True Philosopher

Christ is the true philosopher because he embodies in his ministry the welcoming and caring reception of others so that they might more fully be the beings they are meant to be. Indeed, in the Christlike effort to understand, serve, heal, feed, and reconcile the earth and its communities we show forth the highest wisdom.

--Norman Wirzba

Here I Am

What's Acceptable? What's Possible?

by Jim Wallis

(This column is adapted from a commencement address that Jim delivered at Georgetown University on Sunday, May 20.)

Each new generation has a chance to alter two very basic definitions of reality in our world--what is acceptable and what is possible.

First, what is acceptable?

There are always great inhumanities that we inflict upon one another in this world, great injustices that cry out to God for redress, and great gaps in our moral recognition of them. When the really big offenses are finally corrected, finally changed, it is always and only because something has happened to change our perception of the moral issues at stake. The moral contradiction we have long lived with is no longer acceptable to us. What we accepted, or ignored, or denied, finally gets our attention and we decide that we just cannot, and will not, live with it any longer. But until that happens, the injustice and misery continue.

It often takes a new generation to make that decision--that something that people have long tolerated just won't be tolerated any more.

So the question to you as graduates, as ambassadors for a new generation, is this: what are you going to no longer accept in our world, what will you refuse to tolerate now that you will be making the decisions that matter?

Will it be acceptable to you that 3 billion people in our world today--half of God's children--live on less that $2 per day, that more than 1 billion live on less than $1 per day, that the gap between the life expectancy in the rich places and the poor places in the world is now 40 years, and that 30,000 children globally will die today--on the day of your graduation--from needless, senseless, and utterly preventable poverty and disease? It's what Bono calls "stupid poverty."

Many people don't really know that, or sort of do but have never really focused on the reality or given it a second thought. And that's the way it usually is. We don't know, or we have the easy explanations about why poverty or some other calamity exists and why it can't really be changed--all of which makes us feel better about ourselves--or we are just more concerned with lots of other things. We really don't have to care. So we tolerate it and keep looking the other way.

But then something changes. Something gets our attention, something goes deeper than it has before and hooks us in the places we call the heart, the soul, the spirit. And once we've crossed over into really seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting the injustice, we can never really look back again. It is now unacceptable to us.

What we see now offends us, offends our understanding of the sanctity and dignity of life, offends our notions of fairness and justice, offends our most basic values; it violates our idea of the common good, and starts to tug at our deepest places. We cross the line of unacceptability. We become intolerant of the injustice.

But just changing our notion of what is unacceptable isn't enough, however. We must also change our perception of what is possible.

In that regard, I would encourage each of you to think about your vocation more than just your career. And there is a difference. From the outside, those two tracks may look very much alike, but asking the vocational question rather than just considering the career options will take you much deeper. The key is to ask why you might take one path instead of another--the real reasons you would do something, more than just because you can. The key is to ask who you really are and what you want to become. It is to ask what you believe you are supposed to do.

You do have great potential, but that potential will be most fulfilled if you follow the leanings of conscience and the language of the heart more than just the dictates of the market, whether economic or political. They want smart people like you to just manage the systems of the world. But rather than managing or merely fitting into systems, ask how you can change them. You're both smart enough and talented enough to do that. That's your greatest potential.

Ask where your gifts intersect with the groaning needs of the world--there is your vocation.

The antidote to cynicism is not optimism but action. And action is finally born out of hope. Try to remember that. At college, you often believe you can think your way into a new way of living, but that's actually not the way it works. Out in the world, it's more likely that you will live your way into a new way of thinking.

The key is to believe that the world can be changed, because it is only that belief that ever changes the world. And if not us, who will believe? If not you, who?

Illusion

A human being is a part of the whole that we call the universe, a part limited in time and space. And yet we experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical illusion of our consciousness. This illusion is a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for only the few people nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living beings and all of nature.

--Albert Einstein

The End of an Era

by Ron Sider

Jerry Falwell's death marks the end of an era.

Falwell had a major impact on American public life. His Moral Majority, launched in 1979, not only helped elect Ronald Reagan in 1980, it also encouraged a whole generation of apolitical fundamentalist Christians to join the political debate. Falwell played a central role in focusing the political agenda of that new group of theologically conservative voters on the issues of abortion, marriage, and sexuality, and in aligning them almost entirely with the Republican Party.

