Watering Seeds of Future Promise

It helps, now and then, to step back and take the long view. The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision. We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God's work. Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of saying that the Kingdom always lies beyond us. No statement says all that can be said. No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession brings perfection, No pastoral visit brings wholeness. No program accomplishes the church's mission. No set of goals and objectives includes everything. This is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one day will grow. We water seeds already planted knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our capabilities. We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. That enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest. We may never see the end results. But that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are the workers, not the master builders; ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own.

--Archbishop Oscar Romero

What the Christmas Story Teaches Us About Security

by Esther Epp Tiessen

The daily newspaper is a lot heavier and bulkier at this time of year — packed with wads of slippery Christmas advertisements and flyers. When I grab the newspaper out of the mailbox each morning, I usually toss the flyers directly into the recycle bin without even looking at them.

But last week my eye caught a flyer advertising a "gift of security" — a fancy home alarm system. "Give your family peace of mind this Christmas," the shiny piece of paper urged. "Install an alarm system that will make them secure."

I suspect that a lot of families will invest in security systems this Christmas. After all, we live in a society that is increasingly obsessed with the need for security. More and more homes have alarm systems. More and more people carry cell phones. Increasing numbers of video cameras watch us as we move about in public places. Airport procedures, border crossings and passport applications have all become much more rigorous.

The "war on terror" also reflects this obsession with security. We are told that the greatest of threats facing the western world is the threat of terrorism. And the way to make the world safe and secure from terrorists is to kill them. Our military forces, so it goes, are fighting to destroy terrorism so that all of us will live with more safety and security.

Distressingly, we as North Americans are learning that the war on terror is actually increasing the insecurity for others, as well as for ourselves. We have forgotten that our own security is intimately linked with the security of others. As Ernie Regehr of Project Ploughshares says, "Our well-being depends on others, as well as ourselves. We can't isolate ourselves within an armed fortress; instead we have to be active participants in transforming the world into a place where interdependence is not regarded as a threat but as the fundamental ingredient of community."

But back to the alarm system. There is something profoundly ironic about the marketing of security systems — and the pursuit of security at all costs — at Christmas time. Christmas is the story of a vulnerable baby entering a violent and dangerous world with no assurance of security. Yet a security company dares to promote an alarm system as the perfect Christmas gift!

The Christmas story teaches us something very different about security. The Jesus whose birthday we celebrate came into the world in total vulnerability. His birthplace was a stable and his bed a manger. His people lived under an authoritarian occupation. While still an infant, his family had to flee to a foreign land, because the King wanted him killed.

When Jesus grew, he chose vulnerability as a lifestyle. He carried no sword, possessed no worldly goods that required protection, and surrounded himself, not with bodyguards, but a ragtag bunch of marginal folks. He taught his friends that they should not harm their enemies but love them and do good to them. He told them that they would find security by serving others. He embodied vulnerability when faced with arrest, torture and even death.

For Christians, the message of Christmas is that our security is found not in alarm systems or military might or a war on terror, but in casting our fears upon the One who says that security is found in relationship, in sharing, and in reaching out to others — indeed, in vulnerability. Perhaps this message can be our Christmas gift to the world.

Birth of a Subversive Savior

by E.J. Dionne

"African-Americans read their own collective experience into the agony and exaltation of Jesus. The story of the Christ child, blessed by God yet born in the shadow of poverty and violence, was their story. Jesus' humble birth in antiquity signified the humble origins of African peoples in modernity. In his impoverished entry into the world, Jesus turned the tables on earthly valuations. Fulfilling the promise of the oracle that celebrates his advent in a stable, the hills of the privileged and the valleys of the humble are inverted, marking the beginning of a new era."

-- Allen Dwight Callahan in "The Talking Book: African-Americans and the Bible."


Great traditions are subversive. They constantly call the imperfections of the present to account in the name of a more exalted standard.

Abraham Lincoln marshaled the power of the Declaration of Independence to challenge slavery, and every year, the Christmas story overturns our daily understandings of power and privilege. A newborn king and savior appears among us, born to a most unlikely family, in a most unlikely venue, in the least promising of circumstances.

Callahan's remarkable book, published this year by Yale University Press, describes the rich and intense relationship between the Bible and the African American imagination. But even more powerfully, it suggests--without making the case directly--that the reading of the Christian tradition offered by African Americans is as close as any to the authentic meaning of Christianity.

A Harvard-trained New Testament scholar and ordained Baptist minister, Callahan traces the role of "the talking book" (the phrase belongs to Henry Louis Gates Jr., lead editor of "The Norton Anthology of African-American Literature") from slavery to civil rights and from Gospel music to hip-hop. Callahan makes his case in the book's first sentences: "African-Americans are the children of slavery in America. And the Bible, as no other book, is the book of slavery's children."

It is hard, I think, for anyone nurtured in the Christian or Jewish traditions to dispute Callahan's claim that the Bible "privileges those without privilege and honors those without honor" and that it has a "penchant for bringing peripheral people to the center of history."

"The God of holy scripture has made slaves no less than their masters in the divine image and likeness," Callahan writes. "The Apostle Paul had declared that master and slave were equal in God's sight. And in the book of Exodus, God had freed the ancient Hebrews from bondage in Egypt; the liberation of slaves had been God's will. These were ideas at least as revolutionary as any Jeffersonian proposition."

All this might sound odd to members of two groups. Some on the left see religion as an "opiate of the masses" that offers the oppressed "pie in the sky when you die," in the words of the old song, by way of diverting them from rebellion against this world's injustices. Many on the right see Christianity demanding allegiance to conservatism, and there are a few who can't seem to distinguish between the scriptures and any given year's Republican Party platform.Callahan is alive to the fact that the scriptures and the meaning of Christ's story have always been contested. Elijah Muhammad of the Black Muslims called the Bible "a Poison Book." Slave owners emphasized passages calling upon slaves to submit to their masters. "According to the testimony of slaves themselves," Callahan writes, "obedience was the first commandment...preached to them."

Yet the Bible's subversive message could not be successfully blocked. Ex-slave Frederick Douglass spoke of two religions called Christianity, "the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land" and "the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ." Many years later, W.E.B. DuBois, a founder of the NAACP, called Jesus "the greatest of religious rebels."

And no story has played as large a role in African American faith as Exodus. Introducing Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963 to a Jewish audience as a modern prophet, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel declared: "The exodus began but is far from having been completed. In fact, it was easier for the children of Israel to cross the Red Sea than for a Negro to cross certain university campuses."

Callahan cites the words of an old Negro spiritual:

Poor little Jesus boy
Made him to be born in a manger.
World treated him so mean
Treat me mean, too.

The poor, the outcasts, the slaves: If Jesus spoke to anyone, it was to them, and they have responded to him through the centuries. The African American religious tradition is a blessing to all because it requires us to remember that Jesus of Nazareth really did revolutionize the world.

Truth and Power

By Reza Aslan

In 2000, when Pope Benedict XVI was still Cardinal Ratzinger, he penned a peculiar tract entitled "Dominus Iesus," in which he laid out the ground rules for interreligious dialogue. The future pope wrote that it is perfectly fine for Catholics to engage other faiths in religious discourse. But, he cautioned, one must never "close one's eyes to the errors and illusions" of other religions. Nor should one lose sight of how "gravely deficient" those religions are when compared with Catholicism.

Such a position is perhaps to be expected from a pope who believes that quoting a 14th-century Crusader's absurdly archaic views on Islam is an invitation to dialogue. Having repeatedly criticized his predecessor's tireless efforts to reach out to Muslims as bordering on religious relativism, Benedict has focused his papacy on the issue of "reciprocity" in interreligious dialogue. By this, the pope means the perfectly reasonable expectation that Christians in Muslim lands should have the same freedoms as Muslims in Christian lands to propagate their faith.

Of course, there is no question that much of the Arab and Muslim world has a poor track record when it comes to tolerance of non-Muslims, let alone promotion of interreligious dialogue. But there was a time, a mere 400 years ago, when Rome considered interreligious dialogue to be most effectively facilitated by a Grand Inquisitor, while Muslim Spain, Baghdad, and Cairo opened their gates to Christian and Jewish scientists, philosophers, and theologians, many of whom enjoyed the patronage of the royal courts.

To be sure, this tolerance of Jews and Christians had less to do with the precepts of Islam than with the fact that the Muslim world was basking in a golden era of scientific achievement and religious experimentation. In other words, the Muslims of the era had an unshakable confidence in their cultural, economic, political, and even religious dominance over the region. If this historic commitment to interreligious dialogue has now given way to religious repression and brutal intolerance, it is not because Islam's view of "the other" has changed. It is because the power dynamics of the region have changed.

Today, in large parts of the Arab and Muslim world, many Muslims consider themselves to be under siege by what they perceive to be the unrelenting hegemony of the "Christian West." For many, "interreligious dialogue" often looks suspiciously like religious coercion, and Christian proselytizing is sometimes difficult to distinguish from the still fresh, still bruising, memory of colonialism.

None of this is to excuse religious oppression in the Arab and Muslim world. The pope is right to demand greater freedoms of faith and expression in particularly conservative countries like Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, where Islam's historic commitment to religious pluralism has long been forgotten.

