Under the category of “old, but interesting” news, I’ve been reading the NewsNotes from the Maryknoll Office of Global Concerns, where there’s been a very informative roundup on the November 2010 WikiLeaks release of diplomatic cables and their connection to Latin America.

This bi-monthly newsletter is an excellent resource for understanding the on-the-ground stories for international justice work. Under the outstanding editorial guidance of Judy Coode, I always find a treasure trove of information and helpful perspective.

While most press coverage of the U.S. State Department cables revealed by the website Wikileaks has centered on the Middle East, a number of cables have been from and about Latin American countries. Information contained in some messages confirmed suspicions about political leaders, providing new details.

Others have brought new information showing internal contradictions in the policies of the U.S. and other governments. Cables from countries considered to be “oppositional” like Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua, show how embassies often use biased information from untrustworthy sources. Below are excerpts from the NewsNotes articles produced by Dave Kane, reprinted with permission of 2011 Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns (please support them and sign up to receive their newsletter):

Bolivia: Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera has publicly supported the Wikileaks organization and posted all U.S. diplomatic cables released that pertain to Bolivia on his official website. He said that he wants people to know the “barbarities and insults” of what he called Washington’s “interventionist infiltration.”

Brazil: Documents show internal division in the Brazilian government in relation to Venezuela. While President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva refused to go along with U.S. requests to help isolate Venezuela, one cable shows that the Lula administration offered to support Su’mate, a Venezuelan NGO working in opposition to Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez, in exchange for U.S. authorization to sell a Brazilian training aircraft, the “Supertucano,” to other South American countries.

Colombia: Leaked cables from Colombia are an example of diplomatic actions that are perhaps better to be kept secret. The documents show that former president Alvaro Uribe secretly sought to dialog with leadership of Colombia’s rebel forces, the FARC.

El Salvador: Leaked cables from the San Salvador embassy confirm and provide more detail about how President Mauricio Funes faces increasing division and even subterfuge from his own political party, the Farabundi National Liberation Front (FMLN).

Honduras: A cable sent a month after the coup that unseated President Manuel Zelaya shows how the U.S. embassy had no doubt about the illegitimacy of the coup despite State Department reluctance to act on that fact.

Mexico: Released cables from Mexico show that, despite public praise from U.S. officials toward Mexican police and military, they have great concern that the poorly trained and corrupt security forces are unable to deal with drug cartels.

Panama: The Latin American country where Wikileaks documents have uncovered the most controversial and damaging information is Panama. The cables reveal high-level corruption surrounding a July 2009 contract to add a third set of locks to the Panama Canal, as well as an alleged illegal wiretapping operation by President Ricardo Martinelli. … Another scandal revealed by the Wikileaks cables involved President Martinelli allegedly pressuring and even blackmailing the U.S. embassy to help him spy on political opponents and unions.

Venezuela: A key learning from Wikileaks cables regarding Venezuela is the extent of the campaign by a number of regional government leaders to undermine Hugo Chavez and diminish Venezuelan influence in the area. The cables also show that, rhetoric aside, the U.S. government is not actually concerned about Venezuela providing uranium to Iran or Russia. … From within Venezuela, political opponents also have asked for the U.S. to work to undermine Chavez. Many opposition groups receive funding from the National Endowment for Democracy. Venezuelan Archbishop Baltazar Porras asked the U.S. government to “contain the regional aspirations” of Chavez, according to a January 2005 cable. Porras reportedly offered to organize a joint effort by the U.S. and Venezuela’s Catholic hierarchy and private business sector to try to win over poor communities that had benefitted from the Chavez regime. Porras, the vice president of the Venezuelan bishops’ conference, has denied saying any such thing, classifying the leaked cable as “a science fiction movie script.”

Read NewsNotes’ full content of WikiLeaks and Latin America.
Check out the WikiLeaks full cache

Recently, respected conservative Christian ethicist David Gushee took on the issue of state-approved same-sex marriage. His op-ed will no doubt cause a lot of controversy.

Gushee, a Christian ethicist at Mercer University, gets into it through his reading  of English philosopher John Locke (cue cheers from Lost fans) and Thomas Jefferson. Christianity, Locke, and gay marriage examines the forces shaping American political thought, neo-conservatism, the American Constitution, and how we as Christians determine what is a “normative posture of the church” on certain issues of public policy.

Gushee’s argument reflects a number of conservatives and libertarians who – strictly on the basis of the government’s responsibility to protect individual rights — agree that same-sex marriages should be allowed by the State. In my opinion, this is a way for conservatives to get on the right side of history on this issue and I’m proud of those who can get there through the proper application of conservative philosophy.

However, Gushee is not ready for church-sanctioned same-sex marriage. “As a matter of personal conviction,” writes Gushee, ” I am not ready to embrace gay marriage. I cannot imagine performing such nuptials as a minister. I cannot imagine my congregation doing so.” However, he reckons to an alternate position when it comes to the responsibilities of the State.

