Compassion in Politics: Christian Social Justice, Non-Profits, and Life Theology

These are quite possibly some of the best Christian videos I’ve seen on social justice and missions (in the sense of production quality and design) Its still hard to beat Chris Seay for his hard hitting provocations.

For more information on the Book of Hope project or you can go to the Book of Hope .

Ariah Fine consistently rolls out great social justice videos with a Christian theme.(h/t to Ariah Fine and The Work of the People) 

Good Magazine produced a gritty documentary on homelessness in LA.(h/t Jake Bouma)

Update:  I really liked Ariah Fine’s addition over at I Am Not Ashamed.  I suggest his third video about compassion and Christianity with Shaun Groves.

Thoughts?

I know some expect me to get on the Obama bandwagon, especially those who know of my criticisms of the current president. Yet I continue to want to press for the church to be the primary political instrument of true justice in the world. The church must be FIRST as initiator for social justice, from which we can then push for governmental cooperation.

(h/t to Revolution in Jesusland and Jesus Manifesto)

Read the rest at Reclaiming the Mission or the above links. Thoughts?

The Time Bomb of Unchecked Capital:
From a capitalist perspective Bill Gate’s ideas make a ton of sense. You are empowering 1/3 of the economy to become producers and consumers, rather than them creating a downward spiral of strife. Second, if Gates had come around 10 years ago perhaps we wouldn’t have had a 9/11 or the middle east instability which is driving our gas prices to 3 times what they were a decade ago and creating crushing debt for this generation and the next. Spreading AIDS in Africa, Asia, and Russia is a prescriptions for disaster and perhaps even conflict. The woes of terrorism are much higher in a world of unemployment and lack of hope. Those two disasters could independently bring capitalism on a global scale cowering to its knees. Ignoring it or just letting the hyper-free market just sort it out is waiting on a ticking time bomb.

Protectionist Redux:
Rising wealth among the poorest and the middle class will also make it less likely for nations to resort to protectionist measures that are anti-free trade.

A Theory Far Past its Prime:
Its time to re-define the rules of capitalism to mean more than just procedural free markets. The world that Ayn Rand, Robert Nozick, and the like addressed is radically different than the one we have today. Allowing the free market to unleash itself–without taking into account ultimate ends–innocent kids with Aids who won’t even get a chance to participate in the global economy. Allowing teen mothers to get wrapped up in dehumanizing forms of slavery, child soldiering, and sexual slavery is not a free market I want any part of.

______________ 
1. For the record: economics 101 says that resource inequality will create inequalities in wealth. The geography and infrastructure guarantees bad economies of scale for these countries, which means that capitalism is failing them.
2. Foreign aid represents about 1% of the overall budget, compared to pork barrel spending, waste, ill advised subsidies, and military spending on unneeded technologies, it should not be the target of libertarians.
3. Written in response to an indictment of Bill Gates Creative Capitalism  

Check out “I want to be part of the problem…” Bread for the World is providing training for those interested in poverty and hunger alleviation via their Hunger Justice Leaders Program.  The program will take place in Washington DC from June 14th-17th, 2008 and is all expenses paid for those who apply and are accepted.  Unfortunately, the deadline for application is fast approaching.  

I was reading Revolution in Jesusland and noticed this article from E.J. Dionne:

It is a great sellout of religion to insist that it has much to teach us about abortion or gay marriage but little useful to say about social justice, war and peace, the organization of our work lives, the death penalty, immigration policy or our approach to providing for the old, the sick, and the desperate.

Surely we shouldn’t be beholden to political power on either side of the political divide. But the above quote does provide some focus and food for thought. For the rest of the article check out TPM Cafe.

from anne jackson of flowerdust who is in uganda with compassion international:

contrast.there’s so much of a contrast here.we’re sitting in our bus, driving to another project, and no matter where it is i look, the contrast is striking.the colors in nature…the rich greens and reds in the grass and the mud…and the unsaturated grey in the sky.the cars and motorbikes that crowd the roads…and the goat i see about ten feet outside of my window…and the cattle that passed by our bus yesterday.the skyscrapers in downtown kampala…and the rows of small markets of local vendors selling plantains and brooms.

