Evolutionary Christianity

Since the beginning of December an interesting series of interviews has been taking place on the internet regarding a shift in thinking due to the story of the universe as explained by Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme and many others:

http://evolutionarychristianity.com/  I direct you here because it is best to get a sense of the project as a whole before going to the download page. Nevertheless, the specific interviews can be found at
audio-downloads/

 I draw your attention particularly to the intervention of Thomas Morewood. While you are there you might want to listen to some of the others as well. They include people like Diarmuid O'Murchu, Bishop Spong, Matthew Fox,  and many others: Catholic, Protestant and Evangelical.

This shift in thinking is breaking out throughout the world and not just among Christians. While religion may have played a negative role in many moments of history -- and that story is far from over -- it must be noted that that role has been a failure of religion in its deepest sense rather than an expression if its role. There is an important job ahead to challenge religion to accept task of building a more human world by rethinking its whole set of traditions and finding for itself a very largely transformed role in our world.

Hope: hiding round the corner

    Among the songs and prayers leading up to Christmas, we find this one from Germany in the 14th century:
     Behold a rose of Judah
     From tender branch has sprung,
     From Jesse’s lineage coming,
     As those of old have sung.
     It came a flower bright
     Amid the cold of winter,
     When half spent was the night.

     In a very beautiful poetic way it describes the flowering of hope for our world, “when half spent was the night.” They are words that we can read today, centuries later, and still find deep meaning.
     One of the important struggles many people have today is not just keeping hope alive but of searching for hope itself, for something that will make hope flower in the heart.
     I would like to believe that the flowering of hope is always just around the corner, present but not always evident to our line of vision. It will never come forward unless we keep journeying and struggling. Nevertheless, it is there and it is waiting for us and reaching out to us.

Merry Christmas and a blessed New Year !!

Omar Khadr: Child Soldier

Omar Khadr is a young man who was captured by Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan during a confrontation in 2002. He was 15 at the time and badly wounded; medics had to work hard to save his life. It turned out he was the son of a close collaborator with Bin Laden and, surprise, a Canadian citizen. His father had taken him to Pakistan and enlisted him in the struggle when he was 10 years old. After a period of “robust” interrogation, he was transferred to Guantanamo Bay where, after 8 years, he remains the only Western prisoner there. The US government recently put him through a military trial at the end of which he confessed to all the crimes he was accused of as part of a “deal” that would limit his further incarceration to another 8 years with the possibility of transfer to a Canadian prison after one year.

“Public” and “private” in the debate about “laicity" in Quebec

The Quebec Group on Contextual Theology--See my link--has begun reflecting on what “laicity” means in Quebec.  It is not a discussion we hear about much in the English-speaking world and it is often confused by English-speaking peoples with a discussion about secularity.  However, in point of fact, the two are not the same. Secularity has to do with the distinction between the sacred and the profane.  Laicity has to do very specifically with the way religion functions in the public (especially State) sphere. The debate has been long and heated in Quebec and some trace it back to the reaction to Catholic ecclesiastical influence prior to the Quiet Revolution in Quebec in the 1960s.

Axial Times Series

      I do a fair bit of translating, mostly from Spanish into English. The Latin American Agenda is probably the best known work I translate for. It is coordinated by a Catalan priest working out of Panama, José María Vigil. You can access it at  http://latinoamericana.org/English/ You will notice that a printed version is available from Dunamis Publications, that I coordinate. The past editions are available by clicking at the designated spot at the bottom of the page. It is a remarkable tool for adult education on a wide variety of topics. Each edition has 50 contributors from Latin America, many of them extremely well known like Leonardo Boff and Jose Comblin.

The Geography of Hope

   Chris Turner is a journalist worth knowing. First of all he is has received many awards. Secondly, he is a really good writer, easy to read and fun.  I've just finished his 2007 book (Random House Canada): The Geography of Hope: A Tour of the World We Need.
   It is precisely that: a tour around many initiatives in different parts of the world to look at sustainable development that harbours hope for the future. He looks at wind and solar power, options for public transportation as well as trends in car manufacture, new ways of building houses and urban design to avoid sprawl. He brings in examples from Europe, North America and several countries in Asia. The approach allows him to tell stories and tell them well.
   Most of all I was impressed with the second part that tries to put together some of the threads that deserve analysis in the "business" of sustainability: the economics of it, its ideological bent, the development industry and the role of community.  In this last category he waxes eloquent about a number of communities he visited including the exiled Tibetans in India and the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland.
   The epilogue alone is worth the whole book. Copyright restructions won't allow me to copy it in full--though I'd like to. Nevertheless, here are a few lines to savour.  He is standing on a hill overlooking Calgary, Alberta, where he now lives. It is not exactly the first city one would think of as a location for a discussion of sustainability. Nevertheless:

I look out now from Scotsman's Hill, and I see hope. It surprises me just how much. It's not obvious or easy and it's far from certain, but it's there nonetheless. I see the city with new eyes, through new lenses. This will have to be my sustainable city on a hill, because the piecemeal map I've assembled must in time become a map of the whole world.

