“The central message of the cross is that there is something worth dying for, but there is nothing worth killing for.”
Recently I had the privilege of interviewing Shane Claiborne for our blog. Shane is a founding member of the New Monastic community the Simple Way and author of The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical. While in college, Shane spent a summer in Calcutta working with Mother Teresa and in 2003, he traveled to Baghdad as part of the Iraq Peace Team.
In preparation for our telephone conversation, I had asked our blog participants to contribute questions. I read the questions to Shane and asked him to share his thoughts…
The first question was from Joe, “Ask him about making his own clothes. Yes, you heard me correctly. The guy. Makes. His own. Clothing.” Laughing, Shane explained, “I love making my clothes! My mom taught me; we sew together almost liturgically every Christmas the clothes for the next year.”
He shared that he caught the vision while living in Calcutta in a village of people with leprosy. Since they were completely cut off from the rest of society, they had to make their own clothes and shoes, grow their own food and be a fully self-sustaining community. Shane found himself mesmerized with the way of life that they had created, “a new society in the shell of the old.”
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This is the text of a Letter to the Editor that was published last week in our local newspaper. It was written by my friend Marti Berger, who is active in the Save Darfur Coalition in our area.
Sudan divestment is critical
With Senate Bill 1089, the Oregon Human Rights and Anti-Genocide Act of 2005, our state divested its public funds from Sudan in acknowledgment of the genocide and humanitarian crisis taking place there, created and sustained by the government of Omar al Bashir, voted Parade Magazine’s “world’s worst dictator”.
In a January annual report to the legislative assembly, it was reported that $38 million had been reduced to identified companies in the region since the Act was instituted. Although I am proud that Oregon was one of the first of fewer than 10 states to divest, and the impact meaningful, it is not enough!
There is a current movement called Fidelity Out of Sudan. Fidelity Investments currently holds $1.2 billion in Petrochina, a Chinese oil company in the region. Given the fact that 70-80% of Sudan’s oil revenues are used to purchase weapons of war, Americans with investments in Fidelity are inadvertently funding the war. Please check with your financial planners to see if your money is invested in Fidelity and consider moving it unless the investment company changes its policy. Read the rest of this news item »
“We hope this provides a place for refuge from the polarization of society for people of all faiths, and all spectrums of their faiths. The earth is in crisis. Those who will suffer the most will be the most vulnerable. Our heartstrings are pulled at and our spirit crushed or lifted with every soul. We are all part of creation.”
- Dan Borroff of Faith Forward
The Interfaith Creation Festival will be held in Seattle on May 31-June 3 and is being hosted by a coalition of Muslim, Jewish and Christian groups who are all committed to the practice of creation care. This gathering will feature keynote speakers from a variety of faith traditions and celebrate creation through poetry, music and storytelling. Participants will learn about theological foundations, sustainability and innovations and be equipped to make a difference through environmental advocacy and activism.
Recently I spoke with Dan Borroff, one of the organizers, about the vision for this new event…
Dan explained that the idea began a few years ago with some people from St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in Seattle. They envisioned an ecumenical gathering to address issues of environmental concern, including the threat of climate change. They wanted to help promote a faith-based environmental movement based on an awareness of the theology of creation within the Christian tradition.
After observing some of the fruitful interfaith alliances that had taken place in Seattle in the past, they recognized the need to broaden the coalition to include Jewish and Muslim faith communities, building on the shared belief in the responsibility of humankind to steward and care for the earth. The festival is also open to anyone with a spiritual connection to and concern for the earth, regardless of whether they belong to a religious tradition. Read the rest of this news item »
As you are no doubt aware, Monday morning a lone gunmen killed 32 students and himself at Virginia Tech, a university in Virginia, U.S.A. The story has generated a huge media frenzy, at least in the U.S., hanging out at the top of various news pages and newscasts for a solid 36 hours already. Words like “rage”, “grief”, “troubled”, “deadliest”, “horrific”, “heroic”, “chaos”, and “panic” were used in news stories on the shootings.
