to be winning the battle of attrition. Occupying soldiers are trying to kill insurgents while insurgents are trying to avoid occupiers, so any body count will favor the occupiers - right up to the day they admit defeat and pull out.
In a successful insurgency, warriors are only the tip of a large iceberg. Even though the number of active warriors may be small, a much larger segment of the population is at some earlier stage of recruitment. Some sympathize with the insurgents silently; they know who the warriors are, but chose not to tell the occupiers. Some help in small ways, by delivering messages, holding money, or even hiding weapons. Some harbor warriors and help them hide from the occupiers. Some will not fight, but will act as look-outs and report the movements of occupying troops. A successful insurgency is always losing warriors (sometimes by intentional suicide attacks), but the pipeline of recruitment is full of people moving to ever greater levels of commitment.
Occupiers who continue to think in a symmetric, conventional-war mindset (with its sharp distinctions between soldiers and civilians) do not see these flows of sympathy and commitment. If the insurgency has, say, ten thousand warriors, then these occupiers believe they win by removing ten thousand insurgent pieces from the board.
But they don't win, because in the course of removing those ten thousand pieces the occupiers push some number of sympathizers further down the path of commitment to the insurgency. Ten, twenty, thirty thousand insurgents may die or be captured, and still the war goes on. A man who stays out of the war for fear of losing his house will join it when his house becomes "collateral damage." Each family that loses a member in an occupier attack - especially an innocent member like a child - will move further down the path of recruitment.
In the beginning, an insurgency is a small group of warriors moving in a large sea of people who are waiting to see what happens next. Maybe the occupier will be gentle. Maybe life will go on in some acceptable way. The insurgents' first goal is to goad the occupier into using its overwhelming force so that life cannot go on in an acceptable way. A foolish occupier swats flies with hammers, creating disproportionate damage and forcing the previously ambivalent population to choose sides.
Once the insurgency's pipeline of recruitment is well established, the only exclusively military solution available to the occupier is genocide, or some form of ethnic cleansing that will move the insurgent-sympathizing population somewhere else. An occupier who is unwilling to go that far must accept the fact that overwhelming force alone is not enough. Military force must continue to play a role, but only in support of a political solution that gives the asymmetric warriors a reason to lay down their arms.
Occupier Strategy
If a direct kill-the-insurgents strategy is doomed to failure, what can the occupier do?
The Vietnam-era notion of "winning hearts and minds" is not just a way for guilt-ridden liberals to feel better about themselves. It deals with the real problem: the whole pipeline of sympathy and recruitment, not just the comparatively small number of active insurgent warriors. Every policy of the occupier - and especially any use of force - must be examined in light of its effect on insurgent recruitment. A search-and-destroy operation may kill dozens of insurgents with only minor occupier casualties, and still be a net loss if it pushes the general population further down the recruitment pipeline. A lawnmower may cut down dozens of dandelions, but if it scatters their seeds hundreds more will pop up.
All effective anti-insurgent strategies involve drying up the supply of recruits by isolating the insurgents from the larger population. In the so-called "ink spot" strategies the isolation is geographic: a small area is pacified and reconstructed to the point that it becomes governable. The population, seeing the benefits of peaceful governance, resists insurgent efforts to infiltrate. The surrounding areas come to envy the pacified area, and the governable "ink spot" spreads. Other kinds of isolation can also work, as long as the population comes to see a clear separation between itself and the insurgents rather than a slippery slope.
Insurgency by its nature is a low-lifespan occupation. Lenin's line about revolutionaries - that they are dead men on furlough - applies even moreso to insurgents. They must take action to stay relevant, and any action they take carries great risk. Without a constant resupply of recruits ready to die, an insurgency withers.
In order to disrupt that supply, the occupier need not be loved. It need only convince the population that ending the occupation is not worth dying for.
The Anti-Timetable Fallacy
Much current rhetoric falls apart once these basic principles are understood. For example, consider the Bush administration's main argument against setting a timetable for withdrawing American troops from Iraq: that the insurgents would bide their time until we had left, and then rise up again.
If only they would.
Think about it: Suppose the insurgents sat on their hands for a year while they waited for us to withdraw. Iraq, in other words, gets a year of peaceful governance and reconstruction. Roads and power plants are built. Businesses are started. Pipelines transport oil without interruption while tens of billions of petrodollars flow into the country. People rebuild their homes, get jobs, enroll their children in school. And most of all, old wounds recede ever farther into the past.
What happens to the insurgent recruitment pipeline during that year? It collapses. In the course of that year, many people who thought they were willing to die would realize they had something to live for. No insurgent leader could allow it.
I don't know what actually would happen if the U.S. announced a timetable for withdrawal, and maybe there are legitimate reasons to be against such a move. But I guarantee that the insurgents would not sit back and wait for us to leave.
Hezbollah
Finally, we come to the issue of the day: Israel and Hezbollah.
"Israel has a right to defend herself," President Bush said at a recent news conference. I have no argument with that statement, I just think it is completely irrelevant. Nations and individuals have a right to do all kinds of misguided things. And that's what I think Israel has done.
I understand the provocation. Israel/Lebanon/Hezbollah has some parallels with America/Afghanistan/Al Qaeda after 9-11. Israel has been attacked by Hezbollah forces in Lebanon, and the Lebanese government is either unable or unwilling to do anything to prevent future attacks. Any responsible Israeli leader would be trying to figure out how to defend its people and territory.
But that doesn't mean going in with the hammers and lawnmowers. Israeli rhetoric about destroying Hezbollah as a fighting force is detached from reality. At most, the Israelis can hope to kill some large number of Hezbollah fighters and capture or destroy the current supply of rockets. But all of that is easily replaced: Iran can send more rockets, and the number of people willing to die in order to kill Israelis has surely gone up in the past few weeks. Killing your enemies, if it's done badly, increases their number.
War: What's It Good For?
Like most liberals, I am not a pacifist. I believe military power has its uses, and it does some things very well. If, for example, our goal in Iraq had just been to capture Saddam - well, we did that, didn't we? A similar operation might have captured Bin Laden. Bosnia is far from paradise these days, but at least people aren't dying by the tens of thousands. With similar care the genocide in Rwanda might have been stopped, and the one in Darfur still could be. And if anyone knew a way to go into North Korea and come out a few days later with Kim Jong-il and all the North Korean nuclear weapons, I'd be for it.
But military force is a blunt instrument, and used badly it creates more enemies than it kills. If you're not prepared to kill millions of people - and I'm not - then you have to find a way to circumscribe your enemies, so their numbers aren't instantly replenished, with interest, as soon as you kill them. In the long run, if you aren't willing to commit genocide against your enemy's recruitment pool, then every use of force has to be carefully calibrated.
Because it might not be a pool, it might be an aquifer.

2006-10-12T11:53:00.000Z

Our philosophy
Possibly speak tongues
Beat drums, Abyssinians, street Baptist
Wrap this in fine linen
From the beginning
My practice extending across the atlas
I begat this
Flippin' in the ghetto on a dirty mattress
You can't match this rapper / actress
More powerful than two Cleopatras
Bomb graffiti on the tomb of Nefertiti
MCs ain't ready to take it to the Serengeti
My rhymes is heavy like the mind of Sister Betty
L. Boogie spars with stars and constellations
Then came down for a little conversation
Adjacent to the king, fear no human being
Roll with cherubims to Nassau Coliseum
Now hear this mixture
Where hip hop meets scripture
Develop a negative into a positive picture

Sometimes you just can't get old classics out of your head... wonder what L is up to now?

It sounds like she has been working on both a solo album and one with the Fugees... but she has definitely been throwing down some hot rhymes in solo performances like this one:

Framed by intentions
Inventions whereby they lynch men
Enter the false witness slandering the accused
Planting the seed openly showing he's being used
To discredit, edit, headed for the alleged
Smearing the individual fearing the unsuspected
Expert witness (the paid authority)
Made a priority to deceive the majority
Of disinterested peers
Dodging duty for years
Hating the process
waiting to be returning to their careers
Do we expect the system made for the elect
To possibly judge correct?
Properly serve and protect?
Materially corrupt
Spiritually amuck
Oblivious to the cause
Prosperously bankrupt
Blind leading the blind
Guilty never defined
Filthy as swine
A generation purin it's own mind
Legal extortion
Blown out of proportion
In vein deceit
The truth is obsolete
Only two positions:
Victimizer or Victim
Both end up in destruction trusting this crooked system
Mafia with diplomas keeping us in a coma trying to own a piece
of the "American Corona"
The Revolving Door
Insanity every floor
Skyscraping, paper chasing
What are we working for?
Empty traditions
Reaching social positions
Teaching ambition to support the family superstition?
When the Son of Perdition is Commander in Chief
The standard is Thief
Brethren can we candidly speak?
Woe to the men
Trusted in the chariots dem'
Leaning on horses
They run their intellectual sources
Counterfeit wisdom creating the illusion of freedom
Confusion consumes them
Every word they speak it turns them out really white
Internally they absent of light
trapped in the night and bonded to the Cain of the night
Under the curse
Evil men waxing more worse
Faxing the first
Angelic being cast to the earth
It's time for rebirth
Burnin up the branch and the root
The empty pursuits of every tree bearing the wrong fruit
Turning me ill
Let him who stole, no longer steal
Oh it's real
Surrender for Jehovah is real
How long will you sleep
Troubled by the thoughts that YOU keep
The idols YOU heap
Causing the destruction you reap
Judgment has come
Find it and return to the One
Abandon the flesh
Self-interest: Broadway to death
Pride and the Greed
Hide and subdividing the seed
The knowledge of Good and Evil is what caused us to lie
Caused us to die
Let your emotions be crucified
Renounce all your thoughts
Repent and let your mind be re-taught
You'll find what you sought...was based on the deception you bought
A perception of naught
Where the majority remains caught

Loving a lie
Not realizing in Adam, all die

Loving a lie
Not realizing in Adam, all die

Loving a lie
Not realizing in Adam, all die

Loving a lie
Not realizing in Adam, all die

2006-10-08T20:58:00.000Z

My new discovery:
linguistic blogs!
what could be cooler?
ok maybe this is nerdy, but the dilettante linguist in me has to emerge from time to time...
Jabal al-Lughat focuses on minority languages in the Arab world it seems, but there most recent post is on Sheng, a language (or slanguage as some say) that has recently emerged in Nairobi through the contact of Swahili and English mostly... I came across it when I visited Kenya in 2001. Beautifully obscure!
and this post from anthro-ling has a hilarious story from a Native American language on the brink of extinction, translated from Ohlone to the old-California Spanish of Zorro into English, in order to tell us about a coyote who ate a hummingbird

then there's language hat and bobblevaloboba or something like that... those are a little too esoteric for me, but what an amazing world of discovery! gosh, languages are so cool... golly gee.

2006-09-27T12:50:00.000Z

For a change, let's have some visual...
This is a hysterical cartoon that mixes vampires and the mafia into a political satire which is anachronistically pro-Castro...

this is only the first of 7 clips ~10 min each that make up the brilliance that is Vampiros en Habana! (you can find the rest on youtube)

The only serious thing I can think of that relates to this is Cuban politics in popular culture which has become a sort of farce... Che Guevara has been appropriated by eleventeen year-old teeny boppers, and their soccer moms, by emo hipsters, by dog-walkers and even by giggling babies, for goodness sake! - in short by everything that is not revolutionary.

What the cynics say is that in the 20th c. an American puppet government basically ruled Cuba as a glorified banana republic with some distance in the Machado years, but more with Grau, and finally a complex alliance with Batista, who was nonetheless at times aligned with Cuba's Communist party. When Castro and Che came into power, that all changed, and the government formally went Marxist-Leninist with it's communism, allying with the USSR over the USA until the present. So, basically if you were a rich Cuban to whom Castro brought upheaval and probably a loss of status and wealth, you would think Che was not so good. And if you are alive now living under Castro, you are probably not too happy with him either, unless you were particularly terribly oppressed under Batista... In any case there are probably a lot more non-Cubans that like Che and Castro, than people that are actually from countries affected by them...

2006-09-25T13:41:00.000Z

Is the Pope Muslim?

Last in our series following the Pope's remarks... can't we all just get along? Happy Ramadan - don't forget to check out the daily Qur'an readings for each day this month... www.ramadanquran.blogspot.com

Muslims debate Pope's speech reaction

By Magdi Abdelhadi
Arab Affairs Analyst, BBC News

Christian churches in Palestinian territories were attacked

Despite the predominantly emotional and angry response to the Pope's controversial remarks about Islam, some Muslim writers and intellectuals have been extremely critical of the way Muslims have responded so far.

The angry reactions to the Pope's original remarks included the killing of an Italian nun in Somalia and attacks on Christian churches in Palestinian territories. But several Muslim writers argued that such violent reactions appeared to confirm the very things that Muslims have been seeking to refute. Some concluded that it would have been better to engage in a rational debate with the Pope. The European Muslim scholar, Tarik Ramadan, blamed Muslim leaders and scholars for such violent responses.
'Let off steam'
Leaders who deny their people freedom of expression, he wrote, find it convenient to allow their people to let off some steam as long as it is about Danish cartoons or words uttered by the Pope.
Mr Ramadan asks rhetorically whether it was wise of Muslims to feel offended by the Pope's quotation from a 14th Century Christian emperor while they continue to ignore questions they have faced over the past five years about the meaning of the term "jihad" and the legitimate use of force.
Khaled Hroub, a Jordanian-born academic, wrote that the aggressive and intolerant reactions failed to live up to the ideals Muslims believe in. The Muslim reaction to the Pope's apology has also come in for a lot of criticism. Mr Hroub wondered whether Muslim clerics can ever be asked to apologise for believing that Islam is the one and only true religion. One columnist, Abdelwahab Al Affendi, ridiculed those who demanded a retraction of the Pope's original remarks. Mr Al Effendi wrote saying that nothing short of the Pope's converting to Islam will ever assuage the anger of those people!

2006-09-18T14:06:00.000Z

PAPOLOGY

Well the pope did apologize ... sort of. It seems like his apology is not really being accepted, because it is merely a clarification - "sorry you didn't understand what I meant." But that doesn't really fly in a world where authorial intent is not considered synonymous with true meaning, and I thought this is consistent with the broader truth that Ratzy is not to cool with Islam.

This article says "the consequences of the speech 'signal an irreversible break not only in relations between Islam and the Catholic Church but also of the very image of the Pope in the West.'" later it goes on to say how this is part of a larger trend on Benedict's part:

"Last February, Benedict effectively beheaded the Vatican department for dialogue with Islam by removing its president and merging the department with the Vatican's culture ministry.

Anyways it seems that Muslims - and not just radical islamists, are feeling like the Pope is not on their side, as this cartoon (of which I took some screenshots on the left) from Al-Jazeera shows.

As a side note - I have to say that as much as these cartoons try to be offensive and humorous, they really aren't very successful at either I don't think. I mean the Danish cartoons that ignited the previous scandal were much more offensive, and funny than this is.

2006-09-15T17:28:00.000Z

Oops!
...did I say that?
Can the Pope apologize?

After some remarks this week concerning Islam, the Pope is being asked by many to apologize for his remarks. The full text of his speech is quite an impressive academic discourse, including quotes from Kant, Socrates, the Bible and the Qur'an - not many people tie all those together. And Ratzinger does so in a way that appears to be magnanimous to these "opponents" as they have been construed at various times... yet I am not sure he does not still have an underlying mistrust of their agenda which he subtly seems to subvert. For example he seems to view Islam as ultimately simplistic and un-scientific in the oft-quoted "controversial" passage:
...the emperor [Manuel II Paleologus] touches on the theme of the jihad (holy war). The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: "There is no compulsion in religion". It is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threaten. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur’an, concerning holy war. Without decending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels", he turns to his interlocutor somewhat brusquely with the central question on the relationship between religion and violence in general, in these words: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached". The emperor goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. "God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death...".

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practise idolatry.

As far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we find ourselves faced with a dilemma which nowadays challenges us directly. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God’s nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true? I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God.

Thus he aligns "orthodox Christianity" with the best of Greek thought, then talks about how later perversions of hellenistic greek thought led to a distortion of theology which he starts to say, surprisingly, was countered by the reformation:
Dehellenization first emerges in connection with the fundamental postulates of the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Looking at the tradition of scholastic theology, the Reformers thought they were confronted with a faith system totally conditioned by philosophy, that is to say an articulation of the faith based on an alien system of thought. As a result, faith no longer appeared as a living historical Word but as one element of an overarching philosophical system. The principle of sola scriptura, on the other hand, sought faith in its pure, primordial form, as originally found in the biblical Word.

Ultimately doesn't he seem to be saying that the Reformation took things too far the other way, by insisting on Sola Scriptura and minimizing the role of tradition and reception...

Whether or not I am misreading these specific passages, I think it is likely that the Pope was trying to be sensitive and positive in how he spoke of both of these groups (this is particularly clear regarding Muslims, as he diverged from the text of his speech twice to clarify that he was quoting, and citing another's thoughts). Yet despite his attempts to be sensitive, the fundamental disalignment between Rome and Mecca, or Rome and (dare I say it?) Colorado Springs (ok maybe that is just the capital of American Protestant Evangelicalism) underscore a deep rift that can't be bridged in a 10-minute "anhomily." It's sort of like he says "you are this way, but that is okay, and that is good." But we Muslim Protestants are feeling like "well maybe we are like that and maybe we aren't, but you are not the one who is going to tell us who we are." Personally, it doesn't really bother me - I'm a bit of a papophile anyways, but the question to me is really a deeper one of his reaction. Whether he will apologize or not is not just an interesting question of character and humility (it was stupid and unecessary after all for his speech writer's to throw in such a dangerously worded example to support his point), but is also an interesting question of the true nature of infallibility. Is he even allowed to apologize? Or if he does say, "I am sorry you were offended by my words..." could it possibly be understood as a genuine apology since he officially couldn't have been wrong? (I am sort of exaggerating since I know his statements were not ex cathedra, and so are viewed slightly differently). What is the extent of the Pope's infallibility - does it extend to not being able to apologize for poorly worded speeches that offend millions of people?

2006-09-14T09:10:00.000Z

Home sweet home...

