As the focal point of our lives, mealtimes reflect the nature of our shared lives. They are a central space for expressions of love, caring and affirmation through both the provision of nourishment and the conversation that surrounds a meal from preparation to cleanup. For those in explosive or damaged families, mealtimes often become arenas for accusation, blame, unbridled anger and painful absences. For those in need, scarcity at the table is a constant reminder of their economic plight.
In the ancient Eastern world, the symbolic and instructional reality of the table was exponentially expanded because the gathering and preparation of food was the day's primary task. In Arabic, the root word for bread and life is the same (esh). This unbreakable link between the table and one's survival was clear—a reality often forgotten in our fast-food-restaurant-on-every-corner world, where food appears on demand.
The link between food and life in antiquity extended to the quality of life. Corporate feasts were the epicenters of religious reinforcement, familial rites of passage, general communication, and ethnic identity for local and national communities. The Jewish meal imitated the formal meals in Greco-Roman culture, where the feast was presented in two stages: a meal proper followed by a time of dialogue or entertainment. As a people defined by their prayers, Jews inserted a series of theological blessings and affirmations into this second phase of the meal. The table truly was the central space.
Given this centrality, Jesus' attention to meals and feasts seems appropriate. Many of the most dramatic moments of his life—feeding multitudes, making wine, dining with "sinners," dramatic self-disclosures—occurred at meals and feasts. But although his strategy seems sound, his table behavior could be called outrageous. Surely a teacher of such significance (he called himself "the light of the world"!) would have had his own table and a substantial home filled with a school of devotees and generous fare. Instead, he was a parasite, an itinerant wanderer who invited himself to the homes of social outcasts and dined with the immoral.
His teaching about the table reflected the scandal of his life. The narrative of Luke 14 finds Jesus once again eating in the midst of his opponents under the tight scrutiny of those who are offended by him and perhaps curious about the inevitable spectacle of his actions. He does not disappoint. The confrontation begins with an unlawful act—Jesus dares to heal a sick man on the sabbath. Then he proceeds to tell three stories with scandalous implications.
His first story scandalizes the social hierarchy of the day. Greco-Roman meals often were set around a U-shaped arrangement of couches that formed a triclinium. (The open space allowed the servers room to move among the guests.) Seating within the triclinium was reserved for those with the greatest status or honor, while those with less honor sat on the outside. The Jewish common meal also had designated places of status and honor. But Jesus encouraged his followers to avoid the seats of honor and to take the humble seats.
The University of North Carolina basketball arena (the Smith Center) offers a parallel. Theatre-style seats with cushions and arm rests are reserved for huge donors and are places to be "seen." To basketball-crazed Tar Heels, Jesus would be saying, "Go for the upper deck even though you can't see the game quite as well there." Jesus is taking the social hierarchy of his day, the systems of clan and patriarchy (paterfamilias), and turning them upside down.
A second story goes a step farther. Don't invite your friends, family or the economic elite, Jesus tells his listeners; in other words, leave out those who make you feel comfortable, who help you fulfill obligations or advance your status. Invite only "the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind"—guests who all have additional requirements and needs without the likelihood of reciprocity. In Jesus' arena, there is no lower level. The triclinium does not even exist. This exhortation is a scandal of both inclusiveness (the nature of the guest list) and abundance.
The humble far outnumber the elite in any society. Who has enough food to feed the masses? We live in a society of vast abundance that runs on the perception of scarcity. There are only so many spots on the school team, on the admissions lists of elite schools, in the club and in the boardrooms. Our perception of the value of the triclinium seats keeps us in competition with each other. The greater our status, the more we are driven to compete. Jesus challenges this whole dynamic.
Although our text ends here, there is one more feast story. In it, Jesus rebukes the polite rules of invitation. His feast not only has a bizarre invitation list but has a sense of urgency. Reply immediately. There is no one-year grace period for wedding gifts, no month to decide whether you want season tickets. The feast is an urgent demand.
Jesus' teachings take the common table, the center of his world, and flip it upside down. His table stories describe a revolutionary, redemptive kingdom that confronts the norms of upwardly mobile networking and competition. He eschews the expectations of polite society for a story of revolution. This is the nature of the kingdom.
The table of Christ goes far beyond warm memories and the unique bonds of family. At his table, we encounter Christ—and eat and drink in tension with our culture in conscientious objection, in revolution and in fierce hope of a redemptive future.
Tim Conder is the pastor of Emmaus Way in Durham, North Carolina, and author of The Church in Transition: The Journey of Existing Churches into the Emerging Culture (Zondervan).
The people of Israel stand on the threshold of their inheritance, the land of promise. The long-awaited day of glory has come; it's time to remember their story, their failures and, most important, their deal with God.
We've all played out this scene with our families and friends. I've heard my sister-in-law say to her children before they embark on special opportunities or challenges: "Remember your baptism!" I'm sure she said the same thing to her two oldest boys before they deployed as marines to Iraq and Afghanistan. When we talk to our kids, my wife and I often contribute hints of threat, consequence and potential reward to the script. "This is a unique privilege—the kind that doesn't come around every day. . . . Don't expect every day to be like today. . . . Opportunities come to those who can handle responsibilities."
Like the family values our kids remember before a trip, this deal with Yahweh is a covenant of potential blessings—and curses! The preceding chapters (Deut. 27-28) are quite clear and specific about the nature of these blessings and curses. All that is left is Moses' final call to the Israelites to remember their past and to be faithful to the covenant.
When I get to this part of the story, however, I get nervous. There are so many elements in this text that offend my sensibilities. Blessings and curses? My usual relational language with God does not include curses. The blessings and curses here are very specific and material: the blessings of prosperity, progeny, victory over our enemies, long life—or the curses of death and destruction. A theology of blessing and cursing indicts my image of and hopes in God, and doesn't match my own experience.
In my world, the greedy and selfish seem to prosper at a much higher rate than the generous. Relationships begun with the best of intentions wither. In a world of unwanted pregnancies, faithful and capable would-be parents struggle with infertility and slow adoption processes. This world doesn't seem to mete out blessings and curses with any rhythm of justice or fairness.
But rebuttals to my observations fall flat in light of God's definition of blessing and prosperity. To add insult to injury, the paragraph preceding this week's text implies that the deal God makes "is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach." Are you kidding? Sometimes just answering the phone cheerfully is beyond my reach, much less faithfulness to God's moral code. I am further cursed by the fact that I've read this story many times. I know what comes next. The Israelites accept the mantle of God's promise and on divine orders purge the land of the Canaanites with the sword. Texts like this contradict my notion of a good and gracious God redemptively engaged with our world.
My problem is that I'm tempted to read these words too personally. The question, "What's in it for me?" always lurks in my mind. The indictment of God hangs on my personal circumstances. I ignore the perplexing reality that my personal circumstances are relative and too variable to evaluate except in those rare moments of great triumph or tragedy.
When I jettison my insistence on an overly personal or circumstantial reading of this text, there are other interpretative possibilities. Yahweh for the Israelites was not only a God who made personal covenants; Yahweh was the creator and sustainer of life. As N. T. Wright explains, "The creator God is the covenant God, and vice versa." Much disillusionment (and bad theology) comes from detaching these dual realities.
This text connects covenant and creation with the resonating directive to "choose life." With the blessings and curses of the covenant clearly in the foreground, the Israelites are told, "Now choose life. . . . For the Lord is your life." The covenant was for a particular people to bless the entire world of God's creation (Gen. 12:1-3). God's goodness is evident not only in faithfulness to the covenant but also in acts of blessing that bring the rain for our harvests, staying our hands when they are bent on destruction, and allowing the Spirit to guide our communities forward in mission despite our disunity, competition and infighting. Claus Westermann offers this: "The Old Testament knows a wholly different kind of divine acting not manifested in history; a constant acting not manifested in momentary events, namely, God's work of blessing. Blessing really means the power of fertility. God's blessing causes a developing and growing, a ripening and fruit-bearing, a silent advance of the power for life in all realms."
This is a fresh perspective on God as Creator and on covenant faithfulness. Just as with the ancient Israelites, our covenant-keeping means living in a rhythm of holistic living and worship. Covenant-keeping fashions an awareness of the goodness of creation, a mandate of creation stewardship, and the ever-present hope of a new (redeemed) creation coming. Yes, the lives we live and the circumstances we encounter are filled with pain, injustices and the vestiges of a marred creation. Somewhere in this pain lurk our curses, the consequences of humanity's rejection of life. But life and hope remain. The imperative to "choose life" and the stipulation that that choice is obtainable are not naive or futile challenges. Life does exist in the blessing of God. The choice of life is the commitment to embrace the creative and re-creative work of God by living with an awareness of God's goodness.
Tim Conder is the pastor of Emmaus Way in Durham, North Carolina, and author of The Church in Transition: The Journey of Existing Churches into the Emerging Culture (Zondervan).
Thousand Foot Krutch shows admirable ambition on Welcome to the Masquerade, deftly juggling metal, pop, rap and post-grunge. The trio mostly succeeds in making it all appealing, and the album's sound is ultimately more inventive than derivative—this is not just another mainstream-aping Christian rock band.
The clean cohesion and pop sensibility owe much to producer Aaron Sprinkle (of Poor Old Lu fame), who impressively keeps all the sonic plates spinning. "Fire It Up" fades in as if from a nimbus cloud, then grabs the listener with jagged guitar riffs and a half-spoken, half-shouted refrain. (Listen for the guitar solo by Pete Stewart of Gramma train.)
Elsewhere Masquerade walks on the mild side and stumbles. "Watching Over Me" lurches dangerously close to the should-be-banned category of metal power ballad, with its treacle string section and Brylcreem-smooth angel imagery. Given how original much of the album sounds, this song sticks out like a Spandex-covered thumb. More appealing in the softer spectrum is the album closer, "Already Home," which plants a massive, anthemlike hook atop piano and acoustic guitar, though the strings again sound candied and grandiose.
Lyrically the band serves up easy-to-swallow declarations of faith, which could use more punch in terms of imagery and wordplay. Yet the ballad "Look Away" moves with its storyline—references are to cutting or attempted suicide—toward a redemptive power that lies beyond the pain: "Take all these cuts, and make them shine/ Don't want to be perfect, just alright."
When Masquerade rocks, as much of it does, it sounds like a rowdy house party with a small army of righteous harmony singers in full mosh-pit mode. Witness "Smackdown," with its beat breakdowns tipping the hat to either Billy Squier's "The Stroke" or Run-D.M.C.'s "King of Rock."
We've heard all the elements before, but not quite in this combination. Masquerade wins the listener over on multiple levels: you can stage-dive to it, rap to it, hum it in the shower and most certainly be uplifted by it.
Following their collection of 1960s covers, power-popsters Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs (of the Bangles) assay '70s hits by Bread, George Harrison and Todd Rundgren. The duo sticks to the scripts, emulating the originals' feel (and keys) with pleasing results. On Fleet wood Mac's "Second Hand News," Sweet and Hoffs re-create Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham's vocal vibe. (Buckingham guests on guitar.) Their take on John Lennon's "Gimme Some Truth" boasts just enough bite, though Big Star's "Back of a Car" could use more edge to counter its jangle.
If "Amazing Grace" is your favorite hymn, you're in luck: this disc delivers 14 renditions of the John Newton classic. Katie McMahon's plaintive vocal version features bagpipes; Lisbeth Scott's pop rendition percolates with drum loops and sweeping strings; Walela gilds the tune in tribal hand percussion and a synthesizer drone. While it's hard to imagine listening to the same hymn 14 times in succession, this fascinating musical exercise would make a fitting soundtrack for spiritual meditation. Perhaps most poignant: William Neil's instrumental, played on a faraway church organ.