Therein lies the tragedy of Jerry Falwell. He deserves much credit for helping millions of unengaged fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals understand that one aspect of biblical faith is faithful political engagement. Tragically, Falwell failed to develop a biblically balanced agenda for his political work. His tone was sometimes too harsh, but Falwell was largely right in what he promoted on the sanctity of human life and marriage. But he said little about economic justice, overcoming racism, and care for creation. Falwell is one of the significant reasons why evangelical political engagement was so one-sided for more than 20 years.

Speak the Truth

To keep struggling against hate and to practice forgiveness need not mean abdicating one's rights or renouncing justice. This should be emphasized over and over again. It is part of loving one's enemy that Christians must remind the "enemy" of justice and right. It is part of loving to speak the truth.

--Naim Ateek

We Cannot Merely Pray

We cannot merely pray to You, O God, to end war:
For we know You made the world in a way
That we must find our own path of peace
Within ourselves and with our neighbor.

We cannot merely pray to You, O God, to root out prejudice:
For you have already given us eyes
With which to see the good in all people
If we would only use them rightly.

--Rabbi Jack Riemer

Quotes from Albert Einstein

Nationalism is an infantile disease, the measles of mankind.

No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.

I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.

The fanatical atheists are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who--in their grudge against traditional religion as the 'opium of the masses'-- cannot hear the music of the spheres.

Science can be created only by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

The Age of U-Turns

by Bruce Grierson

It's easy to get the sense these days that you've stumbled into a party where the punch is spiked with some powerful drug that dramatically alters identity. The faces are familiar, but the words coming out of them aren't. Something has happened to a lot of people you used to think you knew. They've changed into something like their own opposite.

There's Bill Gates, who these days is spending less time earning money than giving it away--and pulling other billionaires into the deep end of global philanthropy with him. There's historian Francis Fukuyama, leading a whole gang of disaffected fellow travelers away from neoconservatism. And in the back, humming Give Peace a Chance, the new Nicaraguan President, Daniel Ortega, former head of the Marxist Sandinistas. The comandante has come around on open economies and free trade and is courting foreign investment as the way out for his nation's poor.

From modest recants--Oprah Winfrey on James Frey, NBA commissioner David Stern on leather balls, Rupert Murdoch on global warming--to full-on ideological 180s, reappraisal is in the air. The view long held by social psychologists that people very rarely change their beliefs seems itself in need of revision.

To flip-flop is human. Oh, sure, it can still sometimes be a political liability, evidence of a flaky disposition or rank opportunism. But there are circumstances in which not to reverse course seems almost pathological. He's a model of consistency, Stephen Colbert said last year of George W. Bush: "He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday--no matter what happened on Tuesday."

It's still too early, post 9/11, to get an accurate bead on how much that day actually affected people's lives in a concrete way. But what you can say with confidence is that those slicing jets pierced the bubble of privileged optimism that many Americans had been enjoying. It changed the perception that there was an inside detached from an outside you could voluntarily avoid.

Over the past three years, while researching a book on what I call secular epiphanies, I found people who had pulled a big U-turn in their lives. There was a slaughterhouse worker who became an animal-rights activist, a venture capitalist who quit to found a high-minded nonprofit, a death-penalty advocate who became a leading death-penalty opponent. Often the insight came in a forehead-smiting moment in the middle of the night: I've got it all wrong.

It looked at first like a random bunch of data points, a sprinkling of outliers beyond the curve of normal human experience. But when you stepped back, a pattern emerged. What these personal turns had in common was the apprehension that, well, we're all connected. Everything leans on something, is propped up by something--is both dependent and depended on.

Sure, there were folks who didn't don the love beads but buried them: ex-Greenpeacers who morphed into industry apparatchiks, utopians who left their kooky social experiments for banker's hours. But these aren't typically the kinds of journeys one makes suddenly--and in that sense they didn't count as epiphanies. There are lives that one slowly acquires, like a carapace. And sometimes these are the same lives that, in one deeply private moment of dead reckoning, get shed.

"The difference between you and me," a visiting Chinese student told University of Michigan psychologist Richard Nisbett not long ago, "is that I think the world is a circle, and you think it's a line." The remark caught the professor off guard with its size. It prompted him to write a book, The Geography of Thought, about the differences--culturally encoded over a few hundred generations--between the Western and the Asian mind.

