Americans have a right to self-defense, just as they have a right to free speech and the free exercise of religion. But none of these rights is unlimited. Free speech is not the right to create public dangers. Freedom of religion is not the right to fraud or child abuse. And the Second Amendment is not a right to weapons of mass destructive capacity. This is the reason prudence and judgment are among the highest political virtues. It is often necessary to balance individual rights and the public good. This is the spirit that people of faith should bring to the political enterprise. It is beyond the power of politics to solve every problem—and it can be destructive for government to try. But it is possible to make incremental, patient gains in the common good.
2. A perennial moment of opportunity
Vincent Bacote writes for Comment of the need for biblical saturation, rather than mere intuition, to support holistic mission:
Like Moses, we all (not only younger evangelicals) need to hear the charge to saturate our lives with God’s word. This saturation ought to lead us to a vision and practice of holistic mission that has personal and public dimensions. We can live beyond the suggestions of intuition and have greater guidance through God’s word and the power of the Spirit. This is not a new thing, but perhaps it is news to some of us. We have a great responsibility and opportunity at hand for faithful participation in art, business, politics, education, and other public domains. Where will we turn to guide us to a faith that is truly for all of life?
3. Microfinance in Nicaragua
Tim Maurer writes for Forbes about what microfinance means for the people of La Chureca, the garbage dump in Managua, Nicaragua (HT Chris Horst):
This is not a sermon or a sales pitch, but a story about a place as inspiring as it is disturbing, where greed has raped a people of their material resources and dignity but where brilliantly applied generosity has created hope and enterprise of which Fortune 500 companies would be envious.
4. Tilling among the tulips
Leslie Leyland Fields tells the story of an urban farm in what used to be a strip mall parking lot. Jeff Roessing, who started the farm, believes the theology behind the work is essential:
When I talk to Christian farmers in the green movement, it’s really encouraging that we’re all trying to live out our faith in a real way, but as the pendulum swings, I’m seeing more silence on the theology part of it. Yeah, we’re restoring the land, but our hope is not in farming. I don’t want to lose sight of the fact that God is going to make all things new. In all of this work, people are vitally important, and Christ has to be central.
5. To Kindle or not to Kindle
In a post readers of books will appreciate, Jake Belder reflects on the pros and cons of Kindles compared to real books:
Every time I see a new book I want to buy, I think for a minute about buying the proper Kindle version from Amazon, but I never do. And there are a few reasons that keep me from taking that step.
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!
My friend Andy Kristian wears many hats. When he’s not traveling through East Africa on humanitarian photography assignments, he’s in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, working with his wife as a wedding photographer and videographer. And he has just launched Hiinga, a social enterprise working to empower communities in East Africa “by equipping small farmers with entrepreneurship tools and skills for sustainable living.”
Andy has graduate degrees in psychology and social sciences, has consulted with a range of NGOs, has years of experience as an award-winning photographer, and perhaps most important, he understands the East African context where Hiinga is taking shape (you may recall his guest post about Kony 2012 earlier this year).
A native Ugandan, Andy was raised by a single mother who never had much to her name in the way of money, but who worked hard to ensure her children received a good education. With Hiinga, Andy wants to provide more and more hard-working families in East Africa with the same opportunities he had.
I recently interviewed Andy about Hiinga’s origins, distinctives, and next steps.
TH: First, I’m curious about the name. Where does the name Hiinga come from?
AK: We wanted the name to be indigenous. Something African, but at the same time, something not so hard for people to pronounce or read. Hiinga means “to farm” or “to dig” in many languages in East Africa—in western Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Northern Tanzania, and Western Congo. Since we work with agricultural communities, it made perfect sense.
What led you to start Hiinga? When was the idea born?
Hiinga “the idea” was born in the early 2000s. At that time I was in college. I had grown up in a very poor home and had this burning passion to do something to impact change in my country. We had achieved so much good with so little and had this belief that it was possible for others to do what we did. Hiinga is the result of personal experiences. Everything we aspire to do, I have already lived it. Whether it is a small micro-loan or earning income for education through small acreage farming, that is the story of my life.
What can a social enterprise like Hiinga do that other nonprofits cannot?
By definition, social enterprises resolve challenges through means of entrepreneurship. They create self-sustaining models that become economically independent in the short- to mid-term. Hiinga has a model and a neat business engine that will make it fully sustainable within a period of seven years. As a nonprofit social enterprise, all the profits we make as an organization are re-invested. Most (not all of them) nonprofit organizations do not have business models. As such, they depend wholly on donations and grants. And, in my view, that is the culture they pass on to the communities in which they serve—dependency.
Hiinga is described as an “African founded Christian nonprofit social enterprise.” That’s a mouthful, but I know each word is carefully chosen. What’s uniquely African about your model? What’s uniquely Christian?
