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  • Who Killed Donte Manning?: A Challenge to Find God Where Many Think God Absent

    Thanks to Barb Tamialis for her nice review on Amazon of my book Who Killed Donte Manning?: The Story of an American Neighborhood.

    “I had intended to save this book for summer reading, but when it arrived, I just had to take a peek. Couldn’t put it down until I had finished it. Rose’s reflections on finding God in the city and it’s residents were both provocative and inspiring. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to be challenged to find God in the places where many think God absent.”–Barbara Tamialis, Aliso Viejo, California

    You can add your review here.

  • Video: ‘The Gulf Appears to be Bleeding’

    Thanks to Sue Sturgis over at the Institute for Southern Studies for posting  the story of John Wathen and his heart-breaking video of  the oil spill destroying our southern coast as a result of BP criminal negligence.

    The Institute for Southern Studies was founded in 1970 by veterans of the civil rights movement and has established a national reputation as an essential resource for grassroots activists, community leaders, scholars, policy makers and others working to bring lasting social and economic change to the region. Sue Sturgis writes:

    Hurricane Creekkeeper John Wathen of Alabama and volunteer pilot Tom Hutchings of SouthWings flew over the Gulf of Mexico on Friday to get a look at the massive oil slick spreading from the site of the BP disaster.

    At nine miles out, they began to smell the oil. At 11 miles, they saw a visible sheen on the water. And at mile 87 off the Alabama coast, they reached ground zero of the disaster — what Wathen described as a “red mass of floating goo” as far as the eye can see.

    “The Gulf appears to be bleeding,” he said.

    “For the first time in my environmental career, I find myself using the word ‘hopeless,’” Wathen continued. “We can’t stop this. There’s no way to prevent this from hitting our shorelines.”

    Wathen and Hutchings had no trouble finding their way back to land: “All we had to do was follow the red,” Wathens said. “There was a perfect line of it leading from the rig to the shoreline.”

    Here’s the video from that trip, which is also posted to Wathen’s blog dedicated to documenting the disaster:

    ISS – ‘The Gulf appears to be bleeding’ (video).

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  • Letter to the Editor: ‘The Power of A Good Book’

    Last week I led writing workshops at a federal and at a state prison as part of the NEA’s Big Read program. We studied Ernest Gaines’ novel A Lesson Before Dying.

    Washington, D.C., had chosen Gaines’ book as the one the city would read together. Washington Post staff reporter DeNeen Brown wrote a great profile of Cardozo and Calvin Coolidge high schools students who were wrestling with the book (Ernest J. Gaines’s ‘Lesson’ Prompts Teens To Grapple with Stark Realities). Brown writes:

    On Monday, students at Calvin Coolidge High School in Northwest Washington created a dramatic play based on the novel, which paints the last days of the life of the main character, Jefferson. It tells the story of the town’s only black teacher, Grant, who had been asked by Jefferson’s godmother, Miss Emma, to help Jefferson gain self-respect after suffering indignities at a trial. A racist public defender had called Jefferson “a hog” during the sham trial. The word rattled Miss Emma .

    Alyrah Davis, a 16-year-old junior in an orange sweater, took the stark stage in Coolidge’s auditorium to recite her lines as Miss Emma. “My baby didn’t do anything to anybody,” she intoned. Her class had just finished reading the book and Alyrah wrote her part last week. “My baby is not a hog. He’s a man. . . . That teacher and that reverend, they are going to turn him into a man by the time he gets to that chair.”

    When I read Brown’s article, I knew it was a great opportunity to write a letter to the editors at the Washington Post to let them know that while our city’s teens were reading Gaines’ novel, our city’s imprisoned were also reading it and struggling with the same issues.

    The Post ran my letter in today’s paper. I’m grateful to Carol Fennelly and Hope House DC, along with the Humanities Council of DC, for giving me the opportunity to lead the writing workshops. See below:

    Text below (with shout out to Post copy editor Helen Jones!)

    Thank you for DeNeen Brown’s excellent  profile of the District’s   celebration of the Big Read [“‘Dying’ wish: Free minds,” May 11].

