PRISM January February 2012

January âœˇ February 2012

Running the good race Empowering the faith-based community Joshua Dubois talks to PRISM at the White House

How one man incarnates Christ among Mexico’s Tarahumara Indians

Tolerate your neighbor as yourself?

Taking love up a notch, both inside and outside the church

PRISMmagazine.org

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end homelessness for a single mom & her children.

PRISM Vol. 19, No. 1

January-February 2012

Editor Art Director Copy Editor Financial Operations Publisher Assistant to Publisher Member Services

Kristyn Komarnicki Rhian Tomassetti Leslie Hammond Sandra Prochaska Ronald J. Sider Josh Cradic Deborah Caraher

Contributing Editors Christine Aroney-Sine

Clive Calver

Rudy Carrasco

Andy Crouch J. James DeConto

Gloria Gaither David P. Gushee

Jan Johnson

Craig S. Keener Peter Larson

Richard Mouw

Philip Olson Jenell Williams Paris

Christine Pohl

James Skillen

Al Tizon

Jim Wallis

Myron Augsburger Issac Canales M. Daniel Carroll R. Paul Alexander James Edwards Perry Glanzer Ben Hartley Stanley Hauerwas Jo Kadlecek Marcie Macolino Mary Naber Earl Palmer Derek Perkins Elizabeth D. Rios Lisa Thompson Heidi Rolland Unruh Bruce Wydick

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A Publication of Evangelicals for Social Action The Sider Center on Ministry and Public Policy www.EvangelicalsforSocialAction.org Palmer Theological Seminary of Eastern University All contents © 2012 ESA/PRISM magazine.

Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize?

Run in such a way as to get the prize.

1 Corinthians 9:24

January / February 2012

Contents 2 Reflections from the Editor For the Joy Set Before Us

3 Talk Back

Letters to the Editor

4 Celebrate!

Rejoicing in the power of advocacy

10 The Land Cries Out

8 Washington Watch

Pioneering activist Fernando Hernández exposes the rarely reported social and ecological roots of the crisis in Chihuahua, Mexico’s most dangerous state. In the face of drug lords, greedy corporations, and corrupt governments, he seeks to empower displaced farmers and indigenous Indians.

9 A Different Shade of Green

22 Mourn, Pray, Love

5 May I Have a Word?

Pity or Empowerment?

7 On Being the Church

What Space Must the Church Occupy?

Of Mammon and Men Almost Amish

36 Global Positions Business as Ministry

Participating in the body of Christ involves pain. Will we enter into that pain and grow, or will we recoil each to his and her own corner and die?

37 Art & Soul

26 Getting Schooled in Islam

Excavating de Kooning

41 Kingdom Ethics Election Distresses

42 Off the Shelf Book reviews

46 Music Notes

Why We Shout Like We Shout

An evangelical professor from the Midwest discovers that it is only when we move beyond tolerance into mutual partnership that we can truly love our Muslim neighbors.

30 Human Capital

PRISM sits down with Joshua DuBois, President Obama’s right-hand man for faith-based initiatives.

47 Hands & Feet

Shining in the Ashes

48 Ron Sider

Who Owns America?

Cover: Vintage travel poster showing a Tarahumara Indian running in sandals.

This page: Tarahumara mother with child.

(Photo by Noah Wolf; NoahWolf.com)

R eflections from the Editor For the Joy Set Before Us The pine trees are recumbent now— dry skeletons thrown onto the compost heap or dragged out to the curb for trash pickup. The Christmas lights are wound into balls and crowded into oversized gift bags, cheerless now in the post-holiday wasteland. The nativity figures have been restored to dusty bubble wrap and put away for another year.

Many of us struggle with the letdown that follows this most hope-filled of holidays. January and February stretch out before us, a long, dark trail of days to be endured rather than enjoyed. But that is because we so easily forget that the true miracle—Christ’s incarnation—is never over, never packed up for another day or limited to a particular place on the calendar. Incarnation goes right on happening, an on-going process of salvation.

We do not really celebrate Christ’s “birthday,” remembering something that happened long ago. We celebrate the stupendous fact of the incarnation, God entering our world so thoroughly that nothing has been the same since. And God continues to take flesh in our midst, in the men and women and children who form his body today. And the birth we celebrate is not just the past historical event but Christ’s continuing birth in his members…What we celebrate is our redemption in Christ and the transformation of all creation by the presence of the divine in our midst.* As an antidote to January and February, we offer you this issue of PRISM, which is all about incarnation and transformation and is a reminder to keep the celebration going.

It’s not often you come across a person who lives out the gospel as intuitively, guilelessly, and passionately as the subject of our cover story. Just as Jesus reached down and clothed himself in flesh to dwell among us, Fernando

2 PRISM Magazine

Hernández reaches into Mexico’s Copper Canyon to bring hope to the Tarahumara Indians who have made their home there for centuries. He does this in the form of spiritual encouragement, life-producing plants and wells, education, advocacy—you name it. Talk about holistic. Talk about incarnational.

In his gospel, Luke tells us that when the people saw Jesus, “They were all filled with awe and praised God. ‘A great prophet has appeared among us,’ they said. ‘God has come to help his people’” (7:16). Hernández has a similar effect on people, for the Lord’s love shines in and through him, making him a gift to all truth-seekers who cross his path.

Two thousand miles and several cultural worlds away, a white-bread Midwestern philosophy professor named Matthew Palombo likewise incarnates his Savior. He does this by humbling himself, positioning himself as both pupil—to learn from his Muslim students about their faith and culture—and as servant—to partner with them in creating shalom for the whole community. This is the professional equivalent of washing the feet of his Muslim sisters and brothers, for in doing so he bends his heart, inclines his ear, and aligns himself with their struggles and hopes. The result is salaam.

In “Mourn, Pray, Love,” Church Under the Bridge founder Jimmy Dorrell reminds us that membership in Christ’s body means embracing not just our Savior’s love and blessing but also his pain.

Just as Jesus loved his enemies, engaged his accusers, and forgave those who betrayed him, so we must embrace the pain involved in being the church.

“Moving beyond pseudo-community— where being nice and getting along are often called ‘church’—we need new levels of inclusivity, commitment, and honesty,” Dorrell writes. “In other words, we need to admit the pain and then take the responsibility to deal with it.”

If you’ve read PRISM for a while, you know that one of my favorite reflections on pain comes from the author John Goldingay, who wrote: I have so longed to find somewhere

Kristyn Komarnicki

in life, some corner where joy is unmingled with pain. But I have never found it. Wherever I find joy, my own or other people’s, it always seems to be mingled with pain... And I have found that if we will own pain and weep over it together, we also find Christ’s overflowing comfort. The bad news is that there may be no corner of reality where joy is not related to pain. The good news is that there is no corner of reality where pain cannot be transformed into overflowing joy.

The reason Jesus became incarnate, the reason he invites us to incarnate his presence in this world of pain, is, quite simply, for the joy of it. “For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame” (Heb. 12:2). And if that’s what Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, wanted, then surely it ought to guide and motivate us, too.

So let us not dread these winter days. Let us live boldly and exhuberantly in the knowledge that every day is an incarnational day, and may the Devil be damned! Here’s to a joyful January and a fruitful February. May the stories in these pages keep you warm and energized until we meet again in March. *From “The Coming of the Light,” Sourcebook, 1996, Liturgy Training Publishing.

Kristyn Komarnicki misses seeing her neighbors out on their porches during the winter months, so she hosts an annual “Beat the MidWinter Blues” tea party at her house in February, to which the whole neighborhood is invited. It’s proven a popular and heart-connecting way to get through the coldest months. If you live in Philadelphia and want a hot cup of tea and some warm conversation, give her a shout and invite yourself. She loves it when people do that.

Letters to the Editor I really appreciate the way PRISM focuses on social concern and justice as an outgrowth of Jesus’ life and mission.

As I read Bruce Main’s “A Costly Thing to Waste” (September/October issue) about the work being done at UrbanPromise in Camden, N.J., I couldn’t help but relate and thank God for schools such as UrbanPromise and the work they are doing. As an employee of a pre-K through 8th-grade school in North Central Philadelphia, I can attest to the immeasurable value of providing our youth with an affordable education while seeking to make the Gospel of Christ known to the students, their families, and neighboring communities. Thank you for highlighting the work of schools such as UrbanPromise and making the reality of lives such as Angelo’s known to your readers.

Jamison Parker Hunting Park Christian Academy Philadelphia, Pa.

As the author of Under Construction: Reframing Men’s Spirituality (Herald Press, 2009), I am always intrigued when this subject is addressed.

Knowing and appreciating the “evangelical for social action”

T alk Back perspective of PRISM, I was hopeful when approaching the November/ December men’s issue but was left disappointed. You have many good articles in this issue, but I still felt that a voice is missing. I’m troubled by the predominant use of the warrior as the primary metaphor for men’s spirituality, and your issue does not address this.

Gareth Brandt Professor of Practical Theology Columbia Bible College Abbotsford, BC, Canada

The November/December special men’s issue is awesome! I am weeping just thinking of how God will heal so many men, women, and their families through open discussions like these.

Mary Weyant Wynnewood, Pa.

As director of Friendship Center, a Christian outreach ministry to single mothers, I find PRISM to be vital for our outreach. Your data is helpful and your articles are inspirational, for our donors as well as myself.

Jeannie Avery Friendship-Center.org Flemington, NJ

Make your PRISM experience even richer by engaging your small group in a discussion of the topics raised in the magazine. You’ll find challenging study/discussion questions for each issue at PRISMmagazine.org. This is a great resource for college faculty and small group leaders. Interested in bulk subscriptions for your church, college, or small group? Email PRISM@eastern.edu.

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C elebrate!

Here are some recent advocacy victories we can rejoice in. Send news you want to celebrate to KKomarni@eastern.edu.

(Photo: arindambanerjee)

Wage theft victories When Carlos Ovidio, a construction worker from Austin, Tex., reported to the police that his employer had stolen $2,400 in wages from him, he was told there was nothing they could do because his employer had paid partial wages. He was not alone. One in five construction workers regularly had their wages stolen (University of Texas study, 2009).

But on May 27, 2011, Ovidio and workers across Texas celebrated closing the partial payment loophole. The Workers Defense Project (Austin) led the campaign that led to the passage of this law, which went into effect on September 1.

Other victories, from Seattle to South Florida, were realized in 2011. Wage theft campaigns are being led at the state level in California and at the city level in San Francisco and Los Angeles. In Michigan, efforts are being made to pass anti-wage theft ordinances in Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids.

Sometimes it’s difficult to see forward progress in the ongoing struggle for workers’ rights. But workers, ethical businesses, and faith advocates who work together are making positive change happen. Learn more and get involved in advocacy through Interfaith Worker Justice (IWJ.org).

Abusive orphanage closed After continued visits to the Son of God Orphanage in Carrefour, Haiti, six charitable organizations—Adventures in Missions, Bridgeway Church, Timberline Church, Children’s HopeChest, Journey Community Church, and Respire Haiti—discovered some serious neglect and abuse of the children. On behalf of the coalition of organizations, Children’s HopeChest President Tom Davis launched a campaign on Change.org, asking CNN to investigate the situation. Over 10,000 letters later, CNN responded by looking into the allegations and working with people on the ground in Haiti to investigate possible child trafficking there.

But even better, this campaign helped pressure the Haitian government to do something they rarely do—admit there was significant abuse and neglect at an orphanage and shut it down. Now the children at Son of God are being moved to safer places, and CNN is on the case.

Thanks to everyone who participated in this campaign!

Learn more at Change.org.

4 PRISM Magazine

Mattel takes Barbie out of the rainforest When Greenpeace learned that giant toy manufacturer Mattel was using products from Asia Pulp and Paper (APP), a company notorious for destroying Indonesian rainforests, including the habitat of the endangered Sumatran tiger, they launched an attention-grabbing campaign that featured an environmenttrashing Barbie and a distraught Ken. The result? Over 500,000 emails were sent to Mattel, whose corporate office responded by announcing a global policy that will keep rainforest destruction out of its supply chains.

As the largest toy company in the world, their new policy sends a message to other Greenpeace activists dressed as “Ken” dolls unfurl a giant banner on Mattel headquarters in California. (David companies that reMcNew/Greenpeace) sponsible businesses must be vigilant about keeping deforestation out of their products. As part of its new commitments, Mattel has instructed its suppliers to avoid wood fiber from controversial sources and has promised to increase the amount of recycled paper used in their business, as well as to boost the use of wood products certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). Learn more at Greenpeace.org.

Zimbabwean leaders released Jenni Williams and Magodonga Mahlangu, leaders of the Zimbabwean social justice movement Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA), were arrested with 10 other WOZA activists on September 21 after police used excessive force to break up a peaceful march marking the UN International Day of Peace. Ten of these activists were released without charge after prosecutors refused to prosecute them, but Williams and Mahlangu were charged with “kidnapping and theft,” denied bail, and remanded in custody without access to necessary medication.

On October 4 a Bulawayo High Court judge ordered that Williams and Mahlangu be released from custody and granted bail, after lawyers appealed. Amnesty International thanks all who sent appeals on the women’s behalf. At time of press, the women were set to appear in court on 12 December. Learn more at Amnesty.org.

M ay I Have a Word?

Tomi Lee Grover

Trafficking survivors learn competitive job skills at Bloom Café and Training Centre in Phnom Penh.

Pity or Empowerment?

In my work educating the church about human trafficking, I often interact with ministries that help people transition out of exploitative situations. Many of these ministries set up vendor tables at conferences and church events, where they sell goods made by trafficking survivors—jewelry, handbags, and other gift items. When I see these products, I ask myself how much good I am doing if I purchase a product made halfway around the world that someone lugged here to make a dollar to support survivors and the ministry that serves them.

Is this a purchase I would normally make, or is it a “pity purchase”? In other words, is it a tool for empowerment or simply another form of charity?

demand reduction, corruption, war, sanctions, or shipping methods?

If not, would that not once again put the workers in an extremely vulnerable position of exploitation, perhaps even worse than before?

These “pity purchases” reveal the need for an alternative business plan, one centered on true development practices of goods and services being bought and sold within the local economy for at least a major (more than half) portion of their revenue.

The practices of relief versus development on this issue continue to fuel my conversation with ministries focused on rescue and restoration of victims. These specific concerns also bring into question the historical paradigm of colonial missiology—an external solution powered by a feel-good approach to helping folks in poverty. We have relied far too long on this type of externally imposed solution to fix problems. In some cases we even exacerbate problems rather than fixing them, as is the case when rich countries distribute free (new or used) goods to poor countries and, consequently, local markets for these goods are crushed. For example, between 1992 and 2006, more than half a million Nigerian textile workers lost jobs due to imported clothing donations.

(Watch “A Day Without Dignity” at bit.ly/ fO4koU.) TOMS Shoes, which donates a pair of shoes to the developing world every time someone in the developed world buys a pair, is the perfect example of this—good intentions, bad aid.

How do we move from relief-aid to true empowerment? Are we truly offering a “hand up, not a hand out”? Are we moving those businesses toward an indigenous market base for at least a significant portion of their revenue so

We have relied far too long on externally imposed solutions to fix problems.

More questions emerge. Does this business model offer a viable solution to survivors? Do they make any profit by the time all the additional costs to market the goods are taken into account? When the market is solely reliant on the global economy, rather than on indigenous needs, could the business survive an interruption or alteration of the global market system, be it through

that they are sustainable? We need to do some deep thinking about “survivormade goods” merchandising and economic development. Are we asking the right questions? (Consider the message of PovertyCure.org at bit.ly/inLEm1 and join the conversation.)

There are some micro-businesses that have built the capacity either in product demand, networking with large corporations, or other means of a sustained market, but the number of those operations are minimal in comparison to the number of small-market enterprises that exist. One example is International Justice Mission’s indigenous solution of a bakery in Cambodia. Bloom Café and Training Center was started by a pastry chef who wanted to provide opportunities for sex trafficking survivors. The materials for the bakery are purchased locally.

Survivors trained by the chef make the products and operate the business. They market and sell locally to a customer base in their community and have become known regionally for fine pastries.

As with all good development practice, the currency is recirculated within the local economy several times. Efforts are underway to replicate the business in another local community and multiply the market bases. This is a success story born of a single courageous chef who was willing to teach marketable skills and provide opportunities to meet a local need.

The creation of an empowered people is not just an economic issue but also a spiritual one. The people we want to serve are made in the image of God, who values them as whole persons. How can we personally and corporately as kingdom people value our poorest neighbors? They don’t need our pity. They need to be empowered.

Tomi Lee “T.L.” Grover is an educator with TraffickStop (TraffickStop.org), an anti-human trafficking initiative.

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Craig Wong

What Space Must the Church Occupy?

Wearing smells from laboratories, facing a dying nation of moving paper fantasy, listening for the new told lies, with supreme visions of lonely tunes… let the sunshine, let the sunshine in.

—from the musical Hair Even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.

Psalm 139:12 At a 50th birthday party that my dear wife recently threw for me, Pastor Bill Betts waxed eloquent about the “Greek, Roman, and Jewish phases of our lives.” The first phase swirls with lofty idealisms, dreams about our future and the world we hope to change.

The second is where we take on the world with concrete energy, striving to make our mark. It is in the Jewish phase, however, when we realize that, when all is said and done, it is our friendships, family traditions, and how we’ve lived our lives with one another that ultimately matters.

Bill’s words provided food for thought for many of us that day.

While I’m still somewhere in the second phase (or at least would like to think I am), my “Jewishness” is clearly emerging, particularly as I find myself often pondering the life of my mom and dad, the world they experienced as young parents, and how their world can inform the lens through which I understand ours today. Which made my sister’s birthday gift—tickets to the musical Hair—quite timely, particularly in light of today’s Occupy Wall Street phenomenon.

The social unrest poignantly captured in Hair has its roots in several significant events that played out in 1961, the year my mom gave birth to me. Americans were given much to fear that year. The Soviet Union launched bomb tests, constructed the Berlin Wall, and sent the first human being out into space. Soviet-backed

O n Being the Church Fidel Castro formally declared Cuba a Communist state and successfully thwarted our CIA’s Bay of Pigs invasion.

Most germane to the youth angst of Hair, the United States initiated military operations in Vietnam. And as if these events weren’t enough for a decade, folks would soon reel from the shock of three political assassinations, including a standing president and the leader of the civil rights movement. Intriguingly, MLK was assassinated on the heels of his vocal opposition to the war.

Without question, it wasn’t easy being a mom in the ’60s, as sons and daughters everywhere blew the top off the sexual mores of the day and liberation meant regular psychedelic flights from reality. Hair was a reminder to me that the ’60s revolution was as much spiritual as it was libidinous, as youth, very much entering their “Greek” phase of life, searched for a more worthy meta-narrative than the pursuit of an American dream that required the napalming of Southeast Asian villages.

Unmoved by Washington bureaucratic fantasies of American peace and tired of being lied to, they searched for love, meaning, and universality through myriad quasi-religious experiences.