    He points to any number of urban initiatives already underway including the Light Rail Transit powered by a Wind Farm to the south of the city. But he also imagines all kinds of other possibilities drawn from real experiences he has discovered--and the city is transformed in his eye.

My greatest hope, the one I'd set out on this journey to find, is that all of this represents the first faint glimmering of a sustainable dawn.

   At a time when it is all to easy to point out the catastrophic possiblities that loom before humanity, it is energizing to read a young author who is so filled with hope and to find that hope based on real possibilities that are just waiting to be fulfilled.

Honduras and out

    Honduras was quite a different experience from the two countries visited earlier. (See the previous posts.) For one thing, in economic terms, it is the poorest country in Central America--and it shows! It is also the country that showed the biggest sellout to U.S. style enterprise with major American transnational logos, offices, and outlets staring one in the face just about everywhere in the capital. We visited another Goldcorp mine, the San Martin Mine about two hours north-west of Tegucigalpa. It is a mine that ceased operations a couple of years ago and has been going through the process of shutting down. Goldcorps presents this as a model case for how a responsible mining operation should be closed out. Unfortunately there are a lot of unanswered questions about what went on and is still going on. People from other parts of Latin America who are threatened with mining projects have come to the San Martin mine to learn about the impact of a mine of a community: division and violence in the community, breakdown of cultural ties, contamination of the water sources and indeed possibly of the water table, a distinct possibility of long-term acid drainage. In the history of the mine, children became sick, broke out in rashes and lost clumps of hair. Livestock died, in fact 70 in one instance. The mine has erected an enormous poster at the entrance to their "Ecological Park" announcing the presence of a navigable lake, the presence of many species of animals and plants etc. In the area where the mine deposited its tailings (a very long and high ridge in place of the large hill that was there before), they have planted plants for fodder rather than the trees that were there on the hill before. There are many questions.
   At the same time we tried to discover the situation in the country following the coup that removed President Zelaya from office a year ago. It was followed by months of massive protest and it is clear that the movement to restore a democratic government has not abated in spite of the so-called elections that took place a few months ago.  While little of the opposition appears in the national or international press, the repression of the leaders continues unabated. Almost every day we heard of killing and disappearances. Many of them were officially attributed to gangs but it is remarkable how consistently the  victims turn out to be leaders in the resistance. As one person told us, the situation is very serious and dangerous !

Moving on to Honduras

   We have now completed our visit to Guatemala and El Salvador. We were able to visit the Canadian gold mine operating in San Marcos. The company here is called Montana Explorations but the owner of that company is Goldcorp, registered in Canada. It is a much larger mine that we had realized and there are a number of serious questions about the contamination (especially of water) and the treatment of the surrounding communities. According to a report we received yesterday, one woman who has been opposing the mine -- now operating for several years -- was shot in the head earlier this week. We met with representatives of these woman while in San Marcos. They are poor campesinos without much education, who have seen their lives turned upside down since the mine arrived.
   Yesterday we were able to visit a second gold mine operated by the same company near the El Salvador border. While it is not yet operating, the infrastructure is well advanced and they hope to go inter operation in another few months. There are serious questions here about contamination of water because the mountain where the mine will operate is impregnated throughout with water and the discharge from the mine would be into streams that feed a river that then goes into a very large lage that occupies both sides of the Guatemala-El Salvador border. About 25,000 families live along the shore on the El Salvador side and are fearful that the lake will be affected by the discharges from the mine and that the fish in the lake will die. Several fishing cooperatives cultivate talapia in the lake and most families either live off the fishing or at least feed themselves from the lake which has an abundance of species.
  We were also able to speak with representatives from an NGO in San Salvador which is monitoring the situation in the Cabañas region of El Salvador where a Canadian mining company is suing the Salvadoran government for 10 million dollars for having denied permission to operate. Another American company did the same thing just a few days and for the same amount. It is will probably take quite along time for the issue to be resolved through the Free Trade Agreement mediation processes.  Meanwhile in that same area several people have been assassinated in the area over the past year -- all of them leading opponents of the mine there. While the mine itself has not been identified as directly responsible for the deaths, it is fairly clear that the conflict between those who support the mine and those who oppose it has played a role in creating a violence-prone climate.
   The representative of the Canadian embassy in Guatemala, with whom we met several days ago, minimized the importance of the mining dispute even though the United Nations special relator on mining who visited Guatemala a few weeks ago met with two major manifestations of opposition to the mines -- one group is officially calculated to have included 10,000 people and the other 15,000. The indigenous people of Guatemala are are solidly against mining in their territory -- especially in the western regions of San Marcos and Huehuetenango. 
  Later today we will begin our visit of Honduras where there are several Canadian mining projects. We are also interested in the role the Canadian government and Canadian business interests may have played in the troubles that have plagued Honduras over the past year and that led to a government coup. 
  More later