To Western thinking, the world is linear; you can chop it up and analyze it, and we can all work on our little part of the project independently until it's solved. The classically Eastern mind, according to Nisbett, sees things differently: the world isn't a length of rope but a vast, closed chain, incomprehensibly complex and ever changing. When you look at life from this second perspective, some unlikely connections reveal themselves. You're forced to retreat from the den of libertarianism and sniff the wind, to wake up when someone in Khartoum or Mogadishu twitches in his sleep.

I realized this was what almost all the U-turns had in common: people had swung around to face East. They had stopped thinking in a line and started thinking in a circle. Morality was looking less like a set of rules and more like a story, one in which they were part of an ensemble cast, no longer the star.

The Hope of the World

by Shane Claiborne

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Don’t let anyone make you think that God has chosen America as [God's] divine messianic force to be reckoned with.” There are compelling voices who claim that God has chosen America (not the church) as a special embodiment of hope for the world, and then there are times (perhaps in more recent history) where it seems America embodies an antithesis of what God hopes for. U.S. flags colonize the altars and the money is branded “In God We Trust,” but the economy is an eerie reflection of the seven deadly sins listed in scripture, with a culture dangerously close to the sins of Sodom, a culture the prophet Ezekiel describes as “arrogant, overfed, and unconcerned.” Given the fact that America and God’s kingdom are not the same--and are often at odds--how do we resist the temptation of thinking that America, rather than God or God’s church, is the hope of the world?

Perhaps reflect on the following words from George W. Bush: “The ideal of America is the hope of all mankind. That hope still lights our way. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” And the recent words of Barack Obama on the Late Show with David Letterman, “This country is still the last best hope on earth.” As Christians, how do we reconcile where our ultimate faith lies, especially within an empire as mesmerizing as Rome or America?

Questions for the Democratic Candidates

by Brian McLaren

I'm writing from the Republic of South Africa, where I've been speaking in conferences and other gatherings with church leaders from across many denominations. With the memories of apartheid still alive here, with a poverty rate of about 40 percent, with crime rates moving higher and higher--in part due to desperate immigrants from Zimbabwe--and with
the continuing work of creating a successful multicultural democracy ongoing, several questions come to my mind for the three candidates. Here is how I would formulate them sitting in a home in downtown Johannesburg:

1. For Senator Clinton: If you are elected and serve two terms, it would mean that two families would share the presidency of the United States for 28 years. It's hard not to conclude that we are living in something more like an oligarchy or plutocracy than a democracy. Would you reflect on this problem so we can see how deeply you have thought about it, and would you propose what can be done about it?

2. For Senator Obama: I've heard critics express fear that you aren't tough enough or militaristic enough to be president in a world of terrorism and nuclear weapons. I would imagine that would prompt you to want to prove you are indeed capable of being tough and militaristic. But many of us are hoping for someone who will present another vision for the role of America in the world--something beyond the world's dominant military force, the world's police, or the world's imperial center. Not that America would be weak, but that we would be strong in new and different ways. Can you comment on your vision for the role of America in the world, and what you would do to pursue that role?

3. For John Edwards: When the subject of terrorism comes up, many Americans seem to think that terrorism can be stopped by guns and bombs. But others believe that wherever there is a large gap between rich and poor countries, terrorism (like high crime rates) will be likely, perhaps inevitable. If that is the case, creating a more equitable global economy becomes one of the most essential dimensions of reducing terrorism. Do you agree, and if so, what can America do to increase its security by helping poor nations improve their economic systems?

There are two additional questions I would want to ask all the candidates:

1. America seems to be caught in a cycle of fear. Politicians use fear to garner support and inhibit criticism. News media profit when people are afraid and watch TV news more often, raising ratings and advertising income. The arms industry profits when fears run high. Political parties compete for fear dominance over other parties. Cycles of fear are hard to break. How will your campaign and your presidency address this rise in the fear quotient?

2. The United States is not leading the world in addressing our unsustainable economy. We are the world's prime example of an unsustainable consumer society, and if our lifestyles were generalized to the whole human population, we would need many planet earths to sustain us. Should we be a leader in environmental stewardship and sustainability? How would you lead in this regard? What would your priorities be in environmental renewal and sustainable living?

Baptism

I have glimpsed intimations of baptism being fulfilled in a multitude of unexpected reminders: laughing with the inner-city children I taught as we spashed in the gushing water of a fire hydrant on a sweltering afternoon. Washing dishes at the kitchen sink with my grandmother. Sharing a canteen of icy water with thirsty hikers at a trail junction in a mountain wilderness. Hand watering my dad's newly planted vegetable garden.