Social observers can draw parallels between the anti-Pentagon dissent of the ’60s and the present-day revolt against the global banking elite—for example, the camps, the peaceful rallies, the predominance of young leadership, and encampments of solidarity around a common cause. Most significantly, both groups share an acutely grave awareness that “things are not the way they’re supposed to be”—on the one hand, the gross brutality of endless war, and on the other, the gross inequity of a system that sanctions, and indeed facilitates, the redistribution of wealth from the masses to the top 1 percent while the percentage of Americans living in poverty steadily rises beyond 15 percent, according to the latest census.

The angst about mounting inequality, as resounding through Occupy Wall Street gatherings everywhere, is rightly finding resonance among faith commu-

nities across the nation which, in turn, seek ways to engage. Inter-religious organizations have set up their own tents. Some offer meals, clothing, and other material support. Others, if perhaps from the sidelines, echo prophetic concern or theological interpretation about economic injustice from their respective faith traditions, providing guidance to a movement that has sometimes lacked clear direction.

While there aren’t black and white formulae for what the church’s engagement should look like, we can be clear about this—Christ’s people exist, in their life together, as “salt and light” to a world trapped in darkness. Embodying the grand, redemptive story of God, the church exposes the delusion of economic ideologies (or the murky promises of the derivatives market), making visible a God who provides enough for everyone. Bearing witness to the power of the cross to dissolve barriers of race and class, the church occupies an alternative social and economic space that brings to light our common poverty—and hope—whether banker or beggar, police or protester.

Let the Son shine in!

Craig Wong is the executive director of Grace Urban Ministries in San Francisco. He invites your feedback at onbeingthechurch@gum. org.

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W ashington Watch Of Mammon and Men When the very rich Zacchaeus heard Jesus’ teaching, he said, “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.”

If Zacchaeus had procured only 12.5 percent of his wealth through cheating, his vow would reduce him to zero. Do the math: 50 percent to the poor right off the top + 12.5 percent of unjustly acquired wealth paid back at four times the rip-off rate = another 50 percent. That’s 100 percent of his possessions that he was willing to release. Zacchaeus very conceivably was offering to give all that he had. Even if he had stolen only 10 percent of his wealth through loopholes, coercion, and gimmicky accounting tricks, he would be giving 90 percent of it away, leaving him with 10 percent of what he had before climbing the sycamore tree that day.

What was Jesus’ response to this amazing proclamation by Zacchaeus?

“Today salvation has come to this house!” A wealthy person willing to give away his or her wealth—which is often unjustly acquired in at least a few ways— is a sign of the presence of God, of being delivered from mammon. The bull of Wall Street, fashioned after the ancient money god Baal, destroys lives in its path toward more and more. The truth is that people matter more than possessions, and Jesus affirmed this in his response to Zacchaeus’ exclamation of freedom from wealth.

The lesson for Occupy Wall Street is that Jesus supports the re-redistribution of wealth and calls it salvation for all concerned. When the wealthy give back some of what they’ve taken, rejoicing is in order, for they can experience an otherwise unattainable freedom. I say “reredistribution” because the wealth of the wealthy comes from the many—from the blood, sweat, and tears of those who labor for minimum (and sometimes no) wages throughout the world. The lives of real people laboring in African mines and Asian sweatshops are transformed into dollars that accumulate in bank and

8 PRISM Magazine

trading accounts on Wall Street. Why protest against Wall Street? Because it’s where the hundreds of millions of human lives who have been sacrificed to the gods of wealth are now represented.

At the heart of the quest for wealth and the domination and destruction it entails is Wall Street. The good news is that those who work within that system can be transformed, just as Zacchaeus was, and recognize the injustice of their ways—their ways that are often our ways, too.

The degree to which a society or industry values money and possessions over people is the degree to which it harms us all. I posit the following:

Paul Alexander

Jesus said that people cannot serve both God and mammon, and based on his teachings, I think we must also ask whether we can serve both people and 1. We need to conduct careful, critical money. I hope those within the Occupy analysis of the global trade realities and Wall Street movement stay focused on violent systems that transform human people and emphasize that money is at lives into high returns for a very few most a tool, an object to be used for the good of the many and not a goal in people. itself, because the quest for wealth sub2. US citizens can justly demand tight ordinates and destroys human lives. All regulations and enforcement on the in- of us, regardless of our social locations, dustries that generate such great wealth. can try to be more like Zacchaeus. And We must speak for the lives that are as we’re seeing so clearly these days, transformed into dollars, because once we can organize, rethink the system so they become dollars their voices get co- that it prioritizes people (especially those opted by the ones controlling the dollars. in need), modify our own behavior as needed, and influence policy so that the 3. US citizens can justly demand higher highest are brought a bit lower and the taxes on those with incomes of millions lowest are brought up a lot. Hopefully (and hundreds of millions) of dollars per it can go beyond occupations of Wall year, because it helps bring balance to Street to elected occupations of execua terribly unbalanced system. When the tives and legislatures where wiser policies lifeblood of most people goes to gener- and practices can be implemented. ate profits for the few, who pay them as little as they can, it is right and just for Paul Alexander is ESA’s those profits to be taxed so that social director of public services are provided widely. Healthcare, policy and a professor education, food programs, the “safety of Christian ethics and net” that is so important for a healthy public policy at Palmer civil society, must be maintained if we Theological Seminary are to be able to claim at all that we in Wynnewood, Pa. value people more than money.

Nancy Sleeth

Almost Amish A decade ago, my husband, Matthew, was at the peak of his career as director of emergency services and chief of medical staff at a nonprofit hospital. He loved taking care of patients, and I loved caring for our two children. We were living out the American dream, enjoying the wealth and status of a successful physician’s family, but we did not yet know Jesus.

One day I asked Matthew two questions that would change our lives forever. First question: “What is the biggest problem facing the world today?”

His answer: “The world is dying.” And he wasn’t just talking about his patients.

There are no elms left on Elm Street, no cod on Cape Cod. “If we don’t have a stage where we can play out the other issues, things like war and poverty and AIDS won’t really matter.

Question number two was more difficult: “If the world is dying, what are we going to do about it?” Matthew didn’t have an immediate answer. So together we embarked on a faith and environmental journey. We read many of the world’s great sacred texts, finding much wisdom but not the answers we were seeking.

Then one slow night in the ER, Matthew picked up a Gideon’s Bible. We didn’t have one, so he stole it. Matthew read the Gospels and ran smack dab into a remarkable figure: Jesus. Suddenly my husband found the truth he had been seeking.

One by one, our entire family followed. And that changed everything— the books we read, the music we listened to, the people we hung out with, and most of all how we learned to love God and our neighbors by caring for creation.

Eventually, Matthew got back to me about my second question. His answer: He would quit his job as a physician and spend the rest of his life trying to serve God and save the planet, even if he never earned another cent.

Hmmm. A job without a description.

Or salary. Or benefits.

My response: “Honey, are you sure we need to do that much about it?

A Different Shade of Green After the shock dissipated, we turned to the Scriptures. Jesus’ advice about getting the log out of our own eye seemed to speak directly to our family.

We began cleaning up our own act before worrying about cleaning up the rest of the world. The transition—as much emotional and spiritual as physical—took a couple of years. Little changes added up. Eventually we got rid of half our possessions and moved to a house the size of our old garage.

We reduced our energy consumption by more than two-thirds and our trash production by nine-tenths.

Once we had our own house in better order, we felt called to share our journey.

Matthew wrote a book called Serve God, Save the Planet: A Christian Call to Action. Using stories from our family’s life and his experience working in the ER, he explained why our family made these changes and inspired others to do the same.

People liked the book—a lot. It’s easy to read but hard to ignore. We received letters from readers who felt called to change but didn’t know where to start. So I wrote Go Green, Save Green—sharing stories about what worked, what didn’t, and what our family learned in the process. To handle all the speaking and workshop requests, we started a nonprofit organization, Blessed Earth, and thus a ministry was born.

While addressing a church group recently, I discussed my family’s $50 solar dryer (two clothes lines and the sun) and answered a series of questions about laundry: “Does hanging your clothes really make a difference?” Each load saves five pounds of harmful gases from being emitted, so this is a tangible way I can show my love for our global neighbors and my respect for God’s creation.

“Will doing that save me money?”

Nearly $100 a year: The clothes dryer consumes more electricity than any

appliance in your home except the refrigerator. Plus your clothes will smell fresher and last longer.

“Doesn’t it take more time?” Yes, and that’s what I love about it. It gives me a break from working at the computer, and I get to pray, or listen to birds, or talk with my husband and kids as they work beside me. Best of all, hanging up clothes gives me a chance to hang out with God.

All of the sudden a man shouted out, “What are you, Amish or something?”

Open your eyes! I wanted to reply.

Am I wearing a bonnet? We arrived in a Prius, not on a pony.

The question seemed glib to me— until I realized its significance. Most people equate drying clothes on a line with poverty—it’s what people do in the Third World, or only in the poorest US neighborhoods. To air-dry clothes by choice is countercultural. And who, more than any other group in 21st-century America, has kept simplicity, service, and faith at the center of all they say and do?

The Amish! Which led to my epiphany: Few of us can become Amish, but all of us can become “almost Amish.”

Nancy Sleeth is cofounder of Blessed Earth. This article is adapted from her forthcoming book, Almost Amish: One woman’s quest for a simpler, slower, more sustainable life (Tyndale, April 2012).

For more Almost Amish tips, visit BlessedEarth.org.

9

The Land Cries Out

by Todd Svanoe Photography by Noah Wolf

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An inspiring prophet-activist resists the devastation caused by drug lords, greedy corporations, and corrupt governments in the most dangerous state in Mexico.

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tanding by an ’86 Chevy truck packed to the gills with fruit trees, books, sacks of cement, and other anti-poverty supplies, community developer Fernando Hernández* takes a quick break before leaving on his next sortie to the parched Copper Canyon.

It is June 2011 in his border state of Chihuahua, just south of a sun-baked Texas, and Hernández’ fellow Mexicans have suffered 300 straight days of drought. “Their cows are dying,” he says through a translator. “To many of them, that is like losing their bank accounts. It’s so dry in Balo Jaquie, eight hours from here, that springs are reduced to a trickle. Even their bees compete for the remaining water. If we had not built a small reservoir to contain last year’s rain, the people would have lost almost everything.”

A respected people’s theologian and pioneering activist, Hernández has spent his life defending and empowering the poor in this largest and most dangerous state in Mexico, where one-third of the country’s 43,000 murders have occurred since the Mexican government began challenging drug cartels in December 2006.1 Hernández, whose brother was killed in a vicious land grab in 2007, remembers the deforestation and marijuana plantations in Chihuahua that set the stage for this barbarism 50 years ago. His family was among those whose homes were bulldozed when the first deals were struck—when logging companies, the Mexican government, and the World Bank created a perfect storm for which they are now officially repenting.2 While the federal government has made repeated efforts to address poverty in northern Mexico, they have not only been counterproductive, Hernández explains, but they have also failed to address what for him are the obvious underlying causes—toppled land rights, deforestation, pitiful schools, and an evaporating water supply—problems the bees compete for water...” (Courtesy of F. he has risked life and limb to help address through “Even Hernández) *For the safety of all involved, some of the names, including those of the Hernández family, in this article have been changed. Kidnappings for cash are common, especially among those with known ties to the US.

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says Hernández. Only 12 partnerships with dozens percent of all land in Mexiof international donors, reco is cultivated,3 acceleratsearchers, and volunteers.

Hernández remains ing tensions between rural focused on the deeper Mexicans, drug plantation fallout from Chihuahua’s owners, and land-clearing crisis, the loss of multicorporations. generational sustainability “Just last year a man for his land-raped neighwon a land-rights case for bors, who just barely indigenous landowners, and subsist, both small farmers he was promptly murdered,” and the indigenous Tarasays Hernández. “This is humara Indians, canyon as big a problem now as dwellers for whom Hernánever, and will be as long as dez has been a community corporations want our land developer and guardian and trees.” angel for two decades.

Hernández’ brother was “If we want change, we extorted in 2007 in a failed have to do it on our own.” land grab at the Hernández The 68-year-old does family farm. His late father the work of a dozen men, left his life’s earnings—3,500 making strategic deliveries acres with corn, beans, alto 40 Tarahumara villages falfa, and 200 cows—dividHernández examines some immature Jerusalem artichokes from up to 500 miles away ed between eight brothers the seed-testing garden in central Chihuahua. (Courtesy of Canyon Scholars) from his home, planting and sisters. “It’s their only thousands of fruit trees in security,” says Hernández. deforested lands each year, building reservoirs to replace Three men, hoping to win the farm as ransom, stuffed lost aquifers, and hosting workshops on composting, beehis brother into a car and, when he struggled to escape, keeping, and organic farming. shot and killed him. “We complained to the government,” Meanwhile, Hernández’ wife, Maria, disseminates and says Hernández, “but the word came back that the murmanages 141 American-sponsored educational scholarships derers themselves had died in a conflict with a cartel.” for Tarahumara students, junior high through college-age, A visionary, evangelical Catholic who believes he’ll investing in future community-building leaders through the see his brother again one day, Hernández is resilient, couple’s primary US partner, Canyon Scholars. (See “Inshouldering his cross while doing what he can to invest in vesting in the Tarahumaras’ Future” on page 16.) future generations well beyond his own family. Hernández has the wisdom of a historian to see root causes, the gentleness of a dove to avoid assailants, and the boldLand rights and displacement ness of a lion to warn those who will listen about the A leader reminiscent of the fabled activist Pancho Villa— crash courses they a fellow Chihuahuan are on. peasant revolutionary One of the 86 tunnels and 37 bridges along the Chihuahua Pacifico “A civilization that who also fought for Railway, an engineering feat completed in 1962. has getting money as land rights—Hernández its main value and is more crafty and colthat exploits the earth laborative but no less is not sustainable in passionate, having spent the long run,” says 19 years in the courts Hernández, “because himself as a lay advoit destroys and cate and leader defendcontaminates nature, ing the land rights of generates physical small farmers. and mental illnesses, This is an underand creates economic lying problem that is pursuits that are profmissed by Americans itable but destructive puzzling over immigraand deadly, like drugs tion and the drug war,

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youth, and to the shouts of my father, I overcame the and war.” current.”

Forgive him for sounding apocalyptic, but he’s lived Hernández asks Americans to try and walk a mile precisely those consequences since childhood in this land in Mexican shoes. This was one of three times he nearly where cartel terror reigns and grisly body-bag reports are lost his life as a border crosser, another due to a murder issued weekly. threat, and the last from desert starvation.

Hernández was born in a gold mining town in south“I have crossed the border seven times, and I’ve ern Chihuahua into a hardworking family on an ejido— learned a lot, but I don’t want to leave my family and live government-mandated, communal land, common throughin America. Finally, I realized it wasn’t worth it.” out rural areas of Mexico. Joining 100 families, his father The point is this: The lack of land security and a scrimped and saved, adding cows and renting pastureland path to prosperity leaves aspiring Mexicans no choice. A in years when the harvest was good.

World Bank report shows that, after the Mexican economy Ejidos are generally provided by government arrangestabilized in 2004, only 18 percent of urban and rural ment with wealthy landowners, who surrender them for Mexicans still struggled with “food poverty,” and 25 perpublic welfare purposes, but “land grabs” are common cent experienced “capacities poverty” (lack of opportunity when developers see a new economic opportunity and to advance), but a pay off or petition the whopping 48 percent Mexican government.4 complained of “asAs a boy Hernánsets poverty” (lack dez rose early each of land or capital to morning, milked the invest).5 cows, and carried and sold milk on their “However, if you mule from house to think Mexicans lack house. “I learned to ambition, how do grind corn and cook you explain the fact and helped my mother that, in 2008, Mexiwith the laundry. On cans in the US sent summer vacations $25 billion home to from school I helped their families?” asks plant the fields with Tony Burton, coaucorn, beans, potatoes, thor of Geo-Mexico: and squash.”

The Geography and Yet, in years of Dynamics of Modern Fernando teaches workshops on composting, bee-keeping and organic farming. drought, there was Mexico (Sombrero (Courtesy of Canyon Scholars) nothing to offset their Books, 2010). “Not losses, as government millions, billions!”6 subsidies have historically provided farmers in America.

“Land security is something Americans take for “My father would go to the US, sometimes for an engranted,” says Burton, who first visited the Copper Canyon tire year, and work on contract as a bracero (migrant region 30 years ago. “However, it is as foreign to most of worker).” Investing in his family’s future, he’d send money Mexico’s rural population as economic progress itself.” home to buy more cows, Hernández says.

For Hernández’ family of origin and others on their Hernández and his family have been lifelong border ejido, there wasn’t so much a pull to America to find a crossers, but not by choice. “One time my dad went into better standard of life as the push of drought, displacedebt to buy some cattle,” he explains. “To pay off the ment, and the threat of poverty when times were hard. bank, he went north to work on a big ranch. Because I For the most part, they enjoyed their lives, he says. wanted to buy a truck, he invited me to go with him.”

“Family and friends had meals at my house in the The two tried to cross the Rio Grande River together tradition of Mexican hospitality,” he says, indicating his at the border near Juarez, he says. “My dad and I threw family was better off than most. That is, until one day ourselves into the water, but the current was very strong, when everything in their world was turned upside down. and I got caught in a canal. It dragged me along, and my During the years that Hernández’ family tried to build dad ran along the shore shouting, ‘Don’t give up! Don’t their wealth and own a ranch, rich landowners wanting to give up!’ I will always remember this, because my dad did reclaim the land nipped at their heels. For 10 years his not get frightened easily, and I saw he was scared. father had fought this kind of land claim in the courts, “Finally I grabbed at a weed that was growing in a but his dreams ended when Hernández was 9. crack in the cement. It held and thanks to God, to my One morning men with a bulldozer arrived at their

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The Extraordinary Tarahumara or Fernando Hernández, faith, the land, and human sustainability go hand in hand, and he credits perhaps the oldest civilization in the Western Hemisphere, the 60,000 Tarahumara Indians in western Chihuahua, with modeling to him this kind of simple, godly, and nature-loving lifestyle.

It’s a lifestyle, in fact, that has enabled him to carry his mission deep into their Copper Canyon, a lifestyle that’s soothed him through the Tarahumara’s violin and flute songs, healed him through their herbal remedies, and inspired

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door, announcing that the families had lost their case.

Hernández explains: “Truckloads of soldiers came and, with roughness and shouting, loaded families with their furniture onto trucks. We were asked to choose where we wanted to be taken from among the nearest towns and ranches. Trucks returned every two days until all the people were moved.”

Shortsighted pillaging This region was first targeted by loggers in the late 1800s. But with the completion in 1961 of the famous

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408-mile Chihuahua-Pacific Railroad, stretching from southern Texas to the Copper Canyon, logging picked up its pace.7 “That railway allowed easy access to areas of oldgrowth forest that had previously been virtually inaccessible,” says Burton.

The most severe threat to old-growth stands, however, was a 1989 World Bank loan to Mexico of $45.5 million for a logging and forest management project. The plan, to log more than 4 billion board feet of lumber from 20 million acres of forest over six-and-a-half years, was ostensi-

him through their flamboyant spiritual dances.