But while an argument can be made that interreligious dialogue should have a purpose, it should not be to shed light on the "errors and illusions" of your neighbor's faith. One should never forget that what we call interreligious dialogue is rarely divorced from the dynamics of power between religions. For those, like the pope--and many other conservative Christian, as well as Muslim and Jewish, believers--who believe that such dialogue must begin with the prima facie recognition that one's own religion represents Truth, this is an important lesson indeed.

Faith and Reason

By Richard John Neuhaus

Contrary to older theories predicting the unstoppable course of secularization, the world is becoming more religious and more religiously assertive. Western Europe may be the exception, even though that is much in dispute. Beyond dispute is the new prominence of religion and religiously-grounded morality in American public life. This is a surprise, and mainly an unpleasant surprise, to secularists who are committed to what I have called "the naked public square," meaning public life stripped of religious practice and conviction.

On the world stage, we are confronted by a newly assertive Islam and by radical political movements, aptly described as jihadist, advanced in the name of Islam. Samuel Huntington of Harvard has written of an ominous "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West (which most Muslims continue to view as Christendom). The alternative to a bloody and open-ended clash of civilizations, beyond the containment of jihadism by force, is interreligious understanding and the cultivation of the virtue of tolerance.

Since religion is not going to go away, religious tolerance must itself be grounded in religion. The great question is whether there are within Islam religious resources for legitimating peaceful coexistence with "the infidel." Or is it the case that Islam cannot move beyond the doctrine of a world divided between the "house of Islam" and the "house of war"? Needless to say, Christianity has had its own confusion about the uses of violence, as witness the attempt of the Crusades to retake territory that had fallen to Muslim conquest.

On the question of religion and violence, the most important speech that has been made by a world figure since 9/11 was delivered by Pope Benedict XVI at the University of Regensburg on Sept. 12 of this year. The use of violence in advancing religion is a violation of reason, the pope said, and to act against reason is to act against the nature of God. This understanding of the necessary connection between faith and reason, he said, is the product of centuries of philosophical and theological reflection resulting in a synthesis of Hellenic and biblical understandings of reality. His suggestion that Islam has not undergone a similar philosophical and theological development and is therefore prone to employ violence in the name of religion met with violent protest by thousands of Muslims.

That violent reaction, we must hope, is not the last word. In his later visit to Turkey, the pope--without backing off from the argument made at Regensburg--reached out to his Muslim interlocutors in a plea for interreligious and intercultural understanding. Religion and culture, he insists, are inseparable. The alternative to jihadism and a clash of civilizations is not the secularization of Islam and the creation of a naked public square in the Islamic world. The alternative, rather, is a religious commitment to a civil public square in which differences are engaged on the basis of reason and mutual respect.

Whether this can be achieved between Islam and the West is, one might well argue, the most important question of this century.

A Christian Imperative

by Mark A. Noll

The barriers to serious and effective interfaith dialogue have become mountainous. Antagonism between and among Christians, Muslims, Hindus, secularists, and animists is a prominent feature of the contemporary world. Especially when that antagonism overlaps ethnic tension, the potential for violence is all too familiar.

In the recent past, a number of distinctly modern circumstances have exacerbated age-old possibilities for sectarian strife. Nation-building, as in Iraq, Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, and Lebanon, is sabotaged by conflict stoked by religious difference. Instant electronic communications favor impressionistic extremism over analytical moderation, as witnessed by the furor over Pope Benedict's recent comments about Islam. Great wealth tied to great corruption, as in Nigeria, undermines a society already divided by escalating religious competition. The potential for nuclear war is heightened when, as in the Middle East, religious passions fuel diplomatic standoffs.

Yet speaking as both a historian and a Christian, there is every reason to insist on the necessity of conscientious interfaith exchange. The history of Christianity itself offers a wealth of examples for how things go wrong without it. So long as Catholics and Orthodox existed in self-enclosed isolation, so long as Catholics and Protestants could not imagine the possibility of insight from the other, so long as establishmentarians and dissenters sniped away from a distance -- under these conditions, simmering conflict could easily burst into flame. But when hereditary antagonists met, spoke, and finally prayed with each other, fear and loathing dissipated, to at least some degree, and trust, however fragile, began to grow.

Such meetings have happened increasingly over the last half century. When Pope Paul VI met Athenagoras I, head of the Orthodox Church, in Jerusalem in 1964, the result was a rescinding of excommunications that had been in place for more than 900 years. On a different scale, the Second Vatican Council set in motion a number of consequential dialogues between Catholics and Protestants. Some have been formal engagements between learned theologians; more have been informal gatherings in neighborhoods to study the Bible or provide shelter for the homeless. But whether in high places or low, these interchanges have transformed the once acid relationship between Catholics and Protestants.

Especially at this time of year, Christian believers have every reason to view the challenge of dialogue as essential. Christian faith urges a strong note of realism first of all on believers themselves: Just as the message of salvation features God's mercy, rather than the superiority of the redeemed, so too does the universal scope of the Gospel imply respect for all people, whether inside or out of the household of faith.

At Christmas, Christians are reminded that Jesus Christ, the eternal Word of God, took on human flesh--not just the flesh of the Christian subset of humanity, but the flesh of humanity as a whole. At their best, Christians realize that the narrative begun in Bethlehem encompasses the story of the whole world.

Despite very real difficulties, such Christmas realities make respectful dialogue with all humans--of whatever faith, and none--a Christian imperative.

The Clergy Letter Project

Within the community of Christian believers there are areas of dispute and disagreement, including the proper way to interpret Holy Scripture. While virtually all Christians take the Bible seriously and hold it to be authoritative in matters of faith and practice, the overwhelming majority do not read the Bible literally, as they would a science textbook. Many of the beloved stories found in the Bible--the Creation, Adam and Eve, Noah and the ark--convey timeless truths about God, human beings, and the proper relationship between Creator and creation expressed in the only form capable of transmitting these truths from generation to generation. Religious truth is of a different order from scientific truth. Its purpose is not to convey scientific information but to transform hearts.

We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as “one theory among others” is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator. To argue that God’s loving plan of salvation for humanity precludes the full employment of the God-given faculty of reason is to attempt to limit God, an act of hubris. We urge school board members to preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge. We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth.

--Signed by 10,418 Christian clergy as of December 2006

Bend History

Let no one be discouraged by the belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world's ills, against misery and ignorance, injustice and violence. Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of our generation.

--Robert F. Kennedy

Some Real Tensions

As Christians in the Anabaptist tradition, my Mennonite church and I seek to apply the life and teachings of Jesus to real life. We are committed to the belief that Jesus’ words and actions are relevant to the real and complex issues of our day. So to be a follower of Jesus means that we will attempt to follow his teachings and example. So we don’t write off the Sermon on the Mount as impractical in today’s world. Jesus’ call to love our enemies and do good to those who persecute us means that our calling as Christians will place us in some real tensions with the systems and powers of the world.

--Brian Miller

The Less We Find

The more we try to ground our identities in external possessions or triumphs, the more we plaster our names on everything we can accumulate, the more we cling to surface and style, the less we find underneath.

--John F. Kavanaugh

This War Was Wrong

I have been saying, over and over again, that this war was wrong—from the very start. And I will continue to say that, because until we admit the war was just wrong, we will never find a way out. We are not winning, nor are we going to win in Iraq. We have already lost. We just made a very bad situation much worse, and have to just stop doing it some more. When a war is so wrong and so bad, there are not often any good solutions to be found. Let's just say it—there are no longer and good solutions to the war in Iraq. There is only responsible withdrawal. Of course, it is a civil war, with factions that are far less committed to a unified nation than to their own tribe (read Tom Friedman), and no number of American troops can solve a political disaster with mostly military means. I did say "responsible withdrawal" so don't give me any "cut and run" stuff—nobody is saying that. Unless the Iraqis change their behavior and unless far more international involvement is achieved, everything will just get worse and worse.

--Jim Wallis

Humbled by Mystery

[M]any religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of "faith"! How strange that the very word "faith" has come to mean its exact opposite.

People who have really met the Holy are always humble. It's the people who don't know who usually pretend that they do. People who've had any genuine spiritual experience always know they don't know. They are utterly humbled before mystery. They are in awe before the abyss of it all, in wonder at eternity and depth, and a Love, which is incomprehensible to the mind. It is a litmus test for authentic God experience, and is--quite sadly--absent from much of our religious conversation today.

--Richard Rohr

Jesus and Women

Throughout his life Jesus' response to women was one of compassion and inclusion, a rare posture in his day. He was not afraid to be seen in public with the most marginalized 'sinners' - prostitutes, adulteresses, and a woman who had been 'unclean' for many years with a flow of blood. He revealed himself as the Messiah to the Samaritan woman at the well, invited Mary of Bethany to sit with him and learn, welcomed Mary Magdalene into his circle of friends, and received an anointing of rich ointment before his death, rebuking his disciples for criticizing the woman who lavished such attention on him.

--Joyce Hollyday

The Politics of Joy

by Brian McLaren

Earlier this week, I was speaking to a group of Methodist ministers and we sang the Christmas carol "Joy to the World." Two moments in the song took my breath away.

The first came when I sang "let every heart prepare him room." If the carol is right, the way earth receives God's "prince of peace" is through individual hearts like ours. By making space, by opening our hearts to Christ, by letting our lives be the stable and manger into which good news quietly comes, by rendering the vacuum and vacancy within us vulnerable to the incoming of the Spirit...we become, like Mary, "theotokos"--God-bearers.

