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.
One of the intriguing and endearing things I’d heard about Nicaragua before I visited last year was that the country thinks rather highly of its poets. I wondered if this devotion was rooted in a desire to escape the hardship of life in a poor, war-torn nation, or whether poetry was a way to make sense of it all. Or maybe a bit of both?
Recently I stumbled upon an article by Adriana Bianco in Américas, the magazine of the Organization of American States, about Nicaragua and its most famous poet, Rubén Darío. A snippet:
In some ways, Darío was a literary liberator. He was the creator of a new aesthetic, full of musicality, metaphors, and philosophy, with new vocabulary and versification. He wrote about love, nature, religion, and history. He evoked a world of classic antiquity alongside an indigenous world. He highlighted wealth and preciosismo—frivolous emphasis on adornment and refinement—but his verses also spoke of the profound and the essential. He was aware of the social and economic changes moving Latin America towards modernity; he recognized the advances of science and technology; he hailed progress and democracy; and he knew how to integrate European and American cultures. Dario also built bridges between nations and supported the ideal of Central American unity.
It reminds me of a Bruce Cockburn lyric: “Pay attention to the poet / you need him and you know it.” Poets may sometimes seem frivolous, but they can sometimes also be more powerful than weapons of war. There’s been recent evidence of that in Mexico and Texas. I think Rubén Darío would be proud.
A boy looks in the window at Semillas Biblioteca, a library in Diriamba, Nicaragua
During my first two visits to Costa Rica, both of which were way too brief, I became really curious about Costa Rica's neighbor to the north, Nicaragua. The two countries share a big border, and since CR is comparatively wealthy and Nicaragua is comparatively poor, this creates a bit of tension between the two, as you can imagine (not that we in the US know anything about tensions with a poor neighboring country).
So when I went back to Costa Rica last year to spend two months with my friends at the Association for Development through Education, I was sure to schedule a bus trip to Nicaragua. I lined up visits and interviews for three potential magazine story ideas, not sure which, if any, would ever be published.
Pastor Francisco outside his church
One was a visit to La Chureca in the capital city of Managua, the largest garbage dump in Central America. There, a pastor who was a friend of a friend of a friend walked me through a labyrinth of plastic and sheet metal and introduced me to men and women who were part of a church he pastored until recently.
On another day I caught a minibus to the nearby town of Diriamba, where some friends of a friend had started that town's first public library to nurture an appreciation for learning and reading and to provide young people with a safe place to grow up. The visits to both La Chureca and Diriamba were humbling and encouraging, as I witnessed Christians serving those in need and doing so faithfully, without a whole lot of fanfare.
But for various reasons the magazine idea that in fact came to fruition was a visit to Hogar Belén, a home for disabled and abandoned children just outside Managua, and part of a nonprofit called Mustard Seed Communities. It has been published in the May/June edition of PRISM, and the PDF is available here.
A boy at the clinic at Hogar Belén
I'm glad this story came together because I think it demonstrates a striking contrast between prevailing views of what is considered success -- even in church and ministry among the poor -- and what Jesus has to say about serving "the least of these" with mustard seed-like faith.
The disabled, abandoned children of Hogar Belén don't need any more of the CEO-type leaders that our evangelical culture is intent on churning out. And they certainly don't need any more egotistical political leaders who put up year-round Christmas Trees to remind citizens of all they have to celebrate because of him. My hunch (or hypothesis) is that what the children of Hogar Belén have found is in fact what Christ calls each of us uniquely and all of us collectively to be. But you'll need to read the article to see what that is. Then I'd really love to hear your thoughts.