Read an excerpt from Gushee’s article below:

[T]he news last week was that President Obama and his administration have decided not to defend the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act any longer. This act made it federal law that marriage is between a man and a woman. Cue the predictable howls of outrage at Obama’s decision.  As a matter of personal conviction I am not ready to embrace gay marriage. I cannot imagine performing such nuptials as a minister. I cannot imagine my congregation doing so.

But what should the state do? If we reason from classic Christian sexual ethics forward to the role of the state, most traditional Christians (not all Christians) will come to a position of advocating that government hold onto an exclusively heterosexual definition of marriage.

But if we reason from a Lockean posture of limited government and maximum individual liberty, it is quite hard to find any compelling reason why it is any business of the state to decide whether people of the same sex can marry. Efforts to do so recently, as in California, have collapsed under their own empirical implausibility.

So we have a clash here between a Christendom paradigm and a Lockean one. On the one hand we have part of America’s culturally established but fading Christian majority operating from a paradigm that what God wills (as they understand it) should be civil law. On the other we have a Lockean paradigm that the state should only limit individual liberty for the most compelling reasons having to do with protecting the life, liberty, and limb of others.

In 1791, it was Locke, not Christendom, that prevailed in the shaping of our own constitutional order. This means Lockean premises usually win out, as they eventually will and should on the issue of legal recognition of same-sex relationships.

This says nothing about what Christian ethics ought to be on gay and lesbian issues. It says everything about the limits of governmental power in the lives of Americans. –David Gushee

So kudos to Gushee and others for putting themselves out there, with all their traditionalist understandings of Christian ethics still in place.

Learn more about David Gushee, founder of Evangelicals for Human Rights and principal drafter of the 2006 Evangelical Climate Initiative. His books include Religious Faith, Torture, and our National Soul, Kingdom Ethics, and Getting Marriage Right..

“Each of us has a path to faith is his or her life. Faith is a truly personal gift and the choice to accept faith as a gift is also very personal. These first Christians seem to have evangelized by the way the lived together. The reading from the Acts of the Apostlest seems to paint such a wonderful picture of the harmony of the early Christian community.  We know, however, from the Acts itself and from the letters of Saint Paul that life was not always harmonious.  It was and is a struggle to live in a community completely devoted to Jesus Christ, whether that is a family community, a parish community or a religious community or some other type of community.  It is just not easy to live together.  Yet it is right at the point of conflict in any community that we are invited to put our finger into the wound and to believe.

As we meditate on the death and resurrection of the Lord, it was not something beautiful, but something almost obscene.  It was not glory moving to resurrection but humiliation.  When we meet up with defects and sins and ugliness in community, we are walking the way of the Cross and we must believe that out of the defects, sins and ugliness, God still is forming and bringing about resurrection.

The First Letter of Peter tells us today that in his great mercy God gave us a new birth to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is the same message as from the Acts of the Apostles. We must learn how to place all that seems broken in the hands of a living and loving God, and believe that God is making beauty, goodness and love from it.  As we begin to believe, we not only soften, we come to be like Saint Thomas the Apostle: just a little embarrassed because we had doubted so much.

Let us pray today that we can resolutely look at all that seems sinful, ugly, not of God, destructive and so on—and yet embrace it all as part of God’s creation and know that in our faith, God is transforming us and our world.  Let us believe in resurrection because Christ is truly risen.”–Abbot Phillip, OSB (Christ in the Desert Monastery)

… Well the prophecy was kept;
Christ “first fruit of them that slept”
Rose with vic’try-circled brow;
So, believing one, shalt thou.
Ah! but there shall come a day
When, unhampered by this clay,
Souls shall rise to life newborn
On that resurrection morn.

–from “An Easter Ode” by Paul Laurence Dunbar

All’s Quiet on the God Front
“I have come to love the darkness.”
by Rose Marie Berger

As a child, I was terrified of Good Friday and Holy Sat­urday. I dreaded those hours of “time out of time” that stretched between 3 p.m. on Friday when Jesus officially died on the cross and Jesus’ resurrection, with a clap of alleluias, on Easter morning. It was in those in-between hours that God was dead—and we were alone in the world.

Suddenly, there was no spiritual safety net. Chaos ruled the world and we were defenseless against it. The isolation was nearly unbearable. As an adult, I learned theological mind-tricks to protect me from this fear of God’s ultimate abandonment. But I confess, sometimes when I wake at 3 a.m., all I hear in the universe is emptiness.

Recently, a priest friend said that in all his 70-plus years of prayerful discernment, he’s rarely had a heavenly answer. “God’s mostly silent,” he said. I don’t think he meant absent per se; just not prone to conversation or helpful hints on the best next step. God is just very, very quiet.

This is a man who’s given his whole life—every moment—to God for more than 50 years. He’s done tremendous work among the poor. He’s made genuine sacrifices in his personal life. He prays every morning and every night (unless there’s a baseball game on). How come God doesn’t talk to him? Why is God silent?

Read the rest …