That might sound kind of mystical, not political, and I guess it is. It is something that I believe we all can actually experience: the possibility of preparing room in our hearts so that Christ truly comes.

That brings me to the second transcendent moment in the carol for me this week: "No more let sin and sorrows grow, nor thorns infest the ground. He comes to make his blessings flow far as the curse is found."

The coming of a good king in the ancient world meant a lot, and although kingly language may sound archaic today, I think we can recapture its meaning when we think of a thorny land, polluted by sin and cursed by sorrow, becoming verdant and fertile and healthy again--blessedness flowing over the land like a warm breeze.

And of course, this is where the personal and political meet. Thinking about justice, talking about peace, debating public policy, and working for social change are important...but not as a substitute for the very personal choice to "prepare him room" in our hearts, so that (as the saying goes) we can be the change we want to see in the world.

The way "earth receives her king" (and the blessings he brings) is not by bombs and guns and wiretaps and coups; not by aggressive blog postings or passionate media pronouncements by pundits. Rather, the king (and the kingdom) come first to the quiet hearts of humble people who "prepare him room," and the joy flows to the world through them.

That's the language of spiritual formation, no doubt. But how can there be political transformation in the external world of thorns, sins, and sorrow if our inner lives don't become the manger into which hope, healing, empowerment, love, and joy are born?

What happens in the political realm--in the public world where people treat one another justly or unjustly, peacefully or violently, as neighbors or as enemies--can never be separated from what happens in the personal realm. And the reverse is true, too.

That's the source of the politics of joy.

Serious About Peace?

If we are serious about peace, then we must work for it as ardently, seriously, continuously, carefully, and bravely as we have ever prepared for war.

--Wendell Berry

Peace

True Christians do not know vengeance. They are the children of peace. Their hearts overflow with peace. Their mouths speak peace, and they walk in the way of peace.

--Menno Simons

The Greatest Poverty

You can find Calcutta anywhere in the world. You only need two eyes to see. Everywhere in the world there are people that are not loved, people that are not wanted nor desired, people that no one will help, people that are pushed away or forgotten. And this is the greatest poverty.

--Mother Teresa

What Should the Church Do?

What do we want the Church to do? We don't ask for more cathedrals. We don't ask for bigger churches of fine gifts. We ask for its presence with us, beside us, as Christ among us. We ask the Church to sacrifice with the people for social change, for justice, and for love of brother. We don't ask for words. We ask for deeds. We don't ask for paternalism. We ask for servanthood.

--Cesar Chavez

Friedman's Cruel Legacy

by William Greider

Now that the economists and their camp followers have mourned and celebrated the life of Milton Friedman, allow me to kick a little dirt on the icon. Without question, Friedman was the most influential economist of the second half of the twentieth century, as his admirers claim. What they do not say is that he was also the most destructive public intellectual of our time.

Friedman actually failed as a scientific economist but succeeded as a moral philosopher. His greatest scholarly accomplishment--his monetarist theory of how to regulate money and credit--was intellectually flawed at its core and collapsed when the Federal Reserve tried to follow it. The central bank wisely discarded Friedman's money-supply approach before it did more damage. It is now a forgotten relic at the Fed.

Friedman's broader argument--that a society should be governed by self-regulating markets instead of big government--did better but also did not lead to the utopia he promoted. His "free market" faith has produced instead the very thing Friedman regularly denounced: a bastardized system of interest-group politics that serves favored sectors of citizens at the expense of many others. Enterprise and markets were indeed set "free" of government regulation, but big government did not go away (it grew bigger). Only now government acts mainly as patron and protector for the largest, most powerful interests--the same ones that demanded their liberation. Instead of serving the broad general welfare, government enables capital and corporations to feed off the taxpayers' money and convert public assets into private profit centers, shielded from the wrath of any citizens trying to object. If that is what Friedman really had in mind, he should have said so.

His most profound damage, however, was as a moral philosopher. He championed an ethic of unrelenting, unapologetic self-interest that effectively pushed aside human sympathy. In fact, humans' responsibility to one another has been delegitimized--portrayed as an obstacle to the hardheaded analysis that maximizes returns. Friedman explained: "So the question is, do corporate executives, provided they stay within the law, have responsibilities in their business activities other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible? And my answer to that is, no, they do not."

Pay no attention to the collateral consequences. Your only obligation is to the bottom line. Friedman's message was highly appealing--he promised people a path to freedom--but it triumphed, ultimately, because it served the powerful forces of capital over labor, economic wealth over social concerns. Government was indeed failing on many fronts, especially inflation, and liberalism had no answer. Friedman's answer was alluringly simple. Get rid of government.

People everywhere now understand what Friedman's kind of "freedom" means. America has been brutally coarsened by his success at popularizing this dictum--millions of innocents injured, mutual trust gravely weakened, society demoralized by the hardening terms of life. Most people know in their gut this is wrong but see no easy way to resist it. Friedman's utopia is also drenched in personal corruption. The proliferating scandals in business, finance and government flow directly from his teaching people to go for it and disregard moral qualms. When you tell people in power that their highest purpose in life is to maximize their own returns, there is no limit to how much "good" they will do for the rest of us. I don't recall hearing Friedman express any discomfort. Perhaps he regarded looting and stealing as natural features of capitalism that market forces would eventually correct.

This is what the memorials left out: the cruel quality of Friedman's obliviousness. Art Hilgart, a retired industrial economist, recalls hearing Friedman lecture in 1991 and recommend the destruction of Medicare, welfare, the postal system, Social Security and public education. The audience was dumbfounded.

Finally, a brave young woman asked what this would mean for poverty. "There is no poverty in America," Friedman instructed. A clear voice arose from the back of hall: "Bullshit!" The audience cheered wildly.

Spiral of Destruction

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction...The chain reaction of evil--hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars--must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.

--Martin Luther King Jr.

Gender Inequity Hurting Kids

by Michael Doyle

Poverty, violence and discrimination affect women worldwide and undermine their children's futures, a U.N. agency concludes in a report being issued today.

Women in developing countries work longer hours for lower pay, the United Nations Children's Fund has found. Girls are less likely to get past elementary school. In many countries, women are shut out of household decisions.

"Where you see extreme discrimination against women, you see more problems for children," said UNICEF's executive director, Ann Veneman.

In its data-packed State of the World's Children report, UNICEF spells out the problems nation by nation. The microscope can be painfully acute. In Nigeria, 1 million children younger than 5 die annually. Half of Azerbaijan's residents lack adequate sanitation. A third of the young pregnant women in Botswana's capital are HIV-positive.

This year, the organization also identifies potential solutions. Some raise eyebrows, if not hackles.

Gender quotas can be a "potentially effective vehicle for bolstering women's representation" in legislatures, UNICEF notes as one example. More women can lead to better policies, the agency suggests.

The 160-page report favorably cites, as well, the international United Nations Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women.

"When you empower women," Veneman said, "you benefit children."

A native of Modesto, Calif., Veneman has her own experience as a gender trailblazer. She was the first female head of the California Department of Food and Agriculture, and, between 2001 and 2005, she served as the nation's first female secretary of agriculture.

The Bush administration in which she served, though, has steadfastly argued against quotas in this country.

The United States is also the world's only industrialized nation not to ratify the U.N. treaty on discrimination against women.

Drafted in 1979 and since ratified by 185 nations, including Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.N. treaty is criticized by conservatives as inciting lawsuits, family planning or interference in parenting.

Quotas, likewise, get mixed reviews.

UNICEF notes approvingly a fourfold increase, since 1995, in the number of countries where women make up at least 30 percent of the national legislatures. These include such male bastions as Afghanistan, Burundi and the newly established Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste.

"The levels of representation in all three countries are examples of the successful introduction of quotas during their political transitions," states the report, which will be formally released today in a news conference in New York.

Buy Nothing Christmas

Buy Nothing Christmas is a national initiative started by Canadian Mennonites who offer a prophetic "no" to the patterns of overconsumption of middle-class North Americans. They are inviting Christians (and others) all over Canada to join a movement to de-commercialize Christmas and re-design a Christian lifestyle that is richer in meaning, smaller in impact upon the earth, and greater in giving to people less-privileged.

Who are the Mennonites?

A group of Christians who are community-oriented, counter-culture pacifists (at least in theory). But this campaign is open to everyone, regardless of religion, faith, creed or conviction.

Can I be a part of Buy Nothing Christmas even if I buy a few things?

Definitely. We are all going to have to buy some things. When you do buy things, we encourage you to remember principles like buying locally, fairly-traded, environmentally friendly packaging, recycling or re-using, buying things that last, and so on. The main aim of this campaign is not to save money (although that can be a side benefit), it's not to slow down the pace of Christmas (although that can be a side benefit), it is to challenge our over-consumptive lifestyle and how it affects global disparities and the earth. So, even though you might buy a few things at Christmas, it's important to think in these global economic terms.

Do you think a Buy Nothing Christmas will make a difference?

It already has made a significant difference. Getting people to recognize problems (North American over-consumption) and begin to imagine new, more life-giving solutions is a big deal.

Are you against giving gifts at Christmas?

