Women and poverty

Courtesy of Sojourners Magazine at http://sojo.net/

 It's noteworthy when a religious leader of any stripe openly supports the empowerment of women, but Jim Wallis, the editor of Sojourners Magazine, has never feared speaking out for justice for all people. The continued impoverishment of the female population in America is on Jim's mind a lot lately:

Watching the news cycle for the past week or so, I have been pleasantly surprised at how much the issue of poverty is being discussed. There have been many analyses of the successes and failures of the War on Poverty, the 50th anniversary of which we marked last week. But there is one report that has particularly fascinated me -- and many others -- as it describes how women have been struggling the most against poverty in the United States. In partnership with the Center for American Progress, this year's Shriver Report: A Woman's Nation Pushes Back from the Brink examines the problem of poverty as it pertains to women and proposes solutions to eradicate it.

Although those of us who have lived and worked in low-income neighborhoods have witnessed firsthand how poverty affects women and their children, seeing the numbers laid out is still overwhelming. Two-thirds of minimum wage workers in the country are women. Forty percent of families with children 18 or under have women as either a sole or primary breadwinner. And despite the gains that women have made in the workplace, the median earnings of women working full time are only 77 percent of what the median earnings are for men in similar roles. In Maria Shriver's essay from the report, "A Woman's Nation Pushes Back from the Brink: Powerful and Powerless," she writes, "[m]any of these women feel they are just a single incident -- one broken bone, one broken-down car, one missed paycheck -- away from the brink."

These statistics are not just fodder for ideological debates. They reveal our priorities and values as a nation. And it will take both a spiritual and social movement to change national direction and policy.

Read more:

 

A Protestant leader welcomes the words of Pope Francis

Courtesy of uscatholic.org.

Courtesy of Christianpost.com.

Jim Wallis is a Protestant Christian leader for social change; editor of Sojourner's Magazine; and author of On God’s Side: What Religion Forgets and Politics Hasn’t Learned About Serving the Common Good. I was introduced to Jim Wallis while attending a progressive seminary in the late 1980s, and I continue to be inspired by his work.

 It's typical of Wallis to publicly celebrate and make common cause with Pope Francis. In a piece titled Pope Francis: We Need You in Washington, D.C.,Wallis writes:

Suddenly, unexpectedly, and almost miraculously, the values of simplicity, humility, welcome, and the priority of the poor have burst on to the international stage. A new pope named Francis is reminding us that love is also a verb -- choosing the name Francis because of his commitment to the poor, to peace, and creation in sharp contrast to the values of Washington, D.C.  

Last week the House of Representatives voted to cut food stamps. The previous week marked the 5^th anniversary of the financial collapse, and showed more American inequality than before the recession. And now we face a threatened shutdown of the government unless the health care promised to tens of millions of uninsured people is repealed.  

Pondering all that, I saw the interview with Pope Francis in America magazine and his profile in the new issue of Sojourners. And from every direction, things that the new pope was saying were breaking through the political news cycle. Even my students at Georgetown were telling me that their young friends, Christians or not, were putting Francis quotes up on their Facebook pages. 

Read more:

Syria: a moral crisis requires a moral response

Courtesy of http://omar660.tripod.com/id34.html.

We're talking here about Obama's mistake in issuing a red line dare to the Assad regime in Syria. According to U.S. intelligence reports, Assad took the dare and used chemical weapons against his own people. In response to this tragedy, President Obama and many of his Left Wing followers have suddenly morphed from doves into hawks.

When madness seems to be enveloping the minds of previously sensible people, including the mind of our Nobel peace prize-winning president, it's always a relief to take a time out, breathe deeply, and read what Jim Wallis, the editor of Sojourners Magazine, has to say about the matter at hand:
 
When a head of state is responsible for the deaths of 100,000 of his people and has used chemical weapons against innocent civilians -- the world needs to respond. In one massive attack, the evidence appears to show that 1,429 people, including 400 children, suffered horrible deaths from chemical weapons banned by the international community. That is a profound moral crisis that requires an equivalent moral response. Doing nothing is not an option. But how should we respond, and what are moral principles for that response?

