MARK RUFFALO THE SUMMER READING GUIDE
F E AT
OF MONSTERS AND MEN SLACKTIVISM WHO IS YOUR JESUS? THE FOSTER CARE CRISIS A.J. JACOBS &
CHRIS HEDGES
REL EVANTMAGAZINE.COM
GOD. LIFE.
PROGRESSIVE CULTURE.
IS
SANTIGOLD THE SAVIOR OF POP?
HOW TO SURVIVE A BAD ECONOMY
OBAMA & GAY MARRIAGE
HINT: DON’T PANIC
WHAT DOES HIS PASTOR THINK?
THE ROOTS GO DEEP—REALLY DEEP— FOR THIS INDIE-FOLK-ROCK BAND PRINTED ON RECYCLED PAPER
RELEVANTMAGAZINE.COM
ISSUE 58 / JULY_ AUG 2012 / $4.95
HOW TWLOHA SPENT $1 MILLION
2 / RELEVANT_JUL/AUG 12
The new album from duo Rev. Vito Aiuto,pastor of Resurrection Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn, and wife Monique, is good medicine for the 21st century malaise! "Vito Aiuto's unusual arrangements of classics like 'I Know My Redeemer Lives' lend a worshipful spirit to the entire project." - Relevant
Magazine
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IN SYDNEY AUSTRALIA Hillsong College will equip you with the necessary principles and tools to lead and impact in every sphere of life. With a specific focus on raising and training local Church leaders, the college is strategically placed within the life of Hillsong Church, in order that every student will apply the skills they have learned in the class-room in a practical ministry setting within the Church. Specialising in Pastoral Leadership, Worship Music, TV and Media, Dance and Production, with Pathways that include Youth, Children’s, Event Management, Pastoral Care, Church Ministry or Social Justice.
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“Questions are not scary. What is scary is when people don’t have any.”
The university that combines ministry training with 24/7 prayer and worship.
GOD. LIFE. PROGRESSIVE CULTURE. RELEVANT magazine — July/August 2012, Issue 58 The Avett Bros. is pronounced exactly like it sounds.
PUBLISHER & CEO | Cameron Strang > cameron@relevantmediagroup.com Editorial Director | Roxanne Wieman > roxanne@relevantmediagroup.com Managing Editor | Ryan Hamm > ryan@relevantmediagroup.com Associate Editor | Alyce Gilligan > alyce@relevantmediagroup.com Editorial Assistant | Heather Croteau > heather@relevantmediagroup.com Copy Editor | Christianne Squires > christianne@relevantmediagroup.com CONTRIBUTING WRITERS: Ruth Haley Barton, John Brandon, Penny Carothers, Tyler Charles, David Johnson, Carl Kozlowski, Joshua Lujan Loveless, Jonathan Merritt, Matt Mikalatos, Dan Miller, Jessica Misener, Dean Nelson, John Pattison, David Roark, Kevin Selders, Matthew Sleeth, Laura Studarus, John Taylor, Kristin Tennant, Jamie Tworkowski Design Director | Chaz Russo > chaz@relevantmediagroup.com Graphic Designer | Jonathan Griswold > jonathan@relevantmediagroup.com Production Designer | Christina Cooper > christina@relevantmediagroup.com Producer | Chad Michael Snavely > chad@relevantmediagroup.com Digital Development Director | David Barratt > david@relevantmediagroup.com Web Producer | Lin Jackson > lin@relevantmediagroup.com Web Production Designer | Steven Linn Photographer | Julia Cox > julia@relevantmediagroup.com CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS: Miho Aikawa, Erin Algiere, Anthony Bacigalupo, Felipe Cantillana, Peter Chee, Michael Cogliantry, Crackerfarm, Elsie Larson, Denny Renshaw, Sean Thomas Director of Accounts and Partnerships | Michael Romero > michael@relevantmediagroup.com Account Manager | Wayne Thompson > wayne@relevantmediagroup.com Marketing Manager | Calvin Cearley > calvin@relevantmediagroup.com Circulation & Fulfillment Director | Stephanie Fry > stephanie@relevantmediagroup.com Circulation & Customer Service Coordinator | Sarah Heyl > sarah@relevantmediagroup.com Fulfillment Coordinator | Victoria Hill > tori@relevantmediagroup.com Finance Manager | Maya Strang > mstrang@relevantmediagroup.com Communications Manager & Executive Assistant to the CEO | Theresa Dobritch > theresa@relevantmediagroup.com Systems Administrator | Josh Strohm > joshs@relevantmediagroup.com ADVERTISING INQUIRIES: CONTACT Michael Romero and Wayne Thompson at (407) 660-1411
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TWO RAILS ON A TRACK BY C AMERON S TR ANG
A
6 / RELEVANT_JUL/AUG 12
ONE OF THE EASIEST WAYS TO GET RID OF PAIN IS TO GET YOUR FOCUS OFF YOURSELF.
Cameron Strang is the founder and CEO of RELEVANT. Connect with him on Twitter @CameronStrang or Facebook.com/ CameronStrang.
R E L E VA N T M A G A Z I N E . C O M
uthor and pastor Rick Warren tells the story of a remarkable moment that happened to him about a decade ago. In the same year, he got two pieces of life-changing information: His book, The Purpose-Driven Life, had become the top-selling book in the world—bringing him wealth, fame and unprecedented influence. And then, exactly while that was happening, his wife, Kay, was diagnosed with cancer. Like most of us, Warren had always seen life as a series of ups and downs. You have some good times, then you have some tough times. But having those two things happening at the same time permanently altered his perspective. “I used to think that life was hills and valleys—you go through a dark time, then you go to the mountaintop, back and forth. I don’t believe that anymore,” he says. “Rather than life being hills and valleys, I believe it’s kind of like two rails on a railroad track, and at all times you have something good and something bad.” The simultaneous existence of good and hard in our lives is something we all know to be true, but it is so rare to see it talked about vulnerably by leaders. In our cover story on groundbreaking indie-folk band the Avett Brothers, they tell their fascinating journey of faith, making music and achieving breakout success. And then upright bassist Bob Crawford talks about the struggle and heartache they’re going through right now: His child is currently battling a brain tumor at St. Jude’s. So while the band is in the midst of releasing a highly aniticipated new album, Crawford is having to do media interviews from the hospital where his child is fighting for her life. Two rails on a railroad track. “No matter how good things are in your life, there is always something bad that needs to be worked on,” Warren says. “And no matter how bad things are in your life, there is always something good you
can thank God for. You can focus on your purposes, or you can focus on your problems.” And that’s the key: In the midst of either season, what is your focus? For the Avett Brothers, the heartache of illness has brought the band—their families— closer together and closer to God. It’s changed them, and their music, forever. For the Warrens, Kay’s battle brought a perspective to success that grounded the family and forever altered the course of their ministry. (As an update, Kay is in fantastic health today.) Obviously, the “other track” in the railroad doesn’t have to be something as hard as cancer in your family. We have a Slice on page 12 that mentions the incredibly high unemployment rate for recent college graduates. In one moment, they’re celebrating the triumph of completing college, and in the next they’re stepping into job uncertainty in a terrible economy. (We tackle that on page 62, too.) Two tracks on a railroad. Personally, my wife and I have faced a lot of challenges in the last six months as well. While it hasn’t been anything as hard as cancer, it can be easy to get overwhelmed by the circumstances. But in the midst of difficulty, some exciting things are happening in our lives as well. The key is keeping the right focus. We’ve all been there. We’ve all had the moments where we questioned God and couldn’t see the greater good in the midst of a hard time. And we’ve all come through those periods and looked back—now knowing what was next—and probably see the situation in a totally different way. The challenge is always trying to live with a hindsight perspective in the foresight position. It’s not because we need to know what the outcome is, but just knowing that God is good and He is in control. He’s our provider. He’s our healer. He’s our comforter. He’s our strength. No matter what life throws at us, He’s what we need. Life is never as good or as bad as it seems. So the challenge is, no matter what kind of season you’re in, to realign your focus and get it off yourself. “If you focus on your problems,” Warren says, “you’re going into self-centeredness, which is ‘my problem, my issues, my pain.’ But one of the easiest ways to get rid of pain is to get your focus off yourself and onto God and others.” Warren has lived this. The Avett Brothers are living this. And we’re all living this, to some degree. Life is a journey full of unexpected turns. Thankfully, there are always two rails to keep us on track.
[F N IERXSTT] W O R D ]
FIRST WORD
[ M AY/ J U N E 2 0 1 2 ]
DONALD MILLER Having my favorite author on the May/June cover was exciting enough. But having Penny Carothers write the article about him? You made one Blue Like Jazz fan very happy to go to her mailbox. I have a new kind of appreciation for Donald Miller after reading.” DANIELLE TERRANCE — Louisville, KY
The slice about how desk jobs affect health was terrifying [“Your Job Will Kill You— After It Makes You Fat,” May/June 2012]. I don’t know if I should thank you for including it yet, but I think I’ll finish reading this issue on the treadmill. —ANDREA HERNANDEZ / Denver, CO
Though I found myself siding with Lisa Sharon Harper, I thought both the Democrat and Republican voices in “Broken Politics” [May/June 2012] made thoughtful contributions to the current conversation of faith and politics.
@annegim: The @donaldmiller article was great from Penny’s perspective.
[LE T TERS]
FEEDBACK
@itsdaleconnelly: Great q’s asked by @kristyalpert in @RELEVANT to Anthony Bourdain. Would you rather fly or read minds???? @JamieHoward: I love great thought- and conversation-provoking articles like this one regarding charity via @RELEVANT!! @Nickmahlstadt: Love the #FirstWord by @CameronStrang in the latest @RELEVANT ... the art of looking back, cringing & moving forward.
not only a necessity, but a calling—and that it’s not as difficult as I sometimes think. —JORDAN DELK / Los Angeles, CA
I was so encouraged by Lauren Winner’s article in the May/June issue [“Why I am (Still) a Christian,” 2012]. It really got me thinking about my own reasons for being a Christian and if they have evolved over time. —PARKER PRYCE / Boulder, CO
I love you guys but just noticed you don’t have a Kindle edition. You were one of the reasons I bought the Kindle Fire. —CAMERON BARTLETT / Worchester, MA
—ANN FALWELL / Stuart, FL We have a feeling there are going to be a lot of those conversations this year.
We’re waiting to get on 7” tablets like the Fire until they can offer the same interactive experience as our iPad edition. We’ve gotten spoiled and don’t want to deploy a static magazine.
I am a recent subscriber to RELEVANT and a huge fan of your podcast. I serve in China and throughout Southeast Asia, so your iPad edition is a great resource I don’t have to pay extra baggage weight fees for. Thanks! —JOSHUA WU / Beijing, CHINA
—JULIA A. JENSEN / Bothell, WA
[G O T F E E D B A C K ? F E E D B A C K@ R E L E VA N T M A G A Z I N E . C O M , F A C E B O O K . C O M / R E L E VA N T O R T W I T T E R . C O M / R E L E VA N T.]
8 / RELEVANT_JULY/AUG 12
@calliknight: #NowPlaying Don’t Move by @Phantogram. Grateful to @RELEVANT for the introduction. @brett_morrison: My wonderful parents got me an iPad for graduation. Favorite app so far, hands down, is @RELEVANT. @InJoyPhoto: I just read in @RELEVANT that Pushing Daisies is on Netflix. I may have to go get Netflix instead of buying cable.
R E L E VA N T M A G A Z I N E . C O M
I have to admit, I didn’t think “Going Green for the Right Reasons” [May/June 2012] would be an interesting read. But it was an informative reminder that creation care is
I just finished the old school version of “10 Ways to Find Your Calling” [May/June 2012]. (By old school, I mean I actually read the magazine printed on paper.) GREAT article—a concise description of things you should be looking for if you are trying to figure out what to do when you “grow up.”
@krystalvalle_: Had a dream somebody asked me about the difference between Christianity and Mormonism, so I pulled out the newest @RELEVANT issue. :) #win
RELEVANTMAGAZINE.COM / 9
[SLICES]
SLICES A BIMON T HLY LOOK AT LIF E, FA I T H & CULT UR E
[ B Y T H E N U M B E R S ]
76 % 18- to 24-year-olds who say modern-day Christianity “has good values and principles”
64% Millennials who say modern-day Christianity is “anti-gay”
WHAT DO WE THINK OF OURSELVES?
Twentysomethings weigh in on this generation
A
10 / RELEVANT_JULY/AUG 12
more tech-savvy than their parents, but even that was seen as a neutral fact. And although 6 percent of 18to 24-year-olds say their generation is more openminded and tolerant than their parents’, the same percentage say the Millennial generation is worse off and faces more challenges. Many of those challenges are tied to career problems and the economy. A full two-thirds of Millennials say they are somewhat or very worried about finding a successful or rewarding career. And 76 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds say jobs and unemployment are the most critical issues facing the country. But not everything is entirely pessimistic, as 40 percent of Millenials believe they will be better off than their parents—an isolated bright spot in a generation that seems fairly discouraged.
73 % 18- to 24-year-olds who believe the U.S. economic system favors the wealthy
51 % Millennials who believe having an abortion is “morally wrong” * ”A Generation in Transition,” Public Religion Research Institute and the Berkley Center at Georgetown University
R E L E VA N T M A G A Z I N E . C O M
recent study asked younger twentysomethings how they feel about their generation. The short answer? Most 18- to 24-year-olds don’t like themselves—or their peers—very much. Only 19 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds have a positive view of their generation compared to their parents’. Forty percent of these Millennials judge their own generation more negatively than their parents, while another 40 percent is neutral on the topic. A surprisingly high number of them don’t think their generation is any better than previous generations. These negative responses are mostly related to the attitude of Millennials. For instance, the highest differentiation reported by Millennials was that they are
SLICES
CU RRENT [SLICES]
[ M I S C ] In Europe, scientists have created an autonomous robot that can detect water pollution much quicker than normal testing methods can.
10 things that are happening right now
10.
Windows Is Cool Again?
This summer might mark
The best part?
Microsoft’s full return to critical
The robot
acclaim as an operating system.
looks like a fish ... A man recently
9.
Video Game Football You could waste time
watching pre-season football. Or
survived a trip
you could just play Madden NFL
over Niagara
’13 and NCAA Football ’13. In the
Falls, becoming
video game versions, starters
just the fourth
play longer than one quarter.
person in
DEGREES OF UNEMPLOYMENT
FLAVOR OF THE BIMONTH
history to survive the experience
8.
Pitchfork/ Lollapalooza
In July and August, Chicago yet
More than 53 percent of under-25 college grads are underemployed
without
again becomes the center of
any form of
the music universe.
In case you weren’t already painfully aware of today’s terrible job market, the good folks at Northeastern University have put facts to it for you. Turns out half of college grads are now jobless or underemployed. In 2011, college graduates were more likely to be employed as servers, bartenders and food-service helpers than as engineers, physicists, chemists and mathematicians. In all, 53.6 percent of bachelor’s degree-holders under the age of 25 either had no job or a job that couldn’t exactly be considered full-time—let alone, you know, a career. In case you were wondering, those with degrees in zoology, anthropology, philosophy, art history and the humanities are least likely to find jobs, while those with more practical degrees, like accounting and teaching, are more employable. Unfortunately, the prospects aren’t getting a ton better, either. Only three of the 30 occupations projected to have the most openings in 2020 will require a degree. The most available job options? Driving a truck or caring for the elderly.
protection … Scientists say there may be so much debris surrounding Earth that it will be difficult to send spacecraft into orbit. Hopefully the solution involves lasers ...
7.
Jesus Culture, Coast to Coast
Jesus Culture brings its huge, amazing worship conference to New York and L.A.
Who Will Watch the Watchmen? Again? Unpacking the prequels to the best comic ever
12 / RELEVANT_JULY/AUG 12
and storytelling have never been the same. But now, DC Comics is trying to make a series of prequels to Watchmen. This summer, seven Before Watchmen series will launch, expanding the backstory of many of the original characters. The series will be the work of four writers, all trying to live up to the mass critical acclaim of the original. Because, you know, prequels worked out so well for Star Wars.
6.
Lawless This summer’s “maybe
it’ll win an Oscar in March” movie. WATCH The trailer for Lawless relm.ag/58-lawless
R E L E VA N T M A G A Z I N E . C O M
Every artistic medium has at least one thing no one would ever consider changing. No one would remake The Godfather. No one would think of repainting the Mona Lisa. And no one would dare write a sequel to The Great Gatsby. Watchmen used to be on that list of untouchables. The legendary comic series deconstructed superheroes; and comics, movies
there are those who seek knowledge in order to serve;
That is Love. — Bernard of Clairvaux
At Northwest, you won’t gain knowledge out of curiosity nor vanity. You will learn out of love, so you can Carry the Call. You will learn... to serve. Master of arts international care & coMMunity DevelopMent
Master of arts social entrepreneurship
Prepares students for socially and globally responsible service and leadership in meeting the needs of the poor and oppressed.
Teaches students to use innovative business management skills to solve social problems and create sustainable, effective organizations.
For a complete list of Northwest University graduate programs, please visit northwestu.edu/graduate.
877.453.5327 northwestu.edu/relevant
RELEVANTMAGAZINE.COM / 13
SLICES
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Sony has officially begun work on a movie about Apple founder Steve Jobs. They’ve hired Aaron Sorkin (The Social
tricks on a trampoline and get medals for it. It’s basically everything you tried to do (and got yelled at by your parents for) as a kid. They’re just good at it.
The largest annual
gathering of nerds, this also is comic books, video games and
also tapped
TV. Well, the nerdy ones.
4.
NFL Training Camps Start studying now, and
act as “tutor”
you’ll be ready for fantasy
for the film’s
season this year.
story ... Yankee Candles now makes scents for men, like “Riding Mower” and “2x4.” Because, you know, sandalwood and cedar are
This is not the family reunion game in your grandma’s backyard. This is a serious, do-or-die death match. It’s like a way-faster tennis, except you sort of think, “I could do that.” Newsflash: You totally can’t.
Comic-Con 2012
the new epicenter for movies,
Wozniak to
Badminton
5.
writer and have
founder Steve
On Friday, July 27, the XXX Olympiad will begin in London. While most Americans’ attention will be on track and field, gymnastics and swimming, there are some other crazy sports you really shouldn’t miss. And since every event will be streaming live online, you don’t have any excuse not to catch them.
10 things you need to know right now
Network) as
Apple co-
5 WEIRD OLYMPIC SPORTS THAT RULE
FLAVOR OF THE BIMONTH
[SLICES]
[ M I S C ]
so girly ...
3.
Breaking Bad Perhaps the most intense
drama on TV is back with the first half of its final season. What consequences await Walt?
CBS is going to air a show about
2.
The Dark Knight Rises
Fencing
Groupon.
Even if you hate comic books and
Even though this might seem very hoity-toity, fencing is actually really fun to watch. It’s incredibly graceful, and it’s amusing to try to figure out the rules. Oh, and did we mention they fight with swords? Because they totally do.
Expect to hear
movies, you need to see this.
more about laser hair treatments than you ever have ... Your mom is on Facebook.
Handball
In fact, 72.5
The best way to explain this sport is to say it’s like water polo but with no water, played at the speed of soccer. Plus, there are, like, 20 goals per game for each team, so it’s really fun to watch. Pro tip: You’ll sound smart if you talk about how the Denmark squad is a good, dark-horse pick.
percent of
Yes, technically this is a gymnastic sport. But don’t try to pretend it wasn’t an awesome idea to let people just do
14 / RELEVANT_JULY/AUG 12
with Internet
1.
2012 Summer Olympic Games in London
Will Michael Phelps continue to
access are on
dominate? Will Usain Bolt break
Facebook ...
world records? Will Bob Costas ever age?
Equestrian Jumping
A new survey
Don’t get sucked into jumping’s boring cousin, dressage. Jumping is all about horses weaving around, over and between crazy obstacles. It’s strange how tense it is, since the horses often clear the jumps by mere inches.
has found only
WATCH
49 percent
London 2012 trailer
of Americans
relm.ag/58-
are saving
olympics
anything for retirement ...
R E L E VA N T M A G A Z I N E . C O M
Trampoline
mothers
RELEVANTMAGAZINE.COM / 15
SLICES
CU RRENT
Payphones are one of those relics of the past that still haven’t quite disappeared. In many major cities, they still dot the landscape, though mostly as gross monuments to Sharpie graffiti. One company hopes to change that. Starting this summer in New York City, City24/7 will replace payphones with touchscreens that give real-time information about neighborhoods and local activities. It’s neat, but not helpful if you need to, you know, make a call.
[SLICES]
Payphones Get Touched
[ M I S C ] Apparently, if you can find Bigfoot in Texas, you can also legally shoot him … Judges on the New York Court of Appeals have declared that it is not illegal to view child pornography, but it is illegal to possess it or create it. Which basically means degenerates can look at it on their computer, just not save or print the file ... A man in Nebraska has legally changed his name to Tyrannosaurus
Go to Church With a Mouse As technology has expanded, so have the ways churches try to reach people. One such way is via an “online church” or campus that allows people to experience a service—and the number of online participants seems to be growing. LifeChurch.tv reports that six years after its initial launch, their “Church Online” site now has more than 100,000 unique visitors each week, from 120 different countries. The effect of online church remains to be seen, but it inarguably offers the distinct advantage of managing your fantasy team during church. Thanks, tabbed browsing!
Rex. Related: Nebraskans are awesome … If you have
R ELE VA N T M AG A ZINE.COM
[ Q U E S T I O N O F T H E D A Y ]
any wish to be Internet
WHY GUNMEN DON’T BELONG IN A YOUTH GROUP
16 / RELEVANT_JULY/AUG 12
the room carrying guns. They put pillowcases over some of the students’ heads and put them in a van. The students were driven to a youth leader’s house, where the youth leader was apparently assaulted by the gunmen. Then came the reveal: The entire event was staged to teach a “lesson” about the persecution of Christians. Since at least one student was (understandably) terrified and bruised her legs during the fake assault, prosecutors are now investigating the church for child endangerment and imprisonment.
place to start is Wikipedia. And
Ever owned an unusual pet? Keith Stacey: Iguanas and, for a week when I was 8, a leech.
now there’s a firm that will make you a viable page for only $300 ... Fewer teen girls are having sex. Fifty-seven percent of girls aged 15-19 say they have never had sex,
Jeff Turner: Does a corgi count? Its like a dog without elbows or knees.
A Scripture you just don’t get? Ashley Stewart Platé: Any verse where God hardens someone’s heart.
The fiction book that’s had the most influence on you? Verena Unsin: Guess I have to go with Pride and Predjudice. *girlyblush* Austin Campbell: The Fall of Lucifer. It got me into reading.
compared with 49 percent in 1995 ...
To get in on future #QOTD action, follow @RELEVANT on Twitter and like us on Facebook.
R E L E VA N T M A G A Z I N E . C O M
Most youth groups play dumb (but harmless) games, give kids too much soda and junk food, and host a once-ayear lockout that results in exhausted leaders and lots of teenage relationship drama. In short, most youth groups don’t do a whole lot to court controversy, beyond an occasional TP incident. But one youth group in Pennsylvania is under fire for its, shall we say, unique approach to spreading the Gospel. On a spring Wednesday night, the youth group was having its weekly meeting when two men burst into
famous, the
RELEVANTMAGAZINE.COM / 17
SLICES
P O LITICS
HE SAID, HE SAID
AGE MATTERS
TOPICS DU JOUR IN COURTING THE YOUNG ADULT VOTE
POLITICS + RELIGION PROTESTANTS
OBAMA 43% - ROMNEY 48% CATHOLICS
“I think young voters
OBAMA 51% - ROMNEY 45%
in this country have
BLEAK EMPLOYMENT PICTURE
to vote for me ... 50 percent of kids coming out of college today can’t find a job or can’t find a job which is consistent with their skills; how in the world can you be supporting a president that
[SLICES]
2012 ELECTION CHEAT SHEET NO RELIGIOUS IDENTITY
OBAMA 67% - ROMNEY 23% The exception, according to Gallup, is among black voters. Forty-eight per-
18-29: OBAMA BY 35% 30-49: OBAMA BY 5% 50-64: OBAMA BY 4%
cent of black voters are very religious
STUDENT LOAN DEBT
and only 12 percent are nonreligious, but 89 percent support Obama. (Gallup, April 25, 2012, “Religiousness a Key Factor for Romney and Obama Support”)
has led to that kind of
HIGH GAS PRICES
economy? ... Young people will understand of opportunity and jobs.” —Mitt Romney “When a big chunk of every paycheck goes towards loan debt, that’s not just tough on you ... The sooner you can start buying a house, that’s good for the housing industry. The sooner you can start up that business, that means you’re hiring some folks. That grows the economy ... This is something
65+: ROMNEY BY 12%
6 IN IO registered to vote say they will definitely vote.
shoes.” —Barack
(Gallup, April 26, 2012, “Young Voters Back
Obama
Obama, but Many Aren’t Poised to Vote”)
of the adult population
of the likely voter population
(Barna Group, April 4, 2012, “Election 2012 Preferences: Political Polarization Among U.S.
