Friends of Justice Works for All of Us

Some of you may know Alan Bean. He is a Baptist preacher (of European descent) living in Texas, and PhD graduate of Southern Baptist Seminary in theological ethics. As I recall from conversing with him, he studied with some folks like Glen Stassen who have influenced many of us. But he has built a reputation as a hard-nosed fighter for racial justice. I posted the following piece on my blog today, and thought it might be right for our readers here, too.

My friend Alan Bean, the founder of Friends of Justice, has played a central role in a number of major cases of racial injustice in recent years: the falsified drug busts in Tulia, Texas; the out-of-proportion charges in Jena, Louisiana; and more.

His most recent work is being done on a case from Winona, Mississippi. A man named Curtis Flowers has been tried five times for the same crime, but the District Attorney can't get his conviction. So, against all odds, he is going to put Curtis Flowers on trial again. In the meantime, Flowers has spent thirteen years in prison for a crime for which he has not been convicted.

Bean has traced the meandering, strange, and disturbing details of this case for months now. As happened with the Jena case, Bean kept doing his hard work, studying history, meeting with people, writing, speaking, and negotiating, until finally a major media company took notice. With Jena, it was the Chicago Tribune, and then the BBC. This time, the BBC bit first.

Thanks to Alan Bean, a shady case of racial injustice that was allowed to fester for over a decade will now be brought into the light of day. You can listen to the BBC story and read a shortened version online. But for the best coverage, with a wide range of research, you will have to read Bean's blog.

Bean's work is often featured on the Sojourners blog, "God's Politics." Check out Friends of Justice, and let's all learn from Bean. I'm hoping to see his good research and writing find its way into book form sometime soon.

Quote of the Week

"Failure to love one's neighbor is a frequent form of disobedience to God. Wars are just a large scale version of this type of sin."

Millard J. Erickson (1932- )
Distinguished Professor of Theology
Western Seminary

Lest We Forget: Remembering the Other 9/11

Today marks the 21st anniversary (September 11, 1988) of the destruction of St. Jean Bosco Church in the slums of Port-au-Prince. While Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide was giving mass, armed thugs working for the Henri Namphy regime entered the church and, in a siege that lasted several hours, massacred over twenty parishioners and injured many, many more before setting fire to the church. While Aristide managed to escape with his life, the incident eventually led to his expulsion from the Salesian order on December 15, 1988. Aristide, a liberation theologian and Roman Catholic priest, led the popular movement that led to the downfall of the Duvalier regime on February 7, 1986. Two decades (and two not-so successful Aristide presidencies) later, Haiti continues to be mired in poverty and violence.

Let us continue to work for peace and justice for the Haitian people.

Naga Insurgents Agree to Reconciliation

American Baptist missionary Dan Buttry writes:

For over twelve years I’ve been working for peace and reconciliation with the Nagas who live in northeast India and northwest Burma. The war between the Nagas and India has been going on since 1955. Then in 1975 a flawed peace agreement sparked division among the Nagas that has been as bloody as the conflict with India. In 1997 I participated with Ken Sehested of the Baptist Peace Fellowship and John Sundquist of International Ministries in the Atlanta Talks. Wati Aier was the leader of the Naga mediation team with whom we worked. All four of the major Naga factions at the time were due to attend, but at the last minute one of the largest groups pulled out. Though the participants drafted “The Atlanta Appeal” for reconciliation, the splits were still very deep and expressed in on-going violence.

Read the full story here.

Lions and tigers and bears. Oh, my!

From the Denver Post.

Beating Back Bigotry in Five Minutes Per Day

Tired of listening to anti-immigrant bigotry on the airwaves or reading it in the op-ed pages? Want to do something about it? Then consider participating in Eric Ward's Seven Days to Beat Anti-Immigrant Bigotry. By participating, Ward promises that "you can take a bite out of bigotry in less than five minutes a day!" That's right, by just taking five minutes out of your busy schedule each day for the next seven days, you can help to stop anti-immigrant bigotry cold in it's tracks. Check it out!

War Resistance in Killeen, Texas

An article published in truthout tells the story of soldiers from Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas, who have found one another through their mutual conviction that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are morally wrong and unjustifiable. They are part of a newly connected group of people in Killeen who have determined that they must take a stand against the war. Two soldiers, Spc. Victor Agosto and Sgt. Travis Bishop, have faced court martial for their refusal to deploy.

One of the outgrowths of this developing community of war resistance has been a coffee shop just down the street from Fort Hood, called Under the Hood. Members of the Iraq Veterans Against the War, soldiers, and families of Fort Hood military personnel have found refuge and strength for their convictions in this new gathering place.

The Resistors from Casey J Porter on Vimeo.

The following quotations are excerpts from the truthout article.

