Waving or Drowning?

"And Then I Fell"

Last night on the London - Niarobi flight we flew right down the west coast of Italy past Pisa, and my thoughts were immediately with David.

Turns out he wasn't there.

David is back in Canada, and updates us with some of his own photos and thoughts. Thinking of you here in Mombasa bro... you're my African mentor.

What's in the Reading File

Thursday evening I leave for Mombasa, Kenya and the Amahoro Gathering. Then, it's down to Johannesburg to spend a few days with friends working with Oasis in Cosmo City. Getting there and back is going to be looooong, and a couple friends have asked me about the contents of the reading file I'm taking with me. This is current material, or stuff I've been saving to read. When I actually stop and put it down in a list it helps me see where my thinking is heading!

Here's what I've got.

Articles, etc:

The Chinese in Africa: Trying to pull together, Economist

The Corporate State Wins Again, Chris Hedges (Truthdig)

False Christianity, Soren Kierkegaard

Implicated and enraged: an interview with Judith Butler, The Immanent Frame

Teilhard de Chardin: A Short Biography, John Grim and Mary Evelyn Tucker

The Real Housewives of Wall Street, Rolling Stone

Is the World Too Big to Fail?, Noam Chomsky

Bell Rings True: A Review of Rob Bell's Love Wins, David Dark, (The Other Journal)

The Rise of the New Global Elite, Chrystia Freeland (The Atlantic)

Doing the Work: An Interview Between Steven Pressfield and Ishita Gupta, Amazon

Books to Finish:

Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, Richard Rohr

Naked Spirituality: A Life with God in 12 Simple Words, Brian McLaren

Allah: A Christian Response, Miroslav Volf

Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, Joshua Foer

I won't get through it all, but I may have a few things to say about some of this material when I get back. (And if I don't post this now the list will continue to grow!)

David duChemin's Down (Updated X2)

Our good friend David duChemin, aka @pixelatedimage, has had a fall in Italy and is recovering in hospital.

Erin alerted me this morning to a tweet from his manager Corwin that gave us all a fright:

Now Jeffrey Chapman, who was with him at the time, gives us the blow by blow story. Sounds like David is in rough shape but is still David. Hang in there bro.

UPDATE: Eli Reinholdsten is one of the participants in David & Jeffrey's Within The Frame Italian workshop, and she's posted a few photos of David's adventure. I'll steal one and post here, but go check out the others. We'll keep an eye out and update here when we can.

Photo: Eli Reinholdtsen

UPDATE 2: David updates us in his own words from back in Canada

The Trajectory of Human History

I posted this quote over on my Tumblr page, but I don't want anyone to miss it. This is it. This is what's it's all about...

Today the primary human problem, the core issue that defeats human history, is both revealed and resolved. It is indeed a “good” Friday. The central issue at work is the human inclination to kill others, in any multitude of ways, instead of dying ourselves—to our own illusions, pretenses, narcissism, and self-defeating behaviors. Jesus dies “for” us not in the sense of “in place of” but “in solidarity with.” The first is merely a heavenly transaction of sorts; the second is a transformation of our very soul and the trajectory of history

Richard Rohr, Wondrous Encounters: Scripture for Lent

Holy Days in the Holy Land

Mike's Note: Having been to Hebron and the Ibrahimi Mosque, and seen the insanity that is Shuhada Street, this release from CPT Hebron hits home and breaks my heart just a little bit more.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

20 April 2011

Passover brings further restrictions on Palestinians

The beginning of the Jewish festival of Passover (Pesach) today saw an exacerbation of the restrictions on movement suffered daily by the residents of the Palestinian city of Hebron. The Ibrahimi Mosque lies to the east of the Old City of Hebron. The fourth holiest site in Islam, today the mosque was open only to Jewish worshippers. All of the gates allowing entrance to and exit from the Old City souq on its east side were locked or barred shut to Palestinian residents and non-Jewish international visitors.

This caused significant difficulties for teachers and pupils. A lady whose house is on Shuhada Street, the street along which the Jewish worshippers walk, allowed Palestinians to use her house for getting in and out of the souq; she is widely known as ‘the ladder lady.’ In the morning they rang her bell, and walked through her house and down the stairway into Shuhada Street. The Israeli police on duty in the morning allowed the children and teachers then to cross Shuhada Street on their way to school.

However, when school ended for the day and the children and teachers tried to make the return trip, Israeli soldiers and police initially refused to allow them to cross Shuhada Street, saying that the Old City souq was closed. Teachers, a local community leader, and CPTers asked the police to let the children cross. They pointed out to a senior Israeli policeman that if he did not allow the children to cross Shuhada Street they would have to take a detour of at least three miles. ‘Let them walk three miles,’ he responded. An Israeli peace activist contacted the Israeli DCO (District Coordinating Office) to ask them to intercede. For whatever reason, after a delay, the soldiers and police allowed the children and teachers to cross Shuhada Street, and the ladder lady allowed them to go through her house on their way home.

However, a gate to the Old City was open to some visitors. During the morning Israeli soldiers accompanied several groups of settler-led Jewish groups through the Palestinian souq.

Passover continues tomorrow.

I've posted this photo many times. I took it last year in the old city of Hebron. A dove in teh barbed wire that fences off Shuhada Street.

An Uncharitable Future for Religion?

I have a great deal of respect for the work of Blake Bromley, whose charitable law firm is based here in Vancouver. 

In a recent presentation to a European audience he had some less than optimistic things to say about the future of the sector in general:

Donors will become increasingly sceptical over the next 10 years that investing in charities is the best way to solve social and economic problems, according to the president of a specialist charity law firm.

Speaking at a European Association for Philanthropy and Giving event in London yesterday, Blake Bromley, president of the Benefic Group, an international law firm based in Canada, predicted that donors would start to question whether charities, because of the legal framework they worked in, were the best vehicle to cure society's ills.

"The problem is that too often charity law allows donors to ameliorate social problems rather than solve their root causes." he said.

And if you're involved with a church in Canada there's reason for concern too:

He also predicted that the philanthropic sector would no longer include religion in 10 years. He pointed to the Charities Act 2006, which made it a statutory requirement that religious charities must be able to show that they provide public benefit.

"In secular courts, regulators will gradually begin to hold that religious organisations do not meet the public benefit test of being charities," he said.

I think he's probably correct on both points. Third Sector has the story here.

The worst voice of the brand *is* the brand

Without realizing it, I'm sure, Seth Godin explains why I don't care for the label Christian anymore:

We either ignore your brand or we judge it, usually with too little information. And when we judge it, we judge it based on the actions of the loudest, meanest, most selfish member of your tribe.

When a zealot advocates violence, outsiders see all members of his tribe as advocates of violence.

When a doctor rips off Medicare, all doctors are seen as less trustworthy.

When a fundamentalist advocates destruction of outsiders, all members of that organization are seen as intolerant.

When a soldier commits freelance violence, all citizens of his nation are seen as violent.

When a car rental franchise rips off a customer, all outlets of the franchise suffer.

Seems obvious, no? I wonder, then, why loyal and earnest members of the tribe hesitate to discipline, ostracize or expel the negative outliers.

"You're hurting us, this is wrong, we are expelling you."

What do you stand for?

Atheists Don't Have No Songs

This one goes out to Robert...

(h/t to Open Culture)