Until 12 days go this was my home. It is no longer standing. Part of the whole point of living in a squatter community is that housing security is non- existent, but I guess I wasn't really prepared to come back from Morocco with my sister, awaiting also the imminent visit of my mother, and find out that my shack needed to be removed within a few days. Talk about bad timing. I also felt very strongly that, having lived in this squatter community for nearly 2 years, I didn't want to just pack up and leave as soon as things got tough - what's the point of having lived as a squatter if you just leave when your house is destroyed? So I tried to find another shack to rent, but none of them were really with a family, and wouldn't be safe prticularly (or very social). And having just entertained my family for a couple weeks, and taken them to the airport at 3 in the morning 2 nights in a row, I was too exhausted to think through the decision, and I caved in to the pressure of my Mauritanian friend to just move into a regular cement room with electricity. And I just don't feel comfortable. I am not trying to sound like an ascetic or a spartan masochist, but I don't feel at ease, I don't feel ok with the whole thing. I am trying to assess how ridiculous it would be for me to move back in with the family I had been living with, and just sleep outside with them. It really doesn't have anything to do with the physical comfort or whatever (there are actually positives and negatives to both - the myriad holes in my shack's tin walls kept it cool at night, though electricity in the new place does facilitate reading).
I guess all of this is causing me to look at, much deeper than I ever did before, what it really means to squat on someone else's property, and what specifically does it mean for me as a privileged westerner. Historically there is a sort of fuzzy line between homesteading, squatting, and adverse possession, ranging from peaceful to hostile, and I think most of the people who originally settled the squatter area I've lived in were true "urban homesteaders" - not in the crunchy sense of living simply on the land, but in the sense of they settled a city which had few inhabitants, and just started living somewhere that had space before there was probably even a national concept of property rights (80% of the country is historical nomadic). As the city became fuller, and more crowded, so did the squatter area, and it was no longer just "a nice place to camp on the edge of town" - it was actually relatively centrally located. Thus people living there wanted to continue to hang on to their great spot, so those who were too poor to be able to stay close to the commercial/financial center of town continued to squat when pressure from the government started to come. (It is important to understand that the people that originally moved there were not necessarily poor, but moved to the city for various reasons, from natural disaster (severe drought) to the promise of better jobs that pre-industrial urbanization falsely promises. These inhabitants coming from having had more wealth or whatever moved out more and more aver the years so that now most of the people actually living there are poor (though many people who aren't still "own" shacks there - absentee squatters if you will, hoping for a piece of land) though not everyone. One family near me has a whole fleet of cars (they are/were mechanics of some sort) and has built concrete structures in direct flouting of the "squatting rules" of the neighborhood and in stark contrast to the rest of the tin and wood structures.
So what does it mean for someone like me to move there? It is clearly in complete upheaval of the established order, since the only relatively wealthy people (which has an unjustly high correlation with lighter-skinned people in this area) would be those who have been there the longest - they kind of "get away with it" even though it is beneath them socially in a way, unless this is the only place in the city they have lived (because before that they would have been living in tents), because it wouldn't necessarily be a dip in standard of living in that way. To fly in the face of the established social order is the point of the "prophetic presence" in incarnational ministry, but I wonder to what extent it might be percieved that "I don't have the right to live there" - in that by living there I am trying to steal land from the rightful squatters. Rightly stated, I was not so much a squatter as a "sub-squatter," since I rented from someone else who "owned" the shack I lived in - though I could have bought, and wanted to in order to show solidarity, but I didn't think I would be allowed to actually get land. Was my squatting actually a prophetic challenge against the established social and economic hierarchy that codifies injustice, or was it simply seen as distasteful and inappropriate? Was my leaving really necessary, or was it simply the easy way out of a situation that was uncomfortable and awkward at best? In any case I felt attached to the community (as fragmented as it was) and I miss being part of it in as full a sense as I was before... To end on a funny note... two of my names in the neighborhood which is called the kibbeh, were
1)nejmat al-kibbeh - star of the kibbe (reminiscent of Ghetto Supastar)
and:
2)dherwa f'il-kibda - the camel hump gristle (which is white) in the liver (which is black) [the latter is a dish commonly eaten as an appetizer]

2006-09-12T14:53:00.000Z

9/11 or 11/9

"On 9/11 our nation saw the face of evil, yet on that awful day we also witnessed something distinctly American – ordinary citizens rising to the occasion and responding with extraordinary courage."

This is not a "clash of civilisations" but "a struggle for civilisation".

-Bush, in 9/11 addresses

Somehow I did not have the same reaction that most Americans did to 9/11; not even the sort of sympathy that a lot of people all over the world did. Now on the fifth anniversary, I feel even more distanced from the feelings of national mourning and unity the remembrance of the day is meant to invoke. This is not a polemic against nationalism or patriotism (or jingoism), nor even an apologetic for something else, since I am not even totally sure that what I feel is totally articulable. [I tried once, while in my spoken word mode, and I think the result was the nadir of my political disgust and bitterness... I think it was even too much for the "hater liberal" crowd that tends to frequent those events. I don't feel like I can really put it up here in good conscience, but if you must, and you promise you won't think I am a wretched human being with a dirty mind, you can read it here.]
I won't necessarily stand by what I wrote before, but one of the things that surprises me still, is that no matter how much one may disagree with the Iraq war, or the war on terrorism, Bush's manipulation of the memory of 9/11 as a justification of both of those does not affect the day's sacrosanct nature. It also surprises me that people who are aware of American economic injustices, and idolatry of materialism, and wish to subvert those trends, don't see any relevance in the falling of the Twin Towers as symbolically significant. I am not intending to diminish in any way the tragedy, and cruelty of the deaths of 2992 people - that is something to mourn and to grieve. But if 2992, or 29920, or 299200 people died somewhere else in the world, even by some great tragedy or attack, most Americans wouldn't even know about, not to mention feel some association to it. I have no direct link to anyone that I know of that died or even was nearby the twin towers on September 11th, I expect the same is true for most Americans. Yet 5 years later, this day of national grief is still devoid of any type of constructive learning. It is still 9/11, a reflection of our inwardly focused and self-centered insistence of writing our dates backwards mo/dy/yr, while (most of)the rest of the world writes them dy/mo/yr. Yes 9/11 is a day for mourning the lost lives, just as we should mourn the loss of lives throughout the world every day due to injustice, poverty, and violence. But 11/9 is a day to learn how America can change, and look at how America's relationship with the world can reflect compassion, openness and justice. I think it is time to start remembering September 11th as 11/9, a point from which America reassessed it's status as a superpower economically, culturally, and militarily.

2006-08-13T17:24:00.000Z

Some other thoughts on Christianity, "religion," and culture...

The idea of "religion-less" Christianity, or the concept of a "post-Christian" culture, basically must come down to a cultural analysis, and as SZ mentioned, history has proven that Bonhoeffer's cultural analysis is quite partial, and I'm sure heavily affected by the grave circumstances in which he found himself in a Nazi prison. Nonetheless, the idea that we can talk about a culture which is "religion-less," or a-religious, yet holds a possibility for following Christ, is intriguing, and I think worthwhile in noting in contrast to the unfortunate assumption that Western culture(s) does not alter it's conceptualization of Christianity - i.e. that we can have an a-cultural religion.

I touched on this in an earlier post (which also mentions the emergent church, noted in one comment below), but I think an essay a friend (John Pittard) wrote on this also sheds some insight on the issue:
"For example, in Schreiter’s discussion of the problem of religious syncretism, he draws attention to the fact that the notion of “religion” may mean very different things in different cultures or may be lacking altogether; this makes it extremely difficult for the evangelist to make concepts like “conversion” or “religious fidelity” understandable... After spending the first four chapters of his book describing a bottom-up approach to constructing local theologies that looks to the local culture for its agendas and foci, Schreiter finally turns to an explicit discussion of the normative boundaries that determine whether a local theology may genuinely be considered a Christian theology. The title of this chapter, “Tradition and Christian Identity,” is telling: the normative guidelines developed by Schreiter are focused on ensuring that local theologies do not undermine Christian identity by straining the integrity of Christianity as a tradition. Rather than attempting to identify the contours of a normative gospel that the Christian tradition may or may not adequately represent, an acceptable level of continuity with the Christian tradition itself becomes the guideline that finally determines whether a local theology may be considered Christian."

So, interestingly, the cultural/ecclesiological/liturgical continuity within the church is valued here by Schreiter above the scriptural authority, which is I think what traditionalists seem to be claiming against Emergent's. It seems that they are saying the generation that grew up a-religious, and is now coming to Christ should assimilate into the church's tradition of continuity. But let's look at Pittard's critique of that in his closing paragraph:

"Schreiter ultimately locates authority within the Christian community, which in order to remain a viable community must maintain some continuity of tradition through time (though this tradition could conceivably change greatly over time). If his project is to be more than mere identity protection he will have to suggest a reason why the Christian community is so unique that it must be protected. One might be tempted to answer “Because it possesses the gospel.” But if that is the basis for maintaining Christian tradition, then that tradition should be strengthened inasmuch as it reflects the gospel, and challenged or even attacked inasmuch as it does not reflect the gospel. But Schreiter never articulates a definition of the gospel that is robust enough to challenge the larger Christian tradition. He gives us a model of how to maintain a robust religious tradition, one with enough continuity to remain viable but also enough flexibility to adapt to local contexts, without providing a compelling basis for why that tradition should be maintained. A view of contextual theology that is to provide hope that we are not merely advancing some human religion must do a better job at defining the gospel and explicitly grounding the task of theology in the revelation of God."

So I think that the Emergent Church's discontinuous and incongruous appropriations of various church traditions to meet the needs of its a-religious culture (ironically often with very explicitly religious symbols at times) deserve some defending, from a cultural point of view, as long as they are biblically sound, which I am in no position to comment on from here...

2006-08-10T10:50:00.000Z

When I thought about Bon- hoeffer's idea that Europe has"Come of Age" to a post- religious reality, I immediately connected it to the Nietzschean idea of self- overcoming expressed in "Gay Science", since coming of age is essentially overcoming one's former immature self:

"Christian morality itself, the concept of truthfulness taken more and more strictly, the confessional subtlety of the Christian conscience translated and sublimated into the scientific conscience, into intellectual cleanliness at any price. To view nature as if it were a proof of the good and providence of a God; to interpret history to the glory of a divine reason, as the perpetual witness to a moral world order and moral intentions; to interpret one’s own experiences, as pious men long interpreted them, as if everything were preordained, everything a sign, everything sent for the salvation of the soul — that now belongs to the past, that has the conscience against it, that seems to every more sensitive conscience indecent, dishonest, mendacious, feminism, weakness, cowardice: it is this rigor if anything that makes us good Europeans and the heirs of Europe’s longest and bravest self-overcoming.
All great things bring about their own destruction through an act of self-overcoming: thus the law of life will have it, the law of the necessity of "self-overcoming" in the nature of life — the law-giver himself eventually receives the call. . . In this way Christianity as a dogma was destroyed by its own morality; in the same way Christianity as morality must now perish too: we stand on the threshold of this event. After Christian truthfulness has drawn one inference after another, it must end by drawing its most striking inference, its inference against itself."(Gay Science, 357)

Many have noted that Protestantism's view of the separation of Church and State must logically lead to a secular society, which in turn leads to an atheistic society, or religion-less society, as Bonhoeffer views it. But I think this is not primarily what concerns Bonhoeffer as we can see in the continuation of his letter to Bethge on April 30:

...what is a religionless Christianity? Barth, who is the only one to have started on this line of thought, did not carry it to completion, but arrived at a positivism of revelation, which in the last analysis is essentially a restoration. For the religionless working man (or any other man) nothing decisive is gained here. The questions to be answered would surely be: What do a church, a community, a sermon, a liturgy, a Christian life mean in a religionless world? How do we speak of God - without religion, i.e. without the temporally conditioned presuppositions of metaphysics, inwardness, and so on? How do we speak (or perhaps we cannot now even 'speak' as we used to) in a 'secular' way about 'God'? In what way are we 'religionless-secular' Christians, in what way are we the ek-klésia, those who are called forth, not regarding ourselves from a religious point of view as specially favoured, but rather as belonging wholly to the world? In that case Christ is no longer an object of religion, but something quite different, really the Lord of the world. But what does that mean? What is the place of worship and prayer in a religionless situation?

So I think it is clear that Bonhoeffer speaks of a religionless Christianity in an ecclesiological sense perhaps, which as SZ comments may be relatively trivial, but he also speaks about it in a liturgical sense. That is, how we worship - in the fullest sense of how we live out our called-forth lives in the world ("offering our bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God - this is our spiritual act of worship." Ro 12:1) communally as the church. I think Bonhoeffer is claiming here that the orthopraxy of Christianity requires a willingness to shed Christianity of all of its 'religion,' and imbue it with new forms. As Ivan Illich, the RCC missiologist writes:
"The church is led to marvel about the ever new images [i.e. forms of worship expression] in which her venerable knowledge can become meaningful for the first time... missiology therefore is the study of the church as surprise."

The new "poetic images" or expressions of worship by which the Gospel is communicated have come to be seen as basically different forms of 'religion,' that Bonhoeffer seemed to think would altogether disappear, but as SZ has noted, in hindsight seems not to have. However, the fact that it has disappeared, and then taken new forms has in a sense stripped it of a certain quality of reverent unquestionability that may be the very essence of 'religiosity' that Bonhoeffer, Barth, Nietzche and many others see as dead - all with different reactions of course...

(incidentally Bonhoeffer's mention of Barth made me more curious about where he generally stands - those who are more informed, enlighten me beyond what I can find on wikipedia...)

2006-08-07T09:06:00.000Z

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Letters from Prison
Tegel
30 April 1944

to Eberhard Bethge...

Our whole nineteen-hundred-year-old Christian preaching and theology rest on the 'religious a priori' of mankind. 'Christianity' has always been a form - perhaps the true form - of 'religion'. But if one day it becomes clear that this a priori does not exist at all, but was a historically conditioned and transient form of humn self-expression, and if therefore man becomes radically religionless - and I think that is already more or less the case (else how is it, for example, that this war, in contrast to all previous ones, is not calling forth any 'religious' reaction?) - what does that mean for 'Christianity'? It means that the foundation is taken away from the whole of what has up to now been our 'Christianity', and that there remain only a few 'last survivors of the age of chivalry', or a few intellectually dishonest people, on whom we can descend as 'religious'. Are they to be the chosen few? Is it on this dubious group of people that we are to pounce in fervour, pique or indignation, in order to sell them our goods? Are we to fall upon a few unfortunate people in their hour of need and exercise a sort of religious compulsion on them? If we don't want to do all that, if our final judgment must be that the western form of Christianity, too, was only a preliminary stage to a complete absence of religion, what kind of situation emerges for us, the church? How can Christ become the Lord of the religionless as well? Are there religionless Christians? If religion is only the garment of Christianity - and even this garment has looked very different at different times - than what is a religionless Christianity?

2006-08-05T13:56:00.000Z

It has been surprising to me to see that the fighting in Lebanon has continued so vigorously over the last few years as I have been mostly off-line the last few weeks. This is getting to be very close to a major international conflict, and based on the latest terms for agreement, it is not going to end soon - everybody (i.e. the Israel/US/UN) is acting like the Lebanese taking of Israeli captives came out of nowhere. I will admit that it wasn't the smartest thing necessarily, but it is only one part of a history of aggression on both sides...

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 5 (Reuters) - The United States and France have completed a draft U.N. Security Council resolution on an end to fighting and a framework for a political settlement between Israel and Lebanon. The full 15-member council has to review and accept the text. A vote is anticipated on Monday or Tuesday. Following are highlights from the draft: Calls for a full cessation of hostilities based upon "immediate cessation by Hizbollah of all attacks and the immediate cessation by Israel of all offensive military operations;" Requests, UNIFIL, the U.N. Interim Fore in Lebanon, after fighting has stopped, to monitor implementation of the truce and help ensure humanitarian access to civilian populations. Expresses its intention, after agreement from Lebanon and Israel to a "political framework for a lasting solution," to authorize deployment of an international force to support the Lebanese armed forces; Calls for Israel and Lebanon to support a permanent cease-fire and agree on a long-term solution based on the following principles and elements: -- strict respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Israel and Lebanon; -- full respect for the Blue Line (U.S. drawn boundary between Lebanon and Israel) by both parties; -- delineation of the international borders of Lebanon, especially in those areas where the border is disputed or uncertain, including in the Shebaa Farms area; -- security arrangements to prevent the resumption of hostilities, including the establishment between the Blue Line and the Litani River of a buffer zone free of any armed personnel other than those of the Lebanese force and of U.N.- mandated international forces. -- disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon so there will be no weapons or authority in Lebanon other than that of the Lebanese state; -- establishment of an international embargo on the sale or supply of arms and related material to Lebanon except as authorized by its government; -- provision to the United Nations of remaining maps of land mines in Lebanon in Israel's possession; The draft asks the U.N secretary-general to secure agreements in principle from Lebanon and Israeli on the above elements for a long-term solution. It also asks the secretary-general to develop proposals on the delineation of Lebanon's borders with Israel and Syria that are disputed or uncertain, including the Shebaa Farms and report to the Security Council within 30 days. The preamble but not the operative part of the draft emphasized the need to address the "the unconditional release of the abducted Israeli soldiers" and encourages "efforts aimed at settling the issue of the Lebanese prisoners detained in Israel."

2006-08-05T13:20:00.000Z

another excerpt from Proust (I am now on the second of seven tomes of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, which is À l'ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs):

C´était un de ces hommes qui, en dehors d´une carrière scientifique où ils ont d´ailleurs brillamment réussi, possèdent une culture toute différente, littéraire, artistique, que leur spécialisation professionelle n´utilise pas et dont profite leur conversation. Plus lettrés que bien des littérateurs (nous ne savions pas à cette époque que M. Legrandin eût une certaine réputation comme écrivain et nous fûmes très étonnés de voir qu´un musicien célèbre avait composé une mélodie sur des vers de lui), doués de plus de «facilité» que bien des peintres, ils s´imaginent que la vie qu´ils mènent n´est pas celle qui leur aurait convenu et apportent à leurs occupations positives soit une insouciance mêlée de fantaisie, soit une application soutenue et hautaine, méprisante, amère et consciencieuse. Grand, avec une belle tournure, un visage pensif et fin aux longues moustaches blondes, au regard bleu et désenchanté, d´une politesse raffinée, causeur comme nous n´en avions jamais entendu, il était aux yeux de ma famille qui le citait toujours en exemple, le type de l´homme d´élite, prenant la vie de la façon la plus noble et la plus délicate. Ma grand´mère lui reprochait seulement de parler un peu trop bien, un peu trop comme un livre, de ne pas avoir dans son langage le naturel qu´il y avait dans ses cravates lavallière toujours flottantes, dans son veston droit presque d´écolier. Elle s´étonnait aussi des tirades enflammées qu´il entamait souvent contre l´aristocratie, la vie mondaine, le snobisme, «certainement le péché auquel pense saint Paul quand il parle du péché pour lequel il n´y a pas de rémission.»

if that doesn't make you laugh, just check your pulse :)

2006-07-22T15:38:00.000Z

hmmm... votes on the new look?

