Archives for January, 2005

Shake Hands with the Devil

I am watching the CBC’s The Passionate Eye right now about Romeo Dellaire’s return to Rwanda. The television images are haunting. Roadsides that are littered with bodies for as long as you can see. The United Nations botched the mission before Dellaire even got there and never stopped making mistakes and Dellaire was left helpless when the genocide started. How does one recover emotionally from that? His and his XO’s words are haunting, even ten years later.

It also gives a strong condemnation of the Roman Catholic Church. The church was asked to proclaim that hatred against other races was wrong but refused. The anger towards the church is unreal.

Mother Jones has an interview with General Romeo Dellaire here.

01/31/2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments

Contextless Links

01/31/2005 | Contextless Links, photography | No Comments

The Morals of the Story - Does Jim Wallis’ leftist, Bible-based book get it right? By Elizabeth A. Castelli

A review in Slate of Jim Wallis’ new book.

01/30/2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments

Brian McLaren

One of the 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America. via

01/30/2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments

The Christian Coalition sides with Hollywood against P2P

This struck me as being odd

The U.S. government, 40 states and territories, and outside groups from the National Football League to the Christian Coalition of America asked the Supreme Court on Monday to hold services like Grokster and Morpheus accountable for the millions of copyrighted files traded over their networks.

Why would the Christian Coalition have against file trading? Are Jerry Falwell’s sermons being traded illegally. Wouldn’t Christians who do believe in this thing called evangelism want their message to be spread across the web? Like many things the Christian Coalitions stands for, it doesn’t make any sense to me. Instead of just mocking this decision, there are concrete things we can do, one is to use Creative Commons licenses on our works. If you have never heard of Creative Commons, here is its story and there are some great movies in Flash to view here that give you an idea of what you can do, even if it is now un-Christian to use P2P.

01/30/2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments

Contextless Links

01/29/2005 | Contextless Links | No Comments

Learning…

  • Learning is not compulsory… neither is survival. –W. Edwards Deming
  • If confusion is the first step to knowledge, I must be a genius. –Larry Leissner
  • Personally I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught. -Sir Winston Churchill
  • Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes. –Henry David Thoreau

01/29/2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments

Evangelical Christianity Has Been Hijacked: An Interview with Tony Campolo

An interview with Tony Campolo in Beliefnet.

It’s a common perception that evangelical Christians are conservative on issues like gay marriage, Islam, and women’s roles. Is this the case?

Well, there’s a difference between evangelical and being a part of the Religious Right. A significant proportion of the evangelical community is part of the Religious Right. My purpose in writing the book was to communicate loud and clear that I felt that evangelical Christianity had been hijacked.

When did it become anti-feminist? When did evangelical Christianity become anti-gay? When did it become supportive of capital punishment? Pro-war? When did it become so negative towards other religious groups?

There are a group of evangelicals who would say, “Wait a minute. We’re evangelicals but we want to respect Islam. We don’t want to call its prophet evil. We don’t want to call the religion evil. We believe that we have got to learn to live in the same world with our Islamic brothers and sisters and we want to be friends. We do not want to be in some kind of a holy war.”

We also raise some very serious questions about the support of policies that have been detrimental to the poor. When I read the voter guide of a group like the Christian Coalition, I find that they are allied with the National Rifle Association and are very anxious to protect the rights of people to buy even assault weapons. But they don’t seem to be very supportive of concerns for the poor, concerns for trade relations, for canceling Third World debts.

In short, there’s a whole group of issues that are being ignored by the Religious Right and that warrant the attention of Bible-believing Christians. Another one would be the environment.

I don’t think that John Kerry is the Messiah or the Democratic Party is the answer, but I don’t like the evangelical community blessing the Republican Party as some kind of God-ordained instrument for solving the world’s problems. The Republican Party needs to be called into accountability even as the Democratic Party needs to be called into accountability. So it’s that double-edged sword that I’m trying to wield.

Are the majority of evangelicals in America leaning conservative because they see their leaders on TV that way? Or is there a contingent out there that we don’t hear about in the press that is more progressive on the issues you just talked about?

The latest statistics that I have seen on evangelicals indicate that something like 83 percent of them are going to vote for George Bush and are Republicans. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just that Christians need to be considering other issues beside abortion and homosexuality.

These are important issues, but isn’t poverty an issue? When you pass a bill of tax reform that not only gives the upper five percent most of the benefits, leaving very little behind for the rest of us, you have to ask some very serious questions. When that results in 300,000 slots for children’s afterschool tutoring in poor neighborhoods being cut from the budget. When one and a half billion dollars is cut from the “No Child Left Behind” program.

In short, I think that evangelicals are so concerned with the unborn—as we should be—that we have failed to pay enough attention to the born—to those children who do live and who are being left behind by a system that has gone in favor of corporate interests and big money.

So as an evangelical, I find myself very torn, because I am a pro-life person. I understand evangelicals who say there comes a time when one issue is so overpowering that we have to vote for the candidate that espouses a pro-life position, even if we disagree with him on a lot of other issues.

My response to that is OK, the Republican party and George Bush know that they have the evangelical community in its pocket—[but] they can’t win the election without us. Given this position, shouldn’t we be using our incredible position of influence to get the president and his party to address a whole host of other issues which we think are being neglected?

01/29/2005 | environment, politics | 3 Comments

Do We Know How to Develop?

Much of the current global debate on development is focused on ways to spur economic growth in poor countries. But as World Bank economist Charles Kenny argues, income growth is supposed to be a means to an end — the improved quality of life of citizens in developing countries. And that goal is frequently not met through economic growth — as the Soviet example proves.

