Category Archives: Politics and Culture

Partners in Health: 20th Anniversary Appeal


For 20 years, Partners in Health has provided free medical services to the poorest communities around the world, while lobbying developed nations for more equitable access to medication and technology. Their website states, “Our mission is to provide a preferential option for the poor in health care.”

Millions of people are dying of treatable, preventable diseases such as malaria, AIDS and TB because medications are unaffordable or countries lack the infrastructure for traditional means of foreign-aid delivery to be effective. PIH’s innovative “community-based care” shows dramatic results where other programs have failed. Their aid workers make a hands-on, intensive personal commitment to their patients, helping them adhere to treatment regimens and addressing other non-medical problems that interfere with their care. For PIH, fighting disease in poor communities involves larger issues of social justice, including access to education, clean water, shelter, sanitation, and economic opportunities.

Some inspiring stories from their website:

Profile: Haitian AIDS patient delivers treatment and truth
More than 13 years ago, Denizard Wilson was diagnosed with AIDS. Soon he was too sick to continue working in Port-au-Prince, too poor to afford medical care, fearful that time was running out. Then he moved back to his hometown in the Central Plateau and went to PIH for treatment. “Since I have been with PIH, I have never been sick again,” he says today.

A doctor’s journal: bringing hope to patients in LesothoMathabo Posholi was too weak to sit up in bed when Dr. Jonas Rigodon first visited her. Eight months later, she is up and about and eager “to talk to people who have HIV and tell them that they have to take their medicine.”

To donate to their 20th anniversary appeal, click here.

I also recommend Tracy Kidder’s book about PIH founder Dr. Paul Farmer, Mountains Beyond Mountains.

Inmates’ Access to Religious Books Threatened


From the government that brought you Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo…Not content with violating the Eighth Amendment, our prison system is taking aim at freedom of religion, too. Chabad.org reports on new federal regulations that would remove thousands of religious books from prison libraries:


From behind bars, many prisoners turn to religion to fill the void in their lives. Frequently, prisoners’ pursuits dovetail with the prison system’s goal of rehabilitating the convicts in its care; at the end of their incarcerations, if prisoners leave with a better understanding of right and wrong, so the thinking goes, they’ll be less likely to return in the future.

But that logic has come under fire recently by a federal rule change implemented in May limiting prison libraries under the domain of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons from carrying no more than 150 titles dealing with any single religion.

The new policy, while rooted in a desire to prevent religiously-motivated militancy from taking hold in federal penitentiaries, has struck some – particularly Jewish prisoners and officials with the Chabad-Lubavitch Aleph Institute – as odd, considering that many traditional Jewish texts like Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah legal code are now off limits. The rule is being challenged by Jewish, Christian and Muslim prisoners in a class-action law suit.

“Inmates in prison are searching for a sense of spirituality; they are looking to adjust their lives,” said Ron, who spent the past two years and seven months as an inmate at the Federal Correctional Institution in Yazoo, Miss. As with all of the other prisoners and former prisoners interviewed for this story, Ron requested that his last name not be used.

“Inmates are looking to help themselves and search for ways to rehabilitate,” he added. “Most people on the outside do not hear the cries for help from inmates. Many have very little family contact, [and] there is an atmosphere of hopelessness.”

Surprisingly, according to Ron, who was the leader of his prison’s makeshift Jewish community, most prisons are not built with rehabilitation in mind. With the exception of the odd meager job, inmates could, if they so desired, sit around and do nothing all day. Some take the time to plot future crimes or harbor resentment at a system they blame for keeping them incarcerated, he asserted.

Prisoners’ constitutional rights are more limited than those of ordinary citizens, for security reasons, but even so, the regulation should not withstand a constitutional challenge, assuming that the judges obey precedent rather than politics. I would actually argue this as an Establishment Clause issue, not only a Free Exercise issue.

A good case can be made that the regulation fails the second and third prongs of the Supreme Court’s test for Establishment Clause violations in Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971): it is not neutral between religious and secular content (treating religious literature differently from other books that potentially contain extremist political ideas), and it creates excessive governmental entanglement with religion (determining what sect a book is assigned to — e.g. are you going to have 150 Protestant and 150 Catholic books, or just 150 Christian books? if the latter, how do you allocate that quota among 1,000+ denominations?).

I don’t discount the danger of radical Islam spreading in a disaffected prison population, but an overbroad crackdown on all forms of “religion” sacrifices one of the very freedoms that we are fighting for.