If you like’s Anne’s narrative, I urge you to check out David Kuo’s take on Uganda and poverty.Los Whittaker of Ragamuffin Soul, who is also in Uganda with Compassion, created this touching video:   

Gates say capitalism needs to be revised in order to take account of the lower 1/3 of the globe–the voices at the bottom of the well if you will. He launched this project at Davos. Oddly enough on Monday I ran across a new book at David Kidd on this same subject. I think a slow steady cultural zeigheist is happening around this issue. Check out the 4 minute video of Gates on his new project, which I think he said he’s devoting half of his time to. (h/t Servant of Chaos: Towards a Holistic Brand)

Thoughts?

The director Robert Greenwald, who has previously produced several fantastic documentaries including “Outfoxed” and “Unconstitutional” was recently interviewed by CNBC:

What You May Not Know about MLK: The 8 minute teaser for Greenwald’s “The War on Greed” that tells the narrative of the class warfare on the middle class.

Brave New Films has set up a micro-site at War on Greed Described as “Barbarians at the Capital” Nomi Prins in Mother Jones highlights the fundamental tax injustice and inequality:

Then they used the interest to offset taxes; better yet, because they were structured as private partnerships, they (and their individual executives) could classify their profits as capital gains (taxed at 15 percent) rather than as corporate income (35 percent). Presto! An almost 60 percent tax differential. Plus, when they took a public company private, its profits could get the same treatment. Thus, doing zero restructuring or resale work, and adding no value, the firms were making money—and that was before they collected their broker fees. As an added bonus, as private companies they didn’t have to file with the Securities and Exchange Commission, worry about the transparency rules of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, or bother with pesky shareholder activists.

Not only is there a lack of accountability, but there is fundamentally no reason these radical differentials exist, except for a legal loophole and the strategic work of power-brokers. Both Robert Rubin, the Former Treasury Secretary and Warren Buffet oppose these tax loopholes. David Ignatius in the Washington Post substantiates:

A billionaire who runs one of the leading hedge funds wrote me in an e-mail last week: “Amusing what is going on in the tax charades of the money managers. How in the world anyone can uphold those [making] egregious amounts of money paying low or no taxes is really becoming laughable. . . . The private equity guys I know admit they do not have an argument that holds water.” This financier described watching a production of “Animal Farm” and realizing that “the vastness of the inequity that is escalating geometrically is just, well, Orwellian.”

Another financier who heads a private equity fund with more than $5 billion in investments offers a similarly scorching indictment of the system. The argument that the 20 percent he automatically takes away from profitable deals should be taxed as a capital gain is “completely ridiculous,” he says. Most firms put only a tiny amount of their own capital at risk — often as little as two-tenths of 1 percent, or $2 million on a $1 billion deal. (Private equity refers to funds that use a mix of debt and private capital to buy up companies; typically they pay back the loans by cutting costs.)

If you’d like to spread the word or talk with like minded individuals, “The War on Greed” has a Facebook Fanpage Thoughts? Any other notable quotes from the “War on Greed” press?

Project Kuna Yala

The following is an idea thats been rattling around in my head. The nuts and bolts of this won’t necessarily make sense to anyone but me. If you have done social entrepreneurial ventures, particularly in the developing world if you could at least leave contact info or suggestions in the comments, that would be great.

The basic premise is buying art in Panama Central America to help alleviate poverty. My dad and I did a bit of this in the very late 80’s. With the rise of the internet it makes sense as a very viable model for helping families in Panama, given that we can more easily make contact with those who are interested in art from the developing world and the overhead prices are minimal. My largest hurdles are lack of start up funds, creating a better business model, and curiosities about alternatives to cash for exchange for the art. My worry is that buying from the best artists won’t necessarily solve the problem of poverty–part of it is an issue of distribution. The other question is responsible use of new income sources by indigenous peoples.

