Repaso: Sierra Leone in photos; Jake Belder on forgotten places; Living Room Songs; Q&A from The Justice Conference; UMC repents; Twitter does it again
1. Sierra Leone ten years after the war
Earlier this week I submitted a writing project focused on Fambul Tok, a home-grown peace and reconciliation initiative taking place around bonfires across Sierra Leone. It's worth knowing about. As I finished my writing, former Liberian president Charles Taylor was convicted of war crimes in Sierra Leone, a full decade after the war ended. And The Big Picture posted this photo essay with a look at what the country looks like in 2012.
2. Jake Belder on forgotten places
Jake Belder, an assistant minister in Hull, England (and by Twitter appearances, an all-around good guy) has a great feature essay in Comment:
One of the delights of living in England is venturing off the main roads into the little villages that dot the countryside. At the heart of many of these picturesque villages is a small church that has stood for hundreds of years, a reminder the role churches used to play in holding these communities together. Whenever I get the chance, I wander into these churches. I love the musty smell of the old stonework, the silence, and the sense of being in a place altogether different from the world outside. And when I sit in one of the old pews, I think about those who have sat in them over the last five hundred years. Who shepherded them as they lived their lives in this place? How were they equipped to live faithfully in this context?
3. Living Room Songs by Ólafur Arnalds
Joy Williams of The Civil Wars tweeted this last weekend: “Having my heart broken & mended again by Icelandic composer Ólafur Arnalds' Living Room Songs EP.” I think you’ll agree, as I do, that these songs are hauntingly beautiful, not unlike the music of fellow Icelandic band Sigur Rós.
4. Q&A videos from The Justice Conference
For those who weren’t able to attend The Justice Conference in Portland in February (and for those who were there too, I suppose), videos from a bunch of Q&A sessions have been posted at askquestions.tv. Lots of great stuff.
5. UMC apologizes to Native Americans
Thanks to Brittany Bennett for sharing the link to this video from the United Methodist Church’s General Conference, where the denomination initiated an act of repentance to begin the process of healing relationships with Native Americans. It’s encouraging to see a group of Christians taking this so seriously.
6. Yet another reason to love Twitter
Katie and I have a really good reason to love Twitter; ask us about it sometime. Another reason to love Twitter is when you’re a cancer survivor who loves baseball and you get to play catch with a pitcher from your team just because you replied to this within two minutes.
Repaso is intended as a thought-provoking compilation of news and commentary from the past week related to the intersections of faith, development, justice and peace. As always, I welcome your thoughts on any of the links and ideas in this roundup!
[Photo credit: Finbarr O'Reilly/Reuters via The Big Picture]
Resisting manipulation, seeking truth, and acting justly in an election year
Being an election year, it seems as good a time as any to reflect a bit on citizenship and civility. I plan to read several books along those lines between now and November, and I'll share some thoughts along the way. One of the ones I'm most looking forward to digging into is Uncommon Decency by Richard Mouw. I've heard great things about it, and I wonder how it compares to Miroslav Volf's A Public Faith, which I reflected on earlier this year. I might also re-read The Case for Civility by Os Guinness as well as unSpun by some of the folks behind FactCheck.org -- an essential resource for making sense of "creative" campaign rhetoric.
In the meantime, I want to share a wonderful couple of paragraphs by Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, from her book Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies (Eerdmans). It's not a book about politics, per se, but it's packed full of lessons that would serve us well in our political engagement for sure. In this excerpt she introduces a series of really good questions:
Any effort to find reliable reporting needs to start not with questions about the sources but with questions about ourselves. What are my responsibilities as a citizen? As a person of faith? As a consumer? As a leader? As a parent? As an educator? What am I avoiding knowing? Why? What point of view am I protecting? Why? How have I arrived at my assumptions about what sources of information to rely on? What limits my angle of vision? Have I tried to imagine how one might arrive at a different conclusion? How much evidence do I need to be convinced? What kind of persuasion works most effectively for me? How do I accredit or challenge authority?
The answers to these questions are not simply personal. Some of them involve serious theological reflection on the relationship between the Kingdom of God and the state, what it means to give Caesar what is Caesar’s and God what is God’s, and whether and how to participate in the conduct of worldly affairs. If you’re Mennonite or Amish, that boundary is drawn pretty clearly. But most of us, I think, are navigating the murky middle ground marked out between not-so-separate church and state, trying to resist manipulation, seek truth, and act on it justly in the ways that remain open to us. (pp. 59-60)
What have you found to be helpful in discerning how to be civil in the public square while being a good steward of one's citizenship?
[Photo credit: isoc.com]
Tomato Justice
My latest writing project for PRISM has been published as the cover story for the May/June issue, focusing on tomatoes, migrant farmworkers, and a small town in Florida that has been called “ground zero for modern-day slavery.”
It tackles some uncomfortable realities and will hopefully challenge you to think more carefully (and more theologically!) about your food choices, but I loved researching and writing it because in the end, it's mostly an encouraging success story. Efforts to ensure farmworkers earn a decent wage and are shown a basic level of respect in the workplace (i.e., not held in slavery or being sprayed with pesticides while pregnant, for a start) have largely been successful. One important hurdle remains, but given the successes I highlight, it no longer seems insurmountable.
For this piece I interviewed a Guatemalan migrant farmworker, an advocate for farmworker rights working in Immokalee, the author of a book called Tomatoland, the former speechwriter and press secretary for Cesar Chavez, a professor who is writing a book about Chavez's faith, and an author/speaker/activist you may have heard of named Brian McLaren. Thanks to each of you for taking the time to speak with me; your insights made this story possible.
So, without further delay, I give you: Tomato Justice.
To learn more about the people, organizations and issues in this story, I'd encourage you to begin by checking out Coalition of Immokalee Workers, InterFaith Action's Faith Moves Mountains campaign, Politics of the Plate (blog by Barry Estabrook, author of Tomatoland), and this post from Brian McLaren.
[Photo credit: Scott Robertson via kqed.org]
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