Visit to Central America

    I have not entered any new material for some time now and it will be difficult to post very much in the coming days.
However I do want to bring anyone visiting this site up to date.
    Currently three members of the Social Justice Committee of Montreal (myself included) are visiting Central America. I am sitting here in the middle of Guatemala City after spending several days visiting the western region of  Guatemala, talking with communities affected by mining companies there.  Later in the week we will begin visiting other Central American countries as well.
    The situation is serious and the people are more and more organized. There will be more to say later in the month.
     Meanwhile I hope everyone is enjoying the summer and some measure of rest.

Hope and Mobilization

Here is a provisional English translation of the reflection prepared by the Quebec Group on Contextual Theology. See the French version below.

In the preceding two texts about the economic crisis (Who will help us cross the desert? April 2009; New World Coming, February, 2010. See http://gtcq.blogspot.com/), we tried to discern paths that might serve not only to come through the crisis, but also to deepen our hope. Wishing now to raise questions and to share, we finish this series of texts by proposing a reflection on the mobilizing strength of hope.

    Spontaneously, hope can be associated with waiting, and so be seen as contrary to active and committed mobilization. We believe rather that it is required for engagement: without it, why continue, especially when the results hoped for are not realized or when they are few and far between? Some interpretation is required. In a Christian perspective, it is the search for coherence between our current action and what has been promised by God for our common future. The new world comes unceasingly toward us; it awakens us and comes about through our commitments. (See the earlier texts.) In real life, how can we link the reception of this new life with the responsibility to make it bear fruit? How can we link hope and mobilization in a context of crisis and of multiple questioning?

Espérance et mobilisation

Voici la réfléxion la plus récent du groupe de théologie contextuelle québecoise.

    Dans nos deux textes précédents sur la crise (Qui nous fera traverser le désert ?, avril 2009; Voir venir un monde nouveau, février 2010. Cf. http://gtcq.blogspot.com/), nous avons cherché à discerner par quels chemins nous pourrions non seulement sortir de celle-ci, mais y approfondir notre espérance. Avec le désir de susciter questionnement et partage, nous terminons cette série de textes en proposant une réflexion sur la force mobilisatrice de l’espérance. L’espérance peut être spontanément associée à l’attente, comme en contradiction avec une mobilisation active et engagée. Nous croyons plutôt qu’elle est nécessaire à cet engagement : sans elle, pourquoi continuer, surtout lorsque les résultats attendus ne sont pas au rendez-vous ou se font rares ? Encore faut-il l’interpréter. Dans la perspective chrétienne, elle est une recherche de cohérence entre notre agir présent et ce qui est promis par Dieu pour notre avenir commun. Le monde nouveau vient sans cesse vers nous ; il se révèle et s’actualise à travers nos engagements (cf. précédents textes). Comment lier existentiellement l’accueil de cette vie nouvelle et la responsabilité de la faire fructifier ? Comment rattacher espérance et mobilisation dans un contexte de crise et de multiples remises en question ?

Ecological Economy

    This is a term that is currently making the rounds and that is the fruit of a considerable history. You will remember that, for quite some time now, the term “sustainable development” has been much in vogue among governments and industry. It is a term coined by the Brundtland Commission back in the 1980s in order to respond to the need for more sensitivity to increasing environmental degradation by industry.  The problem with the term is that is contains a contradiction.  “Development” is inextricably bound up with an economy of growth and we have learned to our dismay that growth is, by its very nature, unsustainable on a limited planet.  The development pursued in policies of “sustainable development” has shown itself to be unsustainable.

     There is a further problem with the term “development” that was already well known at the time of the Brundtland Commission.  The opposite of “developed” (referring to industrialized countries) was, and often still is in my minds, “underdeveloped,” or “less-developed.”  However, as Gustavo Gutierrez already pointed out in the early 1970s, the countries of the so-called “Third World” were and are not so much “less-developed” or “underdeveloped” as they are oppressed by economic forces that make an equitable distribution of wealth practically impossible. There was and is, from the perspective of oppression, a call to redirect our thinking about economy as such. Some of the reflections reproduced in this blog reflect that effort. “Economy,” as it turns out, is the way we manage our “home,” that is to say the Planet Earth, so that the needs of all its creatures might be satisfied in such a way that the Planet and life on the planet remains healthy.  Granted, this is a fairly recent insight and one that has certainly not gained ascendency in the world at large, even though support is growing.