2006-07-17T18:08:00.000Z

I wasn't going to post anything on the Israeli - Hezbollah conflict, since I don't have any new or up to date information to share, and I am sure other sources would be informed, but I thought I would just drop a link to the blog of a friend of mine Jane Rubio, who happens to have been in Lebanon at the American University in Beirut, and was blogging throughout this crisis. Apparently she was even quoted in news sources and has been interviewed on major network television since she got back. It really gives you a lot more of a feel for the seriousness of this whole situation - probably the biggest outbreak in the middle east since 2002. And neither side has any military objectives - they are simple retributing one against the other, with the specific aim of attacking civilians. And whatever you hear on Western Media, it is definitely true that Lebanon is bearing the brunt of it - at least 4 times more Lebanese have been killed than Israelis. And what is the US/UN/UK (their working on a merger - to cut down on overhead)doing? twiddling their thumbs...

2006-07-17T12:29:00.000Z

some pics from a recent trip...
accompanied by local proverbs and poems
(translated from the Hassaniya dialect of Arabic
by the famed traveller and explorateer
'Abd us-Salaam Dauda al-Jawal Sarr)

The old man sees lying down what the young man sees standing.

The Silver Daughter's dressed up
And Satan's built above her
A tent that's fine and trussed up
Unlike any other

Destroy selfhood,
and truth remains.

Check out some more great pictures from a friend of mine who also lived here for a while. Here is my favorite of them:

At first I thought it was an alien device or some sort of divining instrument. Then I realized what it really was. 10 points for the first person (excluding the photographer) who can guess... 20 points for the person with the most creative answer.

2006-07-14T00:50:00.000Z

The director of the Yale center for Faith and Culture's Reconciliation Program came to visit this week, and shared some encouraging things with us, not only about what he is doing, but more so how he views that. He mentioned that the apostolic work of people pioneering the coming of God's kingdom to people who don't know him is really the cutting edge, while what he is doing is just support work, though he is engaging major Islamic leaders in dialogue about Jesus...
speaking of "cutting edge" and since I am not sure that I am really at liberty to say much more about what the Reconciliation Program is up to, I will do the schizophrenic thing and switch to "cutting edge" music that has caught my attention recently. Now, I have never been a music aficionado, and since moving here, I am certainly all the more out of the loop, but I like to think when I hear something good, I know what I am hearing. Or at least that I know what I like. And, well, I like Sufjan Stevens... a lot. I have been hearing all kinds of stuff about him, and I thought it was just a lot of hype, particularly since he is one of these crypto-Christian artists that the evangelical sub-culture gets all excited about, like "oh boy one of ours made it," when the artist is usually trying, if anything to dissociate himself from that very sub-culture. So I was skeptical, but curious, and finally I found a place where I could download a few samples for free. And this guy totally knocked my socks off... the poetry of the lyrics, the subtly innovative and playful instrumentation, and the gut-wrenching honesty of the vocals. It epitomized the innocent urbane acoustic folksy purity that I think I am finding more and more characterizes what I will say is my "favorite music." And it actually seems to have a categorical unity that covers the gamut from Bright Eyes to Iron and Wine to Sufjan - Alternative folk. I like it. I like it a lot...
There was this one song though, that I just have to single out: Casimir Pulaski Day (also available for download on that page above).
Golden rod and the 4-H stone
The things I brought you
When I found out you had cancer of the bone

Your father cried on the telephone
And he drove his car to the Navy yard
Just to prove that he was sorry

In the morning through the window shade
When the light pressed up against your shoulder blade
I could see what you were reading

Oh the glory that the lord has made
And the complications you could do without
When I kissed you on the mouth

Tuesday night at the bible study
We lift our hands and pray over your body
But nothing ever happens

I remember at Michael's house
In the living room when you kissed my neck
And I almost touched your blouse

In the morning at the top of the stairs
When your father found out what we did that night
And you told me you were scared

Oh the glory when you ran outside
With your shirt tucked in and your shoes untied
And you told me not to follow you

Sunday night when I cleaned the house
I find the card where you wrote it out
With the pictures of your mother

On the floor at the great divide
With my shirt tucked in and my shoes untied
I am crying in the bathroom

In the morning when you finally go
And the nurse runs in with her head hung low
And the cardinal hits the window

In the morning in the winter shade
On the first of March on the holiday
I thought I saw you breathing

Oh the glory that the lord has made
And the complications when I see his face
In the morning in the window

Oh the glory when he took our place
But he took my shoulders and he shook my face
And he takes and he takes and he takes

I don't know if there is even anything I can say about it, but I just felt like it totally knocked me out. What a sad story. Wow.

2006-07-11T13:55:00.000Z

L'Église!

I bet you never thought Marcel Proust had anything to teach you about how to be excited about the church...

Que je l’aimais, que je la revois bien, notre Église! Son vieux porche par lequel nous entrions, noir, grêlé comme une écumoire, était dévié et profondément creusé aux angles (de même que le bénitier où il nous conduisait) comme si le doux effleurement des mantes des paysannes entrant à l’église et de leurs doigts timides prenant de l’eau bénite, pouvait, répété pendant des siècles, acquérir une force destructive, infléchir la pierre et l’entailler de sillons comme en trace la roue des carrioles dans la borne contre laquelle elle bute tous les jours. Ses pierres tombales, sous lesquelles la noble poussière des abbés de Combray, enterrés là, faisait au chœur comme un pavage spirituel, n’étaient plus elles-mêmes de la matière inerte et dure, car le temps les avait rendues douces et fait couler comme du miel hors des limites de leur propre équarrissure qu’ici elles avaient dépassées d’un flot blond, entraînant à la dérive une majuscule gothique en fleurs, noyant les violettes blanches du marbre; et en deçà desquelles, ailleurs, elles s’étaient résorbées, contractant encore l’elliptique inscription latine, introduisant un caprice de plus dans la disposition de ces caractères abrégés, rapprochant deux lettres d’un mot dont les autres avaient été démesurément distendues. Ses vitraux ne chatoyaient jamais tant que les jours où le soleil se montrait peu, de sorte que fît-il gris dehors, on était sûr qu’il ferait beau dans l’église; l’un était rempli dans toute sa grandeur par un seul personnage pareil à un Roi de jeu de cartes, qui vivait là-haut, sous un dais architectural, entre ciel et terre; (et dans le reflet oblique et bleu duquel, parfois les jours de semaine, à midi, quand il n’y a pas d’office,—à l’un de ces rares moments où l’église aérée, vacante, plus humaine, luxueuse, avec du soleil sur son riche mobilier, avait l’air presque habitable comme le hall de pierre sculptée et de verre peint, d’un hôtel de style moyen âge,—on voyait s’agenouiller un instant Mme Sazerat, posant sur le prie-Dieu voisin un paquet tout ficelé de petits fours qu’elle venait de prendre chez le pâtissier d’en face et qu’elle allait rapporter pour le déjeuner); dans un autre une montagne de neige rose, au pied de laquelle se livrait un combat, semblait avoir givré à même la verrière qu’elle boursouflait de son trouble grésil comme une vitre à laquelle il serait resté des flocons, mais des flocons éclairés par quelque aurore (par la même sans doute qui empourprait le rétable de l’autel de tons si frais qu’ils semblaient plutôt posés là momentanément par une lueur du dehors prête à s’évanouir que par des couleurs attachées à jamais à la pierre); et tous étaient si anciens qu’on voyait çà et là leur vieillesse argentée étinceler de la poussière des siècles et monter brillante et usée jusqu’à la corde la trame de leur douce tapisserie de verre. Il y en avait un qui était un haut compartiment divisé en une centaine de petits vitraux rectangulaires où dominait le bleu, comme un grand jeu de cartes pareil à ceux qui devaient distraire le roi Charles VI; mais soit qu’un rayon eût brillé, soit que mon regard en bougeant eût promené à travers la verrière tour à tour éteinte et rallumée, un mouvant et précieux incendie, l’instant d’après elle avait pris l’éclat changeant d’une traîne de paon, puis elle tremblait et ondulait en une pluie flamboyante et fantastique qui dégouttait du haut de la voûte sombre et rocheuse, le long des parois humides, comme si c’était dans la nef de quelque grotte irisée de sinueux stalactites que je suivais mes parents, qui portaient leur paroissien; un instant après les petits vitraux en losange avaient pris la transparence profonde, l’infrangible dureté de saphirs qui eussent été juxtaposés sur quelque immense pectoral, mais derrière lesquels on sentait, plus aimé que toutes ces richesses, un sourire momentané de soleil; il était aussi reconnaissable dans le flot bleu et doux dont il baignait les pierreries que sur le pavé de la place ou la paille du marché; et, même à nos premiers dimanches quand nous étions arrivés avant Pâques, il me consolait que la terre fût encore nue et noire, en faisant épanouir, comme en un printemps historique et qui datait des successeurs de saint Louis, ce tapis éblouissant et doré de myosotis en verre.

Deux tapisseries de haute lice représentaient le couronnement d´Esther (le tradition voulait qu´on eût donné à Assuérus les traits d´un roi de France et à Esther ceux d´une dame de Guermantes dont il était amoureux) auxquelles leurs couleurs, en fondant, avaient ajouté une expression, un relief, un éclairage: un peu de rose flottait aux lèvres d´Esther au delà du dessin de leur contour, le jaune de sa robe s´étalait si onctueusement, si grassement, qu´elle en prenait une sorte de consistance et s´enlevait vivement sur l´atmosphère refoulée; et la verdure des arbres restée vive dans les parties basses du panneau de soie et de laine, mais ayant «passé» dans le haut, faisait se détacher en plus pâle, au-dessus des troncs foncés, les hautes branches jaunissantes, dorées et comme à demi effacées par la brusque et oblique illumination d´un soleil invisible. Tout cela et plus encore les objets précieux venus à l´église de personnages qui étaient pour moi presque des personnages de légende (la croix d´or travaillée disait-on par saint Éloi et donnée par Dagobert, le tombeau des fils de Louis le Germanique, en porphyre et en cuivre émaillé) à cause de quoi je m´avançais dans l´église, quand nous gagnions nos chaises, comme dans une vallée visitée des fées, où le paysan s´émerveille de voir dans un rocher, dans un arbre, dans une mare, la trace palpable de leur passage surnaturel, tout cela faisait d´elle pour moi quelque chose d´entièrement différent du reste de la ville: un édifice occupant, si l´on peut dire, un espace à quatre dimensions—la quatrième étant celle du Temps,—déployant à travers les siècles son vaisseau qui, de travée en travée, de chapelle en chapelle, semblait vaincre et franchir non pas seulement quelques mètres, mais des époques successives d´où il sortait victorieux; dérobant le rude et farouche XIe siècle dans l´épaisseur de ses murs, d´où il n´apparaissait avec ses lourds cintres bouchés et aveuglés de grossiers moellons que par la profonde entaille que creusait près du porche l´escalier du clocher, et, même là, dissimulé par les gracieuses arcades gothiques qui se pressaient coquettement devant lui comme de plus grandes sœurs, pour le cacher aux étrangers, se placent en souriant devant un jeune frère rustre, grognon et mal vêtu; élevant dans le ciel au-dessus de la Place, sa tour qui avait contemplé saint Louis et semblait le voir encore; et s´enfonçant avec sa crypte dans une nuit mérovingienne où, nous guidant à tâtons sous la voûte obscure et puissamment nervurée comme la membrane d´une immense chauve-souris de pierre, Théodore et sa sœur nous éclairaient d´une bougie le tombeau de la petite fille de Sigebert, sur lequel une profonde valve,—comme la trace d´un fossile,—avait été creusée, disait-on, «par une lampe de cristal qui, le soir du meurtre de la princesse franque, s´était détachée d´elle-même des chaînes d´or où elle était suspendue à la place de l´actuelle abside, et, sans que le cristal se brisât, sans que la flamme s´éteignît, s´était enfoncée dans la pierre et l´avait fait mollement céder sous elle.»

L´abside de l´église de Combray, peut-on vraiment en parler? Elle était si grossière, si dénuée de beauté artistique et même d´élan religieux. Du dehors, comme le croisement des rues sur lequel elle donnait était en contre-bas, sa grossière muraille s´exhaussait d´un soubassement en moellons nullement polis, hérissés de cailloux, et qui n´avait rien de particulièrement ecclésiastique, les verrières semblaient percées à une hauteur excessive, et le tout avait plus l´air d´un mur de prison que d´église. Et certes, plus tard, quand je me rappelais toutes les glorieuses absides que j´ai vues, il ne me serait jamais venu à la pensée de rapprocher d´elles l´abside de Combray. Seulement, un jour, au détour d´une petite rue provinciale, j´aperçus, en face du croisement de trois ruelles, une muraille fruste et surélevée, avec des verrières percées en haut et offrant le même aspect asymétrique que l´abside de Combray. Alors je ne me suis pas demandé comme à Chartres ou à Reims avec quelle puissance y était exprimé le sentiment religieux, mais je me suis involontairement écrié: «L´Église!»

2006-07-11T09:27:00.000Z

The Rise of the New Evangelicals...

THE BOSTON GLOBE

By Harvey Cox | July 9, 2006

IN THE SPRING OF LAST YEAR, President Bush flew to Calvin College in Grand
Rapids, Mich. Because of its conservative religious reputation, his advisers
thought it would be a safe and friendly place, but the visit did not turn out
as expected. He was greeted by a petition, signed by a third of the faculty,
and a large student demonstration. Both denounced the invasion of Iraq as not
meeting the classical Christian criteria for a just war.

Indeed, as the president has tried to shore up support among religiously
conservative voters in preparation for this fall's congressional elections,
returning to such issues as a constitutional amendment banning same-sex
marriage, he has found himself grappling with a new challenge. Evangelical
Protestants are becoming increasingly concerned about a wide range of
issues-the Iraq War, the environment, torture, and poverty, for example-which
put them at odds with much of the Bush agenda.

This interest in what are often considered ``liberal" issues marks the rise of a
younger and more moderate leadership among evangelicals. Paradoxically, these
new leaders are more ``religious" than the old guard of the religious right.
The difference, one could argue, is that they are more concerned about actually
following Jesus, who had much to say about violence and the poor, but said
nothing about gays or a strong military, and who was put to death by torture.
The appearance of these new social concerns means that something important is
afoot in the vast evangelical community of America. It is simply no longer
accurate to identify ``evangelical" with ``religious right."

To those familiar with American religious history, this development will not
come as a surprise. Christians who are theologically conservative have not
always been politically right wing. In the 19th and early 20th centuries,
evangelicals were in the forefront of such progressive movements as abolition
and women's suffrage. And African-American churches, it bears mentioning, have
always been theologically conservative and politically progressive.

Historically, the main worry of the most theologically conservative Protestants,
who began calling themselves ``fundamentalists" in 1912, was religious, not
political. They wanted to preserve such orthodox beliefs as the virgin birth,
the resurrection of Jesus, and the inerrancy of the Bible against what they
called ``modernism," which included the critical historical study of the Bible
and the theory of evolution. But these same people were often left-leaning
populists and progressives in the political arena.

The best known self-styled ``fundamentalist" of the late 19th and early 20th
century was the three-time Democratic candidate for president William Jennings
Bryan. Bryan is remembered today mainly for his role in the Scopes ``monkey
trial" in 1925, the last year of his life. But even then, Bryan remained a
progressive fundamentalist. (No biblical literalist, he believed that the seven
days of creation mentioned in Genesis might refer to very long eons. ``The Bible
is about the rock of ages, not the age of rocks," he remarked, slyly ribbing the
literalists.) Bryan's positions on public policy issues were almost the complete
opposite of those of today's religious right. His famous ``cross of gold" speech
at the 1896 Democratic convention in Chicago brought crowds to their feet with
its stinging attacks on Wall Street. He was so suspicious of militarism that he
resigned from Woodrow Wilson's cabinet before World War I to protest what he saw
as that president's undue belligerency toward Germany.

Some historians believe that after the ridicule poured on them during the Scopes trial American fundamentalists retreated in humiliation and almost disappeared. This, however, is a mistaken picture and makes it hard to explain their powerful rebirth after World War II. Where had they been? And how did they get where they are today?

The fundamentalists had not disappeared. During the 1930s and 1940s they simply regrouped, and began to form a nationwide religious counter-culture made up of thousands of independent churches, Bible institutes, summer camps, conference centers, radio ministries, and revival services. They advised their people to ``come out and be separate." Since society at large was so obviously plunging toward judgment and destruction, they usually eschewed any political involvement. Why patch up a ship that was doomed to sink anyway? The kind of reforms Bryan once advocated now seemed pointless to them. The best one could do was to save as many individual souls as possible.

But in 1940, a rift emerged among religiously conservative Protestants, marking
a major change in the American religious landscape. An influential group under
the leadership of the Rev. Harold Ockenga of Boston's Park Street Church formed
the National Association of Evangelicals. Its purpose was to draw a sharp line
not just against ``modernists," but also against fundamentalists. These
evangelicals held many of the same beliefs as fundamentalists, but there were
important differences. Evangelicals firmly believed in the religious and moral
authority of the Bible, but most did not consider it a dependable source for
geology or history. The main point of contention, however, was that
evangelicals did not want to withdraw from the larger society; they wanted to
engage it. Longing for a rebirth of Protestant Christian influence on American
culture, they went public.

If Bryan had been the most visible American purveyor of evangelical Christianity
in the decades before his death in 1925, beginning in the early 1950s that
mantle was passed to the Rev. Billy Graham. Starting as a raw-boned Tennessee
fundamentalist, Graham matured over the next decades. He soon became the icon of the evangelical movement, but much more than that as well. Year after year, polls showed him to be the most respected religious leader in the country. As he shook off the hard shell of his early years, however, he also reaped scorn
and abuse from fundamentalists for cooperating with ``liberal" denominations
and Catholics in his many crusades; for insisting that his audiences, even in
the South, should not be segregated; and, later, by calling for the abolition
of nuclear weapons.

But alongside Billy Graham's coupling of evangelical theology with a broad
social outlook, a narrow and contentious new kind of evangelicalism was also
emerging in America. When a little-known Baptist preacher and self-styled
fundamentalist named Jerry Falwell, at the urging of conservative Republican
campaign specialists, organized what he called The Moral Majority in the late
1970s, the religious core principles of the original fundamentalist movement
were nowhere in sight. One heard little about theological issues like the
virgin birth or even the inerrancy of scripture. This was an explicitly
political movement.

