Just in case you missed it (as, alas, I did), March 8th was International Women’s Day. Julie has an amazing list of posts from a synchroblog for international women’s day on women of faith, including an entry from our very own Helen.
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »Over the weekend I saw Slumdog Millionaire with my lovely wife.
I found myself generally incredibly annoyed at the movie. I haven’t totally analyzed this yet. I really liked Jamal. The story felt deeply untrue to me, although it’s imagery was incredibly beautiful.
Salman Rushdie said of the film:
I think it’s visually brilliant. But I have problems with the story line. I find the storyline unconvincing. It just couldn’t happen. I’m not adverse to magic realism but there has to be a level of plausibility, and I felt there were three or four moments in the film where the storyline breached that rule. And I’m the only person who thinks this.
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What does “justice” mean in reference to the Khmer Rouge?
Monday, February 23rd, 2009
Recently, for the first time ever, a court is prosecuting an individual who was highly placed in the relatively evil Khmer Rouge government of Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Kang Khek Ieu, also known as Comrade Duch, is charged in a special UN court in Cambodia with personally overseeing the systematic torture of more than 15,000 prisoners.
I find myself unsettled and unclear when I think about the prosecution. Can justice be served 30 years after a crime was committed? I can’t get clear on what actual good is acomplished by the prosecution and imprisonment of this man, who apparently has not done anything all that bad in the intervening 30 years.
Yet I am moved by the cry for justice from those who suffered and died under his government. In 2006 I had the opportunity to visit Seattle’s amazing Cambodian Cultural Museum and Killing Fields Memorial. The museum was founded by Dara Duong, who personally lived through the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime. Inside, along with Cambodian art and exhibits on Cambodia’s history and culture, there were walls filled with photo after photo and name after name of individuals who were tortured and killed in the infamous S-21 prison, of which Comrade Duch was in charge.
Surely just having the international community, along with Cambodia’s current government, finally acknowlege out loud during a trial the truth of what actually happened in Cambodia in the later half of the 1970’s, and renounce it as altogether evil, will provide some tiny measure of comfort to the many Cambodians who lived through that time and who lost loved ones. This makes sense to me, and I can’t really imagine a context for that outside of a trial like the current one, although South Africa’s truth and reconciliation commission does spring to mind.
Since his participation in the horrors of that regime, Comrade Duch has apparently been fulfilling his vocation as a teacher of mathematics and languages, something he is said to be good at. In 1995 after his wife was killed in an attack on his home, Mr. Duch started attended prayers services at a Christian church. He eventually became a Christian and then a lay pastor. Is there any way for justice to be met, and for victims to be heard, and yet for Comrade Duch to be forgiven, and allowed to continue to teach? Is there ultimately any way for him to make amends? If not, is there a way for him to work *toward* that end? Where is the redemption in his story–or is such a question even possible or bearable in light of the contex. What redemption or help is available, or can be made available, to the many Cambodians still suffering, both economically and emotionally, as a result of Mr. Duch’s, and the Khmer Rouge’s, actions?
Your thoughts?
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Hooray for releasing prisoners!
Sunday, February 15th, 2009
Reuters reported earlier this week that three federal judges have ordered California to release as many as 57,000 of it’s imprisoned inmates, to reduce overcrowding in a system that is incarcerating twice as many people as it was meant to incarcerate.
The U.S. continues to have the highest per capita incarceration rate and the highest total number of people incarcerated of any nation in the world.
Maybe these judges will help us begin to reverse this trendRead more about U.S. prison population at the wikipedia page
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US$789,000,000,000 etc. US$600,000,000,000, and finding a way to heal the past and the present
Friday, February 13th, 2009Whis week the news of the passage of the $US 789 Billion Dollar “Stimulus Packge” approved by the U.S. government reminded me of something that’s kind of been out of my mind since Obama took office. Do you remember this counter from Costofwar.com?
Yeah. That first big number in the title of this post reminded me of that second big number. And also of some other numbers I haven’t thought about lately–like the ongoing death toll in Iraq
Lily Hamourtziadou writes in her This Week In Iraq column:
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An organic farm in Kenya’s largest slum
Tuesday, February 10th, 2009I ran across this story today of how passionate organic farming enthusiast Su Kahumbu and youth in Kenya’s largest slum teamed up to turn a garbage dump into a certified organic farm.
This seems like just the sort of local, change the world success story that I would love to be a part of.
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How are we significant? Annie Dillard’s “The Wreck of Time”
Monday, February 9th, 2009Recently I asked on my personal blog “Why do people find Jesus satisfying, as a god?”. I was wondering aloud why Jesus heals only one of the many people at the pool of Bethesda, all of whom were there looking for healing. Shouldn’t “God”, I wondered, be somehow better than us–not limited to making a difference in only one life–but instead able to fix things on a larger scale? It touches on my frustration with the way in which “The Church”/”Christianity”, for the most part, tends to insert too much space between us and Jesus–making him more than human, and different, and … strange. Of course Jesus himself contributes to this with stuff he says right after the pool of Bethesda story. In response to my question, JadeEdf directed me this last week to Annie Dillard’s Essay the Wreck of Time.