Sgt. Travis Bishop, who served 14 months in Baghdad with the 3rd Signal Brigade, faces a court-martial this Friday for refusing to deploy to Afghanistan.

Bishop is the second soldier from Fort Hood in as may weeks to be tried by the military for his stand against an occupation he believes is "illegal." He insists that it would be unethical for him to deploy to support an occupation he opposes on both moral and legal grounds and he has filed for conscientious objector (CO) status.

Spc. Victor Agosto was court-martialed last week for his refusal to deploy to Afghanistan.

* * *

Bishop told Truthout he was inspired by Agosto's stand and had chosen to follow Specialist Agosto's example of refusal. Both his time in Iraq, the illegality of the occupation and a moral awakening led to his decision to refuse to deploy.

"I started to see a big difference between our reality there and what was in the news," Bishop explained to Truthout about his experience in Iraq, but went on to add that morality and religion played a role as well.

When he received orders to deploy to Afghanistan, Bishop said, "I started reading my Bible to get right with my creator before going. Through my reading I realized all this goes against what Jesus taught and what all true Christians should believe. I had a religious transformation, and realized that all war is wrong."

Bishop received his orders to deploy to Afghanistan in February, but at the time "didn't know there was a support network or a way out at all. I thought GI resistance was something archaic from Vietnam."

As his deployment date approached, he met with other soldiers at a GI resistance cafe, "Under the Hood", in Killeen, Texas.

"They told me not only do I have a choice, but I have a support network backing me up," Bishop explained, "I told them my thinking, and they said that I sounded like a CO. They put me in touch with (James) Branum and when I learned from him what a CO was, I knew I couldn't go."

* * *

Bishop hopes his refusal to deploy will inspire soldiers to search their consciences.

"My hope is that people who feel like me, that they don't have a voice and are having doubts, I hope that this shows them that not only can you talk to someone about this, but that you actually have a choice," he said.

"Choice is the first thing they take away from you in the military," Bishop added, "You're taught that you don't have a choice. That's not true. And not wanting to kill someone or get killed does not make you a coward. I hope my actions show this to more people."

There is a video documentary linked below, for those who want to learn more about Under the Hood Cafe. Be warned that there is some rough language used by some persons who are interviewed.


Mike Broadway

Racism and healthcare reform

As someone who lives in the South and who is currently working for healthcare reform, I've been interacting with some people who are deeply suspicious of the President's push for healthcare reform and who believe the myths about it. Most people I've talked to DO support healthcare reform, (of course we're talking to mostly registered Democrats) but they haven't yet been as publically vocal as the right-wing.
Last year during the election, we talked to so many white 'Democrats' in Louisiana who said they would not vote for Obama for reasons that seemed to be related to race in some way. I guess I just thought that once Obama was elected, white Southerners would have to deal with that fact and would be stretched by it once they realized the world hadn't ended because we elected a black man as president. But right now there is this very vocal minority that is behaving as if Obama is singlehandedly destroying the country. This post at Daily Kos has a really good analysis of the racism underlying the teaparty, birther, and anti-healthcare movements.
I don't know how we begin to try to counter this conservative backlash, but I believe that understanding the racial logic behind it is crucial. It goes to show that the struggle against racism in this country is ongoing. In light of this backlash, we need to recommit to work for healthcare reform, because this fight is about peoples' lives.

Pay to Play: Health Lobbies Buy Their Access

"This is not a democracy. It's an auction." Those are the words of a bumper sticker we stuck on a car I used to own. The obscene amount of money that are spent to elect and influence government officials keeps growing because it works. Money keeps buying access. If you might have money to give, then candidates and incumbents want to talk with you. If you already gave money, they want to keep the relationship for next time. And savvy lobbyists know what kinds of assistance and treatment specific legislators want. They also know how to sway the direction of corporate news and the TV-watching and talk show-listening public. In U. S. politics, money makes the world go 'round.

Michael Winship of truthout reports that enormous amounts of money have been spent on lobbying against health care reform in the second quarter of 2009: over $133 million in three months from insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and hospital corporations alone. This does not include spending by other organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce and political action groups which is also on a grand scale.

According to community organizing, there are two kinds of power: organized money and organized people. Theodore Lowi, in The End of Liberalism, wrote that organized money had managed to dominate U. S. politics so heavily that we now operate by a de facto new constitution. Representative government flows from powerfully organized lobbies. Theologian John Howard Yoder warned Christians not to be fooled by the rhetoric of democracy, the rule of the people, when the U. S. polity is better described as a plutocracy, the rule of the wealthy.

There is faint hope in that community organizing has experienced a renaissance in the past quarter century. But grassroots movements still have most of their influence at the local level, and occasionally at the state level. There are ambitions for more national power from grassroots groups, but for now the organized money is in the lead.