Giving gifts at Christmas is a good thing to do--it's a small re-enactment of the incarnation of God's love. Gift-giving, as we know from other occasions (like birthdays, weddings, housewarmings), serves as a kind of social glue that keeps us together. It shows affection, thoughtfulness and love. While gift-giving is a good thing to do at Christmas, that doesn't mean we have to go overboard.

Challenging the System

by Kit & Ian Danley

Neighborhood Ministries has been working in Phoenix's hard neighborhoods for almost 25 years. What began as a simple emergency food and clothing bank has now grown into a Christian Community Development organization which includes a multiethnic-bilingual church, outreach serving over 1,000 kids and youth weekly, aggressive stay-in-school programs, a medical clinic, jobs placement, head start for preschool children, mentoring programs, a growing arts emphasis, an economic barter system, and a lot more. All of these programs have at their foundations an incarnational, relational heartbeat.

A Modest Proposal for a Truce on Religion

by Nicholas D. Kristof

If God is omniscient and omnipotent, you can’t help wondering why she doesn’t pull out a thunderbolt and strike down Richard Dawkins.

Or, at least, crash the Web site of www.whydoesgodhateamputees.com. That’s a snarky site that notes that while people regularly credit God for curing cancer or other ailments, amputees never seem to enjoy divine intervention.

"If God were answering the prayers of amputees to regenerate their lost limbs, we would be seeing amputated legs growing back every day," the Web site declares, adding: "It would appear, to an unbiased observer, that God is singling out amputees and purposefully ignoring them."

That site is part of an increasingly assertive, often obnoxious atheist offensive led in part by Professor Dawkins--the Oxford scientist who is author of the new best seller The God Delusion. It’s a militant, in-your-face brand of atheism that he and others are proselytizing for.

He counsels readers to imagine a world without religion and conjures his own glimpse: "Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres, no persecution of Jews as ‘Christ-killers,’ no Northern Ireland ‘troubles,’ no ‘honor killings,’ no shiny-suited bouffant-haired televangelists fleecing gullible people of their money."

Look elsewhere on the best-seller list and you find an equally acerbic assault on faith: Sam Harris’s “Letter to a Christian Nation.” Mr. Harris mocks conservative Christians for opposing abortion, writing: "20 percent of all recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage. There is an obvious truth here that cries out for acknowledgment: if God exists, He is the most prolific abortionist of all."

The number of avowed atheists is tiny, with only 1 to 2 percent of Americans describing themselves in polls as atheists. But about 15 percent now say that they are not affiliated with any religion, and this vague category is sometimes described as the fastest-growing "religious group" in America today (some surveys back that contention, while others don’t).

Granted, many Americans may not yet be willing to come out of the closet and acknowledge their irreligious views. In polls, more than 90 percent of Americans have said that they would be willing to vote for a woman, a Jew or a black, and 79 percent would be willing to vote for a gay person. But at last count, only 37 percent would consider voting for an atheist.

Such discrimination on the basis of (non) belief is insidious and intolerant, and undermines our ability to have far-reaching discussions about faith and politics. Mr. Harris, for example, makes some legitimate policy points, such as criticism of conservative Christians who try to block research on stem cells because of their potential to become humans.

"Almost every cell in your body is a potential human being, given our recent advances in genetic engineering," notes Mr. Harris. "Every time you scratch your nose, you have committed a Holocaust of potential human beings."

Yet the tone of this Charge of the Atheist Brigade is often just as intolerant--and mean. It’s contemptuous and even...a bit fundamentalist.

"These writers share a few things with the zealous religionists they oppose, such as a high degree of dogmatism and an aggressive rhetorical style," says John Green of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. "Indeed, one could speak of a secular fundamentalism that resembles religious fundamentalism. This may be one of those cases where opposites converge."

Granted, religious figures have been involved throughout history in the worst kinds of atrocities. But as Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot show, so have atheists.

Moreover, for all the slaughters in the name of religion over the centuries, there is another side of the ledger. Every time I travel in the poorest parts of Africa, I see missionary hospitals that are the only source of assistance to desperate people. God may not help amputees sprout new limbs, but churches do galvanize their members to support soup kitchens, homeless shelters and clinics that otherwise would not exist. Religious constituencies have pushed for more action on AIDS, malaria, sex trafficking and Darfur’s genocide, and believers often give large proportions of their incomes to charities that are a lifeline to the neediest.

Now that the Christian Right has largely retreated from the culture wars, let’s hope that the Atheist Left doesn’t revive them. We’ve suffered enough from religious intolerance that the last thing the world needs is irreligious intolerance.

In Community

It is in community that we come to see God in the other. It is in community that we see our own emptiness filled up. It is community that calls me beyond the pinched horizons of my own life, my own country, my own race, and gives me the gifts I do not have within me.

--Joan Chittister

Prison Record

A record 7 million people--one in every 32 U.S. adults--were behind bars, on probation or on parole by the end of last year.

Imagine a World of Givers

Cal Thomas is a conservative columnist. Bob Beckel is a liberal Democratic strategist. But as longtime friends, they can often find common ground on issues that lawmakers in Washington cannot.

Bob: 'Tis the season, Cal. Decorations went up in stores before Thanksgiving and in some places, before Halloween. I heard Christmas carols on the radio in late October. And then there is Sony's latest video game player, PlayStation 3. It went on sale two weeks ago. In Wisconsin, a man was hurt in a shopping stampede. In Putnam, Conn., a man was shot during a robbery attempt as he waited to buy a PlayStation 3. In California, cops had to close a Wal-Mart as crowds overwhelmed the store. Here's the sad part: Sony initially provided only 400,000 units at $500 per, and panic buying ensued. Of course, millions of these units will reach the market soon enough. On eBay, bidding was as high as $10,000 for one PS3! I didn't think holiday merchandising could get any crasser.

Cal: I am old enough to remember when we valued people more than things, Bob. The rush at this time of year to buy things we don't need with money we don't have comes partly from the guilt many of us feel for having neglected our children all year long. Some think they can "buy" the love of their kids. Others are afraid to say "no" to anything their children ask for. They might fear disapproval, not only from them, but from their neighbor's kids who practice holiday giving with the same competitiveness they treat everything else.

Bob: What this reflects is a culture of greed that's affecting more than just holiday shopping. Congress is recklessly earmarking pork barrel projects at taxpayer expense. I can't take my son to a Washington Redskins game (with good seats) for less than $300 (not even this year when owner Dan Snyder should give fans refunds for selling a lousy product). In America's selective affluence, rich kids get hundreds of things they don't need, while poor kids can't get their basic needs met. The value of extended families coming together to celebrate Christ's birth, or Hanukkah, or Kwanza is being overshadowed by the value of the presents each family member brings to the festivities.

Cal: The Department of Commerce reported retail sales in the fourth quarter of 2005 at $960.3 billion. And last year, according to the American Research Group, Americans planned to spend on average $942 per family on holiday gifts. That's more than the annual gross national income per capita last year of each of the 54 countries the World Bank categorizes as having "low-income economies." With people being killed in Darfur and millions starving to death and afflicted with disease the world over, this is obscene. And you're hearing this from a frustrated conservative who wants very much to end this cycle in his own family.

Bob: Like any other parent, I love to see the excitement in the eyes of my kids on Christmas morning. I overdo decorating inside and out and in the process award my electric company with a big bonus. But it seems not only the meaning of the holidays fades more and more each year, but so does the spirit. I don't mean holiday party spirit, but the spirit of a family together; the spirit of reaching out to those who are alone during the holidays and bringing them into our homes; the spirit that comes with collecting toys for poor children, or playing Santa at a nursing home and not charging a fee. Those are the gifts of the human spirit, and they are priceless.

Cal: I have rarely agreed on anything with you as much as this, Bob. Last winter, I discovered an intriguing program run by the humanitarian agency World Vision (www.worldvisiongifts.org). For small amounts of money, you can buy a goat ($75) for a man in a poor African country that will allow him to sustain his family. Or, you can pay for a sewing machine and lessons ($270) for a woman living in a Third World country to help her start a business and feed and clothe her family. A fishing kit ($40) for a hungry family. This is the kind of thing all of us should be doing. It blesses the giver even more than the receiver to know one has changed the direction of another life. For conservatives who criticize big government (but also for compassionate liberals), helping poor people get on their feet in this way beats wasteful government programs.

Bob: And for folks who are wary of charities or don't know where to start, the website Charity Navigator (www.charitynavigator.org) is a smart starting point. You can choose your cause and make sure that your hard-earned cash is being put to good use.

Cal: Excellent idea, Bob.

Bob: I have to say, Cal, that I can't talk about the holiday season without thinking of our troops, especially those in Iraq. Whether you support the war and want to stay the course (and I don't), or think we should end our involvement in Iraq today, we owe a debt of gratitude to those who didn't get to choose their holiday destination. I am upset that most of the incompetent civilian managers of this ill-conceived war will be home this holiday season while 140,000 troops will be stuck in the desert. Now I'm getting out of the Christmas spirit.

Cal: Let me help bring you back, Bob. When the "founder" of Christmas said, "It is more blessed to give than to receive," he meant that giving to others — especially those who cannot give back — does something in our hearts and spirits. Our culture doesn't adequately celebrate this kind of giving. We celebrate celebrities. You mention our troops. There is another biblical verse that says "greater love has no man than to lay down his life for another." That's what our volunteer military is doing for us and for Iraqis that they — and we — might have the gift of freedom.