Paulinho Garcia is one of the best Brazilian fingerstyle guitarists and singers in the United States. On My Very Life he leads a ten-piece band in a grand tour of Brazilian styles, from bossa nova to marcha rancho. The album also showcases his talents as a songwriter. "Cintura Fina" bounces with joyous Portuguese scatting, while the title track sketches out a ballad of marital bliss that's sunnier than Ipanema in mid-January. The upbeat album closer "Disfrutando a Boa Vida" surprises with martial drumming and lead guitar work reminiscent of Carlos Santana.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has its own music scene, with a wealth of artists in many styles. This 16-track disc features several of the most prominent, including vocalist Peder Eide (with Bob Stromberg on the gentle "Abba, I Belong to You"); Jonathan Rundman (getting grungy on "Hey Hey Samuel"); and Richard Bruxvoort Colligan (poppy and perky on "God's Love Endures Forever"). The first of five discs in a series, this collection is well suited for youth-group gatherings and upbeat retreat worship.
The second praise album by Kutless sounds all too pat. It's cookie-cutter hard rock that's not too hard, produced from a deep-fried, alt-rock recipe. True, vocalist Jon Micah Sumrall has a voice that glides between a baritone growl and a tenacious tenor. But "What Faith Can Do," the album's first single, contains enough lyrical banality to outsurplus the loaves and fishes: "Everybody falls sometimes / Gotta find the strength to rise / From the ashes, and make a new beginning."
Magazines list what's in and what's out and persuade us that it's important to know the difference. As school begins, a child psychologist announces on television that what's in and what's out is particularly important for kids. Happy alliances that endure throughout the year will be made on the basis of what young people wear and carry with them these first days of school.
So let's get it straight: Toy Story 3 lunchboxes are very in, X-Men lunchboxes are so last year, and Superman lunchboxes are not even a blip on the screen of in-ness.
In Williamsburg, Virginia, where I live, the fraternities and sororities of The College of William & Mary invite new members in (and leave others out). What's in and what's out translates cunningly into who's in and who's out. Lest you imagine that we've left such distinctions behind with the passing years, reflect on driving through the security entrance to a gated community or walking into a hotel under a doorman's eye. Who's in and who's out is a matter of grave consequence.
Only a few verses before, in the Gospel of Luke, this becomes a matter of consequence for Jesus. Someone asks, "Lord, will only a few be saved?" (13:23). Will this be an exclusive group?
Usually those who ask, "Will only a few be saved?" are secure in their sense of being in and wonder who they may have to tolerate.
Instead of answering directly Jesus paints a picture of the kingdom of God, bright with all the colors of grace: "Then people will come from east and west, from north and south, and will eat in the kingdom of God" (13:29).
Many of the Jews of Jesus' day imagined the end of human history as a great banquet, and some groups had definite notions about who would be invited. When scholars unrolled the Dead Sea Scrolls, they found books of the Bible, including Hosea and Jeremiah. They also found what one group understood to be the invitation list for that great banquet: "All the wise men of the congregation, the learned and the intelligent, men whose way is perfect and men of ability . . . the men of renown."
That's who is invited, but:
No man smitten in his flesh, or paralyzed in his feet or hands, or lame, or blind, or deaf, or dumb, or smitten in his flesh with a visible blemish; no old and tottery man unable to stay still in the midst of the congregation; none of these shall come . . . among the congregation of the men of renown, for the Angels of Holiness are [with] their [congregation] ("The Messianic Rule," The Dead Sea Scrolls in English).
When I read that in class an octogenarian laughed as he piped up: "Preacher, you know that business about tottery old men who can't stay still in the middle of church? They're saying they don't want folks with weak bladders!" There's no room for human frailty at that table. No room for old men with weak bladders or those who need assistance or children whispering who need to be taken out.
This is a stag affair: "Wise men . . . men of renown . . . men of ability." Modern synagogues and churches read the scriptures inclusively, but that ancient guest list intends to be exclusive: no room for women, or for the lame or blind or deaf or blemished or scarred. There is no room for those who have been wounded by life; no room for those who have been broken by the journey, but only for "men of renown."
Jesus proposes a different table: "But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed." Don't allow the world to prepare a guest list with petty calculations of "in and out." Jesus does not offer another invitation list with different estimations of who's in and who's out. He announces something radical and rambunctious—"invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind." He does not exchange one invitation list for another but expands God's invitation beyond every limitation and every exclusion.
In our anxiety about who's in and who's out we face the dilemma that we can never be in enough to be truly secure. Jesus noticed this when he was invited to a meal and saw the guests scurrying to claim places of honor. Even among those who are in, some must be more in than others. If "in and out" measures everything, then there must always be another inner circle that is more exclusive. But this dividing into the accepted and the unaccepted can never quiet our anxiety. Real peace comes another way.
Let your host decide, Jesus says. Let your host say to you, "Friend, come up higher." As long as you grasp and scurry for a place of welcome you can never feel at home. No matter how hard you try you can never earn a welcome. You can only receive welcome as a gift.
Who is this host who speaks so graciously to us and calls us friend? Who can it be other than Christ himself? We do not have to scramble for a place at his table. Our names are on the invitation list. A place is prepared, and when we hold back, uncertain that we really belong, too timid to believe we are truly welcome, he says, "Friend, come up higher."
Everyone is welcome here. You don't have to puff yourself up or pretend. Your value is not determined by calculations. You don't have to get and grab and grasp and grapple for a place. You are welcome here.
Patrick J. Willson is pastor of Williamsburg Presbyterian Church in Williamsburg, Virginia.
I was perilously close to becoming an agnostic—at least about certain statistics. Specifically, I really didn't know the data on Christians in China, and for a while I was not sure if anyone did. Only now, perhaps, do we have the glimmerings of an answer to one of the most pressing questions in global religion: just how many Chinese Christians are there?
This question matters enormously because of China's vast population—now over 1.3 billion—and its emerging role as a global superpower. If Christians make up even a sizable minority within that country, that could be a political fact of huge significance.
Some years ago, veteran journalist David Aikman suggested that China's Christian population was reaching critical mass and that Christianity would achieve cultural and political hegemony by 2030 or so. Writing in First Things last year, Catholic China-watcher Francesco Sisci agreed that "we are near a Constantinian moment for the Chinese Empire." If we could say confidently that China today had, say, 100 or 150 million Christian believers, that would also make the country one of the largest centers of the faith worldwide, with the potential of a still greater role in years to come.
But what can we actually say with confidence when honest and reliable authorities differ so widely on the basic numbers? Estimates of Christian numbers vary enormously, from 25 million or so to an incredible 200 million. If current estimates are so contested, then so are growth projections.
One of the most authoritative sources on religious statistics is the World Christian Database, which offers invaluable reference materials on all parts of the world. On China, though, WCD figures are startlingly high (which does not necessarily make them wrong). According to this source, the country's Christians exploded from under a million in 1970 to around 120 million today (over 9 percent of the whole country), and that number will grow to 220 million by 2050. If correct, that would make the story of Chinese Christianity probably the most dramatic success story in modern religious history.
Other sources, however, place the Christian share of the population significantly lower. The minimum realistic figure is that of the Chinese government itself, which to say the least has no vested interest in exaggerating the tally of religious believers. The government publicly admits to the figure of 20 million for Catholics and Protestants combined—1.5 percent of all Chinese. Beyond those, of course, there are the unregistered Christian communities, the famous house churches, and their numbers are a total mystery. The WCD suggests that there are 70 million house-church believers, others say 50 million, still others far less. Putting the various estimates together, the Pew Forum gives a Christian population of 4 or 5 percent; the CIA's World Factbook puts it at 3 or 4 percent. The differences may sound tiny, but we are dealing with a colossus—in China, just 1 percent of the population means an impressive 13 million souls.
The best evidence we now have comes from extensive opinion surveys undertaken over the past decade, material that is now being made available through a Templeton Foundation-supported project at Baylor University, led by Rodney Stark, Carson Mencken and other scholars. At first sight, this evidence portrays Chinese Christianity as much more modest than in some recent accounts, with a mere 35 or 40 million adherents. However, the researchers stress that these numbers identify only those who are prepared to admit openly to Christian faith. Depending on the attitudes of zealous local officials, such an overt admission might be suicidally rash. Pew survey evidence also finds many additional Chinese who might not describe themselves overtly as Christian, but who are prepared to consider the existence of "God/Jesus"; perhaps these are converts en route to full belief.
Putting the Templeton and Pew materials together, we can reasonably place the number of Chinese Christians at around 65 to 70 million, or a little less than 5 percent of the population. That falls a good deal short of any vision of "converting China." Christians constitute just a small minority within that country, roughly comparable to the percentage of Muslims in Western European nations.
Even viewed in these somewhat reduced terms, though, the Chinese number still inspires awe. Those 65 or 70 million Christians outnumber the total population of major nations like France, Britain or Italy. Put another way, China has almost as many Christians as it does members of the Communist Party. Moreover, the Christian figure represents a phenomenal growth from the 5 or so million who witnessed the communist takeover in 1949 and from the subsequent decades of massacre and persecution. If not quite a miracle, this is a profoundly impressive story.
You stand side by side, i miei cugini, the Italian version of "American Gothic" bisected by iron security gates, to watch us snaking in inches toward X-ray machines. Your eyes glisten like the last buds of autumn. We carry the luggage of your love. It weighs nothing. But when the plane lifts into the night sky, only the moon has more luminescence, more weight than my heart.
The second son, having made the school baseball team, Informs his startled father that they are underequipped In the matter of bats—sticks, hammers, the implements Of destruction, the tools of the trade, the thunder lumber, As the salesman says cheerfully. There is a dense forest Of bats against the wall, gleaming graphite and brilliant Maple, aluminum in every conceivable shade and sheen, And the father gets absorbed in the names, the Torpedos And Thunderclubs, Phantoms and Cyclones, the Patriots And Nitros, Magnums and Maxxums, Rayzrs and Ultras, And, rivetingly, the Freak, which comes in thirteen sizes, Which makes you wonder. The father, a terrible baseball Player as a boy, admires but does not say anything about The extraordinary lean loveliness of the ash bats hanging Lonely at the far end. The boy chooses a bright red metal Hammer, takes a few swings, waggles it a bit, hoists it up On his shoulder, says this'll do, and the sacramental hour Passes, as all holy moments must. But they do happen, as Fast and terrifying as a baseball fired right at your noggin. The batter's job, the second son says, is to identify a pitch As soon as it leaves a pitcher's hand. Seeing is everything, He says, and for once we are in complete and utter accord.
Brian Doyle is editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland in Oregon.
When Yoani Sánchez began blogging about life in Cuba a few years ago, she had to pose as a German tourist and sneak into Internet cafés. From there she was able to post reports on her country's food shortages, its methods of political indoctrination, its glacial movement toward reform and its lack of freedom of speech. As Time magazine noted a few years ago, Sánchez is one dissident whom the world would never have heard from before the Internet age.
Sánchez is also one of 74 Cuban dissidents who in June urged the U.S. Congress to lift restrictions on trade and travel to Cuba. The 74 include journalist Guillermo Farias, who almost died while conducting a 140-day hunger strike to protest censorship by the Cuban government. Farias ended his strike in early July after Cuba announced that it would release 52 political prisoners in a deal brokered by the Roman Catholic Church and Spain's foreign secretary.
The argument for lifting the U.S. embargo on Cuba has been made frequently over the past 48 years, but the embargo has always been successfully defended by anti-Castro forces in the U.S., who view it as just punishment for the atrocities of Fidel Castro's regime. After decades, however, it's clear that the embargo has had little political effect. George Schultz, secretary of state under Ronald Reagan, called the embargo "a failure by any measure"; it has served only to help impoverish Cubans while doing nothing to make them freer.
A first step toward easing travel and trade with Cuba was taken by the House Agriculture Committee this summer. It approved a bill that eases restrictions on trade and allows Americans to travel to Cuba without special permission. The bill is backed by business and agriculture groups that see in Cuba a nearby market for their goods—and a generator of U.S. jobs. The bill stands a good chance of passing the House if it makes it to the floor for a vote, though its fortunes in the Senate are likely to be more complicated.