Anything but an advocate of ``come out and be separate," Falwell welcomed
Catholics, Jews, and even Mormons, if they shared his political and moral
convictions. His agenda was provoked not by religious heresy, but by what he
and his followers described as a frontal assault on the traditional values of
American society.

Some of the voices in this new and politically charged ``moral fundamentalism"
took the battle to the streets and, like Randall Terry, founder of Operation
Rescue, were arrested blocking abortion clinics. Now the enemy was no longer
theological modernism, but a series of court decisions that banned prayer and
Bible reading in public schools, legalized abortion, and reached a climax here
in Massachusetts with the approval of gay marriage. Indeed one preacher called the fight over same-sex marriage not just another skirmish but the ``battle of Gettysburg." ``If we lose this one," he remarked, ``we lose the culture war."

At first the alliance Falwell forged with the most conservative wing of the
Republican Party paid off handsomely for both partners. The religious right
mobilized perhaps millions of voters for Republican candidates, and in turn,
beginning with Ronald Reagan, Republican office holders rewarded the movement's leaders with briefings, phone calls, and access to the highest level of the administration, including the Oval Office. Even though by the 1990s Falwell's Moral Majority had faded, it was succeeded by Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition and James Dobson's Focus on the Family. Both are also driven by explicitly political agendas.

In recent years, however, the political alliance Falwell originally stitched
together has been fraying. Republicans in office have not achieved the
results-on abortion, school prayer, marriage, and other cultural issues-that
the religious right expected. In May of this year, speaking about support for
Republican congressional leaders in the midterm elections, and possibly in
2008, James Dobson grumbled, ``I think there's going to be trouble down the
road if they don't get on the ball."

Meanwhile, a series of missteps and embarrassments-the religious right's
heavy-handed intrusion into the Terry Schiavo case, the intemperate statements by Falwell (who attributed 9/11 to God's judgment on America for its gays and feminists) and by Pat Robertson (who advocated the assassination of the president of Venezuela on his nationwide television program), and the criminal investigation of Ralph Reed, the former director of the Christian
Coalition-appear to have driven more moderate evangelicals away from the old
religious right.

But as the religious right begins to lose its former vitality, something else
has begun to emerge in the American evangelical world that could have even
longer-lasting significance: the reappearance of a politically progressive
evangelicalism.

The spirit of Bryan and his like is being born again. Some of this change is
powered by the amazing growth of mega-churches throughout the country. These congregations, often 15,000 to 20,000 strong, are mostly evangelical in style if not in substance. Their preachers generally steer clear of controversial
doctrinal questions and concentrate on practical spiritual advice for
day-to-day living. Joel Osteen, pastor of the mammoth Lakeside mega-church in
Houston, is more likely to preach on how to avoid procrastination than on
abortion or homosexuality. Like other mega-church pastors, Osteen knows how to market his product, and has found that many younger people are simply not drawn by antigay preaching or by the other hot-button cultural issues so favored by the old religious right.

Last February, many evangelicals responded enthusiastically when Rick Warren, pastor of the immense Saddleback church in California organized a coalition to safeguard the environment based on explicitly evangelical religious beliefs, such as God's command to human beings to be faithful stewards and to nurture and care for the earth. Both Falwell and Robertson have refused to sign on.

The new face of American evangelicalism is not confined to the mega-churches. It is also appearing among younger evangelicals, like the ones attracted to Jim
Wallis's Call to Renewal movement; in smaller, more traditional congregations;
and among evangelical student groups on secular college campuses. It is
especially evident on many Christian college campuses, like Calvin College,
which handed Bush such a rude surprise last year. In April of this year the
vice president of the National Association of Evangelicals, and other prominent
evangelical leaders, joined with more theologically liberal church figures and
with Jewish and Catholic leaders to issue a strong public condemnation of
torture based on shared religious principles. Though not naming names, the
statement was clearly critical of the current administration's policies.

One reason the future may belong to these new evangelicals is that they take the life and teaching of Jesus more seriously than the religious right, which bases its positions not on the gospels, but on what they call ``traditional values" and ``family values." But Jesus himself had little to say about family values; rather, he emphasized love of neighbor, and even of the enemy. And he often criticized the ``traditional values" of his own time so harshly that the
anxious guardians of those traditions viewed him as a menace.

To be sure, the old religious right is not dead yet. Its coffers are crammed
with millions of dollars. It controls hundreds of radio and TV stations. It
still exerts influence, especially on judicial appointments. Nonetheless, we
may be witnessing the last hurrah of the old generation of fundamentalist and
evangelical religious spokesmen. They can no longer speak with any assurance
that they will be heard by all of the people once considered a faithful
following.

What is happening in American evangelical Christianity is both a changing of the guard and the emergence of a younger constituency with different ideas. This does not mean they will all vote for Democrats, with whom they still disagree on several matters, but that they are concerned about a much wider range of issues. The progressive social impulse of early 20th century evangelicalism appears to be making a comeback in an America sadly in need of a vision that is both spiritually vital and politically forward looking.

Harvey Cox is Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard, where he has taught since
1965. His books include ``The Secular City" and, most recently, ``When Jesus
Came to Harvard."

2006-07-01T16:24:00.000Z

Remarks by Senator Barack Obama
Wednesday, June 28th, 2006
Good morning. I appreciate the opportunity to speak here at the Call toRenewal's Building a Covenant for a New America conference, and I'd like to congratulate you all on the thoughtful presentations you've given so far about poverty and justice in America. I think all of us would affirm that caring for the poor finds root in all of our religious traditions - certainly that's true for my own. But today I'd like to talk about the connection between religion and politics and perhaps offer some thoughts about how we can sort through some of the often bitter arguments over this issue over the last several years. I do so because, as you all know, we can affirm the importance of poverty in the Bible and discuss the religious call to environmental stewardship all we want, but it won't have an impact if we don't tackle head-on the mutual suspicion that sometimes exists between religious America and secular America.For me, this need was illustrated during my 2004 face for the U.S. Senate. My opponent, Alan Keyes, was well-versed in the Jerry Falwell-Pat Robertson style of rhetoric that often labels progressives as both immoral and godless.Indeed, towards the end of the campaign, Mr. Keyes said that, "Jesus Christ would not vote for Barack Obama. Christ would not vote for Barack Obama because Barack Obama has behaved in a way that it is inconceivable for Christ to have behaved."Now, I was urged by some of my liberal supporters not to take this statement seriously. To them, Mr. Keyes was an extremist, his arguments not worth entertaining.What they didn't understand, however, was that I had to take him seriously. Forhe claimed to speak for my religion - he claimed knowledge of certain truths.Mr. Obama says he's a Christian, he would say, and yet he supports a lifestylethat the Bible calls an abomination.Mr. Obama says he's a Christian, but supports the destruction of innocent andsacred life.What would my supporters have me say? That a literalist reading of the Bible was folly? That Mr. Keyes, a Roman Catholic, should ignore the teachings of thePope? Unwilling to go there, I answered with the typically liberal response in some debates - namely, that we live in a pluralistic society, that I can't impose my religious views on another, that I was running to be the U.S. Senator ofIllinois and not the Minister of Illinois. But Mr. Keyes implicit accusation that I was not a true Christian nagged at me, and I was also aware that my answer didn't adequately address the role my faith has in guiding my own values and beliefs. My dilemma was by no means unique. In a way, it reflected the broader debate we've been having in this country for the last thirty years over the role ofreligion in politics. For some time now, there has been plenty of talk among pundits and pollstersthat the political divide in this country has fallen sharply along religious lines. Indeed, the single biggest "gap" in party affiliation among white Americans today is not between men and women, or those who reside in so-called Red States and those who reside in Blue, but between those who attend church regularly and those who don't. Conservative leaders, from Falwell and Robertson to Karl Rove and Ralph Reed, have been all too happy to exploit this gap, consistently reminding evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their Church, while suggesting to the rest of the country that religious Americans care only about issues like abortion and gay marriage; school prayer and intelligent design. Democrats, for the most part, have taken the bait. At best, we may try to avoid the conversation about religious values altogether, fearful of offending anyone and claiming that - regardless of our personal beliefs - constitutional principles tie our hands. At worst, some liberals dismiss religion in the public square as inherently irrational or intolerant, insisting on a caricature of religious Americans that paints them as fanatical, or thinking that the very word "Christian" describes one's political opponents, not people of faith. Such strategies of avoidance may work for progressives when the opponent is Alan Keyes. But over the long haul, I think we make a mistake when we fail to acknowledge the power of faith in the lives of the American people, and join a serious debate about how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy. We first need to understand that Americans are a religious people. 90 percent of us believe in God, 70 percent affiliate themselves with an organized religion, 38 percent call themselves committed Christians, and substantially more people believe in angels than do those who believe in evolution.This religious tendency is not simply the result of successful marketing by skilled preachers or the draw of popular mega-churches. In fact, it speaks to a hunger that's deeper than that - a hunger that goes beyond any particular issue or cause. Each day, it seems, thousands of Americans are going about their daily round -dropping off the kids at school, driving to the office, flying to a business meeting, shopping at the mall, trying to stay on their diets - and coming tothe realization that something is missing. They are deciding that their work, their possessions, their diversions, their sheer busyness, is not enough.They want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives. They're looking torelieve a chronic loneliness, a feeling supported by a recent study that shows Americans have fewer close friends and confidants than ever before. And so they need an assurance that somebody out there cares about them, is listening to them- that they are not just destined to travel down a long highway towards nothingness. I speak from experience here. I was not raised in a particularly religious household. My father, who returned to Kenya when I was just two, was Muslim but as an adult became an atheist. My mother, whose parents were non-practicing Baptists and Methodists, grew up with a healthy skepticism of organized religion herself. As a consequence, I did too. It wasn't until after college, when I went to Chicago to work as a community organizer for a group of Christian churches, that I confronted my own spiritual dilemma. The Christians who I worked with recognized themselves in me; they saw that I knew their Book and shared their values and sang their songs. But they sensed apart of me that remained removed, detached, an observer in their midst. In time, I too came to realize that something was missing - that without a vessel for my beliefs, without a commitment to a particular community of faith, at some levelI would always remain apart and alone. If not for the particular attributes of the historically black church, I may have accepted this fate. But as the months passed in Chicago, I found myself drawn to the church. For one thing, I believed and still believe in the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change, a power made real by some of the leaders here today. Because of its past, the black church understands in an intimate way the Biblical call to feed the hungry and cloth the naked and challenge powers and principalities. And in its historical struggles for freedom and the rights of man, I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death; it is an active, palpable agent in the world. It is a source of hope. And perhaps it was out of this intimate knowledge of hardship, the grounding of faith in struggle, that the church offered me a second insight: that faith doesn't mean that you don't have doubts. You need to come to church precisely because you are of this world, not apart from it; you need to embrace Christ precisely because you have sins to wash away - because you are human and need an ally in your difficult journey. It was because of these newfound understandings that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ one day and affirm my Christian faith. It came about as a choice, and not an epiphany; the questions I had did not magically disappear. But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side of Chicago, I felt I heard God's spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth. The path I traveled has been shared by millions upon millions of Americans -evangelicals, Catholics, Protestants, Jews and Muslims alike; some since birth, others at a turning point in their lives. It is not something they set apart from the rest of their beliefs and values. In fact, it is often what drives them.This is why, if we truly hope to speak to people where they're at - to communicate our hopes and values in a way that's relevant to their own - we cannot abandon the field of religious discourse. Because when we ignore the debate about what it means to be a good Christian or Muslim or Jew; when we discuss religion only in the negative sense of where or how it should not be practiced, rather than in the positive sense of what it tells us about our obligations towards one another; when we shy away from religious venues and religious broadcasts because we assume that we will be unwelcome - others will fill the vacuum, those with the most insular views of faith, or those who cynically use religion to justify partisan ends. In other words, if we don't reach out to evangelical Christians and other religious Americans and tell them what we stand for, Jerry Falwell's and PatRobertson's will continue to hold sway. More fundamentally, the discomfort of some progressives with any hint of religion has often prevented us from effectively addressing issues in moral terms. Some of the problem here is rhetorical - if we scrub language of all religious content, we forfeit the imagery and terminology through which millions of Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice. Imagine Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address without reference to "the judgments of the Lord," or King's I Have a Dream speech without reference to"all of God's children." Their summoning of a higher truth helped inspire what had seemed impossible and move the nation to embrace a common destiny. Our failure as progressives to tap into the moral underpinnings of the nation is not just rhetorical. Our fear of getting "preachy" may also lead us to discount the role that values and culture play in some of our most urgent social problems. After all, the problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed, are not simply technical problems in search of the perfect ten point plan. Theyare rooted in both societal indifference and individual callousness - in the imperfections of man. Solving these problems will require changes in government policy; it will also require changes in hearts and minds. I believe in keeping guns out of our inner cities, and that our leaders must say so in the face of the gun manufacturer's lobby - but I also believe that when a gang-banger shoots indiscriminately into a crowd because he feels somebody disrespected him, we have a problem of morality; there's a hole in that young man's heart - a hole that government programs alone cannot fix. I believe in vigorous enforcement of our non-discrimination laws; but I also believe that a transformation of conscience and a genuine commitment to diversity on the part of the nation's CEOs can bring quicker results than a battalion of lawyers. I think we should put more of our tax dollars into educating poor girls and boys, and give them the information about contraception that can prevent unwanted pregnancies, lower abortion rates, and help assure that that every child is loved and cherished. But my bible tells me that if we train a child inthe way he should go, when he is old he will not turn from it. I think faith and guidance can help fortify a young woman's sense of self, a young man's sense of responsibility, and a sense of reverence all young people for the act of sexual intimacy. I am not suggesting that every progressive suddenly latch on to religious terminology. Nothing is more transparent than inauthentic expressions of faith- the politician who shows up at a black church around election time and claps- off rhythm - to the gospel choir. But what I am suggesting is this - secularists are wrong when they ask believersto leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryant, Dorothy Day,Martin Luther King - indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history - were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. To say that men and women should not inject their "personal morality" into public policy debates is a practical absurdity; our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Moreover, if we progressives shed some of these biases, we might recognize theoverlapping values that both religious and secular people share when it comesto the moral and material direction of our country. We might recognize that the call to sacrifice on behalf of the next generation, the need to think in terms of "thou" and not just "I," resonates in religious congregations across thecountry. And we might realize that we have the ability to reach out to theevangelical community and engage millions of religious Americans in the larger project of America's renewal. Some of this is already beginning to happen. Pastors like Rick Warren and T.D. Jakes are wielding their enormous influences to confront AIDS, Third World debt relief, and the genocide in Darfur. Religious thinkers and activists like my friend Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo are lifting up the Biblical injunction to help the poor as a means of mobilizing Christians against budget cuts to social programs and growing inequality. National denominations have shown themselves as a force on Capitol Hill, on issues such as immigration and the federal budget. And across the country, individual churches like my own are sponsoring day care programs, building senior centers, helping ex-offenders reclaim their lives, and rebuilding our gulf coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. To build on these still-tentative partnerships between the religious and secular worlds will take work - a lot more work than we've done so far. The tensions and suspicions on each side of the religious divide will have to be squarely addressed, and each side will need to accept some ground rules for collaboration. While I've already laid out some of the work that progressives need to do on this, I that the conservative leaders of the Religious Right will need toacknowledge a few things as well.For one, they need to understand the critical role that the separation of churchand state has played in preserving not only our democracy, but the robustness ofour religious practice. That during our founding, it was not the atheists or thecivil libertarians who were the most effective champions of this separation; itwas the persecuted religious minorities, Baptists like John Leland, who weremost concerned that any state-sponsored religion might hinder their ability topractice their faith.Moreover, given the increasing diversity of America's population, the dangers ofsectarianism have never been greater. Whatever we once were, we are no longerjust a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, aBuddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.And even if we did have only Christians within our borders, who's Christianitywould we teach in the schools? James Dobson's, or Al Sharpton's? Which passagesof Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Levitacus, whichsuggests slavery is ok and that eating shellfish is abomination? How aboutDeuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Orshould we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount - a passage so radical thatit's doubtful that our Defense Department would survive its application?This brings me to my second point. Democracy demands that the religiouslymotivated translate their concerns into universal, rather thanreligion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject toargument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religiousreasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simplypoint to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain whyabortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths,including those with no faith at all.This may be difficult for those who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, asmany evangelicals do. But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice.Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based ona common reality. It involves the compromise, the art of the possible. At somefundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It insists on theimpossible. If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God'sedicts, regardless of the consequences. To base one's life on such uncompromising commitments may be sublime; to base our policy making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing.We all know the story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham is ordered by God to offer up his only son, and without argument, he takes Isaac to the mountaintop, binds him to an altar, and raises his knife, prepared to act as God has commanded. Of course, in the end God sends down an angel to intercede at the very last minute, and Abraham passes God's test of devotion. But it's fair to say that if any of us saw a twenty-first century Abraham raising the knife on the roof of his apartment building, we would, at the very least, call the police and expect the Department of Children and Family Services to take Isaac away from Abraham. We would do so because we do not hear what Abraham hears, do not see what Abraham sees, true as those experiences maybe. So the best we can do is act in accordance with those things that are possible for all of us to know, be it common laws or basic reason. Finally, any reconciliation between faith and democratic pluralism requires some sense of proportion. This goes for both sides. Even those who claim the Bible's inerrancy make distinctions between Scriptural edicts, a sense that some passages - the Ten Commandments, say, or a belief in Christ's divinity - are central to Christian faith, while others are more culturally specific and may be modified to accommodate modern life. The American people intuitively understand this, which is why the majority of Catholics practice birth control and some of those opposed to gay marriage nevertheless are opposed to a Constitutional amendment to ban it. Religious leadership need not accept such wisdom in counseling their flocks, but theyshould recognize this wisdom in their politics. But a sense of proportion should also guide those who police the boundaries between church and state. Not every mention of God in public is a breach to the wall of separation - context matters. It is doubtful that children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance feel oppressed or brainwashed as a consequence of muttering the phrase "under God;" I certainly didn't. Having voluntary student prayer groups using school property to meet should not be a threat, any more than its use by the High School Republicans should threaten Democrats. And one can envision certain faith-based programs - targeting ex-offenders or substance abusers - that offer a uniquely powerful way of solving problems. So we all have some work to do here. But I am hopeful that we can bridge the gaps that exist and overcome the prejudices each of us bring to this debate.And I have faith that millions of believing Americans want that to happen. Nomatter how religious they may or may not be, people are tired of seeing faith used as a tool to attack and belittle and divide - they're tired of hearing folks deliver more screed than sermon. Because in the end, that's not how theythink about faith in their own lives..So let me end with another interaction I had during my campaign. A few days after I won the Democratic nomination in my U.S. Senate race, I received an email from a doctor at the University of Chicago Medical School that said thefollowing:"Congratulations on your overwhelming and inspiring primary win. I was happy to vote for you, and I will tell you that I am seriously considering voting for you in the general election. I write to express my concerns that may, in the end, prevent me from supporting you."The doctor described himself as a Christian who understood his commitments to be"totalizing." His faith led him to a strong opposition to abortion and gay marriage, although he said that his faith also led him to question the idolatry of the free market and quick resort to militarism that seemed to characterize much of President Bush's foreign policy. But the reason the doctor was considering not voting for me was not simply my position on abortion. Rather, he had read an entry that my campaign had posted on my website, which suggested that I would fight "right wing ideologues who want to take away a woman's right to choose." He went on to write:"I sense that you have a strong sense of justice...and I also sense that you area fair minded person with a high regard for reason...Whatever your convictions, if you truly believe that those who oppose abortion are all ideologues drivenby perverse desires to inflict suffering on women, then you, in my judgment, are not fair-minded....You know that we enter times that are fraught with possibilities for good and for harm, times when we are struggling to make sense of a common polity in the context of plurality, when we are unsure of what grounds we have for making any claims that involve others...I do not ask atthis point that you oppose abortion, only that you speak about this issue in fair-minded words." I checked my web-site and found the offending words. My staff had written them to summarize my pro-choice position during the Democratic primary, at a time when some of my opponents were questioning my commitment to protect Roe v.Wade. Re-reading the doctor's letter, though, I felt a pang of shame. It is people like him who are looking for a deeper, fuller conversation about religion inthis country. They may not change their positions, but they are willing tolisten and learn from those who are willing to speak in reasonable terms -those who know of the central and awesome place that God holds in the lives of so many, and who refuse to treat faith as simply another political issue with which to score points. I wrote back to the doctor and thanked him for his advice. The next day, I circulated the email to my staff and changed the language on my website to state in clear but simple terms my pro-choice position. And that night, beforeI went to bed, I said a prayer of my own - a prayer that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that the doctor had extended to me. It is a prayer I still say for America today - a hope that we can live with oneanother in a way that reconciles the beliefs of each with the good of all. It's a prayer worth praying, and a conversation worth having in this country in the months and years to come. Thank you.