Probable Definite
33% 15%
(Barna Group, April 4, 2012, “Election 2012 Preferences: Political Polarization Among U.S. Faith
urging Congress to keep rates stable.
Segments”)
SKEPTICS BUT NOT
CHRISTIAN
II% 7%
OF THE VOTER POPULATION PREFER PRESIDENT OBAMA 70% TO 30% OVER ROMNEY OF THE VOTER POPULATION PREFER PRESIDENT OBAMA 2 TO 1 OVER ROMNEY
S W I N G E R S Non-evangelical born-again voters, which make up slightly more than 25 percent of the voter population, could be the deciding factor in the 2012 election, according to Barna Group. Today, President Obama has 44 percent of their vote—a decline from 2008. All it would take is an additional 6 to 8 points from that group to win him a second term. However, Bill Clinton was the last Democratic candidate to draw a majority of the non-evangelical born-again voting bloc.
I8%
Decrease in Obama’s approval rating among voters under 30— down from 75 percent in 2009 to 57 percent now, according to Gallup. (Cited by Huffington Post, April 25, 2012, “Younger Voters Shift From Obama”)
R E L E VA N T M A G A Z I N E . C O M
CHRISTIAN EVANGELICALS 7% 10%
38%
percent. Both Obama and Romney are
RELIGIOUS
We’ve been in your
14%
ROMNEY
interest rate—from 3.4 percent to 6.8
56% of those aged 18 to 29 who are
OBAMA
Proposed July increase to student loan
RELIGIOUS
about firsthand ...
18 / RELEVANT_JULY/AUG 12
IOO%
of those aged 18 to 29 say they are registered to vote.
Michelle and I know
Faith Segments”)
CANDIDATE PREFERENCE
AMONG LIKELY VOTERS
that ours is the party
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TAKE YOUR ONLINE LIFE OFFLINE 5 ideas for using your Internet pursuits to enrich your “real life” BY KRISTIN TENNANT
W
ith a few tweaks and an intentional mindset, you can re-engineer your online diversions in a way that adds meaning and richness to your offline life.
1. Rent, Watch, Discuss
Yes, Hulu is the best thing since sliced bread. But try cutting back on your solo video wanderings by three or four hours a month, and use that “reserved” time to start a monthly movie party/club at your house. (Bonus: popcorn!)
2. The Pinterest Potluck
If your virtual food life is way more adventurous than the actual meals you cook, plan a potluck. Everyone has to bring one new recipe they found on Pinterest. (Bonus: new, tested recipes.)
3. Community Organizing
If you’ve built a strong local Facebook platform, use it to organize an event and bring people together in real life. For example, host a cheese-tasting party, a book swap or a giant kickball game. (Bonus: meeting your neighbors, finally.) [ M I S C ] Spirit Airlines is now charging customers $100 if they show up at the gate with
4. The Great Digital Debate of 2012
Use Twitter to generate topic ideas (e.g., “What Christianese do you find most problematic?” or “Organic—yay or nay?”). After a few days of digital dialogue, take it deeper in a coffee shop, bar or home. (Bonus: true, two-way conversation.)
an unpaidfor carry-on bag. Look for a significant uptick in the sale of cargo
5. Spotify Dance-Off
Create a shared Spotify dance playlist. Set a date for a party, and tell everyone to start adding music for the ultimate DJ-ed dance night. (Bonus: burn calories.)
pants … The British health system has teamed up with Facebook so users of the social network organ donors. It’s expected to make it much easier for people to register ...
20 / RELEVANT_JULY/AUG 12
In the second quarter of 2012, JPMorgan Chase & Co.—also known as the only bank that survived the recent Wall Street debacles relatively unscathed—reported over $2 billion in losses. The losses were the result of controversial hedge trading originating in the company’s little-known Chief Investment Offices—primarily through outsized bets done by trader Bruno Iksil, often referred to as the “London Whale.” If you don’t know what any of that means, that’s OK. What’s really important is you know Iksil’s other nickname was Voldemort. No joke.
R E L E VA N T M A G A Z I N E . C O M
can register as
THE DARK LORD OF $$$
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CU RRENT
[ M I S C ] Some theater owners are considering relaxing the ban on texting during movies, at least for some screenings. Yeah, because it’s definitely not distracting when someone is hunched
What Is the Most Believing Country?
over a glowing
A new study from the the University of Chicago looks at how people in different countries believe—or don’t believe—in God. The survey measured belief in theism (a basic belief in God), not any particular religious belief. The study found that the most religious nation in the world is the Philippines. Specifically, 83.6 percent of people in the Philippines say they “know God really exists” and “have no doubts about it.” And 93.5 percent of Filipinos say they “believe in God now and always have.” The United States also ranks fairly high in belief in God. A vast 80.8 percent of Americans say they have always believed in God and continue to do so, and 60.6 percent say they don’t have any doubts about their belief. To be fair, that lower number probably doesn’t include a number of Christians who doubt their faith on occasion, as doubt is hardly a foreign concept in Christianity. Inversely, the least Christian countries are almost all in Europe. Former Communist regions like the Czech Republic and the eastern portion of Germany mostly don’t believe in God at all. In fact, 59.4 percent of people in eastern Germany say they don’t believe in God and never have. Only 3 percent of Americans say they don’t believe in God—an indication that political history matters.
in the Czech
rectangle in a theater ... In what has to be one of the boldest robberies in history, thieves Republic dismantled and stole a 10ton bridge ... An Australian billionaire has announced plans to build a Titanic replica that will be ready to sail in 2016. News flash: It’s not like the ocean has stopped “building”
ANIMALS LIVE HERE
22 / RELEVANT_JULY/AUG 12
A Russian man named I.V. Pugach is claiming he owns the copyright to the goatee and says that anyone who is non-Russian and has a goatee is committing genocide ...
When Ana Carolina Reston died at the age of 21, she was 5'8" and weighed 88 pounds. The Brazilian supermodel’s death, due to complications from anorexia, sparked a debate about the fashion industry’s standards for models. Six years and several model deaths later, publishing conglomerate and owner of Vogue, Condé Nast, has set in place new guidelines for its models’ age and weight, pledging to not knowingly work with models under the age of 16 or those who appear to have an eating disorder. How will they enforce these new rules? In addition to checking IDs, Condé Nast has said they will encourage mature models to mentor younger girls and will mandate healthy food options on set. They say they will encourage designers to “rethink the unrealistically small sample sizes of their clothing.” And Jonathan Newhouse, the company’s chairman, says it marks their “commitment to the health of the models who appear on the pages and the wellbeing of [Vogue’s] readers.” Critics, though, complain the guidelines don’t go far enough, as they don’t keep the publisher from doing any photoshopping or post-production work to make models appear skinnier—thus continuing to promote an unrealistic body image for women and young girls everywhere.
R E L E VA N T M A G A Z I N E . C O M
Have you ever been on a walk in the woods and asked yourself if there might be any smoky shrews nearby? Or been bit by a suspicious-looking spider and wondered just how poisonous it was? Well, fear no more. There’s (soon to be) an app for that. When it’s finished, the Map of Life project, led by Yale professor Walter Jetz, will show the location of every known plant and animal. Users can search for species and see all the places in the world those species live, or they can input their location and find out all the different types of animals native to that area. This is but a small step toward preventing— or at least protecting ourselves during—the impending Chimpocolypse.
icebergs ...
Are Vogue’s New Rules Enough?
RELEVANTMAGAZINE.COM / 23
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Q &A
OBAMA, GAY MARRIAGE AND THE CHURCH Joel Hunter, President Obama’s pas toral counsel, responds to the president ’s endor sement of same-sex marriage After President Obama announced his support of same-sex marriages in May, many Christians were outraged. Joel Hunter is the pastor of Northland Church in Florida and a spiritual advisor to Obama. We asked Hunter how he felt about the president’s announcement and how the church should approach the legalization of gay marriage. You’ve been a spiritual advisor to President Obama for several years. How have you seen his thinking on this issue undergo an evolution?
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At first, I felt a sense of mourning. Gay marriage is not just a citizens’ rights issue to me; it is the redefinition of the core institution of our world. Though I was not completely surprised, I was apprehensive at the speed at which this change is happening without much discussion or preparation. Think of it—thousands of years of marriage defined in every society as [being] between a man and a woman, now being redefined in our country over a few short years. But ... then I felt a sense of optimism: Surely this is God’s opportunity for a new focus by biblically obedient Christians on the value of traditional marriage.
I would recommend grace and truth. Grace: We want every American to have every citizen’s right to legal arrangements, recognition and protection under the law. We treat everyone with respect. Truth: Christians associate the word “marriage” with a sacred institution defined by God (described in Genesis 2:1824 and reaffirmed by Jesus in Matthew 19:4-5). As marriage between people of the same sex grows in acceptance, Christians need to be re-engaged in making our own marriages holy and intimate. We do not need to be preoccupied by the personal decisions of those outside the Church (1 Corinthians 5:12). You’ve mentioned that Christians need to be concerned about religious liberty. What is President Obama doing to try to protect religious conviction? On the Friday following his announcement, the president met with a few evangelical leaders in the Oval Office for the better part of an hour. We talked about the need to protect religious liberty and conscience. The president is fully committed to protecting the free exercise of religion, and we plan in the coming months to work together to clarify the many ways that can be done. How can we best pray for the president?
Joel Hunter is the pastor of Northland Church and an advisor to the president.
Three ways. First, pray for his family and the country. The president cares more about them than he cares about his own life. Second, pray for his relationship with God. He is a human being who needs God’s love and guidance in his life like we all do. And third, pray for wisdom. The decisions he faces every day are overwhelming; he is well aware of his need for God’s wisdom.
R E L E VA N T M A G A Z I N E . C O M
President Obama’s desire has always been that all Americans have the same rights. For years, he believed that civil unions would provide equal protections and rights under the law. More recently, he has come to believe that equality will not be achieved without the right to civil marriage. His more recent thinking was mainly influenced by conversations with his family members, along with several gay friends and staff members.
What was your response to his announcement supporting gay marriage? How did you react when you heard the news?
“THIS IS GOD’S OPPORTUNITY FOR A NEW FOCUS BY BIBLICALLY OBEDIENT CHRISTIANS ON THE VALUE OF TRADITIONAL MARRIAGE.”
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What do you think the Christian response to legalized gay marriage should be?
GODSPEED | BRITT MERRICK | LIFTING OFF JUNE 2012
You were made for this. Have you ever felt like there’s a higher calling for your life? Something more that the mundane weekly routine of work, eat, sleep, play, and church? In Godspeed, Britt Merrick challenges us to step out of our little, self-centered lives and step into God’s grand mission—His plan to redeem, restore, and renew the world.
JOIN ChRIST’S MISSION aND
Change the world.
Available in print and digital editions everywhere books are sold RELEVANTMAGAZINE.COM / 25
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D EEPER WALK
BY RU T H HALE Y B ARTON
Y
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“I COULD FEEL THE WEIGHT OF ... EXPECTATIONS I HAD BEEN CARRYING WITHOUT EVEN BEING AWARE OF IT.”
Ruth Haley Barton is founder of the Transforming Center (www.the transforming center.org) and author of Sacred Rhythms (IVP).
R E L E VA N T M A G A Z I N E . C O M
ears ago, I sat in a staff meeting at my church to talk about how we could attract more people. At one point, someone counted the requirements for church membership and made the startling discovery there were somewhere between five and nine time commitments per week required of church members! Outwardly, I tried to be supportive of the purpose for the meeting, but on the inside I was thinking, “Who would want to sign up for this?” I was already becoming aware of Christian fatigue syndrome in my own life and couldn’t imagine willingly inflicting it on someone else. My sudden clarity in that moment forced me to be honest about what my own Christian life had become. While I was trying harder and doing more, there was an emptiness underneath it all that no amount of activity, Christian or otherwise, could fill. It made no difference at all that I had been a Christian all my life, that I had been in Christian ministry since early adulthood or that I was busy responding to God-given opportunities in many worthy causes. The more I refused to acknowledge a longing for more, the deeper and wider the emptiness became, until it threatened to swallow me up. In the midst of such barrenness, it was hard to even imagine what Jesus might have meant when He said, “I have come that they may have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10, ESV). The Christian life just didn’t feel that way to me. My first response was to try tweaking my schedule, learning how to say no more decisively, adopting new time management tools. But there comes a time in life when the desire is so deep that mere tweaking is not enough. Finally, I made the choice to reorder my life around what my heart most deeply wanted. These longings led me to search out spiritual practices and establish life rhythms that promised something more.
[SLICES]
THE SACRED IN TODAY
The first rhythm I explored was solitude and silence—introducing them into a life that had been consumed with the constant stimulation of noise, human interaction and busyness. As countercultural as it was to regularly and intentionally withdraw from my life in the company of others and give my undivided attention to God, this practice led me to acknowledge a level of exhaustion and overstimulation that I had come to associate with normal Christian living. As I faced these realities without censoring myself or trying to convince myself they were not true, I could feel the weight of Christian expectations I had been carrying without even being aware of it. There were the expectations of being a godly spouse and a good parent and how to balance those with the demands of my professional life; of being a good neighbor, a good Christian, a good ... everything. These had worn me down so much, I found myself overwhelmed with emotion at the simplest gift: the freedom to sit in silent receptivity with God. Nothing to do. Nothing to say. No social interaction to try and figure out. How, I wondered, had my life in Christ gotten reduced to so much busyness, so many words, such weighty expectations? How had I gotten this far in the spiritual life without anyone ever telling me it was OK to stop and just be in God’s presence? What was I to do with the pent-up longing and frustration? Through the simple rhythm of taking a few moments in solitude and silence daily—at first, 10 minutes was all I could muster!—I eventually noticed that the chaos and noise that characterized my inner life was starting to settle. I was no longer as driven by outer distractions and my own inner compulsions to perform and achieve. I began to have a greater sense of my life hidden with Christ in God, rather than being so completely identified with what was going on in the external world. I experienced the presence of God as my ultimate orienting reality, which brought the peace for which my soul had been longing. Rhythms of solitude and silence were the key practices that rescued me and created space for God in my life. Eventually, I added other rhythms—breath prayer, which enabled me to pray with the rhythm of my breathing; lectio divina, an approach to Scripture that incorporates the rhythm of silence and word; and rhythms of daily self-examination, weekly Sabbathkeeping, and discerning and doing the will of God. I do not practice these because I have to; I practice them because I want to—because they provide a way to make choices that are congruent with my heart’s deepest desires, day after day after day.
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2012 SUMMER READING GUIDE
B Y J O H N P AT T I S O N A N D D AV I D J O H N S O N
AN
embarrassment of riches. That’s how we’d describe the deluge of compelling new books slated for release this summer—so much that our first draft of this list included more than 30 titles. After much debate, we whittled it down to 13, including new novels from favorites Michael Chabon and Jess Walter, a collection of cartoons by Flannery O’Connor, and books from writers of faith that have the potential to challenge and change everything. Make room in your beach bag, clear some space in your suitcase (our vacation advice is to bring half the clothes and twice the books), or charge your e-reader. Here are the summer books we can’t wait to dive into.
Fiction & Liter at ur e
Telegraph Avenue By Michael Chabon Ever since we read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, we’ve been huge fans of Michael Chabon. Like, waiting-in-line-at-a-bookstore-atmidnight-on-release-day huge. As with Kavalier and Clay, Chabon gives us another epic, decadesspanning story in Telegraph Avenue—proving again his densely woven narratives don’t lend themselves to easy summary. Just know that in this story, the sins of the past do not stay there, and the characters include the co-owners of a used vinyl store called Brokeland Records, their semi-famous midwifing wives, an ex-NFL quarterback, and a Blaxploitation star. Telegraph Avenue has been called a “NorCal Middlemarch set to the funky beat of classic vinyl soul-jazz.” We don’t know what that means, but it sounds cool. 28 / RELEVANT_JULY/AUG 12
Beautiful Ruins By Jess Walter We loved Jess Walter’s 2009 darkly funny novel, The Financial Lives of the Poets. Now Walter is back with what promises to be one of our favorite novels of 2012. Split between the present and the summer of 1962, Beautiful Ruins tells the story of a hopelessly romantic Italian innkeeper who falls for a beautiful American actress—a beautiful, dying American actress. Fifty years later, against all reason, this elderly Italian gentleman walks onto a Hollywood movie studio lot looking for the almost-love of his youth. The publisher calls Beautiful Ruins “a dazzling, yet deeply human, roller coaster of a novel”—which is just what we’ve come to expect from Jess Walter.
The Prisoner of Heaven By Carlos Ruiz Zafón In his internationally best-selling debut novel, The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafón introduced us to the character of Daniel Sempere, the Cemetery of Forgotten Books and the Sempere & Sons bookshop. He returns to this world with another tale of (non-pejoratively) literary geek suspense. Daniel is married with a young son, and the young family is living with Daniel’s father in the bookshop. Daniel’s friend Fermin, engaged to be married, also works in the store, although lately something besides the wedding has been on his mind. One day, a man enters the store, requests to purchase a beautiful and rare illustrated version of The Count of Monte Cristo, and then turns and inscribes the book with the words, “To Fermin Romero de Torres, who came back from the dead and who holds the key to the future.” Let the page turning begin.
Nonf iction
Mi s cella ne o u s
Dinner: A Love Story
The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore
By Jenny Rosenstrach Jenny Rosenstrach has spent her professional career editing food and feature writing for magazines like Bon Appétit, Martha Stewart Living and Real Simple. But it is her commitment as a wife and mother to get the family dinner on the table every night with her husband, Andy, that forms the inspiration behind her very popular blog and companion book, Dinner: A Love Story. The book is part memoir (including entries from a diary of every single dinner she’s eaten since 1998!) and part cookbook (containing almost 120 recipes) and is organized around the stages of family life (the just-married stage, the new-parent stage, etc.). This is a real cookbook for real families—Rosenstrach promises every meal included in the book has been cooked and eaten at least a half-dozen times in her house. “And in my house,” she writes, “we eat well.”
By William Joyce If you haven’t seen the Oscar-winning short film The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, set down the magazine, fire up your laptop and come back in 15 minutes. For the uninitiated, Fantastic Flying Books is an animated film about “people who devote their lives to books and books who return the favor.” Inspired by Hurricane Katrina and with touches of The Wizard of Oz, the story centers on the character of Morris Lessmore, a book lover and writer who is led to a magical library of flying books after a hurricane hits his home in the French Quarter of New Orleans. The film was written and directed by William Joyce, who now has put together a picture book of the story. Billed as an “allegory about the curative powers of story,” this is a must-see (and must-read) for bibliophiles everywhere.
Bushville Wins! The Wild Saga of the 1957 Milwaukee Braves and the Screwballs, Sluggers,and Beer Swiggers Who Canned the New York Yankees and Changed Baseball
By Flannery O’Connor Before Flannery O’Connor wrote the novels and short stories that came to define her legacy in American literature, she wanted to be a cartoonist. Most of the cartoons in this slim collection were published in school newspapers and literary journals while young Flannery was in high school and studying at Georgia State College for Women. Her grim humor and eye for the absurd are already evident in these early creative efforts, and she was serious about her work, submitting a number of pieces to the New Yorker (she found no luck there, which is probably just as well—if she’d been more successful as a cartoonist, maybe we wouldn’t have gotten “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”). O’Connor died far too young, and this is a welcome addition to a life’s work cut short.
By John Klima In the 1950s, professional baseball was a big-city enterprise, with three teams in New York and two each in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and St. Louis. But in 1953, to general surprise and incredulity, the Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin—a move that jumpstarted a period of realignment and expansion that changed the face of Major League Baseball. Four seasons later, this small-market team from the hinterlands defeated the mighty New York Yankees. In Bushville Wins! John Klima—a sportswriter, trained professional baseball scout and man behind the website Baseball Prospect Report—tells the story of this unlikely championship team that included future Hall of Famers Warren Spahn, Eddie Mathews and a young Henry Aaron. It’s a sure hit for fans of baseball and anyone who likes a good underdog story.
Our Kind of People: A Continent’s Challenge, A Country’s Hope By Uzodinma Iweala Writers are like mirrors, and gifted writers are able to evoke our shared humanity from even the most brutal circumstances. Uzodinma Iweala, an author and physician raised in Washington, D.C., and Nigeria, is one such gifted writer. His heartbreaking debut novel, Beasts of No Nation, about a boy forced to become a child soldier, earned him a spot on Granta magazine’s list of 20 best young American novelists in 2007. Dr. Iweala’s second book, Our Kind of People, is a work of nonfiction that takes an original, perhaps even counterintuitive, look at the African HIV/AIDS crisis. By telling a handful of stories of Nigerians whose lives have been impacted by the disease—stories of husbands and wives, doctors and nurses, sex workers and truck drivers, orphans and caregivers—Dr. Iweala returns dignity and respect to the real people often obscured by the staggering statistics.
Flannery O’Connor: The Cartoons
The Underwater Welder By Jeff Lemire Jeff Lemire is one of the most acclaimed voices in comics right now, and for good reason. His writing on DC Comics’ reboot of the Animal Man series has been tremendous, and anyone who has read his ongoing Sweet Tooth series knows Lemire is pretty much at the top of the comics game. But even if you know about those series, you’re missing a lot if you haven’t read his opus, the Essex County trilogy. Told with spare prose and illustration, the trilogy tells a multigenerational story of heartbreak, love and the bond of family. And now, Lemire is returning to single-volume graphic novels with his newest work, The Underwater Welder. It’s the story of, yes, an underwater welder who works on an oil rig off the coast of Nova Scotia. His work as a diver serves as a metaphor for the growing emotional distance he puts between himself and his wife and unborn son, and it’s while he’s diving that he experiences something surprising and supernatural that changes his life. Since this is a Jeff Lemire book, expect plenty of strange occurrences followed immediately by an unexpected emotional wallop. Lemire’s open illustrations and short amount of dialogue bring characters to eerie life, and you’ll be surprised how much you care by end. You might even be amazed to find a comic book made you cry. RELEVANTMAGAZINE.COM / 29
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2012 SUMMER READING GUIDE
Faith & Spir it ualit y
Reborn on the Fourth of July
COURTESY OF IVP
LOGAN MEHL-LAITURI C an Chris tians be patriots? T he author of Reborn on the Four th of July helps us toward an answer. Logan Mehl-Laituri’s path to peace activism is a much more winding path than you might expect. Why? Because he served more than a year as a soldier in Iraq. Mehl-Laituri then had a conversion experience that led him to eschew violence. His story and take on war, patriotism, military service and Jesus’ call to nonviolence are chronicled in his new book, Reborn on the Fourth of July: The Challenge of Faith, Patriotism and Conscience. We spoke with Mehl-Laituri about his new book, his military service and his commitment to peacemaking.
Q
What was it about war and your time in the military that changed you?
A
The most formative moments may have actually been a peacemaking trip I took to Palestine days after being discharged. There, back in the Middle East, I was suddenly on the other side of the rifle’s scope. I saw soldiers using the same weapon systems I used in Iraq being deployed against another Arab people. I may as well have been back with my unit on deployment, as many of the families we met with asked me about “[their] family in Iraq.”