I'm going to keep on asking folks to demand that Congress listen to the people and get us a universal health care plan that cuts costs and promotes preventive care. We may be a voice crying in the wilderness, but the voices of Isaiah and John both made a difference when they stood up for the truth.

Who Would Have Picked It? A Worst to First Story

by Stan Dotson

This week's Primary Passage (Matthew 20:1-19) transports us to some intense labor negotiations at the vineyard, where some cotton-pickin' grape pickers are getting nit-picky with the boss about the deals they made. Jesus is flat-pickin' to beat the band as he throws down one of his many parables (the Greek word for "parable" literally means to throw alongside) that turn the world system--this time the economic assumptions of the world--on its head. It's hoe-down time in the Kingdom of God, and given the economic twist Jesus throws on it, would more appropriately be called the Commonwealth of God.

The landowner (literally, the house-ruler) in Jesus' reel is engaging in some quirky home economics as he employees day laborers to bring in the grape clusters and get them ready for the foot-stomping. He hires some street corner workers early in the morning and promises them a day's wage--enough for them to live on and provide for their family for one day. He goes back to the corner throughout the day and finds more idle folk, hiring them on the promise to "do them right." When the whistle blows, the laborers line up for their just reward. The home economist turns the line around, and puts those who did the least work at the front of the line and those who worked the longest at the back. If this isn't bad enough for the wore out early birds, every last one of the workers winds up with the same wage. The beasts of burden who bore the brunt of the full day's work begin to grumble, and the bossman responds, Buddyroo, you got what was coming to you. I treated you fair. If I want to be generous with what I have to make sure everybody has food in their bellies tonight, that's my business. So go on and take your wage, and don't spend it all in one place.

Labor economists would have a field day analyzing this story. The main question would be, what happens the next day? What incentive do the workers have to show up early? Won't they all lay around watching the tube until mid-afternoon, and show up for an hour of work to put their daily bread on the table? It all boils down to a question of motivation. Economists theorize about the intrinsic (internal) and extrinsic (external) motivations for work. External motivations tend to dominate the debate in our capitalist system--it's all about the money. Jesus here is tossing that aside and is banking instead on the power of intrinsic motivations--the internal call to be at work in God's field. It's about loving the work so much that it feels like play and pleasure.

Now exactly how is this story illustrative of the reign of God? Followers of Jesus are intrinsically motivated by the overwhelming generosity of God's mercy, a mercy so thorough that it ignores all human merit. Those who deserve it least go to the front of the line. Those who think they deserve it most go to the back. Does that mean that some will try and snooker God, and rely on a cheap grace by sinning boldly and trusting God to forgive it all in the end? Of course there will be some snookerers. Pity them, because they may never know the peace and pleasure and priceless joy found in following Jesus, not for some external reward but in response to the love displayed on the cross.

An old Latin hymn writer put it best, My God I love thee not because I hope for heaven thereby, nor because they who love thee not must burn eternally. Thou O my Jesus Thou didst me upon the Cross embrace, for me didst bear the nails and spear and manifold disgrace. Then why O blessed Jesus Christ should I not love thee well? Not for the hope of winning heaven nor of escaping hell.

Pickin' and grinning my way to the line, be it front, middle or end,

Stan

Readability

I got a couple of comments about the color scheme being a bit hard to read. So I have played with a few color changes. One was very readable, but it looked like the colors of an outfit I might pick out without consulting my daughters. So I tried another scheme, and I think it works pretty well. But then again, I picked the first one. So let me know what you think.

Making Killing a Habit: "Kill, Kill, Kill Without Mercy"

Research after World War II provided the U. S. military with troubling information. Although the research methods and data have been questioned, a very high rate of soldiers in WWII and previous wars seem to have been unwilling to fire weapons in a lethal manner at the enemy. In other words, they would either not shoot at all, or would shoot to intentionally miss the other soldiers.

In order to overcome this "weakness," the process of basic training took on a number of features to overcome what seems to be a natural unwillingness to kill others. One strategy is the use of mantras such as "Kill, kill, kill without mercy," as part of basic training.



A series of articles in the Colorado Springs Gazette, written by Dave Phillips, describes the high level of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and its violent consequences that have affected soldiers of the U. S. Army Infantry assigned to Fort Carson. These soldiers have been sent into some of the most violent and deadly warfare in Iraq. They have come back to commit murder in the U. S. at a rate 20 times their similar age cohort, which is already the most violent age group in the U. S. Their rate of committing murder in comparison to the full population of Colorado Springs is 114 times as great. These statistics are only for murder, but these soldiers are also committing other violent crimes, including domestic violence, and are caught up in substance abuse at dramatically high rates.

