Culture Watch
My son hates social studies. No matter how much I drill him on the subject, he could care less about James Madison, the Bill of Rights, the abolitionist movement, or even more-contemporary figures like Arthur Ashe. This is more than unfortunate; it's a problem.
That's because he's a fourth grader attending public school in the Commonwealth of Virginia. And at the end of the school year, he and every other fourth grader in Virginia is going to be tested on the subject, with an emphasis on the history of the Old Dominion.
The problem isn't the subject matter; it's the way that it's presented. There's little or no attempt to engage his imagination. Facts alone don't begin to tell the story of why these figures are important and why we should know who they are, much less admire them. I also know that this disconnect between history and the imagination is far from universal. His cousins, who are the same age, don't have this problem. They live in Mexico City, a place where art and history seem inseparable. Because they can see and even touch the history of the place they call home, they are more apt to want to read about it.
It's also true for me. I remember when I first saw a reproduction of Diego Rivera's (no relation) painting of Emiliano Zapata, the leader of peasant and indigenous forces during the Mexican Revolution. Rivera's painting, which conveys both Zapata's peasant origins and his nobility, made me want to learn more about the revolutionary leader and the times that produced him. It grabbed my imagination and the rest of me soon followed, so much so that a reproduction of the work hangs in my home.
Novels can lead us to a deeper and more experiential knowledge of our faith, says author David Cunningham in Reading is Believing: The Christian Faith through Literature and Film. In his book, he draws on one novel or film to illuminate each article of the Apostle's Creed. Here he uses Toni Morrison's Pulitzer-Prize winning book Beloved to illustrate "He will come again, to judge the living and the dead."
Our beliefs about the future are tied to how we live in the present, but such beliefs are also related to a certain kind of attitude toward the past. In the Christian context, our belief that "Christ will come again" is a way of reminding ourselves that Christ's first coming was of urgent importance—and thus, that we are called to remember and to live into the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus until he comes again. We spur ourselves to remember the past by thinking about the future, and we spur ourselves to think about the future by remembering the past....
Beloved is a book about our memories of the past, about the shape of our lives in the present, and about our expectations for the future. Its title character [Sethe] is someone who "comes again," in judgment and in love—and the book explores what it means for others to live into that second coming in a faithful way....
The book is filled with biblical allusions—from the party at Sethe's house that turns into a scene of the feeding of the multitudes, to the "tree" on Sethe's back (imprinted by the slavemaster's lash) that recalls the crucifixion, to the book's deeply meaningful epigram, from Paul's letter to the Romans: "I will call them my people, which were not my people, and her beloved, which was not beloved." The characters obviously have deep lives of prayer, and live into their relationship to God with seriousness and with joy...
Fierce Legion of Friends: A History of Human Rights Campaigns and Campaigners by Linda Rabben
The Fragmentation of the Church and Its Unity in Peacemaking, edited by Jeffrey Gros and John D. Rempel
Hebron Journal: Stories of Nonviolent Peacemaking by Arthur G. Gish
Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance by Beverly Bell
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There are basically three kinds of power: domination, collaboration, and satyagraha (truth force). Domination is political power that proceeds from the barrel of a gun. Collaboration promotes "united we stand, divided we fall." Truth force, or spiritual power, preaches "the truth will set you free." All three kinds of power make up the shifting riverbed of the history of social movements and campaigns.
Linda Rabben's Fierce Legion of Friends tracks the strategies of modern social campaigns, an interest that started with her work for Amnesty International in Brazil. Reading through case histories, she discovered the rich and often tragic stories of people who crusaded for freedom in every generation.
Who were the lesser-known people who pushed forward the British, American, and Brazilian anti-slavery movements? How did the famous ceramicist Josiah Wedgwood come to develop a line of Jubilee pottery to fund the abolitionist cause? What prompted lawyer Wendell Phillips to link slave rights with workers' rights? Who marched in support of Chicago's Haymarket prisoners? How did Mark Twain end up fighting against forced labor in the Belgian Congo? Rabben takes the reader through an extraordinary living history honoring organizers, letter writers, and petition signers who collaborated to transform societies for the better.
‘Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world," Margaret Mead once said. "In fact, it is the only thing that ever has." Watching the documentary A Day's Work, A Day's Pay will convince you that Mead had it exactly right.
The hour-long film, shot from 1997 to 2000, traces the personal and political evolution of three welfare recipients living in New York City who move from welfare to work through a program called the Work Experience Program (WEP). An opening scene contains Mayor Rudy Giuliani's claim that the program would provide welfare recipients with dignity and full-time employment. After watching A Day's Work, it's obvious that WEP was more about getting people off welfare rolls than out of poverty and into good jobs.