30 / RELEVANT_JULY/AUG 12
The whole experience was a painful reminder of how victims of war can be found on both sides of the gun.
Q A
How can Christians juggle love of country and others?
Allegiance is a juggling act. What I have found helpful is the language of “threshold.” Christians must discern the limits of their earthly allegiances. We do not give everything to Caesar, but only that which belongs thereto. Our allegiance to God is ultimate, but to our country it is finite. If God, in the language used by Genesis, gets the firstlings and fat portions, then Caesar might be left with leftovers. But the key is to render to Caesar with respect and dignity, [not] ridicule and derision. Where was that threshold for me? I refused to be directly responsible for the death of my enemies, since I was commanded to love them.
“THE KEY IS TO RENDER TO CAESAR WITH RESPECT AND DIGNITY, [NOT] RIDICULE AND DERISION.”
WATCH The book trailer for Reborn on the Fourth of July relm.ag/58logan
By Logan Mehl-Laituri “My index finger dropped onto the curved metal trigger of my M-4 as I considered the actionability of this particular target. How had I gotten to this point?” Reborn on the Fourth of July tells the story of how Logan MehlLaituri, a veteran of the Iraq War, had a dramatic rebirth, applied for conscientious objector status and followed the call of Jesus to be a “lover of enemies.” The book also lays bare the real cost of war to military personnel and Christians off the battlefield. As Shane Claiborne writes in his foreword, “[Mehl-Laituri’s] nonviolence comes from seeing the cost of war and how different it looks from the gospel of Jesus. It’s hard to argue with someone who hates war because they’ve lived the war.”
Thin Places By Jon Huckins According to Celtic tradition, heaven and Earth are only three feet apart, but that distance is even smaller in “thin places.” Jon Huckins says he wrote Thin Places to help ignite “the imagination and practice of individuals across the globe to co-create their own unique thin places that ... [are] a daily and transforming reality.” Mark Scandrette, whose Practicing the Way of Jesus was one of our favorites of 2011, makes a compelling case in his foreword: “This book is a winsome yet dangerous invitation into a better dream to be awake to all that God is doing in and around us.”
Godspeed: Making Christ’s Mission Your Own By Britt Merrick If you attend church, you are no stranger to the idea that we have been put on Earth to be the love of Jesus to the world. The challenge is, how should we really do that? Author Britt Merrick, founder of the Reality community of churches, asserts that “from God’s perspective, there’s no divide between the sacred and the secular.” We are called to bring Jesus to every person and every task we encounter. Merrick reminds readers that they have a higher calling at work, at home and at play—that they were born for a great purpose.
Emergence Christianity: What It Is, Where It Is Going and Why It Matters By Phyllis Tickle The thesis of Phyllis Tickle’s essential 2008 book, The Great Emergence, is that every 500 years or so, the Church holds a giant rummage sale, where “the empowered structures of institutionalized Christianity” are shattered for the sake of renewal and growth—and, right on schedule, we are living through that rummage sale now, which Tickle describes as the Great Emergence. Her follow-up book, Emergence Christianity, is being described as a kind of biography of the early years of this hinge moment in history. As the founding editor of the religion department of Publishers Weekly, Tickle has had her finger on the pulse of American Christianity for decades. We can’t think of a better guide to help explain where we’ve been and where we seem to be heading from here.
that they don’t remain the way they are. A deep anger at injustice and human cruelty is an expression of empathy and love. It is an anger that is bred out of compassion and identification with human suffering when you’ve seen the callousness and cruelty of what we do.
Q
You say that fundamentalism banishes love. What does that mean?
A
THE NATION INSTITUTE
Fundamentalism is about authority. Fundamentalists say they’re about Jesus, but then they want to put up the 10 Commandments, which is [about] Moses, in the courthouse. If they want to nail the Beatitudes up, I’m all behind them. And my frustration with the liberal church is that they have not denounced these people and have refused to call them what they are, which is heretics.
CHRIS HEDGES
Q
BY DEAN NELSON
Those who preach the gospel of prosperity and have fused the language of Christianity with the state are heretics. That’s a perversion of the core message of the Gospel. This radical message is something that has to be fought for.
The Pulit zer Prize–w inning journalis t and author talks war, relig ion and human nature
Chris Hedges was a war correspondent for 20 years and has become a prophetic voice in modern society. When he was with the New York Times, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the war on terrorism, and one of his 11 books, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2003), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. His most recent work is a collection called The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress. We spoke with Hedges about covering war, how to get to love from anger, why he thinks fundamentalists are heretics, and how war has changed his view of human nature.
Q A
You have said that war is an addiction and like a narcotic and that so is covering war. How so?
Colors are brighter. You’re aware of things you’ve never been aware of ... You don’t sleep. If you spend long enough in its grip, you never want to leave it.
Q
Your books are so angry—at politicians, news media, gullible populations, corporations and so on—but there’s always a discussion about love. How do you get there after you’ve seen what you have seen?
A
Isn’t that what Isaiah and Elijah and all the prophets did? They were angry. Augustine said Hope has two beautiful daughters— anger and courage. Anger at the way things are and courage to see
Fundamentalists are heretics?
A
Q
After what you’ve seen covering conflict, what do you feel about human nature?
A
I’ve seen that human beings like to destroy things and others. I’ve seen that through fear, whole populations can be rendered compliant in evil. I’ve seen lonely figures speak truth at the cost of their own lives but that it’s important to bear witness. I’ve also seen how the more incomprehensible kindness is, the more powerful it is. Death is powerful, but love is powerful too. The World As It Is Hedges pulls no punches as he reports on the state of the world—and the effects of war.
RELEVANTMAGAZINE.COM / 31
2012 SUMMER READING GUIDE
SLICES
MICHAEL COGLIANTRY
A.J. JACOBS T he bes t-selling author on his cra z y methodolog y, w hat he’s learned about food and diet and w hy he now chews more BY C A RL KOZLOWSKI
Jacobs’ new book, Drop Dead Healthy, chronicles his efforts to become as healthy as possible over the course of a year and provides plenty of laughs along the way. Jacobs, the author of previous best-sellers The Know-It-All and The Year of Living Biblically, recently spoke with RELEVANT and provided a revealing look at a man who’s learned nearly everything imaginable about improving one’s mental, physical and spiritual life—and isn’t afraid to share it.
A.J.
32 / RELEVANT_JULY/AUG 12
Q
The new book is a continuation of what you call “immersive journalism.” What does that mean to you?
A
Basically, I take a topic and dive right in and turn myself into a human guinea pig. For my first book, I tried to improve my mind by reading the Encyclopaedia Brittanica from A to Z and learn everything I could. Then after that, I decided to work on my spirit and took a crash course in religion because I knew nothing about religion—I’m Jewish, but in the same way Olive Garden is Italian. I dived in to learn all about the Bible by following every single rule over the course of a year. Now I’m trying to improve my body. This book is about the two years I explored all the medical advice in the world to see what works.
Q
You’ve really hit the zeitgeist this time—people obsess on how to lose weight. What’s the strangest thing you learned about dieting?
A
The book isn’t just about food and the belly but about exercise, stress, sleep, sex and feet—any part of the body we’ve tried to improve. In terms of dieting, it’s quality and quantity in eating that matters—to keep quantity down, it turns out Mom is right: chew your food. There’s a movement online called Chewdaism. They believe we should chew all our food at least 50 times per mouthful to get all the nutrients and slow down our eating. That’s excessive
because if you do that, you’ll spend a day and a half eating a sandwich. So I’m now a reformed member of Chewdaism. I chew a lot, just not as much as they do.
[ESSENTIAL JACOBS]
Q
You learned all sorts of strange things, like drinking coffee especially before you work out.
A
I tried all the crazy diets. The raw food diet—thought it would be less timeconsuming than cooking, but quite the opposite. It actually took more time not to cook because you had to prepare more ways and clean a juicer and dehydrating. I did the paleo diet, like cavemen, where there’s all meat—no greens, potatoes or dairy. They all work in the sense that you’re more aware of what you’re putting in your body, so you put in less. In the end, everyone agrees refined carbs like white bread and sugar are the worst, even worse than fat.
Q A
of Living Biblically Jacobs chronicles 365 days of OT lawabiding.
What other insights did you gain?
I went to Central Park for a workout where they believe we should work out in nature. We went out to the park, took off our shoes and shirts, and tossed boulders, climbed trees. It looked silly but felt great. Then we went to Philadelphia, the home of smell and taste research. I learned there that smell is linked to your mental health. People who lose their smell tend to get depressed. They say it’s important to keep your sense of smell sharpened and exercise it like anything else. Do stop and smell the flowers—it’s good for you! They also recommend a game to play where you get out your spice rack and try to guess the smell without looking at it.
Q
How did you decide to get into this kind of thing? Were you overly curious as a child?
A
The Year
I’ve always been curious. I’ve been obsessed with trivia forever and would read trivia books more than other books. I eventually became a journalist, which is great because you get to learn about a different thing every day. But I also want to experience things, and I think on-the-job training is the way to do it. The first thing I did getting into this was that I look like an actor named Noah Taylor. He was in Shine about
The Guinea Pig Diaries Super meta: the journal of a journal. Jacobs on life as an experiment.
15 years ago, and his movie did great, so he was invited to the Academy Awards, and it turned out he did not want to go because he doesn’t like the publicity machine. So everyone said I had to go in his place, and I was working for Entertainment Weekly at the time. Noah set me up for it, and I had people asking for autographs, Will Smith telling me what a fan he was, and it was astonishing. It gave me insight into the life of a celebrity. It’s great because people are kissing your a-- nonstop, with no negative feedback. I can see why celebrities can become monsters, because I was a diva and I was only doing it for four hours. That feeling lasted a couple weeks, even back in New York. At drugstore lines, I’d be thinking, “Don’t you know who I am?”
Q A
What was the most difficult thing you’ve ever done in this vein of journalism?
Q A
What was the worst truth you had to tell?
Probably an article for Esquire about radical honesty. It was a movement started by a psychologist in Virginia who says we should never lie and we should let our mouth operate without a filter. I tried it for a month, and I’m lucky I’m still married and have a job. It’s like a real-life version of the movie Liar Liar with Jim Carrey, but at the same time it was very liberating in some ways.
I was in a restaurant with my wife and kids, and she saw some friends from college, and the friend said, “We should get together and have a playdate.” I had to speak the truth, so I said, “You seem nice, but I’d really rather not. I don’t see my own friends enough, so no.” My wife was horrified, and the two of them stormed out of the restaurant.
Q
The book that really put you on the map had to be The Year of Living Biblically. You scored with Christians, even as a guy who was culturally Jewish. Why do you think that was?
A
I was pleasantly surprised by the reaction, but people seemed to respect it and like it because I didn’t go in with an ax to grind, like Bill Maher in Religulous. I wanted to know what religion was about and what was I missing by not having it in my life? As long as you take it pretty seriously overall, you can have fun with anything, even that.
Q
People often assume big media is godless and doesn’t care about traditional values. As someone who’s worked at some of the biggest media outlets in the country, do you feel that’s accurate?
A
There are people in media with faith, but I do think there’s a big gap in worldview between left and right, faithful and unfaithful. So it was an anthropological trip to try and understand that other mindset. It made me more thoughtful and I hope a better person because it is important not to just dismiss people as crazy.
Q
How did that experiment, in particular, impact your life? Do you have a belief you follow right now?
A
It’s had dozens of impacts. It made me grateful and thankful for everything. I’d be thankful for hundreds of things a day, and it was weird, but it made me realize how we ignore the hundreds of small things that go right each day rather than the few that go wrong. We joined a reform synagogue, though we don’t go often. We feel it makes us a little more spiritually elevated. I want my kids to have a taste of the spiritual so they can accept or reject it later, but at least they’ll have that knowledge.
RELEVANTMAGAZINE.COM / 33
[THE DROP]
Soundtrack to an Election
COURTESY OF JOGJA
DIPLOMACY THROUGH A CONCERT TOUR? Organizer s of this year ’s Center S tage tour hope to fos ter peace via ar tis tic per formances
D
34 / RELEVANT_JULY/AUG 12
from Haiti (Compagnie de Danse JeanRené Delsoin). The Center Stage tour is meant to foster relationships between the nations represented and average Americans. Most of the featured artists are committed to social awareness and raising public consciousness through their music. For instance, the Jogja Hip Hop Foundation, touring late this year, makes rap music that has its roots in Javenese poetry. “We can take poetry, traditional literature, or a spell or mantras, and we reimagine it, giving it contemporary context,” says Marzuki Mohammad (aka “Kill the DJ”), one of Jogja’s MCs. “We bring it into our generation and to the world. We want Americans to know about Javanese culture and our rap, to hear their reactions.” The State Department hopes those reactions will lead to greater understanding and cultural empathy.
[PLANE-RIDE MUSIC]
It’s summertime. Meaning, it’s vacation season and you’ll be on a plane. Here’s a Spotify playlist to make the time fly.
CHECK OUT Some tunes for your travels relm.ag/58-spotify
R E L E VA N T M A G A Z I N E . C O M
iplomacy usually happens behind closed doors, via mysterious cables or in high-level meetings that take place in the shadow of the U.N. building. At least, that’s how it always looks in movies. No one would expect serious diplomacy to take place at a concert venue. Yet that’s exactly what the U.S. Department of State is hoping to accomplish this year through a new arts tour called Center Stage. The Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the State Department is bringing 10 groups to tour across the United States as part of Center Stage. The performers, who originate from Haiti, Indonesia and Pakistan, each tour for a month between June and December this year. The groups range from an Indonesian hip-hop collective (Jogja Hip-Hop Foundation, pictured above) to a Pakistani power pop group (noori) to a dancing-and-drumming show
The political season is in full swing, but not enough attention is on what really matters. We’re speaking, of course, of the music the candidates choose to blare at their various events. Nothing says more about a person than the music they pick for large gatherings, right? Obama’s Spotify playlist has a lot of what you’d expect (Al Green, Bruce Springsteen, ELO), some curve balls (Arcade Fire, Florence + the Machine, Noah and the Whale) and some horrible “safe” choices (Sugarland, Ricky Martin, Darius Rucker ... twice). All in all, though, it’s got something for everyone. Romney’s playlist actually hits many of the same adult alternative notes Obama’s does. He’s got Nat King Cole, the Beach Boys and the Commodores, none of which would be out of place on Obama’s list. But he’s also got The Killers (maybe because lead singer Brandon Flowers is Mormon, like Romney?), a bunch of country (the Soggy Bottom Boys, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson) and some Red State rock (Kid Rock, Toby Keith, Clint Black). While neither of these candidates probably listens to a lot of the music on their playlists, be assured you will hear some good—and some terrible—music on the campaign trail this year.
RELEVANTMAGAZINE.COM / 35
THE DROP
ARTISTS TO WATCH
[RELEFAVORITES]
ERIN ALGIERE
TENNIS
YOUNG & OLD
Why we love them ... Nothing says summer like the sweet pop sounds of Tennis. It makes a lot of sense that this band got its start after a sailing trip. FOR FANS OF Beach House, Vampire Weekend, Dum Dum Girls WEBSITE www.fatpossum.com/artists/ tennis
36 / RELEVANT_JULY/AUG 12
T
ennis seems like a contradiction. They make sunny pop music rooted in ’50s rock tropes and singalong hooks. But their lyrics cover ground like religion, immortality and aging. Singer Alaina Moore sounds like she’s been singing in bands forever. But Tennis is Moore’s first musical outlet since church choir. Wait ... church choir? “I come from a long line of pastors,” Moore says. “All of my experience with music was in church until Tennis. My entire worldview was informed by my extensive upbringing.” While it’s an upbringing Moore has since gone away from (“I felt like I deserved the right to individuate and step outside of that. And to look at the world differently”), deep themes still permeate the lyrics she pens. “[The story of our newest album] is about transforming,” Moore says. “Moving in and out of different ideas about love and God.” “[But] it’s not meant to be overly philosophical. I mean, I can’t help that I overanalyze things!” she says, laughing. “I wanted to take these things that inspire me and describe them in a more ambiguous language, so when people hear the songs, they can let it be about whatever they want. I don’t want to be preachy with the lyrics, even when I’m talking about touchy subjects.”
Charles Bradley If you like old-school soul (and obviously, you should), you will love this.
Matthew Perryman Jones Beautiful melodies and probing lyrics make this singer-songwriter special.
[ M I S C ]
GET SOME
The Cornerstone
Enjoy a few videos from some of our faves.
Festival has announced that 2012 will be its last year. Festival organizers say the decision was reached for
Tennis “My Better Self”—the official video relm.ag/58tennisvid
many reasons, including the difficult economy and changes in the market ... Bono is now the richest musician in the world, thanks to
SUCRÉ Why we love them ...
his 2009
Sucré is made
investment in
up of Stacy King
Facebook that
(Eisley), Darren
just made him
King (MUTEMATH)
$1.5 billion ...
and instrumentalist extraordinaire Jeremy
James
Larson. The result is
McCartney,
a chamber-pop group
son of Beatles
with soaring melodies
legend Paul
and vocals.
It’s a very sentimental record to me, because it was birthed out of a time when Darren and I were just newly engaged and getting married, [and] getting to know Jeremy and us all bonding together. It’s pretty amazing that people are going to hear that. I hope they can ascribe their own feelings and meanings to the songs. I want this album to be sentimental to everyone, not just me.
ELSIE LARSON
SUCRÉ
A MINOR BIRD FOR FANS OF Eisley, Rufus Wainwright, Sixpence None the Richer WEBSITE www.sucreofficial.com
McCartney, says he would
ANA TIJOUX
be interested in forming a band with other Beatles’
Why we love her ...
sons. It’s only a
You don’t have to understand Spanish
matter of time
to know that Tijoux’s words matter.
before “Sons
Chilean Ana Tijoux makes politically informed Spanish hip-hop/ R&B. It’s awesome in any language.
of Beatles” becomes a Las Vegas icon ...
Charles Bradley “Lovin’ You, Baby” relm.ag/58bradley
Matthew Perryman Jones “O Theo” relm.ag/58mpjones
Sucré “When We Were Young” relm.ag/58sucre
The Flaming Lips recently offered some very limitededition vinyls specially
ANA TIJOUX LA BALA
“painted” with the blood of
FOR FANS OF Lauryn Hill, Busta Rhymes, Common
collaborators, like Ke$ha, Chris Martin and Neon
FELIPE CANTILLANA
Ana Tijoux “Shock” relm.ag/58-ana
WEBSITE www.anatijoux.com
Indian ...
RELEVANTMAGAZINE.COM / 37
THE DROP
Q &A [THE DROP]
loving music and being able to play music together. VA: I’m only really interested in singing about God. Almost all our songs [are] about God, what Jesus has done, our attempts to try to love Him and our failures at that, and our attempts and failures at loving others.
Q
Sufjan Stevens didn’t produce your album this time, but he did play on it. What’s it like working with him, as you’ve been doing for years now?
A
DENNY RENSHAW
THE WELCOME WAGON What happens when a Brooklyn pastor and his wife make an indiefolk album with their friend Sufjan Stevens? Awesomeness. BY JESSICA MISENER
—VITO AIUTO “In cases of apathy toward good works, consider these seven remedies.” And then it would say, “Consider how much your Savior has done for you,” and then it would give Scripture verses. I guess in putting the record together, that title fit with how we’ve always thought about our music as a way to experience God’s love, extend it to one another and extend it to other people.
Q A
Q
VA: It’s the title of a book that I really like. It’s an old Puritan devotional manual where you can look up a particular spiritual malady, and it offers these particular devices or remedies for it. So, like,
38 / RELEVANT_JULY/AUG 12
Who would you say you make music for? Is it for yourselves? The community? God?
A
MA: I think it’s just part of who God made us to be, in having these gifts and these tendencies toward music and
WATCH “Would You Come and See Me in New York?” relm.ag/58-ww
Q
What’s it like making music as a married couple?
A
MA: It’s challenging at times, but we would be challenged anyway, by what couch to buy or something. Instead, we’re being challenged about how the songs should go. VA: Monique is a visual artist by training, and I did writing in college, but I think both of us gravitate toward music because it’s something we can do with each other. Like Monique said, it’s difficult to be married, period. But it’s like a practice ground for our marriage, one more arena in which we are given the opportunity to love one another and for me to say, “How am I going to love Monique as Christ loved the Church?” We have to do that in the whole of our life, so we also come to music and say, “How are we going to do this?”
R E L E VA N T M A G A Z I N E . C O M
Vito and Monique Aiuto are one of the busiest pairs in Brooklyn. Vito pastors Resurrection Presbyterian Church, a bustling congregation in Williamsburg. Monique is a full-time preschool teacher. They’re parents to a 5-year-old son. And as the duo Welcome Wagon, their second LP dropped in April on their pal Sufjan Stevens’ Asthmatic Kitty label. We recently chatted with Vito and Monique, over biscotti and chrysanthemum tea on a rainy day in Brooklyn, about their new album and what it’s like making music together. Your new album is called Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices. Why?
“I’M ONLY REALLY INTERESTED IN SINGING ABOUT GOD.”
VA: We’d never produced a record with anyone else until this one, which we worked on with Alexander Foote. The main thing about Sufjan is he’s so generous with everything he has. He makes himself a servant to whatever the situation is. He helped make our [first] record and produced it. Sometimes we argued about it. Sometimes he’d say, “That’s too much horn,” or whatever. But he’s a servant and super generous.
RELEVANTMAGAZINE.COM / 39
[NEX T]
CREATE. INNOVATE. LEAD.
10 SUREFIRE WAYS TO GO VIRAL (Only one of them involves a cat playing a piano.)
IS
40 / RELEVANT_JULY/AUG 12
they enjoy—unless it’s so bad it’s ironic, but you don’t want that. So, yes, agonize over the title, the content and the wording of that first tweet. 3. SEED IT. You are the one who needs to start the sharing. Send it to your friends, and target the influential people in your industry so they share it with their networks. 4. INCENTIVIZE. Make it worthwhile for people to share. Offer benefits in the form of coupons, “points” or extra turnips to those who pass the word. 5. KNOW THE PLATFORMS. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are just the beginning. Utilize Pinterest, Digg, Tumblr, Reddit, StumbleUpon and more. Not all platforms are the same, so know the language and etiquette of each and adapt your approach accordingly.
6. BE ELITIST. Appeal to people’s vanity. Whatever you’re creating needs to offer cultural cache to those who share it—you know, help them look cool. 7. GO FOR NICHE. People love being part of a club. Create a product, video or meme that solidifies their inclusion in a subculture. 8. BUILD COMMUNITY. If people need other people to be a part of something before it’s any fun to use, then they’ll invite others to use it with them. (Think about Skype, Instagram, Words With Friends, etc.) 9. EVERYBODY LOVES A LIST. See how we titled this article? 10. ANTHROPOMORPHIZE. Include a video of any kind of furry mammal (cats or corgis are best) doing any kind of activity generally reserved for humans.
R E L E VA N T M A G A Z I N E . C O M
there anything more oxymoronic or paradoxical than developing a strategy for something organic—a plan for going viral? Perhaps not. But who cares? There’s still no better way to reach the masses (and convince them to reach their masses) in 2012. So, where do you start? Here are our 10 easy, practical tips for going viral. Try them out ... then pass them along. 1. MAKE IT SHAREABLE. If you want your provocative article, hilarious Tumblr or gut-wrenching video to make the rounds, you need to make sure people can share it. Include a button to Tweet, “like” and/or embed. 2. IT HAS TO BE GOOD. (DUH.) Generally, people only share what
RELEVANTMAGAZINE.COM / 41
NEXT
CREATE [NEX T]
HOW TO WIN $1 MILLION BY JA MIE T WORKOWSKI
IT
42 / RELEVANT_JULY/AUG 12
“WE WOULD ASK PEOPLE TO VOTE, BUT WE WOULD ALSO FOCUS ON THE HEART.”
Jamie Tworkowski is the founder of To Write Love on Her Arms, helping those who battle depression, addiction, selfinjury and suicide.