The dissidents in Cuba who support the bill can hardly be termed apologists for Castro. They have put their lives on the line to criticize the regime and to publicize its brutal treatment of political prisoners. The U.S. embargo, the dissidents say, "benefits the most inflexible interests" of Cuba's government. What the regime fears most, they argue, "is an opening of free trade and of free enterprise, and the direct flow of information and communication between peoples." This is one case in which economic, political and moral interests are aligned. They call for ending a failed embargo and opening a new era for Cuba.
My life in pastoral ministry had its share of ambiguities. At a couple of points I considered switching to a teaching ministry. Many times I felt that I was giving my best in the parish but that the results were underwhelming; many times I was disappointed in myself. It's not that I didn't love parish ministry. In the 37 years since my ordination, I have never served a congregation in which God didn't surround me with gifted and generous partners. I loved the congregations and the people I served.
In seminary I had dreamed of pews filled to overflowing as I preached with the conviction and the illumination afforded by my midnight-oil studies. As a pastor, I often longed to feel what Jesus must have felt when the crowds grew so enormous he had to hop in a boat to get some breathing room. Although years ago I'd begged God for a sure sign that I was called to this work, that sign had never materialized. As a result, I performed my ministry with a recurring doubt in my head: Am I truly intended and called for this work?
Then, during the last weeks before my retirement, I was granted a sign—the purest, most profound sign I've ever experienced. The first moment came during a farewell dinner for my wife and me. For weeks members of the congregation had been asking me how I felt about retiring, and I had no answer. I was caught up in responding to everyday duties and tying up loose ends.
But when I entered the church for the banquet, I felt the enormity of the impending change in my life, and I was not at all confident that I could handle the emotional impact of a congregation's well wishes for pastor and spouse.
Fortunately the evening included roasts and jokes and laughter. I received "Olympic medals" that marked such things as the record number of cars passing by the sanctuary window during one of my more long-winded sermons. My face ached with laughter as one skit depicted me giving a tedious and academic answer to a simple question in passing about Adam and Eve.
In another skit, youngsters from the congregation delighted in interrupting my children's sermon with crazy questions. And the choir sang newly minted lyrics to "Thanks for the Mem ories."
There were other precious moments, but the glory of the evening continued unabated as we tidied up the fellowship hall late into the night. Women were cleaning up in the kitchen and running the vacuums while the men stacked tables and chairs. Our financial secretary and favorite Elvis impersonator turned to me and said, "Isn't this what it's all about?"
We looked at each other and knew that this was true. Something had happened to us through the years. No matter what we did together, it was beautiful, and much of it was fun—even setting up and cleaning up. We were in this work together.
The second significant moment came on Sunday morning. After I made the announcements, a man spoke up from the choir loft. He wanted to thank my wife and me for our ministry. He had been a part of the call committee and believed that the congregation had gotten a two-for-the-price-of-one deal. On a more personal note, he was thankful for the prayers and support after his first wife had died and for loving support as he celebrated his remarriage. He thanked God for all God had done for him through our church.
At this point I was in trouble. This little litany of thanks pushed me over the edge emotionally. I was at the baptismal font ready to lead the congregation in the Confession and Forgiveness of Sins, but I was coming undone.
In his letter to the Corinthians, the apostle Paul wrote that being "in Christ" causes us to see people in a new way. In Christ there is a new creation. For me the sign that congregational ministry had indeed been my calling was in being allowed, in this moment, to witness and live that new creation. Almost every member of the congregation was there that morning, even those who regularly found it difficult to get to worship. Each time I looked into someone's eyes I noticed a spark of shared recognition of this new creation. I knew how hard it was for many of them to cope. But here they were, celebrating their walk through difficult times—and the fact that we have walked on because we have walked together. Our life stories had been woven together in Christ. We knew each other's secrets and wounds, sins and weaknesses—and it was OK, because Christ was there too, healing, encouraging and re-creating.
During that last Sunday at St. Luke's, the heavenly sign expressed itself in its most powerful form. During the farewell banquet, the Holy Spirit had taken our collective breath away only to breathe it back full of new life. Now it had become a whirlwind that was way beyond our control. By the time we got to the Eucharist there was no telling where it would all lead.
The people came forward. As I served the bread, each face I looked into shone with the glory of God. As trained astronomers find echoes and ripples of the Big Bang in the universe, so do communicants and pastor feel the echoes and ripples of the Last Supper of Christ passing between them. They experience it as they share all that they are with each other and place it all in the tender hands of God.
There is no easy formula or shortcut for genuine ministry. Programs and ideas come and go. Technologies sparkle and grab our attention for a time. But in the end, one thing matters and en dures—God's love in Jesus Christ. The Christian church is this love at work, the movement on earth that springs from the Spirit's breath and strives to gather all people so that they might live forgiven.
My sign from God had been in the making for 37 years. These people taking the body of Christ from my hands—these people and I had been living as that same body. We had learned together that because we trust the love of God we can face down the assaults of Satan. We do not have to flinch when we confront the absurdity of cancer, indignities on the job, the stabbing pain of the death of someone we love or the enduring, numbing pain of divorce, rejection or loneliness.
Together we have stared down de mons and refused to allow differences of opinion to scatter or discourage us. We recognize fearmongering for the evil it is and renounce it. We are gathered by God and have allowed God to hold us. As we've endured and let Christ bind us together, God has made us ever stronger. This is the truth that was breaking out in front of us in our singing, sighing, laughter and applause, silence and tears.
At the end of the service, after the members of the church had filed out, sharing last tearful exchanges, I noticed a visiting couple bundling up an infant child at the rear of the sanctuary. I greeted them and apologized for all the weeping, which I thought must have seemed bizarre to them. They responded, "This is the way every Eucharist should be."
I had my sign—God had made me a full partner in the excellent absurdity of ministry. Congregational ministry was the right calling for me. I had received a sure sign—the Lord grabbed me and planted me deeply in a life in which I could truly serve and belong.
John R. Seraphine retired this spring from St. Luke Lutheran Church (ELCA) in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. He lives on Heatherhope Farm in Sycamore, Illinois.
Jimmy Carter says he doubts that he would have been elected president in 1976 without the encouragement of pastor Jimmy Allen of San Antonio, Texas. Though Carter said he had won early Democratic primaries in Iowa, New Hampshire and Florida, the Georgia governor came to the Texas primary as "a forlorn, woeful, forgotten, hopeless candidate for president" until he met the pastor of the large San Antonio church. (In the late 1970s, Allen would become the last moderate president of the Southern Baptist Convention—prior to the conservative resurgence.) Carter, in remarks July 23 in Jasper, Georgia, introducing a biography of Allen, Loving Beyond Your Theology, said the pastor "took me under his arm" because Allen had "remembered that I said I was a born-again Christian" and wanted to support his right to say that in public. Carter, 85, wrote the foreword to the book by Larry McSwain of the McAfee School of Theology.
After 17 years as head of the Reformed Church in America, Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, 65, will retire next year as general secretary of the Grand Rapids, Michigan-based denomination. Granberg-Michaelson has been a key leader in ecumenical circles, helping to found the group Christian Churches Together in the USA, the nascent Global Christian Forum and, most recently, the new World Communion of Reformed Churches. In his announcement July 20, he said his time with the RCA "has been rooted in a strong experience of God's calling" but added that "it seems timely to seek a new general secretary." It is expected that a replacement would be approved next June and that Granberg-Michaelson would serve until the fall of 2011 to ensure a smooth transition. Paul Boice, RCA director of communication, said he expected that Granberg-Michaelson will continue to be involved in church and ecumenical affairs.
As many as 1,000 people who had registered for the five-day Baptist World Congress in Honolulu were unable to attend because their visas were denied by U.S. officials, said leaders of the sponsoring Baptist World Alliance in an opening day news conference July 28. The BWA drew about 10,000 to its congress five years ago in Birmingham, England, but this year's gathering was expected to number fewer than 5,000—mostly for economic reasons. Other major church gatherings in the U.S. have had the same problem in the past decade. Would-be registrants from Africa and Asia were the most affected. "It would be very unfortunate if the U.S. had to be eliminated from the list of places to hold meetings," said Neville Callam, general secretary of the BWA, whose office is based in Falls Church, Virginia.
The American Jewish Congress, a national advocacy group that has argued for church-state separation on prayer in public schools, has laid off most of its employees and suspended operations. The 92-year-old organization lost $21 million of its $24 million endowment to financier and felon Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme, which devastated a range of Jewish groups, including Yeshiva University. As with other nonprofits, the economic downturn has also hobbled fund-raising efforts, officials said. Once a prominent organization in combating anti-Semitism and promoting women's rights and other progressive policies, the AJCongress has struggled in recent years to distinguish itself from the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League, said Jon athan Sarna, an American Jewish history professor at Brandeis University. "Once it lost almost all of its endowment, its days were numbered," Sarna said. "The wonder is that it held on as long as it did." AJCongress president Richard Gordon said the group will operate "with a skeletal staff over the next few months" while weighing its options.
The Young Men's Christian As sociation (YMCA) will now call itself by the shortened name "the Y" as part of its newest brand strategy but officially will still identify itself as the YMCA.
As Mamie Moore, national spokesperson for the YMCA of the USA, said in an interview, "What we're doing is calling ourselves 'the Y' because that's what everybody calls us. [However,] YMCA is still our legal name."
Moore said the change is meant to capitalize on the increasing focus the YMCA is giving to its three core areas of youth development, healthy living and social responsibility.
With more than 2,500 centers nationwide, the YMCA will continue its mission to reach out to communities. It is "accurate that we are downsizing to one letter in what we call ourselves, but our mission remains the same," Moore said.
Ironically, the change comes amid a push by some local YMCA affiliates to "light up the C in YMCA," as staffers have described it, with Christian programming, chaplains and even boxes for members' prayer requests.
The YMCA was founded in Britain in 1844, at a time when the Industrial Revolution drew young men to London for work. Founder George Williams and a group of businessmen wanted to offer a Christian alternative to the sordid street life. The first YMCA offered beds, Bible studies and wholesome activities.
The new "Y" branding comes after more than two years of internal analysis and research. The company's logo has also changed to include the organization's full acronym.
"For the past 43 years, what you've seen is the red and black ['Y'] logo," Moore said. "What you'll find now is that for the first time in 43 years, YMCA is embedded in our logo. You can no longer separate the letter Y from YMCA." -Religion News Service
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu has announced his intention to wind down his public engagements when he turns 79 this October.
"I think I have done as much as I can, and I really do need time for other things that I have wanted to do," Tutu told a July 22 media briefing at St. George's Cathedral in Cape Town. He also thanked South Africans for their contribution to the world, including their "panache" during the World Cup games.
Tutu became the first black general secretary of the South African Council of Churches in 1978, and then in 1986 the first black Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, a post from which he retired in 1996. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, he chaired South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which investigated human rights violations in the apartheid era.
The archbishop said the time had come to devote himself to quiet reflection, his family and reading, although he will honor all existing engagements. "I will shut up, but sometimes I might not be able to resist," said Tutu, who is known for his pronouncements on issues of peace and justice the world over.
In fact, in an article published July 20 in the New York Times, Tutu said that it was "deeply distressing" that President Barack Obama had decided "to spend less than he promised to treat AIDS patients in Africa." Tutu wrote that he was "saddened" that Obama chose to cut U.S. contributions to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, a global financing organization. -Ecumenical News International
Progressive Christian college students hope to reconstitute a movement that propelled young adults into pro-civil rights and antiwar activities before it was disbanded decades ago. The U.S. Student Christian Movement, which officially ended more than 40 years ago, will be revived at an October 8-11 meeting at Morehouse College in Atlanta.
"Students will come together to discuss how they will collectively put their faith into action toward progressive Christian concerns," said Luciano Kovacs, North American regional secretary of the World Student Christian Federation, in a statement released by the National Council of Churches.
"SCM USA will provide the coordination of ecumenical student activities in the U.S. and subsequently connect U.S. students with the rest of the global federation." Kovacs said students hope to address issues such as hunger, poverty, immigration, racism and worldwide ecological problems.
