 QUOTE OF THE WEEK |
You feel violated, embarrassed, not sure what is taking place, especially when you haven't done anything. You feel shocked, then you realize what's happening, and then you feel it's a violation of everything you stand for.
- Earl Graves Jr., CEO of the company that publishes Black Enterprise magazine, offering insight into last week's arrest of Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. In 1995, Graves was himself stopped by police during his commute to work and made to face the wall while being frisked in New York City's Grand Central Station. (Source: Associated Press)
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How to Win a Culture War
Want to know how to win a culture war? Don’t fight one. The soul of our nation has been marred from a perpetual state of culture war. In an Orwellian twist, each camp relies on conflict with their supposed enemies for the perpetuation of their own existence. The culture warrior’s clout, influence, fundraising, and organizing is based upon real or perceived attacks from the other side. These “threats” and boogeymen are their oxygen, and without them, they die.
The biggest fear of those leading the culture wars is not an attack from the other side or the threat of losing ground on their issues -- it is common ground. Culture wars require a clash of incompatible ideologies; common ground acknowledges differences but finds practical shared goals. Practical shared goals mean people and parties with different ideologies can both “win.” When culture wars are fought, the only people who win are those who build their careers off them.
Culture wars inevitably have causalities, and if those leading the charge have their way, the next casualty will be meaningful health-care reform. In a nation as prosperous as ours, all Americans should have access to quality, affordable health care. Reasonable people may differ on how best to accomplish this goal, and I welcome a rigorous policy debate about it, but it should be a moral priority for all of us. We must work together to find common ground that will provide quality, affordable health care to all Americans.
At this point in the debate, abortion should not become a wedge issue that could doom the chances of any legislation passing. For too long the issue of abortion in our country has been a contentious and ultimately divisive debate between simplified and polarizing positions of “life” and “choice.” It has been an ideological clash in which each side has sought dominance through shouting their position out louder and longer than the other side. There are code words, buzz words, and shibboleths to identify those on your team and to protect your side from intrusions by the enemy. The trenches have grown deeper and the barbed wire fences higher while little has been done to advance any solutions or provide opportunity for real dialogue.
Federal funding of abortions is prohibited by current law, and that prohibition should be maintained. Any final legislation should make clear that no private insurance company will be mandated to pay for an abortion, nor should they be prohibited from paying for an abortion. These provisions would maintain the current status quo, and demonstrate how sensible common ground can bring people together.
On the issue of abortion itself, Reps. Rosa DeLauro and Tim Ryan’s “Preventing Unintended Pregnancies, Reducing the Need for Abortion and Supporting Parents Act” addresses how best to both prevent unwanted pregnancies and support pregnant women who desire to carry their baby to term. It also makes adoption easier.
The bill demonstrates how searching for common ground can lead to higher ground, in ways that both sides of the debate can embrace without compromising their core principles. It could lead to genuine progress in reducing the number of abortions and improving the quality of life for women and children -- all by addressing the real issues that often lead to abortion. Abortion is legal in the United States, and although Americans are divided on its moral status, most feel the tragedy of abortion and believe that we currently have far too many for a healthy society.
Tim Ryan and Rosa DeLauro are wise public servants who are trying to unite us around the new common ground of abortion reduction, a place that people on both sides of the debate can agree to. Helping young people to delay sexual activity, preventing the pregnancies that people don't want, economically supporting low-income women to give them real choices about having a child, and encouraging adoption all will reduce abortion in America. Who could be against any of that?
We have a great opportunity to advance our shared values and common goals at a crucial moment in our country’s history. Sojourners and I strongly support this good and wise piece of legislation and applaud the creative solutions it offers for real action.
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Debating Race
by Edward Gilbreath
Earlier this month, the death of Michael Jackson got us talking about issues of racial identity, skin lightening, and the desegregation of MTV. Last week, the Sonia Sotomayor hearings left us wondering about the prospect of a "wise Latina" ascending to the position of Supreme Court justice. And now, this week, news of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s being pulled over by police -- in his own house -- has folks buzzing again about the pervasiveness of racial profiling in America.
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Mr. Obama, Our Immigration Enforcement Policy Perpetuates Racial Profiling
by Allison Johnson
While intended to remove hardened undocumented criminals from the streets and process them for deportation, in practice it takes the form of stopping people with brown skin for routine traffic violations, such as a broken taillight or a forgotten turn signal, and processing them for deportation on the spot. And because there is no way to tell, not by accent or skin color, if a person is undocumented, this issue affects all Latinos in areas where police are singling out individuals based on race for immigration-related stops and interrogation.
