Culture Watch

Complete with pictures, The Gospel of Rutba: War, Peace, and the Good Samaritan Story in Iraq (Orbis, 2012), by Greg Barrett, details a remarkable story of generosity, hospitality, and community between the citizens of two warring nations. After three U.S. Christian peace activists visiting Iraq were nearly killed in a car accident outside the bombed-out town of Rutba, Iraqi Muslims came to their aid and initiated a sacred friendship. This “good news” amidst war is a gospel worth retelling.

With both truth and grace, Logan Mehl-Laituri—an Iraq combat veteran turned conscientious objector—explains in Reborn on the Fourth of July: The Challenge of Faith, Patriotism, and Conscience (InterVarsity Press, 2012) how the glorification of military service does not live up to the reality of war. A compelling read for churches and Christians struggling with questions of faith, patriotism, and violence.

Coauthored with human-rights journalist Julia Lieblich, Wounded I Am More Awake: Finding Meaning After Terror (Vanderbilt University Press, 2012) recounts the extraordinary life of Esad Boskailo—a doctor who survived the genocide in Bosnia and now helps victims of terror as a psychiatrist specializing in trauma recovery. Employing a human-rights framework rather than a theological one, this book illustrates how storytelling can be healing—a timely lesson for congregants, churches, and clergy as they grapple with the problem of evil in an age of terror.

Author’s Note: When Arizona House Bill 2281 was used to dismantle the Mexican American Studies program in Tucson public high schools earlier this year, books used in the courses were removed from classrooms—in at least one school as students watched. Most of the titles, but not all, were by Latino writers.

Instead of swallowing their dismay, several students documented what they witnessed through social media. That’s how members of the Houston-based writers’ collective Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say heard about what happened in Tucson. Incensed by the stifling of knowledge, they organized the Librotraficante (literally, “book traffickers”) book caravan. Their goal was to “smuggle” the “contraband” books back into Tucson, and bring attention to what critics contend is a troubling combination of anti-intellectualism and the state’s anti-immigration stance enacted earlier.

Nuestra Palabra members worked with partner organizations along the caravan route to hold press conferences and celebrate Latino arts and culture at several Librotraficante book bashes. In addition to the public events, the five-day journey stopped in six cities, seeding Librotraficante underground libraries along the way. This is a reflection on riding the Librotraficante caravan, which took place in mid-March.

SEEDS. My parents were farm laborers for part of their young adult lives. They did that body-leeching work in the hot Texas sun, picking and hauling cantaloupe, watermelon, onions, and anything else that required a human hand.

My life has been very different from theirs. I make a living working at a desk. But I keep an image near my computer: It’s a black-and-white photo of farm laborers working a field. Bent at the waist, their arms hang from their torsos, grazing the ground like roots recently pulled from the earth. Whenever I start whining—about how hard my chair is, or that my computer is too slow, or that my agent doesn’t love me as much as his other clients—I look at this photo. I work, but the kind of work shown in the photo is grinding and thankless.

Because the workers’ faces are hidden in the shadow of broad-brimmed hats, I feel that I know even less about them. I don’t know their story. What I do know is that the spinach, tomatoes, and onions I enjoy on a chilled plate are because of these faceless, distant people. And yet, I know I’m not that far removed from them. Besides our shared heritage, it’s hard not to feel a sort of kinship to someone who makes it possible for food to appear on your plate.

THE CHOIR AT Lexington, Kentucky’s Imani Missionary Baptist Church is revving up for worship, focusing on things above as the cry of the organ and dissonant blues riffs of the piano fill the large, modern sanctuary. The director gives Cathy Rawlings the signal, and she strolls out in front. As they launch into the spiritual “I’m Glad,” she closes her eyes and offers up a silent prayer. Satisfied, she takes the microphone and begins to recite a poem, “The Creation” by famed Harlem Renaissance poet James Weldon Johnson:

And God stepped out on space
And he looked around and said:
I’m lonely—
I’ll make me a world.

Published in 1920 and written as a tribute to African-American religious oratory, “The Creation” occupies a hallowed place in black American culture. In the poem, God seems to take on the style of a black preacher, walking around, emphasizing specific syllables, and pausing for breath at particular points during the creation story.

LATELY I’VE been on a campaign to read some of the classic novels that I should have read decades ago. This summer it’s been John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. There, I confessed it. All these years I’ve been coasting on repeated viewings of the John Ford film adaptation. But I’m reading the original now. And despite the hunger and hardship faced by the Joad family, I find myself experiencing nostalgia for those old hard times.

Americans fell into the Great Depression of the 1930s without the safety net of unemployment insurance, food stamps, or federally insured bank deposits. In fact, victims of the current depression have those benefits because of the things their ancestors did 80 years ago. Back then, Americans pulled together with the sure belief that we are all responsible for each other and that no one of us can, or should, stand alone. They recognized that a common plight required common action, and they gave us a trade union movement and a New Deal.

In The Grapes of Wrath, that recognition is rooted in the primary value of family solidarity, which grows to include neighbors and co-workers, and, finally, in Tom Joad’s famous speech, extends to all people struggling for justice (“whenever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat”), and even to all humanity, past and present (“maybe all men got one big soul ever’body’s a part of”).

RECENT MOVIES have been dominated by a surprising theme: the exploration of gender through black goo in outer space, strippers in Florida, and a red-haired teenage rebel in mythical Scotland. Detours among British ex-pats in India in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, a genetically modified high school student in New York in The Amazing Spider-Man, and a scout troop on a coastal New England island in the fabulous Moonrise Kingdom added flavor to the mix. But it was the deceptively simplest of films that caused me to think most about what it means to be a human being, and how the fact of gender must be wrestled with, negotiated, and contested rather than assumed.

