A Better World

September is quickly wrapping up, with just a couple more days left. Many initiatives by the office are already happening, or completed. Some of these events include the successful completion of StreetFest, the first blood drive of the academic year that concluded last Thursday, the continued cultivation of community partnerships between residential dorms and their respective agencies, and students doing their Academically-Based Service-Learning at various neighborhoods in Grand Rapids. We sure have lots of real people doing real service.

I thought it would be a good idea to marry our two themes for this month, technology and communities, through this post. Announcing its latest program on the CNN last Wednesday, Google has put in place a $10 million program to fund ideas that have the potential to make this a better world. Check out this YouTube clip.



The “Community” category fits best with what we have been discussing this month. Maybe we should all sit down and proposal an idea?

Technology: Our Friend or Foe?

Technology brings people together. It shapes the way how we, of this (privileged) generation, interact with one another. Phrases like “Google that” or “Facebook me” pretty much grew up with us. We probably didn’t realize such phrases gained meaning only recently. Ask Shakespeare or Aristotle. Then ask your 4-year-old niece. Consider where you are right now on this planet, reading this blog. You probably don't know who its author is. In a way, technology unites people of common interests and promotes community. If online communities do exist, how should such online communal relationships be cultivated? Can technology function like strong and deep roots to keep relationships growing? Isn’t technology amazing and scary at the same time?

Technology can keep people apart too. Some people would rather text or Facebook message their friends even though they live just down the hall. Could this be a cause of many people's fear of public speaking? If so, how are advocacy and lobbying affected? For its powerful society-shaping potential, those before our generation either have to learn how to keep up with technology so to keep up with their children or grandchildren, or they are left sitting on the sidelines.

Thanks to technology, human communication received a facelift. Shakespeare could have been a billionaire when he was alive; Aristotle could have started an online school. Wow.

CAVEAT: I have nothing against Facebook. In fact, I occasionally use it to ask people to lunch... and perform counter-intelligence on identified stalkers.

For the Kingdom

So I went to hear Jim Wallis on campus last night and my dad came along with me. It was a refreshing talk with a couple of great jokes about Washington (I'll put them at the bottom, just for fun) and more seriously, a broad challenge and prediction that this generation may be the one that clears up the confusion about why people think negatively about Christians and positively about Jesus. He was referring, of course, to the research by David Kinnaman (coming to Calvin in January) and Gabe Lyons, in their book, Unchristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity... and Why it Matters. In their polling research both inside and outside the Church, Kinnaman and Lyons discover the painful reality that followers of Jesus are perceived as huge hypocrites that bear little resemblance to the one they follow.

Wallis suggested, as he has been doing for decades, that citizenship for Christians is not and never should be about getting in the pocket of any political party. Faithful Christians will vote for Barack Obama and for John McCain (more likely Sarah Palin, but that's another post...), and neither of these votes is the point. So what is the point?

Wallis' larger point last night was that without a movement among citizens to "change the wind," it won't matter who gets elected. The single most important political fact for Christians is that 30,000 children died yesterday, many from "stupid poverty," or preventable causes. That our society has the technology and the resources, but lacks the will, to reduce this number and lessen, or eradicate, extreme poverty, makes all of our bluster about Christian influence in politics ring hollow.

So the hope in last night's talk, and in my everyday reality in working with students at Calvin College, is that the wind seems to be changing. Even as I sat waiting for the Wallis event to begin last night, I overheard conversations among Calvin students that were profoundly aware of the need to connect our faith practices with our politics, to get beyond the simplified platforms of past elections and wrestle with complexities that require the hard work of living in neighborhoods, worshiping with broken hypocrites, studying policy and history and health psychology. I left with new hope, and work to do. The connections between service-learning and joining movements for change, because of our Kingdom citizenship, abound.