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Four Lessons from the Religious Right
by Brian McLaren
A Seattle Times article on the current state of the Religious Right union matches my own sense of things in my travels across the country. I've heard conservative evangelicals say almost word for word what people quoted in this article say: The times are changing.
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Jimmy Carter's Stand on Women in Church Leadership
by Valerie Weaver-Zercher
In moving op-ed pieces in the Australian newspaper The Age and the British Observer, Carter widely publicizes his 2000 decision to withdraw from the Southern Baptist Convention because of its stance that women are subservient to men and its refusal to allow women to serve as pastors or deacons.
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Taking the Bible Seriously, but not Always Literally
by César Baldelomar
Neglecting the three worlds of biblical interpretation, as well as failing to read it in its original language, will surely lead to an interpretation based on one's idiosyncrasies.
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Henry Louis Gates Jr. Arrested, Now Who Owes Whom an Apology?
by Alan Bean
If a police officer saw me trying to enter my own home and I presented clear evidence that I owned the place, his next move is very simple: offer an effusive apology and clear off my property.... Police officers should understand that when they confront innocent citizens in their own homes a measure of pique is to be expected. Treating an officer with contempt isn't illegal.
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Acedia and Vacation Bible School
by Caroline Langston
A lot of our friends are people for whom the spiritual is a radically open, non-sectarian, often even a non-theistic question—and who tend to think that any Christian children's activities must be some kind of creepy, fascist-army kind of indoctrination. Meanwhile, most of our Christian friends, whether Orthodox, Catholic, or conservative Presbyterian, affect a sophistication that tends to wink ironically at such rah-rah evangelical conventions as Vacation Bible School.
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Is National Health Care Hazardous to Your Health? Check the Facts
by LaVonne Neff
Various Web sites and e-mails are reporting that cancer survival rates are much higher in the U.S. than in various European countries. They appear to be using the same set of statistics to argue that national health care results in dramatically increased mortality rates from breast, prostate, and other cancers. To check the facts, I went to the World Health Organization and made myself a chart. Here's what I found...
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Wal-Mart's Big Green Claim, Part 2
by Tracey Bianchi
[continued from part 1] ... As you hear green claims, from Wal-Mart or anyone else, stop to think for a moment about whether or not you even need to go to the store in the first place. And then if you do, does it have to be at Wal-Mart? Or can it be the local farmer, hardware store, or coffee shop down the street? The greenest thing we can do is consume less.
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Holy Health Care!
by Rose Marie Berger
Debates on our national system of providing health care are raging in political and corporate offices around the country. Traditionally, however, churches and faith centers have been the sites of healing, health, and wholeness for a community.
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Sotomayor's 'Temperament Problem': Perception and Reality
by Ryan Rodrick Beiler
Sen. Graham's questions and Calabresi's observations immediately brought to mind linguist Deborah Tannen's Talking from 9 to 5: Women and Men at Work . The book studies the differences in communication habits and expectations between men and women. If you're a man or woman who sometimes talks to members of the opposite gender at work, I recommend it. One of Tannen's key observations, grossly oversimplified: If women talk like women, they're ignored. If women talk like men, they're hated.
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Reclaiming the E-Word and Seizing the Episcopal Moment
by Becky Garrison
Lost in the buzz over the U.S. Episcopal Church's decision to bless same sex unions was a missional moment. During his speech to the delegates attending General Convention, Brian McLaren proposed that Episcopalians reclaim that dreaded "e" word.
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Wal-Mart's Big Green Claim
by Tracey Bianchi
Well color me happy (as the saying goes): Wal-Mart just released a big claim to be greening up its act. But what does their claim really mean and how do we define what corporate green looks like anyway? Especially since lately, corporate green seems to grow everywhere, at times fertilized by a healthy dose of corporate greed.
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Celebrating Mandela's Birthday and Serving Zimbabwe's Children
by Nontando Hadebe
On July 18 many people from different parts of the world celebrated Nelson Mandela's 91st birthday! What a tribute to a man who has come to epitomize struggle for justice and commitment to the poor and oppressed.
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Turning My Travels into Pilgrimages
by Becky Garrison
Recently, I've begun to think how I can reconnect with God by turning all my travels (including my everyday errands) into pilgrimages.
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I Don't Care What Our Health-Care System is Called, as Long as it Delivers
by LaVonne Neff
I agree that we can't just keep throwing money at our failed system. We need an entire restructuring, along the European model. Call it "socialism" if you like--I don't care what our system is called, as long as it delivers.