Bob: I just wish we'd been able to deliver that gift.

Cal: Even so, we need to think differently this year, and every year, about what matters most in life. It isn't a $500 PlayStation 3, which will be outdated as soon as Sony can make a more advanced model. It is about investing in and changing another life for the better. That is truly a gift that will keep on giving.

Bob: Cal, this is the first column in which we have nothing we disagree on (well, except Iraq). That's a gift. While we're at it, a few bah humbugs: to members of Congress who are still trying to stash more pork into a so-called catch-all spending bill; to politicians who waited less than a week after the elections to hold lobbyist-sponsored fundraisers for 2008; a final humbug to the guy in my neighborhood who beat me out of the holiday decoration award last year because he uses Chinese-made decorations, and I won't.

Cal: Well, good luck this year in the neighborhood contest. I know you're not one to go down without a fight. And even if you can't out-decorate your neighbors, you can sleep well at night knowing that while some of your money is making your neighborhood a brighter place, you've wisely diverted other dollars to make the world a brighter place. I'll join you, directing some of the money I earn to people who need it and whose lives will be improved by it. This isn't charity. It is an investment in other lives that will pay dividends for them, for their nation and improve the prospects of peace. You won't get that from a video game.

Bob: Happy holidays, Cal, and a wish for finding common ground to all.

Science a la Joe Camel

by Laurie David

At hundreds of screenings this year of "An Inconvenient Truth," the first thing many viewers said after the lights came up was that every student in every school in the United States needed to see this movie.

The producers of former vice president Al Gore's film about global warming, myself included, certainly agreed. So the company that made the documentary decided to offer 50,000 free DVDs to the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) for educators to use in their classrooms. It seemed like a no-brainer.

The teachers had a different idea: Thanks but no thanks, they said.

In their e-mail rejection, they expressed concern that other "special interests" might ask to distribute materials, too; they said they didn't want to offer "political" endorsement of the film; and they saw "little, if any, benefit to NSTA or its members" in accepting the free DVDs.

Gore, however, is not running for office, and the film's theatrical run is long since over. As for classroom benefits, the movie has been enthusiastically endorsed by leading climate scientists worldwide, and is required viewing for all students in Norway and Sweden.

Still, maybe the NSTA just being extra cautious. But there was one more curious argument in the e-mail: Accepting the DVDs, they wrote, would place "unnecessary risk upon the [NSTA] capital campaign, especially certain targeted supporters." One of those supporters, it turns out, is the Exxon Mobil Corp.

That's the same Exxon Mobil that for more than a decade has done everything possible to muddle public understanding of global warming and stifle any serious effort to solve it. It has run ads in leading newspapers (including this one) questioning the role of manmade emissions in global warming, and financed the work of a small band of scientific skeptics who have tried to challenge the consensus that heat-trapping pollution is drastically altering our atmosphere. The company spends millions to support groups such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute that aggressively pressure lawmakers to oppose emission limits.

It's bad enough when a company tries to sell junk science to a bunch of grown-ups. But, like a tobacco company using cartoons to peddle cigarettes, Exxon Mobil is going after our kids, too.

And it has been doing so for longer than you may think. NSTA says it has received $6 million from the company since 1996, mostly for the association's "Building a Presence for Science" program, an electronic networking initiative intended to "bring standards-based teaching and learning" into schools, according to the NSTA Web site. Exxon Mobil has a representative on the group's corporate advisory board. And in 2003, NSTA gave the company an award for its commitment to science education.

So much for special interests and implicit endorsements.

In the past year alone, according to its Web site, Exxon Mobil's foundation gave $42 million to key organizations that influence the way children learn about science, from kindergarten until they graduate from high school.

And Exxon Mobil isn't the only one getting in on the action. Through textbooks, classroom posters and teacher seminars, the oil industry, the coal industry and other corporate interests are exploiting shortfalls in education funding by using a small slice of their record profits to buy themselves a classroom soapbox.

NSTA's list of corporate donors also includes Shell Oil and the American Petroleum Institute (API), which funds NSTA's Web site on the science of energy. There, students can find a section called "Running on Oil" and read a page that touts the industry's environmental track record--citing improvements mostly attributable to laws that the companies fought tooth and nail, by the way--but makes only vague references to spills or pollution. NSTA has distributed a video produced by API called "You Can't Be Cool Without Fuel," a shameless pitch for oil dependence.

The education organization also hosts an annual convention--which is described on Exxon Mobil's Web site as featuring "more than 450 companies and organizations displaying the most current textbooks, lab equipment, computer hardware and software, and teaching enhancements." The company "regularly displays" its "many...education materials" at the exhibition. John Borowski, a science teacher at North Salem High School in Salem, Ore., was dismayed by NSTA's partnerships with industrial polluters when he attended the association's annual convention this year and witnessed hundreds of teachers and school administrators walk away with armloads of free corporate lesson plans.

Along with propaganda challenging global warming from Exxon Mobil, the curricular offerings included lessons on forestry provided by Weyerhaeuser and International Paper, Borowski says, and the benefits of genetic engineering courtesy of biotech giant Monsanto.

"The materials from the American Petroleum Institute and the other corporate interests are the worst form of a lie: omission," Borowski says. "The oil and coal guys won't address global warming, and the timber industry papers over clear-cuts."

An API memo leaked to the media as long ago as 1998 succinctly explains why the association is angling to infiltrate the classroom: "Informing teachers/students about uncertainties in climate science will begin to erect barriers against further efforts to impose Kyoto-like measures in the future."

So, how is any of this different from showing Gore's movie in the classroom? The answer is that neither Gore nor Participant Productions, which made the movie, stands to profit a nickel from giving away DVDs, and we aren't facing millions of dollars in lost business from limits on global-warming pollution and a shift to cleaner, renewable energy.

It's hard to say whether NSTA is a bad guy here or just a sorry victim of tight education budgets. And we don't pretend that a two-hour movie is a substitute for a rigorous science curriculum. Students should expect, and parents should demand, that educators present an honest and unbiased look at the true state of knowledge about the challenges of the day.

As for Exxon Mobil--which just began a fuzzy advertising campaign that trumpets clean energy and low emissions--this story shows that slapping green stripes on a corporate tiger doesn't change the beast within. The company is still playing the same cynical game it has for years.

While NSTA and Exxon Mobil ponder the moral lesson they're teaching with all this, there are 50,000 DVDs sitting in a Los Angeles warehouse, waiting to be distributed. In the meantime, Mom and Dad may want to keep a sharp eye on their kids' science homework.

No Thanks to Thanksgiving

by Robert Jensen

One indication of moral progress in the United States would be the replacement of Thanksgiving Day and its self-indulgent family feasting with a National Day of Atonement accompanied by a self-reflective collective fasting.

In fact, indigenous people have offered such a model; since 1970 they have marked the fourth Thursday of November as a Day of Mourning in a spiritual/political ceremony on Coles Hill overlooking Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, one of the early sites of the European invasion of the Americas.

Not only is the thought of such a change in this white-supremacist holiday impossible to imagine, but the very mention of the idea sends most Americans into apoplectic fits--which speaks volumes about our historical hypocrisy and its relation to the contemporary politics of empire in the United States.

That the world's great powers achieved "greatness" through criminal brutality on a grand scale is not news, of course. That those same societies are reluctant to highlight this history of barbarism also is predictable.

But in the United States, this reluctance to acknowledge our original sin--the genocide of indigenous people--is of special importance today. It's now routine--even among conservative commentators--to describe the United States as an empire, so long as everyone understands we are an inherently benevolent one. Because all our history contradicts that claim, history must be twisted and tortured to serve the purposes of the powerful.

One vehicle for taming history is various patriotic holidays, with Thanksgiving at the heart of U.S. myth-building. From an early age, we Americans hear a story about the hardy Pilgrims, whose search for freedom took them from England to Massachusetts. There, aided by the friendly Wampanoag Indians, they survived in a new and harsh environment, leading to a harvest feast in 1621 following the Pilgrims first winter.

Some aspects of the conventional story are true enough. But it's also true that by 1637 Massachusetts Gov. John Winthrop was proclaiming a thanksgiving for the successful massacre of hundreds of Pequot Indian men, women and children, part of the long and bloody process of opening up additional land to the English invaders. The pattern would repeat itself across the continent until between 95 and 99 percent of American Indians had been exterminated and the rest were left to assimilate into white society or die off on reservations, out of the view of polite society.

Simply put: Thanksgiving is the day when the dominant white culture (and, sadly, most of the rest of the non-white but non-indigenous population) celebrates the beginning of a genocide that was, in fact, blessed by the men we hold up as our heroic founding fathers.

The first president, George Washington, in 1783 said he preferred buying Indians' land rather than driving them off it because that was like driving "wild beasts" from the forest. He compared Indians to wolves, "both being beasts of prey, tho' they differ in shape."

Thomas Jefferson--president #3 and author of the Declaration of Independence, which refers to Indians as the "merciless Indian Savages"--was known to romanticize Indians and their culture, but that didn't stop him in 1807 from writing to his secretary of war that in a coming conflict with certain tribes, "[W]e shall destroy all of them."