R E L E VA N T M A G A Z I N E . C O M
was like a scene from the Super Bowl. Bob Costas handed me a check for $1 million. Confetti fell, Colin Farrell clapped and I even brought a pretty girl. Last December, To Write Love on Her Arms (TWLOHA) won the first-ever American Giving Awards presented by Chase. Ever since then, the question on everyone’s mind (including my own) was: How did you do it? How did you get people to vote? How did you maintain momentum? How did you prove yourself trustworthy of all that money? TWLOHA began as a story posted on MySpace in 2006. It was the story of a friend struggling with depression, addiction, self-injury and thoughts of suicide. We learned quickly the story we were telling was one that represented people everywhere. Social media has been a huge part of what we do and how we do it ever since. It has allowed us to see the best of the Internet—people finding and sharing a message they believe in, and it’s allowed us to connect with hundreds of thousands of people. All of this, combined with the fact that perhaps the biggest thing we “do” is communicate, allowed us to believe we could win. So, here’s how we won, and here’s what we learned. Make a plan. The American Giving Awards required a detailed plan for spending the money long before we ever had the money. We decided to focus on three areas: investing in treatment and recovery, which would include a gift of 10 percent to IMAlive, the live online crisis network we helped launch with the Kristen Brooks Hope Center (founders of 1-800-SUICIDE) and PostSecret; creating an online platform that invites people to invest in treatment and recovery in their communities; and taking HEAVY AND LIGHT—our annual “evening of songs, conversation and hope”—to cities across America.
You don’t have to sell your soul. At this point, you’re probably familiar with contests that invite you to vote for your favorite charity. It’s great that corporate America is giving away significant amounts of money to be used for good and showcasing good work being done in the process. Less great, however, is the hype and fuss that comes in the form of constant tweets and updates from organizations—and their supporters—asking for votes. It was important for us to be mindful of this. We would ask people to vote, but we would also focus on the heart of the matter. We would not devote energy to simply trying to win a contest. We would also demonstrate the mission of TWLOHA. Tweets asking for votes were mixed with tweets highlighting stories of hope, informative articles and words simply meant to encourage those struggling with the issues we address. Share the moment. The awards happened on a Friday. It aired the next night. I spent my Saturday evening talking to friends and responding to texts from people watching the show. These people were and are part of my story, and this was my chance to share the moment with them. When my former youth pastor surprised me with a text congratulating me, it felt so good to surprise him with a call. He believed in me and walked with me through some tough years. It meant the world to talk to him that night, to hear he was proud and to share the whole thing with him. Say something. For me personally, then and now, the acceptance speech meant as much as the money. The mission of TWLOHA is to move people—from isolation to community and counseling, from addiction to treatment, from pain to hope. When I was told I would have 60 seconds to give a speech, I knew I had to make it count. I skipped the standard thank-yous. I didn’t talk about programs or campaigns. I traded all that for the heart of the matter: the chance to speak hope to people in pain. If you’re given the chance to say something, that’s no small thing. Say something. It took me two days to figure out the “million dollar check” given to me on stage wasn’t the real McCoy. (“Chase Bank” written in cursive on the signature line = not real.) After hours of conference calls and detailed budget proposals, the real check recently arrived. The money has changed our 2012. It has given us permission to dream, and we’re reminded that we find ourselves in a story rich with opportunity and responsibility. God is still in the business of redemption, and He invites us to play a part in bringing His love and grace to a world in need. He used a donkey. He can use a bank. He can even use a nonprofit with a funny name.
RELEVANTMAGAZINE.COM / 43
NEXT
[NEX T]
IN N OVATE MIHO AIKAWA
ONE BLOCK AT A TIME How Teg u uses bet ter business practices to make bet ter toys Founded in 2007 by brothers Will and Chris Haughey, Tegu is a for-profit company in Honduras that seeks to create high-quality, environmentally friendly toys using sustainable business practices. Tegu is creating a model that challenges other for-profit companies to think about the potential for greater impact. Here’s Will Haughey telling their story.
THE NUMBERS • Employs 60 people, supporting 174 family members • Has planted 34,500 trees • Has provided 3,300 days of school
www.tegu.com
44 / RELEVANT_JULY/AUG 12
R E L E VA N T M A G A Z I N E . C O M
WATCH Tegu’s creative blocks in action relm.ag/58-tegu
We’ve found that despite the deluge of plastic, battery-driven toys today, increasing numbers of parents are tired of toys coming from China with questionable safety standards. They are scrutinizing the manufacturers of the foods and products they buy for their family, looking for not only a certain wholesomeness, but also evidence of a small environmental footprint. It is estimated Honduras lost 10 percent of its forest cover in the 1990s due to illegal logging practices. Because we plant trees 100 times over, we actually reverse damage done by others to the forests of Honduras. Why did we decide to create toys? Our grandfather was an accomplished architect, so we grew up with an appreciation for good design and woodworking. While in Germany, we found inspiration in the classic wooden toys of Europe. We decided to bring wooden toys into the 21st century by embedding them with magnets, breathing life into a classic. My faith in God sits at the core of the motivating force behind starting Tegu. Chris and I both wanted to give back in a way that utilized our business backgrounds and internal drive to innovate. We also wanted to do it in a way that was sensitive to environmental and human resources. For us, giving Honduras a sustainable business model for wealth creation and job development would let us multiply God’s gifts and resources. Each person who gets a job with us can then turn around and bless others, and, meanwhile, the business also blesses those who have invested in Tegu for a financial return. The toys themselves serve to delight and develop the minds of children around the world. We’re focused on operational excellence, too, and we think Tegu should speak for itself, pointing to a faith rooted in the love and service of others.”
Master of Divinity
Dual degrees
Concentrations in: > Biblical Studies and Theology > Christian Education > Ministry Leadership > Missions and World Christianity > Spiritual Formation > Sports Ministry > Worship Leadership > Youth, Family and Student Ministry
>
Music (MDiv/MM) > Social Work (MDiv/MSW)
Master of Arts in Christian Ministry Master of Theological Studies Doctor of Ministry
FALL PREVIEW OCTOBER 25-26, 2012 WINTER PREVIEW FEBRUARY 7-8, 2013 SPRING PREVIEW MARCH 21-22, 2013 REGISTER ONLINE OR BY PHONE baylor.edu/truett/preview 254-710-3756 or 1-800-BAYLOR-U, option 5
NEXT
LEAD [NEX T]
PETER CHEE
FROM LOST BOY TO OLYMPIC LEGEND This summer, Lopez Lomong will again represent the United States when he runs in the Olympics—even though, remarkably, he only first came to the U.S. when he was 16 years old. He was one of the “Lost Boys” of the Second Sudanese Civil War. Since then, Lomong has become a leader in the athletic community, even carrying the
U.S. flag in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. He’s also started a foundation that helps raise aid and awareness of the needs in South Sudan, and he runs with Team World Vision. We recently caught up with Lomong to talk about his Olympic training, his faith and his work to empower those in South Sudan.
Q
How do you use your position to help Sudan?
Q
There are a lot of things that need to be taken care of, especially the education. That’s why I started [the Lopez Lomong Foundation]. I don’t want to just tell the story of what I overcame in my life; I want to tell the story of what I’m doing right now.
A
What does your Olympic training look like?
Q
It’s a very intense few months. The most important thing is to focus on one or two races. I’m not nervous at all. I’m running for joy. This is fun. This is for the people who come and watch. I’m just going to go out there, put my shoes on, line up and run.
A
A
How has your faith helped you?
Q
I’m here because God rescued me, gave me a second chance, kept me alive today. I cannot run a step without God giving me the strength to run and be happy. I’m doing this for the people who are not able to run anymore, who are dead. I’m that voice.
A
So, what’s next for you after the Olympics?
I ran away from the people who wanted to train me as a child soldier. Now I want to coach people to overcome obstacles—to be good runners but also good citizens. This is the leadership I want to bring into the coaching arena when I’m no longer running.
OTHER OLYMPIC HOPEFULS TO WATCH ...
Cullen Jones
Jordyn Wieber
The best chance the U.S. has to win a
Jones, a committed Christian, is
Wieber, an all-around good girl with a
gold in the men’s marathon this year,
an American record-holder in the
3.9 GPA and wholesome image, seems
Hall is a Christian and runs regularly
50-meter freestyle. He’s also active in
to be the heir-apparent for the U.S.
with a charity team.
charity work.
women’s gymnastics team.
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Ryan Hall
WATCH Lomong’s incredible story of capture, escape and redemption. relm.ag/58lopez
[R EJEC T A PAT H Y ]
SUSTAINABLE CHANGE. SACRIFICIAL LIVING.
CHURCH DIVIDED ON IMMIGRANT ABUSE DEBATE Opinions vary widely on a bill offering protection to abused immigrants
IN
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accusations. As NAE president Leith Anderson and Willow Creek co-founder Lynne Hybels wrote for CNN, “It would perpetuate abusers’ use of immigration status as part of the cycle of exploitation.” Hybels and Anderson argue that the bill would allow abusers and human traffickers to keep abused immigrant women from speaking out for fear of deportation. On the other side, Concerned Women for America says the VAWA “encourages the demise of the family as a means to eliminate violence.” Family Research Counsel president Tony Perkins also backs the House in fighting “loopholes for immigration.” For now, Congress remains in limbo—and Christians likewise in determining what “love your neighbor” looks like on a legal level.
R E L E VA N T M A G A Z I N E . C O M
1994, the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) was enacted to protect women victims of violence. One provision of the act grants special U visas to immigrant victims, ensuring their legal status in the United States after prosecuting an abuser. But new bills from the House and Senate show Congress is split on whether or not to scrap this provision—and the Church is just as divided. World Relief, Sojourners and the National Association of Evangelicals are just a handful of faith groups voicing strong opposition to the House bill, which would make visa status for immigrant victims temporary and require their abuser to verify violence
RELEVANTMAGAZINE.COM / 49
R /A
[R EJEC T A PAT H Y ]
TH E N U MB ERS
DEWORMING: THE CHEAPEST WAY TO SAVE A LIFE When people think about changing the world, they probably don’t assume the best place to start is by eradicating worms. But deworming might be the very issue where change can most effectively—and cost-effectively—begin. Approximately 2 billion people worldwide are
PEOPLE INFECTED
BY WORMS:
affected by soil-transmitted helminths (STHs) and schistosomes. STHs are worms that live in the intestines of the host, depriving them of nutrients. Schistosomes live in the blood vessels of the intestines and can cause organ damage and internal bleeding.
2,000,000,000
DEATH TOLL DUE TO SCHISTOSOMIASIS IN AFRICA ALONE: 200,000 PER YEAR
SPECIES OF WORMS
THAT INFECT HUMANS:
300
1
1
SCHOOL-AGED
CHILDREN INFECTED
1
WITH WORMS:
NON-TREATED PERSON
800 MILLION
THE RISE IN SCHOOL ATTENDANCE
CHILDREN
1
THE COST OF
A PILL TO DEWORM
13
%
3
DROP IN LITERACY FOR A
SOMEONE:
IN A DEWORMED STUDENT:
.07 $
1
(INCLUDING DELIVERY AND ADMINISTRATION COSTS) YEAR :
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%
WORM INFECTION:
150
2
COST TO FULLY TREAT A PERSON PER 1 * World Health Organization, March 2003
BECAUSE OF
$ .5
2 * Miguel & Kremer, “Worms: Identifying Impacts,” Feb. 2003
3 * Bleakley, “Disease and Development,” April 2006
MILLION
4
1
4 * Ozier, “Exploiting Externalities ...” June 2011
R E L E VA N T M A G A Z I N E . C O M
25
SEVERELY ILL
IT STARTS WITH
U R BA NA .O RG
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SP OTLI GHT [R EJEC T A PAT H Y ]
GOOD WORK We’re impressed with the great work these charities are doing. ECHO
1
ECHO is a technical-support organization helping leaders in developing countries seek solutions for families growing food in difficult conditions.
2
Me Soap
Five thousand children die every day from a lack of access to soap and water, but introducing soap into hand-washing practices can reduce water-related deaths by upwards of 45 percent. For every bar of FIVE TALENTS
MeSoap you purchase, they donate a bar (or the equivalent of one) to a child in need.
FIVE TALENTS: RESTORING DIGNITY THROUGH MICROLOANS
3
HealthCare Ministries
HCM conducts medical outreach in the developing world in partnership with Assemblies of God missionaries.
For those fighting poverty in countries impacted by natural disasters, ravaged economies or broken political systems, dignity provides a sense that an individual, a family or a community is worth preserving and sustaining, regardless of circumstances. Creating jobs is one of the fundamental parts of restoring that sense of dignity, so rather than providing a temporary respite, Five Talents utilizes microloans, business training and financial education to help recipients form long-lasting small businesses that are built to grow—and thrive. Here we talk with U.K. director Tom Sanderson about the program’s mission and success. Where does the money initially come from for loans?
Q
Why does Five Talents offer loans, not grants?
Q
What is necessary to end the cycle of extreme poverty?
Q
Q
A
A
A
A
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It’s [the recipients’] decision what to do with the money. When their business generates income, they pay back the loan over a short time, and then they’ve got the pride of being able to say, “It’s mine. I did it on my own.” Some of the clients actually look taller because they have so much self-esteem.
There’s the phrase, “If you give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day; if you teach a man to fish, he’ll eat for the rest of his life.” Bono, from U2, added on the phrase, “And microfinance helped to buy the rod.” Business and enterprise is the best way for people to climb out of poverty in a sustainable fashion.
Sixty-five percent of our members are women. Women are often overburdened with family responsibilities and underresourced. They are really shrewd businesswomen and faithful with their money. That’s been exciting to see.
1
EchoNet.org
2
SoapSaves.org
3
HealthCareMinistries.org
R E L E VA N T M A G A Z I N E . C O M
Sometimes money comes from England and the U.S. as loan capital that is granted to our partners. In [our] other model, members of the community are saving, and the loans are coming from their own community.
What has surprised you the most about microloans?
THE FUTURE I S MISSIONAL . “In this fine book, Don brings missionality back where it rightfully belongs—in the basic, work-a-day spirituality of any authentic follower of Jesus.” —ALAN HIRSCH, author
The idea of church as a consumer
of Untamed
product is losing ground. More and more followers of Jesus are waking up to the contradiction of the cozy Christian life. Every time the Spirit of God calls one of us to a life of kingdom significance, the mission of Christ moves closer to the heart of his church. BUT THERE’S STILL WORK TO BE DONE.
“More than a strategy, vision or plan, the unseen culture of a church powerfully shapes its ability to grow, mature and live missionally. . . . Like gravity, the culture of a congregation can either pull people down to their base instincts or lift people up to their sacred potential.” —FROM THE INTRODUCTION
IVPRESS.COM
800-843-9487 RELEVANTMAGAZINE.COM / 53
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WO RLDVIE W
B Y J O N AT H A N M E R R I T T
wiss psychiatrist Carl Jung once said, “Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.” As Americans consume nearly 20 million barrels of oil per day— about 25 percent of the world’s total—you might add black gold to Jung’s list. Each year, as average gas prices inch toward four dollars per gallon and Americans cry for new ways to approach energy policy, some experts respond with a plea for national security. “Energy has become a
S
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Jonathan Merritt is the author of A Faith of Our Own: Following Jesus Beyond the Culture Wars. Follow him on Twitter @Jonathan Merritt.
R E L E VA N T M A G A Z I N E . C O M
central problem in foreign policy,” says James Schlesinger, the first U.S. secretary of energy. “Oil money has trickled down to support terrorism.” Former CIA director R. James Woolsey echoes the sentiment: “I fear we’re going to be at war for decades, not years … One major component of that war is oil.” While decreasing dependence on international oil might increase national security, domestic oil has many hazards as well. And then there are the problems associated with burning coal—and America consumes more coal than any other nation except China. So, appealing to national security by itself cannot support the robust conversation on sustainable energy Christians need to have. We must also consider the health of our children, the well-being of our global neighbors who will be affected by climate change, and our role as creation stewards. For our families. Americans emit millions of metric tons of air pollution from fossil fuels each year. These airborne particulates have a direct effect on the occurrence of childhood asthma. Cases of the disease have doubled since 1980, according to the Centers for Disease Control, and 1 in 10 children are now affected. Our automobiles and coal-fired factories continue to pump out noxious gases, and our kids suffer.
ENERGY IS NOT JUST A MATTER OF FISCAL POLICY BUT FAITHFULNESS.
[R EJEC T A PAT H Y ]
THE POLITICS OF ENERGY
Additionally, both children and adults in regions like Appalachia languish from the abusive practices of the coal industry. As American businesses and households consume increasing amounts of energy, trees are clearcut, explosives decimate mountaintops, coal dust contaminates the air, and headwaters are polluted with toxins such as lead and arsenic. Cancer rates and heart disease in the region are higher than the national average. Americans need an energy revolution to protect our families from these potentially fatal health hazards. For our friends. As the burning of fossil fuels destabilizes our global climate, it threatens the poorest people on Earth. Those who live in low-lying or coastal regions face the loss of their homes. People who rely heavily on agriculture and fishing face the loss of their jobs and food. Those who live on the financial margins risk being pushed into the abyss of poverty. According to a 2009 report by World Wildlife Federation, an estimated 4 billion people are vulnerable to drought and water shortages, crop failures, floods, desertification and the spread of diseases such as malaria as a result of global climate change. As Americans continue to accept unsustainable energy sources and consumption, we compromise the futures of our friends around the world. For our faith. Arguments about our energy future often hinge on economics or innovation or, as we’ve seen, national security. But what about the 159 million Americans who claim to be Christians? Should we not also view this issue through the lens of our faith and the Christian Gospel? When we choose to pursue more sustainable and just energy sources, we’re able to participate in the Gospel story. We move toward a redeemed relationship with nature by protecting the majesty of mountaintops and bright blue skies. We move toward a redeemed relationship with God by protecting His glory in the world around us and obeying His commands to steward the Earth. And we move toward a redeemed relationship with others by refusing to force them to bear the negative effects of our consumptive habits. Energy is not just a matter of fiscal policy but faithfulness. Americans must see a substantial reduction in their reliance on fossil fuels. The only answer is a large increase in cleaner and renewable energy sources. The reasons for pursuing a better energy future do not rise and fall on tanks and terrorism. Concern for our families, friends and faith also root us in the deeper reasons we must abandon our fossil fuel addiction. The answer for our jittery cravings isn’t domestic sources of the same drug we’re hooked on. It’s the rehabilitation of our destructive habits.
RELEVANTMAGAZINE.COM / 55
HOW THE HORMONES IN WHAT YOU EAT CAN AFFECT YOUR HEALTH B Y M AT T H E W S L E E T H
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ore than likely, you are taking birth control pills without knowing it. Almost every girl in America has been taking them for years by the time she reaches kindergarten. It’s not as if preschool workers are making girls swallow little pink pills before naptime. No, the plan is much better than that. How do the birth control pills get into the little girls? Americans eat a lot of meat, and they drink a lot of milk. And as the saying goes, you are what you eat. For decades, the milk production of cows has been augmented by feeding them hormones to stimulate their breasts. When a cow gets its morning dose of Posilac, her breast tissue goes into overdrive. Some of the hormone makes its way into the milk little girls across America pour on their morning cereal. The Posilac makes its way to those girls’ sex organs. In addition, most cattle are fed a steady diet of antibiotics and hormones. Many believe the drugs are given to treat disease, but the cattle are given the hormones and antibiotics even if they are perfectly healthy. The real incentive is faster weight gain. Two-thirds of the beef cattle raised in the U.S. have a hormone chip placed in their ear for the last six months of their lives. The implant supplies a steady dose of estrogen, progesterone and other drugs that stimulate the average cow to gain up to 40 pounds on the same amount of food. This is why hormone- and
M
antibiotic-free meats and dairy products cost more. But meat, milk and cheese aren’t the only ways bioactive chemicals are introduced into what people consume. Plastics—especially the soft ones, like water bottles—contain chemicals called phthalates that act as endocrine disrupters. Heat these containers and they release even more chemicals. The plastic and Styrofoam contain a hormone that looks and acts like female sex hormones. There are so many of these
substances being washed into the environment that scientists say fish and amphibians are changing over to female genotypes. In other words, these creatures respond to the sea of hormones and become females even if they were supposed to be males. How do these hormones impact us? It’s a question that can’t be answered simply. While the long-term effects of hormones in our surroundings are still under study, we do know that estrogen and progesterone affect the female reproductive cycle. And when used in the production of food we eat, they can affect the ovaries and endometrial lining similar to the way birth control pills (BCPs) do. Which brings up more questions: Do these hormones contribute to infertility? Are they related to the rising rate of breast cancer? Several years ago, I saw three women in the course of a week. All three were in their 30s, all three were diagnosed with breast cancer, and all three are dead today. What are the odds, I wondered? I looked it up. A book I had from when I started medical school said the lifetime odds of a woman in the U.S. getting breast cancer were 1 in 19. At the time I saw the three women, the odds had increased to 1 in 9. Today, about a decade later, the odds are even worse. While the quantities most people ingest are small, the jury is still out. After all, this is the first generation of twenty- and thirtysomethings who were raised on hormoneladen milk and meat. Now, as a physician, I know that taking BCPs isn’t all bad. In young adults, the hormones smooth out mood swings, and they often control acne. They make you grow taller and heavier and tend to make breast tissue enlarge. This probably wouldn’t be considered much of a downside ... unless you’re 6. The increasingly lower age for the onset of puberty hasn’t gone unnoticed by the medical world. In a paper published recently in Pediatrics, researchers at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center studied 1,239 girls from New York, San Francisco and Cincinnati. They found that 43 percent of African American girls, 31 percent of Hispanic girls and 18 percent of Caucasian girls are showing signs of puberty by age 8. The increase was especially pronounced in Caucasian girls, where the rates have doubled since the early 1990s. Little girls going through puberty before reaching age 10 are dealing with issues their grandmothers didn’t have to. Training bras in first grade are the least of the problems. Throw a hormone at breast tissue, and it hypertrophies (an individual cell gets larger), and then there’s hyperplasia (the entire gland gets larger). Hormonestimulated tissue replicates itself more frequently. The
more times it replicates, the more chances it has to make an error. Replication errors are often harmless; the body has mechanisms to edit out errors. Occasionally, however, the replication error keeps copying itself. This corruption of the original data is called cancer. So, earlier puberty means more breast cell turnovers in a lifetime. More turnovers mean more chances for error. More errors mean more cancer. The question hangs out there: What are we to do? As a Christian, I believe we can draw wisdom from the Bible. The Bible has quite a lot to say about the treatment and care of animals and the food we eat. Things went drastically wrong when Adam and Eve ate cheap, fast food. Moses and the Hebrews spent 40 years eating manna to learn more about God. Our Savior slept His first night in a cattle barn. On His last night, Christ taught for five chapters over supper. He gave His life that we might have wine and bread that is so pure, it will make those at the feast live forever. And the last page of the Bible describes the chemical-free (“unpolluted”) river of life watering the tree of life. The tree gives 12 crops of fruit, and when we eat them, “all the nations are healed.” All the nations—both male and female. Which leads us to the question: What about all the young boys who ingest the same birth control hormones their sisters take every day? What’s happening to them? These are questions researchers are just beginning to explore. In the meantime, it’s simply critical to take steps to reduce the amount of hormones you ingest. How? We serve a God who is represented by a cross—the symbol of sacrifice. Spend more on food if it supports ethical, chemical-free farming. If being healthy means washing dishes so every church meal isn’t served off Styrofoam, then roll up your sleeves. If it means eating less meat, then skip the burger. But remember the lesson taught to Peter in Acts 10: Don’t pick at your food or turn your nose up when offered a meal. Selfcenteredness is a root cause of these hormone issues—and virtually all creation care problems stem from that same cause. So, more than worrying about ourselves, we should be worrying about others. First and foremost, we are the ambassadors of a loving God. MATTHEW SLEETH, M.D., is the executive director of Blessed Earth and creator of the new film series Serving God, Saving the Planet (Zondervan, 2012). For free, downloadable tip sheets on caring for God’s creation, visit www.blessedearth.org.