Meanwhile, readers, clean out your basements and donate your old books and literary journals to your local prison library. And I mean good books, not just drugstore paperbacks. Prisoners are looking for something of substance to fill their days. I might pick jihadism over Jackie Collins if those were the only two options on the shelf.

Book Notes: Feminism Without Illusions


Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Feminism Without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).

This book by the late lamented historian would have saved me from becoming a Republican had I discovered it when I was in college (1989-93, so it could have happened). Fox-Genovese rejected the entire way that the “canon wars” were framed at that time, and argued that “potential lies not in the repudiation of [gender] difference but in a new understanding of its equitable social consequences.” (p.256) 

Conservatives in the 1990s defended the universality of Western Civilization, and its democratic-individualist ideal of knowledge that could be approached on equal terms by everyone, regardless of “race, class and gender” (the Holy Trinity of political correctness in my youth). The liberals at that time often sounded like determinists, reading texts only through the lens of the author’s, or their own, biological and economic classifications. This paradigm foreclosed communication between groups, and diversity of opinion within them.

However, individualism also has an ironically homogenizing effect when pushed to its limits. It’s liberating to be told that you can be a person first and a woman second. But if I don’t in some sense read this text as a woman, am I reading it as me? Or am I aspiring to become a disembodied intellect — the bargain that male-dominated civilization has typically demanded of women in exchange for access to the republic of letters?

Fox-Genovese saw excesses of individualism on both sides of the canon wars. Conservatives plucked writer and reader out of their personal histories and communities, disguising the power imbalances that affected interpretation. Liberals overshot in the other direction, breaking down the very idea of a common culture into a subjective chaos of individual voices, and ignoring the liberating potential of women’s identification with something beyond their gender. 

In Fox-Genovese’s view, feminism needs to honor women’s experience of two-ness, instead of forcing women to choose between gender and other aspects of their identity:



The principal feminist responses [to gender inequality] have consisted in a celebration of difference and in a denial or repudiation of it. Feminist consciousness, confronting the massive legacy and present power of male culture, has tended either toward female separatism, with an emphasis on essentialism, or toward integration, with an emphasis on androgyny….

Sooner or later all feminists are compelled to face the inescapable, gut-wrenching angers that inform the aspirations of women, too long cast as impure, inferior and inadequate and cast out from the sanctuaries of truth, knowledge, and the Word. This current in any feminism fuels female resentment of male prerogative and encourages women to accept one another’s (and their own) pain. But when this anger crystallizes in separatist tendencies, it easily slips into indiscriminate attacks on “male knowledge” and “male values.” It seeks beginnings in imagined pre-patriarchal utopias, histories in heresy, and futures in gynocentrism….


Another feminist current, seeking to escape the anguish of anger, aspires to the “purer” spheres of androgyny: the true word knows neither male nor female, nor does the rational polity, the equitable task, or the order of the just….Indeed, any vigorous individualism carries androgynous overtones….


The categories of individual, citizen, and artist refer to the self-conscious being, the political being, and the creative being in such a way that the attributive takes priority over the substantive — becomes the substantive. And once being is identified with its attribute and becomes in some sense categorical, being comes to be understood primarily as the unit of a system. Any variety of physical being (male, female, tall, short, black, white) may, theoretically speaking, occupy the category, for individuals become interchangeable. Or so traditional conservatives have always insisted in reproaching radical egalitarians….


[Androgyny feminism] too closely resembles the model of the angels, or of rational politics, or of the occupational possibilities of multinational capitalism. It abstracts too much from the varieties of life in different human bodies, proposing homogenization of the ways of being — of male and female — rather than advocating free access to social and cultural categories for very different beings. (pp.226-28)

I chose conservative individualism over collectivist feminism in college because the intellect seemed like a much more level playing field than the vagaries of the body, popular sentiment or sisterly goodwill. I was smart and therefore unpopular, and whatever feminine wiles I might have had, I was afraid to use, because the callous sexual precociousness of my peers seemed light-years away from my private dreams of romance. The touchy-feely educational environment of the 1970s allowed for a lot of arbitrary favoritism by teachers and cliquish bullying by students, factors that turned me off to emotion-based, particularist philosophies. Impersonality was my friend. I wanted a system where I would get an honest wage for honest work even if nobody liked me.

 

Even now, when I have the power to choose which collectives I belong to, and therefore the privilege to sentimentalize connectedness and particularism, I am conflicted about how much my gender matters to my identity. The traditionally “feminine” aspects of myself are the ones I feel most self-conscious about, because I see them as signs of weakness: my preference for the domestic over the corporate realm, my love of luxury, my emotional sensitivity and volatility, and what we will tactfully call avoirdupois. The traits I am most proud of are “masculine”: my analytical mind, my independence, my outspokenness, my aggression in debate, my impatience with “relationship drama”.