    While high school students were reading Ernest J. Gaines’s novel “A Lesson Before Dying,” D.C. inmates at a federal prison and a state prison in Maryland were doing the same thing. I was invited to lead writing workshops on Mr. Gaines’s book in both institutions through the D.C. Humanities Council and Hope House DC, a nonprofit organization dedicated to strengthening D.C. families.

    With security officers keeping careful watch, I sat down with 25 writers, many incarcerated for life. We used the opening line of Gaines’s book, “I was not there, but I was there,” as a writing prompt. Melancholy meditations on many of the things the prisoners had missed  — the deaths of parents, the births of children, the small, day-to-day intimacies with wives and girlfriends — poured out.

    The final assignment was to write a letter to a character in Gaines’s book. Their letters were full of questions: Why did Jefferson take the money when he wasn’t involved in the robbery? Why did Grant come back to the South after he’d gotten away to California?  As each inmate read his letter aloud, a transformation occurred among all of us gathered. Everyone stood a little straighter, held their heads a little higher and looked at each other with greater respect.

    As we finished, one man looked me straight in the eye and said, “That book changed my life. Are there other books like that?” Yes, brother. There are lots of other books like that. –Rose Marie Berger, Washington

  • Duke Ellington’s D.C.: ‘What we Could Not Say Openly, We Expressed in Music’

    Duke Ellington in front of the Apollo Theatre, New York, 1963. Photograph by Richard Avedon.

    Last week I watched the 2000 PBS documentary Duke Ellington’s Washington. It’s a great way to learn the history of D.C. at the turn of the century – especially the Columbia Heights, LeDroit Park, and Shaw neighborhoods around where I live. I highly recommend it for viewing! Here’s a short description of the video:

    “Before the Harlem Renaissance, Duke Ellington’s Washington was the social and cultural capital of Black America. From 1900 to 1920, it was this country’s largest African American community. Anchored by Howard University and federal government jobs, this community became a magnet for African American intellectuals and sent a stream of shining talents to the nation for generations. It developed a prosperous black middle class which forged a strong society of churches, newspapers, businesses and civic institutions. Its businesses were black owned and run; its buildings, designed, built and financed by blacks; its entertainment, by and for African Americans. This was a proud and elegant community that flourished despite, or perhaps even because, of Jim Crow, the oppressive segregation that forced blacks to create their own separate destiny.”

    The New Yorker (May 17, 2010) also has a great essay by Claudia Roth Pierpont titled Black, Brown, and Beige: Duke Ellington’s music and race in America. Pierpont reviews Harvey G. Cohen’s recently released book “Duke Ellington’s America.” Both the book and Pierpont’s essay are an interesting way to examine race in America through classical American music – jazz. Here’s an excerpt from the essay:

    “What we could not say openly, we expressed in music,” Ellington wrote in the British magazine Rhythm, in 1931, trying to explain the Negro musical tradition that had grown up in America, music “forged from the very white heat of our sorrows.” All his life, Ellington gave the impression of having been unscathed by racism, either in his early years—color, he said, was never even mentioned in his parents’ home—or during the long professional decades when it defined almost every move he made: where he could play his music, who could come to listen to it, whether he could stay in a hotel or attend another musician’s show, and where (or whether) he could find something to eat when the show was over. The orchestra made its first Southern tour just after its return from England, in 1933, travelling (thanks to Mills) in supremely insulated style: two private Pullman cars for sleeping and dining, and a separate baggage car for the elaborate wardrobe, scenery, and lights required to present a show more dazzling than any that most of the sleepy little towns where they made their stops had ever seen. Ellington made a special effort to perform for black audiences, even when it meant that the band added a midnight show in a place where it had performed earlier that night exclusively for whites. Reports from both racial groups were that the players outdid themselves; it is difficult to know where they felt they had more to prove.

    Segregation was hardly peculiar to the South, of course, any more than it was limited, in New York, to the Cotton Club and its ilk. The down-and-dirty Kentucky Club had been no different: even without thugs at the door, there was an unspoken citywide dictate about where the different races belonged. The only exceptions were the “Black and Tans,” the few Harlem clubs that permitted casual racial mixing, and to which Ellington seems to have been paying tongue-in-cheek tribute with the not-quite-meshing themes of “Black and Tan Fantasy.” This was the first number played, after “The Star-Spangled Banner,” at Ellington’s landmark Carnegie Hall concert, in January, 1943, although the piece sounded very different from his twenties hit: taken at a slower tempo, with extended solos, it was twice its original length—so deliberative it seemed a kind of statement—and showed off the burnished power of Ellington’s forties band.