2006-06-20T10:21:00.000Z

Cat Breeding:
The unexpected challenges of slum life

One thing that I am very happy about is that I don't have any mice in my house. The reason why, however, is because the immediate vicinity of my house is crawling with cats. Nasty, mangy, street cats. And by "street" I mean "sandy area where people throw all their trash", so they are gross in a dusty sort of way. And they are always trying to get in my house. They burrow under the door, they sidle in under the carpet - anything... One time I came back from a trip to find my room had turned into a cat colony, it wasn't until I had a fire in my room a week later that the smell went away. It's been a year now that I have suspected my neighbor of being a cat-herder. Last night, was I think the worst, though... I woke up at 2:18 AM to the sound of a litter of newborn kittens' first cries! There was a cat curled up in the corner of my room giving birth!! I don't know quite how to describe the mix of shock, disgust, anger, repulsion, and fear that gripped me, but let's just say I couldn't sleep anymore. I started yelling at the cat in the local dialect of cat language..."sssibbb, ssssibb," but it wouldn't move. I threw a bottlecap in its general direction. No action. I opened the door and waited outside and gave it a ten-count... Stubborn little bugger. I was starting to get pretty angry... I don't have very much space in the world that is mine, and this cat, barges in and just starts reproducing next to my suitcase, like it's a public hospital! I was starting to fume, even, and then I thought, "well Francis of Assissi was an animal lover, what's wrong with me?" So I started praying that God would change my heart so I wouldn't hate these despicable and disgusting animals that are taking over my room like overgrown vermin. Why should I be annoyed, angry, upset, afraid or even bothered by these creatures, whom God formed (albeit an example of "after-the-fall deterioration")? Maybe I should start taking up his style of preaching to the birds...
'My bird sisters, you are much beloved by God your Master, and always, in every place, you ought to praise Him, because He has given you liberty to fly everywhere; and He has given you also clothing double and triple. You are loved also by the air which He has given to you; and moreover, you neither sow nor reap, and God feeds you, and gives you the rivers and the fountains to drink from; He gives you the mountains and the valleys for your refuge, and the tall trees for your nests, and, although you do not know how to spin nor sew, God clothes you and your children. God must love you much, since He gives you so many blessings, and therefore, be careful, my sisters, of the sin of ingratitude, and always seek to praise God.' While Francis said these words, all those birds began to open their beaks, and stretch out their necks, and spread their wings, and bend their heads reverently toward the earth, and, with acts and songs, they showed that the Holy Father gave them great pleasure. And Francis rejoiced and made merry together with them, and he wondered much at such a multitude of birds, and at their beauty and at their attention and tameness, and he devoutly thanked God for them.
Well I am trying to thank God for the cats... the best I can think of is to get a new house and let them have mine... we'll see

2006-06-13T17:11:00.000Z

Call me narcissistic, but I've always loved reading what other people think about me, or who I "should be." For example as a teenage boy I read Raising Cain, a book about why Americans don't know how to raise boys properly and why teenage boys are violent, over-aggressive, and emotionally illiterate. Somehow, I don't think the authors would have been expecting a 16 year-old football player who's never thought about what emotional literacy is to be reading the book. Similarly I remember reading when still quite young a book that I just stumbled upon on Jean Piaget's theories of child psychology (this was jogged back into my memory by the OLPC thing below). This page took the cake though, in its satirical take on Christianity:

Premillenialism
This is the belief among some Christians that, ever since Jan. 1, 2000, it has no longer been possible, in the words of the Prince song, "to party like it's 1999." Postmillenialists are those Christians who believe that it will always be possible to do so, while Amillenialists believe that in this context, "1999" cannot be understood literally, but must be read as an allegorical term roughly meaning "a time at which it is especially appropriate to party."

Rapture
This was a #1 hit in 1980 for Blondie (#5 in the UK), from the otherwise underwhelming "Autoamerican" album. Many Christians now concede that the then-pioneering use of rap in the song sounds a little lame in retrospect. In their best-selling series of books about the song, "Left Behind (Parallel Lines)," Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye defend the rap verse's hip references to Grandmaster Flash and Fab Five Freddy, and maintain that when Jesus returns, all believers will be united in accepting that Blondie's cover of "The Tide Is High" is better than the original.

The Pope
The Pope is the President of Christianity. He is elected every four years by the Congress of Cardinals, which is divided into the Senate and the Holy House of Representatives. As president, the pope can veto important pieces of legislation, which he tends to do. The pope is also magical, and cannot be seen with the naked eye except for one hour on Christmas Eve every year.

The Bible
The Bible was written by God as a merchandising tie-in to His blockbuster film "The Ten Commandments." Each book of the Bible is named after a person who features prominently in it, for example, the Book of Numbers, which is named after Herschel Numbers, who invented numerals. The Bible was so successful that God wrote a sequel, "Bible II: On to Rome," now generally called "The New Testament." Protestants believe the Bible is literal and exactly true in every detail except the description of the Eucharist, while Catholics are not allowed to read the Bible.

Catholics
Catholics are the New York Yankees of Christianity. They are the biggest and wealthiest team, and their owner is intensely controversial (this makes St. Francis of Assisi the Derek Jeter of Catholicism: discuss). Catholics all wear matching uniforms, and are divided into "parishes," or "squadrons," to make choosing softball teams easier. Catholics are rigidly controlled by a hidebound hierarchy that starts with priests and ends with priests' housekeepers. Catholics are not allowed to read the Bible, eat meat, or refrain from worshipping statues.

Orthodox
For many years, American scholars believed the Orthodox were, like leprechauns, unicorns, and Eskimos, purely the product of the fanciful imaginations of medieval writers. Recent evidence leads us to tentatively conclude, however, that Eastern Orthodoxy may have somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 million adherents. Protestants tend to see the Orthodox as "Catholics with beards," while Catholics confess to a haunting sense that they are simply "Orthodox without beards."

The Protestant Reformation
This is the name historians give to a major labor dispute that erupted in Germany in 1517 when a group of monks hammered a proposed union contract to the door of the pope's house, requesting a 95 percent pay raise. The pope refused to negotiate with the monks union until it agreed to pay to have the door fixed, and the result was the world's longest-running strike. For nearly 500 years, a huge portion of Christians have been on strike from being Catholic, saying they are "justified" in their work stoppage because the pope won't expand the number of indulgences they get per year. Currently, the matter is in arbitration.

Calvinism
This theory was worked out by the French theologian and fashion designer John Calvin Klein, who argued that some people are predestined to be glamorous while others are doomed to be plain. America was founded by Calvinists, who sought to establish a country where they could pursue their belief that buckled hats were fashionable.

Fundamentalism
The belief that basic elements of play - like passing, ball handling, and defense - are the essential building blocks of a winning basketball team is generally referred to as "fundamentalism." The fundamentalists formulated their doctrine in the 1980s against the showy, heretical play of Magic Johnson's Los Angeles Lakers. Leading fundamentalist institutions include Bob Jones University and Syracuse. Larry Brown's failure to get the Knicks into the playoffs has been seen as a major setback for the cause of fundamentalism.

Baptism
Baptists are Christians who believe God can only be accessed by means of a swimming pool or, in some cases, a shallow outdoor stream. The first Baptist was John the Baptist, who was said to eat locusts and honey, although contemporary Baptists generally prefer barbecue. "Baptism" is also the term used to describe a key Christian ceremony, in which prospective members of the church are either initiated actually (Catholics, Orthodox, confused Protestants) or symbolically (Protestants, confused Catholics, religious studies professors). Catholics believe that anyone can perform a valid baptism, Orthodox believe that any Christian can, while Baptists, paradoxically, believe that only they can.

The Emerging Church
This is a term that refers to churches attended exclusively by white people in their 20s and 30s who have at least one tattoo or body piercing. Their distinguishing characteristics are a refreshing, "up to date" interpretation of Christianity, and a reluctance to directly answer questions.

The Nicene Creed
This statement of faith is the Christian Pledge of Allegiance, recited every Sunday in squadron meetings by Christians all over the globe. Adopted in the 4th century at the behest of Emperor Constantinople, it was designed to counter the influence of the Aryans, who argued that Jesus was German.

Touchdown Jesus
When professional athletes thank Jesus for helping them win a game, this is the Jesus they're referring to.

The Trinity
This is the Christian expression of God, who Christians say is personified by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Not all Christians accept this: Unitarians, Jehovah's Witnesses, and some Pentecostals reject trinitarianism, as do Muslims. Interestingly, while this does not mean Pentecostals are Muslim, it does mean that Muslims are Jehovah's Witnesses. St. Augustine famously summed up the difficulty of comprehending the Trinity when he recounted a dream in which a small boy told him he would need a bigger bucket if he wanted to bail out the ocean.

Sex
Christians are not permitted to have sex. This unpopular doctrine was formulated by Pope Lactose LX at the Council of Disney in 1439. Despite this restriction, Christians have managed to increase their ranks to the point where there are roughly 2 billion of them. Scholars attribute this to the competitive health benefits and generous "flex time" arrangements offered by Christianity.

Heaven
Heaven is a term referring to the ultimate destiny of a certain number of souls. Depending on who you listen to, heaven is either: where all of us will end up (Origen); where many of us will end up (St. Gregory of Nyssa); where some of us will end up (John Calvin); where a small portion of us have, in some sense, already ended up (John of Leyden); where precisely 144,000 of us will end up (Charles Taze Russell); or where Jack Chick will end up (Jack Chick). Theologian Belinda Carlisle once posited that "Ooh, baby, heaven is a place on earth," but explorers combing the globe have yet to confirm this.

The Devil
Although the Devil - also known as Satan, Lucifer, the Father of Lies, and, to his friends, "Hef" - is mentioned numerous times in Bible II, most Christians today are uncomfortable with belief in a literal, personal demonic entity. Instead, they prefer to think of the Devil primarily as the potential for wickedness that exists within all human beings or, in some cases, as an especially unreasonable landlord.

I hope this helps clear up some easily-made misconceptions about Christianity. If there are any questions about other doctrines or concepts, please don't hesitate to ask.

2006-06-12T12:23:00.000Z

I have recently been bitten by the OLPC bug again and have been trying to think of ways I can be involved, given that I have very little technical expertise with computers. And, actually, in a strange sort of way that lack of technical expertise is my "expertise" if you will, in that it seems like everyone involved in the project is a techie, and this has shaped the views of how this project should be implemented, and the pedagogy behind it. As someone who is surrronded by the worlds of the humanities and the humanitarian realm, I am hoping I can inject some theoretical insights that will help elucidate how it can help all children more fully... here are some comments I posted on their online discussion page...

Certainly I agree with what is written here, and I commend the project's challenges to the status quo, but these comments and concepts are all grounded on a certain understanding of the status quo, and certain assumptions about what the state and goal of learning is. It is an understanding of an educational status quo that is based on classes, schools, and school systems which admittedly does represent the type of systems into which it would be most easy to distribute the $100 laptop, but then it wouldn't be one laptop per child. This would mean that often the poorest children would be left out of this project, but more importantly that countries and cultures upon which the construct of "school" has been imposed (whether through colonialism and imperialism, or the economic pressures of globalization) are undergirded by inherently different models of learning which should not be dismissed (given particularly David Cavallo's assertion that the concept of "school" limits learning reform). Constructionist learning is clearly a very progressive pedagogical foundation for OLPC, but to present it as the right way, the most effective way to learn, is a hegemonic imposition of moral proportions. To insist on constructionism is to insist that, "education means making creators. . . . You have to make inventors, innovators—not conformists," as Piaget is quoted in Conversations with Jean Piaget (Bringuier, Jean Claude, 1980, p.132). And since most of the people contributing to this project are from societies, cultures, or at least educational systems that value this individualist, entrepeneurial, non-conformist esprit, we don't question that it is universally good, and we don't look for the good in traditionally conformist, communitarian cultures. Thus there is an underlying, unstated goal to OLPC, that is probably subconscious to most of the developers and contributors: To produce geniuses. This is not necessarily bad, obviously; in fact, probably most contributors will think, "of course, that's great!" If we translated the statement to economics though, it would read: "to produce millionaires;" and that is ultimately the motto of capitalism's wealth accumulation ethic. And many of us may think that is great - I am not saying it is inherently bad, but it is only one system, and the same with OLPC, and the constructonist trajectory it is on now. It is only one system, a system that will facilitate and encourage individual inventiveness, scientific inquiry, and a unique opportunity for kids who are smart to go above and beyond what they might have been able to do before. But it is not necessarily going to change things on a huge scale for the masses of children who may not fit into or be best served by the pedagogical model that OLPC is setting forth. Just as constructionism is a radical response against the fossilization/stagnation of the institution of "the school" or what might be called "neo-scholasticism" (this is not as unfounded an assertion as it might seem when understood that Habermas, upon whose theories much of constructionism is built, was bitterly opposed to Derrida and the deconstructionist "Contemporary Scholastics" as they are sometimes described) we need to open up this space to come up with radical responses to other educational systems and pedagogical theories which are prevalent in the world.

I was able to think over some of my own pedagogical and epistemological questions in the process, and became a little more familiar with Jurgen Habermas and found out he's putting out another book, Divided West, which I would love to get a hold of as soon as it comes out later this year. It seems to be an analysis of where America has gone wrong since 9/11, and how they(we?) have undermined their/our status as world power.

2006-06-05T19:18:00.000Z

Holy Ghost Power!!

I am definitely not from a Pentecostal upbringing, but I am very open to the Holy Spirit's work in and around me - in fact I want to see more and more of the Holy Spirit's work. But I rarely do for some reason... so in response to a Pentecost Sunday sermon (day before yesterday) and some other conversations, I decided to get insistent, even demanding: "God I demand more of your Holy Spirit - and who am I to demand, who am I to expect that you should entertain the petulant whims of a snivelling piece of dust? I am your son! Am I not your son whom you have sent to serve you in the world, and in the work of your kingdom? Have I not served you faithfully? In fact I have not because I have been so miserably ineffective and empty of the power of your Holy Spirit surging forth in my heart. Am I a bastard unworthy of the gifts of his Heavenly Father? I am hungry Jesus to be filled with the Holy Spirit, do you not fill those who hunger and quench those who thirst? Yet I have hungered so long with a numbing pain for the guidance of your Spirit, and I still feel like a beggar child, lost and famished." Then i felt like God was telling me to do weird things, that I didn't really want to do, like meet with this guy that I have been avoiding for months, because he was annoying me and wanting me to teach him English. Then he told me to clean my room, which has become a mess after months of neglect, and a fire last week caused by my candle-light reading late at night. It was kind of annoying for God to tell me to do these things, but I guess I was sort of annoying in my pleading to Him. And I realized they were somehow barriers to me going forward. I feel guilty every day walking past this friend's barber shop and not stopping in to say hi, and I dread my room sometimes and feel uncomfortable inviting others over because it's always a mess. But somehow God lifted this dread, and lifted with it a lot of confusion about several things which have been bothering me a lot recently. So I am continuing to pray for more of the Holy Spirit, just daring God to do something crazy in my life. ha ha ha. And don't forget "There ain't no party like a Holy Ghost party, cause the Holy Ghost party don't stop!"