     Also during these same years, since the 70s, there has been a growing concern about the “environment,” as it was first termed. The problem with the term “environment” is that it is entirely human-centred. The water, air, land are seen as something that “surrounds” humans and that we needed to manage so that it serves our needs. More recently the term “ecology” has gained respect among thinkers and the general public.. “Ecology” is a term that points much more directly to the Planet Earth as such and to the complex ways in which the various elements that constitute it work to maintain a healthy interdependence.

     So we come to an “ecological economy.”  The term has a very large frame of reference: the Planet Earth.  It is particularly concerned with those 60 or so kilometres between the depths of the ocean and the stratosphere, where the majority of life forms find their habitat. As an economy it looks to the ways in which these life forms interact in such a way as to maintain a healthy balance. It also recognizes that the human species has, over the centuries, carved out such an enormous place for itself that the management of the health of that ecological balance lies more and more in human hands. In this respect “ecological economy” challenges our received theories about who we are as human beings and also our relationship with other creatures and the Planet Earth itself.  It leads us to recognize that we have a responsibility to assure that the health of the Planet, upon which depends our own health as a species, is cared for.

Strategies for Surviving Societal Breakdown

     A month ago I presented a reflection on this blog entitled “Societal Breakdown.” It left open the huge question of what to do. I propose now to address this question in slightly more detail.      Thomas Homer Dixon, in The Upside of Down, Knopf Canada, 2007, outlines several areas of preparedness for major change: population, energy, food, the environment, finances.
     There is no doubt that, at this point, the growth in population itself poses a distinct threat to the equilibrium of the planet. There are varieties of approaches possible here and they are hotly debated. As someone who has worked in international cooperation, I would simply underline the fact, indicated in many studies, that population growth tends to level out as people are given the security that their basic needs for living with decency are met. Even more it is at that precise level (at about $13,000 per person) that the greatest level of happiness in society is attained. Below that, people tend to scramble to survive. It cannot be forgotten that almost half the population of the world lives on $2 a day or less. When income surpasses that equilibrium figure, strangely enough, the happiness dimension in life tends to diminish as more energy is devoted to trying to maintain or increase their level of contentment through “having more.” The best thing that could happen for the planet’s population would be for everyone to be able to find themselves at that level of equilibrium in their part of the world that allows them to find their basic needs satisfied and without enormous disequilibrium between the rich and the poor in any society.
     Every civilisation, as noted in the earlier reflection, is based on energy exchange. Energy is absolutely required for a society to exist. The sources of energy have varied over the millennia. Sometimes it was just human labour; other times it was water (and agriculture that produced food), more recently it has been oil and gas. We know that the oil-based world is coming to an end. Increasingly oil will become difficult to provide at a reasonable cost. The nuclear option is out. The proliferation of nuclear reactors as an energy source is too expensive, terribly dangerous to the population, highly vulnerable to terrorist attacks and we still don’t know what to do with the depleted uranium waste.
     Alternative energy grids need to be developed based on hydraulic sources, the sun, wind and geo-thermal sources. As Rifkin says, every building on the planet needs to be turned into a power station linked to a continental grid. In this way the population will have an adequate and sustainable source of energy to continue functioning. The problem of course is that this will require an enormous outlay in money and construction in order to transform the whole base for energy sources.
     We cannot continue globalizing our food sources. As oil becomes less available the transportation costs will be prohibitive. We need to find ways to eat what is produced regionally, at least as the large base of our diet. This shouldn’t be impossible. Our grandparents certainly knew how to do that and with some of the newer advances in preserving food it should not be a major difficulty—if we are willing to alter our diets.
     In this same logic we have to do away with the automobile and trucking industry as we know it. There has to be a major shift to motors that are electric or hydrogen driven. Moreover public transport has to become the major means of moving people.
     We are learning more and more to recycle and to compost. However there is still a long way to go toward the reduction of waste. In Montreal practically all plastic, glass, paper and metal is recycled through a city-wide program. There is a plan to introduce industrial composting and compost pick-up by the city. We need to get rid of the manic overuse of packaging of everything we buy.
     However, recycling is only the tip of the iceberg. Manufacturing, the airlines, the military and many other major sectors of the economy need to radically reduce their output of pollutants.
     Finally the gap between the rich and the poor has become a crime that is destroying our civilization. The wealth and power of a few major corporate leaders and the transnationals they head up are becoming the unnamed government of the world. The idea that the capital they gather from their shareholders is to be used uniquely and solely to advance the interests of those shareholders and the corporation itself has to be definitively abandoned in favour of real social responsibility and that will entail decentralization and strict governmental regulation as outlined by Joseph Stiglitz in this recent book, Freefall, Norton, 2010.
     Each of these needs to be addressed if we are to be prepared for an eventual breakdown. The European Union seems to be that area of the world where these concerns are being taken the most seriously and where concrete action is already underway and, in some countries, quite advanced. We can learn from them and with them.
     Obviously, as mentioned in the earlier reflection, there has to be a strong, shared, grounded set of values that can take us through. From a purely secular point of view Jeremy Rifkin attempts to address this question in the latter part of his recent book, The Empathic Civilization, Tarcher-Penguin, 2009. In what I consider a deeper way, Thomas Berry addresses the same question in The Dream of the Earth, Sierra Club, 1989 and again in The Great Work, Harmony-Bell Tower, 2000. The development of this “planetary consciousness” and of a sense of empathy with all its (human and other) creatures is fundamental to motivating the enormous effort that an effective response will require. If we take up the challenge, the possibilities for creativity are enormous.