    Read the whole essay here.

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  • John Kinsella: Goat

    Goat
    by John Kinsella

    Goat gone feral comes in where the fence is open
    comes in and makes hay and nips the tree seedlings
    and climbs the granite and bleats, through its line-
    through-the-bubble-of-a-spirit-level eyes it tracks
    our progress and bleats again. Its Boer heritage
    is scripted in its brown head, floppy basset-hound ears,
    and wind-tunnelled horns, curved back for swiftness.
    Boer goats merged prosaically into the feral population
    to increase carcass quality. To make wild meat. Purity
    cult of culling made vastly more profitable. It’s a narrative.
    Goat has one hoof missing—just a stump where it kicks
    and scratches its chin, back left leg hobbling, counter-
    balanced on rocks. Clots of hair hang like extra legs
    off its flanks. It is beast to those who’d make devil
    out of it, conjure it as Pan in the frolicking growth
    of the rural, an easer of their psyches when drink
    and blood flow in their mouths. To us, it is Goat
    who deserves to live and its “wanton destruction”
    the ranger cites as reason for shooting on sight
    looks laughable as new houses go up, as dozers
    push through the bush, as goats in their pens
    bred for fibre and milk and meat nibble forage
    down to the roots. Goat can live and we don’t know
    its whereabouts. It can live outside nationalist tropes.
    Its hobble is powerful as it mounts the outcrop
    and peers down the hill. Pathetic not to know
    that it thinks as hard as we do, that it can loathe
    and empathize. Goat tells me so. I am being literal.
    It speaks to me and I am learning to hear it speak.
    It knows where to find water when there’s no water
    to be found—it has learned to read the land
    in its own lifetime and will breed and pass its learning
    on and on if it can. Goat comes down and watches
    us over its shoulder, shits on the wall of the rainwater
    tank—our lifeline—and hobbles off
    to where it prays, where it makes art.

    Printed from The New Yorker (May 3, 2010). (more…)

  • Video: Time for the Tobin Tax? Bill Nighy Says Aye

    Thanks for Marc Batko over at Demandside for pointing out this hilarious video with Richard Curtis (“Four Weddings and a Funeral”) and Bill Nighy (“The Constant Gardener” and “Love Actually”) promoting the Tobin Tax or Robin Hood Tax (“robbing the rich to give to the poor”) campaign in the U.K.

    Tobin Taxes are excise taxes on cross-border currency transactions. Any national legislature or financial regulatory commission can enact them — and multilateral agreements can be made to enforce them. The revenue is explicitly dedicated to basic environmental and human needs.

    According to Jim Tobin, the a Ph.D. Nobel-laureate economist at Yale University who first introduced the idea, such taxes will “help tame currency market volatility and restore national economic sovereignty.”

    Read the whole article from The Guardian here). What do the financial experts say about how this kind of tax would work?

    Experts’ view of the Tobin Tax:

    Joseph Stiglitz, professor of economics at Columbia University: “A tax structure that does not reward short-term, very speculative gains would be good. If you were investing for a year or five years or 10 years it would be a small tax but if you were holding it for just one minute it becomes a very high tax. The important question is implementability. It’s designed to tackle high frequency activity for which it is hard to find any societal benefit. The only question is, can it be effectively implemented? Will it be circumvented? There’s a growing consensus it can be implemented, if not perfectly, effectively enough to make a difference.”

    Ann Pettifor, fellow, New Economics Foundation: “The proposed currency transaction tax (CTT) represents the tiniest grain of sand in the wheels of global, mobile capital, and places very little restraint on the movement of international capital. For that reason CTT will be welcomed, ultimately, by international financial institutions. The proposal lacks a framework of democratic, accountable governance for the disbursement of funds collected under a CTT scheme. NGOs and treasuries are debating whether funds should go, for example, to national treasuries; to the Global Fund to fight Aids, TB and Malaria, or to the UN for mitigation and adaption to climate change. Until disbursement and distribution of CTT revenues are accounted for in a democratic, fair, and transparent way, the CTT will be vulnerable to attack.”

