>19th Century Restoration Movements — Civic Engagement

I assembled a collection of writings from 19th century American religious restoration and renewal movements as part of a peace research class. After mentioning the project presentation on Facebook, there were requests for more info. This is difficult for me to understand. Really.

Here are the groups/movements covered (this list is by no means comprehensive of the period):

1. NY Peace Society
2. Stone-Campbell (Churches of Christ)
3. Wesleyan
4. Presbyterian
5. Seventh-day Adventism
6. The Church of God (Anderson)
7. Pentecostalism

The original presentation had approximately 100 slides, a 4-page hand-out, and 85 minutes of verbal description. To make it a bit more accessible, I’ve cut it down to ~65 slides.

To learn more about this era, read ch. 16, “Pacifism in the Nineteenth Century” in John Howard Yoder’s Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and Revolution.

Slideshow: 19th-century-restoration-movements-online-mini

>Confucian (Social) Justice

A Korean classmate presented on economic justice today. These were our three pre-readings:

• Making Sense of Confucian Justice.
• “Confucious and Capitalism: Views on Confucianism in Works on Confucianism and Economic Development,” Christian Jochim (Journal of Chinese Religions, no. 20 Fall 1992), 135-171.
• “Sagehood and Metanoia: The Confucian-Christian Encounter in Korea,” Kang-nam Oh (Journal of the American Academy of Religion 61, no. 2, Summer 1993), 303-320.

>American Democracy

Here are two recent articles by economists I respect. First, Sojourners listed this Vanity Fair article by Joseph Stiglitz in their Friday round-up:

Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%

“Americans have been watching protests against oppressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income—an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret.”

[FULL ARTICLE]

Second, Jeffrey Sachs wrote about the budget debate on his Huffington Post blog:

Restoring American Democracy

“It is hard to exaggerate the disaster that passes for American democracy these days. Have a look at today’s news. A “historic” cut in spending has been achieved, the “largest in history,” $38.5 billion. Yet what is actually in this spending cut? There is no report of that. You can’t find the list of cuts in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, or anywhere else. The negotiations are a show, a TV cliffhanger, not a negotiation over actual programs affecting 300 million Americans.”

[FULL ARTICLE]

>Allegiance and Focus

Here is a lengthy quote from Neither Poverty Nor Riches (Blomberg, 1999):

For the Christian, public policies at home and abroad can never be based primarily on what is in one’s ‘national interest’, as the rhetoric of most politicians regularly alleges. Rather, we must ask what is in the interest of all humanity, materially and spiritually? For those of us who work for national or multi-national corporations, are we prepared to work within the system positively to promote limitations on profit-taking for the sake of more humane policies for the workforce, for trade partners and for a better earth? Still, there are limits to how much we can expect Christian values to take root in non-Christian structures. We should be spending the largest amount of our efforts on remoulding the church into a counter-cultural community. We may debate the best way to help the poor through economic and governmental policies, but the needy and marginalized in our world should have no doubts as to our compassion and concern. (p. 252)

>Peacemaker’s Toolkit

>The U.S. Institute for Peace lists a number of online publications in the Peacemaker’s Toolkit, with more handbooks to come. So far, the Kit includes:

• Managing a Mediation Process
• Managing a Mediation Process Web Handbook
• Managing Public Information in a Mediation Process
• Integrating Internal Displacement in Peace Processes and Agreements
• Debriefing Mediators to Learn from Their Experiences
• Timing Mediation Initiatives
• Working with Groups of Friends

>Soldiers against Torture

>

Soldiers against torture (Rodney Clapp, The Christian Century, 4 Oct 2010)

“Their stories are too little told—the stories of U.S. servicemen and women of devout religious faith who, often at great cost, stood up to protest the use of torture in the American open-ended war on terror.” [full article]

>Three Cups of Freshly Squeezed Ethical Juice

>I posted the following item on my ethics class’s forum. I’d thought I’d re-post here as well:

1) Smedley Butler, AKA “Old Gimlet Eye” (You just can’t make this stuff up):

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler
• http://rationalrevolution.net/war/major_general_smedley_butler_usm.htm

War Is a Racket (By Smedley Butler)

• http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
• “[T]he title of two works, a speech [1930] and a booklet [1935]… in which Butler frankly discusses from his experience as a career military officer how business interests have commercially benefited from warfare.”
• “War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.”
• “I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”

2) Narco Cinema

Want to disappear down a rabbits’ hole of cultural and ethical surrealism? Then this be for you:

• INTRO @ CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/03/30/vbs.narco.cinema/index.html?iref=allsearch
• PART 1: http://www.vbs.tv/newsroom/mexican-narco-cinema-part-1-of-3–2
• PART 2: http://www.vbs.tv/newsroom/mexican-narco-cinema-part-2-of-3–2
• PART 3: http://www.vbs.tv/newsroom/mexican-narco-cinema-part-3-of-3–2

3) Zimbardo & the Prison Hoopla

I might not remember a lot from Social Psychology a decade and a half ago, but at least three things have stuck with me: marshmallows (Mischel), shocks (Milgram), and… prison insanity (Zimbardo).

Zimbardo’s experiment shows that the power differential between those playing the roles of officers and inmates led quickly to social problems. In fact, the experiment was called off after just 6 days because the “experiment quickly grew out of hand. Prisoners suffered — and accepted — sadistic and humiliating treatment from the guards. The high level of stress progressively led them from rebellion to inhibition. By the experiment’s end, many showed severe emotional disturbances” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimbardo_experiment).

>I.O.U.S.A.

>After I finished a paper this weekend, we watched I.O.U.S.A., a documentary about personal and national debt. Sobering. Having been interested in this topic for the past decade and a half, I found a fair amount repetitive, but it laid a necessary foundation. If you haven’t seen it, do.

You may call this a cop-out, but I don’t intend it to be: “Set your hope fully on the grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed” (1 Peter 1:13).

Movie Site

30-minute Version

Trailer:

Later we watched the “hybrid-documentary” Paper Heart (Wiki). If you haven’t seen it, think When Harry Met Sally + Napoleon Dynamite.

And now I’m back to the books (or I will be after I post this).

>CPT — Palestine

>Yesterday, David, my professor in Mission & Peace, told about an experience he had while working with Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) in Palestine (Gaza or West Bank?). On the way to a Palestinian family’s home for dinner, he noticed two piles of rubble. At dinner with the host family, the father introduced his son as his little terrorist weapon. David was confused so the man told the story.

The piles of rubble were their family’s previous homes, which had been flattened by the Israeli army. In the middle of the night the army showed up with bulldozers and told the family they had 15 minutes to get out. After the military razed the house, the father took his young boy to a soldier and told him to take the boy since the father no longer had a place to shelter him. I presume it was done with a bit of emotion, and he was arrested for attacking the soldier with a weapon–his son.

Two videos on Palestine:

• CPT (I can’t find the video I want now. These are available from ’05.)
• 60 Mins

>Headlines

>In the news:

• International Court issues arrest warrant for Sudanese president (Nic Robertson, CNN.com, 4 Mar ’09)
• Sudan soldier: ‘They told me to kill, to rape children’ (Nic Robertson, CNN.com, 4 Mar ’09)
• ICC: Bashir Warrant Is Warning to Abusive Leaders (Human Rights Watch, 4 Mar ’09)
• Spring breakers skip Cancun for volunteer work (Elham Khatami, CNN.com, 4 Mar ’09)
• Democrats seek ‘Truth Commission’ probe of Bush (Larry Margasak, San Diego Union-Tribune, 4 Mar ’09)
• Obama releases Bush secret terror memos (Manilla Bulletin, 4 Mar ’09)
• The Tortured Memos (Editorial, The New York Times, 3 Mar ’09)