In the Hand of Dante

Interfaith, international relations, food, digital social contract, humanitarian concerns, and tea. Nothing in isolation.

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Wet weather from my window

Wet weather from my window, originally uploaded by timbrauhn.

My office is on the 9th floor, so I can see about everything in the South Bay. Here’s some interesting weather patterns.

We must do things these days

Not sure why I’ve chosen to post this today.

I am troubled, deeply, by the billions of people worldwide who will go to bed tonight hungry, fearful for their safety, or sick from disease. These days, it’s not worth mentioning the statistics concerning how many people live on less than $2/day. I even hesitate to use the word “statistics,” since it cheerfully allows us to ignore the very human lives behind the numbers. We know that it’s bad.

Facts and figures like these only serve to dishearten us, to make the problem seem insurmountable. But there are other statistics. Successes against disease and poverty are on the rise, many times on the local level, and the momentum of those successes is carrying over from the international development community onto the streets of America.

In grad school, I worked with The 1010 Project, a humanitarian organization that operates a robust advocacy program in the Denver area to raise awareness about issues of global poverty. Our community-based partners live in Kenya, so we didn’t get to visit very often, but frequent Skype conversations reinforced the intimate relations with those we served.

Case in point: We were speaking to a partner who operates a fish farm. Some thieves had broken in during the night and stolen all of the fish. This was bad news, to be sure, but when asked how he felt about the theft, his response was, “I am not angry that they took the fish. They must have been very hungry.”

That level of self-sacrifice and commitment to the greater good inspires me to help the poorest of the poor. Stories like that need to be spread widely. I am committed to treat all humans as I would like myself to be treated, with dignity, understanding, and compassion. That’s why I try to help.

Biosphere politics

Jeremy Rifkin is blowing my mind today. Here’s a very tiny excerpt from his new book The Empathic Civilization:

For the Internet generation, “quality of life” becomes as important as individual opportunity in fashioning a new dream for the 21st century.

The transition to biosphere consciousness has already begun. All over the world, a younger generation is beginning to realize that one’s daily consumption of energy and other resources ultimately affects the lives of every other human being and every other creature that inhabits the Earth.

The Empathic Civilization is emerging. A younger generation is fast extending its empathic embrace beyond religious affiliations and national identification to include the whole of humanity and the vast project of life that envelops the Earth. But our rush to universal empathic connectivity is running up against a rapidly accelerating entropic juggernaut in the form of climate change. Can we reach biosphere consciousness and global empathy in time to avert planetary collapse?

Whew. I can’t wait to read this one.

BEADS!

BEADS!, originally uploaded by timbrauhn.

I really enjoy making beads out of polymer clay.

There, I said it.

Honestly, it’s a kind of meditation for me. Best of all, I can listen to things like podcasts and university lectures while I bead. Someday, I’ll make the world’s most amazing bead and all the Beadpeople of the world will bow down before me.

I will become the Bead King.

And the world will never be the same.

The volunteering religious (noun)

I stumbled upon this nifty little chart through Andrew Sullivan’s blog at The Atlantic. 63 million people, or 27% of the population, volunteered last year. That’s an incredible statistic. It shows just how involved Americans are in helping their communities/the world.

What’s even more telling is the proportion of volunteers by type of organization. Look at the blue section – Religious - and you’ll notice that just more than 1/3 of ALL volunteers put in their hours at a religious org. Again, an incredible statistic. But this chart is missing an important element: motivation.

How skewed would this chart be if we asked people about their deepest motivations for volunteering? So 34% of people volunteered at “religious” organizations. Let’s look at the next two categories. Education/youth service and community service. Why don’t we actually throw hospitals in there for good measure, since lots of hospitals are started and operated under the auspices of a particular faith group.

Even though community and youth service programs might be secular, there’s a fair chance that a lot of the folks who volunteer their time are religious. I don’t know of a faith tradition that says “Don’t go out and help people, it’s a waste of time.” Of course, this is all conjecture, but as we’ve seen, the most fervent and dedicated volunteers tend to be those who do so from a place of faith.

So next time, let’s measure motivation. The statistics that we uncover might be that much more incredible.

Losing old gods, finding nature

I recently headed back to Colorado for a wonderful weekend of R&R with my girlfriend and her family. We went skiing at Crested Butte, an absolutely amazing mountain way out in the center of the state. Here’s what happens when I ski:

…traditional religions with their beliefs in non-material divine beings are in decline…new forms of spirituality have been filling the cultural niches previously occupied by conventional religions. I argue that the forms I document in Dark Green Religion are much more likely to survive than longstanding religions, which involved beliefs in invisible, non-material beings. This is because most contemporary nature spiritualities are sensory (based on what we perceive with our senses, sometimes enhanced by clever gadgets), and thus sensible. They also tend to promote ecologically adaptive behaviors, which enhances the survival prospects of their carriers, and thus their own long-term survival prospects.

