Community for Burundi
You can see two beautiful short videos about the Batwa in East Africa here
This one is about the Batwa education project ...
This one is about a recent mass Batwa wedding and the fascinating story behind it.
The village where these videos were shot by David Shook is the one I visited in June ... here.
If you want to learn more about the people behind Community For Burundi, check out amahoro-africa.org.
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Religion, Republicans, McCain-Rove
Journalist Sarah Posner offers a round-up on Evangelical religion and the Republican party.
I am among the many who feels we are watching a kind of tragic meltdown of John McCain from seasoned Senator and war hero to typical Rovian swiftboat politician. He said he was willing to lose the election to win the Iraq war, but sadly, it appears his character has deteriorated to the point where he is willing to lose his integrity to win the election. He is doing so by degenerating into Rovian "slash and burn" swiftboat politics. For example, check out this. Even youtube has higher standards in what they'll show than the McCain camp has in what they'll produce.
Speaking of Rove, you can read about how he trashed McCain in 2000 here ... and how he's now working for McCain here.
I was reading Andrew Sullivan's in-depth political bio of Rove in the Atlantic Monthly, and this paragraph - about Rove's role in Mark Kennedy's 1994 judicial campaign - jumped out at me:
Some of Kennedy's campaign commercials touted his volunteer work, including one that showed him holding hands with children. "We were trying to counter the positives from that ad," a former Rove staffer told me, explaining that some within the See camp initiated a whisper campaign that Kennedy was a pedophile. "It was our standard practice to use the University of Alabama Law School to disseminate whisper-campaign information," the staffer went on. "That was a major device we used for the transmission of this stuff. The students at the law school are from all over the state, and that's one of the ways that Karl got the information out—he knew the law students would take it back to their home towns and it would get out." This would create the impression that the lie was in fact common knowledge across the state. "What Rove does," says Joe Perkins, "is try to make something so bad for a family that the candidate will not subject the family to the hardship. Mark is not your typical Alabama macho, beer-drinkin', tobacco-chewin', pickup-drivin' kind of guy. He is a small, well-groomed, well-educated family man, and what they tried to do was make him look like a homosexual pedophile. That was really, really hard to take."
The eery, sleazy similarity between Rove versus Kennedy in 1994 and this week's disgusting "sex ed" ad from the McCain camp ... it deserves a second thought.
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Advice to Obama … about Evangelicals
My friend Alan Bean gives Barack Obama some good advice here ... and it's good advice for the rest of us too.
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a good story from colorado …
Check out this story from my friend and musical collaborator, Tracy Howe ...
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The most important book of the year … arrived today
My advance copy of Phyllis Tickle's The Great Emergence arrived in the mail today. It is a treasure. Here's the endorsement I wrote for it:
The Great Emergence offers a sweeping overview of church history and locates us in a moment of great opportunity and challenge. To some, this analysis will come as a rude awakening, and to others, as a dream coming true. My hunch is that this will be one of the most important books of the year, and will shape the conversation among a wide range of Christians for years to come.
I highly, highly, highly recommend this book. It's deep, rich, provocative ... and really well written. It will release soon, and is available for pre-order now.
Now going from sublime to hilarious ... I also just read Nadia Bolz-Weber's book Salvation on the Small Screen. Nadia watched TBN for 24 hours straight in the company of some interesting friends, and the book records their responses. It's edifying in a "sarcastic-Lutheran" kind of way, but even more, it's the kind of book to just plain cheer you up. The guy next to me on a Southwest flight the other day leaned over and had to ask me what was so funny ...
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