--Pat Peterson

Advertising

by Adam Wells

I find it painfully interesting to muse on how advertising make us less free. Consider the following argument: The purpose of advertising is to peak our desires of products: sneakers, foods, cars, drugs and so on. According to a host of wise people, religious, spiritual, and otherwise, it is desires that take us away from a more ideal life, God, or enlightenment, for example. In sum, desires create suffering. This applies both to individuals and humanity.

When we desire, we are not satisfied. When we desire we feel we are lacking something. This could be anything from more genuine human interaction to more shoes or more beer. Ads channel this human desire to consumptive goods, goods that we buy from people making money. From a broader perspective, desires create vast amounts of suffering for people and the ecosystems that they inhabit.

As a nation, Americans consume enormous amounts of products that are not produced within sight. Indeed many of these products are produced in less than desirable conditions across oceans. Consider how often something that is consumed in this nation was produced at the cost of the happiness, health, or wellness of a human being.

It is reasonable to say that much of this consumption is driven by advertising. When we look at our consumption in this way, it becomes obvious that advertising is truly an evil force in modern times in that it is horrifically unhealthy, both physically and spiritually for both consumers and producers.

I would not hesitate to claim that advertising is one of the most awful and horrific inventions that humans have ever conceived. It makes profits for a few while fueling systems of oppression and suffering for billions of human beings. I am reminded why I avoid television at all costs.

Chatty World

In our chatty world, in which the word has lost its power to communicate, silence helps us to keep our mind and heart anchored in the future world and allows us to speak from there a creative and recreative word to the present world.

--Henri J.M. Nouwen

Put Peace Back in Mother's Day

by Marcia Angle and Naila Bolus

For moms, nothing is more important than making the world safe for their children. Mother's Day was originally founded in America as a holiday to unite women against war. Yet today we are bombarded with news and images of warfare and violence.

In proposing a "Mother's Day for Peace" more than a century ago, the American abolitionist and women's rights advocate Julia Ward Howe called on women to use their powerful maternal instincts to turn the world around.

Howe witnessed firsthand the horrors of the Civil War and the scourge of violence, death and disease that claimed the lives of soldiers both on and off the battlefield. She worked with widows and orphans of both Union and Confederate soldiers and later traveled to Europe, where she encountered the devastation of the Franco-Prussian War. In response to all this, she called on mothers of the world to gather to work for peace, as she proclaimed the first special day in their honor in 1870:

"Arise, then, women of this day!" she wrote, "`Disarm, Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience."

What can we do?

More than a century later, our nation is again at war. Today, more than ever, it's time for us to put peace back into Mother's Day.But how can we do this? Most of us can't just pack up our bags for Iraq or Sudan or other conflict-torn regions badly in need of peace building. Nor can we step in and broker peace negotiations among warring nations.

Still, there are many things we can do on Mother's Day, or any other day, to promote the ethics of peace that Howe envisioned.

• Make room for peacemakers. Even though the daily news focuses overwhelmingly on conflict, this is only part of the story. To kindle a sense of hope in our children and grandchildren, we can tell them about people who are working to make the world safer and more secure for us all.

Why not use Mother's Day to talk about what inspiring and courageous moms are doing around the globe? Moms like Wangari Matthai, the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner whose Green Belt Movement motivated thousands of ordinary citizens in Kenya to overcome fear and a sense of helplessness and to defend democratic rights. Or Susan Granada of the Nonviolent Peaceforce, who works on the ground in Sri Lanka to facilitate dialogue between opposing sides in that country's civil war. Or Susan Shaer of Women's Action for New Directions, who works to ensure that women have a seat at the table on Capitol Hill. You can find more stories about moms working for peace at www.rediscovermothersday.org.

• Break down barriers. Most wars and violent conflict can be traced to clashing ideologies that have drowned out our common humanity.

Introduce your children to different cultures by inviting people of different races, nationalities, religions and cultures into your home. Visiting their houses of worship can break down barriers that could contribute to hate and misunderstanding. Encourage your children to stand up for any child who is being bullied, even when it is unpopular to do so.

• Be a role model. There are many ways to model your values. Practice resolving everyday conflicts by asking questions rather than rushing to judgment. Mend fences whenever possible. Speak out against injustice in your community and in the world. Volunteer for and make family donations to groups that work for peace. Explain to your child on Election Day why you're voting and what you're voting for.