One reason I support gay rights so passionately, in fact, is that my attraction to men feels more essential to my personality than the shape of the body I happen to be in. It’s only the luck of the draw that I’m a straight woman and not a gay man! Many women would say that their identity-formation was very much a gendered experience. That wasn’t true for me, and so for a long time feminism turned me off, because it seemed to invalidate a childhood and adolescence in which I was pretty much a floating brain in a jar. Pleasurable experiences of being female were largely unavailable to me then (except for clothes-shopping!). Being told to have warm fuzzy feelings about the Goddess only increases my anxiety that there is a template for female normalcy that I will never fit. I guess I am still an individualist after all — more comfortable expressing my physical side than before, but unwilling to let anyone turn my body into a symbol of values I didn’t choose. 

Support Mthatha Mission in South Africa


Jesse Zink, a young man who grew up in our Episcopal parish, preached an amazing sermon today about his upcoming stint as a missionary in South Africa. Jesse will be working at the Itipini medical clinic in a shantytown outside Mthatha, which was the capital of the largest apartheid-era black “homeland” and is still one of the poorest parts of the country with one of the highest rates of HIV and tuberculosis. You can follow his progress (and make donations) at his blog Mthatha Mission.

In his sermon, he reflected on the mixed history of Christian missions and how the word “missionary” can be reclaimed for a less colonialist, more service-oriented way of living out the gospel in a foreign culture:


I read the Bible as a whole, a complete piece of divinely-inspired literature that – while contradictory and confusing in many places – tells a couple consistent messages throughout. The message I hear most frequently is evident in this morning’s Gospel. Jesus says, “one’s life does not consist in the abundance of one’s possessions” and warns those who “store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.” We can summarize this message by paraphrasing what is often associated with a president: “Ask not what you can do for yourself; ask what you can do for God and God’s people.” God has created us, knows each one of us, and has blessed each of us with a unique set of gifts, not to enrich ourselves and store up treasures on earth but to enrich God’s fallen world and make it more like God’s perfect creation. That is no small task and not one that we accomplish in a day, a week, a month, a year, or even a lifetime. It is a task we shall never see the conclusion of. But it is a task to which we must devote our lives all the same.

Since we each have different gifts, we fulfill this godly duty in different ways, in a way that fully expresses the diversity of the Body of Christ metaphor Paul uses in his epistles. But we are united by one theme: service. I define service as the act of putting the needs of others ahead of the needs of oneself. We have our own desires and wishes, of course, and we shouldn’t deny them, but our orientation needs to be primarily outwards, towards our brothers and sisters in Christ, and not inwards, enriching only ourselves.

It is this attitude that has drawn me first to Nome, Alaska where for the past two years I have worked as a news reporter at a public-service radio station there, broadcasting to Alaska Natives in Western Alaska, who live in what are frequently termed “third-world conditions.” And it is an attitude that made me search for something like YASC. But when I found out that I would be a missionary of the church if I joined YASC, I paused. Why not stay in Nome or anywhere on this continent and continue to be a contributing member of society? Why not join some other secular service program, like the Peace Corps, which I seriously considered after college before opting for grad school? Why not run as far away from the dreaded m-word as possible? What theology of mission could I arrive at that would allow me to reconcile my belief in service with my hesitation at, say, the Great Commission?

…When Christian fervour for overseas mission work began to reach a critical mass in the early 19th century, the focus was on the “missions of the church,” that is, the hospitals, schools, and churches around the world that various parts of the church in the rich world supported. “Mission” is rooted in the Latin word that means “sent” so it made sense to focus on these discrete outposts of people who had been sent from their homes. While this is likely where the negative view of missionaries began, we should also recognize there were as many kinds of missionaries as there are kinds of Christians and many were kind and loving types who prayfully served their new communities.

Over time, however, this focus changed and people began speaking about the “Church’s mission.” The question became, What is the church doing all over the world and how can we all participate in that one mission? The Episcopal Church, for once in its life, was ahead of the game and in 1830 declared that every member of the church was a member of the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America, which remains our official title today and which means all of you are missionaries as well. Everyone participates in mission.

But focusing on the “Church’s mission” forgot an important element: God. So the focus in the last few decades has been on “God’s mission” and the question that is central to this is, What is the mission of God that the church and its members can participate in? The church is not the same all over the world, which is what the “Church’s mission” idea seemed to imply, but God’s mission is.