For Christians, I would suggest there are two principles that should guide our thinking. Other people of faith and moral sensibility might agree with this two-fold moral compass.

1. Our first commitment must be to the most vulnerable and those in most jeopardy. Two million Syrian refugees have now had to leave their country and fully a third of the Syrian people are now homeless in their own country. Lebanon, a country of 4 million people, now has nearly 1 million Syrian refugees. Humanitarian organizations are calling this the worst crisis in two decades. Our Scriptures tell us that our first and deepest response should always be to the most vulnerable who are so often forgotten by the world. The world must respond to those millions of vulnerable and jeopardized people. Faith communities all over the world must respond and call upon our governments to do so as well. The U.S., U.K., and other concerned nations must do that -- immediately. And the international faith community should lead the way for a global response to millions of people in deep distress and danger.
   
2. The other task for people of faith and moral conscience is to work to reduce the conflict. Conflict resolution is always the first goal of peacemakers, whom Jesus calls us, as Christians, to always be. How do we act in ways that could lessen violence rather than escalate it? How do we unite the world community against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, put him on trial in absentia to prove that he used chemical weapons against innocent civilians, bring his criminality to the United Nations and other international bodies, and then surround him with global rejection, isolation, and punishment? How do we use this opportunity of his criminal behavior to pressure and even embarrass those nations who have supported him to support him no more?

These two principles make many of us in the faith community wary of the proposed military strikes that are now being considered by the White House, Congress, and others. Why?

Read more:

Washington declares war on the poor

Poor mother and children during the Great Depression, photo courtesy of progressiveperspective.newsvine.com

 

The Right likes to claim that America is a Christian nation, a convenient way to bolster its prejudices against Muslims and other faith traditions. However, this segment of the electorate conveniently forgets the teachings of Jesus, e.g., “love your neighbor as yourself,” when it comes to setting policy for funding programs to assist the elderly, the disabled, and the poor.

When I graduated from a progressive seminary in 1990, a friend gave me a year’s subscription to Sojourner’s Magazine. That’s when I first learned of Jim Wallis, the editor of Sojourner’s who valiantly leads evangelical Christians down the path of social justice.

Speaking of which, Wallis and many pastors with whom he communicates, are now protesting the so-called deficit reduction debate that’s headed toward a war on the poor. Wallis points out that sadly both the Left and the Right are collaborating today in their attacks on the safety net for those in need while seeking to preserve the privileged status of the wealthy.

Wallis writes:

The way you think and feel about the world is shaped by what you see when you get out of bed in the morning. I remember hearing this from civil rights activists. It simply means that perspective is hugely determined by place, context, and vantage point. This is profoundly true for me and most of the people I've ever met. You see the world from the place you live.

Part of the problem in the current budget impasse in Washington, D.C. is the perspectives of the politicians in the debate. Every morning they see and hear each other; the gladiator ring of national politics; the Washington media; their donors; their ideological base; and their latest poll ratings. Sure enough, the perspective that dominates politicians of both parties on the budget is who's up and who's down; whose power is growing or diminishing; whose constituents and donors are better organized and get their interests in front of the lawmakers; what the pollsters say; and how the end result of the debate will impact electoral gains. This perspective also dominates the news coverage.

So we at Sojourners thought there needed to be another perspective in this debate, and that the nation needed other voices. We need to hear from people who see and hear something different from politicians when they get up in the morning -- real people who are struggling, some of whom are poor, families, children, and the elderly, and maybe people whose job forces them to have to read the Bible.

Read more:

Gasp – What a Concept! Human Beings Should Preside Over the Market – Not the Other Way Around!

It’s Sunday morning, and I was drawn to an opinion piece in the Washington Post by Jim Wallis, a religious leader known for his emphasis on social justice for all people.

