Empire 2.0

Whilst travelling you are never quite sure what to expect at the airports and some of the processes do not seem to fit. Others are very efficient and work well.

I look forward to working on the Partners in Mission (PIM) programme and find out about others in different areas. It would be great to meet up with you all in person or on Zoom sometime soon.

Prayer for Partners in Mission

By Faithlyn Stephens , Partner In Mission, United Church in Jamaica & the Cayman Islands (UCJCI)

Holy Father God, we give You thanks for calling and choosing us to serve in the contexts where You have positioned us. We thank You for the skills and talents with which You have blessed us, and for the human and material resources which You provide for us to undertake the various tasks.

Lord, as we all traverse our respective mission courses, I pray especially for the Partners who entered/will be entering this ministry during this season of a devastating pandemic. Father, may we not be consumed by the many life changes, disruptions and uncertainties which the pandemic deposits on us moment by moment, day by day. Rather, Holy God, may we trust in the knowledge that you are the God of the universe and, hence, You have full control over the ravages of any pandemic. In the same manner that so long as Peter kept his focus on Jesus he walked solidly on the water, if we keep our focus on You we shall walk boldly through this COVID pandemic. May we seek Your divine discernment, guidance and direction as we manoeuvre making the relevant adjustments and modifications to our programmes and plans, so that the outcomes which You desire will be successfully achieved. Dear God, help us to also exercise Your wisdom and patience to deal with and overcome all the other types of challenges which beset us in our daily work.

Almighty Father, grant us the grace and humility to remain in fervent prayer at Your throne of healing and transformation. Bless our biological families, church families, friends, colleagues and associates who intercede in prayer for us and support us in diverse ways. Strengthen the family members who serve on the mission field with us. Remove the discomfort of loneliness from the psyche of Partners whose family members are not in mission with them.

Merciful God, may we feel Your Presence with us always; may the Blood of Jesus protect us on this journey; may Your Holy Spirit accomplish Your purpose through us and sustain us; may we recognize and acknowledge the Guardian Angels whom You lovingly send to care for us

O Lord, with hearts full of gratitude, we release all our anxieties to You, being confident that the mission and those to whom we minister are not ours, but Yours.

In the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen!

Call for Papers for International Reformed Theological Institute (IRTI) 14th Biennial International Conference

Academic theologians from all disciplines interested in the theme of ‘Theology Facing Climate Change’ are invited to submit their proposals for presentation at the International Reformed Theological Institute (IRTI) 14th Biennial International Conference by April 1, 2022.

Theme

The adverse and disproportionate effects of the climate crisis urge theologians to address the question of environmental justice in search of the fullness of life for all, which the gospel proclaims. As the rise of ‘green theology’ and ‘ecotheology’ indicates, there exists a need to develop forms of constructive theology that focus on the interrelationships of religion, nature, and justice in the light of environmental crisis. Complex relationships exist between religious and non-religious worldviews and the degradation and/or restoration of the more-than-human nature.

Understood in this way, theology has the double task of self-criticism of its own tradition and theological concepts, together with retrieval from tradition to develop new constructive understandings and proposals. On the one hand, it should be recognised that Christian anthropocentrism and the emphasis on human dominion over nature has played a part in environmental devastation. On the other hand, voices from Scripture and tradition may point to another account of the relationships between God, human being and the more-than-human nature.

The paradoxical situation that the human being is more than ever responsible for what is at stake on the planet and, at the same time, is faced with the unmanageability of environmental crisis could be illuminated from the perspective of sin, salvation, and restoration. In short, the urgent challenges of climate change and environmental crisis may be addressed from the broad variety of all the classical dogmatic loci.

The 14th biennial IRTI online conference will take the various loci as starting point for theological and (inter)contextual reflection on the urgent theme of climate change. You can send your abstract of no more than 250 words to the secretary Albert Nijboer: a.s.nijboer@irti.nl Presentations should be no longer than 15 minutes.

Online registration will open after 1 April on https://www.pthu.nl/irti/

Click here for details.

Empire 2.0

Separating Adam from Adamah has kept Empire in place: Land as locus of liberation

By Garnett Roper JP PhD

Participating in the DARE forum under the panel, People Land and Empire has helped to clarify for me something I had known intuitively, the empire means doing the same thing to people all over the world in different ways.