If it worked, it seems like an idea that could scale.  The largest overhead is either travel (roughly $650 per ticket) or computer access or perhaps a mobile option is available.

Version 1.0
$1,750/2,000
2-3 weeks
Go bigger next time

Five times a year-Christmas, spring, Twice during summer, fall
10-15 weeks

Competitor
Panama Arts (mostly $18 to $40)
http://panamarts.com/
http://myworld.ebay.com/drydenroad/

Talk to folks at Valdosta
• Get connected with the preaching school and a specific preacher
• I have to get a passport and clear up any legalities. (taxes?)

Version 1.5
Trip with dad

Version 2.0

• No need to travel with this model.

• Could test at $400 (find out what various piece were going for) No more than $60-70 per family. Plus shipping + insurance + 10% traveling fee.
•Think about the way in which money can be a corrupting force. Could we provide them with goods instead of money. (buy via groups, instead of individuals—coop?)

• See also Kiva model below, but need contact to computer.

Version 2.5
Sell via store
Via E-bay
Via flickr
Could sell stock photos ($3-5)
Could even sell photos via ebay

Promotion:
• Blog—perhaps even video. Mostly just pictures (blog to be very design saavy)
• Pay Per Click Google, e-bay, Microsoft, and perhaps yahoo (third world arts)
• Stumbleupon
• Flickr
• t-shirt via threadless and/or café-expreess
• t-shirts on ebay too
• Empower them to sell their own molas? (aka Kiva)

Delivery
•Someone to do domestic mailing
•Offer framing

Random Thoughts 

What if Kiva open sourced their code????

 Please submit your answer to the Davos Question by January 21st.  For other video suggestions and other people’s takes on this question check out You Tube.   In an era in which so many people feel alienated, unrepresented, or disgusted by politics seems like a great way to interact with and perhaps even alter world politics.  Its your chance for a seat at the table and a voice in the discussion.

I ran across Ariah Fine’s YouTube Tuesday choices and noticed an interesting piece that is part of the Damah film festival and the Awaken project spearheaded by Erwin McManus:

McLaren suggests at TPM Cafe:

On the one hand, our religions can fan the flames of holy-war narratives –whether expressed in terms of terrorism or counter-terrorism, jihad or crusade. On the other, our religions can inspire us with framing stories of reconciliation and peace. On the one hand, our religions can foment stories of scapegoating and vilification, but on the other, they can inspire us toward compassion and understanding through stories of reconciliation and grace.

Instead of baptizing greed and self-interest, our faith communities can teach us stories which promote the common good, inspiring us to creatively pursue sustainability both environmentally and socially. Instead of sanctifying the consumerism that reduces everything to a financial “resource,” our faith communities can teach us stories that inspire true reverence for the planet and all it contains – opening our eyes to the signature of God in the hawk soaring among the mountains, the school of minnows flashing in the shallows, the cricket singing in the back yard.

Instead of distracting us from this-worldly injustice, our religions can embed in us a sense of stewardship and responsibility, so that we who have been given much gladly accept much responsibility for our neighbors. Instead of preoccupying us with raising our own moral score so we can consider ourselves spiritual winners at the finish line, we can live in a story of hope that turns our hearts towards our neighbor, toward the stranger, and even towards our enemies.

This fundamentally shatters the claims in Dawkins claims and castigations against Christianity. Thoughts? Agree? Disagree?