I especially appreciated these words in A Religious Response to the Financial Crisis:

…the Earth does not belong to the market. Human beings are stewards of God's creation and should preside over the market -- not the other way around. We must replace the market's false promise of limitless growth and consumption with an acknowledgment of human finitude, with a little more humility and with some moral limits. And the market's first commandment, "There is never enough," must be replaced by the dictums of God's economy -- namely, there is enough, if we share it.

Wallis concludes with some excellent advice:

Moving forward, I hope local congregations and national denominations alike will begin reflecting on where they keep their money and how their investments reflect their faith. I envision congregations creating checklists to evaluate who they do business with, and national church bodies considering where they should invest their pension funds.

When I recently told a few friends that my wife, Joy, and I had decided to close our little account at Bank of America and move our money to a local bank that has behaved more responsibly, I was amazed at the response. Religious leaders and pastors from around the country called to say that they, too, were ready to take their money out of the big banks that have shown such shameful morality and instead invest according to their values, by putting money into more local and community-based institutions.

So we've decided not just to remove our own money, but to invite other Christians, Jews and Muslims to do the same. Already we are hearing reports of whole congregations, groups of churches and faith-based organizations, from California to New York City, deciding to transfer their funds to local banks and credit unions.

The banks say they are "too big to fail." So let's make them smaller. We might finally get Wall Street's attention.

Obama’s Spiritual Guidance from Evangelical Pastors Since Parting Company with Rev. Wright

Otis Moss III, whose father is one of five pastors who currently provide spiritual guidance to Barack Obama, succeeded Rev. Wright as pastor at Trinity UCC.

Have you been wondering where Barack Obama has been receiving spiritual guidance and support since he parted company with Rev. Wright and Trinity UCC, the Chicago mega church that used tax-exempt dollars to support the Obama candidacy and trash Hillary Clinton from its pulpit?

Laurie Goodstein at the NY Times this morning reports:

President Obama has been without a pastor or a home church ever since he cut his ties to the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. in the heat of the presidential campaign. But he has quietly cultivated a handful of evangelical pastors for private prayer sessions on the telephone and for discussions on the role of religion in politics.

(Perhaps Obama’s fellowship with evangelical pastors explains the similarities of his oratory with that of former civil rights leaders and evangelical preaching – even the cadences are identical.)

All are men, two of them white and three black — including the Rev. Otis Moss Jr., a graying lion of the civil rights movement. Two, the entrepreneurial dynamos Bishop T. D. Jakes and the Rev. Kirbyjon H. Caldwell, also served as occasional spiritual advisers to President George W. Bush. Another, the Rev. Jim Wallis, leans left on some issues, like military intervention and poverty programs, but opposes abortion.

Take note regarding Rev. Otis Moss Jr.:

Mr. Moss’s son is the Rev. Otis Moss III, who succeeded Mr. Wright as pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, Mr. Obama’s former church. Mr. Wright and the president are no longer in contact, said several people who know both men.

Rev. Otis Moss III is the pastor in the video featuring guest preacher Father Pfleger in his ugly rant against Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primary. Rev. Otis extends a rousing welcome to Father Pfleger and joins the crowd in its applause for his mockery of Clinton. Moss takes the pulpit to say, “Thank God for the message and thank God for the messenger. Thank God for Father Pfleger.” Watch the video.

We can always hope the son didn’t inherit his bigoted contempt for Hillary Clinton from his father who must have been at least somewhat aware of the impeccable record of both Hillary and Bill Clinton on civil rights throughout their years of public service. But of course, that fact didn’t stop the Obama campaign’s several attempts throughout the Democratic primary to smear the Clintons as racists.

Beyond the adversarial to a “politics of solutions”

Note: This post is a column I wrote for my community newspaper in March 2006 in anticipation of the midterm elections. I had recently read Jim Wallis’ book, God’s Politics, and I was inspired to try to elevate the level of political discourse – at least locally. I’ve been reminded of Wallis’ good counsel lately by the personal attacks on Hillary Clinton during and since the Philadelphia debate. Her opponents have attempted to justify their assault on Clinton because she’s the frontrunner. Is this the American way - if you pull ahead in a contest, your opponents have permission to rip you to shreds?


