Repaso: CEO integrity, Brazilian culture wars, rethinking nuclear weapons, Guatemalan war documentary, Derek Webb on free music, Christianity and culture, good economic news, top global thinkers, and justice for all
1. What does a CEO with integrity look like?
Michael Lindsay, president of Gordon College, had an op-ed yesterday in the New York Times about Gerard Arpey, the American Airlines CEO who just walked away after 30 years out of a belief that filing for bankruptcy -- a procedure that’s become standard in the airline industry -- is wrong. That he is a man of integrity is worth celebrating; that he is a rare exception among CEOs, though, is lamentable. Lindsay writes:
Over the last eight years, I have interviewed hundreds of senior executives for a major academic study on leadership, including six airline C.E.O.’s. Mr. Arpey stood out among the 550 people I talked with not because he believed that business had a moral dimension, but because of his firm conviction that the C.E.O. must carefully attend to those considerations, even if doing so blunts financial success or negates organizational expediency. For him, it is an obligation that goes with the corner office.
2. Culture wars and Pentecostalism in Brazil
The days of the Religious Right might be mostly behind us here in the US, but in Brazil, it seems to really be catching on. The New York Times has a profile of Silas Malafaia, a televangelist with a massive following who is known for his polarizing views, and takes a look at the rise of Pentecostals and other Protestant groups in Brazil:
About one in four Brazilians are now thought to belong to evangelical Protestant congregations, and Pentecostals like Mr. Malafaia are at the forefront of this growth. In a remarkable religious transformation, scholars say that while Brazil still has the largest number of Roman Catholics in the world, it now also rivals the United States in having one of the largest Pentecostal populations. Not everyone in Brazil is enthusiastic about this shift.
3. Evangelicals rethink nuclear weapons
Members of the National Association of Evangelicals board of directors have written a piece for Washington Post’s “On Faith” column that’s worth prayerful consideration:
Christians hold that all people bear God’s image (Genesis 1:27).Therefore, human life and freedom are precious and should be defended from injustice and tyranny. Nuclear weapons, with their capacity for terror as well as for destruction of human life, raise profound spiritual, moral and ethical concerns. We question the acceptability of nuclear weapons as part of a just national defense. The just war tradition admonishes against indiscriminate violence and requires proportionality and limited collateral damage. New scientific studies reveal that even a limited nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan would have profound global consequences, harming billions of innocents. The very weapons meant to restrain evil could potentially destroy all that they were intended to protect.
4. “Our voice, our memory”
Mike at the Central American Politics blog shared this 30-minute documentary about the 36-year civil war in Guatemala, which, according to the makers of the film, meets the international criteria to be considered genocide. Needless to say, it’s not for the faint of heart, but is important for the understanding of history, as well as what you might call “the roots of the present illness.” It’s in Spanish, too, by the way.
5. How free music makes more than sense
Derek Webb, one of my favorite artists who started NoiseTrade (a great place to get free music legally!), has a new reflection on the state of the music industry and what it means for those who make and listen to music (hint: he’s not a fan of Spotify):
There has never been a better moment to be a middle-class or an independently thinking artist making and performing music than right now. The costs and complications of creating, recording, manufacturing, and distributing music are at an all-time low, enabling more music to be made and more artists to make a living than ever before. If your ego can bear not being rich and famous, you can make a respectable and sustainable living as a blue-collar musician. The problem used to be access; now it’s obscurity. And this brings with it a completely new set of problems and opportunities.
6. Andy Crouch on Christianity and culture
If you haven’t read Andy Crouch’s Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling, you really should. But if you don’t want to do that, here’s a 50-minute podcast about Christianity and culture, the big themes of that book. If even that is too much to ask, at least take a listen to the four and a half minute snippet about how cultural change can -- and often must -- start small.
7. Good economic news from Latin America
The BBC reports:
Poverty in Latin America is at its lowest level for 20 years, the UN's regional economic body, Eclac, says. From 1990 to 2010, the rate fell from 48.4% to 31.4%, which means 177 million people currently live in poverty... "Poverty and inequality continue to decline in the region, which is good news, particularly in the midst of an international economic crisis," said Alicia Barcena, Eclac's executive secretary. "However, this progress is threatened by the yawning gaps in the productive structure in the region and by the labour markets which generate employment in low-productivity sectors."
8. Top 100 global thinkers
Foreign Policy has released its latest list of top global thinkers for the past year. A number of the leaders of the Egyptian revolution are atop the list. I was especially interested to see that Yoani Sánchez, Cuban dissident blogger, and Dr. Paul Farmer, medical anthropologist with a long history in Haiti, made the cut as well.
9. And justice for all [infograhic]
GOOD and Column Five Media have produced an interesting infographic on how the US is doing in terms of income equality and providing all citizens with access to the market economy (click on the image below to view the full-size infographic).
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!
Repaso: Steve Jobs, re-appropriation, big questions, bridge-building, visual peacemaking, justice & justification
1. The Gospel of Steve Jobs
Like millions of people, I learned the sad news about Steve Jobs on Wednesday evening through my iPhone. I was with some friends, and we talked about how Jobs transformed computers, cell phones, the music industry and animated movies, not to mention business itself. It’s hard to wrap our minds around the scope of his influence. Back in January, Andy Crouch wrote this reflection on Jobs’s legacy, and while I think he may exaggerate to make a point, it’s an important reminder about the basis of our hope:
As remarkable as Steve Jobs is in countless ways—as a designer, an innovator, a (ruthless and demanding) leader—his most singular quality has been his ability to articulate a perfectly secular form of hope... Politically, militarily, economically, the decade was defined by disappointment after disappointment—and technologically, it was defined by a series of elegantly produced events in which Steve Jobs, commanding more attention and publicity each time, strode on stage with a miracle in his pocket... Steve Jobs's gospel is, in the end, a set of beautifully polished empty promises. But I look on my secular neighbors, millions of them, like sheep without a shepherd, who no longer believe in anything they cannot see, and I cannot help feeling compassion for them, and something like fear. When, not if, Steve Jobs departs the stage, will there be anyone left who can convince them to hope?