It is ironic that Caribbean adopted by the independent territories in the region to describe themselves as Caribbean economic community (CARICOM) is intentionally post-colonial. It however leaves it as an open question, whether or not the region has moved away from the clutches of empire. This paper contends that in relation to empire, at its most fundamental level when it comes to land ownership and use, there is both a residue and a resurgence of empire in the Caribbean region if not also elsewhere.

The forces of empire dispossessed indigenous peoples of their land in the name of conquest. Those forces distorted the uses of the land in the name of economic domination, grew crops that were for the benefit of the tables of the North Atlantic rather than to serve the needs of the nation state and its people. Land was distributed in ways that were for the advantage and benefit of the economically dominant ethnic minority and perpetuated their advantage to the disadvantage of the people of the land. This remains the open question, as to whether or not political priorities and programmes ought to include the repossession of land and the redistribution of land for the purposes of causing the people of the land to flourish and prosper. Is there a narrative that can rescue such policies in the name of the people from the risk of distortion and demonisation? It also raises a question about theology deployed in the interest of human flourishing by seeking to bring grace and power of God in Jesus Christ to bear upon the lived reality of the people in spaces of domination and oppression. Is this a legitimate concern of theology and does theology offer a response to both the residue of empire and the resurgence of empire?

The small island states of the Caribbean do not have enough land to ensure a quality of life comparable to European farmers. The problems of the Caribbean that does not have enough land to benefit from economies of scale are made worse because of the legacy of the unequal distribution of land. This paper explores the land question as historical legacy and challenge for public policy.

In what ways has the particular history of the Jamaica and the Caribbean bequeathed a land situation to the people of the Caribbean that has perpetuated the agendas of Empire rather than facilitated human flourishing in the Region? The land situation is one in which places like Jamaica find itself with between 20 and 30% of its population landless and living in unplanned and unorganised communities called squatter settlements. On the one hand, this landlessness has exacerbated the identity crisis, the situation of inequality and has intensified the lack of economic and social mobility for the majority of the people at the base of the population for whom their lived reality is marked privation, poverty and misery.

This situation of landlessness is not unrelated to the high incidents of crime and violence and social dysfunction generally that have come to characterise parts of Jamaica and Caribbean. On the other hand, the forces and powers that colonised the Caribbean and imposed the plantation economy and chattel slavery with its attendant sense of uprootedness and loss of identity for the people of African ancestry are still in positions that allow them to benefit disproportionately from the economic and social circumstances of the Caribbean. These forces and powers remain in positions that allow them to be in control of the narrative and to determine the public transcript as far as priorities of public policy and national development are concerned.

Have emancipation, nationalism and political independence gone far enough to secure an advantage in economic, political and social terms in so far as the people of the Caribbean region are concerned? Have they merely tinkered at the edges? Have the powers that were the erstwhile masters and owners of the region merely reconfigured themselves in order to continue benefit to the same or similar extent as they have in the past. Put differently, has empire been materially marginalised in the Caribbean or does the Caribbean remain in the periphery or clutches of empire? Is the Caribbean a basin, playground or stomping ground for the forces of empire, imperialism and hegemony? How much of what constitutes Caribbean reality is self-inflicted, the result of mis-governance or misrule since political independence and how much of is it the result of the technologies of power? Is this discussion about the entrenched structures that operate within the region and among the Caribbean people as their lived reality? Or is the discussion framed in the manner that it is because of imbibing a concocted narrative that lionises the erstwhile masters of the Caribbean in the eyes of the Caribbean and demonises the progress of the people of the region? It is therefore important that this analysis does not minimise the progress of the people of the Caribbean as modest as that progress may have been as a way of perpetuating self-doubt that bedevils Caribbean thinking.

This discussion cannot afford to believe about the Caribbean, that the more things change, the more they remain the same for the people of the region. In this way, one is not seeking to “bad-mouth” the progress of the Caribbean people. Despite remarkable inherited disadvantages, the people of the Caribbean have punched above their weight class as global players and actors and in some respects, the Caribbean has achieved a quality of life (rates of infant mortality, life expectancy, telecommunications infrastructure, rates of literacy and numeracy, extent of press freedom) that rivals places in the metropoles of the North Atlantic. On the other hand, there are matters arising from the legacy of misrule by its own and by the emissaries of the North Atlantic, from chattel slavery, colonialism and by the since hurriedly abandoned (by the North Atlantic anyway) globalisation. Careful analysis without aiming to be exhaustive needs to take account of all of the above.

Empire 2.0 invites us to consider the residue and resurgence of empire, the ways in which the technology and infrastructure of power have reconfigured themselves to do the people of the Two-Thirds world what they have done before. In this regard we consider the nature of the intersection between people, land and empire. All factors are at play in the Caribbean.