Protected from commercial society for hundreds of years, the Tarahumara managed to both hear and respond to the Jesuit missionaries’ gospel message during the 16th-century Spanish conquest, and yet fled to the depths of the Copper Canyon to preserve their landloving identity.

Known as the “running people,” the Tarahumara, featured in the November 2008 issue of National Geographic magazine, stand alone in their ability to traverse the steep inclines and dangerous descents of their territory in areas beyond the reach of vehicles.

Still today these natives join against extreme sports runners in an annual international ultra-marathon of 51 miles in the more tolerable terrain of their region. They took first, second, and third place again in 2010.A Their stamina is unparalleled, as they are known to hunt by chasing down deer until they surrender.B The Tarahumara had mastered the use of many of the 350 edible plants and 600 medicinal plants that were documented from the regionC before the marijuana industry reduced the deforested land’s harvest to a single cash crop. The displacement and ongoing demise of the Tarahumara means that many of them have forgotten how to farm, says Hernández, who hosts organic farming clinics to retrain the natives.

“After helping the young relearn their ancestral farming methods, we teach them how to contain and make best use of their limited water and how to use honey bees to cross-pollinate fruit trees in their fields.

This not only helps what we plant to grow. It helps immunize the community against sickness.”

Aware of the sacred value of the Tarahumara’s fading land intelligence, Hernández keeps a notebook—of the chuchubate plant, for example, used as a blood thinner in modern medicines, the rubber-producing guayule plant,D and the yerba del indio and copalquin plants, with which he claims Tarahumara doctors once saved his life.

“I had a tumor right here,” he said, pointing to his stomach, “and it’s gone.”

- Todd Svanoe (To learn more, watch the documentary Tarahumara: Pillars of the World at bit.ly/utvUyC.)

bly put in place to help Mexico correct its trade deficit by reducing its dependence on imported paper pulp.8 But far outweighing any national gain, the deforestation largely erased the livelihood of the Tarahumara and paved the way for marijuana plantations on that land.

That has included years of both extreme drug cartel violence and, at times, death-threat-enforced Tarahumara road-clearing labor.9 As army surveillance helicopters now hover over Chihuahua, and while troops clear marijuana fields, the World Bank concedes that funding lumber-harvest solutions to

Mexico’s economic debt 20 years ago created a greater, more enduring poverty. Today, it suggests that land grants are the way to go.

“Increasing land rights for poor people is the key to reducing poverty and stimulating economic growth,” a repentantly toned World Bank report concludes. Increased land values “can greatly increase poor people’s wealth. In worst-case scenarios, the failure to make progress on land reform leads not only to slower economic development but also to violence and bloodshed.”10 Hernández shakes his head at this postdated wisdom, decrying the shortsightedness that eroded land, depleted underground aquifers, and led to a loss of native knowledge in both the US and Mexico. The ancient Tarahumara governors warned of this degradation, he says.

“They said that our very purpose for being in the world is to look after and take care of the land and its people. The Holy Scripture itself says a day will come when human beings will stop being wolves descended from humans and will beat their swords into plowshares, and abundance will flow like water,” says Hernández, who is concerned about a global ecological crisis.

When the land becomes no more than pawns on a chessboard, life loses purpose and gets out of synch, he says.

Having watched the dissolution of law and order in Mexico and the inevitable chaos resulting from unbridled greed, Hernández warns about a similar economics-driven trend he sees—and warns is unfolding—in the United States and abroad. He decries the multiple consequences of the consolidation of power in the hands of a few, from pesticide-drenched farms to genetically altered products; from unprecedented oil spills to mortgage crisis bailouts; and from nuclear disasters to trillion dollar debt.

“At the same time, more people around the world are coming to fight for the environment, which brings me hope,” he says.

“We must invite other believers and nonbelievers to put forth effort to take care of the world’s resources and to construct sustainable forms of the economy. All that will need to be under the guidance of Jesus and of common sense. The promise of life in abundance that Jesus himself offered us, I believe, is for this earth, not only for eternity.”

Abundant land is now nearly nonexistent for the poor of the Sierra. Today only 1 percent of the old-growth forest remains in Sierra Occidental, leaving numerous native animals—like the Imperial Woodpecker, parrots and macaws, the Mexican grizzly bear, and the gray wolf—at or near extinction levels.11 Mexican authorities for decades have sprayed drug fields with paraquat and other chemicals, wiping out rare butterflies and habitat, adding insult to injury, and contaminating local water supplies for the Tarahumara and their animals.12

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Investing in the Tarahumaras’ Future

creatively and collaboratively in a war-torn region, both with and in spite of the government’s often counterproductive help.

Government gaffes and grassroots gains “Corruption is rampant here,” says Hernández, describing his state’s “king of the hill” milieu, where drug cartel violence snuffs out even government relief officials. “Everyone is suspect. When I was hired by our new mayor to bring relief to the Tarahumara in the Copper Canyon, my first job was to go to the state capital to replace his trucks.”

It is customary for outgoing officials to sell all government vehicles and to pocket collected taxes before disappearing, he says. “There’s no continuity or stability, because they are limited to one term in office.”

Mexican history is full of the grand speeches of politicians and the failed attempts of government to alleviate poverty in northern Mexico, says Hernández. But they either create macro changes that exacerbate problems for the locals—such as NAFTA and the current challenge to drug cartels—or are found to be complicit in the corruption.

To collaborate one must be wise as a serexico’s remote Copper Canyon covers an area larger pent and never expect too much, he says. “In than the Grand Canyon in the United States. Because May, the army soldiers who had been sent to Tarahumara families must pay for fees, uniforms, and supplies burn marijuana fields here forced me to be their for children attending middle and high school, most children taxi. They took gunnysacks from my truck that leave school after the 6th grade. But Canyon Scholars, a USI was using for recycling and stuffed them with based nonprofit, offers sponsors a way to help these proud, marijuana to transport and sell to buyers. They independent people preserve their culture and educate their set me up as a dealer they could blame in case young people by paying their expenses so they can pursue we got stopped.” their educational goals through high school, college, and Since his election to the presidency in 2006, beyond. Learn more and meet some of the young scholars at Felipe Calderón has sought to bring major reCanyonScholars.org. forms, not only confronting drug cartels in the Sierra but also creating relief programs for its poor.

But many of these have yet to prove effective, says “Today when I travel to the Sierra, it’s like RaHernández. chel Carson’s Silent Spring,” says Canyon Scholars staff “The Mexican government’s welfare program provides member Howard Stadem. “No sound of birds. No insects our indigenous neighbors with refined flour and fattening butting against the windshield. The riches that were there food surpluses. I had never seen an overweight Tarahuhave been hunted out or droughted out.”

Still, Hernández is undaunted, calling on his faith daily mara in my lifetime until now,” he says sadly.

“PROCAMPO provides subsidy checks to small farmers, and giving his life in service to an earthbound but heavbut since $600 is not enough for them to build the water enly cause.

“The Holy Spirit soars like an eagle above the waters, well that they need, I see them use the money for alcohol or to escape on a vacation. The ones who have water the earth, and our consciences—and something happens need government officials to teach them irrigation. Without because we make it happen along with other people it this year, most lost all their corn and beans.” of goodwill,” he says, referring to the motley cluster of Similarly, he says, “The Pro-Tree Program at least American and international partners who for over 20 years addressed the environment, but it has not been applied have claimed Hernández and his wife as their ambassawell. It wasted a lot of money, and the thousands of trees dors.13 planted have had a 10 to 30 percent success rate at takBut any attempt to restore what was lost must work

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In solidarity with the Tarahumara, the Hernández family, while living miles above the Copper Canyon, built their home and kitchen into a rocky bluff. (Photo courtesy of Fernando Hernández)

“In our needs ing root because of the assessment, the first dry conditions. thing the Tarahu“Our country is rich mara identify is the in natural resources, need for water,” but we have been bad says Hernández, administrators of our whose water projabundance. The state ects are drawing and monopolistic busiintensified support. “I nesses are allowing an receive water techecological disaster to nology help from an happen. The forests engineer in Australia, continue to be exploitwater filtration coned, the soil is becoming sultation from Zoe more eroded, and the International, supplies water is becoming more from the Mexican and more contaminated Center for Alternative by our state oil compaIndigenous Developny and illegal logging.” ment, and volunteers from American and Mexican universiNow imagine 40 villages of five to 30 families each to which Hernández delivers a dozen varieties of drought- ties,” he says.

A $2,000 grant from Canyon Scholars purchased the resistant fruit trees and lugs cement for water containment reservoirs as far as his 25-year-old pickup will carry initial 200 sacks of cement. “Ten sacks intermixed with rocks helped us finish off an 18-foot well that supplied him. Only three of these Tarahumara villages have running water and none have plumbing, their homes in caves water to a village in Mazaribo,” Hernández reports with satisfaction. or shacks burrowed into the canyon walls. The immense One of his water Copper Canyon, formed catchment systems by six rivers that merge uses a corrugated and empty into the Sea metal building roof, of Cortez, has caverna modest-sized tank, ous gorges deeper and and drip irrigation. longer than our Grand The government Canyon.14 offers plastic tanks Twenty years ago, for $500 to contain Hernández was one of 5,000 liters and the only steely ambas$150 to contain sadors to the Tarahu500 liters, he says. mara from the civilized “But the smaller world, driving down ones don’t last, and dusty trails until he the larger ones the ran out of road, then Tarahumara cannot setting out to walk the afford.” winding dirt paths.

“We were able “In the early days Among the poor in Chihuahua, cows are like bank accounts, but to provide water I’d walk 10 hours by drought has killed many of them. (Courtesy of F. Hernández) containment to 20 foot on cow paths to families in Saucillo. get to the farthest Even though they weren’t able to drink it, they can wash canyon community,” he says. “Now I walk only two hours, their clothes and water their gardens, and their cows will since the lumber and mine companies and government live. We’ve helped nine villages to date,” he says, “but 31 are adding roads quickly.” more are waiting.”

Because of his devotion to the Sierra, Hernández Nature plays a cruel joke following the typical ninewas chosen in 2006 as one of eight government workers month drought season, with monsoon-like rains starting in tasked with land and community development projects in July. If poorly managed, the few acres of farmable land this wilderness region. The remote and foreboding cancan get washed away. The value of durable containment yon proved impenetrable to the others. A few years later facilities cannot be overstated.

Hernández was the only one left standing.

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Biodiversity Lost and Found hihuahua has always contained much of the richest biodiversity in North America, with varied terrain ranging from snowy mountainous habitats to arid deserts to groves of tropical fig trees and palms. Its unique Sierra Madre Occidental region, including the “Mexican Rockies” stretching southeast from Arizona, runs along the state’s western edge.

Traditionally it swarmed with nearly 300 native and migratory birds, a diverse assortment of mammals, and over 80 reptiles.a Western Sierra Madre also contained two-thirds of all the standing timber in Mexico, including 23 species of pine and roughly 200 species of oakb, on land that had been the pristine home to 60,000 Tarahumara Indians for hundreds of years.c The Sierra’s desperately dry seasons have led Fernando Hernández to research droughtresistant plants to add to the apples, mangos, oranges, lemons, and avocaNopal cactus dos he now supplies.

“We specialize in plants like the nopal tuna or the ‘prickly pear’ fruit of the nopal cactus, which can store water for an entire year, or the wildspreading guayaba,” says Hernández.

“Another I am promoting is the mesquite with bean pods that we dry and then grind into flour for breads and meal.”

With a visionary community developer’s eye, Hernández works and plants creatively. He recently planted 40 fruit trees each at two nearby schools. Since Tarahumara children typically walk between two and 10 hours on Sunday to get to their boarding schools, with scarce food provisions to make it through the week, the fruit will be a welcome supplement to their diet.

One day, Hernández received an unexpected visitor. A tour guide came through the Sierra and gave a few Jerusalem artichoke plants to a local teacher. The teacher had no idea what to do with them, so she brought them to Hernández who, in turn, brought the knobby potato-like root to his seed-testing station.

Lo and behold, since 2005, his gardening partners have watched a handful of wild-spreading Jerusalem artichoke roots produce 500 more in arid conditions, promising millions more throughout the canyon in the coming years. An excellent source of iron and fiber, the root also offers potassium and phosphorus. “God did a Jerusalem artichokes miracle,” exclaimed Hernández, “just like he provided manna for the Israelites in the desert!”

The tuber of a sunflower species, this root is not officially an artichoke and has no historical tie to Jerusalem whatsoever.

But the curiously named plant buoyed Hernández’ spirit and prompted him to experiment with other “Bible plants,” he says.

“Our priest went to Israel and found that the Jewish people [are] experts at surviving in a dry country like Chihuahua.”

In fact, Hernández drew inspiration from a story about Herod in Jesus’ day who constructed a water system believed to be still working in Israel today. “In the near future we plan to import figs, dates, olives, grapes, and pomegranates,” says Hernández.

- Todd Svanoe

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Straddling two worlds Many Americans are shocked to learn that Hernández and his wife are largely unpaid workers in an operation run by volunteers on private and government donations and that all of these plants, trees, books, and workshops are given for free.

“It’s the Tarahumara way,” says Hernández. “We share what we have.

Our community has a food cooperative.

Our modest home was a barter. The problem is that the cash economy is replacing our subsistence farming as a way of life.”

But Hernández also says, “If we take care of the world, God will take care of us.” He knows this may sound idealistic and extreme, and he admits that he carried substantial debt in the early days to live this way. But he has helped put three children through college, and his mission is now paying for itself.

Canyon Scholars’ Howard Stadem nods in admiration.

“Hernández ties all of our world problems to the pursuit of money as an end in itself,” he says.

“He has always had a holistic view that placed the highest

priority on serving others and caring for the earth.”

His bartering and ecological lifestyle seemed idealistic 30 years ago, notes Stadem, who suggests that Hernández may just be ahead of his time.

“I have to admit that the mere mention of an ecological crisis produced yawns among many of us in the past,” Stadem says, “but it’s now being taken seriously even by some of our leaders in the US and Mexico. They used to say Hernández was crazy for carrying truckloads of spineless cactus into the Sierra for forage for the animals, but with the drought, now everybody wants some. He used to

carry drought-resistant trees like the morera (white mulberry) by himself, but now the municipality pays for him to do it. What can you say?”

What today’s sustainability and occupation movements might say is: Wait a few years until the value of money is no more than the pulp it’s printed on. Grassroots civilization may increasingly transition to a barter economy, revealing the Tarahumara as leaders for the future.

Yet while Hernández’ and the Tarahumaras’ belief in nature’s provisions has worked for them up to now, current conditions have pushed the feasibility of their lifestyle

After 40-Year Drug War, Cartels Come North orty years after the international War on Drugs was launched by President Richard Nixon, a report of the Global Commission on Drug Policy last June declared, “The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world.”i

The reign of terror that has claimed 43,000 lives in Mexico since 2006 has led to cracks in the wall of secrecy that has long screened governmental relationships with drug cartels from public scrutiny.ii In 2010, former Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) Governor Socrates Rizzo Garcia admitted that for the 70year reign of his party, the Mexican government, along with its army, protected drug-trafficking routes to prevent attacks on civilians, a policy that changed in 2000 when National Action Party (PAN) Presidents Vicente Fox and, in 2006, Felipe Calderón took office.iii With tensions at a breaking point, even American interests are being newly exposed. In March 2010, Reuters reported federal criminal charges against Wachovia Bank, now owned by Wells Fargo, for laundering a staggering amount of Mexican drug money.

“Wachovia’s blatant disregard for our banking laws gave international cocaine cartels a virtual carte blanche to finance their operations by laundering at least $110 million in drug proceeds,” US attorney Jeff Sloman said.iv The record $160 million fine did not surprise the watchdog group Borderland Beat. Digging deeper into the case, they reported in May 2011 that the Wachovia Graphic courtesy of Tony Burton, case involved “illegal money transfers from Mexico, Geo-Mexico.com totaling $378 billion” and that the out-of-court settlement “included a $50 million assessment for failing to monitor cash used to ship into the US 22 tons of cocaine.”v Most close observers know, as the Business Insider put it, that “Mexico cannot win its war against the cartels unless the US does more to curb [its] insatiable drug addiction.”vi Others question the sincerity of the drug war given the US government’s lack of determination to curb over-the-border weapon sales.

Furthermore, a Wall Street Journal report shows fleeing drug lords and new drug plantation activity coming north. There are alarming US ties to the drug problem in the “rapid expansion” of pot farms using US Forest Service land, it reads, “many believed to be affiliated with Mexican drug cartels.”

In 2009 alone, federal agents “raided 487 pot farms” in “61 national forests across 16 states,” where they destroyed “2.6 million marijuana plants, seized 138 firearms, and made 369 arrests on felony drug charges.”vii - Todd Svanoe

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Hernández works with the Tarahumara to find the plants that fare best in dry climates and produce the most nutrition. (Photo courtesy of F. Hernández)

they drop in the water that makes fish dizzy, so they can just grab them. They are simple, happy, and close to God.” But sadly, because of their land displacement, many of the young have not learned the indigenous farming methods that for centuries preserved and made the most productive use of scarce soil.

Changes seem inevitable.

Preparing the next generation

to the brink in several ways: (1) Subsistence farming does assume land ownership, agricultural savviness, and water, all increasingly scarce assets in the drought-stricken Sierra; (2) 42 percent of the Tarahumara Indians have no income in a paying world that is encroaching upon them;15 and (3) meanwhile, electrical lines, roads, radios, and walkie-talkies are creeping into Tarahumaran villages.

Increasingly, money is needed.

Meanwhile, the federal government has concocted another macro solution to uplift the Sierra’s economy, this time through tourism.

A subsidized tourist park has been built in the canyon, an hour southwest of Creel, with a zip line, lift, and cable car to view its breathtaking beauty—and, in Hernández’ view, to enable visitors to gawk at ancient, remote Tarahumara communities.

“It’s a desperate attempt to jumpstart the languishing economy of the Sierra,” says Stadem. “Last I read it was bringing up to 300 people a day by train, which at least brings customers to buy Tarahumara crafts.”

But Canyon Scholars’ investment is deeper, aiming to preserve what is sacred about Tarahumara culture

A race against time At times it feels to Hernández as if he’s losing a race against time.

The opinions of community development partners are divided about the value of and need for modernization among Tarahumara, says Hernández, who wants to preserve their dignity and self-determination.

“In one case, nuns had blocked the development of a road to a Tarahumara village, but when the sisters were away on vacation, the Tarahumara approved it. They want more efficient means of getting their children to school.”

Since illiteracy prohibits most Tarahumarans from taking advantage of a border state economy crowded with 350 Mexican and American assembly plants, their main industry remains farming. But increasingly, meager agricultural yields are needed for their own families’ sustenance and are thus unavailable to produce a market income.16 “Instead of farming their own ground and having their own apple trees, we saw up to 6,000 of them loaded onto cargo trucks and driven 10 hours to work in other apple orchards for cheap,” he says. “Their kids are left behind. We find them in the streets.”

