Bury My Heart...

...at Wounded Knee. That was the site of the 1890 massacre of the Oglala Sioux by the US cavalry. As the news is full of talk about whether Canadian First Nations will blockade highways and rail lines as part of a national day of action on June 29, I'm reading about the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, the site of the Wounded Knee atrocity. The New York Times article has a picture of a Station of the Cross in the Holy Rosary Catholic Church on the reserve - the Romans are represented as American cavalrymen.

Bopha!

Watched the 1993 film Bopha!, about a black police sergeant and his family in 1980 South Africa. Most powerful were the scenes of dancing, singing protesters confronting the South African Police with their rifles, batons, whips and tear gas, and the funeral of the protesters killed by the police.

Lectures About Heaven

That's the title Thomas Laqueur gives to his review of Fritz Stern's Five Germanys I Have Known in London Review of Books (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n11/laqu01_.html):
"There is a joke about a crowd of Germans pouring out of a tourist bus that has stopped in front of the Pearly Gates. They see two signs. One points to the left: ‘Heaven.’ The other points right: ‘Lectures about Heaven.’ The Germans all head to the right."

This joke needn't be about Germans, of course.

Long Time...

...since I posted to this blog. Been busy - convocation, working, gardening, annual church Conference meeting. At Conference, which was in Montreal, Quebec, I went to a workshop led by a couple from the Mohawk community at Kanesetake - it's famous for the 1990 confrontation between Mohawk activists on one side and the Quebec provincial police and Canadian Army on the other. They began presenting about work translating the Hebrew Scriptures into Mohawk - only the Gospels have been translated previously. But the discussion soon turned to conditions within the community, which has 75 percent unemployment (!). I visited places in Nicaragua, the second poorest country in the Americas, which have lower unemployment levels.

Gunner Palace

...is the title of a documentary on a US Army artillery unit in Baghdad four months after the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime. After watching it I read the Newsweek article on chaplains in Iraq: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18367801/site/newsweek/.

This is Your Brain on God

Two good pieces in Slate on neurotheology: an overview by George Johnson (http://www.slate.com/id/2165026/) and John Horgan's piece on being an experimental subject at Laurentian University (http://www.slate.com/id/2165004/). And, in another vein, The New York Times reports on the Noah's Ark children's museum at the Skirball Cultural Centre in Los Angeles; the article has an accompanying video and slide show:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/arts/design/29fink.html?ref=arts. And, finally, a Florida bar is the location for Sunday church services for bikers: http://www.cbc.ca/cp/Oddities/070427/K042702AU.html.

New Music

Listening to CBC Radio 3 lately (http://radio3.cbc.ca/) and getting the podcast of new Canadian music. And Feist has a new album - The Reminder - and she's profiled in The New York Times arts section (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/arts/music/15pare.html) with an interview audio track and the video for 1234.

Virtual Religion

William Saletan's column in Slate (http://www.slate.com/id/2163775/) deals with churches in the virtual reality world of Second Life (http://www.secondlife.com/). It's worth reprinting in full - I sense a possible thesis topic:

Virtual churches are sprouting in Second Life. Many are online branches of real churches, with streaming video of live sermons. Rationales: 1) Cyberspace is another frontier for evangelism. 2) Where better to reach the unsaved? 3) It's no weirder than the current practice of broadcasting to real-life satellite churches where congregants watch services on screens. Secular critique: Second Life should be for fantasies like sex, not drudgeries like church. Religious critique: Church, like sex, is more exciting in the flesh. Social critique: Real religion consists of good works in this world, not pretending to worship in another. Half-cynical view: Conversations in Second Life churches are less fake than the "good-sermon-nice-weather exchanges" in real churches. Fully cynical view: Most churchgoing is fake, so why not let your avatar do it for you, like sending your kids to Sunday school.

Easter Eve

What am I reading today as I prepare for Easter?
A frightening piece on the chemical Bisphenol A, which is present in plastic bottles and other food packaging:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/
RTGAM.20070406.wbisphenolA0407/BNStory/Front/home.
Design for the other 90% - design that is not about tea kettles and chairs, but helping 90% of the world's people live:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/style/
tmagazine/04remix.cooperhewitt.t.html?ref=tmagazine.
And an article on the Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes de Rocha:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/style/
tmagazine/04well.mendes.t.html?ref=tmagazine.

Meek Mild As If

A few years ago the Church of England ran an advertising campaign to try to get people to attend Easter services, and used a poster of Jesus looking very much like Che Guevara. The poster slogan was "Meek. Mild. As If." - probably as provocative then as the current United Church of Canada Emerging Spirit magazine campaign with a bobble-head Jesus. I love the poster, though - particularly as Good Friday approaches and we need to be reminded that Jesus was executed by the authorities on the garbage dump of Jerusalem as a political criminal, just as the death squads brought their victims to the dumps of Managua and San Salvador and killed them. I saw some great Che murals in Nicaragua. There was a debate in our group about how appropriate Che is as a symbol of liberation, given that he spearheaded the more pro-Soviet, hardline faction in Cuba.

