John McCain has asked the North Carolina Republican Party not to run an ad which features a clip of Barack Obama’s former pastor, Rev. Wright making incendiary comments and the words “He’s just too extreme for North Carolina”. The North Carolina Republican Party is apparently going to run the ad anyways, but Sen. McCain has made it clear that he does not approve of the … Continue reading Republicans Could Do a Lot Worse Part II
By now you’ve probably heard about the hardships caused by rising prices on staple food items for poor people around the world. There have been protests and riots in Haiti, Bangladesh, Egypt, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Indonesia and Senegal. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, Sam’s Club and Costco have also placed limits on the amount of bulk rice which can be purchased at one time.
My question is how do we respond to these sorts of problems. President Bush has announced an increase in food aid, which might help NGOs whose work feeding people in danger of starvation continue their work in the face of rising food prices. However, it is hard to see how $200 million is going to fix the problem of people who are working and who had been self-supporting a few months ago, but are now priced out of the food market. Besides, we know from long experience that while food aid may be a necessary band-aid to prevent starvation, it doesn’t provide a long term solution and tends to come with many negative unintended consequences.
My question is if America is willing to actually sacrifice for the good of people a world away? Would you support a moratorium on the import of rice for 60 days (accompanied by tax breaks to help those in the industry who would be negatively affected) to take pressure off the international rice market? Continue reading “Dinner, Food Riots and You”
The candidacy of Barak Obama has inspired a great deal of talk, some of it self-inflicted by Sen. Obama, about the idea of transcending race. However, as the campaign as worn on, it has become apparent that “transcend race” is one of those phrases which means different things to different people. It seems to be a Rorschach test of wishful thinking in which people see it as meaning what they want it to mean.
I want to address how this issue plays out on the conservative side. The conservative perspective is the one which is closer to what I identify with and I think we have suffered as a nation because of conservatives’ refusal to look at and think reasonably about issues of race.
In regards to transcending race, on the conservative side, I have heard a fair amount of talk which indicates a wish for “transcending race” to mean eliminating race as an issue to which we need to pay attention to or offer consideration for. Because of this, conservatives have often reacted to things like the fact that Obama attends an Afrocentric church as a betrayal of his claim to be someone who can help us move past race. However, this perspective is based on a host of completely erroneous ideas.
The first problem with this perspective is that it presumes that in order to “get past race”, we must embrace a sort of “color-blind” nirvana and assiduously pretend that we have already reached such a place. In large part, this seems to mean that we ought to reject anything which conflicts with the idea that we are and should be completely unaware of race. Continue reading “Transcending Race and Delusional Conservatives”
Brian McLaren spoke recently at a conference taking place at Willow Creek Community Church and shared something which I find fascinating. Back in the 1970s, McLaren volunteered as a youth minister. He asked the kids in the group to make a list of what the pressing issues at their churches were. They came up with things like contemporary worship music and speaking in tongues. Then he asked them to make a list of what the pressing issues facing the world were. Their list included typical 1970s concerns like nuclear war, communism and famine. McLaren points out that there was no overlap between the two lists. The problem as he saw it was that as he was leading young people to Christ, they would get drawn into the first list of concerns and become less and less involved in the issues of the wider world.
I think that a lot has changed since the 1970s and churches are starting to do a better job of creating overlap between McLaren’s two lists. In fact, much ink has been spilled observing the rise of a new generation of evangelical leaders who are as interested in social justice and global warming as they are in gay marriage. However, I wonder how much overlap is going on at ground level in churches across the nation between church concerns and world concerns. If you walked into your church’s youth group today and asked the kids for their two lists, would there be overlap? Continue reading “Two Lists”
It has been my observation for some time that we have a very bizarre disconnect in our culture between the way we treat our children and the adults they become. On one hand, when we run across an adult with emotional, mental or substance abuse problems and they share the traumas of their childhood, we are sympathetic. We can see the line between neglect, humiliation, abuse, a failure to protect, etc and the problems which this person has as an adult.