Manifeste de Québec

Ce texte vient de tomber entre mes mains. Je voudrais le partager avec vous..

 Manifeste de Québec
 Pour un monde sans préjugé ni amalgame

     Citoyens de Québec de toutes origines, de toutes générations, de toutes opinions, croyants de religions différentes, agnostiques ou athées, nous nous inquiétons de voir banalisée la résurgence périodique de raccourcis hâtifs conduisant à l’assimilation des termes musulman, arabe, et terroriste.
     Nous voudrions d’abord clarifier ces trois notions.
     Nous ne reconnaissons pas l’Islam, religion ouverte, tolérante, accueillante et généreuse, dans la parole et dans les actes de ceux qu’on nomme couramment « islamistes » ni dans le discours de certains de ceux qui les combattent. Toutes les églises ont leurs intégristes et connaissent ou ont connu des personnes peu scrupuleuses exploitant à des fins politiques la foi candide des peuples. Les juifs séfarades qu’on retrouve dans les communautés ladino autour de la Méditerranée ont été chassés d’Espagne par l’inquisition catholique, alors qu’ils y vivaient en paix pendant la longue occupation musulmane qui l’avait précédée. Le libéralisme est à ce point admis par l’Islam que les exégètes ne s’entendent pas à définir précisément le « musulman pratiquant ».

Societal Breakdown

     Many of you have probably read the novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy, or have seen the movie version. It is a grim tale of a father and his son travelling to the coast after a major disaster has completely destroyed U.S. society.
     Of course we have known such tales since we were very young, especially tales of nuclear disaster in the United States. Do you remember the movie The Day After? I took some young people from a shantytown in Lima to see that movie years ago. Afterwards their comment was, “ So… what’s so special? That’s life every day!” In recent weeks I have posted two reflections on the economic crisis we are currently going through and the possibilities of finding our way through it. But the problem is actually much bigger and much more complex than the financial difficulties we are facing. I follow a website called Truthout. It covers news in the U.S. mainly from a progressive stance. Lately there have been several significant reflections on the emergence of the Tea Party and its significance. There is concern that this phenomenon exposes the tip of the iceberg of a major trend in the extreme right to turn to violence to vent their anger at the current U.S. administration. Several books have been published recently that try to outline the crisis of democracy in the U.S. and its implications globally. Among these are Democracy Incorporated by Sheldon Wolin and Democracy Inc. by David S. Allen. In a Canadian context there is Global Showdown by Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke. There are significant American political analysts who suggest that American society has become totalitarian in a sense at least as rigorous as that of Germany or Italy in the late 1930s with the significant difference that society is managed so that there is no need for an overwhelming repression of the general public. However, they point out that this model may be reaching its limit as access to resources becomes limited.
     In The Upside of Down, Canadian author, Thomas Homer-Dixon, argues that we in North America are reaching a point where there could be synchronous failure, that is to say a point where several major systems that sustain the North American way of life could collapse. These include not only the financial system but also things like social services, electrical grids, energy sources, terrorist attacks, climate change, etc. While the possibility that any one of these could enter into a major crisis is becoming increasingly probable, there is also a possibility that several could occur at once and that we would not currently be prepared to respond adequately. Our whole social structure could collapse.
     So far I have been speaking of the situation in North America. What then also about the rest of the world? The region I know best is Latin America. As you are certainly aware, Latin America went through a horrendous period of dictatorships military repression and civil wars between the 1970s and 1990s. More recently there has been a flowering of relatively people-centered governments even as most Latin American countries opened their doors wide to the entry of major transnationals, like Canadian mining companies. Now it appears that, as the people in general become aware of the extent of the damage being done to their territories by these transnationals, a U.S.-based military, juridical and economic response is being implemented. The recent coup in Honduras, the expansion of U.S. military bases in Colombia and the virtual take-over of Haiti by the U.S. military (all protests to the contrary) are significant examples.
     This is leading many social activists from a variety of sectors to question the approaches they have been following to social change and to ask themselves whether or not a profound reassessment may not be required. The point is not to become overwhelmed by the immensity or complexity of the current situation but to try to find the cracks and contradictions that will allow us to burrow in and open up paths that allow people to continue living in and building societies of compassion, solidarity and justice.
     Is it possible? There are many who think so. Thomas Homer-Dixon is one, Quebec Solidaire; a Quebec-based political party is another. The local, regional, continental and world social forums are still another place where that analysis and mobilization is taking place
     This is certainly not the time to be sitting back to “see what happens,” but rather a time to make sure that what we are doing supports a very deep and long-term vision of a path to change.