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Why We Still Need the NAACP
by Aja M. Carr
What began as a small meeting of the minds, including Ida B. Wells and W.E.B. Du Bois, is now a multi-faceted organization with multiple outreach campaigns and a multi-million dollar budget. As of late, the NAACP has taken up causes like health care, economic empowerment, and education -- without ceasing to support the social justice platform upon which the organization was founded.
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Honoring Deacon Phoebe
by Mimi Haddad
Rather than obscure their leadership, we should honor Phoebe and those women in countless churches around the world who work hard in the Lord. Let us heed Paul's words (Romans 16:2, 1 Thessalonians 5:12), that those who work hard in the Lord deserve our respect.
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Walter Cronkite and True Journalism
by Valerie Elverton Dixon
We trusted him because we knew that he was not in business to support this or that political party or agenda. As believers, we have an agenda: to bring God's realm of peace on earth as it is in heaven. We do this through prayer and work. Good journalism informs us about what people and trouble in the world requires our prayers.
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Sotomayor and the Fundamentals of Diversity and Affirmative Action
by Jim Wallis
The belief that diversity is a goal worth pursuing because it is a benefit to all of us is not a conservative belief or a progressive belief, but a deeply held moral value and American proposition. As Brian McLaren wrote, this is not racism. It is from this foundation that our country has overcome the sins of slavery and legalized segregation -- and it is from this foundation that our country will continue to make strides in overcoming racial inequality through the courts, legislation, and the transformation of society.
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Be Fair to the Pharisees: Guarding Against Anti-Jewish Attitudes
by Joel Allen
In the fall of 1997, I began a graduate program in Bible at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio. One of the things that surprised me in studying the Bible with rabbinical students was the degree to which they perceived the New Testament to be fundamentally anti-Jewish. As an orthodox Christian, I found it troubling to hear the teachings of Jesus described as 'anti-Jewish' and as contributing factors to Jewish suffering.
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Kids Need All the Positive Words They Can Get
by Bart Campolo
Recently, a bunch of people e-mailed me the same New York Times column, which cited a variety of scientific research suggesting that what we think of as intelligence is quite malleable in children and owes little or nothing to genetics. What stuck out to me was one study which found that a child of professionals (disproportionately white) has heard about 30 million words spoken by age 3, while a black child raised on welfare has heard only 10 million words.
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Update an Obsolete Poverty Line
by Nate Van Duzer
The current poverty measure employed by the federal government is based on food prices and consumption habits from the 1950s. It doesn't account for regional disparities or the rising cost of items like housing. And since it measures only pre-tax cash income, it ignores assistance from anti-poverty programs, making it more difficult to see the effectiveness of these programs over time. How can we fight poverty if we don't know where it exists or whether our best efforts are actually helping people?
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Umpires, Perspective, and the Supreme Court
by Jim Wallis
The claim that any human is able to remain unaffected by their background or have a purely objective view of any case is to claim a quality that belongs only to God: omniscience. Of course, judges should seek to apply the law with impartiality, but, with every case, a judge has to hear and weigh facts, and make choices about how to view and interpret those facts. It is exactly a diversity of perspectives and experiences, the variety of ways that a case can be approached and the information processed, that brings us closer to truth and closer to justice.
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| SOJOURNERS IN THE NEWS |
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Top Stories:
Members propose abortion 'common ground'
Politico.com
"There's a new reality here," he said of the new push for "common ground" in abortion politics, and said his proposal has the backing of Christian leaders who have broken with the Christian right, including Revs. Joel Hunter and Jim Wallis. Nineteen other pro-life House Democrats signed an earlier letter demanding bluntly that any government-backed health care exclude abortions. +Click to continue
The morality of reform
The Huffington Post
Addressing current immigration policies, and the lack thereof, Sojourners asks Where’s the Love? Reverend Anne Dunlap offers a pointed and simple plea for kindness and fairness, with an eye for hypocrisy: For those who are “trying to be faithful to God’s way, God’s vision of communities filled with justice, dignity, and love, the reminder to 'love the ‘alien’ as you love yourself' should be the touchstone of our work in solidarity with the immigrant community.” +Click to continue
Christian Groups Eye Hate Crimes Bill
Christianity Today
Churches encouraged to try 'liberating' approach to mission
Christian Today
PM proves a convert to the politics of faith
The Australian
"Sojourners in the news" articles are the most recent news clippings that mention Sojourners in any way - whether favorably or unfavorably. Though we provide the text on our site for your convenience, we do not necessarily endorse the views of these articles or their source publications. |
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