As the genocide was winding down in the early 20th century, Theodore Roosevelt (president #26) defended the expansion of whites across the continent as an inevitable process "due solely to the power of the mighty civilized races which have not lost the fighting instinct, and which by their expansion are gradually bringing peace into the red wastes where the barbarian peoples of the world hold sway."

Roosevelt also once said, "I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth."

How does a country deal with the fact that some of its most revered historical figures had certain moral values and political views virtually identical to Nazis? Here's how "respectable" politicians, pundits, and professors play the game: When invoking a grand and glorious aspect of our past, then history is all-important. We are told how crucial it is for people to know history, and there is much hand wringing about the younger generations' lack of knowledge about, and respect for, that history.

In the United States, we hear constantly about the deep wisdom of the founding fathers, the adventurous spirit of the early explorers, the gritty determination of those who "settled" the country--and about how crucial it is for children to learn these things.

But when one brings into historical discussions any facts and interpretations that contest the celebratory story and make people uncomfortable--such as the genocide of indigenous people as the foundational act in the creation of the United States--suddenly the value of history drops precipitously and one is asked, "Why do you insist on dwelling on the past?"

This is the mark of a well-disciplined intellectual class--one that can extol the importance of knowing history for contemporary citizenship and, at the same time, argue that we shouldn't spend too much time thinking about history.

This off-and-on engagement with history isn't of mere academic interest; as the dominant imperial power of the moment, U.S. elites have a clear stake in the contemporary propaganda value of that history. Obscuring bitter truths about historical crimes helps perpetuate the fantasy of American benevolence, which makes it easier to sell contemporary imperial adventures--such as the invasion and occupation of Iraq--as another benevolent action.

Any attempt to complicate this story guarantees hostility from mainstream culture. After raising the barbarism of America's much-revered founding fathers in a lecture, I was once accused of trying to "humble our proud nation" and "undermine young people's faith in our country."

Yes, of course--that is exactly what I would hope to achieve. We should practice the virtue of humility and avoid the excessive pride that can, when combined with great power, lead to great abuses of power.

History does matter, which is why people in power put so much energy into controlling it. The United States is hardly the only society that has created such mythology. While some historians in Great Britain continue to talk about the benefits that the empire brought to India, political movements in India want to make the mythology of Hindutva into historical fact.

Abuses of history go on in the former empire and the former colony. History can be one of the many ways we create and impose hierarchy, or it can be part of a process of liberation. The truth won't set us free, but the telling of truth at least opens the possibility of freedom.

As Americans sit down on Thanksgiving Day to gorge themselves on the bounty of empire, many will worry about the expansive effects of overeating on their waistlines. We would be better to think about the constricting effects of the day's mythology on our minds.

Simplify the Holidays

The perennial go-to place for giving, and getting, more of what matters throughout the holiday season.

The Hydra of Jim Crow

by Patricia Williams

I saw a little article in a newspaper a few weeks ago about a summer program for children from war-torn areas. The idea is to bring them together in a peaceful vacation spot here in the United States, where they can learn about the humanity of those they have been raised to fear or kill. This project of building bridges rather than walls actually costs $4,000 per child. It's a worthwhile effort, I think--anything to give children the kind of resilience and hope that might render them ambassadors of reconciliation in the ever more uncertain future.

At the same time, I wonder if teaching children to speak across all kinds of boundaries isn't one of the main objectives of a public school system. Public education has always existed to teach children how to become citizens, particularly in a nation as diverse as ours. Increasingly, it must also aim to educate them to operate in a diasporic and polycultural global marketplace. Yet even as we reach out to the young victims of conflicts beyond our shores, the notion of diversity as a necessary coping skill has not, of late, been well received here at home. Indeed, two school integration cases to be heard by the Supreme Court next term, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education, challenge diversity as any kind of compelling state interest. Although they have been treated by much of the media as just another set of affirmative action cases, in fact they are positioned to undo that cornerstone of the civil rights movement, Brown v. Board of Education. The plaintiffs argue that "racial balancing" is a constitutional violation of equal protection. To be precise, they claim that it's not only against the law to consider race for the purpose of segregating schools but also unconstitutional to consider race toward the end of integrating schools.

It is well to remember that the Brown decision was not merely about schools. It struck down the Jim Crow principle of "separate but equal." It stands for the notion that separation is inherently unequal, and that integration is a social good, a desired policy goal. Yet "integration" is not a word one hears very much these days. It is disparaged as "the diversity rationale" and "multiculturalism," and its devaluation has allowed the re-emergence of what I think of as the "segregation rationale." I do not have space here to reiterate the disgraceful and immoral rates of segregation that still exist in housing and schools, now rationalized as a mere matter of "choice"; or the horrendous disparity in health and longevity statistics, attributed to inherent mysteries; or the high school dropout rate of young minorities, dismissed as laziness; or the dismal disparities in employment rates, shrugged away as a collective failure of "individual responsibility"; or, of course, the appalling rates of minority incarceration.

This is all very dangerously circular--minorities have chosen their lot, so it's entirely rational not to let them move into your neighborhood or mix with them in your schools or insure their health. This in turn fuels the notion that it's reasonable to give them an extra once-over when you see them on your street. It becomes "common sense" to impose distance and a separate set of controls on their movement in society. This is further complicated, of course, by the expanded and expanding "war on terror." Republican Congressman Christopher Shays has said, "If the choice is between a young man who fits the profile and an 85-year-old woman, you would check the young man--unless 85-year-old women become a threat." Of course, it doesn't make sense to wait until a homicidal little old lady blows herself up to deem "them" a threat. If we know anything about terrorists, it's that they are experts of the unexpected. And if we only scrutinize grandmothers after one has wreaked havoc, the rational terrorist will be on to the next unexpected category--of young blond women with seeing-eye dogs or some such. That truth is consistently trumped by popular convictions that you can "just tell" a terrorist when you see one. New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, a Brooklyn Democrat, in introducing legislation to allow racial profiling in subway searches, told the Associated Press: "They all look a certain way.... It's all very nice to be politically correct here, but we're talking about terrorism."

The equation of criminality and phenotype has become a poisonous spill of global apprehension: Mexican migrants stand in for Al Qaeda, Christian Lebanese for Hezbollah, Brazilians for British "home-grown terrorism." Against the backdrop of all this "preventive" sorting, the Parents Involved in Community Schools and Meredith cases challenge the state's ability to talk about racial composition in schools, whether for segregation or integration. In other words, we can't talk about remediation at all.

Yet when it comes to the public policy of police profiling, there seems to be lots of room for segregation by race or ethnicity. Selim Noujaim, a Connecticut state representative who emigrated from Lebanon, is another lawmaker who embraces profiling, even of himself. "They may target innocent people sometimes...but if this stops one attack or one killing, it's worth it." Some Americans, however, have already suffered too long as innocent "targets." From the segregated South to South Central Los Angeles, the civil rights movement has attempted to address antagonizing degrees of imprecision in law enforcement. It is precision alone that will save us, rather than vague fears and broadly racialized propensities for ill.

Schools, on the other hand, are a highly effective way to teach children to see past stereotype, if only we had the sustained will to mix them up--thoughtfully, consciously and across established social divisions. Why wait till it's a war zone to stage these uneasy conversations across battle lines? Serb and Croat kids holding hands, Palestinians and Israelis on Sesame Street, black and Hasidic kids from Crown Heights smiling on the 6 o'clock news--always the children, always on display, discussing how to overcome their differences. Learning this skill is the essence of what integration is all about, and it is not just a compelling state interest. It carries all the urgency of global peace.

The Case Against Faith

by Sam Harris

Despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of life and the greater antiquity of the Earth, more than half the American population believes that the entire cosmos was created 6,000 years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue. Those with the power to elect presidents and congressmen—and many who themselves get elected—believe that dinosaurs lived two by two upon Noah's Ark, that light from distant galaxies was created en route to the Earth and that the first members of our species were fashioned out of dirt and divine breath, in a garden with a talking snake, by the hand of an invisible God.

This is embarrassing. But add to this comedy of false certainties the fact that 44 percent of Americans are confident that Jesus will return to Earth sometime in the next 50 years, and you will glimpse the terrible liability of this sort of thinking. Given the most common interpretation of Biblical prophecy, it is not an exaggeration to say that nearly half the American population is eagerly anticipating the end of the world. It should be clear that this faith-based nihilism provides its adherents with absolutely no incentive to build a sustainable civilization—economically, environmentally or geopolitically. Some of these people are lunatics, of course, but they are not the lunatic fringe. We are talking about the explicit views of Christian ministers who have congregations numbering in the tens of thousands. These are some of the most influential, politically connected and well-funded people in our society.

It is, of course, taboo to criticize a person's religious beliefs. The problem, however, is that much of what people believe in the name of religion is intrinsically divisive, unreasonable and incompatible with genuine morality. One of the worst things about religion is that it tends to separate questions of right and wrong from the living reality of human and animal suffering. Consequently, religious people will devote immense energy to so-called moral problems—such as gay marriage—where no real suffering is at issue, and they will happily contribute to the surplus of human misery if it serves their religious beliefs.