Toward a Planetary Theology

This is a book that Dunamis Publishers, my little enterprise, has just put out. It was edited by José María Vigil and contains reflections by theologians from at least five major world religions on five continents. They all responded to questions about the possibility and urgency of a planetary theology with which every religion would be able to identify--like an ecumenical theology but much, much broader. The results are interesting and open a debate. Never before has there been an effort to bring together the threads of inter-religious theology and liberation theology. Take a peek at the Dunamis blog.
Tengo algunas copias en castellano, si alquien quisiera -- mismo precio.

Light and Darkness: A Lenten Reflection

This is something I wrote more than ten years ago. I think we often forget that Lent (the period before Easter) is meant to be a joyful time of realistic reflection about life and where we are headed.

Quite frankly I don’t know much about the Resurrection. I believe, but I sure don’t know much about it. (Actually I learned a little bit more when I visited El Salvator ten years ago during the twentieth anniversary of the martyrdom of Oscar Romero -- March 24, 1980) What I do know about, what most of the world knows about, is suffering, the passion, death. About that we know a lot. And when it comes to knowing about God and religion, most of us identify much more with Jesus in the garden than we do with him rising from the tomb. God may be more reassuring on the mountain top but he is much closer in the Gethsemane . We feel more confidence before a God who cries out in the garden or is led before Pilate than we do with a God who shines with brilliant light on the mountaintop. Maybe we will get there one day. But right now we need to know that Jesus understands what it is to sweat blood in fear, to be betrayed, to be tortured, condemned and led to the slaughter. Humanity has much more experience of being slaughtered than of conquering death.

RÉFLEXIONS SUR LE TERRORISME

C'est une réflexion que j'ai publié il y a quelque temps maintenant (Décembre 2006). De toute façon, j'y crois encore. Je trouve le menace du terrorisme exagéré et manipulé pour faire toute sorte de bêtise, y inclus des guerres de conquête et la limitation de nos droits de citoyens et citoyennes.


Après la Seconde guerre mondiale, Dorothy Day et ses compagnons de New York avaient décidé de ne pas faire grand cas des sirènes d'alarme qui appelaient régulièrement tous les citoyens à se rassembler dans les abris contre les bombes. Elle avait été arrêtée plusieurs fois pour avoir continué à errer à travers la ville au lieu de se soumettre à ces « exercices d'urgence ». Les déambulations, qu'elle se permettait alors que le gouvernement de l'époque exigeait de ses citoyens de suivre des consignes afin de se protéger d'une possible attaque nucléaire, elle équivalait à dire aux autres citoyens, comme dans le conte d'Andersen, qu'en réalité «l'empereur n'a pas d'habit du tout!», comme dans le comte d’Anderson. Elle allait ainsi à l'encontre de tout le système qui visait à inculquer la peur dans les esprits de la population, et par imitation et dont elle révélait la profonde immoralité.

To See a New World Coming: The Crisis as a Moral and Cultural Challenge

(I belong to the Quebec Group on Contextual Theology. Over the past year we have reflected on the economic crisis and have now published two reflections.
Here is the second part of the reflection--February 2010. You will find the first part in the post below- April, 2009)

Just at the point when we share these reflections, Haiti has suffered another terrible blow. A new catastrophe displays before the world the misfortune of this people, held in the grip of a bad development that aggravates once more the consequences of a natural disaster. At the same time there arise out of this tragedy some reasons for hope: the Haitians have given new proof of an astonishing moral and spiritual strength; the international community has mobilized in a vast surge of solidarity. For how long? Obsessed by the phantom of the recession and the hope for a recovery, will well-off societies maintain a cap on their objectives for cooperation or will we see their economic and political interests commit the promised aid for reconstruction? Are another Haiti and another world really possible?