RELEVANTMAGAZINE.COM / 57
CAN THE ECLECTIC ARTIST ACTUALLY SAVE POP MUSIC? B Y R YA N H A M M
SEAN THOMAS
58 / RELEVANT_JULY/AUG 12
IS
there any less cool form of music than pop? It’s usually spat out of our mouths as a way to dismiss indie artists who’ve become “too mainstream” or as shorthand for what’s wrong with music today. People love to hate pop radio, pop stars and pop records. Which is why it’s perhaps surprising to hear that Santi White, better known by her stage name, Santigold, and widely acknowledged as being very, very cool, takes pop music seriously. “I’ve always loved pop music,” White says. “I love the accessibility, the catchy melodies that immediately find their way into your head. I love a good hook. But mostly, there’s something so special about music that can appeal to so many people at once. I’ve witnessed over and over on such a large scale the power of music to create community. Not only does it bring people together, it gets them to feel things together, and that’s magical. That is a beautiful power—a power that shouldn’t be abused.” That abuse of power is a topic White tackles often (and well) on her sophomore album, Master of My Make-Believe— which, of course, also happens to be a pop record. It just happens to be a pop record dripping with themes of empowerment, love for creativity and an obvious disdain for the artless. “I just naturally use writing as my platform for things I need to say out loud, whether to myself or to the world beyond,” White says. “Music is that outlet for me. I guess it’s simultaneously a very personal space and a powerfully communal space. My songs are like my journal, where whatever is weighing on me gets worked out.”
Despite the intensely personal nature of her lyrics, White seems to realize that part of being an artist intent on cultivating a broad appeal means many of her lyrics will be dissected and interpreted in ways she never intended. On Master of My Make-Believe, many observers believe that “Big Mouth,” with its lyrics of Big mouth / big mouth / quiet now / you said enough, might be a direct reference to Lady Gaga. While White has said in interviews that allusion wasn’t intentional, she’s also not afraid of being taken out of context. “Half the time people have their own interpretations of what I’m saying that’s different from mine,” White says. “And really, that’s part of the fun of reading lyrics, to draw your own meaning from them. It sucks when they think I’m saying something I’m not or put some sort of tabloid spin on it. But what are you going to do? This is the world we live in.”
FROM PUNK TO POP
Despite how it might seem from her obsession with making pop music important again, White hasn’t always been known for creating accessible music. In fact, pop might be the most surprising type of music for a person of her background to make. White grew up in Philadelphia, the daughter of a prominent lawyer with ties to city politicians. She attended Weslyan College, where she learned to play multiple instruments, which helped her begin a career as an A&R representative for a major label. She left that job when she became a full-time songwriter, writing songs for R&B singer Res and even writing the title track for GZA’s Beneath the Surface. From there, White went on to be the lead singer of a punk band, Stiffed, back in Philadelphia. Then her life fell apart. In 2004, White’s father died of cancer, three months before he was due to stand trial. (He was arrested as part of a federal corruption case targeting politicians in Philadelphia.) White broke up Stiffed, moved to New York and decided to reinvent her act. Calling it Santogold (she changed the name to Santigold in 2009), she began recording a new album, buoyed by early positive reaction to singles like “L.E.S. Artistes” and “Creator.” That album, Santogold, came out in 2008, making year-end lists all over the world.
And then she did something unheard-of for a pop artist: She waited four years to release a follow-up record. After mostly fruitless recording sessions in Jamaica, thanks to a bad bout of writer’s block, White finally found her voice and began to create an album filled with ruminations on fame, artistry and the American Dream. “I think the current American Dream is to achieve fame, status and/or riches with the least possible effort or skill,” White muses. “Pretty much to blow up quick by any means. It used to be about earning success through hard work and having the opportunity to learn the skills you need to become the best at what you do. I think there is a problem when we live in a society where the end justifies the means. That is a very dangerous concept—on so many levels. And in the process, we’re becoming a nation of idiots.” White says she’s not sure what it will take to wake up the United States—either its pop artists or its consumers. “Well, it could be anything, really: a song, a personal experience, a local tragedy, another national or global disaster,” she says. “Unfortunately in America, too often we don’t pay attention to things until they’re right in our backyards.” With that kind of thoughtfulness and careful rumination on her lyrics, it’s perhaps even more startling that White would choose to express herself through pop. Though, to be sure, her style of pop is not focusgrouped, carefully constructed radio fodder. Instead, White makes music with huge hooks and catchy melodies comprised of genres like reggae, punk, hip-hop and Afro-pop, all smashed together into a cohesive whole.
“THERE’S SOMETHING SO SPECIAL ABOUT MUSIC THAT CAN APPEAL TO SO MANY PEOPLE AT ONCE.” It’s not as if White is unaware of the status of pop as a throwaway genre of music. If previous generations marked pop music with critically lauded acts like the Beatles, Michael Jackson and Aretha Franklin, current pop music is marked by artists critics love to hate, like Katy Perry, Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber. In fact, ask White to name current pop artists she admires, and she can only come up with three (Adele, Jay-Z and Kanye West) before she trails off. “The music business, like most other businesses, is about the bottom line. It’s about making money,” White says. “And in this economy, record execs can’t afford to take risks. So they sign up pre-marketed acts that are pretty much made on television with a built-in audience, or they only put out songs by the top three superproducers who write every song to a proven formula and that at this point guarantees hits based on name association alone.” RELEVANTMAGAZINE.COM / 59
have Meeting for Worship once a week at school, where everyone would just sit in silence for 45 minutes, unless they had something they thought was worth sharing, in which case they would stand up, say whatever was on their minds and then take their seat while everyone else just continued to sit in silence and reflect on what was just said. The idea was that there’s that ‘of God’ in everyone. I wasn’t
“WE NEED ... TO START VALUING ARTISTRY OVER INDUSTRY AGAIN. ART MOVES CULTURE FORWARD, AND WITHOUT GOOD ART, WE STUMBLE.”
White also notes that it’s a combination of the economy and cultural forces that have created the current pop environment. “Unfortunately, great art requires great risk, so art has suffered,” she explains. “People are expected to churn out new music at the speed of lightning to keep up with short attention spans and the trendy, throwaway nature of a singles-driven market. This pressure, as well as this type of market, diminishes the importance of making an entire record full of good songs. All you need nowadays is one or two guaranteed hit singles to get the short-term attention and big-money sales the labels are after. Hence, the new brand of disposable pop music.” It’s in that environment that White is trying to make artistry matter again. She’s on a major label, working with major pop producers, trying to make waves and resurrect a genre she loves. But how will people start caring again? How can such a battered genre change direction? “We need to, as a culture, 60 / RELEVANT_JULY/AUG 12
start valuing artistry over industry again,” she says. “Art moves culture forward, and without good art, we stumble. It’s really about artistic integrity at the end of the day. And valuing real talent. Sometimes I wonder if our values have changed so much as a culture that talent is outdated.”
MAKING POP THAT COUNTS
In a rarity for pop musicians, White writes all of her own lyrics—and is very careful and intentional about doing so. While the beats and singalong qualities of the music might suggest another vapid star, the words tell another story. Master of My Make-Believe has lyrics that touch on everything from youth-driven revolutions like the Occupy and Arab Spring movements (“Disparate Youth”) to individuality (pretty much the whole album), from a possibly tongue-in-cheek rap diss track (the fairly explicit “Look at These Hoes”) to a condemnation of, yes, vacuous pop stars (“Big Mouth”). It’s actually her lyrics that caused the four-year gap between White’s debut, Santogold, and Master of My Make-Believe. In 2012, such a gap is practically an eternity. But White has said she battled severe writer’s block in crafting this album, and nothing could really get done until she found her words. She seems to put serious thought into how her lyrics are perceived and what they mean to her. White says that’s because of an early spiritual influence she experienced as a teenager. “I guess ever since I wrote lyrics, since I was a kid, I’ve always felt that if I had something to say, it better be something worth being heard,” White says. “Going to Quaker school drove that idea home. We used to
Quaker, but something about that idea always stayed with me.” Such a spiritual discipline might seem strange for someone who makes music for people to dance to, but White says it remains a part of who she is, even after all these years. And it’s what feeds her ability to create music. “I am a very spiritual person, though not necessarily in the most conventional ways,” she says. “I try to meditate every day to stay connected with the spiritual part of myself. Especially when I’m creating music. I believe that in order to create my music, I have to stay connected to my spirit; that’s where it all comes from, really.” Regardless of where pop music goes in the future, Santi White is committed to making it better. She’s taking on the monolith of bad music through her genre-bending brand of pop. She’s trying to be a voice in the wilderness through her intensely personal and charged lyrics. And she’s trying to call attention to an American culture that she believes too often settles for mediocrity. “It’s not just the pop artists that are to blame,” White notes. “It’s equally the fault of everyone buying into the vapid culture. I mean, the demand is there. At some point we need to ask ourselves, What is it that we’re trying to do here?” It’s a valid question, and one Santi White is helping to answer. WATCH Santigold’s official video for “Disparate Youth” relm.ag/58-santigold
WHAT AM I HOW
TO
FIND
A
CAREER
THAT
SUPPOSED MAKES
YOU
COME
ALIVE
...
EVEN
TO DO? IN
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A
BAD
ECONOMY
BY DAN MILLER
"M
en wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, long hours.” This ad was placed in the early 1900s by explorer Ernest Shackleton as he was looking for men to help him discover the South Pole. The ad drew more than 5,000 brave candidates. Do you think that ad would work today? Are job-hunters willing to work long hours— or be inconvenienced by difficult circumstances? Chances are, you’re trying to find a job. Oh, sure, most of you
have one, but it’s probably not your dream job. Or you might be working part-time. Are you looking for a safe and stable position? One where you have a guaranteed salary, a company car, medical benefits and a threeweek vacation? If so, you’re probably missing the best opportunities out there. The greatest opportunities today probably don't look like your father's dream job. As a life coach, I have seen a dramatic shift in the workplace. No longer can one expect to graduate, get a great job, stay with that company for 35 years, get a gold watch and retire. That model is gone forever. We have seen the collapse of major financial institutions, auto manufacturers, real estate companies and thousands of smaller companies around the world. Long-standing companies like Enron, WorldCom, Tower Records, Olan Mills, Borders and Circuit City are gone. Powerhouse retailer Macy’s cut 7,000 jobs in 2009 as people moved more and more toward online purchasing. Fifteen thousand newspaper jobs disappeared in 2009 alone. Blockbuster Video filed for bankruptcy protection in 2010 and announced plans to close nearly 1,000 stores as technology increasingly allowed for watching movies without cumbersome DVDs. Is anything predictable in the current employment environment? Is it possible to find work that lets you embrace your calling and desire to change the world in a positive way? Can you take your unique personality, skills and passions and blend those into meaningful, purposeful and profitable work? The answer to that question is a resounding yes. It just might look different than it’s ever looked—and you might need to change your idea of what work is.
WHY YOUR PARENTS’ WORK ISN’T YOURS
Previous generations assumed they would work, make lots of money and retire in ease. Unfortunately, many of them discovered that what they thought was security was simply an illusion, and the retirement they anticipated has vanished in the distance. With changing work models, the chances of having a job with a guaranteed salary and benefits are diminishing. But the good news is that the new models may provide more fulfillment, purpose, meaning, time, freedom and f lexibility. And surprisingly, many of these new innovative work models ultimately produce far more income. For instance, StaffMark, the national temporary-staffing agency, predicts that in the next four years, 50 percent of the workforce will no longer
be employees. Their work will be described by terms like consultant, independent contractor, contingency worker, entrepreneur, electronic immigrant and freelancer. The average person now holds 10.8 jobs between the ages of 18 and 42, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In addition, the average length of a job for someone in their 20s is 13 months. It’s clear that what we mean by “job” or “career” is changing rapidly. The generation of 71.5 million Baby Boomers has seen the front edge of this volatile transition. Corporate fraud, stock market catastrophes, economic upheaval and continuing wars around the world have eroded their sense of security and predictability. The next generations no longer expect or even wish for the same things their parents just assumed were a part of growing up. This generation brings its own unique desires to the table. Twentysomethings are not just throwing out all longing for fulfilling work, economic stability, personal responsibility and a meaningful world. In fact, they are perhaps more committed to those things—a reaction, in part, to a materialism they saw has devastating effects. According to a recent Harris Poll, a whopping 97 percent of Generation Y workers are looking for work that allows them “to have an impact on the world.” The most rapidly growing area of study in academic institutions is that of social entrepreneurship, having been created in over 250 universities, such as Harvard Business School, Yale School of Management, Duke, Belmont, Vanderbilt, Wharton, Oxford and Stanford. What’s more, 72 percent of college students say they want to be entrepreneurs. That’s not the only difference between this generation and the Baby Boomers. Wal-Mart, America’s largest employer, is having difficulty finding people to be supervisors. Current employees, many of whom are in the 17-to32 age group, don’t want to be promoted. They don’t want a separate office. They don’t want to have to discipline their peers. They value freedom and independence more than recognition, titles and rewards. In fact, 62 percent say they’d rather have good friends than a great career. They’d rather have a sense of community and the sense that “we’re all in this together” than separate themselves by moving up a career ladder.
WHAT REALLY MATTERS TO EMPLOYERS
Starbucks attracted 7.6 million job applicants in 2011, while Procter & Gamble got over a million applications for 2,000 new positions. Google hired 7,000 people last year—after receiving over 2 million résumés. But here’s the thing: Many companies don’t want your résumé. Only 19 percent of hiring managers at small companies say they look at the résumés they receive. You know what companies do want to see? Your online presence. What will someone find if they do a Google search for you? If there’s nothing to be found, you’re practically nonexistent in today’s workplace. Union Square Ventures, a New York firm, asks candidates to send links representing their web presence, such as links to their Facebook or Twitter profiles or a Tumblr page. Companies also want to know who you are and what you love, not just what your work experience has been. Todd
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Carlisle, Google’s director of staffing, reads the few résumés he scans from the bottom up. “Candidates’ early work experience, hobbies, extracurricular activities or nonprofit involvement—such as painting houses to pay for college or touring with a punk rock band through
high-profile pastor may be better suited to pursue an entrepreneurial business venture. It’s easy to look for career trends, job openings and hot business opportunities. The more challenging task is to find that unique “bent” you possess and embrace it in work that fits. Thus, the power of confidence in your career choice comes from looking inward for the alignment of your unique and personal characteristics, not from looking outward at where the opportunities lie. I tell my clients that 85 percent of the confidence of having taken the proper direction in a career comes from looking inward and creating a clear focus that blends (a) skills and abilities, (b) personality traits and (c) values, dreams and passions. The remaining 15 percent comes from applying that focus to finding or creating work that fits. With that in mind, some of the best questions you can ask regarding a career or job choice would be:
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE FULLY ALIVE IN OUR WORK? HOW DO WE MAXIMIZE THE USE OF THE TALENTS GOD HAS GIVEN US? Europe—often provide insight into how well an applicant would fit into the company culture,” he says. Jobs are also changing because the old model of getting paid for time is diminishing. If you’re doing graphic design, computer programming, financial analysis, or architectural design, time is not really an issue. The only thing that matters is the end result. Companies are realizing that whether you take four hours or 40 hours to do a job is irrelevant—their only concern is a final product that is excellent. Thus, having you clock in or even work in the same building or city is not important. As soon as you accept responsibility for delivering results, you open up a world of new opportunities for meaningful, purposeful and profitable work.
RETHINKING WHAT JOB SATISFACTION MEANS
The oft-quoted Proverbs 22:6 says, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it” (NKJV). Unfortunately, that verse has been distorted to justify cramming spiritual principles into impressionable children’s minds so their theology will not vary from that of their parents. But this verse may have more application to career selection than to strains of theology. A truer reading of the original text would be: “Train up a child in the way that he or she is bent …” The challenge of parenting is discovering how God has uniquely gifted each of their children and how they can help cultivate those gifts. There will be times when the son of a surgeon will be most gifted (or bent) as a teacher or carpenter or musician. The daughter of a prominent attorney may elect to go to the mission field in Africa. The child of a
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[B Y T H E N U M B E R S]
Just a Job? Finding a job that’s fulfilling and meaningful is not only good for your soul—it’s good for your health, too. • A full 70 percent of American workers experience stressrelated illnesses. • According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 34 percent of workers think they’ll burn out on their jobs in the next two years. • There’s a 33 percent increase in heart attacks on Monday mornings, according to the Los
• • • • • •
What was I born to do? What could be my greatest contribution to others? What is it that when I’m doing it, time just flies by? What do I really love to do? What are the recurring themes I'm drawn to? How do I want to be remembered?
Angeles Times. • More people die at nine o’clock on Monday morning than any other time of day or day of the week, according to the National Centers for Disease
When we are not true to ourselves, to our unique, God-given characteristics, we lose the power of authenticity, creativity, imagination and innovation. Our lives become based on performance rather than the overf low of a full heart. And we set the stage for compromise in all other areas of our lives. In the second century, St. Irenaeus declared, “The glory of God is man fully alive.” What does it mean to be fully alive in our work? How do we maximize the use of the talents God has given us? When questioned about any regrets they have or anything they would have done differently, people approaching death are said to respond with one common theme: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” Looking back, it is easy to see talents that went unused and dreams that were left unfulfilled. Are you fully alive? What does success mean for you this year? Are you where you thought you’d be at this stage of your life? Have you ever had a sense of calling in your life? How did you hear that calling? Is your work a fulfillment of your life’s purpose? Do you go home at night with a sense of meaning, peace and accomplishment? If nothing changed in your life over the next five years, would that be OK? If you want different results next year, what are you willing to change about what you’re doing now? Clarifying these questions will help you move toward being fully alive in your work, regardless of how much the idea of work has changed in our culture.
Control and Prevention. • There’s a 25 percent increase in work-related injuries on Mondays, according to Entrepreneur magazine. • Male suicides are highest on Sunday nights. • According to a December 2011 survey by Manpower, 84 percent of employees planned to look for a new position in 2012—up from 60 percent in 2010.
It will mean a move from the drudgery of work to doing something that gives you life, not just money. It might mean long hours and low wages—but you’ll be doing work that is meaningful, purposeful and fulfilling. Expect nothing less from the work designed for you. DAN MILLER is a life coach and the author of 48 Days to the Work You Love (Broadman & Holman) and No More Mondays. Find him at 48Days.com.
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BY L AUR A STUDARUS
CRACKERFARM
THE BREAKOUT INDIE-FOLK BAND ON FINDING FAME, KEEPING FAITH AND GETTING PROPS FROM BOB DYLAN ome artists’ stories begin with the long struggle to become famous—the years spent toiling in obscurity, honing their craft to the point that maybe more than their immediate family members show up for their gigs. Hundreds of shows played, tens of thousands of tour van miles traveled and thousands of autographs signed—this is the opening story for so many bands. But for the Avett Brothers? That’s all true for them, too. But their story begins at home—in a kitchen and around a piano. “I was keen on the idea of being famous,” says Scott Avett with a laugh. “From as long as I can remember, I danced around the kitchen.” Scott is one-third of the Avett Brothers, and his memories of dancing around the kitchen aren’t his
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alone. From the time they were small children, Scott and his brother, Seth, played music together and imagined they would one day have a band. “I would dance around and sing and pretend that one day, somebody would break down from the big places and maybe wander over to our house to see if they could borrow our phone. They’d look in the window and see me prancing around and say, ‘We found a star!’ Beyond that, which is totally a kid dreaming, I was never under any belief that what we were doing was leading toward something. There was never any sort of formula.” That lack of formula has clearly paid off. For a band with beginnings near the dish rack, the Avett Brothers—which includes Scott, alongside biological brother/guitarist Seth Avett, honorary sibling/upright bassist Bob Crawford, and touring members cellist Joe Kwon and drummer Jacob Edwards— have gotten more than their share of accolades, and not just from a patient mother trying to clear the table. They caught the attention of super-producer Rick Rubin, who produced their biggest album to date, 2009’s I and Love and You. And in 2011, they got the endorsement that matters more than probably any other in music: Bob Dylan’s. To top it all off? That endorsement occurred on music’s biggest stage, the Grammy Awards. “When I saw them live, it struck me how great they were,” says Grammy producer Ken Ehrlich. “I really wanted to put them on the show. It seems like three and a half hours would be enough time to put everyone you want on. But every year, we find ourselves not having enough time to do some of the stuff we want to do.” His fix? Pairing the Avett Brothers and like-minded British folk act Mumford & Sons with a recognized musical elder. “When I thought about these guys from across the pond and
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these guys from North Carolina, the commonality that they share, even though they come from thousands of miles apart—that tradition is so tied to Bob Dylan,” says Ehrlich. “What could we do that would be better to show the true line from the 1960s to now?” So the Avett Brothers played alongside Dylan and Mumford & Sons on “Maggie’s Farm” at the Grammys. And it was clear to everyone that a torch was being passed—the grizzled veteran among his hopeful successors, looking upon them and giving them his throaty endorsement. “He wouldn’t have been on stage with them if they weren’t,” Erlich says. It was a stage—a ladder to fame—a long way from the scuffed f loor of a family kitchen.
BANJOING TO THE TOP
When you hear the band’s music and then hear they’re originally from North Carolina, it makes sense. The Avett Brothers’ music is American roots–based, filled with the banjo, bent guitar and the croon of classic American music like country, folk and bluegrass. But just beyond the sweet melodies and hummable choruses lies an edge that belies the safe-for-Mom’s-ears exterior. The band’s first few albums featured a dangerously teetering punk feel, with caterwauling screeches getting just as much time as meticulously picked acoustic guitars. That marriage of styles can likely be traced back to the musical pedigree of Scott and Seth, which veered from a familial love of American roots music to more aggressive forms like punk and grunge. In fact, the first time Scott picked up a banjo, it was out of irony. “I wanted something to focus on and strive at,” he says. “The banjo was extremely ironic to me because I was in art school. There were a lot of punk rockers and skaters. But as a child, [I had seen] Kermit the Frog playing the banjo. There were tidbits of it in my memory that I was drawn to. I had never acknowledged it.” The results were almost instant magic. “It turns out that it was my natural horse,” he continues. “I’ve never been more in love with the banjo than I am now. I love playing it more than I ever have. I love the instrument; I love the machine that it is. But I loved it the moment I picked it up. And I really picked it up out of irony.” As Scott was in college, moving from punkrocker to banjo aficionado, Seth was in high school, trying to find his own sound.
WATCH The Avett Brothers perform with Bob Dylan and Mumford & Sons relm.ag/58-avett-grammy
Left to Right: Bob Crawford, Seth Avett, Joe Kwon, Scott Avett, Jacob Edwards
“THERE’S AN END TO THIS JOURNEY ON EARTH ... AS SOON AS I STARTED LETTING GO OF THAT, I REALIZED I WAS PLAYING FOR A BIGGER THING AND SERVING SOMETHING BIGGER.” —SCOTT AVETT
“I was in high school, and I fronted a band called Margo. We were a three-piece, heavily inf luenced by Nirvana,” he says. “Just wanted to play heavy pop music. I think I thought some label executive was just going to happen on a show we were going to play in Charlotte, and then we were going to be on the cover of Rolling Stone. If I had known then what it takes, I might have been too intimidated to try.” After their bands fell apart, Scott and Seth joined forces and traded hard rock for bluegrass riffs. Being the kind of kids who from an early age had been developing musical vocabularies that included instruments like the dulcimer and musicians like Woody Guthrie, it was a natural progression. “We were sort of simultaneously having an American roots awakening, as far as realizing the wealth of incredible music that has been grown right here in the South, where we’re from,” Seth says of the shift. “Not only that music, but rock ‘n’ roll, all the stuff we had already fallen in love with that would have never happened without all this incredible American roots music.” The transition came with a few growing pains for the brothers, who were forced to truly evaluate their musicianship for the first time. “We started finding our natural voice because our ears were not being blown out with full guitar stacks and full drum kits and all that,” Scott says. “It was like, ‘OK, let’s sing, and it better sound good because we can’t hide it. We can’t bury it in the mix.’ That was priceless, as far as development,
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because we were not great singers.” He smiles and pauses a beat. “Not that we’re great singers now.” From someone else, that might have sounded like false humility, a plea for a compliment. From Scott Avett, it sounds sincere—a modest acknowledgment of how much there is left to learn. But if the results so far are any indication, he doesn’t have much to worry about—I and Love and You garnered attention from music lovers everywhere, making end-of-year lists and leading to headlining slots at festivals all over the country. Of course, it doesn’t hurt to have Bob Dylan and Rick Rubin in your corner.