2. Making a life, making a living
If that first one comes across as a bit of a downer, maybe this will redeem it. Steve Jobs was obviously a genius, and what Andy Crouch himself would call a culture maker. Here, Jon Foreman writes for the Art House America blog about the human art of re-appropriation, which in his own way Jobs did so well:
This enlightened practice of re-appropriation is unique to the human experience: we adapt within our situation to make the most of it. All other creatures are defined by their innate abilities, mostly untaught. A worm is not taught how to crawl. A chameleon is not taught how to change colors. A rabbit, a horse, a spider — these creatures are defined by themselves and their intrinsic giftings. We human beings are not like this: we bend, we learn, we invent, we change. Humanity has been making herself up all along. Making life. Making a living.
3. Business as arena of wonder, heartbreak and hope
Gideon Strauss, who is no stranger to these Friday weekly roundups, is at it again with a thoughtful, hopeful essay asking big questions about the way we do business. He asks three questions inspired by wonder, three by heartbreak and three by hope. Here’s an experience of heartbreak he shares from his childhood:
As a teenager in South Africa, cycling through the black townships generated by apartheid's racial segregation, I saw how a political order brought about economic structures that consigned a majority of people in that country to lives of poverty. Back in my comfortable white suburban home, I read the warning of the prophet Isaiah: taking part in the worship practices of a faith community gives God no delight if, at the same time, we arrange our communities and societies in such a way that some people are systematically excluded, exploited, or oppressed. What astonished me were the neatly coiffed, nicely suited white businessmen standing next to me in the pews of my childhood church, expecting God's grace and singing God's praise on Sundays, while I knew that they would go to their stores and offices and construction sites on Mondays—not only directly exploiting and oppressing their underpaid and powerless black employees, but also, by their votes and political activism, bolstering a nation-wide system designed with the explicit intent of ensuring that a black servant class would labour but not rise.
4. Building bridges toward the common good
Here’s an interesting interview with David Gushee and Richard Cizik, who co-lead the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good. They talk about how the organization came about, intended as an evangelical alternative to those on both ends of the political spectrum. Here’s Gushee on the challenge of remaining an independent voice:
There was a need for an organization independent of the centrifugal forces right and left that was able to stand on its own two feet -- to follow what we understand the implications of Scripture and our faith to be without fear. Any organization that has the potential to be impacted by the religious right, in particular, you’re always in fear that somebody’s going to come get you from the right. It happened to Rich. It’s happened to me in different ways. Likewise, if you’re in an organization that is funded by or loyal to the left, you can always get nailed from the left. You’re not liberal enough on this issue. You’re not saying what we want you to say. We wanted a genuinely independent voice, in which we could follow God’s truth where we believed it led.
5. Interview with IGVP’s Mario Mattei
For the photographers out there who read my blog, this one’s for you. It’s an interview with Mario Mattei who leads the International Guild of Visual Peacemakers, a group you need to know about if you think that the people you photograph matter.
6. Justice and justification
This spring I reviewed Tim Keller’s book Generous Justice for PRISM Magazine. If you haven’t read the book, here Keller speaks on the connection between justice and justification - two themes many theologians seem to prefer to choose between, rather than articulating an integration of the two.
Generous Justice from The Gospel Coalition on Vimeo.
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Repaso: Evangelical gloom/optimism, joyful environmentalists, Derek Webb’s evolution, and more
Should evangelicals be gloomy or optimistic about the future?
When it comes to our future, a new Pew survey finds that the world’s evangelical leaders are split between hope and despair. The findings are noteworthy:
The joyful environmentalists: Eugene Peterson and Peter Harris
Christianity Today has a refreshing interview by Andy Crouch with retired pastor Eugene Peterson and Peter Harris, the co-founder of Christian conservation organization A Rocha, discussing creation care not as a desperate attempt to “save the planet” but as a way to honor God and bring him pleasure. I love this quote from Harris on the question of biblical support for environmental stewardship:
Let's disagree, but not hate
Capital Commentary, from the Center for Public Justice, has a reflection from former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson on the disappointment by many that the release of Sarah Palin’s emails didn’t produce any real scandals, and how this is a symptom of a broader problem:
The evolution of Derek Webb
An interview at Beliefnet with one of my favorite artists. He discusses how he’s evolved, how not everyone likes it, and how he approached the creative process with his last record, Feedback, an instrumental take on the Lord’s Prayer:
Who, what and where is Bon Iver?
I stumbled upon this on Paul Burkhart’s blog, a New York Times Magazine profile of the dude behind dreamy-indie-folk band Bon Iver, whose much-anticipated new album came out this week and closes with an oddly mesmerizing 80s-esque anthem.
Video: Shopping with $1 in Guatemala
Finally, a video from the World Food Program, with a vivid demonstration in a public market of how tough it is to shop for food if you're a poor person in a place like Guatemala.
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