Mr. Bush visited the university on Tuesday and was quoted as saying “It’s impossible to make sense of such violence and suffering. Those whose lives were taken did nothing to deserve their fate. They were simply at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
What I’ve noticed in reading about the whole thing is this: there is a lot of wanting to get at the why and the how. There seems to be an underlying belief among the whole populace that such violent death is simply *wrong*, that it should not have happened, and that something can and must be done to prevent it happening again.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday, another 58 people were killed or found dead in Iraq in war related violence. You have to search the news a bit to learn of this statistic.
So here’s what I’m wondering. Is the random violence committed by a lone gunman at VT qualitatively different from the institutionalized violence unleashed on Iraq by the U.S. invasion and occupation? And is it easier to get at answers to “how?” and “why?” in one case than the other? And what do the answers to these questions mean for me in terms of giving away my power–the power of my voice and my vote and my pen and my dollar?
Posted in Activism, War | 29 Comments »In response to our first post Welcome to Justice and Compassion, NCxian shared that she would like to learn more about New Monasticism. With help from Joe Turner (thanks, Joe!), I was able to connect with Shane Claiborne and he has agreed to do a telephone interview with me on Wednesday the 18th. Shane is a founding member of a New Monastic community called The Simple Way and author of The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical. Shane traveled to Iraq in 2003 as part of a peacemaker team. He is also reportedly quite an accomplished circus performer.
So I’m looking to you all to supply me with interview questions. Are there topics that you would like me to ask Shane about when I chat with him? It could be about New Monasticism, his book, social action, peacemaking in Iraq, circus performing, or any random stuff about which you would like to hear Shane’s perspective/input/musings.
Posted in Activism, Interviews | 10 Comments »Cluster munitions are larger shells or casings which contain dozens to hundreds of submunitions. They are designed to be dropped from aircraft or launched from artillery, and then the larger casing opens in the air and the submunitions disperse over a wide area, and then explode on impact. The problem is that the submuntions have a relatively huge failure rate (10 to 40+%), so that one ends up with submunitions which have not yet exploded littering the landscape, basically acting as antipersonnel land mines. These can sit dormant for years and years, and for instance in Laos, where the U.S. bombed heavily with cluster munitions in the 60’s and 70’s, every year farmers find and accidentally set them off while tilling the soil to grow food, or children find them while exploring and think they are toys and then get maimed or killed. This is still happening 40 years after they were originally dropped, and the Red Cross estimates that 11,000 civilians have been killed in Laos alone since the end of the war. Read the rest of this news item »
Invisible Children is inviting us to imagine for 24 hours what it is like to be displaced for 10 years. On April 28th, tens of thousands of people across the U.S. will gather in 15 cities in mock internally displaced persons camps to show our support for the internally displaced persons in northern Uganda.
Posted in Activism, Videos, War, What can we do? | No Comments »I recently had the opportunity to visit a Church of God in Christ Mennonite congregation in California. It was a fascinating and enjoyable experience. The men all sat on the right hand side of the church, they all wore clean, long sleeved, button down shirts and dress pants, and they all had short hair neatly parted on the left and neat, well trimmed beards. The ladies all sat on the left side of the church, and they all wore pretty, modest dresses with long sleeves, high necklines, and similar puffy shoulders. They all had shiny black head coverings which covered the back half of their hair and their neck.
They could sing! No accompaniment–just voices in harmony.
Even after the service, the segregation continued, and I enjoyed a half hour of interesting and open conversation with 3 of the guys. It seemed to me that they enjoyed an experience of very tight community which I have often longed for and never really found. On the other hand, they very much lacked the enormous … freedom/mobility at the individual level which I have very much experienced and sometimes enjoyed. It seemed to me that if one of them awoke one day and realized they *didn’t* any longer believe all the things they have agreed to believe, they would either have to deny their new reality, or else experience a really catastrophic loss of community in their life. Read the rest of this news item »
Jim posted this comment on Pray for Uganda:
Sometimes it is difficult to know which crisis to pay the most attention to. What have you two learned about how to cope with all the needs and then where to focus your efforts knowing that in doing so you are ignoring some other critical need?
It is as if our lives are in full time Triage mode since we now “know” what is happening and can’t always bury our heads in the sand.
Jim raises some great questions. Once we choose to become aware of the crushing need in the world around us, it changes and challenges us.