• Consume ethically. Talk to your children about shopping decisions you make to support products from companies that protect our environment and countries with good human and workers' rights records. And work with your family to use energy wisely, because reducing our dependence on fossil fuels makes us all more secure.

War enters our homes on a daily basis through the TV, over the Internet and in conversation at the dinner table. As parents and grandparents, we owe it to our kids to make sure peace gets an equal hearing. Mother's Day is the perfect chance to begin that conversation, to hold a space in our homes for something better.

How do we talk to our children about war? The answer is simple: Talk to them about peace.

Deadened to Depravity

by Rod Dreher

The Washington Post recently carried out an unusual experiment. It hired Joshua Bell, one of the world's most famous classical musicians, to dress like a common street busker and play his Stradivarius in a D.C. metro station during rush hour. The anonymous violinist played Bach, he played Schubert, he played some of the most beautiful music ever to emerge from the minds of mortals. And virtually nobody stopped to notice.

The point was not that most people are uncultured clods. The point, rather, is that we are so caught up in the routine of our lives that we fail to see extraordinary beauty right in front of us. Something's wrong with us.

As Post reporter Gene Weingarten wrote, "If we can't take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that--then what else are we missing?"

If we don't see the beauty that we should, we don't see the ugliness either. For much of my career I was a film critic and saw just about every movie that came out. Every now and then, I'd take my wife to screenings with me, and I'd observe her flinching at intensely violent or explicitly erotic images onscreen. Though I shared her conservative moral sense, or so I thought, I pitied her oversensitivity.And then I changed jobs. I went from seeing 30 or so movies a month to seeing maybe three. It was as if I'd been a heavy smoker who'd gone cold turkey and was shocked to experience my sense of taste returning. Without meaning to, I began to watch movies differently.

The graphic sex and extreme violence that I'd manage to aestheticize away earlier, I no longer could deal with. I told my wife I must be turning into a prude. "No," she said, "you're becoming normal again."

Around that time, I became a father for the first time. One evening not long after my son was born, the mob picture "Goodfellas" came on cable. Three years earlier, I'd written that it was the best movie of the year. Forty minutes into the film, I turned it off. Couldn't stomach the onscreen savagery. Having a newborn gave me eyes to see things I couldn't before. Those eyes that had looked with wonder at this soft pink miracle could no longer take any pleasure in looking upon vivid images of human beings being shot, stabbed, beaten, tortured and abused.

Once we were a culture that looked to our art to educate our moral imagination, to show us what it meant to be fully human. Human in all our brokenness and passion and glory. Even artists who confronted evil did so with an eye toward illuminating the good (which is not a synonym for "nice").

Now, we are afraid to call anything good or evil and no longer have the confidence to assert that standards exist. When people ask if a movie, book, album or play was good or bad, what they're really asking is, "Was it entertaining?" In a culture with an insatiable craving for sensation, boredom becomes the root of all evil.

Thus our moral imagination declines into decadence. A decadent society is one that has lost its hold on standards and denies that they exist. A society in the early stages of decadence loses its sensitivity to beauty and to the good. As it slips further into decadence, it loses its ability to recognize how far it has fallen.

Which brings us to the case of Seung Hui Cho. We may never know to what degree he was psychopathic and what fed his insanity. But Washington Post film critic Stephen Hunter identified striking parallels between the mass-murder ritual Cho conceived as performance art, and the hyper-violent films of director John Woo. While it's impossible to say these films "made" Cho go berserk, Hunter is right to assert that all creative artists have to face the real-life consequences of their work.

What does it say about our culture that there is a hot genre of mainstream films called "torture porn," the point of which is to show human beings being eviscerated? The latest entry, "Vacancy," opened days after the Virginia Tech savagery. It's about a couple who are unwittingly set up to star in a snuff film--a movie in which people are tortured to death for the viewer's sexual pleasure. The Los Angeles Times called "Vacancy" a "ruthlessly efficient stalk-and-slash machine"--this, in a favorable review.

Something is wrong with us, all right.

We have learned to expand our understanding of the normative to include art that exalts things that ought to be repugnant to those who love life. In so doing, we teach ourselves to embrace death, or at least to remain indifferent to its putrid presence. "A human body that cannot react is a corpse," wrote literary critic Russell Kirk. And a human imagination that cannot react against that which would destroy it is nothing more than fever dreams of a zombie.

Do you want to live? Then look at the culture of death, say not this, not anymore--and turn to the good, the beautiful and the true. It's still here, hiding in plain sight.