    David Kern, chief economist at the British Chambers of Commerce: “It may have potential. I’m not sure it’s the most appropriate thing. I think the main argument against it is that it’s most unlikely to be implemented globally. If a tax could be applied it would have beneficial effects … My reservation is that for the UK to engage in this unilaterally would be a very dangerous thing to do because it would destroy the country’s financial sector. People and businesses would migrate to other places. If the US and big European countries implemented it as well then it would not harm our financial sector as much.”

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  • Nonviolent Resistance and Gandhi’s Psychological Jiu-Jitsu

    Last night I was reading reflections sent from Shelley Douglass at Mary’s House in Birmingham, Alabama. Shelley and Jim Douglass are  long-time Catholic Workers, authors, activists, and practitioners of radical hospitality. In her note, Shelley mentioned a new book on Gandhi that she’s really enjoying. It’s called Gandhi: The Man, His People, and the Empire by Rajmohan Gandhi (Mohandas’ grandson). Here’s a description:

    This monumental biography of one of the most intriguing figures of the twentieth century, written by his grandson, is the first to give a complete and balanced account of Mahatma Gandhi’s remarkable life, the development of his beliefs and his political campaigns, and his complex relations with his family. Written with unprecedented insight and access to family archives, it reveals a life of contrasts and contradictions: the westernized Inner Temple lawyer who wore the clothes of India’s poorest and who spun cotton by hand, the apostle of nonviolence who urged Indians to enlist in the First World War, the champion of Indian independence who never hated the British. It tells of Gandhi’s campaigns against racial discrimination in South Africa and untouchability in India, tracks the momentous battle for India’s freedom, explores the evolution of Gandhi’s strategies of non-violent resistance, and examines relations between Muslims and non-Muslims, a question that attracted Gandhi’s passionate attention and one that persists around the world today. Published to rave reviews in India in 2007, this riveting book gives North American readers the true Gandhi, the man as well as the legend, for the first time.

    Then today I came across Tom Hasting’s blog on nonviolence. I appreciate Tom’s emphasis on applied nonviolence and on highlighting those who are teaching nonviolence in the U.S. today. Tom also mentions Gandhi, along with social philosoper Richard Gregg, and Helen and Scott Nearing, the early “back to the land” pacifists in this post:

    Richard Gregg was inspired to visit and learn from Gandhi in India in the 1920s. Gregg was a social philosopher who really began to translate Gandhian nonviolence into practical, explicable social organizing and conflict management models. He thought about the psychological aspects, calling what Gandhi did ‘psychological jiu-jitsu’, that is, using the power of the oppressor against himself, allowing the hatred and violence to expend themselves with far less harm than if those tactics (the oppressor’s strength) would have been countered with similar but asymmetrically weaker hatred and violence. Gregg really influenced the western analysis of why Gandhian nonviolence might work.

    Gregg’s 1934 germinal work, The Power of Nonviolence, is still a classic, and the second edition, in 1960, included a foreword by the young Martin Luther King, Jr. Gregg also integrated the swadeshi philosophy in his own life, moving to a farm with Helen and Scott Nearing, who were quite influential in the nascent self-reliance movement in the US. Gregg coined the term voluntary simplicity and staked out an early claim toward our slowly developing notions connecting war to resource conflict to consumerism to ecological care to urban dependency to injustice. We are still learning this basic system of interlocking causes and effects.

    Due to the fact that our God is one of hilarious surprises, you just never know when something new will pop up. Read more of Tom’s post here.

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  • Creative Action: Not Your Mother’s Union Strike

    Yesterday a  flash mob infiltrated the Westin St. Francis hotel in San Francisco and performed an adaptation of Lady Gaga’s song “Bad Romance” to draw attention to a boycott called by the workers of the hotel who are fighting to win a fair contract and affordable healthcare.