A case in point: embryonic-stem-cell research is one of the most promising developments in the last century of medicine. It could offer therapeutic breakthroughs for every human ailment (for the simple reason that stem cells can become any tissue in the human body), including diabetes, Parkinson's disease, severe burns, etc. In July, President George W. Bush used his first veto to deny federal funding to this research. He did this on the basis of his religious faith. Like millions of other Americans, President Bush believes that "human life starts at the moment of conception." Specifically, he believes that there is a soul in every 3-day-old human embryo, and the interests of one soul—the soul of a little girl with burns over 75 percent of her body, for instance—cannot trump the interests of another soul, even if that soul happens to live inside a petri dish. Here, as ever, religious dogmatism impedes genuine wisdom and compassion.

A 3-day-old human embryo is a collection of 150 cells called a blastocyst. There are, for the sake of comparison, more than 100,000 cells in the brain of a fly. The embryos that are destroyed in stem-cell research do not have brains, or even neurons. Consequently, there is no reason to believe they can suffer their destruction in any way at all. The truth is that President Bush's unjustified religious beliefs about the human soul are, at this very moment, prolonging the scarcely endurable misery of tens of millions of human beings.

Given our status as a superpower, our material wealth and the continuous advancements in our technology, it seems safe to say that the president of the United States has more power and responsibility than any person in history. It is worth noting, therefore, that we have elected a president who seems to imagine that whenever he closes his eyes in the Oval Office—wondering whether to go to war or not to go to war, for instance—his intuitions have been vetted by the Creator of the universe. Speaking to a small group of supporters in 1999, Bush reportedly said, "I believe God wants me to be president." Believing that God has delivered you unto the presidency really seems to entail the belief that you cannot make any catastrophic mistakes while in office. One question we might want to collectively ponder in the future: do we really want to hand the tiller of civilization to a person who thinks this way?

Religion is the one area of our discourse in which people are systematically protected from the demand to give good evidence and valid arguments in defense of their strongly held beliefs. And yet these beliefs regularly determine what they live for, what they will die for and—all too often—what they will kill for. Consequently, we are living in a world in which millions of grown men and women can rationalize the violent sacrifice of their own children by recourse to fairy tales. We are living in a world in which millions of Muslims believe that there is nothing better than to be killed in defense of Islam. We are living in a world in which millions of Christians hope to soon be raptured into the stratosphere by Jesus so that they can safely enjoy a sacred genocide that will inaugurate the end of human history. In a world brimming with increasingly destructive technology, our infatuation with religious myths now poses a tremendous danger. And it is not a danger for which more religious faith is a remedy.

Questions Raised by the Haggard Scandal

by Tony Campolo

The scripture says that when one member of the body suffers, all the members suffer. And so it is that each of us took a hit when Ted Haggard was "ousted," disgraced, and then ridiculed by late-night comedians. But after we get over our initial anger at being betrayed by one of our top leaders, hopefully we will realize that we really need to prayerfully weep for our brother, his family and the members of his congregation.

In the midst of all the turmoil, confusion, and disillusionment, it is all too easy to ignore the suffering of Mike Jones, the male prostitute who blew the whistle on our brother Ted. Mike also will be hurt. His life will never be the same. He will always be scorned and a marked man.

We have to wonder: What drove him into prostitution? From whence did he get that low self-concept which, according to sociologists who study prostitutes, always characterizes these precious children of God?

Do we, the Church, bear any responsibility for how Mike Jones might feel about himself? Might he have heard some of those sermons which define homosexuals as "abominations" in the eyes of God?

Was it the war that so many leading Christians, including Mr. Haggard, have declared on the gay community that made Mike Jones feel that it was his "moral obligation" to expose the hypocrisy in evangelicalism?

Did he feel so oppressed by the way in which we have generated political movements that threaten to deny gays and lesbians their civil rights that he was motivated to strike back in the only way he could?

I have heard so many of my colleagues in ministry express deep concerns over what this scandal will do to the image of the evangelical movement, but I have heard little concern among us for how all of this will impact those Christian gays and lesbians that we know. They are in our churches. They teach in our Sunday schools and sing in our choirs. Most of them are closeted brothers and sisters who suffer in ways that are impossible for the rest of us to even imagine. They are good people who do not take drugs or visit prostitutes. Will the ugliness of this sorry mess feed a diabolical stereotype of them, which is too often circulated in our churches by unkind preachers who have little, if any, understanding of homosexuals?

In the midst of this tragic scandal, we need to be asking what good God wants to bring out of what has happened. Could this tragedy be used by God to draw us back from an arrogant triumphal attitude wherein we, in our self-righteousness, assume the right to take over America and politically recast it in our own image?

Is this a time when we might do some soul searching to see if we have been reduced into the corrupting influence of the power that we have gained in government and in the marketplace?

Finally, are we able to "restore our brother Ted," who, in the words of scripture, has been "overtaken in a fault?" Are we able to consider ourselves lest we also be tempted? (Galatians 6:1)

Right now, both Ted and Mike are facing the dark side of their humanity. Are we willing to affirm them by declaring loud and clear that there is something of infinite worth in each of them?

We’ve got a lot of questions to ask ourselves in a time like this. Let us pray for the grace not to flee from these questions.

Your Kingdom Come

In saying "Your kingdom come," we are acknowledging that faith in Jesus is not simply an idea or an emotion. It is a concrete reality of which we are to become part or else be out of step with the way things are now that God has come into the world in Jesus. When the kingdom comes, we are "to repent" (i.e. change, let go of our citizenship in the old kingdoms) and "believe the good news" (i.e. join up, become part of the revolution).

--Stanley Hauerwas

Becoming a Mission-Focused Church

by Heidi Unruh, Phil Olson, and Ron Sider

What does it take to become a mission-focused church--a church that shares God's self-sacrificial love for the lost, lonely, and broken, and cultivates a commitment toward community transformation as an expression of worship?

Despite an outreach activity here and there, many churches are not really outreach-focused churches. They might give out holiday gift baskets to needy families, or sponsor an annual Bring-a-Friend-to-Church day, or raise money to support the local homeless shelter. But their ministries flow more from skin-deep compassion ("Those poor homeless people") or superficial obligation ("There, that takes care of that!") than a genuine longing to see God's will be done in their community and world as it is in heaven. The dominant understanding is that the church exists to serve the needs--spiritual, social, and relational--of the membership.

From observing where many churches spend their energy, money, and time, said Christian activist Harold Frey, one would think that John 3:16 read: "God so loved the church that He gave His only Son." What does the text really say? "God so loved the WORLD that He gave His only Son"! Church leaders do have a significant responsibility toward the members of the church, but one key dimension of this responsibility "is to lead them into their vocation (mission) in the world, which God loves, and for which Christ died."

Rev. Tom Theriault is mission pastor at a wonderful holistic congregation, Solana Beach Presbyterian Church. He writes about the tension between "in-reach" and "outreach":

I've gotten a lot of mileage from my M & M soap box...the "More and More for Me and Mine" Syndrome, the "What-can-you-do-for-me-today,-God?" Gospel. As in the time of Jesus, many are looking for an M & M Messiah, a savior who will deliver us from all manner of oppressions. As with Jesus' contemporaries, we are frustrated, if not infuriated (Luke 4:30f), by a savior who is for the world. When He turns the "M & M's" right-side-up and into "W-W's"--a "We-are-for-the-World" Gospel, we have trouble.

To be sure, ours is a delivering God. But He delivers for a purpose. He delivers us out of our dead-end obsession with self and into the mainstream of His life-giving water that is destined for the nations (Rev 22:2). We want a "sit-and-soak Savior," One who fills our little hot tubs up with all kinds of soothing blessings. What we really have is a "Get up and GO God," One who soothes and saves so that He can launch us out (the root of the word for "mission" is the same as for "missile") into His Kingdom purposes to sooth and save the world. Hot tubs are great, but if you spend too much time in one you shrivel up and get sick. Same is true for the bath of blessings that our wonderful Savior provides for us. If we stop with merely basking in the blessings of salvation, we, our families, our churches, will shrivel up and get sick. A body needs exercise, and so does the Body of Christ.

Continuing Tom's metaphor, to prescribe the proper exercise for a human body, trainers have to know what the body is designed to do. Internally focused churches are busily doing an incomplete set of exercises, because they have a flawed understanding of what the church body is designed to do. So what is the church designed to do? What is the church's mission?

Say "mission," and many think of what some Christians do "over there." The word has come to be identified with special projects and trips. But mission has more to do with the church's purpose than its programs. As theologian David Bosch explains, "There is church because there is mission, not vice versa." The external mission of the church is to express God's character and saving actions in the world.

Overcoming an inward focus means changing the paradigm from "going to church" to "being the church" in mission. "Going to church" is only part of the purpose for the church's existence. A lay leader at Cookman United Methodist Church puts it this way:

"Being a place where people can just come and worship on Sunday does not make you a church. You have to be in service to one another to be a servant to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. You need to just be there for the people. A lighthouse isn't just out there sometimes. It's always out there. The light is always on. And that's what we need to do as a church."

Churches like Cookman with a mission to share God's redemptive love in the world are beacons of hope and healing, attracting people to God's kingdom. The harvest is slow, but steady.

Why I Signed "That They May Have Life"

by Ron Sider

Evangelicals and Catholics Together (led by Chuck Colson and Richard John Neuhaus) recently released a ringing document on the sanctity of human life, entitled "That They May Have Life."