01/28/2005 | economics | No Comments

Photo Friday Challenge

Mark at Kiwannis Park
Originally uploaded by Jordon.

My submission for this week’s Photo Friday.

Tags:

01/28/2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments

Contextless Links

01/28/2005 | Contextless Links | No Comments

Auschwitz: The Forgotten Evidence

I am watching a chilling history of Auschwitz. It is looking at extensive evidence that shows that the Allies knew what was happening but didn’t know how to stop it and didn’t have the courage or interest in doing it.

Today, leaders from all across the world gathered in Poland to mark the date. CTV News pointed out that many of us don’t care or don’t know about the Holocaust.

Despite the horrific scale of the Holocaust, CTV’s Tom Kennedy says that grim chapter in history is nevertheless losing its capacity to shock.

Even the word Holocaust, he noted from Auschwitz, may have become diluted by overuse — and by history’s more recent horrors and genocides.

An Environics poll published earlier this week in Canada found 30 per cent of Canadians surveyed couldn’t identify that Jews were the primary victims of the Holocaust.

In Poland, that number rose to about half of the population, according to a recent survey conducted there.

The numbers weren’t any better in Britain. A poll conducted for the BBC found that 45 per cent of adults had never heard of Auschwitz. The figure rose to 60 per cent among women and people under 35.

As the world says “never again” I can’t help but think it that we haven’t learned that much from it. The best book on the topic is Pullitzer Prize winner A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide. It documents not only the Holocaust but also Cambodia, the Kurds, Bosnia, and Rwanda. None of the stories reflect well on the west. We say “never again” but then when the moment passes and the media is attracted to something else we go back to our regular lives, barely aware that people are dying.

As I read Shake Hands with the Devil by Gen. Romeo Dellaire, one thing hit me. His description of CBC Radio’s Michael Enright’s role in changing public opinion across Canada. Enright would talk with Canadian officers about what they were seeing and experiencing. Those stories got other media involved and the shift of public opinion in Canada and later the world started to change.

Enright kept at it. I wonder if at times if they second guessed working a story that few were caring about. I have been thinking about the direction of this blog and my passion in 2005. I may not be Michael Enright but bringing attention to those people who have been forgotten and ignored is not time poorly spent. For those that have written and asked for less links about Darfur, Rwanda, and other links that may not be always inspiring, you will be hearing more about them in 2005.

To those of you who are fellow bloggers, maybe finding a crusade and fighting for it, may not be a bad thing after all.

The Saskatoon Star Phoenix has an editorial saying that Canada seems to have learned little from the Holocaust.

At any point, if the Allies had blown up rail tracks and levelled the camp, the killing would have been forced to stop or at least been hampered.

But just as the West ignored the plight of the Jews at the July 1938 conference in Evian, France — 32 countries including Canada, the U.S. and Britain balked when asked to take in Jewish refugees — it ignored the death camp until Russian soldiers broke down its gates that cold January day in 1945.

And then they went on ignoring it. The horror of what the Germans did, and what the rest of the world knew, was too great to be acknowledged for years.

There is no silver lining to this terrible cloud. One would have hoped the world could have at least extracted a lesson from the ashes of Auschwitz. Rwanda, Cambodia, Laos, Burma, Uganda, Yugoslavia and a plethora of other slaughters later, we must realize we didn’t even squeeze this one redemption from this dark page of history.

On Monday, the United Nations had a special session dedicated to the memory of Auschwitz — one that was sponsored in part by Canada. Yet, when Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel stood up at the UN general assembly to ask: “Will the world ever learn,” the room was just half full.

Elsewhere, far-right politicians stormed out of the state legislature in Dresden, Germany, to protest the observance of a moment of silence to mark the liberation of Auschwitz. In Russia, extremists from both the right and left were demanding a ban on Jewish religious and ethnic organizations.

And in Darfur, countless thousands were left to their own genocide, with the world again reluctant to get involved.

01/27/2005 | Saskatoon, blogging | 7 Comments

Mike Webster

I posted yesterday about Mike Webster and his football injuries and part three of the series was another emotional article to read. His life is the result of 25,000 blows to the head.

My mom died of brain cancer. It isn’t the same thing at all but it is hard to read about Mike Webster losing his mind and not think of my mom. Mom was a reader, a debater (I can not imagine keeping a blog if she was still alive, she would have flamed me to a crisp in either the comments or her own blog), and a passionate learner. After they found and removed as much as they could from a grapefruit sized tumor from her brain, we watched a steady deterioration of her verbal and thinking abilities. It seemed like such a cruel way to die. Partly because she was very aware that it was happening and there was nothing other than a miracle from God that could stop it.

Years before the brain cancer hit, Mom dropped a soup can on her foot. It never healed. Several years and a couple surgeries later, her foot was amputated below the knee. Along with that brought years of pain and suffering, compounded by diabetes and compounded because we lived below the povertly line. While Mom suffered a lot for a lot of years, there was always hope that a treatment would finally work. Ironically it was the one thing that she never wanted to happen (her leg being amputated) is what brought a miraculous cure (she went from being critically ill to wanting me to sneak in a Ceasar salad in eight hours and had her leg amputated in between). During that time, there were low times but it was the reality that she was losing her thinking ability that finally defeated her hope.

My biggest fear is not dying. We all die (although I know one person who genuinely believes he will never die). My fear is living like Mike Webster lived. Stuck in life but ceasing to be able to comprehend it.

01/27/2005 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Heart of Darkness

A great story about how former Canadian peacekeepers are making a big difference in Africa. It also shows that a handful of people can make a big difference in the world.

01/27/2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments

Contexless Links

01/27/2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments

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