Still, Hernández points out that the Tarahumara have centuries of experience surviving in spite of their surrounding culture, and they are still uniquely equipped as hunters and trappers to maximize what they have.

He gives a humorous example. “They have an herb

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A growing number of tourists are visiting Copper Canyon. (Photo from Geo-Mexico.com)

Basketball is a central and joyful part of boarding school students’ day.

while equipping the next generation in the canyon.

The Hernández’ own daughter, Citlali, graduated in 2010 from the prestigious Chihuahua state law school, the only one of her 137 classmates to hail from the Sierra Mountains. Though not a Tarahumara herself, she is intent on using her training to defend their civil and land rights and to keep their culture and property from further exploitation.

Educating the next generation is a central thrust of Canyon Scholars, addressing another major failing of the federal government. In 2003, 64 percent of the Tarahumara population over 15 years of age had no schooling, 43 percent of children ages 6 to 14 did not attend school, and 57 percent of all Tarahumara were illiterate.17 Mexican legislation guaranteed youth at least a ninthgrade education in 1993, but in 2002 legislators acknowledged that too many poor children were skipping school and working to help pay bills at home. So it created the Oportunidades program to provide cash subsidies to families in exchange for their parents’ commitment to their children’s regular school attendance, health clinic visits, and nutritional support.18 While it’s working in other parts of Mexico, Hernández says that residents in most of the 3,000 villages in the 16 counties of the Copper Canyon are too remote to receive this help.

“Bilingual teachers are scarce and schools sit empty,” according to one Canyon Scholars report. “In one of the five primary schools we know of, a teacher arrived but left

within a week. Another resigned.”19 “Believe it or not,” says Hernández, “drunkenness and discouragement among teachers is common in the canyon communities.”

Education is an uphill battle, but one in which Canyon Scholars is making progress, playing a significant support role by developing relationships with students and teachers. The results have been significant.

“We’ve connected Americans to junior and senior high students for 11 years,” says Stadem, “and many [Tarahumara] are now graduating from college to empower their communities and help their families escape the cycle of poverty.”

“We now have 15 kids attending the university,” says Maria Hernández, “and most intend to return to their communities. Esperanza, for example, will be a dentist.

Lizania is studying to be an ecological engineer. And Margarita will be certified as a nurse. Her mother is a traditional herbal doctor, so she’s specializing in alternative medicine to carry on this tradition.”

Hernández, Maria, and their partners are making slow but steady strides, both preserving what’s valuable about the Tarahumara lifestyle and making life in the canyon livable for many.

“We ask the Owner of the vineyard to send us workers, better caretakers of his holdings, because we are few and inadequate. If we really ask, God will give it to us, and he will do what is not in us to do,” says Hernández.

Todd Svanoe is a nonprofit consultant and veteran journalist who reports on inspiring efforts that make the world a better place. He can be reached at ts@storycraftbiz.com.

Thanks to Canyon Scholars, young Tarahumaran students can get educated and return to help their people. (Courtesy of Canyon Scholars)

(Editor’s note: due to space limitations, the endnotes for this article have been posted at EvangelicalsforSocialAction.org/PRISM-endnotes.)

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There’s no do pain determi

MOURN

by Jimmy Dorrell Given the choice between pain and nothing, I would choose pain. —William Faulkner

I

PRAY LOVE 22 PRISM Magazine

n the last few weeks, two friends of mine, both pastors of growing churches, have been fired. For the most part, neither saw it coming. Both had been called to local congregations of at least 300 members, congregations that wanted to move beyond their traditional format to become churches of renewal and missional practice.

Both men had been very clear about their intentions to transition the church from a program-based model to one that emphasized spiritual formation, the priesthood of the believer, attention to the local community, and intentional diversity. Both had created vibrant small groups where honesty and accountability were encouraged, and more members were getting out of the pews and into the world. There seemed to be a general contentment in both congregations, and the elders of both churches had recently

oubt about it: church = pain. What we do with that ines whether we stagnate and die or grow. approved the pastoral leadership in annual evaluations.

Then, surprisingly, both pastors were asked to leave.

Searching for answers in the midst of confusion, both men heard similar responses from the elder boards. The responses came down to this: While we appreciate some of the good things you did, we wanted more organization and pastoring than you provided.

Did these two churches approve of how their pastors were leading them through the process of change? Or did they disapprove? The answer is both! The transition from an attraction-oriented, internally focused church to a missional church is more difficult than most churches and leaders recognize, and churches can simultaneously support change and believe that it is simply too much to ask. There is still a common expectation that the pastor is the leader hired to orchestrate the dispensing of religious goods and services each week, and any interruption of this program is viewed as a failure. As Brad Brisco of the Missional Church Network writes, “The gravitational pull for us to focus all of our resources on ourselves is very strong.” We want our leaders to help us change while simultaneously keeping things the way they’ve always been.

It’s no wonder that one of the most oft-used words in church change is pain.

No pain, no change

Unlike traditional church training that asks members to accept certain cognitive information, real change often comes at points of personal angst or conflict. In the pain we can choose to grow. When my wife and I traveled the world in 1984, we worked among the poor and oppressed in various countries. That brought us face to face—painfully!—with our own hypocrisy and wealth-based values. Having walked through slums of only a few of the world’s 1.4 billion absolute poor, we discovered a deep sense of responsibility. From the pain of those encounters came the chance to accept responsibility and grow in the way we lived, prayed, and loved.

Since then, our ministry has been offering a povertysimulation experience for students and adults. Though it pales in comparison to the painful realities of those who are constantly hungry and poor, as participants feel the strain of several days of poverty, they become significantly more teachable. When we allow pain to speak to us, and when we pause long enough in the change process to admit our feelings and gather our insights, the change produced is lasting.

This is a lesson that we can apply to churches that are changing. Pain is necessary—and it isn’t as if churches are pain-free to begin with! As Christian Smith and Michael

Emerson write in Passing the Plate (Oxford University Press, 2008), “Churches simply cannot make significant changes and keep all their people pleased. Not everyone is pleased now.”

Denial, avoidance, and blame only ignore the realities and delay the process. Moving beyond pseudo-community—where being nice and getting along are often called “church”—we need new levels of inclusivity, commitment, and honesty. In other words, we need to admit the pain and then take the responsibility to deal with it. Along the way there will be fighting, pouting, resistance, passive aggression, and lots of blame to go around.

But if the church is to survive, we will have to learn to “fight gracefully,” recognizing that real community requires integrity and that lasting change is always accompanied by pain.

Denial unto death

Of course, we always have the option of pretending that the pain doesn’t exist.

In his bestseller, Who Moved My Cheese?, Spencer Johnson creates an allegory of how different people respond to change. One of the characters simply refuses to believe his daily cheese is gone and, staring at the empty spot, becomes immobilized. Clearly one way that churches deal with the pain of change is to deny that anything is really happening.

Many of us believe that if only things stay the same, we can continue to be comfortable. And if things aren’t staying the same? Well, then we can act as if they are. After all, in a busy world, who has time to deal with all the challenges at the church? It seems hard enough to get our own houses and offices in order. The garage needs cleaning, the kids want a weekend campout, that new diet might be just the thing, and of course the bills have to be paid. With all this going on, the thought of tackling the bigger issues behind the church’s diminishing attendance and unmet budget seems impossible.

So in the midst of our frenetic lives, the problems of the church simply do not make our list of things to do. Sure, they may be chatted about in Sunday school classes and after-church fellowships, but the leaders of the congregation know that to really face the challenges will mean a plethora of meetings, arguments, and hurt feelings, and there is the presupposed reality that little is likely to change anyway.

Denial seems the easiest solution. Until things get worse. And they will.

Usually spawned by another broken air-conditioning unit or a lack of leaders for vacation Bible school, the con-

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gregation is forced to face the facts. And since continued denial and avoidance get harder and harder as signs of the church’s poor health become more obvious, we do what is natural—avoid church entirely. We find ways to not be around, thus avoiding the guilt and frustration of a dying church. Our reasons sound legitimate, at least at first. “Got to see the parents this weekend!” “We’re headed to a conference.” “The kids have been sick.” And as the reasons to be absent multiply, the congregation slips closer to the point of no return.

Soon death is inevitable. Willful ignorance, procrastination, and busyness speed what denial has already begun.

Godly church change involves pain, and attempting to deny and avoid pain only produces another kind of change— church death.

It’s your fault!

When denial and avoidance are no longer options, we still have a fallback plan—blame. Pointing fingers is as old as Adam.... and Eve, Cain, Jonah, and almost every other Bible character we meet. Instead of taking responsibility for our actions, we point our fingers at others as a handy way out.

The pastor and staff of a church in transition are easy targets. “If the preacher had better sermons, more folks would attend.” “If everybody gave more, we wouldn’t have these financial problems.” “That youth director spends too much time playing with those kids instead of teaching them the Bible.”

Yet, like the self-destructiveness of denial and avoidance, blaming others only compounds the problem. Blame is highly destructive in groups that are trying to move into true community and grow. In Love Heals, Shannon Peck writes that condemnation, accusation, blame, criticism, and disrespect are toxic. “They cut deep,” she says. Church bodies have a

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difficult time healing—and this at the very moment when health needs to be a priority.

Blame doesn’t need to be the final word, however. When Christ-followers care enough about their Savior’s church to see things as they really are and take personal responsibility for some of the sickness in our local bodies, we have a real chance to accomplish lasting, Spirit-led change and emerge as a living, growing force for renewal and missions in our communities and in the world.

This means listening, studying, praying, risking, giving, and stretching, as well as devoting time to the process that could have been spent in personal recreation. And this means pain, as change always does.

But we have not been given a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power. And if our churches fail to change, it will be our fault and no one else’s.

Getting personal

In the late ’70s, after years of joy in the traditional church, I began to struggle. I came to think that the early church, described in Acts 2:42-47, had been most true to what God wanted for his church. It seemed to capture the essence of the body of Christ with daily contact, shared meals and possessions, and learning from the apostles about the things Jesus did and said. Convicted that Christianity was best lived out through incarnational living among the poor, my wife and I moved into the middle of a blighted African American neighborhood that had once been a wealthy area until the “white flight” to the suburbs in the ’60s. We purchased a sprawling, 4,000-square-foot house for only $12,000, and settled with our family into a rat-and-roach hotel, formerly the home of two mentally ill veterans, a 19-year-old construction worker, and a bonafide cat lady who had collected 40 felines in her nightly runs through the alley trash bins. After gallons of pesticide and long months of renovation, the old house was eventually livable. Even in the midst of nightly gunshots, fights outside the bar across the street, and prostitutes working our street, we began to feel at home.

In the months and years that followed, we welcomed college students who wanted a more “radical” and community-based lifestyle. After work or school, we would invite low-income children and teens to the house for backyard Bible clubs and recreation on our newly poured concrete basketball court on the adjacent lot. Through the years, other Christians moved nearby to join our high-stakes call to the inner city. We worked on each other’s houses, babysat each

other’s kids, ate many meals together, and enjoyed some of the best conversations about faith and discipleship we had ever known.

Since virtually all of us were disenchanted with our churches, we decided to meet together for worship on Sundays. Without tradition determining our worship style and teaching, we enjoyed the creativity of various members. One week we would have teaching, followed by dialogue and Communion. Another week might include acting out a parable with the participation of several of the children. One woman brought candles; another brought a challenging tape to listen to; still another brought a map to show the locations of unreached peoples and persecuted Christians. We always ate together and agreed where to send our weekly offerings. Gradually, a few of the neighbors began to attend. Most everyone felt a sense of love and “body life” that they had never experienced before. This was church!

Yet within three years, our little neighborhood church fell apart. While we continued to grow, some of us focused on deepening relationships with each other while others felt we were ignoring our call to minister in the neighborhood.

My wife and I were in this second group. With full-time jobs, family, and so much time committed to “church life,” we had little left over to serve others, yet that was what we longed to do. So after much conversation, we determined to leave with the church’s blessings. The others hung on about nine months longer until the whole church ceased to meet, and some held significant resentment toward others as they separated. The church we thought would someday be an example to all other Christians was no more.

As our little church imploded, I found myself numb, detached, and hopeless. If this church, with all its good intentions, effort, personalities, theological background, and location could not work, maybe no church could. With three young children, two of whom were old enough to miss their “church friends,” we felt compelled after a few weeks to find another place for them to attend Sunday school while we licked our wounds and decided what to do next. Over the next few months, we attended a large church with a pastor who seemed to genuinely care about our pain and the grief we were experiencing and had no problem with us just attending while we healed. Through those months, we tried not to focus on what went wrong and who was at fault, but clearly those questions recycled through our brains and emotions almost daily. In time, the hurt and sadness lessened and seemed to pop up only on occasion.

Through the pain of that church experience, God eventually brought healing. In the following years, we experienced a deeper humility than ever before. Abiding in Christ became more important than starting something new. That submission to God seemed to be the foundation through which he chose to eventually call us to the poor and marginalized and use our own gifts in ways we had never before imagined. We would never have asked for the pain, but in time God clearly used it for his own glory.

Little ventured, little gained

It is hard to move toward newness and change without openly acknowledging the pain from losing what was once meaningful, healthy, and life-giving. Particularly when a difficult circumstance or crisis causes a church to enter the change process, there is usually a temptation by high-control leaders to push the process forward before others in the congregation have had time to mourn the loss. When a church chooses to transform itself—and especially when change is thrust upon it, as when a pastor dies or runs off with the secretary—there is sadness and grief and even anger.

Attempting to fix the problems without some kind of corporate mourning will likely delay the grieving process and can frequently sabotage the renewal process. Because grieving is personal and complex, no one can create a timeline or know when it will end. Commonly acknowledged stages of grief are described as numbness followed by strong feelings from nostalgia to anger, then drifting, and finally recovery. Depression or emptiness, as deep as they are, can become cathartic in spiritual renewal. We all experience death and loss. It is basic to our humanity. But for many folks, especially in an individualistic society, corporate bereavement may be harder to share. In the midst of the healing process, some church members may lash out at others or cast blame as an inappropriate expression of their own unresolved pain.

In the Sermon on the Mount—“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted” (Matt. 5:4)—Jesus embraces open grieving as part of the healing process. In our painavoiding culture, which tends to push feelings to the side in an effort to get back to work, we need to hear his words. It is only after our weeping and sorrow that our “grief will turn to joy” (John 16:20).

Churches that have become self-centered and inward must come to a place of confession and mourning for their corporate sinfulness. They will come to embrace the selfemptying (kenosis) of Jesus, the Suffering Servant, in his darkest hour that preceded the greatest hope ever known.

There is “death to self” in the renewal process—our own dark hour, when we seem to finally come to terms with our finitude and pain, and we trust that only the living God can bring the healing and rebirth needed for personal renewal.

The miraculous power of a church’s corporate “death” to its own aspirations and selfishness is soil from which real change grows.

Jimmy Dorrell and his wife, Janet, founded Church Under the Bridge and its holistic parachurch partner, Mission Waco, in 1992 and have been leading these innovative ministries ever since. Dorrell’s passion is to motivate churches toward a more holistic missional ecclesiology that offers new life for struggling churches in America. This article was adapted from Dead Church Walking: Giving Life to the Church That Is Dying to Survive by Jimmy M. Dorrell (Biblica, 2011). It appears here by kind permission of the publisher. The book is available for order on Amazon.com.

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Getting Schooled in Islam

by Jesse James DeConto Prof. Matt Palombo’s Introduction to Ethics class at Minneapolis Community Technical College (MCTC) is discussing Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. Kyle Williams, a white suburban kid from middle-class Minnesota, squares off with Khadijah Cooper, an African American who spent childhood summers with her grandmother, a lifelong domestic worker in the Jim-Crow South. Williams can’t understand how Hegel could argue that the slave might be more free than his master, just because he has learned the skills to take care of himself while the master has not.

“If you’re a slave owner, I mean, basically, don’t you still have freedom because you have money?” says Williams, 20.

“I don’t know. It’s sort of confusing me how self-sufficiency is being compared to freedom.”

“If that slave owner didn’t have slaves, he might not be able to plant or whatever because he has people doing that for him,” says Cooper, 28. “You always have to have somebody do it for you because you have no idea how to plant the cotton, take the cotton, make the cotton into clothes.

That’s something that somebody else has always done, so he’s always dependent on that, and that’s not being free.”

It’s just the sort of culture clash Palombo cherishes in his role as a teacher and community activist. In his journey from conservative evangelical to interfaith middleman, Palombo has been shaped by refugees, immigrants, and other minority voices he rarely heard at his evangelical high school, college, or seminary. Now that he’s behind the lectern, Palombo believes that understanding the world requires solidarity with the oppressed, whether it’s a Jim-Crow-era servant or Muslims vilified because of the terrorists among them. A culture of tolerance, he says, tends to critique or romanticize minority groups against a standard of Western values; instead of exploring similarities and differences, Palombo has plunged into cooperative advocacy with the Twin Cities’ Muslim community,

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offering his own Westernized faith up for judgment.

“Any healthy relationship has a deep sense of selfcritique. We are building a relationship where I am allowing you to change me,” he says. “The complete emptying of God in Jesus, to say ‘I am opening myself up to the world. The world that hates me, I love it’—tolerance doesn’t allow you to do that. You cannot build any healthy relationship on tolerance. Healthy relationships are painful, they are risky, they are messy, and that’s what love is built on.”

Conversion: ‘A turning point’ Palombo was two months into teaching at MCTC when President Bush declared war on Iraq in 2003. Fresh out of Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Fla., preceded by a conservative Christian high school and college, Palombo had not personally known any Muslims until he encountered his students at MCTC. Minorities make up half the student body, compared to about one-third of American college students overall. One-third at MCTC are black, including African Americans, Somalis, and other recent African immigrants; that’s nearly three times the ratio of black students in the nation’s total student population. The college doesn’t keep statistics on its students’ religions, but much of its immigrant population is Muslim, and students walk the halls in traditional Islamic garb, creating an environment Palombo had never known. What he knew of Islam had come only through evangelical missionaries visiting his church or schools, reinforcing a dualism of Christians versus all non-believers, including Muslims.

“Most of the presentations characterized Muslims as backwards, illiterate, and immoral,” Palombo says. “In seminary, I remember being told that ‘good Muslim Americans’ were actually putting on a front to sneak extremist Islam into America and take over.”

In high school, Palombo had read The Autobiography of

Malcolm X; in the story of Malcolm’s conversion to the Nation of Islam, Palombo found a “heroic” voice for an oppressed people and couldn’t accept the adversarial interpretation of Islam he was being taught. As the media covered the war in Iraq, their depiction of Muslims as “backward, powerless, and uneducated” didn’t represent the students he knew.

“That was a turning point for me: the faces of my Muslim students shattering American stereotypes,” he says.

and even returning to Somalia as teens to fight in the Islamic revolution.

“It’s because they have nothing to do,” says Shaie. “You don’t think about being Muslim. You think about the safety of the community. I don’t want anything to happen to my daughter.”

