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!
Interview with Scott Moore, documentary filmmaker (Part 2 of 2)
Picking up where we left off yesterday, here's the second half of my interview with Scott.
TH: This week you announced a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to cover production for your upcoming film, Becoming Fools. Talk a bit about what this film is about, how you found out about this story, and how the Kickstarter campaign works.
SM: Interestingly, we actually met Italo on our first trip to Guatemala for production of Reparando. we spent some time with him and did a small interview, and got some footage in the streets and with kids. After that first trip and we realized the thread was going to be the war and Italo’s story didn’t blend as well as the others, we decided to put him on the back burner and not include it in Reparando. But we stayed in contact with him. Then last fall after launching Reparando, I was up in Michigan at the film’s premier with Joel van Dyke, a missionary in Guatemala. We were just kicking off Reparando but I was already thinking about what we wanted to do next, since the process takes forever. He mentioned Italo again, so we decided to scout and do research when we went back to Guatemala at Thanksgiving to premier Reparando.
We spent a few days with kids on the streets to get scouting footage, and sketched out a rough version of the story. But then Italo drowned tragically in February. If he had been shot, it would be tragic but more understandable. Drowning seemed so pointless. So, most importantly, now the kids have lost their hero, and we’ve also lost the hero for the story. But his death sort of inspired other people to pick up his dream and carry it forward. It’s not huge now, a little more organic, as you’d expect outside of the US, but there are some of his colleagues who are working with the kids. I liked the idea of clowns as metaphor, since they represent both comedy and tragedy. It was an incredibly beautiful way to represent the reality of these street kids. They have this terrible backstory, but we can turn it into a comedy by using the clown theme. I was originally not sure about this theme, because the clown sort of has a stigma in the US, and people either love it or hate it. But it’s more than a metaphor for the story. My hope is that there will be an event next spring where these kids can perform with professional clowns. Originally, I wanted them to have fun and then also talk about life on the streets. But then as I thought about it, I realized that clowns can communicate non-verbally and act out a scene that communicates truth. They can communicate non-verbally to communicate to the audience, and that’s great, but it’s also cathartic for the kids themselves to help them understand their own story. So I realized that the clown really is a very important detail, and it really gave it more purpose. It’s not just that Italo was a clown, but it really is deeper and richer now.
So Kickstarter is a great platform for raising funds for creative projects. That’s their model, wanting people to fund creativity for the sake of creativity, not to gain a profit out of it. There are incentivesas small thank yous, but not a profit, per se. The way it works is setting a financial goal and setting a timeline, and through social media you ask people to make a pledge. Each pledge level has incentives to say thank you. Over the course of the time set for the campaign, if you raise the total goal you keep it minus the Kickstarter fee. If the goal isn’t met, no money is exchanged. It makes perfect sense. We went back and forth with how to set our goal. There are some who have reached their goals, but a whole slew that have set much lower goals. I looked at the numbers from every side, and we really need more than $150,000, but that’s the bare minimum. So we prayed, “God, if you want us to do it, everything is yours anyway, so you’ll do it.” So we said, let’s set the goal at what we really need, and then trust that God will provide. I read recently that Kickstarter projects that make it to the 30% mark actually have a 90% chance of being fully funded. It’s a psychological thing, a point at which people get behind it.
TH: For those who watch your films and decide they want to do something to help those living in slums or on the streets of Guatemala City, how would you suggest they do that?
SM: One of our models for telling stories is we like to partner with organizations that are there on the ground responding to needs. We work with EdT, a ministry, a partnership in Guatemala between Shorty and Tita and several others. Joel [van Dyke] provides some leadership for that. In the beginning we wanted people to funnel funds through us, but we realized that we’re storytellers and we can’t handle all the details of funding and connecting, so now on our website we link to organizations and are working on official partnerships. We’re hoping Compassion or World Vision and some others will get involved. We also hope to inspire those working in their own bubbles to get connected and collaborate. With every story we partner with those responding to the needs represented -- hands on ministries. We ask that people connect directly through them, but we can also work as a facilitator to help connect people with these ministries.
What’s unique about Reparando is that people have watched it and have then applied it locally. The film’s stories take place in Guatemala but the concepts are actually universal. So where’s our own La Limonada? Some people might say, “At this point we can’t get to Guatemala, but we can make a difference here.” I love that, because that’s authentic. Not everyone can get to Guatemala, but everyone can make a difference where they are. The new film laser-beam focuses on street kids, and hopefully it will encourage people to respond in their cities. I live in Nashville, and we have 2000 kids in this school district who are considered homeless. That blew my mind because this is Nashville! And those are the documented ones, since they are registered at schools. Tita says the number is at least 12,000 in Guatemala City, though the official number says 6,000. There are kids living in the street everywhere. We just want to give people a place to run to and find redemption.