Human beings ideally progress from the age of innocence through experience and finally to wisdom. We don’t usually proceed neatly from one stage to the next. Typically we revisit the earlier stages from time to time. And hopefully, as we mature, we most often choose the way of wisdom.

Politics is one area where we easily regress to earlier stages, especially in the heat of a campaign.

I’ve been thinking about these things since Minnesotans launched the midterm elections on a cold wet evening earlier this month. After our precinct caucus adjourned, a neighbor and I were looking ahead.

We talked for a few minutes about the challenge of expressing our political opinions without attacking those who disagree with us.

I failed to mention that I grew up in a household where a political discussion could become an all out brawl. Or that I still enjoy an occasional no-holds-barred debate with one or two of my relatives.

Matter of fact, my early childhood training sometimes spills over into the public arena. In those instances, no problems are solved, and my opponents and I become even further alienated. Those reasons alone are good enough to stay within the bounds of civil discourse.

But I’ve also been inspired by Jim Wallis’ book, God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It. Wallis is a genius at finding common ground in the most polarized hot-button situations. “Our political leaders must learn the wisdom that the way to reach common ground is to move to higher ground,” he contends. “And we citizens should start by showing the way.”

Wallis encourages Americans to move beyond the adversarial politics of liberal and conservative to a “politics of solutions.”

His analysis of Washington’s approach to problems also applies to state and local government: “Right now Washington responds to a problem or crisis in two ways. First politicians try to make us afraid of the problem, and second, they look for someone to blame for it. Then they watch to see whose political spin succeeded, either in the next poll or the next election. But they seldom get around to actually solving the problem.”

Wallis says the media would rather “pitch a fight between polarized views instead of convening a public discussion to find serious answers.”

Whatever the forum, these guidelines for civil discourse encourage such discussions.

{Maybe we should give each presidential candidate and the moderators a copy of these simple guidelines ahead of each debate}

· Recognize a person’s right to advocate ideas different from your own.
· Discuss policies, politics, issues and ideas, not people.
· Disagree without being disagreeable.
· Use civil and helpful, not hurtful language.
· Respectfully respond to different points of view.
· When unsure of what another means, ask for clarification.

· Realize people may not understand what you have to say. Be patient and explain yourself again if others misinterpret your meaning.

· Recognize that sometimes people can and must agree to disagree.

· If you are not sure what you are about to say is civil, find another way to say it or let it go.

· Reliance on labels for groups of people {illegal immigrants?} is often the first step toward the negative. Whenever possible, avoid them. They rarely add to the quality of any discussion.

Regardless of the issues, the tools of civil discourse can help us reach common ground. Not only will we be more likely to find real solutions to our problems, but as Jim Wallis suggests, we’ll be out in front, showing our leaders the way.

"All We Are Saying Is Give Peace a Chance"

Two Men and a Truck, assisted by my son, helped me move into my new apartment that Labor Day weekend.

A few days later, rushing around to get ready for work, I paused at my second floor east window to watch the breaking of a bright new day in suburban St. Paul.

On the way to my car, I heard the ominous sound of propellers overhead and looked up to see helicopters circling the area. I pulled out of our parking lot and within minutes, I was stuck in a massive traffic jam ― a big tanker had overturned on the nearby interstate.

It took forever to get to work and by the time I parked and walked to my cube in the Communication team’s office, the place was eerily deserted. My co-workers were across the hall staring at a conference room TV. I caught up with them just in time to see the plane slam into the second tower on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

Life as we knew it, both locally and globally, changed instantly. Formerly reasonable and presumably peace-loving acquaintances became angry and defiant. Still numb with shock, I stood in the corridor as a regional vice-president strode toward me and said, “We’ve got to hunt these people down and kill them.”

Hunt them down and kill them.