Much of my study and research includes trying to learn how to form Christians toward virtues of love, non-violence, peacemaking, patience, kindness, hunger for righteousness, justice, mercy, humility, etc. Here we see that such virtues are a hindrance to the military objectives of the state. The state-sponsored machine of violence teaches a different set of virtues: among them "Kill, kill, kill without mercy."

Economic Recovery for All

This is the fourth post in an ongoing series from my blog, "earth as it is in heaven," in which I am publishing the text of a theological statement on the economy issued by professors from eight theological schools in North Carolina. The statement is part of a campaign by Industrial Areas Foundation Affiliates east of the Mississippi River. The slogan is "10% Is Enough," referring to the need for a cap on consumer interest rates, a reinstitution of usury protection for borrowers. This section of the statement introduces basic theological concepts which underly the campaign. For analysis of causes and effects of the crisis, of the failure of the bailout, and further theological reflection, you can look at posts on "earth as it is in heaven" starting on July 23, 2009.

THEOLOGICAL REFLECTION ON THE ECONOMY
A Working Paper for North Carolina United Power
from an Interchange Among Theological Educators
July 2009

III. Faith Perspectives on Responding to the Crisis

A. Introduction

Among the most cherished biblical texts in the Christian scriptures is Jesus' teaching to his disciples concerning prayer in Matthew 6. Verse 12 says, “And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” The same Greek word in this passage has historically been translated by both the English words “debts” and “trespasses.” The first translation affirms an economic obligation; the second implies a broader, metaphorical one. While both are theologically significant, the first has been underemphasized.

The background of this economic obligation appears in Deuteronomy 24:10-13. A lender must not take away a borrower’s essential items for survival as a pledge for a loan. A loan must serve the good of the whole community, both borrower and lender. When a family member or neighbor is in dire economic straits, biblical economics deems it wrong for a relative or neighbor to make a profit on their misfortune. If someone needs assistance, the command of the Torah affirmed by Jesus is that our hands ought always to be open to help the poor (Deut. 7 and John 12). The Sabbath Year and Jubilee Year laws insist that there is a limit to what a lender can demand from those who have fallen on hard times. This kind of mutuality is what God blesses and it is to be the material and economic shape of our earthly lives if they are to reflect existence as it is in heaven.

However, far from taking reasonable steps to assure the safety and security of borrowers in need, many banks (and hence, many businessmen and women of faith) currently are forcing people out on the street, refusing to share the impact of the loss of real estate values. In contrast to this scenario, Biblical economic principles demand shared risks and as shared opportunities for lenders and borrowers as well as limitation on lending so as to prevent usury.

TYAYA- Young Adults at Peace Camp 2009

It's the last night of peace camp 2009, and some of the young adults are hanging out and eating pizza. The youth service and open mike tonight were amazing. It's depressing to think that tomorrow we will all be departing to different places and it will be a whole year before we get to see each other again.

There were many wonderful things about peace camp this year (as there are every year). For example, hearing Kate Campbell and D.E. Adams sing together. Amazing. Especially for those of us who have grown up with their music.

I loved Rita Nakashima Brock's bible study on paradise (and Song of Songs, Ezekiel, and Revelation). I sometimes feel as if there is not much in the bible that speaks to me, or that I just don't want to deal with the violence and the mess. Then I come to peace camp and get to hear different interpretations, which aren't oppressive and problematic and at the same time have really solid historical, cultural, linguistic evidence supporting them, arguably more solid support than more traditional interpretations. I also loved Angela Yarber's 'discursive' on a passage from Song of Songs, which made this week's bible study the most sex positive, queer affirming bible study ever!!!

One thing that has been hard for me this week is that my parents were not able to be with us at peace camp; my dad was in a bus accident a few weeks ago while he was traveling with our church youth group to Passport. More about that here. He is still recovering back in Shreveport, and it will be a long slow process. But we have videos of parts of peace camp to bring back, and some cards that the BPFNA family signed, both for my dad and our home church.

btw, TYAYA is an acronym that stands for 'The Youth and Young Adults' (of the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America). It's not a very creative acronym but is really fun to say =)

Name This Blog!

Hello, readers. We have come up with a tentative name for our blog.

We like having "baptist" in the name as a way to find like-minded people from our tradition, which has so often forgotten our origins as a persecuted minority with a sharp-edged critique of the violence of empires. Out there among baptists we know there are many who share our longing for peace and justice and our eagerness to work for it.

We also like the word voices because it reminds us that there the Holy Spirit has called many, gifting each one, and expects us to listen to one another, so that every voice is heard and no voice is silenced. By such means, the Spirit has the greatest opportunity to guide us to do the work of God here and now.

The name we are using now is pretty straightforward, but also not particularly exciting. So give it some thought, and if you are so inclined, post some possible names for this blog site.