In the 1950s and '60s, the Student Christian Movement was an ecumenical network that paralleled the work of the National Council of Churches.
Students who have been involved in "New Fire" meetings prior to recent assemblies of the council seek to reorganize the national movement, said Philip Jenks, a spokesperson for the National Council of Churches.
A regional conference of the World Student Christian Federation was held in San Francisco in January 2009 and prompted an initiative to begin the new national Student Christian Movement. -Religion News Service
I should have seen my road to Damascus moment approaching. I'd been warned.
"Looking into the eyes of someone dying of hunger becomes a disease of the soul," Volli Carucci of the United Nations World Food Program told me on my first day in Ethiopia.
A disease of the soul? I had received an overdose of medical admonishments during my many years of covering Africa for the Wall Street Journal: Get your yellow fever shot. Don't forget the malaria pills. Beware bilharzia in standing water. Avoid the meningitis season. Be cautious in the cholera zones. But never before had I been warned about my soul. Now where, I wondered dubiously, could I get a shot or pill for that?
We were on a top floor of the WFP's building in Addis Ababa in the spring of 2003, looking out on a country ravaged by an epic famine. Even Carucci, a veteran of many hunger emergencies, was stunned by the magnitude of this one: more than 14 million people were on the doorstep of starvation—a greater number than in the famine of 1984, which had inspired the Live Aid concerts and the "We Are the World" anthem as well as pious pledges of "Never again!"
"Tomorrow," Carucci said, sensing my doubt, "you will see." Early the next day we were traveling south from Addis Ababa through the drought-choked plains of the Great Rift Valley. After several hours, the paved but pothole-embroidered road gave way to a rugged dirt trail that corkscrewed up into the highlands. By midafternoon we were standing in a field of rocks on the Boricha plateau, where the famine was particularly acute. Behind us were several olive-green tents. We entered one, following the local director of Ethiopia's Disaster Preven tion and Preparedness Commission.
Inside, dozens of children were starving to death. Our first steps took us beside a mattress where two stick-figure infants were receiving nourishment through nose tubes. Just beyond them, dozens of parents hunched over other mattresses, keeping a deathwatch over their children.
We made our way to a corner of the tent where five-year-old Hagirso was propped up between the legs of his father, Tesfaye Ketema. A few days before, Ketema explained, he had cradled his emaciated son for an hour and a half as they rode in a donkey-drawn wagon over rutted dirt roads to this famine clinic. A year earlier he had made the same trip, but on that trip he had carried bags of surplus grain to the Boricha market after a bumper harvest.
Now his son was on the verge of starvation. He weighed just 27 pounds when he arrived at the clinic—the very portrait of famine: swollen head, bone-thin arms and legs. His eyes, remarkable in a frightening way, were deep black holes. No hint of playfulness. No baleful beseeching. They were empty, lifeless.
Hagirso's lifeless eyes changed me. I saw wrongs and in justices I hadn't noticed before. Why was such hunger happening now, after two years of bumper harvests? Why was it happening again, 19 years after the 1984 famine? Why was it happening still, at the dawn of the 21st century, when more food was being produced than ever before?
Looking into Hagirso's eyes touched me in a way nothing else in Africa ever had. A new passion and purpose—and an urgency to answer those questions—seized me. What I saw infected my soul. And what I saw was what Carucci had predicted I'd see: "You see that nobody should have to die of hunger."
As a priest is called to the ministry, I felt called to the hunger story. It was as if all my previous adventures as a journalist, particularly the many years of foreign corresponding, had led me to this point. Having arrived at the starvation tents of Boricha after years of wandering from story to story as a foreign correspondent, I now wanted to settle and concentrate on one story: hunger. Of course other big stories would break: the Iraq war, the Asian tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, the global financial collapse. But to me the biggest story of all was the tragedy of 25,000 people in the developing world dying every day of hunger, malnutrition and related diseases.
I was raised in the Lutheran church and schools, and I know the Bible well. Now one particular passage was becoming my compass: "For I was hungry and you gave me food. . . . What you do to the least of my brothers, you do unto me."
The road to Boricha became my road to Damascus. Looking into the eyes of the starving, I saw Matthew 25. Surely the hungry in the emergency feeding tents of Boricha were the least of all.
Starvation wasn't anywhere on my radar when I was growing up amid the wheat and corn fields of Illinois and Iowa, the breadbaskets of the world. Even when I moved to Africa in 1986, to establish the Journal's Johannesburg office, I didn't pay much attention to the hungry. For five years I was preoccupied with covering the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. On subsequent visits to Africa, hunger was part of the wallpaper, the background noise of the continent. For me, and for much of the world, hunger was a given in Africa, an inevitability.
That all changed in Ethiopia. I saw for the first time that it didn't have to happen.
Kneeling beside Hagirso's mattress, I listened to Ketema tell his story. His bumper harvests from the two previous years had been replicated across the country. The surplus production overwhelmed Ethiopia's underdeveloped markets. Prices collapsed. What Ketema and other peasant farmers received from the merchants of Boricha was barely enough to cover their planting and harvesting costs; many of them lost money. The next planting season, with their incentive sapped, they cut back on their costs by sowing cheaper, lower-quality corn seed, by abandoning the use of fertilizer and by taking land out of production. They knew this would result in smaller harvests, but they calculated that they would still reap enough to feed their families. But then the rains failed. Drought spread across the land. The harvests shrank further than expected and the emergency feeding tents filled. The markets had failed before the weather did. The tragedy was of biblical proportions: feast giving way to famine, the success of the farmers leading to their failure.
As he stared at his starving son, Ketema's eyes filled with tears and guilt. What had he done to his child? I wondered something else: What had we done to his child?
In reporting an earlier story on African agriculture, WSJ colleague Scott Kilman and I had come across a warning from Norman Borlaug, the American crop breeder who won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for saving millions from starvation with his work on the Green Revolution in Asia. In his Nobel lecture, Borlaug pleaded, "Man can and must prevent the tragedy of famine in the future instead of merely trying with pious regret to salvage the human wreckage of the famine, as he has so often done in the past. We will be guilty of criminal negligence, without extenuation, if we permit future famines."
Criminal negligence. Boricha 2003 wasn't just a famine scene; it was a crime scene, Borlaug's prophecy come to pass. The world's neglect of Africa's farmers—the sharp decline in investment that could have built up their storage capability and improved their access to markets to absorb the surplus, the lending conditions that forbade crop price supports that are common in the U.S. and Europe, the one-sided subsidy system that gave an advantage to Western farmers in world trade, the American food aid system that put U.S. agriculture interests ahead of the interests of those being helped—had all dramatically come to bear in Ethiopia.
I began to press Journal editors to stretch our coverage beyond one story on the economics of the Ethiopian famine into a regular hunger beat. To grab the attention of readers who might be suffering from emotion fatigue, I would get them to look into the eyes of the hungry, to share the emotions I felt. The reporting needed to go beyond the human suffering, to capture the human neglect, the shame that at the dawn of the 21st century this could be happening.
After several years on my self-styled hunger beat at the Journal—including writing about hunger in the U.S. upon my return home in 2005 —I felt there was more that needed to be written. I knew that my soul wouldn't rest until Scott Kilman and I had put all we knew about hunger into a book. So we set out to write Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty. Our mission was to take readers into the eyes of the hungry, to outrage and inspire, to create a constituency that would shout, "Enough is enough!"
I wanted everyone to see what I had seen: no one should have to die of hunger—not in the 21st century. Not after the Green Revolution was one of the great scientific achievements of the 20th century.
Yet here we stand, one decade into the new millennium, and the hunger crisis is worsening. The roll call of the world's chronically hungry has swelled dramatically in recent years, accelerated by the global food crisis of 2008-2009 and soaring past 1 billion people. That, the folks who do the counting tell us, is the highest absolute number in history.
The book, it turns out, wasn't enough to quell my restlessness. So after 30 years at the Wall Street Journal, I left the paper to follow my road to Boricha and take up a new mission with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs: to raise the clamor to make ending hunger through agriculture development the great populist cause and singular achievement of this decade.
The last decade put clamor-raising precedence on our side. Amid the wreckage of the global financial system stands the miracle of debt relief for the poorest countries of the world. Amid the rampant human suffering from wars and swindles came great advancements on AIDS. Amid so many divisions, the world at least gathered together—even if the results fell short of the ambition—to confront the challenge of climate change. As the clamor intensified on these issues, we saw policies change, great sums of money raised, millions of lives saved.
Why not a clamor for action against hunger?
The Jubilee 2000 campaigners, rising out of British church pews, barged into international politics and put the issue of debt relief for the poorest nations on the front burner. The cold hearts of bean counters in world capitals and international lending institutions melted, and billions of dollars in debt were forgiven, wiped off the books.
When the Jubilee campaigners first came to the United States, where the purse strings of global finance resided, they faced deep skepticism. Debt relief, critics said, would do nothing more than encourage further fiscal indiscipline in the developing world. Besides, members of Congress told the campaigners, they were hearing no clamor back home among their constituencies.
The campaigners huddled and decided, "They want clamor, we'll give them clamor." They built political pressure from gatherings in church basements, from potluck dinners and ice cream socials.
Debt relief, a most arcane subject, suddenly became sexy. Finance committee meetings in Washington released tears instead of snores. The hushed silence wasn't from the tedium of interest rate calculations but from stories of how onerous debt levels were preventing mothers from feeding their children. The skeptics scoffed that the Jubilee campaigners were hopelessly quixotic, that debt relief would never happen. But it did.
Why not hunger relief?
A multitude of activists, many of them from the Jubilee campaign, raised the clamor on the devastation of the AIDS epidemic. Again the skeptics roared, "It'll never happen." But a global fund was created and soon filled with billions of dollars. President Bush launched a $15 billion initiative, and Congress approved. AIDS drugs were rushed into Africa.
Why not hunger?
Environmentalists, galvanized by the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, raised the clamor and elevated climate change to a top position on the world agenda.
Why not hunger?
In the final months of 2009, two global gatherings were scheduled: a world food summit in Rome and a world climate change summit in Copenhagen. Very few world leaders made the pilgrimage to Rome, but they all flocked to Denmark, tripping over each other on the way to the cameras and microphones.
Why not hunger?
This is the wider inconvenient truth: If we don't end hunger, which is the common enemy of all development efforts, none of the campaigners on these other issues can truly claim success. All the AIDS medicine rushing into Africa doesn't have the impact it should on hungry, starving bodies. There's a very pointed African saying: Giving such drugs to a hungry person is like washing your hands and then drying them in the dirt. After all, what do our medicine prescriptions commonly say? Take with food!
Any success on the climate change front will depend on creating conditions in which those who likely will be the most impacted—the small farmers in Africa around the equator and the Sahel—can still feed their families. They will need new water- harvesting techniques, irrigation and drought-resistant seeds.
So why not hunger?
It's 2010. It is time to end the neglect of agriculture development, as President Obama is attempting to do in his "Feed the Future" initiative. It is time to end the hypocrisy and blind self-interest of our policies, as some in Congress are proposing.
It is time for everyone to look into the eyes of the starving, where we all can see that nobody should have to die of hunger.
Roger Thurow is senior fellow on global agriculture and food policy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He and Scott Kilman are authors of Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty (Public Affairs).
After a five-month absence, parts of Port-au-Prince looked marginally better than when I had last seen the city in February. At least some debris from the January 12 earthquake had been removed. But generally, the city seemed at a standstill.
Many Haitians were focused on the welcome distraction of the World Cup soccer tournament. I often heard the comment that if it were not for the World Cup, the streets of Port-au-Prince would be filled with protesters angry at government inaction. "People are waiting for someone to show the way," said a young Haitian aid worker with the Lutheran World Federation.
