"You have not come to hear a detached, scholarly lecture about the two powerful figures who are on our program. I am deeply and unavoidably attached. Fully engaged.
Feature
Wes Howard-Brook 1-01-1999
It's all too easy to make fun of the extreme examples of prophecy belief that we encounter on bumper stickers and best-seller lists.
Walter Brueggemann 11-01-1998
The book of Isaiah is like a great fugue, always advancing to fresh statements, at the same time continually returning to pick up and restate themes already sounded.
Scott Robinson 7-01-1998
Rita Dove is a woman who does not back down from unexplored territory. She is the youngest Poet Laureate in U.S. history; she is also the first African American to be so named. She is the author of several books of poetry, including The Darker Face of the Earth (1994), Mother Love: Poems (1995), and Museum (1997). Composer and free-lance writer Scott Robinson interviewed Dove while she was in Minneapolis preparing for a vocal performance with the Plymouth Music Series.
—The Editors
Let us honor the lost, the snatched, the relinquished,
those vanquished by glory, muted by shame.
Stand up in the silence they’ve left and listen:
those absent ones, unknown and unnamed—
remember!
—Rita Dove, from "Umoja—Each One of Us Counts"
‘‘I was very aware of the public nature of the piece," says Rita Dove of her poem "Umoja," "and I wanted it to have a certain majesty, and a certain pageantry." Commissioned for the Atlanta Centennial Cultural Olympics in 1996, and set to music by composer Alvin Singleton, "Umoja" is one of a number of Dove’s poems written for very public occasions.
A musician herself, Dove is keenly aware of the interplay of music and poetic word. But while poetry is most often a private undertaking, read by individuals in books or magazines, music-making is, by its nature, a public act. And Rita Dove, both in her enthusiasm for music and in her educational outreach—which emphasizes the music inherent in poetry itself—is a public kind of poet.
Stanley W. Carlson-Thies 7-01-1998
The charitable choice provision of the 1996 federal welfare reform law makes Christian ministries and other faith-based organizations eligible for government funds to provide welfare services, without requiring them to form separate corporations or remove religious content from the services they offer. We asked two experts on charitable choice to explore the issues of church-state relations raised by the provision.
—The Editors
Cooperation between government and religious organizations to serve the needy is not new. But previous federal rules for such cooperation were often so restrictive, uncertain, or arbitrary that many Christian ministries rejected federal dollars for fear of losing their spiritual mission. The charitable choice rules for federal welfare funds are designed specifically to address this fear by protecting the religious integrity of participating faith-based organizations.
Charitable choice is built on four principles. It
- encourages state and local governments to use contracts or voucher arrangements to obtain services for welfare families from non-governmental organizations;
- requires the governments not to exclude faith-based organizations from competing for funds because they are religious or too religious;
- obligates the governments to respect the religious integrity of organizations that accept government funds to provide welfare services;
- protects the right of the needy to receive help without religious coercion.
The charitable choice provision is a set of conditions on how the federal welfare block grant that each state receives can be used, not a separate fund designated for churches.
Melissa Rogers 7-01-1998
Should houses of worship and other religious organizations increase their efforts to assist people moving from welfare to work? Absolutely. Should they do so by following the model established by the charitable choice provision of the welfare reform law? Absolutely not. Charitable choice is unconstitutional, unwise, and unnecessary.
Unconstitutional. Charitable choice ignores important legal distinctions that protect religion. For many years, groups that have ties to religious bodies, but are not pervasively sectarian (such as Catholic Charities and Lutheran Services in America), have received government money to perform secular social services, provided that they do not proselytize or discriminate on the basis of religion in hiring.
Courts generally have refused, however, to permit the government to subsidize pervasively sectarian entities, such as a church or a drug rehabilitation group that relies on acceptance of the gospel. Why? The Constitution recognizes that individual citizens, not the government, should choose whether their money supports the missions of Methodists, Mormons, Baptists, or Buddhists.
It doesn’t solve the constitutional problem to restrict the use of tax money for secular purposes. In pervasively sectarian ministries, it is almost impossible and always unwise for government to try to separate sacred from secular. When government attempts to do so, it becomes excessively entangled with the ministry, which is itself unconstitutional. Charitable choice attempts to obliterate the legal distinction between religiously affiliated and pervasively sectarian institutions, allowing both to receive tax funds.
Richard Cizik 7-01-1998
For three weeks in February 1998, a delegation of U.S. religious leaders made a historic visit to the People’s Republic of China. Selected by President Clinton and invited by President Jiang Zemin, the delegation’s unprecedented mission was to begin a dialogue with top government officials in China on the subject of religious freedom. The delegates said they knew the dangers of such a state-sponsored visit—especially the risk of co-option by their hosts—but felt they were able to voice criticisms, broaden awareness, and introduce a new perspective on religious freedom to many Chinese officials.
Rev. Richard Cizik, a policy analyst for the National Association of Evangelicals and a staff member for the delegation, said he has been preparing for this trip since reading Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth as a child. Cizik received a graduate fellowship to the National Political Science University in Taiwan in the early 1970s, and visited the garrison coastal islands of Quemoy and Matsu—the closest that an American with a Republic of China passport could get to mainland China at that time. "Looking through binoculars from one of the concrete bunkers built to house artillery batteries," he said, "I promised God that I would someday get to the mainland." This year he fulfilled that promise. —The Editors
"We’re here to build a spiritual bridge between the United States and China," the rabbi, minister, and archbishop calmly explained. At least a dozen reporters with cameras, including representatives of Xin Hua, the official Chinese News Agency, crowded the entryway of the White Cloud Daoist Temple to interview the highest level delegation of its kind at the start of a three week mission on behalf of religious freedom.
"Don’t you think you are being used by the Chinese government for propaganda purposes?" a reporter from Reuters inquired.
"Except my mother and me, the entire Schneier family died in Nazi concentration camps," the rabbi responded. "I know what it means to be manipulated by authorities, and that’s not going on here."
Ched Myers 7-01-1998
Zvonimir Atletic / Shutterstock
The Hebrew Bible's vision of Sabbath economics contends that a theology of abundant grace and a communal ethic of redistribution is the only way out of our slavery to the debt system, with its theology of meritocracy and private ethic of wealth concentration. The contemporary church, however, has difficulty hearing this as good news since our theological imaginations have long been captive to the market-driven orthodoxies of modern capitalism.
Our fears have persuaded us that the biblical Jubilee is at best utopian and at worst communistic. Yet we find it awkward simply to dismiss the biblical witness, so an alternative objection inevitably arises, as if on cue: "Israel never really practiced the Jubilee!" If genuine, and not simply a strategy of avoidance, this challenge is best addressed by considering both the "negative" and "positive" evidence.
By "negative" evidence I mean the fact that Israel's prophets repeatedly and relentlessly criticized the nation's leadership for betraying the poor and vulnerable members of the community. This strongly suggests that the Sabbath vision of social and economic justice remained a measuring stick to which they could publicly appeal.
There can be no question that the Sabbath disciplines of seventh-year debt release and Jubilee restructuring were regularly abandoned by those Israelites who wished to consolidate social advantages they had gained. The historical narratives in the Hebrew Bible indicate that as the tribal confederacy was eclipsed by centralized political power under the Davidic dynasty, economic stratification followed inexorably. Indeed, the prophet Samuel warned that a monarchy would be linked intrinsically to an economy geared to the elite through ruthless policies of surplus-extraction and militarism (1 Samuel 8:11-18).