Terrorism, poverty, and violence

It’s not that poverty doesn’t move them, but more correctly it is an interpretation of poverty that radicalizes (and is itself radical).

When I started my studies at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies, I made the mistake of joking with a German colleague. We were discussing “terrorism” as a theoretical construct and I parroted the oft-repeated line that views terrorism as an outlet to poverty. This particular interpretation (which, I must be clear, I do not believe), is that for people living in poverty, the promise of money, power, and most importantly, food, can drive people to do horrific things. My colleague’s response to my joke: “That’s bulls***. It’s a fortune-cookie truism, Tim. Too simple.”

Zing!

We now know that petty criminals and regular foot soldiers are definitely susceptible to offers of money, guns, and stability. Look at how successful the Somali pirates are. They provide something to people who don’t have much. But we also know that many high-profile evildoer types are far from poor. Osama bin Laden has some kind of advanced degree. Many of the 9/11 hijackers were no strangers to the classroom. Much of the theory that surrounds extremism in all its forms comes from the halls of academia.

So it is with the Underpants Bomber [because I can] Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who certainly did not come from a life of poverty. For me, the quotation that begins this post is the most telling and complete explanation of the lure of extremist viewpoints in the modern age. Not poverty but an interpretation of poverty is the recruiting tool. I’m reminded of Archbishop Camara of Brazil, one of the central minds of liberation theology, who famously said:

When I feed the poor, they call me a saint.
When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.

My Del.icio.us links Dec 13-Jan 23

Religious literacy

US Airways flight diverted after passenger “caught” praying.

How’s that for a headline? Let’s go with our gut reaction – it was a Muslim, wasn’t it?

Wrong.

Those lines are lifted from the news story. What kind of a person wraps straps around his head to pray? Jews, that’s who. Observe:

Yeah. A plane was diverted because the flight crew was concerned that a passenger was praying. As it turns out, Orthodox Jews wrap their arm with a black strap and tie a small box to their heads. The accoutrement is called tefillin, and it’s actually pretty cool. The box contains scripture verses, and the arrangement of the straps on the fingers actually looks like Hebrew letters.

Two important take-aways:

1. I’m sure that the young Jewish man’s response to the flight attendant was “I’m praying.” The tone was probably the same as it would be if I was asked why I was breathing air: “I need oxygen to live.” Such responses should be the end of conversations. Why on earth anybody would be worried about a 17-year-old boy wrapping a leather strap around his head is beyond me. Are we really that scared of the unknown?

2. The more important issue here is something that we refer to in the interfaith education sphere as religious literacy. Stephen Prothero addresses our shortcomings in his book by the same name (Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know – And Doesn’t). Americans are woefully ignorant of traditions not their own. An incident like the aforementioned “prayer alert” is evidence of this. Also germane to our social, theological, ecological, and political processes, we are woefully ignorant of our own traditions.

Religious literacy looks like a hot-button issue from the air. We are concerned about schooling people, especially young people, about religion in general because it rubs against our wall of separation between church and state. Maybe some of that friction is good – we’d stop having silly incidents like these.

Prayers have power, but they’re not a security issue. We should learn this.

NB: If you really want to read the news coverage of this non-event-event, the BBC and NYTimes both have it.

Five myths around disaster relief

Edward Brown, relief director for World Vision, debunks five myths around disaster relief. I offer my thoughts on each point in place of Brown’s remarks. This came in the form of a Facebook note:

1. Collecting blankets, shoes and clothing is a cost-effective way to help – When I worked with The 1010 Project, we collected things like computers and notebooks for our partners in Kenya. In the aftermath of election violence in early 2008, we were able to provide materiel that aided in reconstruction and job training.
2. If I send cash, my help won’t get there – Sure it will! Even the most incredibly effective aid organizations have to “borrow” off the top of donations to fund operations. In the case of Haiti and other emergency situations, aid dollars are earmarked for immediate use, even if the funds aren’t technically immediately on hand. EG: The Red Cross has raised many dozens of millions of essentially borrowed dollars, but since the actual donations won’t balance for a few weeks, the Red Cross will essentially be working on borrowed money.
3. Volunteers are desperately needed in emergency situations – Yeah! Volunteer, just not in a disaster zone. Many nonprofits operating on the ground in Haiti need help recording donations and processing the flow of other donations. Help them out, or offer to handle other mundane tasks. Vacuuming an office during a busy week can make a world of difference.
4. Unaccompanied children should be adopted as quickly as possible to get them out of dangerous conditions – Unless you are a charity that deals directly with “orphans”, maybe you could just cool it for a little while. Let proper guardians step forward, and if none are available, then activate your networks.
5. People are helpless in the face of natural disasters – Absolute nonsense.  Give a social entrepreneur a dollar, and they’ll stretch it in a dozen different directions. Small-scale aid projects can be carried out by on-the-ground partners while larger orgs debate procedure and directives.

That being said there is still a lot that has to happen in Haiti to make reconstruction work. Let’s hope that we dump the disaster-emergency language and move towards reconstruction-help dialogue.

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