God’s mission is, and always has been, one of reconciliation, that is, bringing people to each other and bringing people to God. At Creation, God created Adam and Eve to be in relationship with each other and in relationship with their Creator. They, of course, fell away from that relationship, setting the model we continue to follow today. The reading for Hosea this morning is a reminder of the numerous times Israel fell away from God but also the equally numerous times God called those same sinful people into closer relationship with God, in the spirit of what Hosea calls God’s “warm and tender” compassion.

But God decided the work of reconciliation needed a human face and so took human form as Jesus Christ, who reached out to everyone but particularly the down-trodden, the outcast, and the forgotten and sought to bring them into loving relationship with their world and God. In the remainder of the New Testament, God’s message spreads beyond Israel as people are sent into the world to seek to reconcile our fallen world to God’s creation.

It is a testament to the challenge of this reconciling task that our mission is the same now as it was then: to do that work of reconciliation with the power of the Holy Spirit and the knowledge of Revelation and the Resurrection, that what is old can be made new again and that what is dead can be re-born. I’ll save my exegesis of the Great Commission for another time but it is this theology and this history that has made me comfortable with the idea that I am now a missionary. The point of performing this service mission in a religious context as opposed to a secular one is that it is rooted in and affirming of the faith that is the fundamental driving force behind the desire to serve….

Jesse’s sermon filled me with hope as an example of the Episcopal Church via media at its best: Public service not as a substitute for faith in Jesus, but as the natural and beautiful expression of that faith. Confession of Christ as Lord as the foundation for all we do, but not as a substitute for actually feeding his sheep. My prayers are with him.

“This New Armada” by Conway


My correspondent “Conway,” a prisoner at a supermax facility in central California who’s serving 25-to-life under the state’s three-strikes law for receiving stolen goods, reports in his July 13 letter that conditions have improved since his transfer to a new facility. He now has a job as education clerk, grading GED’s, and access to a typewriter and a library of donated books. (Unfortunately, I have no way for readers of this site to send him books without revealing his name and location, which he’s asked me not to do; instead, if you are so moved by this post, donate some quality reading materials to a prison in your area.) Here’s one of his latest poems, written on the back of a news story from several years ago about brutality at Corcoran prison:

This New Armada

I never understood this loss
   till cuffs were locked behind my hands;
I should’ve seen it comin along
   slidin past my hourglass’ sands.
Inside heaped stones, heavy of time
   forever life’s boulders climb
out of reach my memories leach
   reminisce the cloudless sky
clinging to my heart, like a lover apart
   caught in a hurricane’s eye…

Treading the sweating dust, with lust
   after a desert storm,
bringing the singing lightning along
   in its jagged twisted form.
On this unwholesome Armada —
   of prisons, marching across the land
waiting to crush the abandoned souls
   into miniscule grains of sand
These inescapable islands adrift
   dark sentinels of injustices thirst
a land of chain webs-n-mazes
   cunning nets, sworn to catch you first…

High walls with strung wires
   broken strings on an old guitar
reminding the unforgiven alone
   left serenading “The Morning Star”
it is bad when you run away
   “They say” that Razor wire hurts
Those ominous ropes reveal —
   past attempts, you can see
their decomposing crucified shirts…

Support Soulforce Campaign for Gay Marriage in NY State


New York Governor Eliot Spitzer has introduced a bill to extend equal marriage rights to same-gender couples. Over the next two weeks, interfaith gay activist group Soulforce will be sponsoring GLBT youth to travel to the districts of key “swing vote” state senators and assembly members to tell their personal stories. Soulforce will hold townhall meetings, attend community events and church services, and speak with state legislators and their constituents about same-gender marriage. You can volunteer to participate or support them with your donations here.

Adnan Mahmutovic: “Integration Under the Midnight Sun” (excerpt)


The latest issue of The Rose & Thorn e-zine features this lyrical and heartbreaking story by Adnan Mahmutovic, from his collection Refugee. “Integration Under the Midnight Sun” offers a glimpse of female refugees from the Bosnian war now living in Sweden, and the varied ways they come to terms with their memories of lost loved ones.


For three years I have been embalmed, but there is faint thunder under my ribs. I wear the same outfit in which I left Bosnia: a blue oversize cardigan somebody wrapped around me that night I was shoved into a bus to Sweden, a pink shirt and a white bra with laced edges underneath, a short corduroy skirt and mismatching colourful stockings like the ones of Pippi Longstocking.