We want to be intentional about our leadership. As an organization serving Africans, we want to make sure Africans play a large role, from top to bottom. We want to champion African solutions for African problems, in association with critical partners in North America and the Western world. We are working with entire communities/villages in Africa in a collaborative form. We are uniquely Christian because we intentionally integrate spirituality in our work, from how we operate, to devotional times, and leadership development and discipleship in the villages in which we work.
What are your immediate plans for Hiinga, and in what areas could you use help?
Right now, we are working with two villages in Uganda. We have given them tools, seeds, inputs, training, and all they need to plant and have a successful harvest. We need to aggressively expand into other communities and take the critical help they need. People in the villages in which we are very excited and they have some achievable dreams that we can all help them do. They want to send their children to schools, have better housing, and start small businesses.
We need financial help. We need donations (any amount). We need connections to pastors, churches, schools, families, small businesses, and to your friends and family. We need people to commit to pray for Hiinga and our farmers, every day, every week. If you know someone interested in importing some agricultural products from Africa, we are interested in connecting with them. Because markets are very critical to achieving these goals.
February 29 is next week, and my friends at HOPE International have put together this cool new video to encourage people to make this year’s extra day count.
Please consider making the most of 2012′s extra day by making it count for one of HOPE’s clients in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At the web site for the Leap Forward campaign there’s a simple calculator that’ll help you determine how much your Leap Day is worth. HOPE’s end goal is to raise funds to support their microfinance operations in Congo, placing people on the pathway out of poverty. I love creative ideas like this, so consider this a public service announcement.
Last week’s Repaso was a day late and a little on the light side, but I think I’ve made up for it here. This week, a dizzying array of cool stuff. Ten items, in fact. Please enjoy, and comment with any thoughts.
1. Remembering Rich Mullins
Veteran Christian singer-songwriter Andrew Peterson has a reflection for The Rabbit Room about the late great Rich Mullins, who passed away 14 years ago this week. Rich’s record A Liturgy, A Legacy, and a Raggamuffin Band is in my all-time top five albums. It is sheer magic.
We rounded the bend at sunset and there before us stood those craggy Tetons, all gray stone with white snow tucked into the fissures. The clouds were gold with sunlight and long, misty fingers of rain dangled from them, caressing the peaks and the aspen- and fir-covered shoulders of the range. Who else but Rich Mullins could write music that would adequately suit a scene like that? I demanded the iPod, selected A Liturgy, a Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band, and we drove the next forty-five minutes without speaking. We weren’t speaking because we were being spoken to.
2. Eugene Peterson interview in Leadership Journal Katie is reading Eugene Peterson’s new memoir The Pastor, and I’m getting more and more excited to read it too with each little excerpt she reads to me. In this interview I was reminded of so many of the reasons I love Peterson. For example, this:
My task as pastor was to show how the Bible got lived. Of course it’s important to show that the Bible is true, but we have theologians and apologists for that. I just accepted the fact it was true and didn’t bother much about that. I needed to be a witness to people in my congregation that everything in the Bible is livable and to try to avoid abstractions about big truths, big doctrines. I wanted to know how these ideas got lived in the immediate circumstances of people’s lives at work, in the town, and in the family. The role of the pastor is to embody the gospel. And of course to get it embodied, which you can only do with individuals, not in the abstract. And so that’s why, for me, a small congregation was so essential. It enabled me to know the people I was preaching to, teaching, and praying with.
3. FoxNews visits Lancaster
If we needed any “fair and balanced” convincing that Lancaster really is a hip destination (if Lady Gaga’s visit didn’t do it for you), here you go! My roommate’s mom even gets a shout-out for good measure.
It’s a Saturday afternoon in the Prince Street Cafe, a coffee-and-sandwich spot in Lancaster, Pa. A couple in their 20s canoodle on a plush leather couch by the fireplace. A 30-something in thick, black-framed glasses punches away on a laptop between bites of a green salad topped with quinoa, and a college-age girl with a brunette pixie doodles in her sketchpad. It comes as a bit of a surprise, then, when you wander upstairs to artist Julia Swartz’s gallery and find a series of portraits depicting local Amish men-straw hats, serious-looking black suits, and all. Here at the Prince Street Cafe, it’s easy to forget you’re in Amish Country.
A plastic school might sound like it’s better suited for Barbies than for people, but the technology—developed by the Guatemalan nonprofit Pura Vida—is actually quite clever and allows for schools to be built for less than $10,000. The plastic bottles are stuffed with trash, tucked between supportive chicken wire, and coated in layers of concrete to form walls between the framing. The bottles make up the insulation, while more structurally sound materials like wood posts are used for the framing.
If, as Jews, we replace the old caricature of hayseed fundamentalist mobs carrying torches and pitchforks with one of dark conspirators trying to worm their way back into political power at the highest levels, we run the risk of accusing them of doing to others what we are doing to them: demonizing. We didn’t like it when people said we had horns and tails, ate the blood of Christian children and poisoned the wells of Europe with plague, much less conspired to rule the world through our Protocols. “Evangelicals in the main want the same kind of common-sense solutions and moral integrity as other Americans,” [Rev. Joel] Hunter says. “We do not want to use political means for our faith’s advancement; we just want to vote our values and leave it at that.”