A FAMILY BAND
Growing up in the semi-rural enclave of Concord, North Carolina, Scott and Seth— born four years apart—had what you might call an idyllic childhood. The brothers have difficulty describing it as anything other than picturesque, recounting family traditions that included meals eaten together, church on Sundays and taking turns caring for the family’s hobby ranch, which included cows, pigs and a f lock of chickens (“It’s not that we necessarily grew up on a farm as farmers,” Scott says). Neither brother can remember a time when music wasn’t a part of their lives; often it was woven into family traditions. “My grandmother played the piano the whole time,” Scott remembers. “That certainly spilled over to my father and my uncle and aunt. They all seemed to know every hymn that ever existed. I was always so amazed. They come and go for me. They come in, and I forget them. But it’s so ingrained in them that they would all get around the piano and start belting out these songs. That tradition runs very deep. There’s a whole lot of soul in that. It’s very emotional and very warm. It seems to be a great way of communicating.” “It was a pretty casual imprinting,” Seth adds. “We didn’t grow up in a family that pushed it really hard. But it was like, ‘Well, we want you to try this for a year, and if you don’t like it after that, then you can stop.’ But our parents wanted us to have at least a rudimentary, basic education. That included the arts ... We had to face that. We just kind of took to it. For me, I liked the piano lessons a lot, and I stuck with it for many years.” Another form of imprinting took place during those years. Seth and Scott were raised on Gospel music—their grandmother was a church piano player, and their grandfather was a Methodist minister—which explains why spiritual imagery has always
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found its way into their music. From the earliest albums to I and Love and You, the musical output of the brothers has been shot through with themes and sounds gleaned from family time spent circling the piano.
MEANWHILE, IN NEW JERSEY ...
A free spirit with his sights set on a career as a news photographer, Bob Crawford packed up the station wagon and headed from his native New Jersey to the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia. During a mid-trip stop in Charlotte, North Carolina, Crawford met an ESPN photographer who encouraged him to segue into film work—a significantly more lucrative career choice.
Despite a lack of formal film training, Crawford took to life on the set. But by 2000, after a stint working as a production assistant and a gig on Remember the Titans, Crawford came to the end of his film career, lacking a desire to climb the ranks any further. “I had burned out on the film business,” he says. “I looked at the old-timers who were so full of knowledge and realized some of them were pretty cranky.”
“I FEEL LIKE THE PRESENCE OF GOD IS SOMETHING THAT’S THERE EITHER WAY. WE CAN ACCEPT IT, OR WE CAN TRY TO MINIMIZE IT OR MAKE IT SEEM LESS OR TRY TO IGNORE IT. IT TENDS TO COME BACK AROUND.” —SETH AVETT
A natural musician, Crawford’s instinct was to go back to school with the goal of teaching music theory. It was a path he planned to pursue until he met Seth and Scott through mutual friends. Having set up shop as a folk-driven duo— reveling in the freedom of not having to carry around large stacks of instruments— the brothers had come to the difficult decision to add another member to the fold, ostensibly to act as a fresh pair of ears during the writing and recording process. “We were very guarded as to who we were going to bring in,” says Scott. “We had stripped everything down to the two of us. We were happy to be the two of us. We realized quickly, though, that we needed help. We needed someone to take on what we were hearing and what we were envisioning and wanted to be in that moment.” As Seth tells it, the brothers’ first meeting with Crawford was all business. “We hardly spoke—we just went right into it,” Seth recalls. “We played a couple of old-time songs, we played one original song, then it was like, ‘Cool, great, thanks for meeting
us.’ It was ten-thirty at night, and everyone had to get up and go to work. That was it.” Despite only having recently purchased an upright bass, Crawford’s performance was enough to secure him a spot in the band. “There’s a saying that PAs used to say: lie and apply,” Crawford laughs. “If a job comes up and you want it, and you kind of know what you’re doing, but you don’t know what you’re doing, you lie, and apply, and then you pray.” It never occurred to Seth and Scott that Crawford might not be as skilled with the bow as they thought. Scott points out that his ignorance—in part—may have stemmed from possessing an equally tenacious drive to succeed on his newly adopted instrument. “I’m similar to Bob, I guess, because once I learned 12 songs, I got hired as a banjo instructor,” he recounts, a slight smirk playing around the edges of his voice. “I only knew 12 songs! But I was confident enough. There were at least 12—12 that I could start with. And if I keep learning, I can just stay ahead of the pack and keep teaching. We both hacked our way in, and we developed in front of people. I do think that’s part of what the initial draw was, the drama that we dealt with—learning and stumbling, f lubbing through every song. People, I think, were drawn to it. The drama was there.” In addition to tightening the bottom end, Crawford also propelled the band forward, applying his unquestionably high work ethic to booking tours and encouraging Seth and Scott to work harder at developing their craft. “He does this today. It’s amazing,” says Scott. “We were with Bob last night, and we had a full day of work. Bob is upset with me because during our one-hour break, I didn’t want to practice this one thing with him. He told me, ‘We’ve got to do this, we’ve got to do this.’ He’s such a great man. Motivating in that way.”
THE FREEWHEELIN’ AVETT BROTHERS
In 2003, the three musicians quit their day jobs to focus on making music, agreeing to treat the band as a business—assuring that, at bare minimum, they made a menial living wage. While the other two members had safety nets in place—planning on returning to school or teaching, should their music careers stall—Seth admits he never had a viable Plan B. “I don’t tend to look all that far ahead,” he says. “That’s just one of my qualities—or tragedies, depending on the narrative ... I’ve pretty much always wanted to play music with Scott. We’re going to be in a band, and we’re going to play music, and that’s what we’re going to do. As a kid, that’s a highly immature vision. I really can’t believe that’s what’s actually happening.” To hear Crawford tell it, they needn’t have worried. “As long as there were things on the calendar keeping it going, we had no problem keeping it going. There was never a long-term plan or a long-term goal. It was always whatever comes next, and there was always something next. This person’s birthday party, or this person’s graduation party, a gig at this bar, or a gig at this college. Before you know it, you’re doing morning television in small towns, [then] you’re doing Conan O’Brien.”
But the band’s biggest moment to date—that evening at the Grammy Awards—almost didn’t happen. As Seth recalls it, Dylan’s appearance at the show was contingent on his finishing work on a painting. In regard to his band’s near-miss at performing with Dylan, Seth offers the verbal equivalent of a goodnatured shrug. “There’s never been a question in anyone’s mind that Dylan’s priorities are finishing the art and making sure he stays true to his art,” he says. “I was actually glad to hear that. ‘Well, cool, if you don’t finish the painting ... yeah, you need to work on that painting.’” He pauses before clarifying. “When I got that news, it was like, ‘Yeah, this is going to be pretty awesome.’” The band’s slow upward trajectory—from performing at churches and bars to late-night TV and large theaters—has brought with it an increasingly fanatic fan base that tracks their every move. Scott notes that, perhaps counterintuitively, the moment he began to embrace the impact his band has had on listeners was the moment he began to let go of his own personal importance. “I think it was at the moment I stopped being embarrassed to give my autograph, or at the moment I stopped feeling awkward when someone said, ‘You changed my life for what you do, please don’t stop,’” he says. Those were the moments that taught Scott how to be humble—that taught him this career had to be about more than just his own goals or his own fame. If people cared that much—he had a huge responsibility with that platform. “I started realizing I have no idea what I’m talking about,” Scott continues. “It’s not about me at all. We’re all part of the whole ever-changing current movement. When I realized that, I began a journey I’m on now, which is, ultimately, [that] every year I give, a little more of
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myself is erased—a little more of that ego that we are strapped with and unfortunately burdened with. In art, just like in banking, or racecar driving—even farming—we all have this ego. We have to realize, ultimately, that there’s an end to this journey on Earth. This physical journey. As soon as I started letting go of that, I realized I was playing for a bigger thing and serving something bigger.” It’s not often you hear a rock star so contemplative about his own ego—so bent on becoming a better person. Usually, musicians seem hell-bent on extending their egos. But for Scott Avett, the formation of himself as a person—his soul—is as important to him as the formation of his art. “I don’t have the answer now, but I’m on a journey that helps me erase that part of me that was very self-serving,” he says. “When it visits me now, I’m much more aggressive toward it. I’m quicker to close that door than I used to be. I’m much more reluctant to indulge in that.”
FAITH AND SICKNESS
Prone to sunny harmonies and gentle tales, the band has been forced to face some devastating, real-life heartbreak. Last November, Crawford’s 2-year-old daughter, Hallie, was diagnosed with a grade III ependymoma brain tumor. Speaking from the hospital where his daughter is undergoing chemotherapy, Crawford is pragmatic about the lessons learned during this incredibly difficult time, emphasizing how thankful he is to be able to take time off from the band to be with his family. “I count less in this world than I’ve ever counted in my life, being an advocate for my kids and being there to take care of them,” he says emphatically. “Having a child changes your life. Having a second child changes your life in a different way, and then having a child with a serious illness changes your life in a whole different way. I’m very fortunate with the guys that I am in business with because we are very family-centered.” Supporting his family through his daughter’s illness has afforded Crawford a deepening of faith. “This has been the hardest time of my life, my wife’s life,” he says. “I came to God through this experience in a more
So, what about that next album ... ? We’re very close to there. We’re 98 percent of the way done. The mixing is all done. We’re tying up loose ends. For us, at the moment, it means sequencing. I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately, the analogy of color. If you put a fire-engine-red dot on a white piece of paper, it looks red. But if you put it on a forest green piece of paper, it doesn’t look like the same red. The sequencing of an album is very important to us. It’s a very relative thing ... The relation between song to song is very important, and the flow is very important.” —Seth Avett, on the band’s seventh full-length, due out late this summer or early fall
personal way. I’ve been trying to get closer and nurture that.” It’s a belief the Avett Brothers all share—each member supporting a personal relationship with God over one driven by culture. However, each member also adamantly insists that theirs is art made by Christians—not “Christian art.” It’s also clear they’re more thoughtful about it than might be assumed. “There needs to be a safe zone, and music is a safe zone,” Crawford says. “We are a polarized society. We need areas that are not so polarized. People have a right to their views.” “Writing lyrics is not some magical WATCH manipulation tool,” The Avett Brothers perform “January Seth adds. “If that’s Wedding” at Austin City Limits what you’re looking relm.ag/58-avett-acl for, that’s basically the same as telling
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someone you’re right who doesn’t want to hear it ... There’s no better way to get someone to stop listening.” In other words, while the Avett Brothers’ music may espouse themes associated with belief in God, don’t expect them to use their concerts as bully pulpits to exclude those who don’t hold to a similar belief. “I’m careful with my words, because I’m a true believer that words get in the way, as well,” Scott says. “People get caught up so much about, ‘Well, so and so says they believe in this, this and this. So-and-so over there believes in this, this and this.’ We’re arguing about what the name of it is. What if we didn’t care about that? There are common denominators. There is a unification that’s undeniable. I think if there was no church on this planet, there would be no less spirituality ... no less religion in a man’s life.” Seth echoes the sentiment. “I feel that a relationship with God is something that can continue,” he says. “It will continue whether you want it to or not, regardless of church or family. I feel like it’s good to go to church if you’re called to do it and you can do it. I feel like it’s been a good thing in my life.” Church, prayer and family have all been a huge part of Seth’s life—of Scott’s and Crawford’s too—and Seth, while admitting that being on the road makes it harder, still desires to connect with God as often as he can. “I try to pray,” he says. “Not just when I’m down or when I’m needing or wanting something. I try to keep that conversation f lowing. I feel God’s presence more at some times and less at other times. I feel like the presence of God is something that’s there either way. We can accept it, or we can try to minimize it or make it seem less or try to ignore it. It tends to come back around.”
THE PRESENT AND FUTURE
Though Crawford’s daughter’s illness has delayed some of the band’s work, they are currently wrapping up their seventh full-length album. Due out in early fall, they note that a third of the tracks have been refined via road testing, including “Down With the Shine,” “The Once and Future Carpenter,” and “Geraldine.” While the Avett Brothers are hesitant to give specific details about the forthcoming album, Scott notes that over the years, while the scenery may have changed, the core of the band has remained the same. “I can’t tell you how much the idea of me prancing around the kitchen and performing in my living room—that’s what it was for so long,” he says. “I don’t understand how that dream or that determination has been so resilient. But it just has. I think it’s a healthy thing. I was never doing it for any reason except because I was really enjoying doing it.” Scott and his brothers—biological or honorary—are carrying that dream from a farmhouse kitchen to Bob Dylan’s right hand, from the family piano to the biggest stages in the world. LAURA STUDARUS is a writer living in Los Angeles. She is a regular contributor to Under the Radar, Filter, eMusic and RELEVANT. Follow her @Laura_Studarus.
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had been a bad year for the Hilton chain. In June 2010, a flagship Hilton hotel in Chongqing, China, lost its topnotch rating after being completely shut down by the police. In their press release, the police described a “complete chain” of hotel staff involved in prostitution, including hotel managers, security guards, luggage carriers, receptionists and staff. Later that fall, two women were arrested in Limerick, Ireland, for running a brothel out of another Hilton hotel. The chain was severely embarrassed by both episodes and announced plans to roll out an internal code of conduct to prevent child sex-trafficking. Many onlookers, though, believed the chain was taking too long to instate preventative measures to stop future activity and to sign an international code to protect children from sexual exploitation in travel and tourism. One such observer was Avaaz. org. Avaaz is a petition-building website and launching pad for activist organizing. They bring what they call “people-powered politics” to decision-making worldwide. Avaaz took up the Hilton case and began a petition in October 2010. Thanks to the power of
social media, within a very short time the website had collected 317,000 signatures for a petition that called on the Hilton CEO, Chris Nassetta, to sign the Code of Conduct for the Protection of Children from Sexual Exploitation in Travel and Tourism. To give the petition teeth, the campaign came with a threat: Sign the code, or the group would take out ads in Nassetta’s hometown newspaper telling him to do so (paid for by donations from signers). Twentyfour hours later, Avaaz got a frantic call from Hilton’s vice president. Within the week, Nassetta had signed on. As a result, 140,000 employees in 3,800 hotels worldwide are being trained to detect, report and assist girls and women forced into the sex industry. Despite successes like this, Internet and social-media activism is getting a bad rap these days. If you’ve ever signed a petition via Facebook or retweeted a worthy cause, you may have been accused of slacktivism, a catch-all term for activism that requires little and achieves even less—or so critics argue. They contend that slacktivists lack real commitment, care only about self-satisfaction and peer approval, and contribute nothing to meaningful change. In their view, modern-day Internet activism is simply an extension of the need to render one’s life “likeable”—little more than bra-burning or button-wearing for a new era. What should be made of these critiques? Are the naysayers on to something? Given the plethora of silly causes and the questionable effects of Internet activism, it’s hard to blame the critics for fretting. The problems facing society are real and rarely respond to quick and easy solutions. But at the same time, the world is changing in unprecedented ways, and the way we engage the world must change as well. Via the web, activism can now be global in scope. But real progress will not come at the click of a mouse alone; it requires strategic engagement and connection both on—and off—line.
“PEOPLE ACT AS IF THERE’S NO VALUE TO ENTRY-LEVEL EMPATHY, AND THAT’S SIMPLY NOT TRUE.” —JEDIDIAH JENKINS SLACKER + ACTIVISM
Slacktivism wasn’t always considered a slur. In 1995, before most people had an email account, Fred Clark and Dwight Ozard coined the term to describe “slacker activism,” the bottom-up activities used by young people to affect society on a small, personal scale. Years on, at some point between the first URL coming into existence and Charlie Sheen’s Twitter frenzy flame-out, the world moved online. Now more than ever, the digital and the real worlds have blurred. In 2005, Americans used the Internet for personal use for around six hours per week; just five years later, that figure doubled. Today, time spent on the Internet equals the amount of time Americans watch TV, and one out of every five minutes we spend online is spent on social media. This cultural shift, coupled with the advantage of low transaction costs and global reach, makes having an Internet and social media presence a no-brainer for nonprofit organizations. It’s a simple calculation, Nancy Lublin, the CEO of Do Something, adroitly notes, referencing the ease of signature gathering for a cause: “Which
would I rather have—an underpaid college student standing on a street corner, clipboard in hand, trying to collect petition signatures from passersby, or a free online version that relies on potentially millions of unpaid friends who help me out with viral clicking? You say slacktivism; I say economies of scale.”
THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TWEETED
Few campaigns get off the ground these days without constituents who link to them via Facebook and Twitter. Social media is hands-down the best platform for sharing causes and information. As a result, our knowledge of the problems facing the world is rivaled only by details of the lives of our over-sharing high school friends. But what does awareness really accomplish? Maria Popova, creator and editor of BrainPickings.org, argues that online communities “broaden our scope of empathy” by making us more aware, which leads to empathy, which in turn leads to action. But does it? Do people act sacrificially without personal connection to a cause? Will the connections between Facebook friends ever tip us from awareness to action? Malcolm Gladwell famously answered no. Though slacktivism had been a topic of concern since at least 2009, the debate got heated when Gladwell weighed in with an October 2010 New Yorker article entitled “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted.” Gladwell passionately argued that slacktivism would never achieve the same results as the civil rights movement or the suffrage movement or the anti-slavery movement because social networks do not make for the kinds of communities that can withstand the inevitable establishment pushback against world-changing campaigns. He argued that social media can’t RELEVANTMAGAZINE.COM / 75
provide the essential elements required for change: discipline and strategy. “Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information … but [these] weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism,” he wrote. “[Social media] makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact.” Gladwell’s claims have been disputed, and this disagreement is at the heart of the debate about the efficacy of social media activism. But the honest answer is that we don’t yet really know the answer. We do know that the Internet has been a connection hub for organizing historic protests, even when we exclude the Arab Spring, whose reliance on social media has been disputed. (“Social media wasn’t a catalyst. The events it described were the catalyst,” said one observer.) For example, in 2008, a young engineer in Colombia put together a Facebook campaign against the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) that led to 365 different protests attended by an estimated 4.8 million people. (The largest prior protest in Colombia had an attendance of 20,000.) A year later, a similar campaign in Bulgaria mounted the largest protests since the fall of the Iron Curtain, which led to the resignation and later conviction of several Parliament members accused of corruption. In the U.S., protests often take trivial forms, like those found tucked in among the more serious petitions at Change.org. There are the petitions to ignore Kim Kardashian or to ban jobkilling ATMs or to allow food trucks in [name your city]. Perhaps fueled by these types of expression, the fear of a generation interested only in selfaggrandizement persists in this country to an almost paranoid degree, as if millions of young people who would have otherwise been calling their elected 76 / RELEVANT_JULY/AUG 12
officials or marching in the streets are instead holed up in their basements, growing their fingernails long, as they click obsessively on Facebook links and cause-related videos. But no one can definitively answer the question on everyone’s mind: In a pre-Internet era, would these slacktivists have been out on the street? Or are they the kind of people who would only engage if it involved little risk or sacrifice anyway? We do know that awareness of global issues is at an all-time high, which many people suggest is, overall, a good thing. (Though others worry about disillusionment if clicktivist activities do little to create change.) To date, though, there is no evidence that Internet activism is replacing offline activism or other forms of civic engagement. A recent study even found the opposite to be true. The study, published in November 2011, was conducted jointly by Georgetown University’s Center for Social Impact and Communication and Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide. They researched the connection between social media and offline activism and found that so-called slacktivists may be more engaged than they’ve been given credit for. The authors write, “Americans who support causes most often by utilizing promotional social media (e.g., joining a cause group on Facebook, posting an icon on a social profile, blogging about a cause) participate in more than twice as many supportive activities (both online and offline) when compared to their non-social media promoter peers.” The study suggests that clicking “like” on Facebook can and does lead to real-world activism. As Bill McKinnon says, online engagement with these issues may be just “one tool along a continuum that can be used in concert to the same desired end.” As long as it doesn’t end there.
“WHAT IS NEEDED ARE PEOPLE ... WHO ARE WILLING TO TAKE THE VERY FIRST STEP.” —BETHANY HOANG WHAT MAKES FOR MEANINGFUL ACTIVISM?
Some scholars are coming up with new and better names for slacktivists that remove the pejorative connotation, such as nano-activist or micro-activist. But can you take the “slacker” out of a slacktivist? If this generation wants to change the world (which we do)—and, more importantly to those of us who follow Christ, let God change us—then we must. Forget for a moment the debate about clicking and slacking versus marching and telephone-banking. We’ve been online and in the streets, and we know the issues. But many of us are stuck. Some are burnt out by cause fatigue and juggling the needs of our own families with the overwhelming needs of the rest of the world. Others yearn to make a difference but are frozen by fear and a sense of utter inadequacy. The beauty of the Christian life is that we can step back and remember it’s not all about us—neither our knowledge and good deeds nor our stilted efforts. Bethany Hoang is so passionate about this topic that she has written an upcoming book about it that is informed by her work with International Justice Mission (IJM). As director of the IJM Institute, she “convenes and equips” leaders to seek justice on
behalf of the global poor who are suffering from abuse and oppression. Despite confronting some of the worst atrocities occurring in the world today, she’s not concerned about the ability of the Facebook generation to make an impact. “My main concern with the term and idea of ‘slacktivism,’” she says, “is that it brings forward such an automatically negative connotation as a blanket descriptor over a host of actions that could actually be quite meaningful. Justice begins with seeking God first. And because justice is about responding to who God is and what God longs for, every action we take, if done from the core of our formation in Christ, can bear great meaning—even the actions that seem most small and insignificant.” Chai Ling, a former leader in the Tiananmen Square movement who now lives in the States, agrees. “Social media is a powerful tool for activism. It’s still only just a tool—social media itself is not going to inspire people to pray and take meaningful action. The Spirit prompts us to pray, and so we have an immediate course of action when we learn of a need via Twitter or Facebook—no matter where that need is.” Ling now leads All Girls Allowed, a nonprofit that seeks to reveal the injustice of China’s onechild policy and to support women and girls in that country. “Prayer also inspires and informs direct action,” she adds. “As All Girls Allowed moves into working more closely with the Church in China, we know our work will depend more than ever on the prayers of faithful, devoted believers.” IJM and All Girls Allowed have a social media presence because they know that these seemingly insignificant actions are powerful. Bethany Hoang’s first seemingly inconsequential step toward activism was writing her name down on an email list to learn more about
sexual slavery. “It cost me very little in the moment,” she says.“But I have, literally, never been the same since.” She hopes others will also take that first little step, too. “In reality, what is needed in our world of massive human suffering is not more people who are unwilling to do anything until they are doing the most visible, heroic, direct form of action they can imagine,” she says. “What is needed are people— masses of people—who are willing to take the very first step to which God calls them, even if it seems absurdly small. And then, prayerfully, to talk with God, talk with others in their community, and take the next step.”
