Here is a sign (via The Consumerist) that speaks volumes about what has happened to American civic society since 1980:
The text of the sign reads:”It’s time for you to do your part to stimulate the economy. And there’s no better way to kick the economy up a notch than with a really great pair of pumps. Or a new flat screen TV. Or a fabulous bag. Or whatever you’ve been dying to get your hands on! So don’t delay. CELEBRATE THE STIMULUS. TREAT YOURSELF TO SOMETHING SPECIAL TODAY!”
Who would it be scandalous for Jesus to share a meal with today?
I found myself asking that question this week. As a Catholic, I felt particularly convicted by the Gospel reading at last Sunday’s mass. It was Mathew 9:9-13, in which Jesus responds to those who questioned why he would eat with sinners:
12But when Jesus heard this, He said, “It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick.
13“But go and learn what this means: ‘I DESIRE COMPASSION, AND NOT SACRIFICE,’ for I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
It seems we live in the age of righteous fulmination, scornful separation and hatred. Far from bridging divides, the internet seems prone to exacerbate them — and sometimes it seems no place more so than the Catholic blogosphere.
I take this Gospel reading as at the core of our Christian call to love. A radical, unconditional love that must include evenespecially those we deem sinful.
This song by the Roches seems an anthem for this radical love.
As anyone remotely familiar with the recent history of Darfur will expect, there is much that is deeply harrowing in this book. What is surprising and remarkable is that, despite the horrors, Daoud Hari’s storyteller’s instinct, gentle humor, and stubborn joie de vivre make the book a pleasure to read. It not only puts a human face to tragic headlines, but issues a stirring call to advocate on behalf of those who have lost their homes and families in Darfur.
After a narrow escape from an attack by the Sudanese government on his village, Hari and his family were forced to flee to the refugee camps in Chad. There, his fluency in English, Arabic and his native Zaghawa (the language of the Ethnic group of the same name that is attacked by the Sudanese government and Arab militias in Darfur) led him to become a translator for prominent Western journalists. Feeling that getting the story of what was happening to his people out to the wider world was the best way he could help them, Hari repeatedly risked death by leading journalists back into Darfur to observe the genocide first hand. After a number of narrow escapes, Hari, a Chadian driver and Pullitzer-Prize winning journalist Paul Salopek were caught and suffered severe beatings and deprivation for months before being released under pressure from the advocates in the United States and around the world. Forced to flee Africa after this episode, Hari continues his work of making the story of the genocide known to the world – this memoir being one of his most effective means of doing so.
Hari is much more than a simple translator of languages. He also makes the complex and dangerous moral world of Darfur intelligible to Westerners. The power of the book lies not only in showing what has been suffered, but making us understand the rich tribal life of the Zaghawa that is in danger of being lost. Though Hari is no doubt accentuating the positive aspects of traditional life, one cannot help but be impressed by the conviviality and hospitality within the extensive network of kinship relations he describes:
Everyone knows the family of everyone else among the Zaghawa. If you live in a small town, you know a great deal about the families who live there. If your town had no television or other things to take you away from visiting all the time, your town could be very large and you would still know something about everyone. So it is like that. And of course when people travel close together like this on long journeys, you get to know a great deal about many people. Everyone is well-known eventually.”
In fact, no matter where he travels in North Africa, he seems to be able to find cousins or family friends who are eager to give help and transmit news. And where he does not know people, his humility and good humor allow him to win friends. And in a world as dangerous as Darfur, it turns out that friends are everything. In the very last lines of the narrative, describing his feelings as he is forced to leave his beloved Africa, Hari explains this beautifully and captures the essence of advocacy work:
I would work now in other ways to help get the story out and help return the people to Darfur and their homes in peace. What can one person do? You make friends of course, and do what you can.”
If you have not seen it, the video (warning: it is horrible to watch; I’ll link to it but not embed it), is a chilling cascade of horror that seems to epitomize the callous indifference of modern society:
(AP) HARTFORD, Conn. - A 78-year-old man is tossed like a rag doll by a hit-and-run driver and lies motionless on a busy city street as car after car goes by. Pedestrians gawk but appear to do nothing. One driver stops briefly but then pulls back into traffic. A man on a scooter slowly circles the victim before zipping away….Nine cars pass Torres as a few people stare from the sidewalk. Some approach Torres, but no one gets any closer than a couple of yards and no one attempts to stop or divert traffic until a police cruiser responding to an unrelated call arrives on the scene after about a minute and a half.”
What does it mean? The indignant bloggorati have concluded that something has gone dreadfully wrong in America, or at least in cities like Hartford, Conn. I don’t dispute this, but I think it is also more complicated than that. This story of course reminds me of the horrible Kitty Genovese case, in which 38 witnesses in a NYC apartment complex were said to have ignored for a half an hour the cries for help of a woman who was being repeatedly and brutally attacked and eventually stabbed to death in plain sight in the Apartment’s courtyard.