Shaie began to dream—about an interfaith community center where Muslims and non-Muslims could interact; where Muslim women could swim and exercise in female-only facilities without covering their bodies; and where youth could learn leadership and job skills and find access to medical care, legal advice, and social services.

Muslim alienation: ‘You don’t want to be different’ Palombo had moved to Minnesota to be near family, a move he thought would be temporary. He had answered an MCTC ad seeking an adjunct ethics instructor; before the end of his first semester, the college had hired him full time. The recession of 2001 had eliminated a patronage meant to send him to the United Kingdom for doctoral work, so instead he stayed at MCTC, encountering students like Saccido Shaie, an aspiring teacher and mother of three in her late 20s.

Shaie had come to Minneapolis in 1994 at the age of 12. Two years earlier, violent revolution had forced her family from its rural village in north Somalia. They fled to the capital, Mogadishu, then to Kismaayo in the far south, and finally across the Indian Ocean to Kenya.

“When we left our home, we didn’t take anything. I was just wearing my one dress,” she says. “We thought this was going to go on a couple of days or weeks, and then we were going to come back to our house.”

They spent nine months in a tent city set up for Somali refugees by the Kenyan government, her older brother mending from a car crash during their escape that had put him in a coma. The US government brought them to Atlanta, where they spent a year before Shaie, her mother, and young siblings followed some older sisters to Minneapolis where they had found work. Shaie arrived just in time for middle school, speaking little English and wearing the hijab on her head. At a pool party, Muslim modesty forbade her wearing a bathing suit like everybody else “I remember just putting my legs in the water and watching everybody else swim,” she says. “When you’re that age, you don’t know what’s Muslim or what’s Christian. You know what’s okay in your community, but you don’t want to be different.”

Shaie came to respect her Muslim identity, with its head coverings and long, loose-fitting robes. But she watched many of her peers perceive their differences with shame, turning to gangs and violence, becoming vulnerable to sex traffickers,

Interfaith partnership: ‘We eat together’ Meanwhile, Palombo was seeking out Charles Amjad-Ali, a Pakistani Anglican and one of the world’s leading scholars on Muslim-Christian engagement. In 2006, Amjad-Ali became his mentor in a PhD program at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minn.

“He knew that he needed some serious work in Islam because he had Muslim students and he had no work on it,” Amjad-Ali says. “It is not good enough to say, ‘I feel good about them.’ You cannot love your neighbor as yourself without knowing who they are.”

Shaie met Palombo at a student organizations fair, where he was staffing an Oxfam International booth and promoting the Center for Civic Engagment, which he and other faculty and staff members founded in 2007. Shaie soon enlisted Palombo as secretary for a new organization, Somali Youth Action, which has since been renamed the Ummah Project, signifying a wider sense of community. They aim to raise nearly $50 million to purchase about five acres of land in the city and build 120,000 square feet of space, plus a parking deck, for Minneapolis’ 150,000 Muslims, many of them from Somali refugee families. Shaie says it would be the only facility of its kind in the Western world, providing separate swimming pools, cardio, and free-weight areas for men and women. Organizers hope it will be a place where Muslims can be themselves but also interact with people of other cultures.

“We’re trying to show people from other faiths, this is how Muslims practice and this is how Muslims want to live,” says Ibrahim Mohamed, a Muslim student from the minority Oromo group in Ethiopia. “People praying is not a problem.

Sisters wearing the hijab is not a problem. We’re all human beings, and we’re all going toward one end.”

Observing Muslim piety and hospitality, Palombo felt his own faith transforming. For his doctoral work, he studied Arabic at the newly opened Islamic University of Minneapolis. The rhythms of prayer punctuated the entire campus schedule, causing him to reflect on both the struggles of his Muslim

Living in a pluralistic society demands a much higher price—and offers much greater rewards—than merely accepting those who are different from us.

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“You cannot build any healthy relationship on they are risky, they are messy, a students to practice their faith in a secular setting and his own desire for Christian liturgy to shape his life. He arranged a meeting with Islamic University President Sheikh Farok Hamod Asamarai, seeking support for the Ummah Project, and there found a table spread with food and circled by half a dozen Muslim sheikhs. A professor translated into English a conversation about recent earthquakes that they believe may signal Mohammed’s warnings about the end times.

“I haven’t experienced this kind of hospitality from a president and a vice president of a university before,” Palombo says. “This community is interpreting the world now as if the eschatological end is coming, and they’re just trying to hang on and meet it. Things are happening in the world that are really destructive, and yet we eat together and you’re welcomed here.”

Theological implications: ‘God is coming back to the West’ Palombo sits in his windowless office on the fourth floor of MCTC’s downtown campus, where he teaches and coordinates a half dozen other philosophy faculty. The end of the semester is almost here, at which point he’ll start a year-long sojourn in South Africa, where he’ll study under renowned Muslim scholar Farid Esack. Taped on his door are photographs of Muslims and Christians acting as human shields for one another during the recent revolution in Egypt.

Palombo chats with his colleague Nadia Mohamed, an Egyptian who teaches world religion and global studies. Mohamed talks about her culture shock when a teenaged friend told her she couldn’t wait until she turned 18 so she could move out of her parents’ house; Mohamed insists that her own children should stay at home until they marry, because they need guidance in handling money and other adult responsibilities.

“There is a verse in the Koran that says you have to take care of your parents, especially when they get old,” Mohamed says. “Don’t huff and puff at them, because when you were young, they used to change the diapers off of you.”

“I think there’s a commandment like that in the Christian Bible, that says something like that as well: ‘Honor your parents,’” Palombo says, laughing.

While the vast majority of Christian and Muslim moral teachings overlap, Palombo says, Christian doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Cross clearly don’t. But for Palombo, that’s not the point. He is building an argument that interfaith dialogue has to start not with theology but with a common pursuit of justice. He grounds his approach not in Father Abraham or in Jesus as a Prophet of Allah, but in the

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book of Revelation, which he reads as St. John’s account of a threatened community resisting the political power of a great empire. He points out that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all emerged in resistance to political power. He views Mohammed as a true prophet of God “It’s not fundamentally about your view of the Trinity, but it’s more fundamentally about, Are you on the side of the oppressor or the oppressed?”

Islam versus the West is today’s supreme cultural dialectic, and Palombo is seeking a Hegelian synthesis. Unavoidable is the question often condemned by pundits following the 9/11 attacks: What did we do to make Muslims so angry with us? His answer: We’ve colonized Muslim lands, exploited resources, and exported a culture of greed, covetousness, and extravagance all over the world. Muslims, he says, make Americans uncomfortable because they literally wear their faith on their sleeves, practicing public prayer and living with a strict morality that eschews common Western liberties like premarital sex or lending at interest.

“Islam is the most powerful critique of the West that is out there,” he says. “I think God is coming back to the West through Islam. God is in the faith and actions of Muslim people, and we see that when they challenge the ungodly actions of the West.”

Significantly, Palombo sees Islam’s critique not in the substance of the faith itself but in its outsider status. Muslims around the world are relatively poor and lack global political power; terrorism, he says, is an extremist reaction to the oppression of the West.

“Talking about someone’s class and economics is at the same time talking about Islam,” he says. “You don’t necessarily see wealthy CEOs in their plush houses talking about the end of the world. It’s a way that poor and oppressed communities can try and use religious symbolism and teachings to confront the empire. It’s Daniel and the lion’s den. You’re living in empire, and somebody is not bowing, and the Muslims are not bowing. That’s where Jesus goes, that’s where God is—at the most extreme critiques of power and empire. I don’t want to say that the West will be okay in its empire-building. God is mighty to change that.”

Palombo has worked to bring Muslim voices, including his colleague Mohamed’s, into Solomon’s Porch, the emergent church he and his family attend in Minneapolis. He says even in a liberal congregation like this, some are antagonistic toward Islam. Some of his Sufi Muslim friends left the church after a visiting missionary described Muslims as illiterate, backwards, and hostile. Three years ago, he offered a four-week

n tolerance. Healthy relationships are painful, and that’s what love is built on.” study on Islam in his home, but a few of the participants repeatedly “slandered” Muslims and disrupted the conversation.

“Finally, I asked one to leave when she wished death on the early Muslim community,” he says. “I have not had a study since.”

Doug Pagitt, the founding pastor, says the congregation includes many schoolteachers who interact with Muslim children on a daily basis, and Palombo helps members overcome their fear of offending people who seem so different.

“Our people and a lot of urban, 21st-century people are just nervous about being cultural idiots,” Pagitt says. “You don’t want to be insensitive, and that blocks a lot of opportunities for people to connect. Matt says, ‘Get over it. You can make a mistake. There’s nothing wrong with blundering something.’ Matt’s a normal guy. He’s not a big deal.

It’s totally doable.”

Shaie says Palombo’s strength is in his simple humanity. “Regardless of where he’s from or his religion, we’re all people,” she says. “If you cut your skin, you’re going to bleed. He knows all the issues, and so he knows all the time he puts in here is worth it. It’s something that makes a difference for people.”

Palombo agrees that it’s not his expertise in philosophy and religion that enable his partnership with Muslim students but his willingness to submit to their authority.

“I am in a situation of being the minority and allowing veiled Muslim women to direct what I do, to lead me,” he says. “When you’re going to critique the Muslim world on things like equality or democracy, they trust you because you have led up to that with severe criticisms of the West.”

Palombo quickly magnifies their debate to the scale of geopolitics. “Have you ever heard people say, in a global context, that America is an irony, here? Because it heralds freedom as the most important thing, but it becomes more and more dependent, more and more of a slave to the rest of the world,” he says.

“It’s just like when a teenager becomes an adult,” says Cooper, a descendant of slaves, echoing Nadia Mohamed’s earlier critique of American autonomy. “‘Oh, I’m 18 now. I’m an adult. I’m so free.’ But then there’s rules and regulations.

You’re free, but you can’t go rob a bank. You know what I mean? Yeah, you’re free, but you’re really not free.

“Freedom is only in relation to others. It’s not separat-

Professor Matt Palombo joins his Muslim students in Friday prayer at

A different sort of freedom Minneapolis Community Technical College.

Back in his ethics class, Palombo’s Muslim influence comes through. Williams had been speaking as a young man who lost his father at 18, worked throughout his teenage ing yourself,” says Palombo. “It’s developing healthy relationyears, aspiring to a law-enforcement career and dreaming of ships with others. the financial freedom he saw in his first job as a caddy at That’s the sort of freedom Palombo strives to foster a local country club. Cooper has been speaking as a latein his classroom, his church, and his scholarship, and in comer to higher education, a waitress throughout her 20s Shaie’s dream of a Muslim community center in middle who had watched her grandmother live with dignity, working America. as a domestic servant and commuting by bus from her home in rural North Carolina. Cooper was hoping just to take care of herself and her family with a career in community health Jesse James DeConto is a writer and musician in Durham, education; Williams wants something more—the freedom to do N.C. Find more of his work at JesseJamesDeconto.com and what he wants when he wants.

PinkertonRaid.com.

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at his office in DC. They talked about the wide variety of policy priorities Dubois works to advance and the values he shares with the president.

Kristyn Komarnicki: For those of our readers who are unfamiliar with the work of the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, can you give us an overview of what you do?

Joshua Dubois: The White House Office of FaithBased and Neighborhood Partnerships is charged with ensuring that local faith-based and secular nonprofits are partnering with government to serve people in need. The way we do that practically is that out of the White House I manage 13 smaller faith-based and neighborhood partnerships across government.

For example, we have an office at the Department of Labor that helps local churches set up job training programs. We have an office at the Department of Veterans Affairs that helps synagogues, mosques, churches, and secular nonprofits reach out to veterans in their communities with computer access so that veterans can apply for jobs. We have an office at the Department of Agriculture—their major project is impacting hunger, especially childhood hunger, with faith-based organizations through summer food programs, for example.

Human Capital An interview with Joshua Dubois In spite of the ongoing controversy over whether the US government should fund social programs via faith-based organizations (FBOs), President Obama expanded the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships that he inherited from the Bush administration. And he chose a bright, congenial young Christian to head the office.

Joshua Dubois was only 26 when he took his place in Obama’s administration in 2009. Now three years into the job, he speaks passionately about the various ways his office seeks to connect the political and civic realms, all in the service of those most in need.

A special assistant to the president, whose tasks include sending daily devotionals to the president’s Blackberry, Dubois grew up in Nashville and was in a leadership role at a Pentecostal church by the age of 18. After earning an undergraduate degree in political science from Boston University and a master’s in public affairs from Princeton, he joined Obama’s Senate office as an aide in 2005.

ESA Public Policy Director Paul Alexander and PRISM Editor Kristyn Komarnicki met with Dubois in September

30 PRISM Magazine

Paul Alexander: Talk a little bit about what you do here in relationship to immigration and immigration reform.

Dubois: One of the other things our office does is ensure that religious voices are heard in regard to policy debates here in the House and across Washington, DC. So our role in the immigration debate is really channeling the energy, the voice, the work that’s going on in the faith community, ensuring that the president knows what they’re saying, what their priorities are.

Recently the president and the secretary of homeland security made a major decision to prioritize violent offenders in terms of deportation proceedings, getting them out of the country and holding back on focusing on those who had not committed any crimes and are just productive members of our society. A motivating factor in that decision—I’m sure the president would say—were the voices from the faith community who were on the ground and were telling us what was happening in their communities and what our immigration focus should be. Our job is to make sure those voices are heard and to set up meetings with the president.

He’s met with evangelical leaders, Catholic bishops, Muslim and Jewish leaders on immigration, and we set up those points of connection.

Komarnicki: And you pushed the Dream Act, right?

Dubois: We pushed it as far as we could go last time, and we were really so disappointed. But we’re going to keep coming back to it.

Joshua DuBois looks on as President Obama signs the proclamation marking the first Thursday of May as the National Day of Prayer. (Photo by Pete Souza)

Komarnicki: The policy goals outlined by your office, or the key priorities you want to see faith-based and neighborhood partnerships engaged in, are (1) economic recovery; (2) supporting maternal and child health, including reducing both unintended pregnancies and the need for abortion; (3) promoting responsible fatherhood and strong communities; and (4) promoting interfaith dialogue and cooperation. How did you decide upon these issues?

Dubois: When I sat down with the president and we talked about how this office would begin its work, we saw these as salient issues in our country today and also issues about which we had heard a lot from faith groups over the course of his campaign and his career in public life before that. I should say that while those are four overarching priorities, we actually have a broader set. As I said, we manage 13 additional faith-based offices all across government, and each one of them has an individual priority, and there’s some fascinating work going on.

Alexander: You’re Pentecostal, as am I. What do you think we can do as American Pentecostals, as American evangelicals, to build relationships with Muslims and with Jews in order to help address the Israel/ Palestine situation but also to enhance interfaith dialogue here in the US? Dubois: Well, President Obama’s view is that while it’s easy to have conflict over theological issues—one’s view of heaven and hell, good and evil, etc.—it’s a lot harder to disagree about serving those around you. It’s a simple notion but one that he’s held for a very long time, dating back to his earliest days working with religious communities on the South Side of Chicago: that if we can use service and the common good as a magnet to bring people together from different religious backgrounds then we’ll build understanding and we’ll learn how to live with one another. We have really seen interfaith service—not interfaith dialogue—these are two distinctly different things—we’ve seen interfaith service as a

simple but powerful tool to address conflicts both here at home and around the globe.

We just kicked off something called the President’s Interfaith and Community Service Campus Challenge. This is an effort to bring college students of different religious backgrounds together on campuses across the country for a year-long intentional service project. At colleges that are mostly single-faith, we’re encouraging them to partner with their local houses of worship for a service project. So maybe Campus Crusade for Christ would work with a local synagogue and mosque to turn around a failing school.

Quite frankly, we were a little bit worried when we kicked this off—but maybe I shouldn’t say worried—hopeful, I should say hopeful!—about what the response would be from Christian colleges—and I say this as a Pentecostal, because interfaith is not something we often do—but it’s really been overwhelming. One institution that had a tremendous response was the Council of Christian Colleges and

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where there are earthquakes and floods, and we’ve said to them, “As you continue to work on how you engage religious minorities, one of the positive things you can do is work with them to respond to the needs after a disaster.”

Through that process they acknowledge President Obama reviews his genealogy, which was prepared for him by the Church of Latter Day Saints’ Family History that these Committee. From left: Senator Harry Reid, Joshua DuBois, LDS people exist, Church President Thomas Monson, and Elder Dallin Oaks in the Oval Office in July 2009. (Photo by Pete Souza) and they bring them into the fold and begin to work and have a conversation Universities—they were excited to get involved. The president has said from the beginning this is not about syncretism, it’s with them. It really speaks to the president’s trajectory on interfaith cooperation that is rooted in practical service that not about all of us somehow believing all the same things, but it’s about partnering together to heal the wounds of this meets human needs. We’ve found that to be the most effective route. world.

So we have over 300 campuses that are engaged in Komarnicki: Which policy goal or initiative are you this thing, and we thought we might get 50! We had a personally most passionate about? huge convening here in Washington. You should see the projects they’ve started. In fact many of them used 9/11 Dubois: I’m passionate about all of them, but I spend as a kicking off point and were out feeding the hungry and a lot of time on the president’s work on responsible faserving the homeless on Saturday, September 10, to begin therhood and really doing something to close the father this year, so interfaith service is really where it’s at. Sometimes it’s more titillating to delve into theological issues, but absence gap in our country. It’s something that doesn’t get talked about a lot, but there is a generational shift in terms we’ve found it’s more effective to begin with service and of dads being active and involved participants both in their we’ve applied that to the international context as well. We are working around the globe consulting with foreign govern- family and in American life. It’s something that has impacted ments on how they can reduce conflict among and between the president personally, me personally, and a lot of folks in the administration as well. While we’re not going to change faiths, and one of the things we encourage them to do is the rates of father absence immediately, with the focused find a practical goal on which different religious groups can attention of the president and other leaders we can have a work together. longitudinal impact, so we spend a lot of time working on For example, something the United States does really that. well is disaster response. Our faith groups come together— The president’s broad sense is that we need to talk a Mormons work with Southern Baptists work with the United lot more about the importance of the family. He’s candid Church of Christ works with Jewish organizations work with about the sanctity of sexual relations and sees how the Islamic Relief to help people rebuild their homes after a flood or a tornado, and they’ve been doing it since the late coarsening of our culture is affecting young people. That impacts young men becoming fathers before they’re ready, ’70s. It’s really a fascinating and effective subculture that which makes them more likely to be uninvolved fathers and no one’s really looking at. We’ve talked with the Chinese also impacts the demand for abortion. government and with our friends in Pakistan and others

32 PRISM Magazine

Komarnicki: I’d be interested in hearing what it was about Barack Obama that appealed to you initially, especially on a personal level as a Christian.

Dubois: Well, I did my undergraduate degree at Boston University and also became the associate pastor at a small Pentecostal church there. I went to policy school at Princeton, and I was doing a lot of praying about whether I wanted to go in a ministry direction or work in public policy.