Jose Nicolau, who thought he was best suited for custodial work, was assigned by the WEP program to be a janitor. One moving scene shows Jose washing out trash bins. "Like an artist puts his signature on a drawing," he says, "I want to put my signature on the way I work." Jackie Marte, a 23-year-old mother of two, says, "All we want is decent jobs. We want to live like everyone else. We want to get paid for the work that we do."
Juan Galan is a former WEP worker who turned organizer when he was hired by ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). After experiencing extreme working conditions in the program and the harassment of people on the streets toward WEP workers, he decided he was "not going to take it any more." Galan began to organize WEP workers around a bill introduced in the New York City Council that would secure a grievance procedure, better pay, and job training for WEP participants.
Walking the Bible: A Journey By Land Through the Five Books of Moses, by Bruce Feiler. A young, funny journalist makes a 10,000-mile journey across the Middle East to answer this question: "Is the Bible just an abstraction, or is it a living, breathing entity with relevance to contemporary life?" (Perennial).
Wide as the Waters: The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution it Inspired, by Benson Bobrick. The lively, scandalous twists and turns of the evolution of the English Bible—what we know today as the King James Version (Penguin Putnam).
Seeing With Our Souls: Monastic Wisdom for Every Day, by Joan Chittister, OSB. Reflections on 12 qualities of the soul that ask us to identify the political, spiritual, economic, and cultural choices we make (Sheed & Ward).
The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, by Philip Jenkins. A provocative and powerful look at the implications of Christianity's expansion in Africa, Asia, and Latin America (Oxford University Press).
The New Testament—Introducing the Way of Discipleship, edited by Wes Howard-Brook and Sharon H. Ringe. Commentaries by various authors, including Ched Myers, A. Katherine Grieb, and Neil Elliott, on the New Testament's challenge of radical discipleship (Orbis Books).
When Sojourners' CultureWatch editor asked me to write about my "favorite things," I gave a quick "Sure!" It's not often that I get to talk about McDonalds' new "Tangy Cajun Chicken Parts" and that delightful way the flavor seems to stick to the roof of your mouth, even though you'd rather it didn't.
But the editor pointed out that, no, she was more interested in the cultural aspects of my life, the books I'm reading, the films I've seen, what particular collections of poetry I walk past in the bookstore as I hurry to the magazine section that contains lots of easy-to-read photographs. So, culturally speaking, here are some of the more literary aspects of my life, printed in bold face, so if you just skim through it looks like I'm really smart:
Theological Ethics, Helmut Thielicke's brilliant three-volume series on the implied dialectic of freedom and bondage, occupies by far the largest amount of space on my bookshelf. Which is why I moved it the other day when I dropped my slinky. I occasionally use this device to entertain the pets—since my family has developed a keen lack of appreciation for my skills—and I was shocked to distraction by the sight of our rabbit attempting to "be romantic" with one of the cats. That's when I lost control of the slinky and it dropped onto the bookshelf behind several other books that I have never read but which also look good in boldface, including New Testament Greek for Dummies, John Calvin: Years of Laughter, and A Bunch of My Wife's College Textbooks.
The books I have read reflect a broad range of interests. So I won't mention that the last three are all by Tom Clancy, a frothing-at-the-mouth militaristic simpleton who should be ashamed for writing such great stories. His view of our nation's role in history is the exact opposite of Sojourners' worldview, which, while consistently taking the moral high ground, has never once produced a great action novel. (Yes, Sojourners' perspective on globalization is important, but would it be that hard to throw in a little air-to-air combat?)
The film opens with a faint sound, a vibration that says something's coming, and so you listen very closely.
The members of her New Orleans church call her "Sister Shocked." She's the Ms. Shocked who sued the Mercury record label under the 13th amendment—that's the anti-slavery amendment...
During the mid-1960s, traditional forms of private confession seemed to disappear abruptly from Roman Catholic practice, according to James O'Toole, associate professor of history at Boston College.
It takes the rare vocal talents of a singer like Lila Downs to silence a Madrid crowd—and convince them to put out their cigarettes without complaining.
His image is used to promote cement companies and bakeries, and to sell music CDs, videotapes, T-shirts, hats, mugs, and potato chips.
When I heard about the death of country singer Waylon Jennings in February, my mind flashed back to the day I first bought one of his records.
Moving toward the end of the Year of Sept. 11, my favorite things are books and music with insight into life's big picture, the meaning of the journey that we're all on
In light of the 9-11 wars, people worldwide are digging more deeply into the study of applied nonviolence.
Driving north on I-75 through the flat state of Ohio, I'm usually scanning the horizon for those ticket-giving folks who, I'm told, like out-of-state cars.
Jewish-Christian "dialogue" is too often just that—an intellectual, theological discussion with no grounding in shared experience.