Culture Watch
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
---
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).
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
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.
A few blocks away, a sidewalk mailbox is covered with a magic-marker tribute to a young man downed in a shooting—"RIP Boo"
A frequent comment by political pundits after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks was that the United States lacks "good old-fashioned human intelligence" against terrorism.
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.
All Christianity has to give, and all it needs to give, is the myth of the human Jesus.