More on Gaza: Please read prayerfully
I'm including another eyewitness account of Gaza from an Irish friend of a friend (below the jump), also available here.
Ben White also contributes an important and strongly-worded article especially for the Christian community here. I urge Christian leaders to take his words seriously.
Key quotes:
The Palestinians are stateless, colonised, dispossessed, exiled, walled-in, and occupied. Israelis often say that they feel walled in by the Arab states around them. Yet it is a relatively wealthy state, enjoying the military, diplomatic, and financial support of the largest power in the world. With this backing, it is able to defy UN resolutions and encroach on Palestinian territory.
THERE are often two obstacles to the taking of an appropriate stance towards a just peace in Palestine/Israel by Churches and Christian groups in the West. First, it can be difficult to formulate a meaningful critique of Israeli policies without attracting cries of "excusing terrorism" or "anti-Semitism". The latter accusation is especially levelled against Christians who join the global movement to put pressure on Israel by using boycotts and disinvestment.
Yet it is neither an apologia for the Hamas movement and Palestinian rocket-fire — nor anti-Semitism — to call the destruction in Gaza and the Israeli colonisation of Palestine what it is: illegal, and conducive to continuous war rather than peace....
More than ever, Christian leaders and Churches need to stand up and be counted. This could mean many things: pilgrimages that show solidarity with Palestinians; targeted boycotts of Israeli products; writing to MPs; inviting Palestinian speakers; twinning; film screenings; selling Palestinian-made goods.
See below the jump ...
0 Comments15 Minutes
David Brooks gets it right …
I was impressed by David Brooks' NYT piece on the economy today for a couple reasons.
In "An Economy of Faith and Trust," he begins:
Once there was just Newtonian physics and the world seemed neat and mechanical. Then quantum physics came along and revealed that deep down things are much weirder than they seem. Something similar is now happening with public policy.
Once, classical economics dominated policy thinking. The classical models presumed a certain sort of orderly human makeup. Inside each person, reason rides the passions the way a rider sits atop a horse. Sometimes people do stupid things, but generally the rider makes deliberative decisions, and the market rewards rational behavior
Those Newtonian/classical economics models have failed us. Reality is more complex, and we now have to face that fact. (One recalls Alan Greenspan's statement a few months ago that there are flaws in his model - admirable honesty!) This wave of second thoughts in economics parallels the kind of theological shifts in thinking many of us are calling for. (This will be a main theme of my 2010 book ... details TBA) What many people call "orthodoxy," we're suggesting, is actually a kind of Newtonian or Smithian model that has a lot to commend it, but can't cope with the complexities of reality.
Brooks concludes,
Mechanistic thinkers on the right and left pose as rigorous empiricists. But empiricism built on an inaccurate view of human nature is just a prison.
I would add that mechanistic thinkers in theology on the right and left would do well to make a similar discovery.
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Countdown Day 24
What we need is not simply a new way of thinking, although our quest leads deep into and through the mind. We also need a new way of being, a new inner ecology, a new spirituality that does more than make us opinionated or fastidious, but that renders our souls an orchard of trees bearing good fruit, rooted in who we are before God and who we are becoming in God. (29)
From A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith (available February 9, 2010)
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Race and poverty …
My friend Lynne Hybels offers a beautiful reflection on MLK day here ... And there are links to some excellent sermons by Bill Hybels too.
Nicholas Kristof offers a surprising defense of sweatshops here ... Kristof (who has been a heroic journalist in drawing attention to people in poverty and danger around the world) argues persuasively that as bad as sweatshops are, they're far better than unemployment, which raises important questions for those of us thinking that this economic crisis provides an opportunity to envision a new kind of economy ... how can we move from a single bottom-line economy that seeks to maximize profit to one that seeks to maximize employment? For those of us who have seen first-hand the kinds of dumps and dump-dwellers Kristof describes, this is an especially powerful article.
Readers of Everything Must Change will especially appreciate these two articles.
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Costa Rica update …
Here's an update on the work of my friend Roy Soto and company ... I'll be with them in just over a week. There have been some big aftershocks since the original earthquake. If you feel moved to help with a donation, that would be wonderful!
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