2006-06-02T17:42:00.000Z

Clash of Civilizations

While I don't think we are all going to blow each other up (as you'll see in this cartoon, famous for the line "I am 'le tired'"), I think some people do think the end of the world is near, and that the world is on a course towards inevitable disaster, and confrontation, notably between "The West" and "Islam." Now this is complete horsefeathers, poppy-cock, hogwash, hullabaloo, balderdash, baloney, blatherskite, bosh, codswallop, flummadiddle, jiggery-pokery, malarkey, meshuggaas, moonshine, piffle, pishposh, tomfoolery, tommyrot, twaddle, whangdoodle, and windbaggery... and whatever else you want to call it. But if we look at Islamic-Christian dialogue, not to be confounded with politics between the Middle East and the West, there is some basis for addressing differences and similarities. I recently came across some of this sort of dialogue and found it both stimulating and promising. The Yale divinity school's Center for Faith and Culture, headed by Miroslav Volf has a new program called the Reconciliation Program, aimed at specifically promoting dialogue between Christianity and Islam, while including Judaism because of its obvious place as the foundation for both religions. A recent conference they held was exploring specifically the issues of Theocracy and Democracy in Islam and Christianity with all the lectures and panels online. I found particularly worthwhile the lecture by Muhammad Qasim Zaman on "Islam, Democracy, and Religious Authority," and the subsequent panel, but wondered why there seemed to be no one with an authoritative voice from the heartland of Islam. This is certainly not to say that people of Arab ethnic descent are "more Muslim" than those from other places - that would be an unfair generalization, and there is no absolute measuring stick anyways. But it seems to be the case that when issues of democracy and contemporary politics in Islam come up, it is more frequently people from India or Pakistan that take the mic. One Arabic teacher I had, who was Egyptian, explained that Arab scholars, academics, and intellectuals are getting over the language barrier, which has shut them out of the academic discourses in the past, but now they are faced with the "theory" barrier (which ironically, is also a language barrier more and more). Within their own discourses, obviously Islamic scholars from al-Azhar and other renowned institutions are unparallelled in their knowledge of Islamic law, but in order to communicate within the academic discourse on law, politics and juridical thought, they need to start from scratch basically, because there are different foundations. Places like India were quick to appropriate Western (specifically British) models of education early on, and assimilate them into Islamic education, as Zaman mentions in his lecture. Most other countries, particularly Arab-majority ones, have a major divide between religious and secular education.
That leads into what I am doing here, which is working with children who are in an insufficient religious educational system, and trying to supplement the memorization of the Qur'an which they are learning with their Marabouts with a more western-style of education, including practical skills. Yet, I am seeing that this is vastly insufficient for them, and that the gap between learning french with us in a classroom, and learning the Qur'an with their Marabouts under a canopy, is too great. Worst of all, neither of these is really in their native language (halpulaar)... So, I am rethinking our approach once again, while at the same time advocating for changes and reforms of this negligent system of education, which forces the boys to beg for money and food most of the day on the streets. It must have started out along the lines of mendicant orders of monks, but is perverted to the extent that these children become almost like slaves to their marabouts.
One way I am hoping to advocate on behalf of these boys is by making a documentary the conditions in which they live, and the difficulties they face. The twist though is that it would actually be a satirical political allegory on the recent changes in power and the future of the country. The title will be "Le Coup d'État des Talibés" and will portray the talibé boys rising up against their Marabout (staged of course) representing the coup d'état which occurred last August 3, and then the subsequent jockeying for position and control concerning what they will do now, whether to continue learning the Qur'an or go instead to a regular school. It will provide a rich opportunity to advocate not only for plurality and diversity in education, but also in government, from an Islamic point of view. The boys can each have a speech about what they feel should be done for their future, based on Qur'anic passages. We're still in the early stages of planning but I think this has a lot of potential to be both humorous and entertaining, while awareness-raising considering the Talibes' social plight, and politically provocative in advocating for religious freedom in the new constitution and regime.

2006-05-04T10:44:00.000Z

Rabbit Redemption
(continuing the series on my friend's paintings...)
Bunny blindness

"I once was blind, but now I see..." says the old hymn, echoing a simple faith and conversion experience that is certainly valid. However there is also a way in which we take off the lenses of this world and realize that we are actually blind when we come to Jesus. This painting seems to capture that in a humorous and non-threatening way... these black bunny silhouettes have put on certain personae - we have the nerdy little kid, the fashionable woman, the gruff old wise academic, and the blind bunny who has removed his awkward angular glasses. He has realized that he is truly blind, and that his glasses only allow him to be seen (as a certain identifiable type) and do not allow him to see. Similarly, we realize when we encounter Christ, that the world is not really as we have seen it, it is not as we have perceived it, and being re-born at that point, we are afflicted with that birth-blindness which forces us to learn to see the world anew. I love the way this bunny is turning a bit to the side, whereas the others are all facing the viewer head-on as if they are on TV or something. It also looks kind of like a police line-up in a way...
This next painting also features a sort of line-up, and a similar form of 3 figures standing in a somewhat similar position and 1 who is different. In this case the difference is a bit more drastic, fitting since the 3 other characters are less uniform in their posture and demeanor. The self-consciousness of the characters in their action, takes away from it's genuineness, as in the other work. Above, they are announcing, "Look everyone, we can see!" though they don't actually see, and here the bunnies announce, "Look everyone, we're having a party!" though their awkward expressions show that they are not really celebrating. And, again as above, the fourth bunny gives it away - he is passed out, perhaps from drinking too much, though this looks like a 7-year old's birthday party. (Though a friend did recently tell me a story of getting drunk at one such party at the age of 7 or 8 when an adult unwittingly offered them some spiked punch.) It reminds me of Modest Mouse's song "The good times are killing me." I think the honesty of the nervous, self-conscious, "Are we having fun yet?" of this piece echoes the sentiment of the painting above, but I have trouble seeing the element of grace so clearly portrayed, except in the Lutheran, "Pecca forte, sed in Christe fide fortius" (sin boldly, but trust in Christ more boldly) sense of confronting and embracing our sinfulness. Alternatively, one could see the red balloon in the middle as a symbol of grace; it certainly brings the composition together in a very strong way both in terms of placement and color. Even reminiscent of the movie Le Ballon Rouge (the red balloon) that is so well known as a children's movie but actually works on some deeper levels - I haven't seen it recently but I open it up to your comments about that...

Finally, continuing the balloon theme, we have this painting which depicts to me a sense of overwhelming by extreme normalcy:

The two white bunnies have a strange familial relationship where the larger should be caring for the smaller, but the smaller is trying to run away. The simple, flat tones seem to be decrying their own simplicity, particularly the large swath of pink in the background which is seems like it should be so glaring and unnatural, but with the combination of the black ground and the orange balloon feels subdued and surreal rather than garish. The piece has a sort of imbalance that bespeaks the awkwardness and ambivalence of the relationship between the two people... I have to confess I have yet to arrive at any theological conclusions on this one, but I will let you all know...

2006-05-02T14:37:00.001Z

Thoughts on the Bible and the Qur'an, and interpretation...

The other day in a discussion with a friend about sources of the Qur'an, particularly the Jewish Midrashic sources, I had an epiphany that the differences between most western hermeneutical frameworks and the Jewish hermeneutical framework, could have some profound implications for how we understand Islamic hermeneutics, and ultimately how Muslims could perhaps better understand Christ.
Generally, the Christian interpretations of the Bible that I have read are very focused on finding the right answer, reducing the text to its essential truth, and proving why their interpretation whould be judged the correct one (against the other ones, which the more pluralistic commentators will mention and explain in refuting).
This contrasts greatly from the Midrashic approach which values the plurality of interpretations, and lays them all side by side, with the choice of "correctness" left to the individual's conscience. Often interpretations would center on ambiguity of meaning for one specific word to create a whole background story that amplifies the stories of the Torah. This is where the story of Joseph in the Qur'an may come from, which includes an extended narrative about Potiphar's wife presenting Joseph to all of her friends to prove that her lust is justified, and indeed when he enters the room, he is "so hot right now!" that all the ladies swooned and cut themselves with the knives they are holding (to cut fruit, as the Midrashim tell us... and this is the origin of the whole story, since there was apparently a word in the biblical account related to fruit).
here is a slightly more extended explanation from Lectio Difficilior:

Characteristics of Midrash. Stories around biblical texts show a specific development which is characteristic of biblical exegesis. The original biblical text is taken to serve as a consistent matrix for narrative production. Whereas the biblical matrix is considered a sacred text, absolutely unchangeable and infallible, its exegesis shows the character of an open dialogue. It is contestable, shifting, imaginative, diverse, argumentative and someTimes New Roman even contradicting. Exegetic texts are thus defined as extended biblical stories; the extensive biblical narrative is generated according to the following characteristics:

1. The formal aspect is generated by Aristotelian classical narrative such as, replenishing ambiguities, narrative structure with beginning and end, round characters, detail multiplicity and completion of details. These literary principles already infiltrated the Israelite culture at the time.

2. Interpretations of verse and or sometime even a word by means of a homiletic narrative, the purpose of which is both exegetic and deductive.

3. Actualisation of the biblical story to the contemporary time of the extended narrative.

The biblical text epitomises the feminine figure as the Master’s wife. The biblical story of Potiphar’s wife has been amplified by midrashic homiletical exegesis. Hebrew Exegesis would usually entitle her, Potiphar’s wife. Characteristically of exegesis, the midrashic texts concerning Potiphar’s wife rely on one and the same biblical text while engaging in dialogue with preceding midrashic texts in a cumulative fashion. As a dialogic tradition, the extended texts recycle scenes around the major proto-type matrix. In this, midrashic production shows similarity to formulaic.

Certainly we can see that the Midrashic approach has it's drawbacks, and leads to distortion of texts that I would see as authoritative and complete on their own, but there is something helpful about the idea of an expansive, amplifying Biblical interpretation, and I think that I am seeing how it could be a cultural issue to some extent... for cultures that emphasize narrative and consensus, it seems as though an expansive and inclusive hermeneutic is more valuable. I have to insist that this does not necessarily mean that the truth becomes inclusive and expansive, because the purpose of interpretation is not to create a "bound set" of what is true, but rather a "fuzzy set" of truth (to use an analogy from set theory). By entertaining every possible interpretation, eventually a relative consensus should emerge that centers around God's truth.
Medieval Islamic Scholars all took this approach of listing all the different interpretations, and not particularly distinguishing between them or indicating that one was preferable. So I wonder if such an approach to interpretation here would be useful. There may be doubts about whether this is really appropriate to open the Bible to any interpretation that new believers from an Islamic background might be able to come up with, however it could have some interesting results if you apply it to the Qur'an. If you open the Qur'an to an inclusive, expansive hermeneutic, you could get results that are consistent with Christianity. In fact, many of the Medieval Islamic Scholars whom I noted above actually did come to such conclusions. And some Sufi religious leaders here seem to be approaching that. So I have been trying to do just that - write a qur'anic commentary (tafsir) that is consistent with the Bible. It requires twisting and distortion of the Qur'an's text and reception, but culturally that may not be unacceptable... except for Fundamentalist Islamists...
Which brings up the question of where do these Fundamentalist Islamists get their hermeneutic from? It isn't steeped in traditional Islam, actually, since Medieval Islamic thought was actually very open-minded and progressive. It really only emerges in the 18th-19th century, probably with greater influence from the west... certainly it is a reaction against a certain liberal opening up to the world, but it actually probably incorporates the "Western" hermeneutic of insisting that only one interpretation can be right. I seem to be coming up with a lot of ironic inconsistencies in Fundamentalist Islamism these days... this one is probably even more essential than the cross-dressing Salafists.
So I had a couple of thoughts about what could be done to come up with these resources... Some sort of online collaboration where many people can add their take as to how a certain Qur'anic passage could be interpreted in line with the Bible. It could be sort of like a wiki commentary, but maybe not open to just anyone online, but a certain group of people.
This rose for me the question of why there isn't such a thing as a co-operative Bible commentary along these same lines. I would be really interested to see what certain friends and acquaintances would think about certain passages that I am reading, or what they think of my interpretations. As I mentioned before, since the Bible is authoritative in a way that I don't see the Qur'an as, I would be a bit hesitant to just open this up to anyone online. I think if it started with a core of a few people who represent a diversity of opinions, and those people each invite a certain (limited) number of others, and so on, it could represent a fair amount of diversity of opinion, and might have a wide enough group of contributors to have fairly regularly and lively discussion. If anyone would be interested in participating in such a project, let me know, I would love to set that up as a way to further advance my own Bible study and understanding in this place where I have little contact with people who are really thinking deeply about some of these issues.
And to end up on a light note, put on your best hasidic New Yorker accent, and try to read the following excerpt from the gospel of Luke in the Orthodox Jewish Bible translation - Oy vay!:

At that time, the talmidim approached Rebbe, Melech HaMoshiach with this she'elah saying, Who then is greatest in the Malchut HaShomayim? And having called a yeled to himself, he set him before them, and said, Omein, I say to you, unless you change inwardly and have a complete turn around and become like yeladim, you shall never enter the Malchut HaShomayim. Therefore, whoever humbles himself as this yeled, he is the greatest in the Malchut HaShomayim. And whoever receives one such yeled in my Name receives me [Moshiach]. But whoever causes a michshol (stumbling block) for one of these little ones, who have emunah in me, it is better for him that a heavy millstone be hung around his neck, and that he be drowned in the depth of the sea. Oy l'Olam (Woe to the World) because of its michsholim (stumbling blocks)! For it is inevitable that michsholim come; but oy to that man through whom the michshol comes.

2006-04-30T14:41:00.000Z

NOUAKCHOTT, Mauritania — Three prisoners accused of belonging to an Al Qaeda-linked Algerian militant group escaped Thursday from a jail in Mauritania's capital, officials said.

The three men were imprisoned on suspicions of membership in the Salafist Group for Call and Combat insurgency, which has launched attacks inside Mauritania. They escaped around 1200GMT from a prison in Nouakchott, said top justice official Limam Ould Teguedi.

An investigation has been launched into the circumstances surrounding their flight, he said.

Police Lt. Mohamed Lemnie said the three were imprisoned in April 2005 by the regime of ousted ex-President Maouiya Ould Taya, who jailed many political opponents on what Mauritanians felt were trumped-up terrorism charges.

Mauritania's new leader, Ely Mohamed Vall, released dozens of those prisoners after taking power in a bloodless August coup, but kept about two dozen suspected militants behind bars, including the three that fled Thursday.

The story behind this AP news item, is how these three men escaped. Political prisoners are accorded the right of unsupervised conjugal visits, so on one such visit their wives came, dressed in burqas, the all black, head to toe garment which leaves only the eyes showing - even those sometimes obscured by a see-through mesh covering. Relatively standard for the wives of fundamentalist Islamists. As they come out again after their visit, one of the guards notices after they have walked past, a patch of men's clothing peeking out from beneath the burqa. He bolts after them and they run to the car that is waiting for them outside. The guard finally gets his own car and chases after them but is cut off by another vehicle planted to facilitate their escape. Meanwhile the wives sneak past with their malafhas (think full-length sudanese thoub, i.e. covering everything but the face - how immodest of them!)

. You may be wondering how I know this too-strange/hilarious-to-believe story of transvestite escapee Islamists, when even the major news agencies failed to publish it... well, thankfully I have friends in low places.
PS if anyone has seen the cartoon with two burqa-clad characters expressing their frustation to one another with something like, "It's so hard to be a transvestite around here" I'd love to add that to this post

2006-04-25T11:52:00.000Z

Bunnies pt. II

My artist friend, whom I poked fun at earlier for her paintings of bunnies, has now completed the entire collection, which has developed a long way from the original rabbit. This one, which was apparently her favorite, takes a really interesting look at shame and portrays a different sort of forgiveness. But it retains this cute, and humorous side which disarms the gravity of the subject matter. Attention is drawn away from the shame by the bright and innocent red bunny, and is further diffused by the fact that they are all bunnies, so it is just kind of silly. The painting subverts itself, but without undermining its own meaning - yes the shame is real, and we need these bright, inspiring, warm characters to step up to our shame, to face it and not be disgusted by us, but we also need to face the reality that it is all kind of trivial (not so much unimportant, but silly) in the larger picture. God sees our shame and he laughs, not at us, but at the silliness that our shame should keep us from him. At the same time he is sensitive to the fact that we must feel the seriousness of our shame, of our fallenness, in order to come to him. But it is Christ first who comes to us, in an unintimidating way and looks upon our sin - steps in it, and makes it all right. But there is something different about this Christ figure, it looks like the red bunny is a little girl almost (is that a silhouette of a skirt?), in any case the Christ-bunny seems to be innocent, small and powerless.
This brings me to a quote from David Bosch's book, A Spirituality of the Road, on the book of 2 Corinthians, "Apostolic ministry is always arduous and done in feebleness, a world where the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. That which his opponents reject is precisely what Paul chooses to be the center of his message and his life: weakness, affliction, and self-denial. The difference between Paul and his opponents, we have said, lies in the cross... [where] his hands are neither open, nor closed; they are defenseless, and pierced through. Often when we have differences among ourselves and argue about the essence of the gospel, those defenseless, beaten, and defeated hands are not in evidence. One muscular Christ confronts another similarly muscular one, resulting in the print of the nails disappearing behind the flexing of those powerful muscles...[but] the more muscular our Christ becomes, the more difficult it will be to rehabilitate him back to Calvary... On the basis of the centrality of the cross Paul's ministry is characterized by modesty. Such modesty does not, however, in any way exclude conviction... Although going about it in a humble way, modest, and unassuming way, he leaves no doubt about his conviction that the message he proclaims involves a matter of life and death."

I have been confronted by the humanness of Christ over and over again in the last few months in different ways, and this painting fills out the picture even more. "I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven," said Jesus - and I have never really understood what he meant. One mentor recently said it meant that little children never question that what their parents say is the truth, thus we should never question our heavenly father. But I think that the simple grace and comfort that children show to each other when they get hurt or are sick is perhaps more striking... if you observe children as they approach the suffering of other children, they have a certain curious innocence that contains no fear or disgust of the pain they are approaching. I think it is this childlike curious innocence which counteracts shame; where shame thinks it knows its own evilness, is overwhelmed by it and wants to hide because of it , a child unself-consciously explores the world with awe, without being overwhelmed. I think in a similar way Christ often first reaches out to us in our shame with a kind of curious innocence that disarms us and ultimately makes us realize that our shame is silly to God.
In a second painting we see a bunny trying to sew his ears back on, and it seems to tackle the following question one has of how to be put back together. The bunny in front of the mirror seems to have been caught in an incomplete state, as if he was naked almost, but he is more than naked - he is ripped up, broken. And the other bunny seems to walk in on him with a sort of gentle and confused gaze, "what's wrong - oh, I see!" but is not too shocked; nor does he seem ready to offer a simple solution... Instead he is simply there in the moment of brokenness, and he himself has a clipped left ear. Like in Henri Nouwen's book, Christ is the Wounded Healer, and it is by his stripes we are healed... more to come soon on Bunny Theology, thanks to my friend's remarkable paintings.