I felt passionate about progressive issues and about those who are kind of left out—my grandparents were in the civil rights movement, and I just had a sense that we could do more both privately and in the public sector to help those who have been marginalized. I was also deeply passionate about my faith, and I didn’t find too many progressives who were able to combine the two—who would talk both about the policy they cared about and how their values motivated those policies.

I was doing an internship here in Washington, and it was at a restaurant that I first saw the then-State Senator Barack Obama give his 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention. He was talking about all the policies that I cared about, all the poverty-related things I cared about, but then he started talking about the awesome God that we could also serve in the blue states and the fact that you can be a progressive and still be motivated by your values and beliefs. So I thought, “I want to find out more about this guy.” I read his book, wrote him several letters, and eventually came in for a few interviews, and he brought me on in the early stages of his Senate office, so that was it. I didn’t have any type of connection or anything—just a lot of prayer.

Komarnicki: Aside from direct cuts to federal funding for social programs, what other public policies may undermine faith-based partnerships, and what is the likely impact of cuts on the capacity of FBOs to be effective partners?

Dubois: Well, the entire debate on Capitol Hill right now concerns me. I was talking with some Catholic friends the other day about how the Vatican sees what’s happening in the United States now, and the shift towards radical individualism is something that I think we haven’t seen in this country before. I mean the American people have always been a very independent people, but there’s also been a sense that we’re all in this together. The president believes that free markets have created more wealth than any other system in human history, and he believes strongly in the power of individuals to shape their own lives, but he also believes that government has a role to play and that we have a role to play in each other’s lives. But that sense of togetherness as a country appears to be eroding, based on some of the conversations we’re hearing on Capitol Hill.

I think it’s one of the most threatening things to faith-

based partnerships and FBOs—some of my more conservative friends don’t see it this way yet, but when you look at the long run, this shift towards radical exclusionary individualism is a dangerous thing for faith-based partnerships.

Komarnicki: What is one thing you love about our political system? And one thing you’d change if you could?

Dubois: One of the things I love about our political system, about the White House, and, quite frankly, about both parties on Capitol Hill is that there are just some really good, well-meaning people who work at these positions. That sort of gets lost in the debate that we see on television, but the vast majority of folks who go into public service do it because they care about this country. It has been a pleasure for me to work in the White House and with this president. My colleagues and I don’t agree on everything, and there are vigorous debates, but folks come in every day thinking that they’re going to do some good for our country. So that human capital is something I love, that sense that people are motivated by and large by the right thing so that we’re not walking around here questioning everybody’s motives.

As for what I’d like to do away with? The Joshua Dubois with Max Finberg (right), direcbureaucracy tor of the USDA Center for Faith-Based and around programs Neighborhood Partnerships, at a National Food Summit that focused on increasing and initiatives, access to nutrition assistance to the Latino Community. (Photo courtesy of US Dept of both in the Agriculture) executive branch and, quite frankly, in the Congress. A lot of bureaucracy is created by the laws that Congress sends us that we have to follow, which kind of slows things down. I think anybody will admit that it takes a while to start something new or change something that’s been there. I’m sure those are all for good reasons—checks and balances and so forth—but if you see something that’s not working it’s going to take a while to shift it, and that’s very frustrating sometimes.

Komarnicki: My last question is about the abortion reduction campaign. How much of your work is emphasizing healthcare education and economic approaches?

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And the president strongly believes in prevention. Now, he thinks it should be age-appropriate and that there should be parental engagement, but at the end of the day, he thinks that contraception is part of the solution here for those who choose to engage in sexual activity. We acknowledge that there’s going to be some disagreement there, but the president strongly believes in contraception as well.

Alexander: Any parting thoughts?

Joshua Dubois with PRISM Editor Kristyn Komarnicki and ESA Public Policy Director Paul Alexander.

Dubois: There’s been a lot of activity—but much of it hasn’t gotten noticed, quite frankly—to support women and children and specifically to support pregnant women and reduce the factors that put women in that position in the first place. One of the most important things that we’ve done is in the healthcare field, in the Affordable Care Act that President Obama signed into law in March 2010. The Pregnancy Assistance Fund offers $250 million over 10 years with the explicit goal of supporting organizations that help pregnant women bring their pregnancies to term. That’s the first time that that’s happened, and it’s a significant accomplishment.

Komarnicki: Why do you think we don’t hear about that in the media?

Dubois: Well, it’s certainly “Man Bites Dog,” isn’t it? But it doesn’t fit the narrative about this president, and so for some reason people have not spoken about that as much.

But it’s really significant work in terms of supporting pregnant women. The other thing that we’re really focusing on is our adoption system, ensuring that adoption and adoptive families are seen as just as valuable as any other family out there and really strengthening the institution of adoption so that it’s a viable choice for women. In order to make it easier, this president has increased the adoption tax credit, making it refundable. That means that, to a tune of around $14,000, if a family chooses to adopt, they can get a tax credit to help afford it.

We’re also galvanizing faith communities and community organizations to step up to the plate and adopt kids, adopt them out of foster care. When you work on foster care adoption you improve the entire system of adoption, because in the public mind people see adoption as a valuable and valid option for anyone. This is something we’re really passionate about, and we’ve been working with organizations from across the spectrum—for example, faith organizations and women’s organizations, but also I recently sat down with Focus on the Family President Jim Daly and those folks to talk about how we can connect on adoption as well.

34 PRISM Magazine

Dubois: I’d like to say that this president, in many ways, has really tried to lead with his values—values around fatherhood, values around supporting pregnant women, but more broadly, too, as with the American Jobs Act that’s focused on gaining people jobs with dignity. He’s also passed the healthcare bill that prevents people with preexisting conditions from being discriminated against anymore, so fewer people will die because they don’t have access to healthcare. These aren’t just policy issues, they’re values issues for him, and they have been for a long time.

Komarnicki: Those are pro-life issues.

Dubois: Well, you said it, I didn’t! But correcting the record on some of these things is important. No matter what decision people make at the end of the day, they should at least make the decision on the basis of truth. I was talking the other day with some colleagues from the Bush administration and was thinking about all the negative stuff that came out about President Bush, and much of it was not true. You can have legitimate disagreements on issues, especially on foreign policy, but I think Bush did his best to work for this country. And I would say, in the same way, President Obama is not only doing his best but has also been able to do some important things for our country.

I would hope Christians would look at the facts.

Paul Alexander is professor of Christian ethics and public policy at Palmer Theological Seminary as well as director of public policy at the Sider Center on Ministry and Public Policy.

Passionate about peace with justice, he is deeply involved in the Israel/Palestine situation. Kristyn Komarnicki is editor of PRISM Magazine and also coordinates ESA’s weekly ePistle and Christ & Culture blog. Her special interests include antipornography and trafficking education. Special thanks to Heidi Unruh and Sider Scholar Rebecca Hall for research help with this interview.

Learn more about the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships at WhiteHouse.gov/ administration/eop/OFBNP, where you can also download Partnerships for the Common Good, a toolkit for faith-based and neighborhood organizations.

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G lobal Positions Business as Ministry In the last several years, we’ve seen big business incorporating more and more into its rhetoric and practices the goal of serving the common good. Look at Noreen Hertz predicting the importance of “Co-op Capitalism,” or the impressive number of corporate CEOs who together have created “Conscious Capitalism,” a free-market philosophy that subjects profit maximization to higher purposes. The “B-Corporation” movement is gaining steam as an alternative way to create and register corporations with the specific intent of enshrining the interests of employees, consumers, the community, and the environment as its main stakeholders.

Impact investing—the creation of businesses that provide income, services, and jobs geared specifically to tackle situations and people in poverty or at risk—has blossomed. Multinationals have institutionalized the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) movement

and sustainable.

This “social entrepreneurship” approach has taken the civil society sector by storm. Everywhere you look NGOs are doing things like purchasing apartments with donated moneys and renting them out for a steady stream of income, running handicraft establishments and bakeries that employ women rescued from sex trafficking, delivering clean and affordable water to hundreds of thousands of people through forprofit businesses, making credit available through a host of micro-finance/ enterprise approaches to those who would start up and expand their businesses, and creating and supporting “fair trade” businesses and their use of market-based approaches to ensure that a larger share of the profits go to the producers.

Business and NGO partnerships are expanding rapidly, both in terms of funding as well as through joint business projects. The cooperative movement, still strong in some places, has inspired more recent and global movements like the “Solidarity Economy” and the “Economy of Communion” that put principles, values, and spirituality at the core of economic relationships and practices. Protestant mission agencies have jumped onto the “Business as Mission” bandwagon, using business as a way to maintain their presence in closed countries, tying together evangelism and good works, and preaching business as a ministry and calling on par with any other. The theology of business is receiving new attention, going beyond “marketplace ministry,” with books like Why Business Matters to God and the most recent papal encyclical asserting the deep, spiritual nature of business. In short, business is no longer held at arm’s length by those working for justice and shalom—quite the contrary.

We are faced, then, with this mix of new and old trends combined into a powerful force driving both the private sector and civil society to put busi-

Both the private sector and civil society are putting business at the heart of social change. into their practices. They have established their own internal watchdog departments, lobbied local governments to respect the rights of their citizens, and joined the UN-sponsored Business Leaders Initiative on Human Rights.

In short, businesses are focusing on double, triple, and quadruple bottom lines in which profit is no longer the only, or even the most powerful, game in town.

At the same time, on the “civil society” side, things are equally effervescent. “Do-gooder” organizations and individuals of all types, both secular and religious, who once spurned business as the root of all evil, are jumping into the business of business. These organizations and individuals are starting up businesses as a way to provide income for their projects and programs, to create jobs for the populations they seek to serve, and to deliver goods/ services and create social/spiritual change in a way that is more effective

36 PRISM Magazine

David Bronkema ness at the heart of social change and transformation. Why is this important?

Simply put, this movement could be used in unparalleled ways to change structures of power and oppression and promote justice. The business sector is showing that it is not a homogenous entity (it never was) bent on selfish gain, and the civil society sector is showing that it appreciates the fundamental role of business in social transformation. This opens up the door for people of goodwill in both sectors to strike alliances to break the political logjam created by the concentrated few who use the power of business and civil society to keep others in line and entrench their own interests to the detriment of the majority.

But these alliances need to be nurtured to reach their full potential, given the temptations that exist to use all of this to perpetuate “business as usual.”

This is where the church comes in. The spiritual nature, potential, and power of business needs to be preached in our churches in the North and the South, supporting business as a calling and ministry and holding Christian businesspeople accountable to submitting their business endeavors and associated political power to Christ. This will, hopefully, help combat the inherent prejudice that still exists against business among Christians struggling for social change and fling wide open the possibilities for the kind of alliances described above.

And in the midst of this, those of us who are serious about faith-based development work need to engage in prayerful discernment about how we can serve as bridge-builders between these two sectors, knowing that they can and will be used powerfully by God as they work in concert.

David Bronkema is chair of the School of Leadership & Development at Eastern University, St. Davids, Pa., where he also serves as director of international development programs.

A rt & Soul

Makoto Fujimura

Excavation by Willem de Kooning, courtesy of MOMA.org. Author photo by Julia Nason.

Excavating de Kooning Among 20th-century artists, Willem de Kooning stands as a pinnacle of achievement, one of the greatest of the “New York School” of painters who came to be known as Abstract Expressionists in the ’50s and ’60s. Yet the recent de Kooning retrospective at MOMA left me with a profound sense of unease, thanks to his masterful articulation of disfigurement, alienation, and discontent.

Born in 1904 in Amsterdam, de Kooning came to America as a stowaway, worked as a decorator and housepainter, and eventually found himself involved with the burgeoning creative scene in New York City.

De Kooning’s chief rival and friend was Arshile Gorky, the most eloquent and determined painter of all the Abstract Expressionists. It was Gorky who dared to rent a space near Union Square, call it his studio rather than his home, and commit to being a full-time artist. Inspired, de Kooning quit his design job and likewise took a leap of faith, bringing to life an art movement that we now, looking back, consider a decisive cultural force.

Of course, it would take many years before the market rewarded these artists.

Gorky never saw that day, committing suicide in 1948. De Kooning heard the sad news while teaching at Black Mountain College with Buckminster Fuller, Joseph Albers, John Cage, and other progressive thinkers. He began his seminal work, Excavation, at that time, and continued for two years; the MOMA exhibit appropriately highlighted the painting as de Kooning’s masterpiece.

Excavation thrills the eye, cutting in and out of the picture plane, in an “all-over” movement much like Jackson Pollock’s work. De Kooning’s

and wealth. For artists beginning their journey, de Kooning is still the northern star.

Given this, one might expect de Kooning’s journey to be one of triumph and celebration. But moving past the brightly lit walls of the MOMA retrospective, I sensed a spirit that was uneasy in its skin, a maestro dogged by deep fear. His works, especially those that capture moments of clarity, are moving precisely because they portray an authentic wrestling. He never quite reached the freedom that he sought in his life or in his art as he daily dealt broad brushstrokes to the blank canvas. Like the East Hampton light that bathed his boat-shaped studio, he floated in the culture of celebrity, carrying throughout his life a sense of urgency to succeed but always lamenting his inability to lay hold of lasting peace in his relationships or with his alcoholism.

For de Kooning, painting was an act of excavating himself, his tradition, and his dysfunctions. In his last days he produced colorful, forlorn canvases applied and repeatedly scraped away, done with the help of his assistants; as and yet de Kooning’s genius allows a he faded away to Alzheimer’s, he was visual synthesis of accumulation never unable to function at all except when holding a brush in his hand. Afflicted, de before seen in contemporary art.

His disfigured Woman series is a Kooning at the end could no longer exviolent sequence that breaks down both cavate his memory, but in between the the iconic tradition of portraiture and the empty white spaces remain the ghostly idealized image of woman. His expansive gestures of a genius. landscape pieces show de Kooning at his best, where his gestures glide on the surface and etch the visual space, simultaneously opening and anchoring Makoto Fujimura the space.

(MakotoFujimura.

De Kooning was amply rewarded com) is an artfor his paintings, which sold for millions ist, writer, and the toward the end of his career. Outliving founder of Internamost of his contemporaries, including tional Arts Movement Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, he (InternationalArtswas able to enjoy his accomplishments Movement.org). touch allows the painting to breathe, never closing off space or overworking the piece. The work takes figurative language from the melancholic garden images of Gorky, often mixing in forms from Old Masters’ paintings and even magazine advertisements. In a strange homage to Gorky, it synthesizes all that de Kooning knew about the world of visual imagery. Excavation is an exhumation, with multiple layers of paint

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Gather. Discuss. Repeat.

PRISM always gives you a lot to ponder. Want to go deeper? Want to share what you’ve learned with others and keep the conversation going? PRISM offers study guides designed to help you do just that. These are perfect for small groups, Sunday school discussions, college classroom use, or even personal study. Here’s a sampling of what we offer. You’ll find guides for all the issues, as well as the complete guide for this issue, online at EvangelicalsforSocialAction.org/PRISMStudyQuestions.

Photo: Noah Wolf

The Land Cries Out (page 10) Mexican community organizer Fernando Hernández invites Americans to “walk a mile in Mexican shoes,” mentioning the numerous border-crossings he has made into the US, several of which could have easily been fatal. Do you think what Hernández did was wrong, in light of his circumstances? If you were walking in his shoes, what would you do?

Twenty years ago, the World Bank made a loan in order to create a paper industry within Mexico. Rather than helping the country, it ended up destroying the livelihood of the indigenous Tarahumara and leading to a surge in the drug trade and cartel violence within Chihuahua itself. How can we, as Christians, ensure that our national and international governmental organizations do not carry out policies that harm local communities? How have policies such as NAFTA contributed to local poverty within Mexico?

Consider investing in the future of the Tarahumara people by supporting the work of Canyon Scholars, either individually or as a group. Because Canyon Scholars is a volunteer organization, 100 percent of scholarship contributions go to the students for books, supplies, school fees, and clothing. Go to CanyonScholars.org to learn more.

Mourn, Pray, Love (page 22) Jimmy Dorrell writes that “we want our leaders to help us change while simultaneously keeping things the way they’ve always been.”

Does this resonate with your group at all? In what areas does your church recognize a need for growth and change? Are you excited about this change, or do you feel a reluctance?

He also claims that “when we allow pain to speak to us ... the change produced is lasting.” What areas of your life are causing you pain now or have hurt you in the past? How have these experiences changed and shaped you? What encouragement can you offer to those suffering now?

After reading the book of Acts, Dorrell was convicted that the truest form of church community is one that fellowships, breaks bread, and shares its joy and pain together. Does that description match the community at your church? If not, what steps can you take towards nurturing genuine community?

As they talked and discussed these things with each other, Jesus himself came up and walked along with them.

Luke 24:15 from dialogue and true friendship?

Charles Amjad Ali states that “you cannot love your neighbor as yourself without knowing who they are.” How much do you and the members of your church know about nearby immigrant communities? What steps are you taking to love your Muslim and immigrant neighbors as yourselves? What steps might you take?

One of the points of this article is that “interfaith dialogue has to start not with theology but with a common pursuit of justice.” What injustices could Christians and Muslims in the US collaborate on at a national level and on a local level in your own community?

Pity or Empowerment? (page 5) In “Pity or Empowerment?” Tomi Lee Grover asks some hard questions about ministry approaches that depend on foreign markets— and the sympathy of others—to empower victims of human trafficking. What do you think of her assumption that most of these purchases are not only made out of pity but also fail to empower the people who make them? If you have purchased products produced under similar circumstances, what motivated you to do so?

Getting Schooled in Islam (page 26) Prof. Matt Palombo posits that tolerance of other cultures leads to two options—romanticization or criticism—neither of which lead to genuine cooperation or interaction. Discuss with your group some Grover mentions a case in Nigeria in which charitable acts actuof the ways that we in the US have criticized and romanticized Mus- ally crushed the local clothing industry through an influx of donalim cultures and faith. In what way do these stereotypes prevent us tions. What sort of foreign ministries or charities do you and your

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church support? If these involve donations, how do you make sure that these are helping, instead of harming, the people served?

on joy) in your life?

Sleeth writes that “hanging up clothes gives me a chance to hang Consider reading and discussing with your group Toxic Charity: out with God.” What distractions keep you from spending time with How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (and How to God? What would help you slow down and be able to listen for “the Reverse It) by Robert D. Lupton (reviewed by Grover on page 45). still, small voice”? Within your group, consider holding each other accountable for seeking out regular opportunities to seek quiet communion with God. Start small, setting a single goal for the comWhat Space Must the Church Occupy? (page 7) Craig Wong compares/contrasts the Occupy Wall Street protests ing week, then check in with each other the next time you meet. of today with the anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s. What parallels and differences do you see? Do you or any members of your I pray that your partnership with us in the group recall the political atmosphere at that time? faith may be effective in deepening your

understanding of every good thing we share for

Discuss in your group what the role of the church at large, and your the sake of Christ. church in particular, should be with regards to the Occupy movement. In what ways can you support the protestors? In what ways Philemon 1:6 do you feel a need to challenge them? Go to OccupyTogether.org/ Business as Ministry (page 36) actions to find the actions nearest you.