I signed the document because I believe that a strong defense of the life and dignity of every person is right at the heart of biblical teaching and faithful Christian discipleship. This document is a powerful articulation and defense of that foundational truth. That said, I wish that the document had said some more things and said some things differently.

The "completely pro-life" theme is there briefly: "The culture of life encompasses also the poor, the marginalized." The document insists that many things violate the dignity of the human person: genocide, economic exploitation, mistreatment of women, racial discrimination. But I wish that these had been much clearer and more prominent. If I had drafted the document, the completely pro-life theme would have been central.

The document recognizes that there are honorable Christian pacifists but assumes too easily that virtually all Christians are in the just war tradition. At the very least, the text should have said not that "Christians believe" in just war, but that "most Christians" since the fourth century do.

When one signs declarations drafted for a wide range of people, one inevitably signs on to content that one would like to have rephrased or supplemented with additional complementary statements. I wish (at least some days) that everybody agreed with me and had just the balance of ideas and ways of stating them that I do. Alas, they do not.

I think there is an important role for declarations that a wide range of Christians sign. I always ask myself: Do I agree with the basic arguments? Is there anything I simply cannot endorse? Is the basic impact of the document true and important?

My answers to these questions led to my conclusion that "That They May Have Life" is a truly important declaration on a crucial question for American life. I hope and pray that it is read widely.

As the document states, "We can no more abandon our contention for a culture of life than we can abandon our allegiance to the lordship of Christ." Amen.

In Touch With Jesus

by Sonja Steptoe

Sometimes a scavenger hunt is just a scavenger hunt. That's all it is at many churches, where the frenzied chase to collect trinkets and complete silly tasks is a perennial activity aimed at getting teenagers into their doors. But at Calvary Baptist Church in Bellflower, Calif., a scavenger hunt is also a metaphor for the lifelong pursuit of meaning and happiness that begins in adolescence--and rich grist for a sermon targeted to teens. "A scavenger hunt is a search," youth leader Doug Jones, 20, tells the 80 teens who have just returned from a race through this working-class city 30 miles east of Los Angeles. Quoting from Romans 10: 13 ("Anyone who calls on the Lord will be saved") and Matthew 7: 7 ("Ask, and God will give to you. Search, and you will find"), he urges them to "ask God to come into your life and rescue you, and bring your personal scavenger hunt to an end."

Youth ministers have been on a long and frustrating quest of their own over the past two decades or so. Believing that a message wrapped in pop-culture packaging was the way to attract teens to their flocks, pastors watered down the religious content and boosted the entertainment. But in recent years churches have begun offering their young people a style of religious instruction grounded in Bible study and teachings about the doctrines of their denomination. Their conversion has been sparked by the recognition that sugarcoated Christianity, popular in the 1980s and early '90s, has caused growing numbers of kids to turn away not just from attending youth-fellowship activities but also from practicing their faith at all. In a national survey recently released by Barna Group, a polling firm that tracks religious trends, only 33% of kids 13 to 18 responded that they attend a youth-group event regularly--a 3% drop since 1998. And while nearly 75% pray each week, that number has declined 9%.

Even more worrisome to many youth ministers was the Barna survey finding that 61% of the adults polled who are now in their 20s said they had participated in church activities as teens but no longer do. Some experts point out that young people typically drift from organized religion in early adulthood, but others say the high attrition is a sign that churches need to change the way they try to engage the next generation of the faithful. "This dip should serve as an exhortation for everyone to be about the business of discipleship, missions and a higher calling than popcorn-and-peanuts youth culture," says Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals. Scholars who have looked at young Christians say their spiritual drift is in part the result of a lack of knowledge about their faith. "The vast majority of teens who call themselves Christians haven't been well educated in religious doctrine and therefore don't really know what they believe," says Christian Smith, a University of Notre Dame sociologist and the author of Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. "With all the competing demands on their time, religion becomes a low priority, and so they practice their faith in shallow ways."

As the exodus has increased, churches are trying to reverse the flow by focusing less on amusement and more on Scripture. When Chris Reed failed to convert a single youngster during one 12-month period soon after taking over as youth minister at Calvary in 1995, he decided to restructure his young people's program by adding both larger doses of doctrine and closer adult mentoring. Now, religious instruction, based on a model developed by youth pastors at Rick Warren's Saddleback Church, centers on five Christian principles--evangelism, fellowship, discipleship, ministry and worship.

There's still some fun, games and live-band music in the mix at Calvary, but every youth activity, from scavenger hunts to prayer meetings to scrubbing floors and donating food and clothes at Los Angeles homeless shelters, must relate to one of the principles. Additionally, Reed recruited parents and young adults like Jones to forge bonds with small groups of six to eight teens. The grownups lead weekly Bible studies, help plan missionary trips and monitor the high schoolers' emotional and spiritual well-being with frequent phone calls and face-to-face encounters outside of church. Since Reed's overhaul six years ago, the total youth rolls--including the reconstituted Sunday school and college programs--have grown from 70 to more than 200. In 2003, a record 64 teens accepted Christ as their savior at Calvary. "We're healthy spiritually," Reed says. He adds that even adults who once thought teen members had little to contribute and needed baby sitting welcome their involvement in all church activities.

Bible-based youth ministries at churches around the country are enjoying a similar success. At Shoreline Christian Center in Austin, Texas, youth pastor Ben Calmer vetoed the purchase of a pool table because it didn't further his goal of increasing spiritual nourishment. Instead he started a class in which the young people wrestle with such difficult questions as, Why doesn't God answer all prayers? No one seems to be suffering from the absence of the pool table. Youth membership has doubled, to 160, during the 18 months Calmer has been in charge. Similarly, teens at Covenant Life Church in Gaithersburg, Md., are embracing the big doses of Bible study youth pastors now recommend. Teen ranks have tripled, to nearly 600, since the mid-1990s.

The Calvary kids say they too are happy with the more traditional approach. Priscilla Balcaceres, 16, believes she would still be holding grudges and feuding with friends and family were it not for Bible lessons and sermons on forgiveness. "Before attending Calvary, I believed in God and prayed at night, but I was still very bitter and unhappy about many things in my life," she says. "I've learned what it really means to be a Christian, and now I wake up smiling every morning." Meanwhile, Amanda Sinks, 16, spouts verses from Timothy, Corinthians and James the way other teens recite rap lyrics. "There's nothing boring to me about reading the Bible every day," says Sinks, who became a Christian 17 months ago and counts a heightened ability to withstand peer pressure as one of the benefits. If things keep up this way, hanging out with God might even become cool.

How Much Love

It is not what we do that is important, but how much love we put into what we do: we should do small things with great love.

--Mother Teresa

The Spiritual Health of Ronald McDonald

by Will Braun

Perched on shiny plastic benches we filled our little temples of the Holy Spirit with greasy treats. Ronald McDonald was relatively new in town and a Sunday school teacher's chances of qualifying as cool were increased if she or he took the class for some fast food fellowship. I was about 10 at the time, and happy for a break from the Sunday morning routine.

Since that day at a McDonald's in a small town on the Canadian Prairies, my spiritual constitution has shifted. Where my faith formation once included commercialized snacks on the Lord's day, now my Mennonite convictions prevent me from eating McDonald's food at all. For nearly a decade, I haven't put a penny of my money into Ronnie's corporate hands and I haven't put any of his food in my body.

I have no interest in heaping blame on Sunday school teachers who take their class for an occasional treat (or on parents who face tough choices when it comes to fast food). Sunday school teachers and parents deserve affirmation and encouragement. My interest is broader: analysis of the spiritual health of the Big Mac.

For me, being a Christian means faith is applicable to all aspects of life. The point seems obvious, but if it is, why have I never heard a sermon on the fast food phenomenon?

John Ralston Saul calls the Big Mac the "communion wafer of consumption," placing McDonald's at the symbolic, spiritual center of consumerist devotion. The franchise is indeed iconic both in scale and nature. With over $20 billion in sales at its 27,000-plus stores last year, a $2 billion advertising budget and one of the most recognized symbols in the world, McDonald's is more than just a place for cheap eats. It is a cultural force that aggressively shapes the spirit of our age.

My reasons for not eating at McDonald's are spiritual. If our bodies are temples, surely what we put in them affects the health of our souls. And despite attempts to fight their reputation as a peddler of fat, McDonald's continues to infuse an unconscionable amount of grease, sodium and sugar into the global diet. I prefer, when possible, to nourish my soul with food grown and prepared with care and respect.

I also care about the cumulative spiritual impact of saturating society in commercial messages. McDonald's is a bearish participant in the profit-driven communication of values. Behind the seemingly innocuous smiles and cheery tunes are shareholders whose primary concern is not the physical or spiritual well-being of society. Of every dollar spent at McDonald's, part goes to their advertising campaigns. I think they have enough influence without me lending my support.

Then there is all the white and yellow garbage, a lowest-common-denominator approach to labour and accusations of environmental abuses. Sure McDonald's has some positive qualities--every corporation knows how to smile--but overall McDonald's is spiritually unhealthy.

So I go elsewhere to feed my body and soul. I still get the urge for fries from time to time, but the sense of gratification I get from not having eaten at McDonald's in almost a decade--the sense that I am making a spiritually healthy choice for myself and the world--makes it easy for me to pass up the urge. At such times I like to think it is my Mennonite instincts of withdrawal from worldly influences that are kicking in.