I heard that phrase often in the days that followed. The media echoed the refrain and soon the drumbeat began for an all out war on terror that called first for bombing to smithereens already shell-shocked Afghanistan, still struggling to recover from a previous war.

Barely pausing for breath and with unlimited hubris, the Administration geared up to send the people of Iraq into “shock and awe” with a targeted, high tech, pre-emptive strike against their country.

It’s rumored that he who appeared in a video recently with beard trimmed and dyed black is still hanging out somewhere along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In the meantime, the insurgency, once referred to by Donald Rumsfeld as a few dead-enders, demonstrated decisively that an I.E.D. concealed in a strategically placed goat cart on a back street in Baghdad, could effectively checkmate the world’s greatest superpower with all of its technological superiority.

Six years later, it bears repeating until we’re blue in the face: Iraq had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks against the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

There were in the beginning occasional voices of dissent. The late Susan Sontag published an essay in the New Yorker shortly after 9/11 guaranteed to provoke the wrath of a good number of liberals, conservatives, and those in between. Six years later, her remarks would seem prophetic to any semi-conscious American. Here are a few excerpts:

“The disconnect between last Tuesday's monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing…

“A wide spectrum of public figures, in and out of office, who are strongly opposed to the policies being pursued abroad by this Administration, apparently feel free to say nothing more than that they stand united behind President Bush…

“A lot of thinking needs to be done, and perhaps is being done in Washington and elsewhere – about the ineptitude of American intelligence and counter-intelligence, about options available to American foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, and about what constitutes a smart program of military defense…

‘"Our country is strong," we are told again and again. I for one don't find this entirely consoling. Who doubts that America is strong? But that's not all America has to be.”

Those days I found refuge and sanity at my church where we gathered, not so much to rail at our “enemies,” but to get centered again in the midst of a national mood combining a volatile mix of nationalism, hyped up patriotism, and evangelical fervor rapidly approaching hysteria.

Ignoring the hype, members of our congregation stood fast and for whatever it was worth, a majority of us signed a resolution opposing the invasion of Iraq.

When it was too late to matter, the NY Times, the daily paper that sets the news agenda in the United States, published a front-page apology for its inadequate investigative reporting in the run-up to that ill-fated invasion, including the farce about weapons of mass destruction.

Let it be noted here that from day one, my son insisted: “The war with Iraq is about oil, Mom.”

But even at our most cynical, small incidents occur that nurture our spirituality and keep us going. I was browsing in the local Barnes and Noble one evening, when another customer hesitantly asked my help. Identifying himself as Muslim, he said he was looking for a book on comparative religion; he wanted to learn more about other faith traditions.

As we scanned the shelves in B & N’s skimpy section on religion, another gentleman joined us. Turned out he graduated from a Catholic seminary in my home state of Ohio. He referred our Muslim seeker to a nearby used bookstore that he often frequented.

It occurred to me later that our theologically diverse threesome, representing Unitarian-Universalism, Roman Catholicism, and Islam, had bonded immediately in a common quest. And I found myself wondering just how a Muslim in search of greater religious understanding happened to run into not one, but two seminary graduates at a neighborhood bookstore.

In the spirit of process theology that advocates bridges instead of barriers, religious leaders as disparate as Vietnamese Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh and evangelical Christian Jim Wallis, editor of “Sojourners Magazine,” began pleading for sanity and calling for peace.

In his book, “Calming the Fearful Mind: a Zen Response to Terrorism” Thich Nhat Hanh wrote: “Many of us claim to be disciples of the Buddha, of Jesus Christ, of Mohammed, but we don’t listen to their teachings. Hatred cannot overcome hatred. Violence cannot overcome violence. The bible, the Koran, the Torah, and the Sutras teach us that. But we don’t always believe in our spiritual path. We must think that our spiritual teachings are not realistic, because we have put so much faith in military and financial power. We think that money and weapons can make us strong. But our country has a lot of weapons and a lot of money and we are still very afraid and insecure.”