At the center of disappointment and frustration is the fact that hundreds of thousands of people remain stuck in tent cities. The call, oft-heard after the quake, to "build back better" is heard less and less now, for very little building of any kind is going on. The standstill is due to a number of tangled issues, including questions over who owns and who rents land, about whether property owners should be compensated for the rubble they remove, and about whether the government could (or should) declare eminent domain and simply move people out of the camps located in public squares, parks and golf courses.
After the quake people had visions of building new cities outside of Port-au-Prince—a kind of Haitian version of Brasilia—but such talk is scanty now. Haiti has a long history of unfulfilled visions. The Comedians, Graham Greene's satiric novel about Haiti in the mid-1960s, includes this assessment: "Haiti was a great country for projects. Projects always mean money to the projectors so long as they are not begun."
Housing is not the only problem. My LWF colleague mentioned that relief supplies have been held up in customs simply because of inefficiencies. When I asked Sylvia Raulo, the LWF country representative, about the problem, she said NGOs have legitimate grievances with the Haitian government. But she then explained what that government faces. The country's entire customs operation is being run out of an average-sized office no larger than her own, housing about a dozen employees.
"There is a real issue of capacity," she said about the losses experienced by the Haitian government—losses that include huge numbers of buildings, equipment and, of course, personnel.
Prospery Raymond, country manager for the U.K.-based humanitarian agency Christian Aid, said all sides have to be pragmatic right now if they are to ensure "that everyone has a safe and sustainable place to live." He said the Haitian government has to realize that corruption is not going to be tolerated by the international community. "Building back better," Raymond said, "not only means building back better homes, it also means being accountable."
But at the same time, Raymond said, the international community needs to accompany the Haitian state in a reconstruction that could take two decades or more. "I think it's good to push the state," he said. "But they [the authorities] still have to get back on their feet."
Of course, it is not only the government that has to get back on its feet. Day-to-day survival is the order of the day for people like Patricia Pierresaint, 47, who lost her husband, Andre Felix, and daughter Josette in the quake. Pierresaint spends her days as a vendor, selling cookies, gum and candy at the Place Boyer camp, where she now lives. Pierresaint was injured in the quake and is receiving a small monthly stipend from Church World Service to assist disabled persons during these difficult first months. Pierresaint has used the money to get her small vending business up and running.
She is grateful for the assistance, but she has to think about what she will do to support herself and her surviving four children when the six-month stipend ends.
"You never know what to expect" in the Place Boyer camp, Pierresaint said. Women feel threatened by sexual violence. In such an environment, "I don't have piece of mind," she said. Pierresaint waved off a question about how she felt the authorities had responded to the quake and its aftermath. "No, I'm not angry with the government," she said. "It's God's will."
I cannot gauge how many people shared Pierresaint's opinion on the theodicy question; certainly many Haitians have tried to find cosmic meaning in the quake. The idea that the disaster was divine retribution for the sins in Haitian society was not confined to Pat Robertson. That opinion was expressed by some Haitians too, particularly those in Pentecostal communities.
Others, however, have emphatically rejected the idea of divine punishment. The disaster "was not a punishment," said Kerwin Delicat, an Episcopal priest based in the city of Léogâne, the quake's epicenter. Like other church leaders, Delicat is trying to discern how Haitians can find "a way to take responsibility, as human beings, as co-creators with God, to rebuild and reconstruct the country."
That remains a daunting task. Many buildings still pose a hazard as they perch perilously on hillsides. The numerous tent cities look tattered, as the spring and summer rains have worn down the tent fabric. Residents have built canals and boardwalks to maneuver around the campgrounds' mud and sludge. Moreover, the camps keep expanding. An area north of Port-au-Prince that had been nothing but deforested hillside when I first saw it in February is now dotted with telltale blue tarps and tents.
In many ways, the city seemed to be adjusting to life amid the rubble. But the new normalcy is indescribably oppressive. The simple task of driving across Port-au-Prince can take 90 minutes. I repeatedly heard quoted the dismal estimate by logisticians (later confirmed in a New York Times report) that removing all the earthquake debris from the country would require at least 1,000 trucks working 24 hours a day for up to five years. The same Times story quoted a UN official as saying that no country could possibly be "fully functional at this stage after such a disaster." It noted that following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, it took the government of Indonesia, which did not suffer anywhere near the same scale of loss of personnel, more than two years before it was able to move displaced persons out of tent cities.
People show some willingness to cut Haitian authorities some slack, though that sentiment is accompanied by a fair amount of cynicism. "Why would people expect miracles from the government?" asked one Haitian colleague. "The government was barely functioning before the earthquake."
Other observers have been far less forgiving. A June 25 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times by E. Thomas Johnson, response coordinator for the Danish humanitarian agency DanChurchAid, accused Haitian authorities of lapsing "into the classic pattern of corruption, inefficiency and delay that holds the country hostage."
"Though it's important that the Haitian government is in the driver's seat of the recovery effort, it has not yet stepped up to the job," Johnson wrote. "The government needs to aggressively facilitate imports of needed goods and equipment and allow agencies to resettle both camp residents who are most at risk and those whose homes were not damaged."
Johnson also suggested that old patterns were reemerging, with the Haitian elite, which lives "in luxury in elegant homes high above the dusty sprawl," maneuvering to control the post-disaster reconstruction.
That may be the case, but it is also true that Haitian authorities and outside groups have to find ways to work together. From what I saw, humanitarian groups are doing a good job around the edges in providing the essentials of shelter, water and sanitation. (That aid is separate from the international assistance pledged by governments. Much of that has yet to be delivered, in part because of concerns over the Haitian government's ability to administer the funding.)
"This earthquake was a huge disaster, and we could say, 'We're finished,'" said Ernst Abraham, who heads Service Chretien d'Haiti, a Port-au-Prince-based humanitarian and development agency. "Or we could say, 'OK, it's a new chance, a new beginning.' If we take the second option, as a citizen of Haiti, I feel I cannot go far alone. But then, the world community cannot go alone and cannot go far without the government's help and backup."
Abraham and others voiced their frustrations, particularly with the way Haiti authorities have discussed reconstruction plans with donor countries—the United States, Canada, members of the EU—more than with Haitians themselves. I heard the refrain "We know nothing that is going on" from many aid workers. The notion that the recovery from the disaster could usher in an invigorated, reborn Haiti has lost some luster. "This 'new beginning' feels like it is proceeding without action to make it real, concrete," Abraham said. "People are losing their faith about this 'new beginning.'"
These frustrations cast new light on a comment I had heard in January from a Latin American humanitarian worker. He warned of the snares posed by Haiti's complex and politicized history. Noting ruefully that Port-au-Prince felt like it was in the grip "of an occupying force of NGOs," he said that Western nations and NGOs "feel like they can come in with their tents, their clusters and their e-mails and think they control events. They can't. Things take on a life of their own in Haiti."
Working in Port-au-Prince has always been a frustrating enterprise, even in normal times. Thankfully, when you leave Port-au-Prince the situation regarding rehabilitation and recovery appears more hopeful. Small-scale housing reconstruction by teams from the Christian Reformed World Relief Committee was evident outside of the city in small towns. Colonial Jacmel, a badly damaged city along Haiti's southern coast, buzzed with energy, in part because of reconstruction efforts by such groups as the German relief agency Diakonie Katastrophenhilfe.
It is probably too easy to contrast the megalopolis that is Port-au-Prince with small towns. Obviously, it is simply easier working and getting around in Jacmel. If you judged Haiti solely through the lens of Port-au-Prince, you might conclude that Haiti is hopeless. I don't think that is true; I met too many talented, committed and politically savvy Haitians to believe that. But it is also obvious that something has to be done about the scale of Port-au-Prince, which is not only too big but is "too politicized a city," as Sainnac St. Fleur, a construction foreman in Jacmel, put it.
The centrifugal force of Port-au-Prince was evident when I returned to Petite Riviere de l'Artibonite, three hours north of Port-au-Prince. In February I had met with members of a community group there that had initiated a food program to help those who had left Port-au-Prince to stay with relatives and friends. Several thousand had arrived in Petite Riviere after the quake, part of a larger migration of about 500,000 who had left Port-au-Prince in those early weeks. The appeals in Petite Riviere for food, made over community-based radio, were simple: "If you have a family of six people, please donate a goblet of rice."
When I returned in June to see what had happened, I found that about half of the 3,000 who arrived in Petite Riviere from the capital had now left. Of course, many had no intention of staying permanently, and some have homes in Port-au-Prince. Also, humanitarian aid is generally easier to access in the capital.
Still, in a country where even getting a driver's license requires a trip to the capital, the pull of Port-au-Prince remains a central fact of life. "The future is still Port-au-Prince," said Datus Raynashca, 20, who was displaced from the capital with her father and plans to return there. "There is nothing here."
The flow back to the capital meant that the daily food program in Petite Riviere had to be cut back to two-to-three times a week because contributions of food and money declined. "It's like we've run out of resources," said retired agronomist Nicolas Altidor, who helps with the program. Such a cutback, accepted stoically and quietly but with palpable disappointment, is keenly felt. Residents go hungry as a once-flourishing rice industry falters in the face of U.S. rice imports and as small farmers are caught in a cycle of debt as they try to plant and cultivate their crops.
Those and a host of other problems were pushed aside briefly as Haitians followed the fortunes of Brazil in the World Cup. Brazil has endeared itself to Haitians, partly because it reportedly has promised to help train a Haitian team for the 2014 international games. Many Haitians felt deflated when Brazil lost its match against the Netherlands. But the next day, Port-au-Prince's Brazil fans took to the streets to celebrate a loss by Argentina, Brazil's archrival. It was a momentary distraction after six months of loss, hardship and disorientation.
Chris Herlinger was in Haiti on assignment with Church World Service and the Geneva-based ACT Alliance.
Chris Herlinger is a New York–based freelance journalist and a writer with Church World Service.
Remnick's biography is heavy on the ins and outs of everyday politics. It is lighter on the question of how Obama developed his policies and where his political beliefs come from.
When I opened this biography, I was as curious about how David Remnick would pull off a biography of a sitting president—after only one year in office—as I was about Obama himself. Is there more to learn about Obama? Michelle Obama said during the campaign that her husband's life is "an open book. He wrote it and you can read it." She was referring not only to his autobiography, Dreams of My Father, but to the fact that Obama is not a man of many secrets. If there is any remaining mystery, it is probably the result of our own inability to fathom a person who doesn't fit our categories.
The portrait painted by Remnick is quite familiar. He shows us how hard Obama worked to forge his identity, how comfortable and fluent he is in various cultural and linguistic contexts, and how capable he is of weighing the merits of different points of views. He is both comfortable in his own skin and a little touchy about criticism.
Remnick is less interested in Obama's personality than in the cultural moment of his emergence. The title refers to Obama's role as a bridge between the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the new political possibilities for African-American leadership that Obama's rise portends. The book begins with a meditation on a pivotal day in civil rights history, March 7, 1965, known as Bloody Sunday, when civil rights marchers, including John Lewis, attempted to cross Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, and were attacked by police.
Remnick argues that Obama sees himself as a member of "the Joshua Generation" (the title of Remnick's 2008 piece in the New Yorker), a generation of African-American politicians who inherited the legacy of the civil rights movement but who are different kinds of political leaders than their civil rights heroes. Obama, in this metaphor, is Joshua to John Lewis's Moses—someone who can actually take African Americans to the promised land.
The formulation helps to clarify Obama's complicated relationships to African-American leaders of the older generation, and much of Remnick's book is focused on analyzing these relationships. Some, like Lewis, unequivocally embraced Obama's leadership. Others, like Jesse Jackson, chafed at Obama's style. Obama's careful distancing of himself from identity politics prompted some blacks to complain that Obama is not "black enough" and to suspect that he doesn't really represent African Americans.
Remnick's biography is heavy on the ins and outs of everyday politics. It is lighter on the question of how Obama developed his policies and where his political beliefs come from. That creates a certain imbalance: Obama comes off more as a shrewd politician (which of course he is) and less as a powerful thinker (which I suspect he also is). The reader learns a lot about almost every major political player in Chicago, but nothing, for example, about Reinhold Niebuhr, the theologian who is said to have had major influence on Obama's understanding of politics. I would have liked a greater balance between the two parts of Obama's achievement.