6. Entrepreneurs more likely to pray
A few of my friends working at the intersections of business and faith tweeted or shared this story. Interesting findings:
Entrepreneurs behave just like most Americans when it comes to religion — but with one spiritual twist. They’re significantly more likely to pray several times a day or to meditate, says sociologist Kevin Dougherty, a co-author of the Baylor Religion Survey. The survey can’t answer whether prayerful, peaceful folks are more likely to take a business risk or whether the stress of a start-up drives folks to their knees or to the lotus position, Dougherty says.
7. Nicaragua and the Ortega family
One of my favorite places to go for news and commentary on Latin America is the Central American Politics Blog by Mike, a professor at the University of Scranton right here in Pennsylvania. He shared this video from Univision about how Daniel Ortega’s family and the Sandinista party have taken control of the Nicaraguan media, and by extension, have ensured they will be in control after November’s elections and for the foreseeable future.
8. Social networks in Latin America
Stephanie Garlow, who runs GlobalPost’s Latin America blog, has some interesting info on social media popularity in the region:
There’s a whole wide world of social networks out there, and Latin America isn’t missing out on the party.
More than 95 percent of internet users in Latin America now use social networks, up 16 percent from a year ago, according to a study by internet analysts comScore.
9. Jewish support for immigration reform
M. Daniel Carroll R., a Guatemalan-American professor of Old Testament at Denver Seminary and author of the important book Christians at the Border, has a blog post on the increasing participation of the Jewish community in working for immigration reform and their reasons for involvement:
As I have spoken to these Jews about their reasons for joining the “cause,” two primary reasons have been given me. One is that their own history for many centuries as a people has been one of migration and persecution, so it is fitting that they come alongside of other immigrants. Second, they have a long experience with discrimination, caricatures, and hate speech, and they are seeing that phenomena surface now against immigrants. They feel that they cannot defend their own rights if they do not speak out for others, who are experiencing the same thing.
10. Andy Kristian’s micro-finance video
I’m meeting with my friend Andy this morning to discuss a cool project he’s working on. This is some rough (but beautiful!) footage he put together during a recent trip to Northern Uganda. Can’t wait to see the finished product.
[W]hen aid types whine about new NGOs “crowding the field” and spreading scarce resources too thin, I say balderdash. If your NGO isn’t getting funded because another NGO is, then you need to make your NGO faster, smarter, leaner, and more effective. And, even if there is a short reduction in the overall effectiveness of the NGO sector in a particular country because there are too many, it is offset by the long-term improvement that competition and innovation will bring. But that’s for the aid industry. Not for humanitarian relief. It is called humanitarian relief for a reason. Short-term relief, to save the starving for example, is a public service not an industry. The immediate threat to life outweighs the long-term need for competitive innovation.
2. Social justice and evangelism
Maggie Canty-Shafer writes for Neue about a theme I’ve explored from time to time here as well:
Social justice is a complex subject for Christians. No one can disagree that Scripture commands to love the poor and oppressed, but what that looks like practically today is largely debated and at times ignored. As the world becomes increasingly more globalized and information more accessible, awareness along with responsibility has grown. This responsibility comes multiple fold. Why, how and even if we combine social justice with evangelism is an ever-evolving discussion that must be considered from a local and global level. Both the individual and the church must play a role for the Body to have the impact Scripture intended—an impact we’re capable of but nowhere near.
3. TV archive from 9/11/01
As we all know, the tenth anniversary of the tragic 9/11 attacks is this Sunday. Here’s an amazing collection of TV coverage from that Tuesday morning and the hours and days after it (HT @brettmccracken):
The 9/11 Television News Archive is a library of news coverage of the events of 9/11/2001 and their aftermath as presented by U.S. and international broadcasters. A resource for scholars, journalists, and the public, it presents one week of news broadcasts for study, research and analysis. Television is our pre-eminent medium of information, entertainment and persuasion, but until now it has not been a medium of record. This Archive attempts to address this gap by making TV news coverage of this critical week in September 2001 available to those studying these events and their treatment in the media.
9/11 changed many things, but it did not make America a more or less Christian nation. America is not the New Jerusalem. America is not the Whore Babylon. It is a nation among nations. Called, like all nations, to live its political life in pursuit of public justice. Mixed, like all nations, in the composition of its citizenry with regard to religious commitments and convictions. For Christians, this means that we should not seek political hegemony in America, but that we should seek to live faithfully: proclaiming the gospel in word and deed, pursuing public justice and the common good alongside our neighbors who do not share our gospel faith.
5. Intercontinental ballistic microfinance
Here’s a really cool video from Kiva, showing the rise in its total loans and paybacks from the time it started until today, represented by dots bouncing across the globe. What’s especially cool is what happens when Kiva is featured on Frontline in 2006 (HT A View From The Cave).
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