Chagall and Crosses

I haven't felt much like blogging since getting back from Central America - and I'm now on Facebook, where I feel loved as people are always wanting to be my friend:) But I was reading Helen McLean's review of Jonathan Wilson's biography of the painter Marc Chagall, published in The Globe & Mail book section today. She writes:
"Chagall had no wish to convert to Christianity, Wilson says. What he wanted was to reclaim Christ for the Jews, not as messiah but as a poet and prophet. He was obsessed with the concept of the crucified Christ as a universal symbol of martyrdom, painting it often and eventually even identifying with that tortured figure. In a late painting of the crucifixion, he wrote "Chagall" in Hebrew letters at the head of the cross."

Back From Managua

I'm back from 10 days in Managua and Nicaragua's northern Atlantic region. There is much to process: dire poverty co-existing with (or producing?) hope and faith.

There is an interview with former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in the London Review of Books: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n04/hall02_.html. He speaks of his own experience with liberation theology.

From Algiers to Managua

Just watched The Battle of Algiers, the landmark 1966 Italian-Algerian film about FLN terror and French counter-terror; many lessons about liberation struggles, the limitations of counter-insurgency, and the present fiasco in Iraq. Innocents suffer on both sides.

On Wednesday morning I leave for Nicaragua for 10 days - and I'm not sure what I will be like when I return from my first exposure to pervasive poverty (in inner-city ministry I have had lots of experience with poverty, but nothing on the scale of Nicaragua, the second-poorest country in the Americas). How will I be transformed? Will I simply be angry? Will I be evangelized to be a power for justice? Check back in late February.

Candlemas

February 2 is Candlemas in the old Christian calendar, as well as Groundhog Day and Imbolg in Celtic spirituality. I haven't blogged for a while, but I've been thinking about the spectrum that has charity on one end and justice on the other, and how to invite people to move along the spectrum. It's like the story about a town on a river, and suddenly babies begin washing up on the banks of the river. The townspeople begin saving the babies. More babies wash up, and eventually institutions grow up, dedicated to saving, sheltering and raising the babies. But no one in the town ever asks where the babies are coming from.

Denying Denial

A group of over 100 Iranian intellectuals have condemned their government's sponsorship of a conference on Holocaust denial; see http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19831.

I watched John Ford's 1964 film Cheyenne Autumn. I thought it was ground-breaking for its time; it is sympathetic to the Cheyenne people (although few of the Native characters are played by aboriginal actors) and to Quakers, and depicts cowboy racism and the collusion of mining and railroad interests in destroying the First Nations of the Plains. It certainly shows the progression from the same director's The Searchers, which begins to show racism towards the First Nations, to Dances With Wolves.

Origins of Faith Traditions

Reading Tariq Islam's piece in the London Review of Books on Islamic history (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n03/ali_01_.html). He writes:
"Judaism, Christianity and Islam all began as versions of what we would today describe as political movements. They were credible belief-systems which aimed to make it easier to resist imperial oppression, to unite a disparate people, or both."

While the statement is simplistic, one can certainly make this argument for Islam, and in large part for Judaism (as the worship of the Lord played a role in inspiring a Canaanite peasant rebellion that eventually led to the nation of Israel). It is less easy to argue this for Christianity, but there was a major element of political liberation in both Jesus' teaching and the preaching of the early Jesus movement.

So, how then shall we live? Is faith all about political resistance to oppression? How do we act when we ourselves are both oppressors and oppressed (see the Solzhenitsyn quote below), calling ourselves people of faith while living in the rich West? Stay tuned for answers (if I have any).

Good and Evil

Just when I'm trying to lighten up the blog...Reading reviews of Martin Amis' new Gulag novel, House of Meetings (see http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/14/books/review/Schillinger2.t.html?ref=books, among others). The Times review includes a poignant quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago:
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

This Blog Needs Some Levity

I have been watching The Office, both the British and US versions. It's hilarious, but is even funnier because I have worked for similar bosses. In Thursday's broadcast episode of the US series, Michael emails a compromising picture of himself to the wrong recipient; at my political party job I would get calls from bigwigs asking how to get an email message back.

David Letterman says: NBC News is now under fire for referring to the Iraq War as a civil war. Today President Bush said, "No, no, no. It’s not a civil war until it’s made into a series of Time Life books.”

The Dawkins Delusion

More attention paid to Richard Dawkins' atheist manifesto The God Delusion: a good article by H. Allen Orr in the New York Review of Books, at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19775; and a scathing review by Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html. Eagleton begins, "Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology."

No Noose

I have been ruminating on Saddam Hussein's execution, and read in Slate that Christopher Hitchens is opposed to the death sentence for the deposed dictator: http://www.slate.com/id/2156776/. Hitchens is a gung-ho proponent of the continuing war (read: fiasco) in Iraq, so I was surprised that he and I are of one mind on this issue, if not on the morality and efficacy of the war itself:
"The disgusting video of Saddam Hussein's last moments on the planet is more than a reminder of the inescapable barbarity of capital punishment and of the intelligible and conventional reasons why it should always be opposed...We (Americans) have helped to officiate at a human sacrifice. For shame."
Also on Iraq, there are two excellent pieces in the New York Review of Books; Christian Caryl's What About the Iraqis?, looking at the war (for once) from the viewpoint of ordinary Iraqis instead of the occupation forces or the elite (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19793); and Mark Danner's Iraq: The War of the Imagination, dissecting the Bush Administration's errors in managing the occupation, particularly the disastrous decision to disband the Iraqi military and the Baathist civil service, creating an instant Sunni insurgency (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19720). Recommended reading.