In an initial text on the current crisis (Who Will Help Us Cross the Desert? April 2009), devoted above all to an economic and political analysis, we took up the question of hope: By what path is the future opened up? Suspicious of the plans for economic and financial recovery proposed by world leaders as ways out, we looked toward the alternatives emerging among the innumerable groups that form the network of social movements. They already announce, by their prophetic practices, the possibility of a different world, on condition that we manage to integrate the cultural dimension to the efforts of social transformation.

" As important as they might be, our commitments to social transformation remain sterile if our mentalities, our deep attitudes, our vision of the world, in short the common culture is not transformed as well in order to become more permeable to human meaning " (page 6).

In this perspective, we announced a follow-up to our reflection, one that would take up more explicitly the cultural and moral dimension of the current crisis. This is what we want to attempt in the text that follows.

Who Will Help Us Cross The Desert?

 (I belong to the Quebec Group on Contextual Theology. Over the past year we have focused on the economic crisis and have now published two reflections. This is the first. )


(2009)The current crisis has global dimensions: people without work, a food and environmental crisis, deterioration of public health in numerous countries, destabilization of the middle class, the dumping of millions of human beings into abject poverty. These catastrophes reveal the weakness of the colossus with feet of clay, the emptiness of an empire that pretends it is invincible, definitive like the “end of history.” Its collapse puts up for question not only the way our economic and financial systems function, but also its cultural and moral basis. We can speak of a crisis of civilization.

This empire has no doubt not completely given up the ghost. We search to set it free, to loosen the bonds of our more or less conscious collaboration. What liberation can we expect? By what paths? Who will help us cross the desert?

The crisis we are speaking of

Every day, the headlines carry news of a catastrophic economy. Here are a few examples. Black January for American employment: almost 600,000 positions have been eliminated and it continues. GM demands 30 billion dollars to avoid bankruptcy… The OEDC foresees an unemployment approaching double digits for all the member countries except Japan between now and the end of 2010. Since January, indirectly through various financial “tools” of the Feds, or directly by the Treasury, the American State has loaned 3,000 billion to the private sector in addition to offering a guarantee of 5,700 billion in certain investments. By comparison, the 700 billion agreed on for saving the AIG and others look like… confetti! In Quebec, there are 2,561 consumers who declared bankruptcy in January. In its turn, the Quebec Deposit and Investment Bank has ended the financial year 2008 with a loss of 40 billion dollars, that is to say, a negative return of more than 25%... In Japan the electronic industry loses billions, the stars in the sector were forced to let millions of employees go… The economy is in a shambles…. Is it possible for ordinary folk to understand something?

Ukraine Has Talent: War and Peace

This is an amazing piece of art done with fingers on a table of luminous sand:
Kseniya Simonova What can I say?

Diversity

Last September (2009) I gave a talk at the Canadian Ecumenical Centre in which I tried to touch on an aspect of the themes I addressed in my book, Dealing with Diversity. I am particularly concerned by the shift to integralism in the Catholic Church.

We are faced today with the most profound crisis since the rise of civilization 7,000 years ago. The planet, our shared home, is being ravaged by human presence to the extent that the result may be the near extinction of humanity. In addition, the race to get control of natural resources is driving humanity more and more toward extensive economic, cultural and social exclusions often through the use of violence.
The underlying source of the destruction lies in attitudes that have shaped public policy and economic activity. Thus the question of values and of motivation is crucial to any solution.

The World of the Andean Peoples

This is something I wrote a few years back for a little publication with an international focus.

The original peoples who inhabit the Andean Region of South America, like every culture, have their stories of how the world is and how it came to be. Many of these beliefs pre-date the arrival of Europeans in the 16th century but have evolved as a result of their contact with missionaries.


The Aymara people believe their origins lie in a liaison between the Sun and the Pachamama (Mother Earth) on an island in the middle of Lake Titicaca. They believe this gave origin to the “first humanity.” However that humanity, semi-gods, displeased the Sun who destroyed them. A second attempt was more fruitful and the contemporary humans are the result.

The impact of torture

This is a witness I gave at a Popular Commission a couple of years ago. The Commission gathered witnesses in preparation for a Supreme Court Case regarding Adil Charquoui, held under a Security Certificate indefinitely under suspicion of being a terrorist. The Supreme Court finally ruled that the Certificate law was unconstitutional.


My intention is to provide you with a sense of what torture does to people. I begin with a word from Elena Miranda, a young Chilean woman who killed herself, after being tortured:

They know I exist but they don’t look at me

They know that I am but they don’t feel anything for me.

For me this sums up the experience of many of those we are hearing from these days. The response of the Peoples’ Commission is an attempt to see and to feel the experience of those who become invisible.