    With a chorus of “Don’t get caught in a bad hotel,” Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Queer activists put the song and dance together as a creative way to tell the hundreds of thousands of LGBTQ people from all over the country coming to San Francsico in June for the Pride Parade to stay out of the boycotted hotels. There some blue language so be forewarned, but it’s a great 5-minute video.

    To learn more about how to honor the boycott and support the workers visit Sleeping With The Right People and Hotel Workers Rising. This event was organized by San Francisco Pride at Work, One Struggle One Fight, and The Brass Liberation Orchestra.

    See kids, standing up for justice can be fun! All that band practice doesn’t have to go to waste.

  • Pope Benedict: “Greatest Persecution of the Church is from Sin Within”

    On the papal plane, Shepherd One, en route to Portugal to visit the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima, National Catholic Reporter senior correspondent John Allen got an interesting response from the Pope on the issue of the “sin within the church.”

    Benedict’s emphasis on the greatest challenge to the church being from within, rather than attacks from the outside, is different from what other church leaders have recently claimed, that the media, the Jews, or secularists were to blame for unjust criticism of the church. (Really? That old playbook?)

    The Pope’s response in the interview with Allen is intriguing because Benedict aligns the suffering of the church as embodied in the suffering of the pope – “because the Pope stands for the church” – but then states clearly that the greatest challenge of the church is sin from within. This raises the final corollary question – does the Pope carry the sin of the church within himself? The question is, of course, both theological and personal.

    That the whole conversation is couched in the mysticism of the appearances of Mary at Fatima in 1917 is also fascinating. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

    John Allen: Now we look to Fatima, which will be the spiritual culmination of this trip. What meaning do the apparitions of Fatima have for us today? When you presented the Third Secret of Fatima in a press conference at the Vatican Press Office in June 2000, you were asked if the message of the secret could be extended beyond the assassination attempt against John Paul II to other sufferings of the popes. Could it also be extended to put the suffering of the church today in the context of that vision, including the sins of the sexual abuse of minors?

    Pope Benedict XVI: First of all, I want to express my joy to go to Fatima, to pray before the Madonna of Fatima, and to experience the presence of the faith there, where from the little ones a new force of the faith was born. It’s not limited to the little ones, but has a message for the whole world and all epochs of history, it illuminates this history. As I said in the presentation, there is a supernatural impulse which doesn’t come simply from someone’s imagination but from the supernatural reality of the Virgin Mary. That impulse enters into a subject, and is expressed according to the possibilities of the subject, who is determined by his or her historic situation. The supernatural impulse is translated, so to speak, according to the subject’s possibilities for imagining it and expressing it. In this expression formed by the subject, there are always hidden possibilities to go beyond, to go deeper. Only with time can we see all the depth which was, so to speak, dressed in this vision, which was possible for the concrete person.

    With regard to this great vision of the suffering of the popes, beyond the circumstances of John Paul II, other realities are indicated which over time will develop and become clear. Thus it’s true that beyond the moment indicated in the vision, one speaks about and sees the necessity of suffering by the church. It’s focused on the person of the pope, but the pope stands for the church, and therefore sufferings of the church are announced. The church will always be suffering in various ways, up to the end of the world. The important point is that the message of Fatima in its substance is not addressed to particular situations, but a fundamental response: permanent conversion, penance, prayer, and the three cardinal virtues: faith, hope and charity. One sees there the true, fundamental response the church must give, which each of us individually must give, in this situation.

    In terms of what we today can discover in this message, attacks against the pope or the church don’t come just from outside the church. The suffering of the church also comes from within the church, because sin exists in the church. This too has always been known, but today we see it in a really terrifying way. The greatest persecution of the church doesn’t come from enemies on the outside, but is born in sin within the church. The church thus has a deep need to re-learn penance, to accept purification, to learn on one hand forgiveness but also the necessity of justice. Forgiveness does not exclude justice. We have to re-learn the essentials: conversion, prayer, penance, and the theological virtues. That’s how we respond, and we can be realistic in expecting that evil will always launch attacks from within and from outside, but the forces of good are also always present, and finally the Lord is stronger than evil. The Madonna for us is the visible maternal guarantee that the will of God is always the last word in history.

    Read the whole interview here.

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