(h/t to Zach Exley at Revolution in Jesusland)

This week’s Time magazine features an analysis our “Our misguided farm policy.” To me it seems to be a metaphor about how government policy often favors big business to the extreme detriment of local and small businesses :

But farms still cover most of our land, consume most of our water and produce most of our food. If you eat, drink or pay taxes–or care about the economy, the environment or our global reputation–U.S. agricultural policy is a big deal.
It’s also a horrible deal. It redistributes our taxes to millionaire farmers as well as to millionaire “farmers” like David Letterman, David Rockefeller and the owners of the Utah Jazz. It contributes to our obesity and illegal-immigration epidemics and to our water and energy shortages. It helps degrade rivers, deplete aquifers, eliminate grasslands, concentrate food-processing conglomerates and inundate our fast-food nation with high-fructose corn syrup. Our farm policy is supposed to save small farmers and small towns. Instead it fuels the expansion of industrial megafarms and the depopulation of rural America. It hurts Third World farmers, violates international trade deals and paralyzes our efforts to open foreign markets to the nonagricultural goods and services that make up the remaining 99% of our economy.

The system is overbloated. Grunwald points out:

But farm lobbyists say that simply highlights the continuing need for a safety net–and if the net happens to catch Scottie Pippen, Chevron, Ted Turner and 1,324 recipients in bucolic New York City, that’s a small price to pay.

And rolling back subsidies could help feed Africa:

Another unintended consequence: we don’t make West African cotton farmers poor, but our subsidies encourage overproduction that slightly reduces world cotton prices, making millions of them slightly poorer. An Oxfam study found that eliminating our subsidies could boost their average income as much as 5.7%, enough to feed two of their kids for a year.

Also Grunwald highlights that “the top 10% of subsidized farmers collect nearly three quarters of the subsides.” This seems to be a rather egregious example of a misguided and mismanaged policy which systemically favors the rich over the middle class farmer. Isn’t it time to roll back some of our subsidies or at least reallocate them so that they are more just? Thoughts on the situation? Thoughts on the article?

Free Public Screening: Golden Rule Politics: Reclaiming the Rightful Role of Faith in Politics. Produced by Baptist Center for Ethics.

This DVD offers an antidote to the prevailing myth that GOP stands for “God’s Only Party.” The 35-minute DVD challenges the Christian Right’s political myth constructed over 25 years that the Republican Party is America’s moral party, the party of God’s favor.

Screening Sponsor: Doing Justly at Second Presbyterian Church.

Confirmed Panelists:

Tim Alexander, minister, Smith Springs Church of Christ
William Buchanan, pastor, Fifteenth Avenue Baptist Church
Gray Sasser, chairman, Tennessee Democratic Party
Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder, associate pastor, New Covenant Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and assistant professor of religion at Belmont University

Date:
Thursday November 8, 2007
7pm-9pm

Check out Cool People Care for more info. You can also check it out in short segments online here.

Contact:
info@ethicsdaily.com
615-415-2348
more information
Address:
Second Presbyterian Church
3511 Belmont Boulevard
Nashville, TN 37215

Pastor Rick Warren in Forbes correctly emphasizes:

At the World Economic Forum in Davos you will hear endlessly recited the importance of public and private partnerships in attacking global problems. While that is certainly essential, it is not enough. Neither business nor government has the universal distribution, the army of volunteers or the credibility in villages to get the job done. A one- or two-legged stool will fall over. You need three legs.

Governments set national priorities and agendas. Their role is to protect the people, preserve freedom, provide opportunity and promote prosperity. Businesses and the rest of the private sector provide capital, expertise, technology and management skills, all vital. But the Church also brings several critical missing elements to the table: The worldwide network of congregations offers universal distribution, a local presence everywhere, a large pool of motivated voluntary manpower, long-term grassroots commitment and built-in credibility with villagers. Governments are limited by geography and the sovereign rights of other nations. Businesses, even multinationals, must deal with the barriers of local customs and languages. But indigenous congregations face none of these barriers.

Wow!!!!!!! I think all too often that we’re powerless against the problems of the world. If only we had the faith of mustardseeds…..and with God on our side we might just move mountains.

If you’d like to check out the rest of the article, check out the Rick Warren Forbes article here. (thanks to Dave Ferguson for the link) I would check it out, he links to the Forbes theme issue on the Power of Networks.

thanks to wiseacre for the photo. i’d like to think of it as a David v. Goliath metaphor.