STEP BY STEP
Discovering the next step eventually gets you out of your chair. For Robert Lupton, it meant leaving a budding business career to settle in innercity Atlanta. Since then, he has become something of an authority on Christian community development. Lupton works with neighbors to develop mixed-income housing projects and revitalize struggling communities. But he didn’t get there in a day, or a year, or even a decade. He and his family have spent the last 40 years in Atlanta, and they made their fair share of mistakes early on. He shares the ideas that developed over a lifetime with these communities in his most recent book, Toxic Charity. Lupton argues that most charitable work is ineffective or actually harmful to those it is supposed to help. Given his location and experience, Lupton’s response to the rise of slacktivism is wariness. “When I see the capacity of social media to mobilize masses of people, I begin to understand its potential for both great good and great harm,” he says. “Slacktivism seems to be skewed more toward the harmful side of the equation since it
Supporters at a KONY 2012 rally
tends to create the illusion that complex problems can be solved by a click and a contribution. “On-the-ground justice work is gritty, sweaty, painstaking, timeconsuming labor laced with crushing disappointment as well as exhilarating victory. You can’t get that sitting in your living room in front of a laptop.” Lupton argues that doing “for” rather than doing “with” those in need is the norm in our charitable work, which, when combined with patronizing pity and unintended superiority, leads to toxic charity. Lupton advocates relationships with the poor that are built on mutual respect and genuine exchange in order to avoid this situation of disempowerment. And slacktivism, or nano-activism, or whatever you want to call it, just doesn’t cut it. “Slacktivism looks for quick fixes. Entrenched poverty has no quick fixes,” Lupton says. “Those who attempt [the quick fix] will soon become frustrated and move on to easier causes, or they must adjust their expectations and commit to a long and difficult (though rewarding) mission.”
ENTRY-LEVEL EMPATHY
Of course, everyone has to begin somewhere, as Jedidiah Jenkins points out.
“People act as if there’s no value to entry-level empathy,” he says. “And that’s simply not true.” Jenkins is director of ideology at Invisible Children. (You remember them, right? That charity with the video?) He is charged with developing and articulating the core philosophies and goals of the organization. Ridding the world of Joseph Kony, which is Invisible Children’s stated aim, is intimately tied with empowering a generation of activists. “Our hope is that learning about the issue of Joseph Kony and the LRA is so morally clear and shocking that it would wake young people up to the world around them, a world that needs them to care,” Jenkins says. “We hope that it would start something within them that manifests itself in every aspect of their life, from local volunteering to job choice to the way they consume products and food and information.” Invisible Children believes that why you’re doing something is often more important than how or what you’re doing. Recently, some took issue with this stance, arguing that good intentions can often do more harm than good. But the “why” of Invisible Children has always been the engine behind their work. Using the power of media, they hope to inspire their supporters to “do more than just watch.” And they have. Their offline following has always been very strong—the envy, even, of more established organizations. Anyone who has met an Invisible Children activist knows firsthand the depth of their commitment and passion. With 3.2 million “likes” on Facebook and, of course, the video that went global in a matter of days, the organization’s web presence is nothing to sneeze at. But where Invisible Children really excels is in the way it RELEVANTMAGAZINE.COM / 77
[THE LIST]
Read These Here are three books on doing social justice the right way.
Toxic Charity Robert Lupton
When Helping Hurts Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert
Into the Mud Christine Jeske
motivates its constituents to adopt the organization’s cause as their own. Henry Jenkins, a professor at the University of Southern California, has been studying Invisible Children as a case study in participatory culture civics. His research suggests that the organization has a strong following because it encourages involvement and youthful passion, even if it’s a little unrefined sometimes. According to Neta KliglerVilenchik, a doctoral student on the project, much of the debate around “Kony 2012” was an effort to protect the rhetorical boundaries around social engagement and expression, especially, she says, “who is and who is not allowed to speak; what is the right way to speak; and what should that sound like.” Invisible Children pays little attention to these boundaries and resonates strongly with young people. It’s redefining what social action looks like and inviting constituents to participate. Could getting young people out of their chairs really be that simple? 78 / RELEVANT_JULY/AUG 12
ACT:S, World Vision’s social media activism network, is banking on it. The network exists to ignite faith and justice movements and to equip and inspire young people to tackle poverty and injustice in college and beyond. ACT:S is a network of 30,000 creative activists and young people, and its newest effort is an online connection point for activism (www.worldvisionacts.org) overseen by ACT:S leadership. The site, which launched in the spring, aims to connect a community of creative activists by providing a multidimensional, central location for learning about issues of poverty and injustice, creatively responding, and connecting to others. Their first efforts involved Twitter campaigns to tweet senators, and the leadership of ACT:S sees this social media activism as an easy on-ramp to further engagement. “Our audience often doesn’t even know who their senator is,” says James Pedrick, who co-founded the college group that became ACT:S. Pedrick and his team know that lasting and radical change requires more than an Internet connection. That’s why they’ve invested in a dynamic resource: young people. “Good-hearted people are intimidated by the term ‘leader,’” says Kurt Rahn, national mobilization coordinator for ACT:S, so ACT:S supports even the smallest efforts. The organization knows not everybody is going to organize a bowling tournament to raise money, as one group does every year, or start a schoolwide cleanwater-education project. But many can do something as simple as bringing up issues in a Bible study or selling citronella candles to raise money for bed nets, as Elanor S. currently is sharing at the site. ACT:S knows that changing the world “involves personal sacrifice, investment, commitment,” but they also recognize, like the other organizations mentioned here, that almost everyone, at least initially, needs someplace to start.
IN LOVE WITH THE IDEA OF CHANGING THE WORLD
Unlike most, who begin with fits and starts, Eugene Cho seems like he was born as a fully-formed activist. In response to the faces of extreme global poverty they saw while visiting Burma, Cho and his wife, Minhee, felt led to donate one year’s salary, or $68,000, to found a nonprofit called One Day’s Wages. They’ve invited others to give one day’s wages to the fight and have raised over $1 million dollars in the last three years. But Cho is not resting on his laurels; he readily admits he has a lot to learn. “You could use my face as one of the poster children for slacktivism,” he says. “One Day’s Wages was my attempt to change the world, and it was God’s way of saying, ‘No, this is about changing you.’ The past couple of years have been painful because when you intend for [your work] to be something to change others ... and then you realize—I realized—there is idolatry in my life, greed, materialism, capitalism run rampant ... it’s pretty sickening sometimes.” Part of breaking down these “quasi-idolatries,” as Cho calls them, is getting out in his community to be with and serve the homeless population in the neighborhood surrounding Quest Church, where he is lead pastor. Quest opened a site for homelessness advocacy, called the Bridge Care Center, a little over a year ago. Because those in need are so close, it’s easy for Cho to confront another phenomenon he sees in himself and in this generation. “My fear is that we are more in love with the idea of changing the world than changing the world,” he notes. “In response to that phrase: There’s a cost to justice, [and] we have to examine why global causes have become more of a trend.” Cho believes it’s become this way because overseas issues “allow for safety and
distance.” At the homelessness center, the distance falls away. “I travel abroad once a year,” he says. “I can go to the Bridge Care Center every week. On the corners are our friends ... [It’s] very hard sometimes.” Cho believes involvement this close to home has another advantage: It’s not as tempting to “exploit men and women to create the nonprofit complex.” By which he means, he sees a phenomenon happening among those who have a heart for justice to jump on the bandwagon of the newest big thing, which is tempting but unhelpful. Justice work does not assimilate to our high-speed age; we must assimilate ourselves to the long process of being changed by God and finding our unique calling. In Cho’s words, you can hear echoes of Robert Lupton: “On-the-ground justice work is gritty, sweaty, painstaking, timeconsuming.” And rewarding.
NOW WHAT?
The debate is on about the place of Internet activism in our quest for social change, with consensus a long way off if it’s ever reached at all. We see progress all around us, even in places like China where, as Chai Ling relates, “the ‘Great Firewall’ of web censorship is alive and well, but social media has exposed cracks in censorship.” There is great power and hope in the world because of these kinds of developments. But there are pitfalls, too. We don’t have to get caught up in the arguments, but neither should we turn a blind eye to what makes for life-changing, empowering development for giver and recipient. So, go ahead—click away. Just get up and out, too. PENNY CAROTHERS is a writer and the social justice editor for the Burnside Writers Collective. Find her online at PennyCarothers.com and on Twitter at @pennycarothers.
THE WRITER/DIRECTOR TALKS GRITTY FAITH, HOLLYWOOD’S IMPRESSION OF CHRIST AND, OF COURSE, THE HULK BY JOSHUA LUJAN LOVELESS
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things that frighten us or repulse us. Otherwise, we’re part of the problem.
Q
You’ve played everything from a priest to the Hulk. How do you, as an actor, live in the tension between being entertaining and being meaningful?
[THE LIST]
Ruffalo's Best Here are a handful of Mark Ruffalo flicks you should definitely see.
A
I love acting, and I love the art of storytelling, and I try to find meaning in it in all of the forms that I do it in. I care about what I do. There’s not a lot of tension between the two. I know the moment when I’m like, “I need to go do a little gritty independent. ” Or, “I just want to do something that’s pure entertainment now. I’ve been in the dark for a long time. I want to come into something lighter.”
nlike many actors of his generation, Mark Ruffalo is known for moving easily between bigbudget crowd-pleasers (The Avengers) and smaller, more thoughtful films (Sympathy for Delicious). We talked to the versatile actor about faith and film.
Q
One of your most recent films is your directorial debut, Sympathy for Delicious. It has the theme of a faith struggle, but it’s pretty gritty and dark. Why doesn’t Hollywood have as many films that maintain that type of balance?
Q A
romp Zodiac David Fincher’s serial-killer movie Blindness A terrifying society where
Q A
no one can see Sympathy for Delicious Ruffalo's directorial debut You Can Count on Me A powerful sibling drama
Do you have a re-entry routine you do with your family to detox?
Q A
Q A
Hollywood is afraid to make a movie that no one is going to go see. That is based, in some regard, on assumptions but also on a certain kind of reality. There are certain coarse realities about faith, real street-level faith. We don’t want to look at it because it’s ugly to us, but it’s where there is a lot of grace. If we are who we say we are, then we have to engage in those
A con-heavy
Well, sometimes you find yourself living in the world of the character you’re playing moreso than you are in your own life. Especially when you’re shooting a little intense movie, or even a long movie where you’re on a set for six months. My wife and I call it “reentry.” There’s a process of coming back to reality that we’re aware of, that we’ve learned how to handle, that I think we’ve gotten pretty graceful about doing. But it certainly presents its own bizarre difficulties.
Sometimes it’s just that Papa brings home his own schedule and his own style and everyone has to get reacclimated to Papa being here. But the first thing we do is hug until we melt into each other’s arms. That’s pretty much number one, just to get in sync with each other again. And that does a lot. I know to kind of be gentle. But mostly it’s spending quality time together, immediately coming in and talking and just being aware that [it] is a little bit of a process of re-entry.
Do you think Hollywood is more afraid of making those kinds of movies, or are Christians too afraid to see them?
Bloom
Is it a challenge to play other people and return to your authentic self?
I think they’re afraid. To have a really honest conversation about faith today is taboo in a way. You want to clear a room quickly? Start talking about God. For better or for worse, it’s a taboo conversation. There’s a lot of hangups, and people, I think, have a lot of negative connotations that are attached to it ... We’re in a marketdriven culture. I think they’re afraid that there is no market in these kind of stories.
A
The Brothers
You’ve worked with a lot of great directors. What separates a good director from a great one?
I [know] the difference of the people that I liked to work with and the people that I didn’t enjoy working with. People that turned me on sparked my imagination, sparked my creativity, and made me feel that I was important and part of a project. That’s what I’ve admired in the directors that I think are great. Greatness is such a subjective thing for so
many different people. But that’s what I was looking for, and the people that I think are great are the people that inspire other people to be great around them.
Q A
What is the best thing about being the Hulk?
There’s a little bit of incremental evolution of Bruce Banner and the Hulk [in The Avengers]. You see more of a nuanced kind of character in the Hulk. And the guy’s older! Bruce Banner is older in this version. He’s been living with it longer. He’s, in a way, learning to live with it and accept it and still have a life. And it’s a great cast. They’re all a lot of my buddies, and I really love what they’ve done with the genre, starting with Iron Man. RELEVANTMAGAZINE.COM / 81
FOSTERING HOPE BY TYLER CHARLES
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HOW THE CHURCH IS CHANGING THE FACE OF FOSTER CARE AND ADOPTION IN THE U.S.
Y
ou’ve seen the commercials depicting starving children overseas. You’re familiar with the “sponsor a child” model for aiding impoverished, starving and sick children. You know of the celebrities who’ve adopted children from Ethiopia and Vietnam. And there’s nothing wrong with these efforts. In fact, there’s reason to celebrate any effort to save or improve the lives of children overseas. But what about the kids stateside? It might not sound as glamorous, but there are thousands of kids in the United States who need a loving home. And for many, that need is not being met. As of late 2010, more than 408,000 children were in the U.S. foster care system. Of those children, 107,011 were considered “adoptable”—meaning, their parents’ rights have been terminated or relinquished. Every year, 20,000 to 30,000 kids “age out” of the foster care system. Of those, 50 percent will have dropped out of high school (compared with 8 to 9 percent of the general population). Sixty-two percent will be unemployed within 12 to 18 months. Half will be unemployed at 21 years of age. A quarter of them will be homeless within two years. Nearly 50 percent of females will have a child within 12 to 18 months.
And 30 percent will be arrested between the ages of 18 and 21. For these children, not having a family makes a drastic and devastating difference in their lives. In recent years, Focus on the Family has started confronting this issue with their Wait No More campaign, which specifically challenges churches to adopt children out of foster care. In just a few years, Wait No More has seen more than 1,930 families initiate the adoption process. In Colorado, where Focus on the Family is based, 800 children were in foster care and awaiting adoption in 2008. By 2010, that number had been reduced to 365. Jedd Medefind, president of the Christian Alliance for Orphans, has taken notice of the Church’s response to the need for more domestic adoptions. “From the very start of Church history, Christians at their best have earned a reputation as a people who take special care of the orphan. And it’s becoming that way again,” Medefind says. “I love what’s
happening in foster care across America, as more and more churches are saying of kids in the foster system, ‘Maybe no one else will claim these kids, but we will. We’re going to foster and adopt and mentor them and let them experience God’s love in personal, tangible ways.’” The Christian Alliance for Orphans is a network of more than 100 churches and organizations working together to inspire and equip Christians to effectively love orphans—whether it’s through adoption, foster care, mentoring or global initiatives. “Throughout the Bible, it’s clear God is near to the destitute and vulnerable, so I think we get to be near to God in a special way when we enter the sorrow and beauty of the orphan,” Medefind says. “It’s an amazing privilege to get to pour into this work—laboring for things I know God cares deeply about.” Previously, Medefind oversaw the Office of FaithBased and Community Initiatives and served as a special assistant to President George W. Bush, so he also understands the impact government initiatives can make. “Effective government can play a key role, especially in protecting children from abuse and neglect,” Medefind says. “But ultimately, government can’t provide the love and nurture every child most needs. That’s why government programs can help children survive but rarely enable children to thrive. That comes only from loving individuals and families.” Medefind believes we should avoid a “massive, assembly-line fix” designed to solve everything. “Huge programs and one-size-fits-all solutions often make matters worse with their unintended consequences,” he says. “Instead, what we must respond to is God’s consistent call to love and serve these precious children faithfully and wisely and sacrificially, one by one.” Medefind is driven by the thought of that one child facing the world without a provider, protector or nurturer—without a sense of belonging or consistent love. “It’s a girl who grew up in foster care not having a single person to cheer for her at high school graduation. It’s a little boy crying in the night with no one to comfort him,” he says. “When you see and feel even a little of this, I think you get a small taste of the way God must ache at [how] evil has marred His beautiful world.”
THE CHURCH AT WORK
According to the annual State of Giving report from the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA), giving to adoption and orphan care has increased significantly in the last two years—in the orphan care category, for example, giving increased by 11.6 percent in 2009 and 20.5 percent in 2010.
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“I’m animated by the way loving orphans can transform the Church, as well,” Medefind says. “As we rise to meet the need of the orphan, God meets our profound need to escape flabby, self-centered Christianity and slowly see our character changed to reflect Jesus. The truth is, if you go into this work motivated solely by duty, guilt or even idealism, you’ll eventually run dry. The vastness of the problems will always outstrip your enthusiasm to solve them. We must be nourished by a profound sense of grace—God’s great love for us, as well as for each orphan— if we hope to continue to serve even when the need is so big and dark and tangled.” But caring for an orphan is not a simple task. “To care for an orphan in a personal, long-term way is rarely easy,” Medefind continues. “The complexity of each child’s need and [the] wounds of their past can make it a difficult, sacrificial journey to foster or adopt or mentor. This is not a road God intends us to walk as just one individual or family. God means for us to live out His call to care for the orphan in the context of Christian community. Having good, compassionate motives isn’t enough. We continually need to pair zeal with knowledge, and love with skill and insight.”
RESPONDING TO AN EMERGENCY
“This isn’t a passing ministry trend, social justice fad, best practice or church growth mechanism,” Ben Nockels says. “This is an emergency. We are in the midst of a local orphan crisis known as foster care.” Nockels is a pastor in Oklahoma City and a founding partner of the 111Project (pronounced “1,1,1”), an organization formed in 2011 around the mission to find 111 foster families from Oklahoma 84 / RELEVANT_JULY/AUG 12
“THIS ISN’T A PASSING MINISTRY TREND ... THIS IS AN EMERGENCY. WE ARE IN THE MIDST OF A LOCAL ORPHAN CRISIS KNOWN AS FOSTER CARE.” —BEN NOCKELS
City churches with the stated purpose to “leave no Oklahoma child without a family.” “There has been a strong sense throughout that God has prepared us and made a special grace available for such a time as this,” Nockels says. “The words of Victor Hugo articulate and capture this powerfully: ‘There is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come.’ The local and universal Church changing the face of foster care is an idea whose time has come.”
Robin Jones is the director of the Oklahoma Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives as well as a founding partner of the 111Project. In her director role, Jones works with both secular and religious groups. Even when she speaks in secular settings, Jones can’t help but highlight the work God is doing in Oklahoma. “Regardless of your worldview, it cannot
be denied that something greater than all of us is cre- advocating for anyone to recklessly enter the ating the environment for incredible movement and process of becoming a foster parent, which preparing the way for change,” Jones says. “Even with could lead to additional trauma for already the major systems and political reform around foster vulnerable children. care taking place in our state, I am convinced it is the “I am suggesting we each embark on Church who is going to change the face of foster care a journey led by the Holy Spirit, characin Oklahoma.” terized by the life of Jesus, marked by the Jones believes orphan care should be part of the love of God the Father, who ‘fosters’ us all,” DNA of local churches. But in order for that to hap- Nockels says. “Individuals of faith need to pen, church leaders need to be on board. Nockels change their perspective of fostering and knows church leaders can inadvertently create a bar- [start] thinking about what is best for the rier that prevents people from taking steps to care for child, not what is most convenient and best orphans, simply by not engaging or acknowledging for the adult.” the issue. “We need elders, pastors, leaders, decision makers— MENTORING those at the top of the organization—to recognize, bless, Realistically, not everyone is in a position to give credence and sanction to all that is already taking adopt or foster. Even if the financial considplace at the bottom,” Nockels says. erations are less signifi“I have noticed a tendency on cant than many assume, [TAKE ACTION] the part of the Church to look for a single 22-year-old might all the many things that need to not be the best guardbe done to serve children in foster ian for a 16-year-old care, short of taking them into our from the foster care Consider donating to families in own homes and welcoming them system. But no one is your church going through the as full members of our families,” too unqualified to be a adoption process or fostering a he continues. “Perhaps we are too mentor and a friend— child. You can also throw a “baby quick to say, ‘Not everyone is called which is the message shower” for a crisis pregnancy to be a foster parent.’ Conventional the Mentoring Project center or orphanage and rally wisdom certainly says yes to that (originally founded by your church or small group to idea, but I’m not so sure. I’m not so author Donald Miller in donate needed items. sure the Kingdom of God and the 2008) has been trying to way of Jesus have much to do with communicate. conventional wisdom.” The Mentoring Project If you are able and feel God According to Jones, common equips churches, recruits leading you to become a foster objections include, “I just don’t mentors across the nation parent, begin researching know if I want to get emotionally and creates sustainable what it will take, and ask your attached to a child and then have mentoring communities, community to pray with you to give them back” and “We tried to all in an effort to “rewrite through that process. If fostering foster in the system, and it was just the story of the fatherless or adopting isn’t for you, too difficult. We just don’t want to generation.” become a mentor through your subject ourselves to that again.” John Sowers, presilocal Boys and Girls Club, the Jones also says there are many dent of the Mentoring Mentoring Project or a halfway misconceptions about foster care. Project, says fatherlesshouse in your area. Despite what some people believe, ness is the engine drivmost of the children in foster care ing the most devastating do not present more extreme diffisocial issues—from gang Use the statistics and resources culties than other children. Families violence to teenage pregin this article to speak to your do not need to be wealthy (or even nancy and from sex trafchurch or small group about the homeowners) or have children of ficking to drug abuse, as foster care crisis in the U.S. and their own in order to foster or adopt. well as suicide. Addressing in your city. Most adoptions from foster care are the root issue—fatherlessfree—in fact, the minimal costs ness—is the surest way to associated with adopting out of fosmake a positive difference, ChristianAllianceForOrphans.org: ter care are often reimbursable. And according to Sowers. Providing every orphan with the in most instances, a person’s marital “Showing up is the key experience of God’s unfailing love. status, age and income do not autoto reaching the next generTheMentoringProject.org: Mentoring matically disqualify them from eliation,” he says. “This genAmerica’s fatherless youth. 111Project.org: Leaving no Oklahoma eration will never believe gibility to foster or adopt. child without a father or a family. our Gospel—that God can Jones and Nockels are both be their Father—unless we quick to state that they are not at all
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show up in their lives in the same way Christ shows up in our lives at the Incarnation.” According to Sowers, mentors “win” simply by showing up. And when showing up is the only prerequisite, everyone is qualified. “You don’t have to be some kind of bearded guru with all the answers. You don’t have to be cool, rich or beautiful. You just have to show up,” Sowers says. “Showing up in the life of another echoes God’s promise: ‘I am with you.’” Another thing mentors don’t need to be? Old. “Young adults are poised to make a significant impact in the lives of youth,” Sowers says. “The only people who should not become formal mentors are those who do not pass background or personality checks or those who cannot commit to being present. A mentor needs to show up unconditionally, have integrity and live honestly, and coach with grace and truth. A mentor needs to expect to find the unexpected—the joy that Jesus talks about when He says, ‘It is better to give than to receive.’” Nearly every city has a waiting list for mentors. According to Sowers, even though everyone should consider being a mentor, it is imperative that mentors be willing to commit for at least a couple of years. “Perhaps the worst thing we can do is to commit to being a mentor and then not show up,” Sowers says. “We become just another broken promise in the revolving door of broken promises. But mentors earn the right to be heard simply by showing up and modeling integrity. Over time, they are given the place to speak into another’s life.” TYLER CHARLES is a campus minister with the Coalition for Christian Outreach at Ohio Wesleyan University.
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THIS YEAR’S INDIE IT-BAND IS ALL ABOUT MYTHS, FAIRY TALES AND CREATING SPACES. BUT SPIDERS? NOT SO MUCH. BY KEVIN SELDERS
H
alfway through discussing his band’s wildly successful first North American tour, Of Monsters and Men co-singer and guitarist Ragnar “Raggi” Þórhallsson is confronted by a mysterious eight-legged beast. Standing near a bush outside his Washington, D.C., hotel— which he’s soon leaving to return home to Iceland following several sold-out shows in the States—Þórhallsson notices the creature crawling up his arm. “THERE’S A SPIDER ON ME!” he
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exclaims, interrupting himself. Then: “Sorry. I’m not used to insects.” That’s because there aren’t many bugs in Iceland, from whence Þórhallsson hails. The island nation’s Nordic climate keeps the creepy little creatures away. Ghosts, mythic kings and magical monsters are more to Þórhallsson’s liking. He has filled the band’s debut album, My Head Is an Animal, with such mystical things. Iceland’s geological mix of mountains, glaciers and volcanoes has proven to be the perfect environment for a variety of
fantastical beasts to thrive, at least in the fairy tales from Þórhallsson’s youth. These fables, he surmises, are the likely influence of the band’s mythical lyrics, copenned by the group’s lone female, singer/ guitarist Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir. The two sing about an epic battle between birds and bees, wolves running with the wind in the dark, and a whale—with a house on his back—who gives people rides across the ocean. “Surroundings kind of mold you,” Þórhallsson says of his native land. “I think
and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros had come together to write the tunes, and you’ll come close. Their indiefolk-pop sound is full of collective shouts (“Hey!”) and huge, singalong choruses over a pounding rhythm section. It’s clear the music was created in community, and it’s probably best experienced that way, too. Many of the album’s songs contain moments where, as if coming to a clearing deep in an overgrown forest, the lyrics seem more like reality than fable. It’s these lines that help you realize we’re all part of a larger story. In “Mountain Sound,” for instance, Þórhallsson sings, I heard them calling in the distance / so I packed my things and ran / far away from all the trouble / I had caused with my two hands. While he isn’t quick to share the original intention of the songs or the personal stories behind them, Þórhallsson appreciates that listeners connect to the words through their collective meaning. “It’s cool if people can hear the lyrics and take something from them that relates to them,” he says. “I’m sure if there’s something I’ve been through, others have been through it, too.”