So your reward for getting all the way down here is the two jokes:
First, the religious one:
Two senators, a republican and a democrat are arguing over their parties ability to "get" religion. The republican said to the democrat, "you democrats just don't get it, and you never will," to which the democrat disagreed. The republican then threw down the challenge, "I'll bet you $20 can't recite the Lord's prayer, right here, right now." The democrat rose to the challenge, and boldly prayed, "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep..." "Incredible," said the republican, handing over the $20, "I didn't think you could do it!"
Second the political one:
A person falls into the Potomac River and is drowning a hundred feet from shore. The republicans rush to rescue him and throw a 50 foot rope, shouting, "The rest is up to you!" When that doesn't work, the democrats throw another rope, this one 200 feet long, and then they let go of their end of the rope.

Places

“Places” is a key idea that the office has been discussing and thinking about over summer, the staff training last week, and also especially during this period of StreetFest. The theme for this year’s StreetFest, to embrace fully, projects the hopes “aimed to promote care for place, located within a context of personal relationships and focused on attentiveness to particularity and otherness.”

I think a “place” is somewhere where its residents have a sense of belonging, somewhere where reciprocal and organic relationships between the residents and their environments grow together. People shape places. Some people decide to live in a specific place with no intention to leave, while some people move from place to place.

If places reflect the people within them, then transient people and returning residents are “windows” to that place. These “windows” bring life, new perspectives, and an air of energy from the outside. A place without “windows” is locked within, sinking slowly into a comatose state. Reflectively, if places influence people too, then would non-vibrant “window-less” place suffocate its residents? What do you think?

What does “place” mean to you? Is it any different from “space”?

Activism?

This entry is long overdue. I got a bit distracted with StreetFest.

I finally got a chance to read my assigned article, "Who Is an Activist" while in Minneapolis for a cousin's wedding. On Saturday morning my father and I took a walk along the Mississippi, we moseyed through the farmer's market in the old mill district, and stopped at a coffee shop where he encouraged me a bit about this whole daunting task that I currently face (that is, StreetFest). We sat across some sort of government building and read separately for a while. 

Working as the StreetFest coordinator has been a difficult blessing. This summer has been a lesson in engaging the "system" and sampling bureaucracy. I've enjoyed getting my hands a bit "messy," even at those moments when I'm partly confused as to whether or not I'm doing the right thing. In light of my summer job and my more recent discouragement, reading the article "Who Is an Activist" this past Saturday was a refreshing act of reflection.

Living in right relation with God and creation is important. It is the foundation of everything, it is the motivation for activism. And yet, I have also found it to be entirely confusing and exhausting. What does it mean? Do my summer activities reflect this effort? Perhaps a year or two ago I would have had a different opinion as to whether or not being StreetFest coordinator had anything to do with activism.

I appreciate what this article says about activism when the author writes that we must "have a strategy for shaking the system." In this way, practical activism may sometimes appear mundane. I am sometimes a bit bashful about Streetfest, because it is easy to wonder what purpose it serves. However, my hope is that this event will appropriately apply pressure where it should (our letter-writing campaign to Gildan, vegetarian lunches, and challenging incoming students to engage their city).

I firmly believe that activism has a place in everything. I echo what this article when it says that while not every activist much be a Christian, every Christian must be an activist. In this realization, I believe we are called to living with clear communication. That is, to work together. There must be unity between those involved with new-monasticism, the Jesuits living and working in garbage dumps, the Christian politicians, and the suburban church-goers.

Activism must reach deeper than a protest; it is essentially about a life of love. We must work to insure that our life is consistent with this call to love, participating in our Creator's transformation.

Would anyone like to share their thoughts? (Please)

Summer Reading, "Numero eg" (that's Spangarian)

Discussion: “Faith, Social Justice, and Service-Learning in Environmental Studies: the Struggle for Integration” by Mark Bjelland

I agree! and I appreciate Bjelland connecting faith, service, and social justice to environmental studies. I want to focus on the idea that the connecting of each of these practices should be done most intentionally by recognizing that they are all imperative to the success of each other. As much as I appreciate Bjelland seeing a place for faith, service, and social justice in environmental studies I think we should recognize that it is also necessary to create a place for environmentalism in all other aspects of study and practice. Particularly when we believe that living a Christian life acknowledges that all things are important and therefore connected. In living the Christian life all things are required to be taken care of and to also care for.