The next time I spoke to my son about the prospects for peace, he looked me steadily in the eye and said: “It’s about oil, Mom.”

Jim Wallis reports in "God's Politics," which offers a challenge to both the Left and the Right, that President Bush, who once publicly named Jesus his favorite philosopher, refused to meet with a delegation of U.S. church leaders before leading the nation to war. However, on Feb. 18, 2003, the U.S group was joined by international church leaders in a fifty-minute meeting with Tony Blair. Wallis said they testified in moving personal statements to their conviction that war was not the answer to the real threats posed by Saddam Hussein.

Wallis adds, “We told the prime minister that the answer to a brutal, threatening dictator must not be the bombing of Baghdad’s children.”

Today, the nearly 3,800 American troops who have died in Iraq since the invasion exceeds the number of Americans who died in the attacks on the Twin Towers.

And a recent poll in the Los Angeles Times estimates the death toll of Iraqi civilians at 1.2 million.

As for the children, large numbers of those who have survived the war so far are orphaned, homeless, and malnourished.

UNICEF reports: “Many children are separated from their families or on the streets, where they are extremely vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. Most children have experienced trauma but few receive the care and support they need to help them cope with so much chaos, anxiety and loss.”

9/11, we remember, dawned golden bright. Six years later, the skies over Ground Zero were gray, as raindrops mingled with the tears of survivors gathered nearby.

I wasn’t the only one reminded of where I was and what I was doing on 9/11: Roger Cohen wrote in the NY Times:

“My daughter’s fourth birthday was that morning, and we looked at the billowing smoke from the water’s edge in Brooklyn Heights and she cried. I took the subway to work, one of the last to run, and a woman beside me was sobbing. When, that night, I emerged into Times Square, nobody. I walked for miles through a ghost city.”

Cohen recalls;

“The United States was not previously a homeland, it was just our land, and that unhappy neologism with its Orwellian echoes, its sense of exclusion rather than inclusion, its faint fatherland-like echoes, seems to capture the closing and the menace and the terror-terror refrain with which we have all learned to live.”

Prompted by that refrain, we continue to ask the question that Sen. John Warner asked Gen. David Petraeus in last week’s hearings on Capitol Hill: “Are we safer now?”

And if you were watching, you saw the general, with his chest full of medals, struggle mightily before finally acknowledging, “I actually don’t know.”

Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker offered only a glimmer of optimism in their recommendations for further military engagement in war-torn Iraq based on small signs of success, overshadowed lately by several credible reports of numerous failed benchmarks.

Instead of listening to our president’s speech this Thursday night, I went out to dinner at Culver’s with my son, who had also been following the week’s developments. Pausing between bites of his butter burger, he said, “Mom, it’s about oil.”

The Petraeus report, appended by Bush’s speech, was best described by one commentator as a calculated attempt to kick the can down the road another six months.

According to the transcripts, Bush boasted, “Our troops in Iraq are performing brilliantly. Along with Iraqi forces, they have captured or killed an average of more than 1,500 enemy fighters per month since January.”

And so we continue as we began, determined to hunt down and kill every last one of those whom we fear and label as our enemies.

A brief digression here: In his just released 531-page memoir, Alan Greenspan, a widely respected conservative Republican and former chairman of the Federal Reserve, writes without elaboration:

"I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."

I knew that.

In words compatible with process theology, Thich Nhat Hanh says:

“We have looked for strength and security in military might. “We have attempted to defend ourselves with weapons of war. We have brought great suffering and destruction upon ourselves and others. Our way of dealing with terrorism is taking us down a dangerous path of distrust and fear. It is time to stop. Let us pause. It is time to seek true strength and true security. We cannot escape our interdependence with other people, with other nations of the world. Let us take this moment to look deeply and find a path of liberation. It is possible to look at each other again with the eyes of trust, camaraderie, and love.”

May it be so.

Note to readers: Today's post is an edited, condensed version of the presentation I gave yesterday at my church fellowship. As always, your comments are welcome.

Virginia