I bask in the midnight sun, which is colder than usual. The polar circle is gliding down to this village. I do not want to go to my one-roomer. I have nothing there but two half-withered plants called Adam and Eve, sheltered behind metal shutters, cut off from all the temptations of nightlight. When they are not placed next to each other, Adam and Eve produce drops of water on their thick leaves—tears of separation. But these two specimens are crying all the time, as if they have been unhappily married since naked times.

It would be nice to have a house like the one back home in Bosnia, but what good would it be if it is not crowded by my parents and seven brothers. There would be no steam from the kitchen and thick, pungent smells of exhausted bodies. I used to tell them apart by the sweat on their cheeks, by the way it mixed with the soap smell from their uncombed hair and their hand-me-down clothes. In the mornings, I would lie in my bed, pretending to be asleep till each and every one of them gave me a kiss. They would whisper, “Snow White, rise and shine.” Waking up, the splendid ceremony.

Not any more. I wake up alone and the first face I see is my own. The mirror tells me my hair is no longer jet black; there are lime white, unwieldy streaks on my head, but my skin is still white….

Read the rest here. Read a review of Mahmutovic’s book here.

Pride NYC: June 2007

I was in NYC the last weekend of June for the Pride March, which I watched from the steps of my former church. The Church of the Ascension is on Fifth Avenue toward the end of the parade route. I was very moved to see members of the parish, in T-shirts reading “Proud Episcopalian,” spend hours passing cups of water to the marchers.  Too many heads in the way for me to get a photo of them, unfortunately.

The parade seemed more family-friendly this year than the last time I attended, five or six years ago. Despite the perfect weather, few bared all. I think there were also more religious groups, especially Episcopal ones. One of the grand marshals was Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum of Congregation Beth Simchat Torah, where my parents and I used to attend High Holy Days services. If you’re ever in NYC on Shabbat, check out CBST — Rabbi Kleinbaum gives the best sermons around. (Our family is at least three stripes in the diversity flag all by ourselves.)


Dignity USA is a Catholic group that advocates equality for women and gays in the Church.




The Episcopal flag and the rainbow flags.



I forget which group this was, but I liked their color scheme. Modern life offers too few opportunities to dress like a butterfly.



St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church members with their “Come to St. Bart’s” banner.



As usual, the drag queens were the best-dressed.



This was the noblest Roman of them all.



Riverside Church, an interdenominational Christian church near Columbia University, is known for its liberal political activism. Their senior minister emeritus, the Rev. Dr. James A. Forbes Jr., is an internationally acclaimed preacher.


Well, I guess that’s it till the Halloween parade…

Know Your Audience (A Little Too Well)


From yesterday’s Boston Globe, word of an unusual book-signing planned in Waitsfield, Vermont:


At The Tempest Book Shop, the paperback books won’t be the only things without jackets Thursday.

A “clothing optional” book signing event will be held by nudity author Jim C. Cunningham, with customers invited to leave their clothes at the door.

“The reason for this is to ‘put our bodies where our mouths are,’ living what we preach,” Cunningham said. “The public are invited to express their solidarity with our message by also donning their birthday suits upon entering the book store.”

The event is scheduled for 6 p.m., which is after the shop’s usual closing time. And there are rules: Everyone who plans to strip must bring a towel, and there’s no gawking….

Cunningham’s 596-page “Nudity & Christianity” book contains no pictures. It’s packed with biblical references to nudity and other citations that support his view that nudity is natural, not erotic, and that clothing — generally — should be optional.

Well, they do say that the cure for stage fright is to imagine your audience naked.

Signs of the Apocalypse: The Jews Killed Mickey Mouse!

Today’s Morning Intelligence Brief from the geopolitical news service Stratfor (subscription-only; well worth it) offered this tidbit about how Palestinian militant group Hamas is trying to establish its legitimacy as a political party:


Hamas has arrested the spokesman for the Army of Islam, the group that is holding British Broadcasting Corp. correspondent Alan Johnston in Gaza, senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri said on Monday. The arrest comes exactly two weeks after Hamas publicly announced that it would free Johnston from his jihadist captors “using all means necessary.”

Hamas’ recent actions are part of its Gaza leadership’s strategy to illustrate the group’s political legitimacy in the wake of its June 15 takeover in Gaza. This also explains why Hamas recently killed off the infamous Mickey Mouse look-alike character that urged Palestinian children to kill Israelis in a children’s TV show aired on a Hamas-owned station. After getting serious flack for using a Western Disney character to promote jihad, the producers at the station had the character beaten to death in the show’s final episode by a character posing as an Israeli.

Well, that certainly makes things all better…