1. Carpooling in Mexico Alejandro Cartagena is a Dominican-born photographer who lives in Monterrey, Mexico. His recent project features overhead photos from an overpass of workers riding in flatbed pickup trucks in Mexico. I first heard about it via the New York TimesLens blog, which provides some background info, but I actually prefer viewing the project on his site, where the photos lie side by side.
2. Os Guinness interview
Skye Jethani (senior editor of Leadership Journal, author of With) and Phil Vischer (creator of VeggieTales) have started a new podcast. The fact that their most recent episode features a nearly hour-long conversation with Os Guinness caught my attention. They discuss topics like evangelicalism, the Religious Right, and pluralism in society. I’d love to see Os’s face when Phil sings his impromptu opening and closing songs.
3. Who’s who among development bloggers Aaron Ausland, a great international development blogger in his own right, has a new “who’s who” list of bloggers in the genre. If you’re really interested in digging in and becoming conversant with some great thinkers and practitioners in the field of development, follow Aaron’s blog and the others on his list.
5. Richard Twiss on a theology of place Richard Twiss, a Native leader really worth listening to, was a recent guest speaker at Antioch Church in Bend, Oregon. The full video of that message is here. If you have a shorter attention span, at least check out this four-minute clip about the importance of developing a theology of place:
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!
1. MLK’s God-with-us world Skye Jethani, author of With: Reimagining the Way You Relate to God (which I reviewed here), on King’s “kitchen encounter” as a turning point in the Civil Rights Movement.
2. Mission on our Doorsteps
If you’re in the Chicago area, you may want to check out this event on March 16 & 17, put together by World Relief. Here’s the mission statement:
Through a movement of prayer & collaborative mission, the body of Jesus Christ in and beyond Chicagoland will emerge multi-ethnic, united and Christ-centered and become an instrument for transforming our churches and neighborhoods.
3. The U2 paradox
Eric Hynes makes an interesting argument that “never has a band been more mockable, never has a band been more successful” than U2. After analyzing every album in the U2 catalog, Hynes concludes:
The problem is how ultimately these records lack everything that makes rock roll, that makes pop crackle, that makes soul. It’s not about coolness—it’s about desire. I can’t get no, you can’t always get, I can’t quit you, I put a spell on you, I still haven’t found, please, please me, why don’t we do it, wouldn’t it be nice, I saw her standing, how could you just leave me standing, burning, desire. At its best, U2 doesn’t merely satisfy our desires, but takes us somewhere, marching into the shadows, exploring spaces within and without, risking failure and greatness, and giving us something worth confessing in the end.
4. The danger of being evangelical powerbrokers Christianity Today’s editor-in-chief David Neff has a critical take on the meeting that took place last weekend in Texas with 150 evangelical leaders to pick a presidential candidate to support:
I believe that Christians have an urgent duty to engage the social, economic, and moral threats to a healthy society. That requires a wide variety of political action. However, one thing it doesn’t call for is playing kingmaker and powerbroker. By conspiring to throw their weight behind a single evangelical-friendly candidate, they fed the widespread perception that evangelicalism’s main identifying feature is right-wing political activism focused on abortion and homosexuality. In truth, it is hard to imagine the Religious Left in 2008 doing something similar: holding a conclave to decide whether they would throw their collective weight behind either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, unwilling to leave the Democratic primary results to the voters.
5. Nuns fighting trafficking at the Super Bowl
With the Super Bowl coming up in Indianapolis on February 5, a group of nuns is working hard to fight human trafficking and prostitution, which generally happens during large sporting events like this.
“The hotels are going to be busy and we want them to be able to do what they have to do,” Sister Ann Oestreich told the Catholic News Service. “The Super Bowl is a celebration, but we don’t want exploitation to be part of it.”
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!
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.
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!
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.
I finished reading City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve been sitting on it, mulling it over, ever since. It’s an important book, warranting a great deal of careful thought, and it’s also one of those rare books on US politics that actually does more to promote civil discourse in the public square than to erode it.
The book’s authors, Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner, are both conservatives — and political insiders at that. Gerson, as you may know, was a top aide and speechwriter for George W. Bush. He’s also a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post, and a senior advisor at ONE. Wehner is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a DC think tank. He previously served in the Reagan and Bush (I and II) administrations.
The central question of the book is one both urgent and timeless:
What does it mean to be a Christian citizen in history’s most influential nation; in a world marked by growing interconnection, danger, and need; in a time of bitter domestic polarization and economic stress?
The first part of the answer is that there are more than two political options, odd as that may seem to us in twenty-first century America. As Gerson and Wehner write, Christians throughout history have formulated quite an array of differing — and, in some cases, diametrically opposed — political approaches that can’t be summed up by the overly limiting categories of right and left. Here are some of the main ones:
Constantinian: “wanted the church to govern earthly affairs, so as to bring society better into line with their understanding of God’s will.”
Augustinian: “the purpose of the state is to restrain evil and to advance justice.”
Anabaptist: “Christian allegiance should be to the kingdom of God alone.”
Lutheran: “two kingdoms, one carnal and the other spiritual, each needing to remain separate from the other and each making its own legitimate demands.”
Calvinist: “God [is] not only Lord and Creator but ‘a Governor and Preserver…’ The sovereignty of God, in other words, extends to all spheres, including all human institutions.”
Kuyperian: “three spheres — the Church, the State, and Society — each distinct but interrelated with the others, all part of the created order, all governed by God.”
Barthian: “the state… like the church, served Christ’s divine purposes beyond simply restraining evil.”
Niebuhrian: “believed in the necessity of politics in the struggle for social justice.”
Falwellian: “restoring America’s ‘moral sanity’ as an urgent Christian imperative.”
For that survey alone, the book is more than worthwhile. But that’s just the first chapter. Gerson and Wehner go on to outline, with conviction and grace, broad principles for Christian participation in politics. As conservatives, they take predictable stances on a variety of issues, but as Ron Sider writes in his endorsement on the book jacket, “one need not agree with all the assumptions or arguments to find this book a significant contribution to Christian reflection on where our nation should go.”
Politics, they write, presents us with an “unavoidable tension”: while a politicized faith has its dangers, “there is also moral abdication when faith ignores the opportunity for ‘genuine ethical action,’” a term borrowed from John Perkins. They point out the failures of the Religious Right, and urge us not to make the same mistakes — whether on the right or on the left. Rather, they urge discernment, faithful engagement, and above all, an emphasis on persuasion rather than attack. “If you would win a man to your cause,” said Abraham Lincoln, “first convince him that you are his sincere friend.”
In a polarized political climate that is anything but civil, in which demonizing and mudslinging are the norm, where cable news channels teach us that the way to discuss politics is to see who can yell the loudest, a book like this is a breath of fresh air. It’s practical, and true to both theology and history. Borrowing from Augustine, Gerson and Wehner conclude with both determination and hope: “The City of Man is our residence for now, and we care for its order and justice. The City of God is our home.”