The wonderful thing about Pixar’s Brave is how it negates the historic disempowerment of female fairy tale protagonists. This is a new kind of Disney princess: one who doesn’t need a man to save her, nor homicidal violence to achieve victory; one who develops a healthy relationship with her mother; one, ultimately, who takes responsibility for her mistakes, integrating Snow White purity with Mulan’s steel. It’s also a physically beautiful movie, delightfully entertaining, and alive for adults and kids alike.

On the other hand, the world of Magic Mike, wherein Channing Tatum relives his earlier career as a bachelorette-party treat, is a film about lost men who play on stereotypical female desire for tips. The soulful yearning for intimate connection that Mike embodies is the most emotionally resonant part of a film otherwise of average interest.

AFRICAN-AMERICAN women’s wisdom emerges from an experience of triple (or more) oppression. Denied the dignity of womanhood, condemned for their skin color, whether too dark or too light, and often imprisoned by mis-education, demeaning and meaningless work, and a denial of their very humanity, African-American women have yet managed to forge a spirituality of hope and survival that has sustained them for centuries.

As Alice Walker noted, they dreamed dreams and had visions; they imagined a time and place when the pain and indignity of their lives would be transcended, not in some far-off heaven but right here in the future of their children and their children’s children. Somehow our foremothers persisted in their faith. They made rosaries out of beads and knotted string and learned scripture by rote memory. They resisted as best they could anything and anyone who attempted to keep them from living their faith on a daily basis.

Once freedom, so-called, came, they struggled, despite the callous disregard of their fellow Christians, to remain faithful. When their children were forbidden entry into diocesan or public schools, when they were required to sit in upper galleries and back pews, when they had to wait until last to partake of the sacraments, they did not suffer these indignities quietly but often walked out and with their meager resources built their own schools and church buildings.

Aiming to Shine

The debut album by Korean-American hip hop artist Gowe (pronounced “go,” it stands for Gifted On West East), We are HyperGiants, feature lyrics that touch on race, culture, and materialism, while unabashedly praising Jesus. www.facebook.com/TeamGowe

Can I Get a Vision?

If you’re blessed with vacation time this summer, don’t forget to let yourself dream. In Dreaming, Memphis Theological Seminary professor Barbara A. Holmes explores the power of dreams as a place for refueling our personal and social imaginations and meeting the mysterious, living God. Fortress Press

THOSE OF US who are passionate about prison reform could talk at length about the injustices of the penal system, but prison activists and concerned citizens sometimes gloss over the internal conflicts of prisoners in their daily lives as well as the pain and fears of crime victims in local communities. The documentary Concrete, Steel, and Paint raises some essential questions about hope, forgiveness, and reconciliation through the moving story of unlikely partners—those incarcerated for committing violent crimes and those affected by violent crimes—who come together to create a mural in their community.

The film begins at Graterford Prison near Philadelphia, a maximum-security institution where men are serving long sentences for violent crimes, including homicide. The men interviewed for the film seem thirsty for opportunities for healing. One of the first prisoners we meet, Tom, says: “When you do wrong that you can’t correct, it’s horrible.” Another inmate, Zafir, tells the camera: “I don’t want my legacy to be that I was a murderer.”

The energy for a mural project came from Jane Golden, the executive director of the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, who believes in the power of art, and murals in particular, “to shift the consciousness of a community.” Golden began working with prisoners in Graterford in the early 2000s. The men in her workshops eventually came up with the idea to reach out to the community. “I thought it was an interesting idea,” Golden says, “but I told them the only way this can possibly work is if we can get the community involved.”

After a significant amount of pushback from community members, Golden suggests making two separate mural walls to convey the different journeys of offenders and victims. “It’s healing for me to tell my story,” says the mother of a homicide victim. “Maybe it will be helpful for them to tell their story.” The film teaches viewers that there are points of similarity in these stories—hurt, loss, anger, regret—and there is a shared desire for healing and for change, but the journeys are still different and portraying them in shared space could minimize the ability to convey truth for each group. Can offenders and victims of crime ever share a platform to express pain, to ask for healing?

CHUCK COLLINS’ new book does exactly what an introduction to wealth inequality and all its faults needs to do: summarize without oversimplifying, and provoke dialogue and action about the urgent problem of what Collins memorably dubs the U.S.’s “inequality death spiral.”

Newcomers to the topic will find a concise overview of how wealth inequality has skyrocketed since 1980, how a small elite has changed the rules to enable still higher inequality, the many seen and unseen ways that’s a problem for us all, and the beginnings of a solution. Those more familiar with the subject can benefit from Collins’ overview, well-selected statistics, and well-honed, direct turns of phrase. Those who want deeper reading will find excellent footnotes at the end of the slim volume. Everyone will find her experience livened by the stark words Collins quotes from people identifying as part of the 99 percent—and those who are part of the 1 percent.

Collins’ many years as an advocate against inequality show in the book’s graceful balance: It emphasizes the usefulness of the 99 percent-vs.-1 percent idea, while also making clear that neither side is monolithic. He acknowledges very real economic, class, and racial divisions among the 99, but makes a compelling case against letting those differences be the basis of divide-and-conquer political strategies: “It is important that the 99 percent see that they have some important common ground, rather than be peeled into a hundred subgroupings.” And Collins, who himself grew up in the 1 percent, refuses to demonize it or to accept the demoralizing falsehood that it is unified against those below. Rather, he quotes multiple allies within the economic elite, while decrying how “a small segment of the 1 percent—with an organized base in Wall Street’s financial institutions—has worked over many decades to rig the rules of the economy” in the areas of “taxation, global trade, regulation, and public spending.”