Dillard says
We who are here now make up about 6.8 percent of all people who have appeared to date. This is not a meaningful figure. These times are, one might say, ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it? Are we not especially significant because our century is – our century and its nuclear bombs, its unique and unprecedented Holocaust, its serial exterminations and refugee populations, our century and its warming, its silicon chips, men on the moon, and spliced genes? No, we are not and it is not.
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Daringly Awkward Sermon Contest–is MTWABP awkward?
Thursday, February 5th, 2009(H/T Pam)
(Note: MTWABP stands for “make(ing) the world a better place”)Geez Magazine has a contest running for “daringly awkward” sermons”. The entry fee is $33 and the top three sermons win $400 prizes and get published in the magazine.
Geez says:
Building on last year’s “30 Sermons You’d Never Hear in Church” contest, we’re calling for Daringly Awkward sermons. Because, let’s face it, social change can be a bit awkward. We squirm at our privilege, at right-wing relatives, at the drunk stranger in the back pew, at our pad in the comfy end of the global village, at litter in the poor part of town. But let’s say that it’s good to squirm, stumble and oafishly fumble on the path that leads beyond the status quo.
So dare to be drawn to the awkward people, pauses and topics that lie along the path to a more fair and compassionate world. Or at least dare to pontificate about them. Find the wisdom, humour or wonder in awkwardness. Our pulpit awaits.
Whether you’re an activist, anarchist, atheist or good old-fashioned Christian, we invite you to confront or comfort, pontificate or confess, urge or encourage.
We see our readers as social justice-minded people of faith. We strive for fresh language to describe the interplay between spirit, activism, simple living and care for our neighbours.
If any readers of JaC submit sermons, I’d love to hear about them here =). Here’s the contest page.
What do you think about Geez claim that trying to MTWABP (Make the World a Better Place) can be awkward? Have you found it so? Do you have a story to that effect? Your thoughts?
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Friday video - the Davos fight
Friday, January 30th, 2009There has been a bit of a scrap at the Davos Economic Forum. Basically what happened was that the Turkish Prime Minister took exception to his treatment during a debate with the Israeli President.
Perhaps ironically, the Turks are also fighting ‘terrorists’ in a conflict which has - apparently - killed 37,000. In Turkey it is illegal to mention their own history of violence.
The unfortunate truth is that all the main participants in the wider Middle East conflict have blood on their hands and are responsible for creating the instability. None of them (and by extension, none of ‘us’) have any leg to stand on whilst claiming some moral high ground with regard to the killing of innocents under the banner of tackling terrorism.
In some ways, the fighters of Gaza, Kurdistan, Iraq and Afghanistan could be blamed least. Whilst it is true that these are often insurgents - irregular and guerilla troops - with some very unsavoury methods, they are at least fighting for a noble aim. They are fighting against the odds for freedom, for national recognition, for the end to occupation, for a perceived religious greater good which in other places and in other times would have been lauded. Whereas those whose with fat behinds who wring their hands over the Gazan devastation in plush suites in Davos, Cairo, New York and elsewhere are using it as just another opportunity to gain political capital. Meanwhile millions endure another day in the open prison called Gaza and the overcrowded forgotten 60-year-old refugee camps of Syria and the Lebanon.
The problem is that our priorities are wrong. This is not an issue of identifying which countries are ‘more wrong’ than the others in the Middle East, because that is a game which can never be objectively won. The real issue - which nobody really wants to address - is how to protect and improve the lot of the poorest and most left out in the region. People who have never really had much of a chance in the first place. Sadly as all sides pick up their cudgels to batter ‘the other’ this seems increasingly unlikely.
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Brigadier General Michael Lehnert, hero of Gitmo
Thursday, January 29th, 2009(H/T D) Back before Guantanamo was an internationally infamous prison, General Lehnert managed to stay a sweet cucumber in a vinegar barrel, and set the camp up to actually follow international law and human decency. From the story in the Washington Post.
Brig. Gen. Lehnert had built his own Guantanamo, one with ICRC oversight, a Muslim chaplain and an overriding ethos that stressed codified law and the unwritten rules of human decency. Lehnert’s team let the detainees talk among themselves; it provided halal food, an additional washing bucket inside cells that lacked toilet facilities, a Koran for each detainee, skullcaps and prayer beads for those who wanted them, and undergarments for the prisoners to wear at shower time, in accordance with Islamic laws that proscribe public nakedness.
I wanna be like that. All this vinegar, however, makes it difficult.
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