In this regard, land is an important flashpoint. Land is the site through which, in many respect, European hegemony has been asserted in the region. It must be borne in mind that the Caribbean has been the arena in which various European powers have sought to assert their hegemony and dominance in relation to each other. Some Caribbean territories changed hands among European Countries (England, France, Spain and Holland) in the period of colonisation and some of the territories in the region were sold from one member of the North Atlantic community, to another. Land that is owned publicly (Government land) is still referred to as Crown Lands, which is a relic of the colonial past. ²

When slavery was abolished in Jamaica, there was no attempt to enfranchise the landless African population, who left the hobbles and plantation grounds of the plantation and fled to the marginal lands in the hillsides. Very little has happened since then to systematically enfranchise the African base of the population where land ownership is concerned.

The Biblical narratives concerning land

The creation account in Genesis 2 indicates the inseparable relationship between human beings and land. There is an inter-dependence and co-relationship between human beings and the land. According to the Genesis account, “Now no shrub had yet appeared on the earth[a] and no plant had yet sprung up, for the LORD God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no one to work the ground”(Genesis 2. 4-7). On the other hand, the creation accounts indicate that man was formed from the dust of the ground, Adam from Adamah. When Adam was formed “The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.” The separation of Adam from Adamah has created all forms of crises for human society: the ecological crisis is one such crisis, but also the separation of Adam from Adamah has precipitated the economic social and political crises that bedevil modern human society. It is the separation of Adam from Adamah that is the greatest impediment to human flourishing. In Paradise past, there was a unity between Adam and Adamah such that resulted in the flourishing of creation and harmony within the human community. When the Fall is depicted in Genesis 3, it is in terms of a recalcitrance of the land in which its yield becomes less assured or predictable and the land requiring more from human beings in order to produce sustainably. ³

17 Genesis 3.17-19 “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. 18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. 19 By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”

The hostility between Adam and Adamah is the consequence of the Fall and so also is the rivalry and competitiveness rather than complementarity between the partners in the human family. This remains the case and to find remedies for it is the task and project of salvation, redemption and liberation.

It is useful to consider how land was regarded and treated in the rest of the Pentateuch or Hexateuch. The provisions made and injunctions given in the books of Deuteronomy and Joshua are instructive in terms the value placed on land. Land was critical to the self-identity of the fledgling people of Israel. How land was handled and how land issues were settled became pivotal to the progress of social justice in Israel. The Promise Land was the gift from Yahweh to Israel in quest of a nationalist agenda. Joshua was a significant figure for the land project in which Israel was made to settle on the allotment of land in the broad spacious and fertile plain given to the tribes of Yahweh. The suggestion is whether or not the historicity of the text is established, it is clear that the perspective of the Deuteronomist is that land was critical to the agency and viability of the nation state.

Having left Egypt, Israel entered the land of the Hittites in order to find space to become a people. The drama of the passing out parade of Empires and their relationship to the fledgling Israelite nation state was also about land. The Assyrian absorbed the northern Ten Tribes and over time the identity of Israel as a separate and distinct people vanished. Babylon expatriated the best of Judah, laid waste both their agricultural development and their civic, religious commercial and political infrastructure. Jeremiah who looked beyond the exile for a new beginning bought a parcel of land as a token of hope in the future of the people of the land, the ‘am ha ‘aretz. The Persian Emperor Cyrus returned Israel to their land and in that sense reconstructed and restored the prospect of a viable Israelite nation state. Yahweh was the ultimate landowner and the land was leased to clans and families in perpetuity, it could not be sold. This was structured into the Israelite economy by the so-called jubilee principle in which every 50 years land reverted to the ownership by families to which it was first allotted. The Jubilee principle preserved liberty and equality within Israel among its people and was a critical to social justice legislation.

Dr Garnett Roper is the former President of the Jamaica Theological Seminary (JTS). He earned his Phd in Theology at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, and his subject of research is the Development of a Caribbean Public Theology. Dr Roper was also one of the presenters at the Council for World Mission (CWM) Dare conference in 2017 and 2018. The biblical concept of land as Promised Land, land as divine possession and the indigenous concept of land as sacred are related. The project of social justice and the ecological crisis (Climate Change) will require for their remedy that the issue of land, made worse for the people by the machinations of empire, be addressed.

You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know.