The Montreal Declaration

Last May an international congress on environmental education was held in Montreal with the participation of almost two thousand delegates. The Quebec Coalition on the Socio-Environmental Impact of Transnationals in Latin America coordinated a series of workshops at the congress and also an activity on Mount Royal, the emblematic symbol of Montreal: we invited several international delegates to register and open an open-put mine on the mountain!  The residents were not amused and managed to get the government to withdraw the mountain from any possible candidacy for mining operations. (It was theoretically still an open possibility.) Nevertheless we went ahead with a symbolic opening of the mine. The action was an attempt to help the people of Montreal understand what is happening in many communities around the world. I personally have visited the site of the hill in Tambogrande (Peru) where the Canadian-based Manhattan company had attempted to convince the citizens to allow them to do precisely that. In Cerro de San Pedro, the Canadian subsidiary San Xavier Mine has destroyed the historic hill that is the symbol of the State in Mexico.

On the occasion of these events, several groups published the following declaration:

The Montreal Declaration

Within the framework of the Firth World Congress on Environmental Education in Montreal, Quebec, the signatories indicated below are participating in this encounter in which we have shared the wide variety of experiences that are taking place in defense of the land and against the advance throughout the world of the Canadian extractive industry. Counting on representatives from various countries (Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Papua New Guinea, Honduras and Canada), we have come to the conclusion that Canadian international mining companies are taking advantage of all the economic and political power that governments such as Canada and also local governments provide, even bypassing national laws and decrees that have declared certain territories to be protected zones. In so doing, they are also violating the human rights of indigenous, rural and urban communities.

In a number of cases, local populations have the weight of legal reason recognised by the appropriate juridical instances on their side. Nevertheless, rights have been trampled and the excesses demonstrate the plundering carried out by Canadian mining companies throughout the world who then hide behind the fact that in Canda there is no law regulating their activity outside Canadian borders. They pull out arguments about free trade treaties that irresponsible governments have signed with Canada while bypassing the federal constitution.

The activities that environmental groups have carried out to stop this enormous ecocide on the American continent, as well as in Africa and Oceania, are repressed by local governments in league with transnational companies. In this way, the companies become super-powers that condemn millions of people to the loss of their right to make choices about their immediate future, about their land and their right to a healthy environment.

For this reason those of us gathered here declare:

Peace is the Fullness of Life

     In the world of the Bible, peace is an expression of the fullness of life. Thus world peace is another way of considering the Reign of God, a place where the will of God is fully observed. In light of the Our Father we can say that the Reign of God happens when there is sharing (Give us today our daily bread) and forgiveness (Forgive us as we forgive). If peace is the fullness of life, the Reign of God, then it will be marked by sharing and by forgiveness. Through sharing and forgiveness human society will find the context for development of full life for all.

Spiritualité de la Terre (2007)

Quand vous étiez très jeune avez-vous senti, en un moment, une présence de Dieu au moment d’être proche à la nature? C’était peut-être au bord d’un lac, dans la forêt, sur une montagne, devant une fleur, un oiseau ou un petit animal. En ces moments-là Dieu se révèle très proche et l’expérience est souvent d’une paix et harmonie que nous reste dans l’esprit longtemps après.

The Work of Peace-building

This is an oldie, a presentation at an Ontario regional meeting of Development and Peace early in the decade I believe. The Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace (CCODP) is the hands and feet for international development of the Canadian Roman Catholic Church. I worked there for a while. Although the reflection is directed to CCODP members, I think the message is true also for all of us who work for peace.

Pacem in terris
April 11 marked the 40th anniversary of Pacem in terries (Peace on Earth), the encyclical published by John XXIII shortly before his death. It was a ground breaking document that opened a number of paths for the Church at the close of the Second Vatican Council. On the occasion of this 40th anniversary, John Paul II issued a letter this year for the celebration of the World Day of Peace (January 1, 2003). In it he underlines four pillars of peace: truth, justice, love and freedom. We might do well to consider these pillars in reflecting on our work of peace-building in CCODP.

Recent Trends in Liberation Theology: Pluralism and Eco-theology

This is a presentation I made at the "Call to Action" congress in Milwaukee last November. My main point is that Liberation Theology is far from dead and in fact is moving into some very interesting areas lately.

The title of the workshop, “Recent Trends in Liberation Theology” is vast. I will speak mainly of some trends emanating from the Latin American Theological Commission of the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians (EATWOT) with whom I have most contact. I realize that, in doing so I am cutting a narrow slice of all that is going on: EATWOT has also an active Women’s Commission. It is organized internationally to include Africa, Asia and also minorities in the USA. Moreover EATWOT is not the only association of Liberation Theologians.

Holy Cross International Justice Office

Take a look at this site -- it's in my blog list. There is some good stuff there especially on Climate Change including the Earth Charter. It would be good to sign up as a supporter of that. The brochure on Climate Change is an excellent tool for groups in parishes and schools. Take a look !