Instead, Remnick embroils his reader in the minutiae and squalor of Obama's campaigns. The reader gains a strong sense of people who are part of Obama's inner circle. David Plouffe, David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett all make notable appearances. Perhaps the most significant figure besides Obama is Michelle Obama. Remnick shows her to be what her husband says she is: a woman with her feet on the ground and her eyes wide open. When Obama was sworn in as senator in 2005, after having received international attention for his speech at the Democratic convention the year before, Michelle Obama remarked (according to a Chicago Tribune story), "Maybe one day he will do something to warrant all this attention."
She is a reluctant politician's wife. She would have preferred a more private and more stable life, working perhaps in a foundation. Remnick gives a vivid portrait of her frustration during the years that she spent raising small children while her husband, as a state senator, drove around the state of Illinois shaking hands.
Equally striking is the account of how unhappy Obama was as a senator, both in the Illinois state house and the U.S. Senate. Not attracted to the constant socializing and good-ol'-boy traditions of congressional politics, he spent many lonely hours in his hotel room, going over policy notes, watching sports on TV and talking to Michelle on the phone. Remnick tells of Obama sitting in a committee meeting—where he was 18th in line to ask questions—listening to Joe Biden give what Remnick calls a "bloviation." Obama passed a note to an aide that read: "Shoot. Me. Now."
In Remnick's view, Obama was too restless and ambitious to enjoy the slow rhythms of Congress. When the iron of presidential politics was hot—something that for him happened quickly—he struck.
Remnick argues that one of Obama's central contributions has been to change Americans' narrative about themselves. Obama rejects both the "bootstrap" narrative of rugged individualism and the multicultural narrative of America as a collection of various injured parties. He chooses a third alternative in which all Americans can draw on the African-American experience to understand themselves as a people of progress and change, part of a nation in which the harmful past can be transcended and all can work together to create a better future. He draws on the African-American experience not to stress victimization, but to demonstrate that America is continually reaching to become more of what it is meant be.
These are interesting points, and Remnick takes no short cuts in getting us there. But still I wonder: Why did Remnick write this biography now? It seems both too late and too soon. The many details Remnick supplies do not alter the picture of Obama that emerged in the campaign and in his early months as president, and at times Remnick seems unable to decide which of the political details of Obama's rise are most significant. Perhaps it is just too early to tell.
Amy Frykholm is special correspondent for the Century.
Prayers linger in choir stalls, soak into walls. Centuries of prayer can make you feel buoyant in medieval European cathedrals. Gratitude settles over you like a benediction within busy urban shrines. When you can't pray, you can go to a place consecrated for prayer and let the residue of others' prayers carry you effortlessly, wordlessly into a state of prayer.
The sisters of the Community of the Holy Spirit sold their trio of linked brownstones in New York City to Columbia University in order to build a green convent on a vacant lot further uptown. The new convent features environmentally sustainable materials, water heated by solar power, rainwater collection and plant-covered roofs. The choices of stones and bricks and tiles, the uses of light and ventilation, all reflect the sisters' commitment to the reparation of and respect for Earth. They've designed a holy place to live around the act of praying.
I visited the shell of the new convent on a sunny day when the sky glistened with storybook clouds. I made my way from what will be the chapel at the heart of the house, along with the kitchen and refectory, to the upstairs offices and guestrooms, to the future library where French doors open to a garden on the chapel roof. The next two upper stories will be sisters' cells. The elevator will open onto the roof so that elderly sisters can easily enjoy the garden, the sun and the view.
I lingered on the roof, orienting myself. Facing west, the Hudson River runs left to right. To the south you see City College and the tall buildings of midtown Manhattan. From the east—the Bronx and Yankee stadium—you'll be able to hear the crowds cheering on summer evenings. Below, the tree-lined streets of West Harlem fan out like a moss garden.
Even without interior walls, the efficient new convent feels lovely and loved. Nevertheless, the sisters express deep nostalgia for the 60 years of convent life in the old brownstones that they adapted for other purposes. "This is our last Christmas in the old convent," the sisters said, or "Our last Holy Week," "our last Pentecost." The two senior nuns came to live in this building in 1950 and 1958. One of them remembers the flophouse across the street and women shouting to their clients from the windows one warm Good Friday, "Just be patient! Everyone will get his turn!" The nun tells me she expects to meet those women for whom she's prayed all these years like old friends "in heaven."
A unique sense of place in a consecrated building is essential to monastic hospitality. You come as a guest to place yourself purposefully in those prayer-soaked spaces. I came the first time as a heartbroken woman terrified by an impending divorce. For over 20 years I benefited from the community's generosity and deepening friendships as a guest and grateful friend during the changes in my life—my children growing up, the turns in career, a second marriage, life's tragedies, losses, triumphs. On the day I threw myself into the Reverend Mother's arms heaving with the release of pent-up sobs, I could not imagine that a man I'd meet and marry in the future would propose that we live our dreams alongside these very sisters at their upstate organic farm.
As beautiful or as inspiring as a building might be, faithfulness to the order's vision and charism and that plodding, repetitive praying without ceasing create the real atmosphere in a community. A building, like a sacred vessel, can shape the expression of that charism. In The Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton says, "John Ruskin proposed that we seek two things of our buildings. We want them to shelter us. And we want them to speak to us—to speak to us of whatever we find important and need to be reminded of."
I recently spent a week with the city sisters. Empty closets, assortments of giveaways displayed on the sidewalk steps, library books in methodically labeled piles, color-coded stickers on furniture and lamps—all reminded me of the impending move. Still, the building itself imparted a sense of peace and an effortless kind of prayer.
My own prayers linger in guest rooms, library, refectory and chapel, but especially in the back stairwell. On more than one occasion insight alighted upon me unexpectedly, as sometimes happens when you're not setting your mind directly on solving a problem or necessarily desiring a solution.
We don't know Columbia's proposed use of the old convent. Those old prayers won't leave 113th Street and settle on Convent Avenue in Harlem. Instead, like love, prayer begets prayer exponentially, never diminishing the source.
If prayer soaks into walls, what sorts of odd influences might haunt the old convent building? Will life-changing revelations come to its employees as they descend the stairs? I suspect so. They won't know what hit 'em.
Suzanne Guthrie, a writer and Episcopal priest, creates a weekly lectionary retreat at edgeofenclosure.org. She lives with the sisters of the Community of the Holy Spirit on their farm in Brewster, New York.
Neil Jordan's Ondine is a lovely picture, but it's so gentle and understated that it's attracted little attention. Unlike a lot of other summer films, it never comes at you aggressively.
The movie is derived from the German fairy tale about a water nymph (an undine) who falls in love with a fisherman. But writer-director Jordan reconstructs the story. His setting is an Irish coastal village, and the fisherman is Syracuse (Colin Farrell, in an impassioned performance). He's a recovering alcoholic whose wife, Maura (Dervla Kirwan), kicked him out when he stopped drinking, since she couldn't quit too.
One day Syracuse pulls up his net and finds a nearly drowned young woman (Alicja Bachleda) caught in it. She's terrified of being seen by anyone else, so he puts her up in the cottage he inherited from his mother. But he persuades her to come aboard his trawler, and her eerie siren song brings him phenomenal luck. He tells his daughter Annie (Alison Barry), who lives with Maura and her boyfriend, about Ondine, framing the story in the terms of legend. But Annie, who's nobody's fool, realizes that her father is talking about a real-life creature, so she ventures to the cottage to get confirmation. After reading up on supernatural water creatures at the local library, she insists the visitor is a selkie, the Scottish equivalent of an undine. Her research tells her that selkies can grant a wish to a mortal, and Annie has a big one: one of her kidneys is failing, and she needs a donor.
Maura and the town at large view Syracuse as a clown, both because of his former drunken antics and because he used to perform in a circus. They call him Circus, a nickname he hates. He insists that the priest (Stephen Rea, in a droll performance) he turns to as a sort of AA sponsor—there's no AA chapter in this tiny seaside town—call him by his given name. Syracuse is sensitive and canny, and his playful storytelling with his daughter displays a poetic awareness. His consciousness that he's caught up in a fairy tale is relayed with a combination of irony and wonder.
The movie doesn't reveal the truth about Ondine until toward the end, and even then Jordan wisely leaves the magic unexplained. In fact, some of the details of the story's last act are muddier than they ought to be, presumably as a result of his determination to maintain the fairy-tale mystery.
The early scenes between Farrell and Bachleda are lyrical, but the magic really kicks in when the marvelous little Alison Barry enters the film. Her dark-eyed seriousness and intensity are distinctly Irish, but so are her earthbound humor and her pragmatism. She refuses to be defined by her illness; when her father buys her a wheelchair, she tools around town in it as if she'd scored a moped. There's a matter-of-factness in her conviction that Ondine is a mythical sea creature. She sets out to forge a bond with Ondine, who like us is enchanted by her.
Lit by the great cinematographer Christopher Doyle, the film's exteriors are suffused with lush, ethereal greens, and its interiors are dense and befogged. Jordan keeps the camera ambulatory and often shoots from unusual angles, so we feel a little disoriented, a little tipsy. The filmmaking keeps us either in Syracuse's romantically dazzled perspective or in Annie's, and it doesn't render a single episode in a conventional manner. A funeral is conducted on a dock, with the mourners under umbrellas like the bereaved in the last act of Our Town. When Syracuse persuades Ondine to come out in public, he does it by inviting her on a clothes-shopping spree; it turns out that this possible sea sprite is seduced by the allure of new clothes. When they make love, she's swathed in a silver dress that crinkles like foil. Jordan's movie about romantic faith—the theme at the heart of all fairy tales—blows the stale summer-blockbuster air right out of your head.
Steve Vineberg teaches at the College of the Holy Cross.
In the early 1990s my Grandma Adams, who had been a widow for several years, began to hang out with a widower named Bob. Grandma and Bob got along famously. They complemented one another: Grandma was hard of hearing and Bob was almost blind. My brother tells a story about joining them one night at a restaurant. Grandma, Bob and my brother were just tucking into steaks and baked potatoes when an amiable fellow approached the table. His demeanor was that of a longtime friend, and he talked to Bob and Grandma for several minutes. Grandma and Bob nodded and smiled as if they knew what was going on.
After the gentleman left the table, Bob asked, "Who was that man?" Grandma replied, "I don't know—what did he say?"
Grandma has been gone for years now, but this story remains a family favorite. We laugh freely about it because we are not laughing at Grandma (she loved the tale herself). We don't assign to Grandma any moral responsibility for her hearing loss and its sometimes amusing (and sometimes frustrating) consequences. Her physical capacity to hear had simply worn out.
But blame can be associated with the failure to hear. Think of Stephen in Acts 7:51, railing at an audience of religious officials: "You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you are forever opposing the Holy Spirit . . ." And when Jesus frames a parable with the comment, "Let those with ears to hear listen," he is intimating that there is some element of moral or spiritual choice behind success or failure in hearing and understanding the parables.
Is hearing or the failure to hear a matter of responsibility and culpability, or is it not? Maybe another family story will help sort this out. Eight years ago, I suffered an ear infection that led to a puncturing of the eardrum. A doctor wanted to test how much damage had been done, so I was ushered into a sound-proof booth and administered a number of tests. When we were finished, I asked the technician about the results. She replied that, for a 45-year-old man, my hearing was slightly above average.
"Well, isn't that interesting," I said. "Now I have medico-scientific proof that my wife and daughter are wrong. They think I'm getting hard of hearing." The technician didn't miss a beat. "There is a difference between hearing and listening," she said.
So there you have it: there is a distinction between hearing and listening. We may have functioning hearing organs and still fail to listen to what others are saying. Put differently, hearing is a matter of physical endowment, but listening is a skill at which we can work to become better, more adept.