OF VICTORIES AND SUCCESS
ANTHONY BACIGALUPO
it plays a part in what we are doing and what we’re about.”
OF EXPERIENCE AND IMAGINATION
The stories beneath the fairy tale–like imagery of the songs come from anywhere and everywhere. They involve both experience and imagination. “We like to take weird stories and interesting things—not like a book or a big story, but just small, vague stories that we can spin around,” Þórhallsson says. “We also like to make up stories. It’s more fun to make up a story instead of just talking about life. We throw in some personal experiences, too, but we kind of hide that and mask it in fairy tale.” If you haven’t heard Of Monsters and Men yet, sit back and imagine what the Where the Wild Things Are soundtrack would have sounded like if Arcade Fire
Of Monsters and Men’s short history began with Hilmarsdóttir’s solo project, Songbird. She developed a need for a band and added Þórhallsson, guitarist Brynjar Leifsson and drummer/percussionist Arnar Rósenkranz Hilmarsson. Within months, the quartet, now called Of Monsters and Men, entered the Músíktilraunir, an annual battle of the bands in Iceland’s capital, Reykjavík. They left as the 2010 winners of the competition. Following the unexpected win, the band rounded out their sound by adding Árni Guðjónsson on accordion and piano, and bassist Kristján Páll Kristjánsson. The musical backgrounds of the band’s six members differ greatly. “I don’t really have one,” Þórhallsson says. “This is the first band I’ve been in. I started playing acoustic guitar when I was 16 maybe, just at home. Árni, the piano player, has a bachelor’s in composing from the Iceland Academy of the Arts. It’s different between us all.” The same goes for their musical influences, which include jazz, classical, folk, alternative and even heavy metal. “It’s always hard for me to mention [a specific influence], but when I was a
teenager, one of the first songs I learned to play on acoustic guitar was a Death Cab for Cutie song,” says Þórhallsson, the band’s eldest member at 25 years old. The youngest is 21. “That was my favorite band when I was younger.” After conquering Músíktilraunir, the band earned a spot in the lineup for the Iceland Airwaves festival. It was there that Seattle radio station KEXP filmed the band performing “Little Talks” in Þórhallsson’s living room. The video became an Internet hit, yet another domino falling in the band’s path toward success. “Little Talks,” My Head Is an Animal’s lead single, was inspired by the elderly people in the band members’ lives and speaks to the love that continues between two people despite the death of one. It features a clap-and-shout-along chorus backed by horns and accordion, as well as verses in which Þórhallsson and Hilmarsdóttir communicate back and forth. As “Little Talks” rose to No. 1 in Iceland, radio stations in the United States began playing it, generating a deluge of support from listeners. “I can’t even really put it in words,” Þórhallsson says. “We’re in the news back home, and they’re asking us to do all the television shows. It’s very cool, but it’s overwhelming.” The song continued winning over ears in the States, leading to greater exposure and the adoration of at-capacity crowds. “It’s mind-blowing,” Þórhallsson adds. “I can’t really believe it. It’s kind of hitting us now. We’ve been playing for soldout crowds, and they’re singing all of our songs. It’s like a dream.” With their current whirlwind success, the band didn’t get much time away from the tour bus or the stage during their time in the United States and Canada. However, additional U.S. dates are already booked for later this year, during which time they might get the chance to be influenced by stories they hear away from home—and meet a few more new critters along the way. “We haven’t really had much time to explore the country,” Þórhallsson says. “Hopefully in the near future, we’ll get more time for that.” WATCH Of Monsters and Men perform “Slow and Steady” relm.ag/58-monsters
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WILL THE REAL JESUS PLEASE STAND UP? CONSERVATIVE JESUS. COOL JESUS. ACTIVIST JESUS. WHY WE CAN’T MAKE GOD’S SON INTO OUR OWN IMAGE. B Y M AT T MIK A L AT O S
esus waits for us outside the church door every Sunday morning—or, with a slightly disapproving frown, on Saturday night. What, you can’t make time on Sunday morning? He smells our breath for cigarettes. He checks to make sure we’re carrying our Bibles. (Partial credit for having it on your smartphone.) He returns our hip flasks to us after sniffing its contents. He takes out a tape measure to make sure the hems of women’s dresses aren’t too far removed from their knees. He makes sure the men wear collared shirts. Not certain that’s the church for us, we head downtown to another church—one that meets in a pub and where Jesus leans against a wall, his hair in dreads, wearing an old, beat-up army jacket for ironic effect. This Jesus has a checklist, too. He checks ID cards at the door to make sure everyone’s the right age (old enough to get into a pub, young enough to fit in). He hands out pints and watches through narrowed eyes to make sure we’re free enough in Christ to drink. He checks wrists and ankles to make sure there’s some ink—a few Hebrew words or a tiny fish or the blue outline of a dove. The conceptions of Jesus vary wildly, but one thing is for sure: When Christians imagine Jesus, He is largely schizophrenic. He loves me enough to forgive me for sleeping with my girlfriend, but when I fail to have devotional time six days in a row, He’ll likely punish me in some passive-aggressive way, like giving me a cold or making my tire blow out on the freeway. He doesn’t care enough about my prayers to make Aunt Jodie’s cancer go away, but He’ll occasionally answer fervent prayers for a parking spot at the mall so I can make it to the movies on time—because Jesus desperately wants me to see The Dark Knight Rises and not miss the previews.
J
The Apostle John said, “When Christ appears, we will be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is” (1 John 3:2). This implies we don’t see Jesus in His totality now. According to the Scriptures, we won’t see Jesus in His entirety until we’re in His presence. So, anyone who says they have Jesus all figured out is either dead or deceived. Let’s talk about some of today’s common pictures of Jesus and how the real Jesus differs from them. Because there is a real Jesus—a living, breathing Person with thoughts, ideas, personality and opinions— and there are right and wrong perceptions of who He is. And presently, there are an awful lot of images of Jesus floating around. So, what are these pictures today’s Christians have of Jesus?
“WHO DO YOU SAY I AM?” WELL ... A BUNCH OF THINGS
HOLLYWOOD JESUS. With straight, shoulderlength hair and piercing eyes, Hollywood Jesus is gorgeous in clean, first-century robes. This Jesus speaks mildly all the time, like some sort of mystic guru on a mountaintop. When I get annoyed at the slow service in a restaurant, He calmly intones, “Be a good and loving Christian.” Our emotional responses to Hollywood Jesus range from mild, pleasant feelings to mild, semicrippling guilt. He never asks anything too difficult and never demands sacrifice other than a façade of unwavering politeness to strangers.
But does this match the Jesus of the Scriptures? People’s emotional responses to Him varied wildly. They felt terror when He calmed the seas. They experienced hate-filled, murderous impulses when they heard His teaching. They wept in His presence, they repented of their sins and they fell at His feet in complete and total worship. When’s the last time Jesus terrified you? When’s the last time you hated something He taught? When’s the last time He said, “Sell everything you have, give it to the poor, and come, follow me,” and you didn’t immediately follow that up with, “He doesn’t mean that literally. What He actually means is ...”?
MAGIC 8 BALL JESUS. You remember Magic 8 Balls—the toys Christians have thoroughly denounced because of their occult significance. They’re black! They have the number eight on them! We try to get direction for our lives from them! You shake them up, and multisided dice with words written on them jostle for position to give you an answer to a question you’ve asked, usually related to RELEVANTMAGAZINE.COM / 89
whether a member of the opposite sex likes you. So often, Christians pray this way. They knock at heaven’s door, wait for Jesus to answer, grab Him by the robe and ask, “Is this the person I’m going to marry?” We shake Him, waiting for an answer of “Yes,” “No,” or “Answer cloudy. Ask again later.” Christians often say God may answer yes, no or not yet—as if Jesus is a Magic 8 Ball with a limited number of pat answers. As
pull Himself off the cross and bring a world of hurt to those who crossed Him. He didn’t even die a hero, in a blaze of martyr glory. He died a criminal, mocked and beaten and apparently defeated. And when He rose again, He showed Himself to a woman and a few beloved friends—sans weapon, mission of vengeance or any kind of epic soundtrack.
BRIDEGROOM JESUS. There’s a special Jesus set aside for women’s retreats, as well, and He’s called Bridegroom Jesus. This Jesus is for single women. He’s the loving, sufficient substitute for a husband. Any time a single woman feels depressed or discouraged about being single, one of the ladies says, “Let Jesus be your husband. He should be enough for you. He can meet all your needs.” It’s as if we forgot who said, “It’s not good for man to be alone” and made women as an answer to that. Does He think it’s good for women to be alone, then?
ANYONE WHO SAYS THEY HAVE JESUS ALL FIGURED OUT IS EITHER DEAD OR DECEIVED. if Jesus couldn’t say something like, “You’re asking the wrong question. Remember last week, when I told you to deal with your history with your mom? Let’s take care of that before we talk about marriage.”
MEN’S RETREAT JESUS. This is the Jesus whose picture of biblical manhood miraculously lines up with John Wayne’s ideals— the perfect reflection of manliness according to Western American culture. This Jesus is strong, responsible and can take a punch. He leads His wife with a firm but loving hand. He’s the Ultimate Fighting Champion Jesus, and He believes in red meat, sports and taking charge in relationships. But Jesus didn’t use a single sports metaphor in His teachings. He wasn’t married. He wore a dress. He wept. And— unlike Ultimate Fighting Champion Jesus would—He didn’t throw a punch when they came to arrest Him. He didn’t knock all the guards down when they whipped Him. He didn’t 90 / RELEVANT_JULY/AUG 12
PERPETUALLY ANGRY JESUS. He’s always looking for an excuse to yell at you for your shortcomings. He frowns and clucks His tongue when you miss church once a quarter. He has a tally sheet of your devotional times over His desk so He knows when to send divine retribution. It doesn’t matter that God describes Himself as forgiving and slow to anger. Perpetually Angry Jesus is quick to judge and lightning-fast to punish. IRRESPONSIBLE PARENT JESUS. On the other extreme is a Jesus who’s loving to the point of irresponsibility. He lets you eat ice cream until you puke because, well, He wants you to have what you want. He looks the other way when you cheat on your income taxes or download illegal movies and music or lie to your boss. This Jesus understands, and He doesn’t want you to be held to any moral standard that makes you uncomfortable. Of course, the real Jesus paid even the temple tax, never stole, never lied and called His followers to live a life like His. And He loves you enough to discipline you when you cross a line, rather than looking the other way, whistling and waiting for it to be over. OVER-EXPLANATORY JESUS. Many Christians are uncomfortable with vague theology and uncertainty. They must have precise
clarity on what is acceptable and unacceptable teaching. Pastors, leaders, authors, Bible study leaders and youth workers need to have their theology tight and explained clearly—with footnotes. What would these Christians do if the real Jesus came telling stories and refusing to explain them? What would they do if He said, “I tell parables so you won’t understand”? How long would that be allowed in their pulpits? A Jesus who preaches with an introduction, threepoint outline, conclusion and application is a lot easier to stomach. In fact, seminary students are taught that this is the correct way to preach. Because ... they should preach a different way than Jesus did?
COFFEE SHOP JESUS. I’ve talked with a lot of Christians and asked them, “What would you do with Jesus if He were here with you for a day?” The vast majority of their answers involve a deep heart-to-heart with Jesus while sitting at a coffee shop. Sometimes it’s so Jesus can tell them how very much He loves them. Sometimes it’s to talk about their future or scold them for their present. Most people like the idea of Jesus sitting across from them at a round table, sipping a latte and catching up on life. Here’s a challenge: Find one example in Scripture where Jesus has a one-on-one appointment with someone when He wasn’t specifically talking about the Good News. You have the Samaritan woman (an evangelistic conversation). You have Nicodemus (an evangelistic conversation). You have Zacchaeus (an evangelistic conversation). If Jesus came to your town today, it’s likely He would sit down with you and a group of His followers—or gather in a field or a stadium or a church—to teach and heal. If you’re lucky, you’d get to join Him when He went out to dinner with some prostitutes and IRS employees. He’s not a hang-out-and-catch-up-over-coffee kind of guy.
REALITY CHECK
The fact is, Jesus is a real Person. I suppose He likes certain colors better than others and prefers to eat fish over lamb. He probably has a favorite pair of shoes and a style of music He enjoys more than others. He’s not a walking personification of a certain set of theological viewpoints. Of course, on the other hand, He’s not ever wrong in His theological convictions, either. But unfortunately, He’s not the kind of guy to sit down and explain it all in a point-by-point theological treatise or a creed or a statement of belief. He likes parables and proverbs and teaching by example. He’s this incredible, fascinating, terrifying, infuriating, loving, spectacular, incomparable, beautiful Person. He’s not sitting outside the church waiting for you. He’s right there beside you, within you, around you, waiting to have a conversation—yes, even if you’re at a coffee shop. And I, for one, am looking forward to getting to know Him—the real Jesus—better. MATT MIKALATOS works with a Christian nonprofit equipping college students for overseas missions. He is the author of Imaginary Jesus (Tyndale/Barna). Find him online at MattMikalatos.com.
Learn, engage and explore the Emergence Christianity phenomenon with Phyllis Tickle and Emergence Church Leaders.
Bruce Reyes-Chow—
speaker, writer, social media consultant; pastor
Doug Pagitt—
pastor, Solomon’s Porch Minneapolis; co-owner, JoPa Productions
Troy Bronsink— musician, writer, worship curator from Atlanta
Danielle Shroyer— pastor, Journey Church, Dallas
Neal Locke— co-founder, First
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Join former Warden of the Iona Community for a weekend of Celtic Spirituality.
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FILM
JEFF WHO LIVES AT HOME JAY DUPLASS, MARK DUPLASS [PA R A M O U N T VA N TA GE , R]
> Throughout Jeff Who Lives at Home, the camera quickly zooms in on characters like a punch—a sudden shift from big to small. It’s a stylistic staple of Jay and Mark Duplass, who wrote and directed the film: a commitment to small, intimate stories that communicate the heart of human experience. The film follows Jeff (Jason Segel), a jobless 30-year-old who lives in his mother’s basement, where he spends his days getting high and watching movies. Jeff’s everythinghappens-for-a-reason philosophy gets tested when his mom (Susan Sarandon) asks him to leave the house to buy wood glue, leading to an audacious trajectory involving his discontented brother (a convincing Ed Helms) and a chain of seemingly random—and quite hilarious—events. The film culminates in a strikingly spiritual finale—evoking both pathos and laughs—that affirms Jeff’s optimistic beliefs without negating human responsibility.
THE DEEP BLUE SEA TERENCE DAVIES (MUSIC BOX FILMS, R)
UNDEFEATED DANIEL LINDSAY, T.J. MARTIN (WEINSTEIN CO., PG-13)
> Set in early-1950s England,
this film centers on the unhappy wife (Rachel Weisz) of a wealthy judge who tries to fill the void in her life through an erotic affair with a handsome pilot (Tim Hiddleston), only to be left more isolated and empty. Following British auteur Terence Davies’ symphonic style, the film is filled with historic detail, nostalgia and morality invoked by the filmmaker’s devout Catholic upbringing. But more than anything, it’s a showcase for Weisz.
> In America, football still serves as a rite of passage for young men. Take the true story of the Manassas Tigers in North Memphis. Through the tests, trials and teamwork of the sport, the lives of poor and underprivileged AfricanAmerican teens destined for failure are being transformed for the better. This Oscarwinning documentary tells their story—a real-life version of Friday Night Lights’ later seasons.
International House of Prayer presents
onething 2012 ANNUAL CONFERENCE
The onething conference is a gathering of young adults who have set their hearts to live with abandonment and devotion to Jesus. Join us with Mike Bickle, Misty Edwards, Allen Hood, and IHOP–KC worship bands.
SHERLOCK HOLMES: GAME OF SHADOWS GUY RITCHIE (WARNER BROS. PICTURES, PG-13) > Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law bring back their brilliant bromance in this Sherlock sequel. The detective (Downey) and doctor (Law) find themselves in another predicament when an anarchist professor plans to push war into Europe through a series of bombings and assassinations. This tense plot, like that of its predecessor, plays out as an entertaining ride with dazzling eye candy.
THE HUNGER GAMES GARY ROSS (LIONSGATE, PG-13) > Though the buzz surrounding
the big-screen treatment of Suzanne Collins’ acclaimed novel has died down, the film lives on as a satisfying adaptation. Jennifer Lawrence plays Katniss Everdeen, a spunky teen who takes her sister’s place in the Hunger Games—a live television event where children fight to the death. This premise, a parallel to our culture’s obsession with violence as entertainment, comes alive in the depth of Lawrence’s performance.
THE KID WITH A BIKE JEAN-PIERRE DARDENNE, LUC DARDENNE (SUNDANCE SELECTS, PG-13) > In The Kid With a Bike,
the Dardenne brothers demonstrate how simplicity can be profound. Their French drama tells a straightforward story about Cyril, a boy who longs for the love of his absent father, and features hardly any dialogue. The shots either remain still or move slowly. Yet as minimal as it may be, the film proves rich, revealing deep and important truths about humanity.
THE GREY JOE CARNAHAN (OPEN ROAD FILMS, R) > A theological question lies at the center of this reflective yet chilling adventure: Is there or is there not a God amid a world overwhelmed by suffering? As a group of Alaskan oil drillers— their leader a sad and skeptical hunter (Liam Neeson)—fight to survive a pack of hungry wolves in the desolate wastelands of the frozen North, an answer never clearly emerges. In exploring faith and the problem of pain earnestly, the film fails to find clarity, leaving viewers, fittingly, in “the grey.”
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PASSION PIT GOS SA MER
SIGUR RÓS VALTARI (XL) A stark departure from previous material, the sixth fulllength album from Icelandic post-rockers Sigur Rós has a fearsome cathartic edge, switching effortlessly from what sounds like a sputtering diesel engine to a full angelic choir. On “Varúð,” a full epiphany emerges at the end involving crashing waves, bowed guitars and Jónsi Birgisson’s unique soaring vocals. Valtari reveals itself over time, from the light touches of sweltering synths to an explosive grandeur. >
[COLUMBIA RECORDS]
> Pop radio, you’re done. Pack up your stuff. Passion Pit has found a way to create more engaging pop melodies that stick to the neurons like silly putty on a napkin than anything you’ll hear on your local FM station. The Cambridge, Mass., outfit, just now getting to its second proper release since 2009’s breakout debut, has put the hyphens back in P-A-R-T-Y—but has done so with a surprising number of pretty sad lyrics. “Carried Away” is so fluffy, it could resurrect the MTV ‘80s music video format by itself. “Hideaway” fizzles with AM radio distortion at first, then bluntly recalls the propulsive pop of Bloc Party. Did we mention pretty much every song is a masterpiece of production, songwriting and Roland synths?
TALLEST MAN ON EARTH THERE’S NO LEAVING NOW (DEAD OCEANS) > “We will end up somehow
with a peaceful mind” sings Kristian Matsson, also known as the Tallest Man on Earth, on the heartwarming “Leading Me Now” from his folky third—and best—release. Like early Bob Dylan, Matsson is adept at placing you in the scene: sweeping up after an earthquake, seeing the broken smile of a child. Matsson’s folk leanings come off as genuine because of the lyrical wordplay and earnest vocals.
Navigating uncertainty. Engaging new relationships. Protecting God’s creation. Questioning assumptions.
Charlie Butler | Rice Lake, WI Master of Divinity Student
Explore these degrees | Master of Divinity, MA Marriage & Family Therapy, MA (Religion), Doctor of Ministry
800.264.1839 | www.lpts.edu
MATTHEW PERRYMAN JONES LAND OF THE LIVING (CANTE JONDO RECORDS) > Matthew Perryman Jones
must be expelling some demons—he sings about dancing on fire, raising the dead and getting lost. On “The Angels Were Singing,” he tries to wake up his senses: “Each tear was a chorus, a sacred reprise,” he sings. “By Canción de la Noche,“ amid flashes of hopeful drums and an aching piano interlude, Jones questions the inner workings of love and faith.
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DIRTY PROJECTORS SWING LO MAGELLAN (DOMINO RECORDS)
PURITY RING SHRINES (4AD)
JENNY & TYLER OPEN YOUR DOORS (SELF-RELEASED)
> Dirty Projectors is what
> Not many bands can say they
> Abide in your Savior / abide
every other indie band wants to be: creative but not irritating. On Swing Lo Magellan, the band pulls off the near impossible by surprising you at every turn and yet offering a palatable set of songs. On “Maybe That Was It,” you’ll hear what sounds like someone tuning a guitar— somehow, inconceivably, it works. And “See What She Seeing” doesn’t just use an electric piano; it seems to use the sound of one being plugged in and turned off.
play a synthetic tree structure during concerts. Montreal’s Corin Roddick and Megan James hammer on glowing orbs and create effervescent electro-pop. Their two voices, often looped into a pattern, fill the space between Owl City–like joy and The Knife–like pain. “Heavy feathers lift my drooping heart into a bright, bound, sea-surrounded fury,” sings James on “Saltkin”— words she originally meant for the privacy of her own journal.
in His love / the labor of God is to trust in the Son sing Jenny & Tyler on the melodic folkrock song “Abide,” off their fourth release. Channeling early Jesus Rock songs of the ’70s (outspoken lyrics, lines from the Bible) but infusing them with something Richard Buckner or Brandi Carlile would love, the married couple, now residing in Nashville, are not averse to an all-instrumental track (“Lament”) or one that is based entirely on Psalm 86.
TEACHING
WEX.VICTORY.COM
[TOC]
CONTENTS The Avett Brothers
66 God, Grammys and grief—what’s brought the indie-folk legends closer than ever [F E AT UR E S]
Mark Ruffalo 80 There’s more to this actor than just big, green muscles
56 Your Food Is Changing You The real reason to eat organic. (Hint: It’s not just for the animals.)
From the RELEVANT Studio
82 Fostering Hope
Santigold 58 You may not think “pop music” when you think of Santigold, but this eclectic icon is here to prove the genre isn’t beyond saving
What the U.S. Church is doing for the 400,000 kids in foster care
Of Monsters and Men 86 68
Why this is the band to have on your summer playlist
62 What Am I Supposed to Do? A bad economy doesn’t have to be bad news for your dreams
WATCH John Mark McMillan relm.ag/58mcmillan
88
Slacktivism 74
Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up?
Can you change the world by tweeting?
Avoiding the temptation to make Jesus into your own image
10
34
40
48
6
The Drop
Next
Reject Apathy
First Word
• Election Cheat Sheet • Summer Reading Guide • A.J. Jacobs • Ruth Haley Barton on the Sacred in the Everyday
• Tennis • Sucré • Ana Tijoux • Charles Bradley • Welcome Wagon
• 10 Tips to Go Viral • Jamie Tworkowski on Winning $1 Million • Tegu • Lopez Lomong
• Defending Immigrant Abuse Victims • Five Talents • Why Deworm? • The Politics of Energy
Two Rails on a Track
96 / RELEVANT_JULY/AUG 12
Feedback 8 Recommends 92
WATCH Derek Webb and Sandra McCracken relm.ag/58derek-sandra
R E L E VA N T M A G A Z I N E . C O M
Slices
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