2006-04-20T09:59:00.000Z

Sometimes I wonder whether the subversive artistic aesthetic that underlies the cartoon to the left and the spoof Camel ad below are nihilistic and overly cynical, or could actually be part of a constructive critique of wrongs of society. What is the place of protest art that attacks the establishment? some would say it is propaganda, others would say it is revolutionary. While I affirm the inherent value of art, I feel like the artistic process can be difficult to muster within myself unless I am inspired by some goal or message that is challenging, prophetic, or revolutionary. But I find again that such a task oriented mentality crowds out the mentality of being that encourages my latent creativity. I try to infuse some of the activist ethic into a process which for me inherently involves a slowing down, and reflection, but there is a certain internal tension or paradox that arises out of this, and has often, maybe particularly recently, stifled or muffled my creativity. As I try to carve space and time out in my schedule for my creative side, I am wondering whether I should look to be an activist-artist along the lines of CIRCA, or whether I think kind of attitude/approach is too crass and cynical to be artistic...
My hope is that my integration of these two impulses will not lead me into cynicism and a spirit of angry protest, but into a world of "Prophetic Imagination" as Walter Brueggemann describes it. Perhaps I'll learn to imagine the world through the somber depths of death and the state of injustice, onto the incomparable lightness of resurrection, and hope...

2006-04-15T16:53:00.000Z

χριστος ανεστι
αληθως ανεστι!

2006-03-30T17:06:00.000Z

“They shall repair the ruined cities,

and restore that which has long lain desolate”

This verse from Jeremiah was on a banner (in Spanish) that hung in my home church (Yay SENCE!) and as I recently traveled to the oldest cities here in this country, seeing the ruins of those cities, I prayed that God would build this country on a new foundation, which is Jesus Christ. My voyage also reminded me of Christ's words as he entered Jerusalem 'gentle and riding on a donkey' when the Pharisees commanded him to rebuke his disciples: “I tell you, if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.” In fact I even found a stone in one of these ruined cities which had the words “Praise God” written on it:

Another example that I was able to visit in this same region, of “the rocks crying out,” is an incredible rock formation (similar to a meteor crater) which consists of several concentric rings, that look like an eye from outer space – where it can be seen easily by satellite cameras because it is the largest such formation in the world – almost 30 miles across! No wonder they call it the “Eye of God.” It really does seem to be a case of all nature crying out in praise, as his fingerprint is so clearly visible on the landscape.

But as the song says, “Ain't no rock gonna cry in my place, as long as I'm alive to glorify his holy name.” And I certainly have no intention of letting any rocks take my place in proclaiming Jesus here, and having done that, I am beginning to see some fruit, praise God. Earlier this year, the young man I mentioned in my last letter, who lives near me, was baptized, and I have been discipling him over the last few months. Pray that we would have more opportunities to discuss spiritual matters, since he is working very long hours in a factory (and is being paid very poorly and sporadically for his work) and has little privacy to pray or study God's word in the few hours he is not working or sleeping. Pray also that I would have the chance to develop materials to teach him that are locally appropriate not just for him, but other poor people who are able to read very little.

Other exciting developments have been with the older man whom I have mentioned in letters before, who is a religious leader in his village to the North (let's call him Nicodemus for convenience's sake). I stopped in at his village as part of the same trip I have been talking about, as well as the village where he did his religious studies, and first heard of Jesus. I have also been able to meet up with him here in the capital city, as he has had business here as well. Through these discussions and times of teaching from the Bible I have been extremely encouraged, as he said to me, “I am so happy that I have the same understanding of Jesus as you.” I have even been encouraged to see how he shares with others so freely, as he described to a relative of his, “Most people don't understand it, but Jesus is the Lord of all existence.” He has been studying the Bible on his own and memorizing scripture, but the recent advances in his understanding have come through the help of a Sudanese Arabic man who is visiting here. I came in contact with this man through an expatriate here that I did not know before, but was hosting this Sudanese friend and wanted me to meet him. The Sudanese man is the leader of his tribe, and came to find out if any members of the tribe, which is spread out across North Africa, might be here. His tribe turned to Christ after his father had a vision of Jesus a number of years ago, and they want to share the good news with all of their people, as well as others who are from a similar Muslim background. Thus he was very eager to talk with Nicodemus, and other religious leaders of his region, who are all of the same Sufi sect which is also quite widespread in certain areas of Sudan.

This has not been the only reason Sudan has been on my mind of late, in fact long before I came in contact with this Sudanese man, our team had been praying for a similar team working over there. We recently heard word that they are needing help because there are few people working with them, and incredible interest among the local people. So I have been praying about going to work with them for a month or two this summer, because they need people who speak Arabic and can do development work. Pray that God would open the doors if it is his will for me to go to that suffering land. Pray also that there would be someone to take over my duties here while I would be gone, including the street boys' center, which I have been overseeing.

Please continue praying for these boys as we are trying to give them some chance at an education besides memorizing the Qur'an. We have been doing more classes in French and Health/Science as well as lots of fun activities to give them a second chance at just being kids. Since they are supposed to spend the entire day begging on the streets, they often don't even get a chance to play soccer – everyone's favorite sport. So over the next week and a half we are having a special soccer tournament, which we will also use to teach them a bit about teamwork, fair play, and some health lessons. It will also give us an opportunity to do a basic physical check-up with a Doctor who has volunteered her time to help them.

Thank you again for all of your prayers and your continued support for my work here. May God bless you and reward you richly for your faithfulness!

2006-03-06T18:54:00.000Z

Does this Bunny Look Creepy to You?

This painting, by a friend of mine, has always struck me as somehow a little kooky, kreepy, or kinky. Her first theory is that it was because I am a man that I associated the sketchiest possibilities with the see-through slip, and red high-heeled shoes. I think the lack of nose (which along with the button eyes lead to a vacant expression), and the doll hanging limply in the left hand like a dead man don't help. In any case, I am polling for a definitive opinion: is this a sketchy/disturbing painting with pedophilic undertones or an innocent and playful painting of a little bunny dressing up like an adult bunny?
Since I know the painter, I know what she intended, but that leads to the interpretive question of whether the author/artist's intention really has much to bear on the meaning of their work. Often what they may have consciously intended is only a small part of the meaning, but what about the problem of completely unintended layers of philosophical thought being imposed on paintings that may have been thoughtlessly conceived. Like Edvard Munch's
"The Scream," which has been said to represent the existential angst of a generation (actually it really became most popular a couple generations later). But it was that generation's appropriation of a mediocre painter's aberrant work that propelled it to "fame," rather than a sudden blossoming or recognition of genius I would presume. That is not to deny that the painting does capture some sort of cosmic desperation, but I doubt whether it does so in a way that Munch meant it to, so imbued with philosophical connotations.

Somehow, though, thoughtfulness can be expressed in art best in a sub-conscious or sub-literal way - that is, sublimity requires subtlety.
The lack of subtlety in "The Scream" explains why it was really only popularized many years later. A counter example, is De Aardappeleters (the Potato Eaters),below by Van Gogh, one of his early works. It gropes for the later impressionism that defined him, with its brusque strokes and emphasis on perception over reality. His emphasis on the social reality is something that particularly appeals to me. This work really seems to connect with the immanence of the supernatural among the working peasant farmer, whereas his later impressionist work may speak of the transcendence of God in his creation. This could be seen in the treatment of light, as The Potato Eaters has a sort of sombre chiaroscuro feel, but the source of light is visible, hinting that the divine presence is not some hidden point of infinite light, it is rather the unexpectedly dim God-with-us Emmanuel of a baby in a stable.

From 1881 to 1885 van Gogh lived in the Netherlands, sometimes in lodgings, supported by his devoted brother Theo, who regularly sent him money from his own small salary. In keeping with his humanitarian outlook he painted peasants and workers, the most famous picture from this period being The Potato Eaters (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; 1885). Of this he wrote to Theo: `I have tried to emphasize that those people, eating their potatoes in the lamp-light have dug the earth with those very hands they put in the dish, and so it speaks of manual labour, and how they have honestly earned their food'. In 1885 van Gogh moved to Antwerp on the advice of Antoine Mauve (a cousin by marriage), and studied for some months at the Academy there. Academic instruction had little to offer such an individualist, however, and in February 1886 he moved to Paris, where he met Pissarro, Degas, Gauguin, Seurat, and Toulouse-Lautrec. At this time his painting underwent a violent metamorphosis under the combined influence of Impressionism and Japanese woodcuts, losing its moralistic flavour of social realism. Van Gogh became obsessed by the symbolic and expressive values of colors and began to use them for this purpose rather than, as did the Impressionists, for the reproduction of visual appearances, atmosphere, and light. `Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes,' he wrote, `I use color more arbitrarily so as to express myself more forcibly'.

2006-03-06T17:29:00.000Z

Homeless Bostonian Set on Fire
BOSTON --Police were continuing to search Monday for two people who attacked a homeless man, kicking him the stomach and setting his legs on fire as he slept in a city park.Mayor Thomas M. Menino vowed to track down the suspects and have them arrested."We're going to find you," he said. "We're going to lock you up. We're going to hope the jury and the judge throw the book at you."The 30-year-old man, whom police would not identify, was sleeping on a park bench in the city's North End when he was awakened Sunday morning and verbally accosted. He drifted back to sleep after the assault, but his attackers returned.They then drenched him with a flammable liquid and set his legs on fire, police said. A 911 caller reported 5-foot flames in Langone Park in the city's historic North End.Firefighters thought a garbage can was ablaze when they arrived around 2 a.m."On further investigation they discovered it was a middle-aged gentlemen in a blanket," fire department spokesman Scott Salman said.The homeless man had ripped off some of his clothes to stop the burning."He was shivering and was partially dressed," said Boston police spokesman John Boyle.The victim was being treated at Massachusetts General Hospital for burns to his legs. The suspects ran away, and crossed a nearby bridge that heads into the city's neighboring Charlestown section.The victim told firefighters that he was attacked by two "youths," who they assumed were teenagers, Salman said. Boyle described the suspects as about 30 years old.No arrests have been made and police gave no indication of what provoked the attack.The park is a short walk from a cluster of downtown bars that close at 2 a.m.Nationally the number of assaults against the homeless has risen dramatically since 2002, according to a recent report by the National Coalition for the Homeless. In 2005, 73 homeless people were assaulted nationwide and 13 died, the report said.

2006-03-04T17:42:00.000Z

excerpts from an interview of Dr. Lamin Sanneh of the Sene-Gambia, professor at Yale Divinity School:
Lamin Sanneh is the D. Willis James Professor of Missions and World Christianity and professor of history at Yale Divinity School. Gambian born, Sanneh is descended from the nyanchos, an ancient African royal line. As such, his earliest education, in the Gambia, was with fellow chiefs' sons. Following graduation from the University of London with a Ph.D. in Islamic History, he taught at the University of Ghana and at the University of Aberdeen, in Scotland. He served for eight years as Assistant and Associate Professor of the History of Religion at Harvard University, before moving to Yale University in 1989. The author of a dozen books and scores of articles, he is an editor-at-large for The Christian Century and a contributing editor for the International Bulletin of Missionary Research.

Why did you move into communion with the Roman Catholic Church, after your long sojourn as a Protestant?
The Catholic Church eventually relented after years of ignoring and wishing me away! In that time the Protestant church had remained for the most part incredulous of me.
I do not know the reason for that. It could be cultural, it could be liberal distrust of religion, it could be residual hostility toward converts as illegitimate fruits of mission, it could be unfamiliarity with non-white people, it could be presumptions about my political motives and leanings, it could be any or all of the above, how do I know. But, whatever it was, it wore me down eventually.
I felt my reasons for being a Christian had little resonance with the reasons a liberal West gives for the Christian name. I remember on a visit to Germany from Africa when I was on school vacation seeing the sign, "The Episcopal Church Welcomes You," and duly betaking myself there one Sunday only to discover I was unwelcome! My secular white American friend felt vindicated about why he ceased to be a practicing Christian. It was all one big cultural pretense, he said. Don't get literal with Christian slogans. There would be no questions asked if I was white, he observed caustically.
I realized that a cultural paradigm had usurped the place of God in our enlightened scheme of things, and that was one reason why for so long the church tried to make me feel guilty and untrustworthy for claiming the Christian name. With my religious orientation, however, I was unable to reconcile myself to that fundamental compromise with the world. I thought Jesus was for real in spite of the prevarications of the church.

How did you end up choosing an academic career in which you have spent most of your time on the faculty of several of the most prestigious universities in the world?
I come from a Muslim scholarly family. My paternal grandfather and my father's brother were both professional religious scholars, and so it felt natural from childhood for me to aspire to be a scholar. My heart was set on it, even though I tried many other occupations in between. I have never doubted that the life of the mind and life in the service of God and neighbor belonged together. But nobody can determine where and how he or she will end up—nor did I.

What are among the most serious misunderstandings that Muslims typically hold regarding Christians?
Several misunderstandings leap to mind at random. Muslims believe that Christians:
have no revealed language for revelation and so are divided by the languages of the world;
deny the oneness of God by their trinity;
labor under the misapprehension that Jesus was crucified when, according to the Qur'an, he was not;
without a mandate like the salát of Islam, follow their own whim in the worship of God;
have no revealed law and so cannot know or follow the truth;
blaspheme when they call Jesus the Son of God instead of the son of Mary, as Muslims say;
have abandoned the Mosaic code on dietary practice and the Sabbath;
are unfaithful to the teachings of God's prophets, including those of Jesus, concerning obedience and unity of faith and practice;
are in error when they separate church and state with the goal of reducing religion to the private and subjective level;
have turned to the nation state as an object of worship and for which they give their lives;
give citizenship and patriotism primacy over allegiance to God;
promote religion as personal, emotional assurance without reference to society and the world, as if it is enough to say religion is grace, which is nothing other than religion as a vague, general aspiration without the means or method to implement it, or the space to practice it;
practice a religion that is without a home or a promise land, and so have little respect for Islam as a religion at home still in its birthplace while prevailing in many other places besides.

How is the Muslim faith most frequently misunderstood in the West?
Comparable misunderstandings of Islam in the West include the beliefs that Islam:
is a violent religion that breeds terror;
is intolerant of other religions;
oppresses women;
is a religion of laws and rules rather than of grace;
uses jihad to spread itself;
unites church and state to breed intolerance, fanaticism, and conflict;
restricts revelation to a book instead of to a person;
was founded by a man who used violence as a weapon;
encourages polygamy.
In the wake of 9/11 its aftermath, including this country's ongoing response, do you have any advice for American evangelicals generally, and for evangelical missionaries particularly?
The cultural captivity of Christianity has not spared evangelicals in America. Witness the bellicose tone of many evangelical leaders applauding America's military intervention in Iraq, making religious militancy a partner with America's military might in a joint assault in the war on terror and on Islam. The flag has become a more prominent symbol in many evangelical churches than the cross.
As to advice, it is hard to give that without sounding unconvincing or ineffectual. One should never have to apologize for who one is, including for being a Christian that happens to come from America, for that will guarantee being sidetracked from the task at hand. Yet by trading on the American name one makes that all but inevitable.
One should also recall that Christianity originated in the Middle East, and that the language of the Arabs is much closer to that of Jesus than, say, English. We risk a chauvinistic promotion of American culture in the guise of true religion unless we can separate meat and sandwich. With respect to cultural biases, we see the speck in the other person's eye but are blind to the splinter in our own (Matt. 7:3).
How would you compare Christianity as it is understood and practiced in Africa and in North America?
The main difference I see is the difference between a post-Christian American society and a post-Western Christianity rising in Africa and elsewhere. The one is in decline, at least intellectually, and the other is in spate. The taming of Christianity in North America requires very different tools from those required by the conditions favoring expansion in Africa. Christians are not afraid to go to church for prayer and healing when they are ill, for instance, whereas in North America prayers may be said for people who are ill but only in absentia.
Africans trust God for their spiritual, physical, social, and medical needs; Americans don't.

What is the greatest challenge you face as a professor teaching in a divinity school on a secular university campus?
The challenge for all of us is to bring the fruits of scholarship to bear on issues of faith and service, to make a vital connection between knowledge and life. We should humanize scholarship with the demands of faith, and illuminate vocation with the light of scholarship. The Divinity School at Yale is not just a department for the study of religion, but a center of religious learning disciplined by practice, and of practice informed by learning.
You attended the Anglican Communion's Lambeth Conference in 1998, when there was such a marked difference between the agendas of the African bishops and those of their North American counterparts. What do you think is the future of the Anglican global communion?
Senior churchmen at Lambeth spoke of how Third World Christians, bankrolled by conservative groups in the United States, were set to promote a reactionary cultural agenda. Implicated in the crisis of national political breakdown, the old-line churchmen claimed, the new Christian leaders would foment witch-hunts of enemies and opponents as happened in the pre-Enlightenment West.
Angry at the Third World bishops for their anti-gay stance at Lambeth, Bishop John Shelby Spong of Newark, for example, declared in a remark that caused outrage and for which he issued a half-hearted apology afterwards that the witch-hunting and superstitious societies from which these bishops came represented a threat to the Anglican church as a force in Western civilization. What he saw and heard at Lambeth, he subsequently reaffirmed, "was the sunset of the Anglican communion."
This was not just an instance of the West defining itself against Christianity, but also, more tellingly, of a post-Christian West, still recovering from seeing religion as contagion, mobilizing behind a domesticated highbrow view of culture for safeguard.
At Lambeth itself, and subsequently, there was widespread consternation among Western bishops that the Third World bishops seemed misguided enough to think that the Bible could replace enlightened reasonableness as a standard of guidance and Christian teaching. The unprecedented large conversions taking place in Africa and elsewhere were viewed as unwelcome resistance in the path of the West's cultural juggernaut.
The West limits its role in the new Christianity to taking precautions against too close an encounter with it. According to many church leaders, the Anglican Church is threatened with a major schism in the foreseeable future. The extraordinary irony is that Anglicanism has never been stronger, never more appealing and more global in membership than at present. In the mystery of God, you wonder whether that energy will find other channels rather than dissipate entirely.

2006-02-25T10:42:00.000Z

Interesting article about the hypocrisy in Bush's interventionism... this one rings almost too close to the Fahrenheit 9/11 observation that when money talks to George Bush, it often speaks Arabic...