William Wilberforce

In the Same Breath

When the Coronavirus outbreak first ripped across nations throughout the globe, people on the ground were mostly caught unprepared and relied heavily with the plethora of different narratives painted by the Governments as reliable sources of information. Film maker Nanfu Wang, being a Chinese native who had immigrated to the United States of America, witnessed first-hand, how the delay in deliverance of important information and worst, misinformation, could spiral a powerful country out of control and into an incomprehensible state of disarray and confusion.

https://bit.ly/3GDee2D

Forever Prisoner

The aftermath of the terrorist attacks on 9/11, thrusted America into an overdrive of finding not only the culprits, but also pre-empting potential events such as this which could happen again in the near future. The application of torture techniques on prisoners in isolation, became justifiable and necessary. The lives of those held in captive, regardless if they are innocent or guilty, are unjustly tried and tested in remand, and would be forgotten and conveniently wiped out from existence if they were to die from the ordeal.

https://bit.ly/3dQAbia

Procession

6 men faces the uncomfortable truth by confronting the Catholic Church head-on, on the sexual abuse and trauma resulted, which haunts them into adulthood, through the actions they’ve received from the priests when they were serving under the altar. Rather than going on a witch hunt for the perpetrators, the men are seeking to forgive and along the way, hopefully heal to recover mentally and emotionally and find the closure they require to leave the insidious past behind them.

https://bit.ly/3oPGMzF

My Octopus Teacher

The documentary tells a story of what mankind could learn from other living creatures that shares the same Earth as us, when we allow ourselves to observe intently with an open heart and mind. Craig Foster spent a yearlong journey trailing and revisiting the kelp forest in a part of the South African sea, to repeatedly rekindle with an Octopus. In this case, familiarity doesn’t breed contempt, as both species were more frequently exposed with each other, familiarity instead bred curiosity and then friendship.

https://bit.ly/3dQf8wq

Welcome to Earth

Welcome to Earth opens our eyes to what you have already assumed about how much we know about the planet we call home. This docu-adventure takes viewers across expansive lands and continents to the depths of the oceans, exploring wonders that are hidden from us and out-of-sight. Will Smith conquers not only perceivable fears but also of the unknown, trudging down precarious land formations or standing in close proximity of an active volcano, while uncovering the perspectives of beauty so readily available of this planet we live in.

The Ivory Game

The Ivory Trade has been a thorn in the sides of environmental preservationalists for decades, as governments are doing not enough to protect the elephants from poachers or diminishing on the demands for elephant tusks. In China, where ivory is perceived to be a symbol of wealth and status, the black market thrives on its demand which drives up poaching activities for those seeking a fortune through hunting these already critically endangered animals.

https://bit.ly/33rJmDY

No Burqas Behind Bars

This prison holds the untold stories of tragedies, where women are made faceless and unidentifiable by an oppressive society of post-Taliban Afghanistan. They are all rendered powerless in a patriarchal and religious society which controls women by charging them with crimes of morality, most of which had taken the routes they’ve chosen due to the abuse and mistreatment in their home environments or at the hands of their husbands. However, being held in captivity does not diminish the hope in these women, for they are constantly looking ahead to change their lives upon release.

Rotten

Do we ever think about where on earth does our food come from and how does it end up eventually on our plates? And have we also considered, especially after being exposed and hit in the faces with the relentless throngs of marketing messages from these powerful food corporations, that they are plying the absolute truth and nothing but the truth about the products they are selling to their customers? Rotten investigates no holds barred, to uncover the impossibly corrupt and fraudulent practices of the food industries all over the world which would send one hurling up the contents of their previous meal.

https://bit.ly/33sV2q0

Strong Island

The murder of William Ford, an African American school teacher in 1992 by a 19-year-old white mechanic in front of an all-white jury, resulted in the latter’s acquittal with no charge, due to the claim of self-defence. Two decades later, his brother and film maker Yance Ford, took it to himself to unravel the truths that were swept under the rug and conveniently forgotten, but not by those who are subjected to the realities of such injustices – and in desperate need of answers and accountability to bring about rightful closure.

https://bit.ly/33hWVpi

2040

A film that looks at a father’s hope for a future in which his daughter could live in without the repercussions of climate change. We see him exploring existing and new solutions that are scalable, practical and viable for implementation in the prevention of a not-so-distant possibility which already appears so bleak and dire for those who are to inherit the earth. Gameau is adamant and is out to demonstrate to the world that the required change can still be achieved, with current consequences reversed, if everyone does their part.