The facts turned out to be more equivocal: because the attacks took place in different locations, no witness saw the entire sequence; most heard only parts of the incident and did not realize its seriousness; a few saw only small portions of the initial assault, and no witnesses directly saw the final attack and attempted rape that killed Genovese. In the Hartford case, the police have begun to back off of their initially harsh judgment based on the video, indicating that four people dialed 911 within a minute of the incident.
Still, the tepid reaction of witnesses to these crimes remains disturbing. In the wake of the Genovese case, psychologists studied the bystander effect – in which individuals are less likely to help someone in trouble when there are others nearby who could help as well — and this seems to be at play in the Hartford video. Particularly painful to watch the small knot of people standing several feet away from the man, none of them stepping forward to comfort him.
Particularly painful is honestly asking myself where I would be in this picture. Would I have the courage to move to him. I pray I would. But you are better than me if you are completely confident of your reaction.
Then there is the fact that the video has quickly gone viral. There seems to be a voyeuristic aspect to all this handwringing, an unseemly reiteration of the indifference of seemingly callous onlookers. I am not sure what to make of this, but we seem to have a deep need to tell this story of cruel apathy about ourselves.
Clearly something has gone wrong in America — but what? And what role are each of us playing in it?
We should not let the day to go by without noting the 45th anniversary of the death of Pope John XXIII. Born Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli on (25 November 1881) and elected Pope at the age of 77 in in 1958, it was widely supposed that he would be little more than a transitional pope, modestly filling St. Peter’s chair. He was indeed a “transitional pope,” but in quite another way — convening the second ecumenical council of the Vatican (Varican II) in 1962, ushering in a dramatic new era for the church. In his brief papacy, John XXIII also wrote two major encyclicals articulating the Church’s social teaching: Mater et Magistra (On Christianity and Social Progress) in 1961 and Pacem in Terris (On Establishing Universal Peace in Truth, Justice, Charity and Liberty) in 1963.
He dictated a message for the Church from his deathbed that continues to speak to our challenge as Catholics in the modern world:
Now more than ever, certainly more than in past centuries, our intention is to serve people as such and not only Catholics; to defend above all and everywhere the rights of the human person and not only those of the Catholic Church; it is not the Gospel that changes; it is we who begin to understand it better….The moment has arrived when we must recognize the signs of the times, seize the opportunity and look far abroad.”
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.” — G.K. Chesterton (29 May 1874 - 14 June 1936)
Chesterton was a tremendously prolific writer of Christian and Catholic apologetics, philosophy, biography, poetry, detective and fantasy fiction. Chesterton’s political and religious views were and continue to be difficult to pin down. Living in our own era of simplistic dichotomies in virtually every sphere of society, it is worth remembering Chesterton’s stubborn commitment to nuance and complexity. Though deeply conservative, he was never authoritarian. Consider the way his defense of tradition was steeped in the values of participatory democracy:
Tradition is only democracy extended through time. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.
Paradoxically, the man best remembered as an apologist for orthodox Christianity and Catholicism begins to sound a bit like the anarchist skeptic Utah Phillips, whom I wrote about yesterday. Indeed, though coming from a much different set of commitments, and highly critical of the kind of socialism Phillips embraced, Chesterton too was deeply critical of capitalism and modern industrial values. He found in his British patriotism and religious orthodoxy grounds to denounce British imperialism and economic injustice.
Chesterton provided one of the best descriptions of saints that I have ever heard, one that I think well fits both he and Utah Phillips, and all of the great women and men I’ve remembered on this humble blog in posts in the category of hagiography:
[The saint is] a medicine because he is an antidote…. He will generally be found restoring the world to sanity by exagerrating whatever the world neglects.”
Time is an enormous, long river, and I’m standing in it, just as you’re standing in it. My elders are the tributaries, and everything they thought and every struggle they went through and everything they gave their lives to, and every song they created, and every poem that they laid down flows down to me - and if I take the time to ask, and if I take the time to see, and if I take the time to reach out, I can build that bridge between my world and theirs. I can reach down into that river and take out what I need to get through this world” — Utah Phillips
Utah frequently said that the long memory is the most radical idea in America. He explained the idea in the liner notes to a 1996 album of that name that he did with Rosalie Sorrels:
The long memory is the most radical idea in the country. It is the loss of that long memory which deprives our people of that connective flow of thoughts and events that clarifies our vision, not of where we’re going but where we want to go.”
Utah spent a lifetime collecting stories, songs, poems, ideas and dreams from the people with whom he shared the joys and struggles of work and activism, then generously poured them out for countless others to find. Utah’s gone now. It’s up to us to keep that river of memory flowing clear and clean, to forge for ourselves some vision of where we’ve been and where we want to go.
This book by one of the leader of the American Association for Ethiopian Jews (AAEJ) provides an important perspective on the political maneuverings that culminated in the dramatic airlift in 1991 of more than 14,000 Ethiopian Jews from Addis Ababa in a single day. It also provides and interesting look at the world of American Jewish philanthropic organizations and their relationship to Israel and Israeli politics and policy.