David Bronkema mentions movements, such as Conscious CapiOf Mammon and Men (page 8) and Who Owns America? (page talism and B-Corporation, that seek to put other aspects of busi48) Paul Alexander writes that “a wealthy person willing to give ness, such as the welfare of employees, above profit. Discuss away his or her wealth ... is a sign of the presence of God.” What some of the challenges and complications of such a strategy, as parallels to the Zacchaeus story have we seen in our world today, well as the benefits. Consider the implications in a troubled econespecially now with the Occupy movement? What have you heard omy as well as in a more prosperous one: In which setting does it about the so-called Patriotic Millionaire movement, and how does make the most sense? their message strike you? What about the “Layaway Angels” who have been popping up in stores at Christmas over the past couple Bronkema mentions several ministries that do evangelization, both nationally and internationally, through business. How do you feel years? about this strategy? What are some practical ways in which the Do you consider yourself to be wealthy? Who might consider you church can act as a watchdog to make sure that these companies to be wealthy? Visit Giving What We Can (bit.ly/4BvB3W) to see and ministries live up to their ideals and purpose? how your income compares to that of the average person. In what ways do you feel rich? In what ways do you feel impoverished? Excavating de Kooning (page 37) (Feel free to consider nonmaterial aspects of wealth and poverty Makoto Fujimura writes that Willem de Kooning portrayed in his paintings a sense of “authentic wrestling,” fueled by the contrahere.) diction between the success of his career and the failure of his personal life. What issues and contradictions are you Ron Sider mentions that together the wrestling with in your life right now? How do you exrichest 1 percent of US citizens own press those struggles to yourself and to those around more than the bottom 90 percent and you? that 15 percent of Americans now live below the poverty level. What can you What creative outlets do the people in your group enand your church do to address this situjoy? Can you envision any of those outlets working in ation? Can we as the body of Christ actandem or informing each other at all? cept a political climate that taxes least those who have most?

Watch with your group “Faith and the Arts” (bit.ly/uvdNJV), from the recent Inaugural Symposia on ChrisAlmost Amish (page 9) tianity and Culture at Gordon College in Wenham, Nancy Sleeth and her family were inMass. Makoto Fujimura is one of the panel speakers, spired by the Gospel of Jesus to make a along with singer/songwriter Sara Groves, and writer/ 180-degree turn in their personal habits director Todd Komarnicki. They speak poignantly and lifestyle. In what areas are you beabout the connections between art and faith, and ing challenged to change and grow right de Kooning is one of the artists they touch on. What now? What is at stake when you grow? question(s) would you ask the panelists if you had the What would it take to recast “sacrifice” chance to meet them? (emphasis on pain) as “gift” (emphasis

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K ingdom Ethics

Election Distresses By the time you read this column, the Republican primaries will have started. We can only hope that the level of rhetoric will have improved. As a Christian I have been suffering increasing distress at the Republican race to the bottom. I submit that the following patterns have been visible in Republican campaign and debate rhetoric and that each one violates a core Christian moral principle: Immigrant bashing. Any day appears to be a good day to club one another over the head with rhetoric about “illegals.” Mitt Romney is bashed for having “illegals” do his lawn work. Rick Perry is bashed for letting “illegals” go to school in his state. Herman Cain, before he dropped out of the race, joked about an electric fence to kill “illegals” at the border. Christian principle violated: human dignity. People who are present in the United States without legal documentation are still people. They are human beings, made in God’s image, precious to God. The rhetoric of “illegals” is noxious and offensive.

Mormon bashing. Rick Perry’s Baptist pastor friend Robert Jeffress attacks Mormons as a cult and suggests that no evangelical Christian should vote for a Mormon for president. This is simply imposing a religious test for public office.

It reinforces the terribly mistaken notion that what evangelicals should look for in a president is a member of their particular tribe, not the best person for the job based on credentials, experience, and policies. I have issues with Mormon the-

David P. Gushee

ology, sure; but Mormon of exactly how many people had been theology is absolutely ir- executed in Texas. At another debate, the relevant to qualification for audience offered its approval at the nopublic office. Baptists—my tion that we should “let die” a person own tribe—used to know who did not have health insurance by that, back in the day when his own choice. No compassion for imwe were barred from public migrants, those without health insurance, life because of our weird those on death row, the poor, the untheology. Now, however, employed, recipients of our foreign aid, far too many Baptists have and so on. Christian principle violated: forgotten their own history. compassion!

I could say so much more. (Example Christian principle violated: respect for religious liberty. six: climate science bashing.) Every deForeign aid bashing. mocracy needs well-contested elections.

The Republican candidates Those who hold public office need to be in a recent debate derided the value of held accountable for their performance. international foreign aid and promised to They need solid, thoughtful challengers cut or eliminate it. But this very small part who offer viable alternative policies. Lest of the US budget buys enormous good this article be taken as some kind of brief and goodwill around the world. Much of for President Obama, I assert that it is the money is channeled to ChrisEvery democracy needs welltian agencies like Catholic Relief Services that use it to save peo- contested elections. Those who hold ple from starvation and disease. public office need solid, thoughtful Christian principle violated: care challengers who offer viable for the poor. alternative policies.

Progressive taxation bashing. All announced Republican tax pro- precisely because of weaknesses in his posals would make the US tax code more leadership that the nation needs a viable regressive. Whether it is the recycling of alternative for serious consideration. How the flat tax idea or Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 great it would be if we had a contender plan, each would impose a higher per- (or more than one) who could challenge centage of the tax burden on the poor the president on the continued presand middle class and a lower percentage ence of our troops in Afghanistan, our on the wealthy. At a time when the gap involvement in Libya, our drone strikes between rich and poor is growing dra- around the world, our stagnant economy, matically, and when the social safety net our gridlocked partisan civil war, and our protecting the poor is more threadbare growing national debt.

“Iron sharpens iron,” the Bible says. than ever, these proposals threaten to worsen the situation dramatically. Chris- But there’s not a lot of iron visible right tians once played a key role in develop- now in our political class. We are all the ing that social safety net and in support- poorer for it. ing a progressive tax structure that asked proportionately more from the wealthy David P. Gushee is dithan from those below them in income. rector of the Center for But Ayn Rand, libertarianism, and the selfTheology and Public interest of the wealthy are on the march.

Life at Mercer UniverChristian principle violated: economic jussity, Atlanta, Ga., where tice. he is also a professor Compassion bashing. At one deof Christian ethics. He bate, Republican presidential candidate is the author or co-auRick Perry expressed no hesitation what- thor of a dozen books, including The soever over his record of presiding over Future of Faith in American Politics: hundreds of executions. The debate audi- The Public Witness of the Evangelical ence whooped and hollered at the news Center (Baylor University Press, 2008).

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O ff the Shelf Addiction and Virtue

by Kent Dunnington InterVarsity Press Reviewed by Harold Dean Trulear I recall vividly a conversation with a colleague about what he thought to be the sad state of campus ministry. He especially eschewed the “soft overemphasis on personal piety at the expense of intellectual rigor” by deeming their gatherings “milk and cookies with Bible study.” When I suggested that groups like InterVarsity did not fit his characterization, he snidely proffered, “Yes, milk and cookies, Bible study and a book!”

After reading one of InterVarsity Press’ latest offerings, Kent Dunnington’s Addiction and Virtue: Beyond the Models of Disease and Virtue, I can only respond that if a campus ministry consisted of milk, cookies, the Bible, and this book, there would be no doubt as to that group’s intellectual rigor. This well-reasoned philosophical treatment of addiction offers a strong corrective to the polarized positions on addiction as either a moral choice or a disease; it does so in two ways—by rigorous analysis of the weaknesses of both views and by the introduction of Thomas Aquinas’ notion of “habit” as a mediating category.

Herein lies the challenge for the reader. One must patiently move through the detailed philosophical argument in order to understand that Dunnington’s assertion of “addiction as habit” does not treat habit in its current popular definition but as a theologically and philosophically robust term. Dunnington describes habit as “a relatively permanent acquired modification of a person that enables the person, when provoked by the relevant stimulus, to act consistently, successfully, and with ease with respect to some objective.” (Yes, the language is that academic throughout.) Having read his full argument, I question his use of the word “successfully.” Dunnington insists that addiction represents an attempt by an individual to provide meaning, order, devotion, and purpose in a postmodern world absent of these things. In that regard, he calls the addict an “unwitting prophet” whose quest can instruct others who live content with soft relativism and personal comfort.

So what about “sin”? Yes, Dunnington does eventually move to contextualize addiction within this theological category, but only after insisting—rightly, I believe—that the term be removed from popular mischaracterizations of sin and recover its “robust” biblical and theological heritage. Indeed, the reader must be patient with the author, who waits until more than halfway through the text before introducing specifically theological terminology and argument. As the author explains, this is not “a self-help book on addiction,” nor an effort “that will help the church better respond to addicted persons.”

Rather, the ultimate takeaway for the informed Christian who faithfully wades through the intricately woven yet accessible argument is what the church “has to learn from those intentional communities in which recovery is happening.” This includes “treating its members as repentant sinners,” which teaches dependence on God and not self-righteousness; developing friendships that require “that its members enter into certain kinds of relationships that are struc-

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tured toward a particular end,” which “lives out the Aristotelian insight that one of the chief purposes of friendship is ‘training in virtue’”; and recognizing that “transformative friendship requires physical proximity and the sharing of considerable amounts of time together.” As a Christian in recovery, I found myself nodding in quiet assent when I considered the “necessity” of such practices in AA in my own life and how difficult it has been to find them practiced in the church before finding my current congregation.

Additionally, churches need to become more theologically solid with respect to their doctrine, worship, and relational life, for the sake of those folks who struggle with addiction and for its own health and well-being. To that end, the addict indeed becomes an “unwitting prophet” whose journey can benefit the whole of the church.

It was hard work making it through this text with my impatient, addicted personality. And it was worth it, but it definitely put me in the mood for some milk and cookies!

Harold Dean Trulear is associate professor of applied theology at Howard University School of Divinity in DC, director of the Healing Communities Prisoner Reentry Initiative at the Philadelphia Leadership Foundation, and a regular columnist for PRISM.

God in a Brothel

by Daniel Walker InterVarsity Press Reviewed by Laura Lederer

Fifteen years ago when I came to Washington, DC, to work at the policy level on stopping human trafficking, there were only a few lone feminists battling what we knew was a multibillion-dollar global industry and criminal enterprise. The odds of us succeeding in eradicating it were next to none. I remember remarking that feminists alone would not be able to stop this new slave trade. I knew we needed to multiply our numbers by thousands, hundreds of thousands, to make a difference, and I sensed that evangelicals and other faith-based organizations could become a true ally in the fight in which we were engaged. After all, we all believed in the ultimate dignity and worth of every human being.

If I sent up silent prayers in those days, it was for partners in the struggle to stop slavery. Today, those silent prayers certainly have been answered. Thousands, indeed tens of thousands have joined a new global abolitionist movement. Hundreds of new organizations have sprung up around the world to address particularized forms of human trafficking. Working within a framework of prevention, prosecution, and protection/assistance, we have done a decade of work drafting and passing laws, creating pro-active law enforcement entities, and creating shelters and comprehensive sets of services tailored to trafficking victims.

And yet with all this new activity, curiously we still seem to remain, to a great extent, at a Trafficking in Persons 101 level. The same

Book Reviews anti-slavery speeches by ambassadors, the same slides in the same education and awareness trainings, even the same stories in hundreds of new books on human trafficking give those of us who have been in the fight for what seems like forever a sense of bone-weary doggedness as we design yet another program, another project, another intervention.

It was with this skepticism that I came to Daniel Walker’s book, God in a Brothel: An Undercover Journey into Sex Trafficking and Rescue. I expected yet another set of victim stories recounted for no real purpose. What I found instead was an astonishingly detailed account of the protected places and spaces where one set of human beings recruits, transports, harbors, buys, and sells another set; where young women and children are commodified and used—by the traffickers and pimps, by the customers, by the community in collusion—all for profit of one kind or another by the users.

Walker’s stories of rescue are inspiring and courageous, and in this book the reader travels with him on missions to Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States as he infiltrates trafficking rings, enters underground criminal conspiracies, and rescues hundreds of females, saving the lives of those trapped in slavery.

I found his detailed descriptions—for example, of corruption in communities, word of a raid spreading “faster than fire,” alerting those at work in the black market of bodies to scatter before law enforcement arrived—to be true to life.

Even more courageous, though, is Walker’s willingness to examine his own motivations, to describe to us his temptations and his hubris, and to show us the personal toll this work took on him and on his (now ex-) wife, family, friends, and community. Quoting Nietzsche, who says, “He who fights with monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster,” Walker summons us when doing this work to remain vigilant at every moment to a centeredness of the soul.

With all the ego and empire-building in the current anti-trafficking movement, and in an epic battle against principalities and powers, it is perhaps the hardest thing to do and perhaps the most important of all.

Laura J. Lederer was Senior Advisor on Trafficking in Persons in the Office for Global Affairs for the US Department of State from 2001 to 2009. Today she is president of Global Centurion Foundation (GlobalCenturion.org), an international organization that fights human trafficking by focusing on demand.

Reader tip #1: PRISM jute bags are a great way to store or transport your 2012 reading pile! Go to PRISMmagazine.org to order yours.

Reader tip #2: Your books can open doors for prisoners!

Donate used books to prison libraries by going to BooksThroughBars.org or PrisonBookProgram.org.

Haiti After the Earthquake

by Paul Farmer PublicAffairs Reviewed by Tim Høiland

Few would argue with the fact that what followed Haiti’s devastating earthquake in January 2010 was one of the most widespread showings of sympathy and humanitarian support in recent memory. What is up for debate, however, is why rebuilding efforts haven’t made more progress as we near the quake’s two-year anniversary.

In Haiti After the Earthquake, anthropologist and medical doctor Paul Farmer affirms that this outpouring of compassion indeed saved countless lives, but he also addresses the deeper problem of what he calls the “history of the present illness”—a history marked by the scars of slavery, foreign occupation, dictatorship, and a slew of disasters both natural and otherwise. Complementing Farmer’s writing is a collection of essays by several others—many of them Haitian—which allows for an illuminating range of perspectives.

Farmer, who cofounded the medical organization Partners in Health, writes as one who has lived and worked in Haiti for nearly three decades. His main argument is that Haiti’s woes are directly tied to its crippled public sector and that a strengthening of that sector is precisely where Haiti’s hopes for a brighter future lie.

The scope of the disaster, Farmer writes, put Haiti and the entire humanitarian community in “uncharted territory,” making it “hard to know how to prioritize anxieties.” He writes, therefore, with measured humility, though he is critical of the so-called “experts” who descended upon Haiti with what proved to be unfounded confidence in their solutions. Further, he argues, Haiti has long been a “republic of NGOs,” with foreign entities filling a leadership vacuum that has done little to strengthen the country’s already weak public sector.

Farmer recognizes that it is far easier to identify a problem than to offer a solution, so he devotes an entire chapter to the nation of Rwanda, where Partners in Health also works and where he and his family now live. Not long ago, following the genocide of 1994, Rwanda was considered more or less a lost cause, not unlike Haiti today.

It has since been transformed, however, and while foreign agencies and governments have played important roles, it has been the work of Rwandans themselves—led by an ambitious and disciplined government especially committed to massive job creation—that has truly helped Rwanda rise from the ashes.

Because Farmer is a special envoy to the UN, his voice is routinely heard in high places. But here, as elsewhere, he seeks to “echo and amplify” the voices of those who were lost on that fateful day as well as the voices of those who remain. Through a project called “Voices for the Voiceless,” Farmer has worked to represent the perspectives of ordinary Haitians and then to share them with donor governments and agencies in hopes that decisions made at high levels will truly align with the interests of real people on the ground.

Some humanitarian workers and generous citizens may bristle at

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“There’s so much potential for real and apparent misunderstanding here.” Owen tells the reader that she continues to visit John, but she does not reveal whether she considered alternatives such as introducing others to him for visits.

Through Owen’s honesty about her sometimes painful path from working for to being with, we are invited on a journey of self-reflection about our own engagement with those we view as “the other.” While Tim Høiland is an advocacy journalist, international development worker, the description of being with affirmed my own experiences, I was left and a regular contributor to PRISM. He blogs about the intersections of wondering whether we are doing enough. After years of vigils in Durham, the organizers continue to be mostly Caucasian, while those who faith, development, justice, and peace in the Americas at TJHoiland.com. have been murdered are mostly African American and Hispanic. How do we assure that being with does not become a fancy term for being “accepting of” the status quo?

Living Without Enemies

by Samuel Wells and Marcia A. Owen Michele Braley is a trained facilitator of Victim-Offender Dialogue in InterVarsity Press Crimes of Severe Violence and is the program manager for a restorative justice program that offers low-level juvenile offenders an opportunity to Reviewed by Michele Braley repair the harm caused by their behavior through a community process As an advisory board member of a min- instead of court. istry for parents who have lost a child to murder or whose child is imprisoned for Abraham Kuyper murder, I looked forward to learning from

by Richard J. Mouw the experiences of Samuel Wells, profesEerdmans sor of Christian ethics at Duke University, and Marcia A. Owen, executive director of the Coalition for a NonvioReviewed by Stephanie Summers lent Durham, in their book Living Without Enemies: Being Present in the Midst of Violence.

As a college student I was transformed The authors provide a thought-provoking framework for examinby encountering the “Reformational ing how we engage with others: working for, working with, being with, worldview” inspired by Abraham Kuyper, and being for. Working for is the often automatic, and often ineffeca worldview that animates the campus tive, response to a problem. One person has a need, while the other ministry of the Coalition for Christian person has the skills, availability, and willingness to help. These skills Outreach. At their annual Jubilee Conferare honed and then made available only in specific circumstances. As a social worker, I saw myself in the authors’ critical observation that ence, I became acquainted with the political implications of Kuyper’s most college-educated people “assume that this is the way it is done: thought through Jim Skillen, then president of the Center for Public You become very good at what you do, and you spend the rest of your Justice. But it was Byron Borger of Hearts and Minds Books who introduced me to the engaging style of Fuller Theological Seminary Presilife doing it for people.”

Much of the book is devoted to being with, which is more evolved dent Richard Mouw, through the gift of a book as we packed up after than working with or working for and “breaks down the separation that the conference. Like Kuyper’s own books, Mouw’s Abraham Kuyper: A assumes we can know the answer without needing to enter into the Short and Personal Introduction is a book designed to be shared among suffering person’s experience.” It was the discovery of the power of friends.

The book was written as an introduction for the Kuyper-curious, being with that led Owen to the creation of a vigil to honor each person murdered in Durham. Being with is not easy, since it requires one and the title describes the brevity of style but not the depth of ento be present without answers and despite fear of the unknown. The counter with the 19th-century Dutch leader. Mouw asks his reader to consider Kuyper as “an important guide,” helping address the ways authors compel us to be present in spite of the difficulty.