On the other hand, we somehow seem to think that children will survive all manner of things from being dumped in a crowded daycare for 12 hours a day at 6 weeks, to watching violent and sexual entertainment, to being bullied at school without any serious damage being done. It’s as if we as a society seem to think that as long as our children are not subject to permanent bodily harm and have adequate exposure to education and enrichment activities, we’ve done our job. There’s no serious consideration given to the sort of people we are raising and the effect that masses of people raised without adequate attention, nurturing, values and compassion will have on our society. Even when we claim to be advocating for kids, we have a hard time connecting the children of today with the adults they will become. We speak of children as the future, as if they were magical beings who can set things right by virtue of compelling the adults around them to behave well so as not to upset the children’s cuteness, not out of concern for the sort of adults they will one day be.
We have compassion for damaged people on the back end while refusing to do anything to stop the activities which cause this damage to begin with. Adults rule, the kids will be alright and families are whatever the adults want them to be. Continue reading “It is family that will change the world”
Joanne Jacobs points us to a story in The Village Voice about the growing number of African American homeschoolers. If you can get past the first paragraph which is as bad a display of provincial ignorance as one is likely to ever encounter, it’s an interesting, in depth story. Given the abysmal job the public school system is doing of educating African American boys in … Continue reading African American Homeschoolers
We have a small deck off of our kitchen where I hang our bird feeders. This allows us to draw them in close enough to actually see them when they come to eat. Visitors to our house in late spring and summer are often startled at the appearance of this fellow: The Baltimore Oriole. Because of their extremely bright colors, these are some of the … Continue reading The Orioles Are Coming
My 3 year old daughter has been advocating for everyone in the house to play something she is calling “kissing tag”. I guess she wants us to chase each other around and try to kiss each other. I have no idea where she is getting this from, but obviously, as the person charged with ensuring that we have a safe learning environment I should implement … Continue reading Someone should notify the authorities!
Northwestern University just put out a study which found that white people avoid dealing with black people or discussions of race out of fear of doing something which will cause them to be accused of bigotry. This is probably one of those “We need researchers to tell us this?” things.
As many of my readers know, I am married to an African American man, so we’ve had many of those conversations which most white people avoid like the plague. I’ll just say that it’s been interesting.
Over time, I’ve come to see the relationship between white Americans and black Americans as being like a bad marriage. Neither side trusts the other, each attributes the worst possible motivations to anything the other side does, neither is willing to listen to the other but continually demands that their concerns be taken seriously, etc., etc. The solution to a bad marriage generally requires the two parties to stop being so self defensive, listen to each other, avoid responding negatively at all costs, be willing to do the right things for the relationship irregardless of what the other person may or may not do, etc. I believe that it will take the same sorts of actions between white and black Americans to actually move past the distrust and hostility which we generally deal with each other with.
I think that one of the biggest problems with the black-white relationship is that we fail to understand or appreciate how things look from the other’s perspective and then insist on assigning the worst possible motivations to what the other group does (or does not do). I believe that if we are willing to start making a real effort to understand the other group’s perspective (not necessarily agree with – just understand that POV as sincere and real), it would allow us to stop being so defensive and hostile with each other.
I bring this and this study up because my husband recently shared an idea he has about just the sort of “white persons inadvertently messes up, black people go ballistic” interaction which seems to have made white people so nervous that they avoid race at all costs. Continue reading “Black-White Conversations We’re Afraid To Have”
I have been noticing a phenomenon lately which has probably always been present in humanity: a seeming inability to hear new ideas. I’m not speaking even of being unable to understand new ideas, which is pretty understandable. What I am observing is an inability to even recognize when a new idea is being put forth. There seems to be an unconscious assumption that there are a set group of possible ideas about a variety of issues and therefore everything you will read, see or hear fits into one of those known sets.
It seems that when exposed to a new take on one of these old issues, people make a mental evaluation of which known idea sets this information most closely resembles and then respond to that rather than anything which is actually being said. It’s an odd phenomenon. I’m not sure if it comes from the lack of original thought which unlies almost everything we read or hear these days or if it’s just a natural result of our human tendency to categorize things.
Not only is this happening in the world at large, but I think it has taken over our religion as well. In her book Wondrous Depth: Preaching The Old Testament, Hebrew scholar Ellen F. Davis gives what I think is a good explanation of the problem with regard to our habits of reading scripture and why it just decimates the life of the church:
[It is] the gravest scandal of the North American church in our time – namely the shallow reading of scripture. Such reading results from the assumption that we already know just what the bible says; therefore our reading is a simple rehearsal of what (we think) we know rather than an attempt to probe deeper. Continue reading “The Mind, New Ideas and the Living Word”
The Upside Down World 