The book is not – as the author makes clear from the outset - a comprehensive account of the controversial origins and history of the Ethiopian Jews, their sufferings in the turmoil of post‑World War II Ethiopia, and the series of dramatic rescues that brought virtually the entire community to Israel in the 1980s and 90s. Readers interested in broad accounts should look to a number of other books: Steve Kaplan’s The Beta Israel: Falasha in Ethiopia and David Kessler’s The Falashas for the long and controversial history; Stephen Spector’s Operation Solomon andMitchell Bard’s From Tragedy to Triumph for the broader story of the rescue of the Ethiopian Jews.
Instead, Lenhoff provides a consummate insiders account of the AAEJ’s successful and sometimes controversial campaign for the return of the Falasha to Israel under the law of Aliyah. Lenhoff’s memoir powerfully conveys the passion for justice that drove him and other members of the organization to tirelessly do the mundane work of grassroots organizing, and shows how the organization acted as a gadfly to reluctant Israeli and American policy makers, goading them to notice and ultimately take action to rescue the long‑suffering Black Jews of Ethiopia. As such, the book is an inspiring and at times even gripping account of the power of grassroots activism.
But the strength of a memoir that trades on insider’s knowledge can often place limits on its analytical reach, and that is the case here. The book allows us to understand Lenhoff and the AAEJ, but is much less successful in its representation of the motives of other key players in the story. Lenhoff seems quite fair even when he is highly critical of other individuals and organizations. But based on this book alone, the reader is not given the means of judging Lenhoff’s claims about the role of the AAEJ. Similarly, at some points in the book, Lenhoff suggests that the AAEJ’s story has some broad lessons for understanding the nature and function of grassroots activism. But, immersed in the particularities of his own experience with the AAEJ, Lenhoff never identifies exactly what those lessons might be.
In short, this book provides a valuable but incomplete and very particular perspective on a much bigger story.
Not intentionally, but that’s the way it’s worked out.
I wish I could say we have absented ourselves from the blogosphere in pursuit of some much needed reflective retreat and contemplation in preparation for this greatest of holidays that comes so fast upon us. But it’s been some family issues that needed my presence, and alas much, much, much of the usual academic busyness.
This semester has been particularly hard for me as, with less than a week’s notice, I had to pick up a course I have never taught before when a colleague left suddenly for a family emergency — a historical survey of science and technology in society from pre-history to the present, pretty much impossible to teach even with a lifetime of preparation! There is an old saw that teaching is easy, you just have to keep 24 hours ahead of your students. It feels like I’ve been struggling all semester to keep five minutes ahead of my students.
Anyway, checking in to see if anyone has been looking at this humble blog, I find a funny thing — many more people visiting it in my absence than when I was blogging regularly. Clearly I have had the wrong idea about how this blog thing works if less blogging yields more page views. If only I had managed to never post at all this blog might have drifted up to the upper reaches of the blogosphere.
But since I’ve never been too good about knowing when to shut up (what did Mark Twain mean by that business of remaining quiet to keep them wondering?), I’ll try to get back to blogging on a regular basis even at the risk of driving the blog stats down. But probably not so much till May (when academics are free to frolic and play).
In the meantime, if you do find something on this blog useful, do drop us a note of encouragement in the comment boxes. It would mean a lot to know this blog mattered to somebody. It might get even get Annie Wim writing again. She’s stopped posting her backseat homilies since it seemed that no one was reading them, despite my tireless explanations of the power of this medium: what but the wonderful worldwide web would allow thousands of newly created blogs per day to connect with literally dozens of new readers? Of course as an academic, I’m exactly the opposite — the thought that nobody will read my work must be what keeps me going. How else to explain it?
Anyway, we wish you a Blessed Easter wherever you are, and whatever reason you might have for visiting this humble blog.
With the exit of John Edwards from the race last week, the Democratic Party can congratulate itself for at long last ending the issue of poverty in America. Sure, the remaining candidates briefly mentioned it in last Tuesday’s Hollywood Debate (a venue that seems to fittingly describe the spectacle), but they’ve been wonderfully silent about it ever since. Maybe that’s because Edwards himself told us that he had secured personal assurance from Obama and Clinton that they would carry on his work. Well then, no need to actually talk about the issue. Mission accomplished — done and done! Of course, the Republican candidates have done the Democrats one better. Poverty never has existed as an issue for any of them.
Anyway, with this little item scratched off the national to-do list, both parties can focus on what they do best: servicing the corporate giants and pandering to the comfortable classes. Ah, the sweetness of democracy under empire!
We just hope that someone will give the good news to those who’ve been left behind to carry on somehow in the real world — the 36.5 million Americans in poverty, and the more than 50 million near poor who are uncomfortably sandwiched between the poor and the middle class in that “sweet spot” where public programs do not kick in but necessities like health insurance are far beyond reach. We’re sure they’ll be glad to know that the presidential hopefuls won’t be bothering themselves with poverty any more.
In a world structured around distraction and disengagement, to focus my attention for a few moments at least on things that are really important.
Change?
What the poor and powerless must beg for in a world choked with excess; what we are called to do individually and collectively in response.
Catholic Social Justice?
Catholic in terms of the faith tradition that formed and informs my deep commitment to social justice; catholic in the sense of universal, recognizing and embracing the work of all people of good will working to bring about the change we need.