This book is intended to challenge assumptions and make the “evangelicals have been a prominent presence in public life in recent reader uncomfortable. My discomfort while reading about working for years,” acknowledging that “we have not been known for having a cowill stay with me and push me to continue to rethink how I engage herent theological-philosophical perspective on our efforts to influmy community. There were other times when my gut-level discomfort ence the policies and practices of the larger society.”

Making judicious selections, Mouw narrows his text to two slim left me wondering if it was one of the author’s actions that was actually amiss. In an illustration of touch as a component of being with, sections. The first includes a Wikipedia-size version of Kuyper’s life Owen describes her visits with a prisoner named John, who reached and a multiple-chapter overview of his “theology of culture,” includout to her when he had no one to visit him. John wanted a hug during ing Kuyper’s thinking on the redemptive implications of the cultural their visits, since prison gave him few opportunities for physical touch. mandate for all of life, “pluriformity,” sphere sovereignty, political Owen wonders if she should continue the visits and tells her husband, authority, the rights and duties of government, and the place of the the idea that NGOs have done long-term harm even while doing immediate good, but we should resist the urge to react with either pride or despair. As one working in the field of relief and development, I believe this book provides an important opportunity to acknowledge the mistakes of the past and to change course, when necessary, to ensure that Haitians truly have the opportunity to build back better.

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Book Reviews church. The chapter “Politics and Creation” affirms the pursuit of public-justice norms, as summarized by Mouw, “that there is something about government, when it is functioning properly, that fits nicely into God’s basic creating design for human life.” Mouw’s albeit abbreviated graphic on medieval and secular perspectives on God’s relationship to the cultural spheres, presented in contrast to Kuyper’s, provides a clear depiction of these ideas.

In section two, Mouw updates Kuyper’s thinking for our day, including a chapter on “Kuyper for Evangelicals.” In a final chapter, Mouw carefully explicates Kuyper’s work on Islam, offering personal counsel on the importance of Muslim-Christian dialogue born out of “deep convictions in a pluralistic world.”

I highly commend Mouw for presenting Kuyper as a man with feet of clay, candidly acknowledging that Kuyper was wrong (e.g. his racial views) and inconsistent (e.g. his lack of ecumenical practice despite commitment to church pluriformity). This is a refreshingly honest contribution to make in a small book about Kuyper, and a gift to those of us who think he has important things to say, as it speaks directly to the legitimate objections that have limited wider consideration of Kuyper’s thought.

In this American political moment, where there is seemingly much cause for losing heart, Richard Mouw’s introduction to Abraham Kuyper presents a hopeful vision to be received by communities of believers seeking to demonstrate graceful Christian citizenship.

• Strive to empower the poor through employment, lending, and investing, using grants sparingly to reinforce achievements.

• Subordinate self-interests to the needs of those being served.

• Listen closely to those you seek to help, even to what is not being said—unspoken feelings may contain essential clues to effective care.

• Above all, do no harm.

Possessing a wealth of practical experience on the ground, Lupton exposes the unintended negative consequences of good intentions—his criticism of short-term missions and “vacationaries” (missions tourists) will be a wake-up call for many. He also analyzes a sample of so-called developmental programs that promised empowerment but instead resulted in dependency. “Decades of free aid from well-meaning benefactors has produced an entitlement mentality and eroded a spirit of entrepreneurship and self-sufficiency,” writes Lupton. “The outpouring of more aid, though necessary to preserve life in a time of disaster, is ultimately worsening the underlying problem.

Humanitarian responses unaccompanied by disciplined development strategies become a curse on a country.”

Lupton asks readers to think about their long-term commitment to change, and to measure results not by the number of clients served but by the return on investment of those individuals and communities that are truly changed and empowered. “What is required to transform deteriorating neighborhoods is geographically focused vision with Stephanie Summers is the CEO of the Center for Public Justice (CPJustice. measurable goals over extended time.” org). Among many books Byron Borger has shared with her over the years, Perhaps the greatest challenge lies in turning around a historic the first was Mouw’s creation-to-redemption-narrative, When the Kings ministry of benevolence and transforming its volunteers and the comCome Marching In (Eerdmans, 2002). munity to think differently about the services it provides. While the author creates a framework for reassessing good intentions and for carefully considering the impact of our efforts, he will leave some readers wanting more concrete help in applying the information.

Toxic Charity His insights are excellent but broad—“Innovation and risk-taking are

by Robert D. Lupton at least as important to the world of compassion as to the world of HarperOne business”—and they necessarily leave readers to extract and distill the details for their own particular setting. My guess is that many readers Reviewed by Tomi Lee Grover will be challenged and excited by his ideas, and then eager to seek his In Toxic Charity: How Churches and Chari- expertise as a hands-on consultant to guide their ministry’s transforties Hurt Those They Help (and How to Re- mation from merely hopeful to truly helpful.

One area I’d like to see strengthened in the book is a biblically verse It), Robert Lupton writes of the paradigm shift he has passionately pursued based discussion of the value and dignity of the individual and work. through community development over Many churches build their whole foundation on Matthew 25 and focus the past four decades. Examining the history of benevolence, he tells exclusively on crisis ministries/intervention, but they need to develop stories that demonstrate how the good intentions of ministries and in- a better sense of how to to approach compassion through the theolodividuals have often had an inverse effect on the people they served. gy of dignity. The ideals of development and Lupton’s Oath of Service More importantly, he considers how to reverse the tide of hurtful help. will make more sense for these church as they begin to understand Starting with his Oath for Compassionate Service (similar to the how Christ’s ministry was rooted in his recognition of each person’s Hippocratic Oath, which establishes a standard for medical profes- intrinsic value—when Jesus looked at people his first thought was for sionals), Lupton proposes eight hallmarks of compassion for those who they were and who they were created to be, rather than for their engaged in mercy ministries. Key to understanding Lupton’s work, need. May God grant us the grace to go and do likewise. these principles include: Tomi Lee “T.L.” Grover is an educator with TraffickStop (TraffickStop.org), • Never do for the poor what they have (or could have) the capacity an anti-human trafficking initiative. She wrote the opinion column in this issue, on page 5, examining pity vs. empowerment in ministry. to do for themselves.

• Limit one-way giving to emergency situations.

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M usic Notes Why We Shout Like We Shout The new documentary Rejoice and Shout begins with gospel music star Andraé Crouch reminding us why Scripture says God is the only referent for the word awesome. “If we really heard God’s voice,” he says, “we’d be reduced to juice; the vibrations of his voice would reduce us to liquid. So we have to use other people to speak his word because [otherwise] we wouldn’t be able to stand it.” The voices of those other people— especially their singing voices—get inside us and not only express God’s word for us but also influence the way we share God’s word with others. That is how traditions get started, and gospel music is nothing if not tradition.

The first singing voice you hear as Don McGlynn’s film gets underway is that of a young member of the large Selvy Family, likely no older than 8 or 9, offering up a highly melismatic, rubato rendition of “Amazing Grace” that sounds anachronistic coming from the mouth of a child. Then you realize that she has heard the women in her family, young and old, sing this way all her short life. As Selvys sit all around her beaming, this child with eyes closed, head tilted back, is calling up something from her soul that those other people have helped her discover, something they themselves nurtured, something God put there first.

Gospel music artists took in all that others had to give and then passed it on to others in audiences across the country, performing in churches, schools, theaters, concert halls, and opera houses from the 1900s on. Ira Tucker Jr. remembers the “warmth and camaraderie” of the gospel circuit, where people would walk right up to the front just to shake the hand of a singer. “And it was okay! There was never the separation where the artist was way above the audience. It was always, ‘We came from you.’”

Others who came from the people they sang for include Tucker’s father, lead vocalist for the Dixie Hummingbirds;

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J.D. Buhl Brother Joe May, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and Gertrude Ward with her daughters Willa and Clara; R.H. Harris and the Soul Stirrers, who gave us Sam Cooke, and shouters and screamers like the blind boys from Alabama and Mississippi, who would get into singing competitions across the country, where “the winner was always the audience”; the Swan Silvertones, featuring gospel’s first falsetto lead, Claude Jeter; Mahalia Jackson and other women who grew up listening to Bessie Smith records but whose religious sensibilities would not allow them to sing the blues; “the greatest student of gospel,” Reverend James Cleveland, who began as a song hawker for composer Thomas A. Dorsey and went on to found workshops in major American cities in order to pass on to choirs and directors what he had learned the hard way; the Staple Singers, whose exciting lead, Mavis, is still tearing up freedom songs; and the Hawkins family of “Oh Happy Day” fame, who sailed gospel music through the ’70s and ’80s, bringing us to Crouch and the Winans, the group Crouch introduced to the nation in the ’90s. All of these are familiar names to PRISM readers, and all appear in Rejoice and Shout.

But this is not a movie to read about; it is one to see. It will bring together into a cohesive knowledge all the bits of information and historical impressions about gospel music that readers carry around with them. The story of gospel music is the story of black music; and the story of black music is the story of American music in all its forms.

Soul icon Smokey Robinson is on screen early to remind us that plantation sing-

ing is “the root of all American music.” It is when slaves were Christianized and “pushed into” the once-European religion of their masters, says historian Jacquie Gales Webb, that “they brought their own rhythm with them,” including the call and response of the drum, and the music that we have come to know as gospel began. Bill Carpenter, author of the gospel encyclopedia Uncloudy Days, places the first record of this emerging style, “Gabriel’s Trumpet” by the Dinwiddie Colored Quartet (recorded in 1902), as preceding, “by at least two decades, any of the really major African American blues and jazz artists that we’re familiar with.” The RCA Victor 78 is the first known “gospel record,” but one that sounds very much like a barbershop quartet, since “gospel music as a genre did not exist at that time.”

The full realization of this genre into “a unique, innovative art form”—through the refined harmonies of the Golden Gate Quartet and other jubilee singers, the “swing and bounce” of Mahalia Jackson’s crossover to white audiences, the shake-a-leg choreography of the Ward Singers, and the hip-hop dance moves of Kirk Franklin—is a story of praise and faith as expression of both stellar talent and daily life, the answer to why we sing the way we sing, and why we shout the way we shout.

J.D. Buhl currently teaches eighth grade English and literature at the Casady School in Oklahoma City. He contributes regularly to PRISM and Valparaiso University’s The Cresset.

H ands & Feet

Sarah Withrow King

Shining in the Ashes When Dr. Cliff Matousek left Haiti after a two-year teaching stint in the early ’90s, he could not get the story of the Good Samaritan out of his mind. “The whole country of Haiti seemed like the man who was robbed, beaten, and left at the roadside to die,” says Matousek (pictured above). Knowing the obstacles faced by most Haitians—systemic poverty, malnutrition, epidemic disease, soil erosion, lack of medical care and educational opportunities—Matousek and his family founded Literacy for Haiti (LFH) and returned to the mountain village of Damye in 1997 with the goal of teaching residents how to read in their own language. Despite a full-time teaching job in the US, Matousek says, “I read the circumstances of my life and realized that God had given me the language and a glimpse of what impoverished life looked like for a reason.”

Fifteen years later, the organization has administered more than 5,000 microloans, built houses for destitute widows, paid for surgeries to restore sight to a blind man, and provided vitamin treatments that have allowed a young girl to walk again. Through prayer and teaching, the organization has also brought many Haitians into relationship with Christ. To restore the health of the land, they have held seminars in soil conservation, composting, and tree planting, and have seen new forests grow up where there were once barren fields. For annual tuition of $16, the village school teaches 300 first through

sixth graders and is well on its way to being economically self-sustaining.

Matousek insists he’s not a missionary, but rather “God’s delivery boy,” attributing the modest economic and educational improvements experienced by the people of Damye to God’s faithfulness and to the extraordinary leadership of Emanyel Filius, who heads up LFH’s work in Haiti. “LFH really started because of the prayers of the Christian mountain people themselves and from the vision of [Filius].

They have great faith in Christ, and, to be sure, they have never had anyone else in whom to trust. When I arrived that first day, it was as though they expected me.”

A college professor, Matousek spends five weeks every summer in Damye, often with his wife, Bobbi. The rest of the year Filius administers LFH building and loan programs, water projects, and agricultural initiatives, serves as the principal of the local school, pastors the local Church of God, and has planted three other churches on the mountain. He is also responsible for all malnutrition and vaccination programs in the zone as the region’s health agent. Matousek calls him “easily the greatest man I have ever met and he has no idea how great he is.”

When the Matouseks travel to Haiti, they live as villagers do, in small huts with no power, running water, or plumbing. An increased number of tin roofs evidences the slight improvement in wealth that Damye has experienced as a result of the economic and relational investments. Wealth, however, is not the only thing that has increased. “Faith in Christ is becoming more prevalent on our mountain,” says Matousek. “There is a greater sense of hope in many of the people we work with, because they can see that although most of the world has forgotten them, God has not.”

Despite the daunting physical challenges, Matousek says that “the greatest challenge is in mindset, overcoming

the North American attitude that we know how to fix a culture and that everyone should just follow the plan from A through F and it will all be fixed.”

Communication, cooperation, and, most importantly, prayerful attentiveness to God’s will are what develop trust and allow progress to be made.

Want to help? “We would be honored if you would join the mountain people as they continue to pray for help,” says Matousek. The microloan program, which loaned more than $45,000 to 480 borrowers in 2011, with a payback rate of more than 97 percent, needs more funds for the estimated 500 people who are waiting to enter the program. Another way to participate is in the Empowering Kids Project, which builds relationships between schoolchildren in Haiti and the US by partnering with US schools to sell necklaces created by Haitian children.

The Matching Funds Grant program allows grantors to bridge the gap between the low tuition cost and the school’s operating expense.

“One day all of our work will be judged as by fire”—says Matousek. “Every home for a widow built in his great name, every loan given and repaid in his great name, every little girl healed, every child sent to school, even just a cup of cold water given for the sake of Christ will shine in the ashes.” (For more information, please visit bit.ly/tX6Tvv.)

Sarah Withrow King is a misplaced Oregonian pursuing an MTS at Palmer Theological Seminary, where she is also a Sider Scholar at the Sider Center on Ministry and Public Policy. She loves her husband, toddler son, and four pets, and enjoys her vegan lifestyle and nonEnglish rap music.

Hands & Feet profiles extra/ordinary Christians who embody the gospel.

Send your nominees to KKomarni@eastern.edu.

47

R on Sider

Who Owns America?

The richest 1 percent of Americans own more of the country’s wealth than the bottom 90 percent. That’s who owns America.

The statistics on income show the same extreme inequality. (Wealth refers to one’s total accumulated resources, such as property, stocks, bonds, cars, etc.; income refers to money received from wages, investments, etc.)

The top 1 percent of tax filers earn more income than the bottom 50 percent of the total US population. In 2004, the richest 0.1 percent (that is one out of every 1,000 Americans) had more combined pre-tax income than the poorest 120 million. That means that out of every 1,000 Americans, one single person had more income than 385 people on the bottom.

The American economy grew substantially over the three decades from 1979 to 2007. But almost two-thirds of the total increase in income went to the richest 10 percent. Between 2002 and 2007, two-thirds (two of every three dollars) in income growth in the whole country went to the richest 1 percent (yes, that is 1 percent!).

Not since 1928, just before the Great Depression, has the wealth and income of this country been shared so unequally.

Please don’t suppose that I think biblical faith demands equality of wealth or income. Choices rightly have consequences, and some economic inequality is inevitable and a necessary outcome of our God-given freedom to make our own choices. But what level of inequality is too much? One crucial way to judge whether a given level of inequality is good or bad is to ask whether it helps or hurts the people at

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the bottom. If the poorer members of society are losing ground as inequality escalates, then that growing inequality is morally wrong. And that is exactly what has happened.

The poorest 20 percent of Americans actually had less income (7 percent less) in 2009 than 30 years before, in 1979. The median (i.e. half are higher, half are lower) annual income for a man working full-time, year-round in 2010 was less in 2010 dollars than in 1973! During roughly that same time, the average annual income of the richest 1 percent jumped by $700,000 per person. Is it fair for the richest 1 percent to enjoy a $700,000 increase per person while the average Joe is losing ground?

Poverty is also growing in our nation. For all but two of the last 10 years, the poverty rate has increased.

In 2010, over 15 percent of all Americans were living in poverty—that’s 46 million people!

Escalating executive pay illustrates the growing inequality. In the late 1960s the average CEO received about 24 times as much compensation as the average production worker. In 2009 it was 185 times as much.

This escalating inequality is not just bad for the people on the bottom. It is also bad for the economy as a whole. A recent study by the International Monetary Fund has argued persuasively that it was precisely the enormous inequality that peaked in 1928 and 2007 that was a major cause of both the Great Depression in the 1930s and the “Great Recession” from which we still suffer the effects.

A comparison of two periods in our history underlines the fact that this kind of inequality is not at all necessary for economic growth. The American economy grew steadily in the 30-year time periods of 1950-1980 and 1980-2010.

In fact, it grew faster in the first period.

Who benefited from these two periods of growth? It depends on which one you’re talking about. In the earlier period everybody benefited. The lower 80 percent of Americans actually enjoyed a higher percent increase in

income than the top 20 percent, and the poorest 20 percent benefited the most! Their income increased 116 percent while the richest 5 percent enjoyed a smaller (86 percent) increase.

As we just saw, the situation was radically different in the second set of 30 years. The poorest 20 percent lost ground from 1979-2009. The middle three-fifths gained a little, but the top 20 percent (especially the top 5 percent) gained by far the most.

A comparison of these two periods of American history shows that the kind of escalating inequality experienced in the last 30 years is not necessary— certainly not for economic growth.

These statistics plus much more (including footnotes!) are in my new book, Fixing the Moral Deficit: A Balanced Way to Balance the Budget, to be released by InterVarsity Press toward the end of February. Growing federal debt is a serious problem. We dare not continue, year after year, putting current expenditures on our grandchildren’s credit cards.

But it would also be immoral to balance the budget on the backs of the poor. Some prominent politicians today want to reduce the deficit primarily by cutting programs that help and empower poor people. At the same time they want to give more tax cuts to the rich.

That is flatly wrong!

In my new book, I argue that any fair solution must deal honestly with the astonishing inequality in wealth and income that exists today. Fortunately, polls show that a substantial majority of Americans think that one of the major problems in our country is that more and more wealth is owned by just a few. I think they are right. And there are good ways in our democracy to change it!

Ron Sider is president of ESA and professor of theology/public policy at Palmer Seminary of Eastern University.

PRISM Vol. 19, No. 1

January-February 2012

Editorial Board Miriam Adeney Tony Campolo

Luis Cortés Richard Foster G. Gaebelein Hull

Karen Mains Vinay Samuel

Tom Sine Eldin Villafane

George Barna Rodney Clapp Samuel Escobar William Frey Roberta Hestenes John Perkins Amy Sherman Vinson Synan Harold DeanTrulear

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A Publication of Evangelicals for Social Action The Sider Center on Ministry and Public Policy www.EvangelicalsforSocialAction.org Palmer Theological Seminary of Eastern University All contents © 2012 ESA/PRISM magazine.