Interview with Scott Moore, documentary filmmaker (Part 1 of 2)
Last week I mentioned the campaign to make Becoming Fools, a film about kids who live on the streets of Guatemala City and how they’re finding redemption in some unexpected places. I interviewed Scott Moore who heads up Athentikos, the non-profit group that’s pushing to get the project funded through a Kickstarter campaign. Scott and his wife Amelia really believe in this story, and are going out on a limb to make sure it gets made. I’d really encourage you to consider supporting the project, and I hope you enjoy my interview with Scott, in which we discuss both of his important films, the difficult task of portraying US involvement in Guatemala’s civil war, how clowns are a great metaphor, and more. This is part one of the interview; part two will run tomorrow.
TH: For those unfamiliar with your work, could you describe what Athentikos is trying to do?
SM: We are trying to tell stories that expose needs around the world, but do it in a way that inspires, because we believe that God is at work in the midst of those needs and we can join in the work that’s already in progress. It was birthed out of a trip into a prison in Guatemala City with Joel van Dyke, a missionary there. He had tried for a long time to get me to go into the prison to meet gang members. I was reluctant at first, but finally ran out of excuses, basically. I met a young gang member in this maximum security prison. He opened up to me and shared his heart, comparing Christianity to a gang. He said, “We both have a leader we follow and symbols and language and ideals. The difference between the two is that if I’m not authentic to my gang they’ll kill me.” That was heavy on my heart, and I realized I couldn’t just go on with my life and adopt my sons [from Guatemala] and not do anything. I knew I had to respond. I’m not a doctor or a lawyer or anything like that, but I am creative and I can tell stories of those who are being authentic. For me that was a win-win. I could be authentic with who God made me to be by telling stories, and in so doing we could create community and make a difference.
TH: I recently watched Reparando, your documentary about how ordinary Guatemalans are seeking to transform their communities and their country. Having grown up in Guatemala during the civil war, I think Reparando does a great job of capturing the effect the war continues to have, but without becoming overly political or controversial. That’s not easy to do. How did you manage to weave together these different stories so seamlessly and powerfully without getting stuck in controversy?
SM: We spent a year in pre-production, even before we took any trips. Interestingly, in that year, the war came up a little bit, but it wasn’t until we took our first production trip and interviewed people, that we realized that everyone had this one thing in common - they were all the result of the war. Since the war didn’t become a focus until after this first trip, we went back to do more research and interviewing specifically about the war. And we decided to then focus in on [the stories of] Tita and Shorty. We originally shot really broadly and tried to tell several stories and make it diverse. The Tita story, the Shorty story and the doll metaphor tied together really well. After going back again we were able to interview people with specific knowledge of the war and worked with experts who could help shape the language we would use. I didn’t want to make a history documentary. We wanted to present enough information for enough context of the war without distracting from the beauty of Shorty’s story. It was a bit of a tightrope, with probably hundreds of iterations of the story.
I’m the son of a Navy chaplain. I grew up everywhere, but I consider myself a patriot. I know we’re not perfect [as a nation]. I didn’t want to point fingers, but to tell the story. It’s interesting, because though we have no way of knowing exact numbers, we estimate that tens of thousands of people have seen the film. And we’ve gotten three responses back saying we’re anti-American. And the common theme among them has been those who have been ignorant of the history. I wanted it to whet their appetite so they’d research on their own. In the very beginning I put up a trailer and it actually referred to “rebel forces”, and immediately got all kinds of negative criticism from Guatemalans and all sorts of others familiar with the history. They basically said, “If you want to tell the story, you need to tell the truth.” i didn’t want to implicate the US or the CIA, but I felt we had to say that we did what we did. In the context of the time, as horrible as it was, I kind of understand it. Fighting communism, and the stance it took against Christianity and faith and freedom, it made some sense. I just wish the US would have followed up afterwards to repair things. If they had done that, Guatemala wouldn’t be anywhere near where it is today. And unless we as a nation come to terms with the truth of our history and realize that we do these things, tear things up while overturning evil, we won’t be able to truly embrace the need to help with the restoration.
TH: You describe visiting a maximum security prison where you found yourself surrounded by gang members, and you say this had a lot to do with your returning to try to find out why people join gangs and why there are such big slums, and this turned into the Reparando film. When you set out to ask those questions, what did you expect to find? How did the answers surprise you?
SM: I assumed, coming from the context of America, that there was struggle and that poverty was the common thread. I knew Guatemala was a very poor country, but I was very unaware of the details of the civil war and was shocked in that. In a way, it was kind of like watching Hotel Rwanda for the first time. I was in college when all of that happened, and I’m sorry to say I didn’t have a clue about any of it. This was a sort of similar response. The war ended in Guatemala the same year I got married. I didn’t have any knowledge of it. We even recently apologized, I think it was Hillary Clinton who recently apologized, but we’re just now coming to terms with it.
Check back tomorrow for the second half of my interview with Scott, focused on his forthcoming film, 'Becoming Fools'.
Featured Writing
Recent Posts
- Thoughts on Teju Cole’s “Open City”
- Not one square inch!
- Weekend Video: The Voice of Justice
- Repaso: Guatemala’s war years; The MBA Oath; Dakota prison letters; working poor in Latin America; religion vs. science
- Sustainability in the Valley of the Sun