How does the virtue of listening fare in our noisy culture? Listening requires patience, and we are impatient. Listening requires a background silence, and we seem determined to use radios and iPods and televisions to blot out every threat of quietness. Listening requires focusing attention on another as he or she speaks, and our omnipresent consumerism habituates us to focus first and foremost on ourselves. The odds are against us learning the virtue or skill of listening. We won't just stumble into good listening. If we are to achieve some level of aptitude in listening, we will have to be quite intent at practicing and sharpening the skill.
Christians especially have a lot at stake in learning how to listen. As the theologian Stephen Webb remarks, "All of biblical religion can be summarized in the Shema of Deuteronomy, which begins, 'Hear, O Israel.'" Hearing—listening—is the primary sense and skill that must be honed if we are to follow the God of Israel. This is true from creation onward in the biblical story. Webb again: "We are used to thinking that it was light that broke the primordial darkness from which all life comes, but it was really God's voice . . . 'Let there be light.' Sound precedes light; we hear before we can see." True to the biblical norm, Jesus is preeminently the voice of God, and we have his words to hear rather than photographs or portraits of him to gaze upon.
Grandma was on to something then. When it comes to knowing the God of Israel and Jesus Christ, the first and most important question is: What did he say?
Rodney Clapp's American Soundings column appears in every other issue of the Century.
Earlier this year there was talk in Congress about replacing the picture of Ulysses S. Grant on the $50 bill with a picture of Ronald Reagan. What I knew about Grant was that he was from Illinois, that he was known as a hard drinker, that he was the general who won the Civil War, and that he was a mediocre president who was buried in upper Manhattan near Union Theological Seminary.
But—on my brother's recommendation—I read a biography of Grant, by Jean Edward Smith, and was chastened to realize that what I took to be conventional wisdom about Grant had little basis in fact. Grant never allowed alcohol to interfere with his responsibilities. His reputation as a corrupt, inadequate president is also wrong, or at least incomplete. Grant's corrupt behavior was limited to naively accepting gifts from grateful northern industrialists. His error in judgment was to trust his appointees too much and to be loyal to them in the face of evident scandal and corruption.
I came away from the book with an appreciation not only for his decisive military leadership, which turned the tide for the Union, but also for the fact that his presidency occurred at a time when the nation and the Constitution were fragile.
The really mediocre and problematic president was the man Grant succeeded, Lincoln's vice president, Andrew Johnson. As general in chief, Grant was responsible for how the victorious Union dealt with the Confederacy. Grant showed his hand at the surrender ceremony at Appomattox by treating Confederate General Robert E. Lee with respect, providing food for the starving Confederate troops and sending them home with their horses so they could resume farming and feed their families. "Grant," Smith reports, "did not pause to celebrate, and he halted the firing of victory salutes. 'The war is over,' he told his staff. 'The rebels are our countrymen again.'"
Grant continued to lead Reconstruction efforts as president. He believed that healing would happen only when freed slaves were granted full rights, including the right to vote, and he never wavered in his conviction that African Americans were citizens.
I hope he stays on the $50 bill. In fact, I think he deserves wider circulation—like on the $10 bill.
John M. Buchanan is editor and publisher of the Century.
The First Amendment protection of religious freedom is designed not just to protect the religious traditions that the majority of us like or feel comfortable with. It is meant to protect religious traditions that the majority may find strange or objectionable.
Back in the early 1800s it was the Baptists who felt harassed by the majority religion. They worried that their liberties were regarded by the majority—the Congregationalists—as favors that could be taken away at any time rather than as an immutable right. In a letter to President Thomas Jefferson, a group of Connecticut Baptists sought support for their conviction "that no man ought to suffer in name, person, or effects on account of his religious opinions" and "that the legitimate power of civil government extends no further than to punish the man who works ill to his neighbors."
It took years for the nation to sort out the meaning of religious freedom, but it eventually endorsed the vision of liberty that those early Baptists expressed.
The sorting-out of religious freedom continues in our time. From California to Maryland, plans for constructing Muslim mosques have faced heated opposition. The biggest outcry has come in response to plans for a Muslim center in New York City, two blocks from the site of the 9/11 attacks. Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and even religious leaders such as Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention and Abraham Foxman of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League have said that building the mosque would be an affront to the victims of the 9/11 attack, who died at the hands of terrorists who invoked Islamic beliefs for their actions. Gingrich mounted a tit-for-tat argument: "there should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia."
Gingrich expressed precisely the view that those early Baptists feared. He treats religious freedom as something that the majority can give or withhold as it sees fit—as a political bargaining chip, not an immutable right.
Gingrich misunderstands the constitutional order he thinks he is defending. The right of U.S. citizens to build a mosque has nothing to do with what Saudi Arabia chooses to do. It is a right guaranteed in the First Amendment. And in the Jeffersonian tradition, it is a right ultimately based in the freedom that God gives to all humans.
Throughout the controversy, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg has kept his eye on the essential issue. "If somebody wants to build a mosque in a place where it's zoned for it and they can raise the money, then they can do that. And it's not the government's business." Bloomberg also eloquently stated why this stance, however unpopular, is an appropriate tribute to the victims of 9/11. When police officers and firefighters rushed to the scene of the attack, he noted, "not one of them asked, 'What God do you pray to?' . . . We do not honor their lives by denying the very constitutional rights they died protecting. We honor their lives by defending those rights and the freedoms that the terrorists attacked."
Missing strings: Nearly 40 years ago Nathaniel Ayers was diagnosed with schizophrenia and subsequently thrown out of Juilliard School of Music. He ended up homeless and playing a two-string violin in the streets. Discovered by Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez, his story was the basis of the 2009 movie The Soloist. Ayers was invited this summer to the White House to perform on the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. "It's the most incredible thing I ever could have imagined," said Ayers, who still struggles with the disease (The Week, August 13).
Cloistered chants: An order of cloistered Benedictine nuns near Avignon, France, was picked as the world's finest female singers of Gregorian chant following a search by Decca Records. The nuns' order dates back to the sixth century. Their convent remains closed to the outside world, and its rules prohibit record company executives from entering the abbey. The nuns will film their own television commercial and photograph their own album cover. The album, Voices—Chant from Avignon, will be released in November (Catholic News Agency).
Occupational hazard I: Pastors are experiencing obesity, hypertension and depression at rates higher than most Americans, reports the New York Times (August 1). Clergy Health Initiative, a Duke University survey of Methodist ministers in North Carolina, cites clergy as having a 10 percent higher rate of obesity, for instance. One reason for the health problems: pastors are not taking time off for vacations. "They think that taking care of themselves is selfish, and that serving God means never saying no," says Gwen Wagstrom Halaas, a medical doctor who is married to a Lutheran minister and is the author of The Right Road: Life Choices for Clergy.
Occupational hazard II: In a New York Times op-ed piece (August 7) G. Jeffrey MacDonald argues that no amount of time taken off by pastors will address the main source of their stress: a consumer-driven religion which expects them to be spiritual concierges. "The pastoral vocation is to help people grow spiritually, resist their lowest impulses and adopt higher, more compassionate ways," says MacDonald, a United Church of Christ pastor and author of Thieves in the Temple: The Christian Church and the Selling of the American Soul. "But churchgoers increasingly want pastors to soothe and entertain them." He understands the pressure: the advisory committee in his own small Massachusetts congregation told him to keep his sermons to ten minutes, tell funny stories and help people feel good about themselves. The implicit message was "give us the comforting, amusing fare we want or we'll get our spiritual leadership from someone else."
Big government at work: Without government intervention, large parts of the auto industry would have been wiped out, losing a million or more jobs, says columnist E. J. Dionne. But the bailout was wildly unpopular at the time when George W. Bush and Barack Obama spent $25 billion and $60 billion respectively to save the ailing industry. When Obama added to the auto bailout funds, a Gallup poll found 72 percent opposed it. The Obama administration now claims that 55,000 auto-related jobs were added since June 2009 and that all three U.S. automakers are operating at a profit for the first time since 2004 (Washington Post, August 2).
Locked up: In 1970 the number of Americans in prison was fewer than one in 400; today that figure stands at one in 100, largely due to tougher laws and longer, mandatory sentences. One study found that if a person were arrested for aggravated assault at age 18 but managed to stay out of trouble until age 22, the risk of a repeat offense was no greater than it is for the rest of the population. Imprisonment is expensive: it costs California about $50,000 a year per prisoner—in a state where only a seventh of that amount is spent on education (Economist, July 24).
Flagging injustice: Churches throughout India were urged to hoist black flags for a day last month to protest discrimination faced by Christian Dalits, people from low castes treated as untouchables. The protest marks the 60th anniversary of the introduction of free education and reserved government jobs for Hindu Dalits. Such benefits were extended to Sikh Dalits in 1956 and then to Buddhist Dalits in 1990. Christian Dalits, who account for two thirds of some 28 million Christians in India, as well as Muslim Dalits, are denied these rights.
Can you do that? Anne Rice, author of best-selling vampire novels, returned to the Catholic Church in 1998 and stopped writing fiction about the underworld. But recently on her Facebook page she announced to fans that she has "quit being a Christian." She said she remains "committed to Christ as always but not to being 'Christian' or to being part of Christianity. It's simply impossible for me to 'belong' to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group." She refuses to be part of a church whose public face is antigay, antifeminist, anti-artificial birth control and antiscience (Facebook.com).
Color of penance: Pope Benedict XVI has become known for his attire: red shoes, sunglasses rumored to be Serengetis and ermine-trimmed capes and hats. Anne Burke, who was head of the review board set up by the U.S. Catholic bishops to oversee their policies on priests accused of pedophilia, has written to the pope suggesting he wear a simple black cassock for the remainder of his papacy to demonstrate penance for the priest sex scandal. Speaking to a Chicago Sun-Times columnist, Burke said the pope should urge clerics to spend a day a week in prayer and fasting as a public expression of sorrow for failing to safeguard children (David Gibson at politicsdaily.com, July 31).
Swear not: The Church of Sweden is considering imposing fines on swearing at Synod meetings following the outbreak of profanity at last year's annual meeting. The proposal, slated for a vote this month, points out that soccer trainers are fined $70 for swearing during games (UPI).
Christians and Muslims need to recognize that they are "spiritual siblings," said speakers at a recent global Baptist congress in Hawaii, even as they warned fellow Baptists against the signs of Islamophobia displayed in Western countries.
"The vilification of Christianity by Muslim extremists in order to justify militant jihad and the need to convert an 'immoral' West to Islam is alive and well," Nabil Costa, executive director of the Lebanese Baptist Society in Beirut, Lebanon, said during the five-day Baptist World Congress that ended August 1 in Honolulu. But he went on to say that in "the same way, political and media voices in the West have used longstanding prejudice against Islam in order to paint a vile picture of a religion that is part of an 'axis of evil' and bent on the destruction of a so-called free world."
As reported by EthicsDaily.com, a Web site of the Baptist Center for Ethics, both Costa and Robert Sellers, a missions professor at the Logsdon School of Theology in Abilene, Texas, warned of a widespread demonization of Islam that has taken root in some evangelical churches.
The two were speaking at a workshop on interfaith relations during the 20th world congress of the Baptist World Alliance, whose constituency includes more than 37 million baptized believers. Sellers urged Baptists to counter a growing culture of Islamophobia. "Baptists have clearly responded to Muslims in sev eral ways, not all of them positive. Without a doubt, one way—reacting with fear and stereotyping—is un productive and patently unkind," he said.
Newspapers and news services have reported angry protests against U.S. Muslim groups around the country in recent weeks, often by small groups, but also in the form of angry words from some evangelical church leaders.
"Defaming the Prophet Muhammad, speaking ill of Islam or portraying Muslims collectively as if they were all extremist or terrorist individuals is wrong, unloving and deceitful. I trust that none of us wishes to sin against our neighbors by spreading fear and stereotypes," Sellers stated.
Costa warned against Christians en gaging in religious hubris and urged that both Christians and the U.S. government act with humility in their relations with predominantly Muslim communities and countries. Costa praised President Obama's outreach to Muslim countries.