Irony is a constant in politics. Since Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush has deliberately defined the world in the black-and-white, us-versus-them language of his war on terror. Now, the rhetorical demons he so assiduously promoted are coming back to bite.
They are doing so in the form of what should be a run-of-the-mill corporate takeover. A company based in the United Arab Emirates has bought another company based in the United Kingdom.
In a normal world, this would be a ho-hum event. However, in the fraught world of Bush's war on terror (or "long war" as he now likes to call it), the sale is anything but.
The ostensible problem is that the British company, Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co., manages six vital U.S ports, including those of New York, Miami and New Orleans.
The sale would put management of these ports in the hands of an Arab, state-owned company, Dubai Ports World.
What's more, critics of the sale say, two of the 9/11 terrorists came from the U.A.E.— a country made up of seven emirates, including Dubai.
What more need be said?
All of this has left Bush and Co. in the unusual position of decrying guilt by association.
The American president points out, correctly, that the arch-conservative and profoundly undemocratic U.A.E. government is a staunch U.S. ally.
His defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld notes — also correctly — that terrorists can come from anywhere, including the U.S. and Britain. Why condemn an entire nation because a few of its citizens made the wrong choice?
The editors of The Wall Street Journal, who find the entire episode distasteful, note that security at these ports will continue to be handled by the U.S. government.
The only effective difference is that profits made by running the ports will flow to princelings in Dubai rather than capitalists in the City of London.
But among Americans, none of this seems to matter. A citizenry whose fears have been so successfully exploited by this administration remains unconvinced.
"I'm a big Republican and I think Bush has lost his mind," Newark longshoreman Tom DiDomenico told a local news service here in New Jersey.
Those kinds of fears, however irrational, are echoed throughout the U.S. — which may explain why opposition to the sale is growing among both Democratic and Republican lawmakers.
New Jersey has filed a lawsuit to prevent the takeover. In Washington, Democratic senators want to ban any foreign, state-owned firms from operating U.S. ports.
Republicans are so uneasy about the deal that Dubai Ports has agreed to temporarily delay the U.S. portion of its takeover.
For his part, Bush has vowed to veto any Congressional bill blocking the transfer.
In effect, he is saying that his war on international terror should not be transformed into a war against international capital.
Americans are understandably confused by this.
In the wake of 9/11, they were told by this same president that it was just fine to arrest and lock up Muslim immigrants without charge.
They were told that when it came to taking prisoners of war in places like Afghanistan, it was necessary for America to abandon its long commitment to the Geneva Conventions.
They were told it was necessary for the U.S. to hold prisoners indefinitely and without charge at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba or other secret jails in Europe and the Mideast.
They were told it was crucial for American interrogators to be able to employ techniques against prisoners that both the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations have said amount to torture.
They were told that the war on terror required Americans themselves to give up some civil rights — that it was necessary for the president to authorize illegal wiretaps; that in some national security areas, it was necessary for the courts to be denied jurisdiction.
They were told that they had to put up with government intrusion at an unprecedented level, that virtually everything they did, from using the Internet to reading library books was, and had to be, subject to FBI surveillance.
They were told that their soldiers had to invade Iraq and, if necessary, die there.
So, perhaps, it is understandable that so many Americans balk at the idea of their ports being run by an Arab company. It is irrational; it is even racist.
But in the topsy-turvy world that George W. Bush helped to create, it is sadly logical.

2006-02-24T18:25:00.000Z

Eucharist
The Blood and Body of Christ

making real the ultimate sacrifice

I have been thinking a lot about how to convey the gravity of the death and suffering of Jesus to local friends who are coming from a culture that can not accept that someone on God's side could suffer (the infallibility of the prophets) not to mention God himself. Encouraging this in their devotional and worship/liturgical experience is further difficult for me since their tradition has such a strict prohibition against the idea of physical representations, thus a cross or a painting of Christ's suffering are out of bounds. The things which help me to feel and make real the sacrifice of Christ for myself are not accessible in the same way for these friends I am trying to disciple. Open forum for any ideas on how to present and perform the Eucharist in so meaningful a way that these new believers can grasp hold of the depth of Christ's love...

(ps the picture above is one I drew of a time of communion by candlelight with extremely poor local believers)

2006-02-21T09:40:00.000Z

He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he has born our griefs and sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and by his stripes we are healed.

statue in Garden outside Rodin Museum in Paris

2006-02-19T17:02:00.000Z

"Sin distinguishes man from beast; is sin divine?"
-John Bunyan, author of Pilgrim's Progress
(yes, that is a donkey carrying a car...)

2006-02-16T10:17:00.000Z

Augustine
"The supreme human law is love, and this law is best respected when men, who both desire and ought to live in harmony, so bind themselves by the bonds of social relationships that no one man monopolizes more than one relationship, and many different relationships are distributed as widely as possible, so that a common social life of the greatest number may best be fostered... It is true that our ancestors had a religious regard for kinship and, being afraid that it might be lessened and lost in the course of successive generations, they tried to hold on to it by the bond of marriage and, as it were, to call it back before it got too far away. So it was that, when the world was fully populated and there was no marrying of sisters or half-sisters, people still preferred to marry within their own clan. No one, however, can doubt that the modern attitude toward the marriage even of cousins [who are the nearest in consanguinity after brothers and sisters] is morally sounder. [For] it is socially right to multiply and distribute relationships of love... and thus increase the community of kinship."

Though Augustine's intention is to argue against practices of incest, and tribal insularity, I wonder to what extent this passage from the City of God (bk. XV, ch. 16) applies to the idea of interracial marriages (please correct me if there is a better or preferred term, especially given I refer to race as much as culture here). Augustine himself was the son of a native North African woman (probably Punic or Kabylie) and a Roman father, and in his time this would have been very common because of the military presence of Rome sending men throughout the Empire to places where the majority of women were non-Roman. Probably these marriages between soldiers or Roman officials and locals were often characterized and an imbalance of power, as is unfortunately still the case in many places around the world today (American soldiers in South Korea are notorious for this). Inter-racial marriages in America have seen increasing acceptance among majority culture, though as late as 1968 arcane laws prevented Thurgood Marshall from buying a house with his East Asian wife. As interracial marriages have become more accepted, certain pairings have come to be seen as more common, or stigmatized. For example white men and asian women marrying, and black men and white women marrying are the most common pairings. These have led to stigmas of people 'selling out,' or the 'asian fetish' stigma or, frustration and anger by those who are being systematically overlooked by members of the opposite sex of their own ethnic group. Some might say that these are all "hypersensitivities" of the late 90's, and that 'we are past that,' but I am hesitant to overlook what seem to be continuations of systematic patterns of racism, particularly being a white male myself. Furthermore I am sensitive to the argument that I have heard minorities suggest (note this is different from the majority culture/race trying to keep 'pure bloodlines') that they fear the loss of their culture through the assimilation that tends to occur with interracial marriages. Then again this quote from Augustine seems to encourage the idea that the wider the web of kinship obligations, the better and richer the social fabric of the body of Christ.

2006-02-13T16:40:00.000Z

Next in our series of “Muslim Dictators Running for US President” we have this gem of Saddam Hussein. While walking through the market, I spotted this wallet, almost identical to the “Ben Laden” one featured a week ago. Who comes up with these things? And what is the message? Pure irony?

In any case I thought this was a good occasion to take a look at the trial of Saddam Hussein, which has become a tragic farce, plagued with angry outbursts, hits on lawyers (two have died, and one fled), and theatrics to make The People's Court (a laJudge Wapner, not the new Judge Milian) look like tax litigation. Today they finally re-started after an 11-day adjournment brought on (at least partly) by Hussein and his co-defendants boycotting the trial because of their claims that it was unjust. Less than a month ago the previous judge had to step down because of the unbearable pressure of Saddam's daily tirades, not to mention the outside pressure from the reconstructing government. Just yesterday they threatened to further disrupt the trial with a hunger strike, but they apparently are not following through. The judge promised that he would bring the defendants to the trial by force if necessary and Saddam's brother Barzan did scuffle with the police briefly on entering. The trial today is covering the execution of 148 people at Dujail in 1982, and it struck me how methodically they go through each specific case of murder and “crimes against humanity.” It seems as though it would be too painful and gory to really sit down and look at each case of someone who has so thoroughly “stolen, killed and destroyed” his nation over so many years. But he deserves a fair trial, I guess, just as everyone else does, and given the political climate of Iraq right now, if he didn't receive a fair trial the results could be disastrous among the rebellious factions (whether they will actually acknowledge the fairness of the trial is another story, but the effort must be made). The most interesting part of today's trial was a 1987 memo discussing the fate of 2 people who had been condemned to execution at Dujail, but somehow escaped their fate. A note written by Saddam says “we cannot allow coincidence to be more compassionate than us,” which doesn't sound like your typical Hitler/Stalin/Napoleon ruthlessness. One would expect, from the caricature Saddam's persona has become, that he would say something like, “make sure you get those other two *(%^#@ that you @#^*$ failed to execute before.” Though I don't think we can judge Saddam's character based on that one memo, it raises the issue to me of how bad is he actually. He has been compared to all the infamous genocidal dictators, but I wonder if he's really that bad... like on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being the Cookie Monster whose evilness is limited to depleting the world's cookie population, to 10 Adolf Hitler the perennial favorite for most evil person ever (though he does have plenty of competition), where does Saddam stand? I am guessing he lines up in the 7.8 range, between Idi Amin and Qaddafi, though I don't have exact figures on the number of deaths he is reponsible for. Please vote!

2006-02-10T21:29:00.000Z

One of my favorite things is spotting clever/ridiculous t-shirts, and the fun gets even better when they are just too good to pass up, so I talk them off the backs of their owners.
And now for the top T-shirt finds of the last year:
Hug Therapist
found on the back of a burly Nigerian businessman at the Senegal/Mali border... it only took about 15 minutes, my quickest acquisition - now that's fast talking :)

and note (just below the bear's feet) :

it's from "The Hug Factory" in Louisville, Kentucky... in case you need one yourself. I have to admit that part of the humour/appeal of this one is the practical application - anyone who sees it just has to find out whether the wearer actually is a big teddy bear, which is very positive for someone like myself who needs a lot of hugs...

2006-02-10T17:04:00.000Z

This one is my favorite, but in large part because of the story and context around how I got it. I took a couple weeks off for a trip to Dakar and other places, and I found a mechanic wearing this shirt, which contrary to how it appears is a white t-shirt before years of grime and grease covered it. In its current state it is almost impossible to wear it next to the skin. The irony of seeing a guy wearing this shirt and working himself to the bone while I am on "vacation" was too much. I cracked up, and bought him a brand new shirt in exchange for his dirty one (great sermon illustrations abound...)
The other great part was the back side, which says "Switzerland is Yours," which is so hilarious because of all the Swiss people I work with, and the general way in which this t-shirt antithesizes Switzerland...
It was so interesting to see how he was so hesitant to believe me when I said I would buy him a brand new shirt, right then and there, and to him there was no reason why he should be singled out among all his other friends with equally filthy shirts with uncomprehended writing... but in the end he couldn't resist taking me up on my offer. This is very similar to God's grace for us - we can't resist it, we don't understand why he's chosen us to receive it, and it doesn't fit anywhere in our conception of who we are and how the world works. Our "shirts" are so dirty they can't be cleaned, and we don't care, we just accept it because there seems no other way than to keep working in them. But God offers a clean shirt, when we had become so used to the dirty one, we didn't recognize there was anything wrong with it. And when God is done with us we stand out in our previous surroundings so much that everyone notices us. Well actually they notice the shirt...

2006-02-10T16:50:00.000Z

This one is a real hit with my co-workers, who are all in the 40-ish range pretty much... and by "hit" I mean it induces them to hit me. Cleverness does have it's costs... (though in this case definitely not financial costs...I got it for a dollar in the "Fukojay" - pretty incredible to find something like this in french-speaking country)

2006-02-09T20:48:00.000Z

Worship, Globalization, and the Emergent Church

When asked recently why I am here in a Muslim country, I responded "To call people into worship of Christ who have no specific historical/cultural experience or preconception of what the church is, such that they may create a culture of worship (a liturgy if you will) that reflects the worship which the Holy Spirit invokes in their hearts when they encounter Christ."
While some people look to the earliest church, and the first followers of Jesus for the "right" form of worship, and the perfect expression of Biblical doctrines, this is a different sort of approach to that same issue. In some ways this reflects Herodotus' account of Psammetichus' search for the first human language. After trying to trace it back linguistically, he decided that he would have to run a different sort of experiment, so he raised two children without allowing anyone to speak to him, with the assumption that the first words he uttered would have to be those which are "natural" to humanity... thus he determined that Phrygian was the first language.
Thus I hope to learn more about what it means to worship Jesus from people whose cultural background does not have a "liturgy" for doing so. I don't however believe this is "the correct form of worship," just as I don't think that of the original disciples was "the correct form." But I think it takes experiences from many cultures, worship traditions and liturgies to enrich our worship.
One group that is exploring what that means in the postmodern world, particularly for those who have access to many cultures and are maybe not even sure which is their own, is the Emergent Church. They are very self-consciously post-modern, yet they describe themselves as an order, with 4 principal commitments: Commitment to God in the Way of Jesus, Commitment to the Church in all its Forms, Commitment to God’s World, and Commitment to One Another. While these are sort of vague, and a lot of their other writing is a bit non-committal (some might even find it wishy-washy), I think they have enough substance to start an interesting conversation that challenges the status quo in a helpful way. A recent theological reflection from Anglican emergent Ian Mobsby at Cambridge places their movement between catholic tradition and evangelicalism. I think the British/Australian wing seems to lean a bit more towards the pandering to pop culture sort of thing, a la Relevant Magazine in the US, but it is hard to know what is really going on with any of them from such a distance...

2006-02-09T10:25:00.000Z

This is the image promised in my last post, from a wallet I bought here in the market.
A la mastercard:
cheap black plastic wallet, with velcro and zippers 12 cents
aluminum wallet "chain" 4 cents
"Ben" Laden facial mimeograph print 2 cents
full color printing of assorted striped patterns (including "African power" red, yellow, green motif on reverse) 3 cents

TOTAL RETAIL cost: 67 cents
having a "Ben Laden for US President" wallet: Priceless

2006-02-02T15:32:00.000Z

Comments on the State of the Union

I don't have anything particular to say about the state of the union, because, well, Bush didn't have anything particular to say - just lots of vague generalities about how strong we Americans are and how much stronger we need to prove ourselves to be so that the world will not fall apart. So I am going to jump on the bandwagon and bash Bush. It's not so much the fact that he is wrong about specific policies that annoys me, it is more that his general world view is so arrogant and self-centered/self-interested (l'etat c'est moi) that I find it difficult to accept anything that proceeds from his mouth... here are a few highlights that really gave me a bad feeling...

"Tonight the state of our Union is strong -- and together we will make it stronger."
Did he feel that it was a prerequesite of a "State of the Union" address to include a one word answer on what that state is?

"In a complex and challenging time, the road of isolationism and protectionism may seem broad and inviting -- yet it ends in danger and decline."
Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow, and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few. Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will recognize them by their fruits. Mt. 7:13-16 just juxtaposing...

"...allowing the violent to inherit the Earth. But they have miscalculated: We love our freedom, and we will fight to keep it."
This one really got me...what ever happened to the meek inheriting the earth?... doesn't he realize that most of the mujahideen and terrorists he is denouncing see themselves as freedom fighters? The violent will inherit the earth all right, but it will be us, because we will be more violent...

Human life is a gift from our Creator -- and that gift should never be discarded, devalued or put up for sale.
So, how then does he explain the paltry price he has put on the tens of thousands who have needlessly died in Iraq on both besides because of American occupation. I sympathize with the argument that they can't just leave now, because they messed it all up and they can't just leave it a mess, but they are in this situation because they did it all wrong from the beginning. I am finding this in my own life, that one can't just continue on in a situation that one entered wrongly with the hope of eventually redeeming it - only God can redeem the situation. It is our place to recognize that we should not have entered the situation, and must stop the sin, so that God can heal us. I will suspend my disbelief for a moment and assume that Bush actually does have some sort of faith - what he must do from within this framework is trust and pray that God will work out the situation with Iraq, because he obviously can't do it himself (as we see from the mounting figures of casualties) and he should have never thought that he could.

Forgive me for a somewhat angry rant (I admit it could be related to my generally sour mood)...hopefully the picture (coming soon) will lighten it a bit :)

2006-01-31T17:48:00.000Z

I took the plunge today and converted to linux, using an OS called UBUNTU which was designed by Benjamin Mako Hill (among other people) who also is the main software man for the $100 laptop aka One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. It is not everything I ever dreamed maybe, but I am learning. my current crisis is getting it to support multiple languages - otherwise my Arabic documents won't work out too well for me.
Why linux? Well there are lots of reasons, including not giving in to "The Man" (if Microsoft and Windows isn't "the man", then who is?), as well as just being different (I have been told that my Enneagram type is 4 - need to be different), and wanting to learn about the interface that millions of children will be using through the OLPC program. But the real reason why I (and you, yes both of you) should be using linux, is because it allows you to have control over the way your computer works. Right now, it is Microsoft who controls what you can or can't do with your computer, and how you can do it. With linux, you decide. Granted, without certain computer programming experience and skills, you won't be able to do anything too much more crazy than what Microsoft stuff does, but you will probably have a lot more flexibility, and would have a lot easier access to people who actually care about and face the same computing issues. There are an unbelievable number of people who are making little updates and improvements and special little customized alterations to this open-source stuff all the time, around the world (in dozens of languages). Give it a try - you'll be surprised at how cool it is, and how much different it feels to know that you could totally reconfigure lots of things on your computer if you wanted to with relatively little effort.

2006-01-29T15:28:00.000Z

al;jdshfa

liwrefn'c

These 2 (somewhat flabbergasting - hence the "khuruja") links point to some controversial ways people have been asking the question of whether Jesus is black - which is a more specifically stated way of asking the eternal question of whose side Jesus is on. The first one talks about a guy who has been going around parties in NYC dressed up in Blackface as Jesus. The second one is about the Rolling Stone cover with Kanye West dressed up as Jesus, which I saw a "phantom post" about on a friend's blog - I hope it didn't come down because someone thought it was sacrilegious. I don't feel as though Jesus needs to be defended, because truth speaks for itself. It is amazing that as bad a rap as Christianity gets, not just now in its association with our current American conservative politics, but throughout history, Jesus always comes out clean. Everybody wants to say that Jesus is on their side - even the ironic blackface Jesus guy plays himself with his hipster sarcasm because he is still posing as (and associating himself with) Jesus. I have to say his message is particularly convoluted, because he seems to be making a statement that hipsters are beyond race (elaborated by The Assimilated Negro in his last few paragraphs on a post about whether the "Negro Hipster" exists), but also has a political dimension to his gag, because he is dressed in an American flag. Is that a further ironic twist, poking fun at people that think Jesus is Republican (which when joined with the blackface part - presumably making fun of those who think Jesus is black? - seems to be a mockery of the likes of Condoleeza Rice and her flock of what some might call Uncle Toms.) Then again he could also be making a Bamboozled sort of statement about white people co-opting the image of black people to legitimate "their" religious and political agenda. I think the person who did it was probably not quite so thoughtful and didn't actually know what he meant by it. Anyways I am more than anything curious about what other people think about whether Jesus was black, and/or whose side he is on. And if none of this seems very interesting to you, check out this funny article about the Blink don't Wink campaign.