Jesus Creed just posted this review of Everything Must Change:

What does Jesus have to say about equity?

Here are some passages where McLaren thinks Jesus somehow subverts the equity system of his day:

1. Matt 5:25-26: seek reconciliation outside the system.
2. Matt 18:23-35: “penal fairness that requires punishment by the book but lacks mercy isn’t the kind of justice desired by God” (246).
3. Matt 20:1-16: an economy of care for the common good … “social sustainability, healing, and transformation” (247).
4. Luke 16 — the so-called “unjust” steward presumes on a meaning of “just” Jesus doesn’t use. Jesus evidently sees the whole system as unjust and praises a man who defects from the system.
5. Luke 16:13-15 — serving God or mammon and Pharisees who loved money.
6. Followers of Jesus are to have a “justice” that outstrips that of the Pharisees and scribes.
7. He invites the excluded to banquets (Luke 14): read the chp in Luke — potent rhetoric.
8. His treatment of women is similar at undoing systemic injustice; his treatment of children and he washes feet — all subversions of the system.

What does holiness mean? He appeals to John Wesley, for whom holiness was social holiness. Then he appeals to Walter Rauschenbusch to show that holiness transcends the personal; then to Jacques Ellul on rank individualism. “We have in many ways responded to the big global crises of our day with an incredible, shrinking gospel” (252).

The invisible hands of free markets will not undo the systemic injustices of the equity system.

What to do? Check out Jesus Creed for the answer.

Thoughts? Interesting that most of the verses come from Matthew and Luke.

thanks to Carf for the flickr photo

Interesting perspective on a better way to live from Rob Bell in Velvet Elvis:

WAY + +

As a Christian, I am simply trying to orient myself around living a particular kind of way, the kind of way that Jesus taught is possible. And I think that the way of Jesus is the best possible way to live.

This isn’t irrational or primitive or blind faith. It is merely being honest that we all are living a “way”.

I’m convinced being generous is a better way to live.
I’m convinced forgiving people and not carrying around bitterness is a better
way to live.
I’m convinced having compassion is a better way to live.
I’m convinced pursuing peace in every situation is a better way to live.
I’m convinced listening to the wisdom of others is a better way to live.
I’m convinced being honest with people is a better way to live.

Have a favorite Rob Bell quote, podcast, resource or video?

(note to zondervan and other book publishers: Please, please, please as a Christian and book afficionado: three pages is hardly enough of a preview of a book. Please.)

In my explorations of the blogosphere today I ran across these thoughful words from Henri Nouwen:

“When God looks at our world, God weeps. God weeps because the lust for power has entrapped and corrupted the human spirit. Instead of gratitude there is resentment, instead of praise there is criticism, instead of forgiveness there is revenge, instead of healing there is wounding, instead of compassion there is competition, instead of cooperation there is violence, and instead of love there is immense fear.

“God weeps when God looks at our beautiful planet and sees thousands of maimed bodies lying on the battlefields, lonely children roaming the streets of big cities, prisoners locked behind bars and thick walls, mentally ill men and women wasting their time in the wards of large institutions, and millions of people dying from starvation and neglect. God weeps because God knows the agony and anguish we have brought upon ourselves by wanting to take our destiny in our own hands and lord it over others.”

Wow! Thoughts?

UPDATE:  If you would like to learn more about Henri you can check out the Henri Nouwen Society’s webpage or his reading group blog.

(h/t to Mike Cope)
thanks to tanakawho for the flickr photo

This site just launched, but seems like it could be a great model for getting volunteering and communities energized. Check it out whats going on at Change the World Louisville. While its certainly early, I think it has the potential to be a great local model for communities:

We are a group that stepped forward to help on developing the Change the World—Louisville eCommunity We have been working to develop the means to share information on social entrepreneurship and social change.

They even have a social change book club! How cool!

Anyone know of anything similar? I wonder how it could be intergrated with other ongoing work, like Volunteer Match or Idealist.org (for instance via a widget)?