Improving Christian-Muslim relations has been discussed at meetings for the last three years by the BWA, which is based in Falls Church, Virginia. The BWA is a fellowship of 216 Baptist conventions and groupings; it does not include the large Southern Baptist Convention, which withdrew its membership over several issues in the last decade. -Chris Herlinger, Ecumencial News International
Christian aid group wants to stay in Afghanistan despite brutal killings
The ten-member medical team killed in Afghanistan last month included a German, a Briton and six Americans who brought their varied skills in health care and in regional languages to remote parts of the poverty-stricken country. Several of the volunteers had spent years in such perilous missions.
All were shot to death August 5 while making their way back to Kabul. The Taliban claimed responsibility, accusing the workers of spying for the government and proselytizing for their sponsor, the International Assistance Mission, a Christian aid agency. Because some local officials suspect that common criminals may have carried out the attack, the U.S. embassy said the FBI was investigating the deaths in cooperation with Afghan authorities.
In a Kabul news conference on August 9, Dirk R. Frans, executive director of the IAM, denied that espionage or religious conversions were motives for the government-approved, two-week medical mission to Nuristan province. "Our faith motivates and inspires us, but we do not proselytize," Frans told reporters. "We abide by the laws of Afghanistan" that make proselytizing illegal.
The assault on foreign Christians was the largest since the 2007 kidnapping of 23 South Korean missionaries by the Taliban in Ghazni province. Two male hostages were killed before the South Korean government negotiated the group's release weeks later.
Asked if IAM would end its work in Afghanistan, Frans said the deaths left the organization "devastated," but that "as things stand now" IAM will not leave Afghanistan after having worked four decades there, according to the Associated Press. The group's commitment to the country was such, said Frans, that the families of five of the eight foreigners had chosen to bury their relatives in Afghanistan.
The IAM executive said that outside experts have called its security systems among the best in the country. "Secular consultants have been critical about our stated dependency on God for our security, wrongly assuming we left it all to prayer," he added. "When they checked our systems and way of working they have had next to no additional suggestions."
Frans noted that team leader Tom Little, 62, an optometrist originally from Delmar, New York, and United Meth odist mission worker Dan Terry, 64, had both served in Afghanistan for 30 years and raised families there.
Little, working with the Noor Eye Institute, trained the former Afghan foreign minister and presidential candidate Dr. Abdullah Abdullah. As reported by the BBC, Abdullah described the IAM team as dedicated people and called the attackers "enemies of the Afghan people."
Terry's murder defies comprehension, said Thomas Kemper, chief executive of the United Methodists' Global Min istries agency. "He loved the country with a passion and worked tirelessly on behalf of its most marginalized communities," Kemper told United Methodist News Service.
David Wildman, an Afghanistan expert with the Methodist agency, added that Terry, who was adept in the country's regional languages, "understood the wisdom of poor communities." Terry and his wife, Seija, a nurse, raised their three daughters in the country. Wildman also noted that most humanitarian teams working in Afghanistan are not targeted despite the violence there.
Another victim was Glenn D. Lapp, 40, of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who worked for the Mennonite Central Com mittee in relief efforts after the Katrina and Rita hurricanes hit states on the Gulf of Mexico. Though trained as a nurse, Lapp served in Afghanistan as manager of IAM's provincial ophthalmic care program, according to the Men nonite Central Committee.
Anticipating the end of his two-year term in October, Lapp wrote recently to MCC officials that he hoped his denomination could continue its peacemaking work in the country: "The main thing that [foreigners] can do is be a presence in the country—treating people with respect and love and trying to be a little bit of Christ in this part of the world." -compiled from news services
Ruling overturning Prop 8 shaped for higher courts?
When U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker struck down California's Proposition 8—the 2008 ballot initiative to outlaw gay marriage—he said the motivation for the majority of voters was clear.
"The evidence shows conclusively that moral and religious views form the only basis for a belief that same-sex couples are different from opposite-sex couples," Walker wrote in his sweeping, 136-page decision announced August 4 in San Francisco. "These interests do not provide a rational basis for supporting Proposition 8."
In Walker's reasoning, religion amounts to a "private moral view," which should not infringe upon the constitutional rights of others. While some legal scholars say Walker's decision lands on firm legal ground—a law must advance a secular purpose to pass constitutional muster—some religious leaders accuse the judge of trying to scrub faith from the public square.
On August 5, Prop 8's supporters filed an appeal of Walker's decision. Jim Campbell, an attorney with the Alliance Defense Fund, a conservative Christian law firm involved in the litigation, said the religious freedom argument will play an important role as the case moves up the federal judicial ladder—including, potentially, the U.S. Supreme Court.
"At bottom, our strategy here is, and has always been, that in this country we should respect the rights of the people when they do what they have always done: vote based on their religious and moral convictions," Campbell said.
Abolitionists, antiabortion activists and civil rights activists have all been motivated by personal faith, Campbell argued. "To be blunt, we felt [Walker's decision] was an all-out attack on religion."
Walker did note, however, that no religious group will be forced to perform same-sex weddings.
Howard Friedman, emeritus law professor at Ohio's University of Toledo, said Walker is not attacking religion per se; he is just not giving religious expression any special consideration. "He's basically saying that a private moral view isn't a rational basis for legislation," said Friedman, who writes the popular Reli gion Clause blog. "Case law goes both ways on that. There are certainly some cases that say a merely moral view isn't enough to support legislation; on the other hand, there are some cases that talk about laws being a moral view on society."
Walker's reasoning relies, in part, on a 1996 Supreme Court decision that struck down an antigay law in Colorado, Friedman said. That decision, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy—who's considered a key swing vote on the high court—invalidated laws grounded in "animosity toward the class of persons affected."
The Los Angeles Times said August 6 that some legal analysts believe that Walker crafted his decision to nudge judges on the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court to face the practical reality of gay unions, rather than treating them as a legal abstraction. Most analysts expect that the case will ultimately reach the Supreme Court, where four conservative justices are thought to be unlikely to support a constitutional right of same-sex marriage.
In recent years, Justice Kennedy not only struck down the Colorado antigay law but also, in 2003, wrote the opinion invalidating a Texas law that made gay sex acts a crime. Walker, in his recent ruling, often cited portions of Kennedy's two opinions.
But law professor Vikram Amar of the University of California at Davis told the Times that Kennedy's previous gay rights opinions overturned laws, at least in the Texas case involving sodomy, that were not being enforced. "Kennedy is very sensitive to trends," said Amar.
Recent polls in California have shown a slim majority of registered voters now favor the right of gay and lesbian couples to marry. But in terms of law, all but five states and the District of Columbia ban same-sex marriage.
An estimated 18,000 same-sex couples married during a six-month period in 2008 after the California Supreme Court ruled that such marriages were legal and before the voter-approved Prop 8 barred further marriages.
When Walker overturned the Prop 8 ban, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Jerry Brown urged the judge to permit same-sex marriages to resume as soon as possible. Walker said gay marriages could resume by August 18.
But a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco on August 16 reinstated a stay on the ruling while the appeals case is heard. Another three-member appeals panel will hear the case during the week of December 6 after deadlines were moved up to November 1 for both sides to file their written arguments. An attorney for the two gay couples challenging the ban said they were gratified that the appeals court "recognized the importance and pressing nature of this case." -Religion News Service, other news services
After public family feud, another Schuller steps up
Christian author Carole Lewis stands at the front of the congregation, sharing her tale of woe—bankruptcy, a daughter's death, a husband's prostate cancer, a home destroyed by a hurricane. Pastor Sheila Schuller Coleman stands nearby, listening attentively.
Neither Coleman nor the congregation seems particularly fazed by Lewis's litany of tragedies. Instead, they wait for what everyone seems to know is coming: a positive message. Then, as if on cue, Lewis delivers. "God has been so faithful to our family," Lewis says, as Coleman and others nod in agreement.
It's an ordinary Sunday at the Crystal Cathedral, the gleaming Southern Cal ifor nia megachurch built on a message of trans forming misfortune into blessings. The hundreds of parishioners seem to crave the optimism. It's also a philosophy the Crystal Cathedral needs now more than ever.
Coleman, 59, who was formally in stalled as senior pastor on July 11 after nearly a year as interim pastor, is the latest member of the Schuller clan to lead the landmark church, which is down the road from Disneyland. Her tenure follows a bitter and public family feud.
Her father, Robert H. Schuller, 83, founded the church in the 1950s in his three-bedroom house where the choir rehearsed in the living room. "I was the first receptionist for the church at the age of four," Coleman recalled, laughing.
Coleman said growing up in and around the congregation made her feel loved and inspired to help people. Church leadership wasn't always in the cards; her parents explained that women could not be ordained. Her younger brother, Robert A. Schuller, was the heir apparent.
The younger Schuller took over as senior pastor in 2006. But the new arrangement didn't last long, as reports surfaced of a simmering father-and-son rivalry. The all-smiles megachurch that reached millions of viewers worldwide through the weekly Hour of Power program and exuded confidence through "possibility thinking," one of the founder's many slogans, had some troubles at home.
"I'm just glad I didn't grow up feeling that pressure," she said, referring to the father-and-son tensions. "People don't expect me to be just like Dad."
Coleman, like her father and brother, attended Hope College, earning a bachelor's in organic chemistry. When she wasn't accepted into medical school, she settled into a life as a writer and educator.
She married and became the mother of four, and she helped edit her father's books and wrote some of her own, including Mommy Grace: Erasing Your Mommy Guilt. She taught in public schools and served as principal at the Crystal Cathedral's primary and secondary schools, and she recently finished a doctorate in administrative leadership at the University of California, Irvine.
"My passion is for children," she said. "I feel my calling is to reach, teach." But Cole man says she couldn't help saying yes to her father, who first eased her into administrative duties at the church as her brother looked elsewhere for ministry opportunities.
Tensions remained in the Schuller family. For her part, Coleman said she and her brother were never terribly close, given their four-year age difference. But she added that there has never been any animosity between them and that she has always loved him. "We are as in touch as we ever have been," she said.
In an interview last year with Christianity Today, Coleman's brother said he was squeezed out of the Hour of Power broadcast when church leaders "decided to no longer air my messages. I was disappointed, sad, hurt, and angry," he continued. "It was a very difficult time, and quite frankly remains a difficult time."
Young Robert, who studied for the ministry at Fuller Theological Seminary, was publicly criticized by his father, who said his sermons had too much Jesus talk.
Longtime member Augustine Rem linger, 83, says the son relied on the Bible for his sermons. By contrast, the senior Schuller was an admirer of Norman Vincent Peale, known for "positive thinking" sermons. Under Coleman, Remlin ger said, people are slowly drifting back to the church. "She knows what she's doing now," she said.
Coleman's father attributes her success at the church to a shared vision: "Sheila will be doing what I would be doing if I were in her shoes," Schuller said in a recent phone interview. "Focus on the positives."
That's not been an easy task amid crippling budget troubles. In May, the Crystal Cathedral sold its Rancho Capistrano property to Rick Warren's Saddleback Church, which plans to use it as a retreat center. The sale reduced Crystal Cathedral's mortgage to $35.5 million, Coleman said, but recent reports indicate a $55 million budget deficit and a 27 percent drop in revenue.
Coleman says the church has done what it can, given the economic climate and a diminished congregation, though she says the cathedral's Hispanic ministry has seen a huge boost in numbers. "Things are turning around slowly," she said. "I've had a huge, huge mess to clean up."
Some vendors and ex-employees waiting to get paid have sued but recently agreed to a longer grace period. In an August 5 e-mail to staff, the church announced that founder Robert H. Schuller, who has not retired, will take a 50 percent pay cut for the next two months, as will his immediate family members. Employees face 5-to-10 percent pay cuts, but no layoffs are planned in this cutback.
Coleman added: "We are thankful that our financial situation is looking up and we can begin to take positive steps toward repaying our debts," specifically to vendors, a total said to be about $2 million. -Lilly Fowler, Religion News Service