In the article Bjelland claims that Gustav, the school he works at, has become less associated with the church over the years and he has struggled with integrating these well. I don’t want to belittle that that may be true and it is also a fear for educators at Calvin. Thinking actively about integrating faith, service, environmentalism and social justice may seem like a revolutionary act but in actuality I think that it can be seen as following how we have always been intended to live. I think that it would be wise for colleges and universities to make intro environmental classes a requirement of many majors and programs. I think it seems more accurate that beyond becoming educated on a skill or particular field the goal for any educational institution is to create people that will care and be mindful of the way that we live. Shouldn’t we therefore be providing them with all the resources to do this well?

I encourage all of you to think about this. There are several ways that action can be done. Being extreme is one, the reason I think extremeness is important is because in reality we are going to fail at uniting these ideas with thoughts and actions. But if our aim and goal is amiably extreme then when we fail at reaching them we will at least have made some movement in the right direction. However, some people are discouraged by failure and need to approach change with accomplishable steps. However, each person has their way that fits them and contributes to their transformation and growth in living, I want to encourage you to please change and participate. Figure out what way or process will help you think and act most thoughtfully and pursue it.

Love from Maine, Elisabeth

Preparing the Way for Justice - Reading 3

The abstract reads, "Though moral educators cannot make their students virtuous, they can promote certain habits of active learning, analogous to the traditional spiritual disciplines, which can dispose the soul towards the subsequent blossoming of embodied and lived-out justice. The incorporation of a range of these disciplines improves typical service-learning courses because each discipline is designed to resist or prune preexisting negative dispositions which could otherwise undermine the transformative power of the service-learning experiences themselves. Kant's doctrine of virtue and Merton's account of monastic spirituality are developed to explain and defend this view."

And here is how he concludes, "I have been arguing that common attempts at the promotion of justice in moral education can suffer form a certain narrowness of vision. In many instances, students quite simply are not morally prepared to make the gargantuan leap from often sheltered and privileged lives to the sacrificial steps required to stand up and support the rights of all, especially the oppressed. Tossing such students into situations where they must go through the motions of justice will not likely bear must fruit unless the ground of their dispositional set is being carefully tilled as well. I hope to have shown that such tilling can be accomplished by adopting the spiritual disciplines as a way to form helping, bulwark, and uprooting dispositions that can then serve to clear a path toward justice. As instructors we cannot guarantee that someone will take the project of morality seriously enough to turn whatever moral exercises we may offer into a fully lived-out justice. But if we grant that transformational moral education is a worthwhile goal, we are at least responsible for creating the conditions under which justice may be cultivated with as little resistance as possible."

Whew. This is in case you don't have the time to read the entire article. The main value I find in Brad Hadaway's argument is the idea that our disposition toward justice may be intimately related to our general spiritual condition. The idea that many Calvin students come to college with preexisting dispositions that actually block them from a deep concern for justice issues resonates with me - I'm pretty sure it was the case with me back in the day. Even now, I think we are all affected by certain elements of our context that prevent us from fully caring about justice for everyone - it's simply too much to think/care about all at once.

My question for all of you has to do with whether or not you can find any connections in your own journeys between your participation in the spiritual disciplines (prayer, service, study, giving, fasting, meditation, worship, etc) and your ability to more fully care about the "rights of all, especially the oppressed?" Another question I take away from this idea has to do with the links that our work has with the work of other folks at Calvin who are charged more specifically with the task of introducing and encouraging the spiritual disciplines in Calvin students - Residence Life staff, and Christian formation staff for starters. Any thoughts on these relationships might be productive too.

That's it for now - hope all's well with you all.

Jeff