On Being Blog

by Krista Tippett, host

Religion Dispatches offers a riveting report of a recent meeting in Oakland in which a leading Mormon authority offered an apology for the pain caused by the LDS Church’s activism on California’s Propisition 8. To an emotional gathering of “LGBT Mormons and their allies,” Elder Marlin K. Jensen reportedly said:

“To the full extent of my capacity, I say that I am sorry … I know that many very good people have been deeply hurt, and I know that the Lord expects better of us.”

I’m on record as saying that we should measure the public virtue of religious traditions not merely by the positions they take, but by the way they treat those with whom they agree and disagree along the way. It is, sadly, rare to witness religious authorities open up to this kind of human and seemingly searching encounter on an issue in which they have staked a theological and political claim. I say, “Bravo.”

by Hussein Rashid, guest contributor

Rumi ensemble from Iran performs at the Bab Makina Palace courtyard. (photo: Hussein Rashid)

Some people had Elvis. Others had The Beatles. My dream concert is the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music. With a rotating list of performers, it does not matter who was there, but the idea of the festival is what counts.

Over ten years ago, I bought a CD called B’ismillah (“In the Name of God”), a two-CD set from a Fes concert. In that moment, I knew the power of music. The organizers started the festival 16 years ago to bridge the rift amongst civilizations after the first Gulf War and they sought to use music as a common language. The concerts continue to bring in a variety of musical traditions from around the world to show what all people have in common.

My review at Religion Dispatches explains the mechanics of this year’s festival. However, one highlight that I was totally unprepared for was Sufi Nights. After the formal concerts during the afternoon and evening, there was an area set up for local Sufi groups to perform.

Sufism is a broad label for a wide variety of mystical traditions in the Muslim faith. Sufi groups tend to reflect their local cultures, bridging the Arabicized scholarly religious tradition with the local, living Islam of the different communities Muslims belong to. Some of these Sufi groups rely heavily on music.

In the United States, we have been exposed to Sufis and Sufi music for a long time. Jalaluddin Rumi is one of the best-selling poets in the U.S. and is founder of the Sufi group known as the “whirling dervishes.” Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones introduced the Master Musicians of Jajouka to new audiences. The late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was a musician from Pakistan known for qawwali singing, a type of devotional music in South Asia that was incorporated into films like Dead Man Walking.

Because Sufi groups are deeply embedded in the cultures in which they emerge, the free Sufi Nights concerts attracted large numbers of Fasians, in addition to the international crowd who had come for the festival. Each night the performers would be welcomed, personally, by the local community. They were part of the life of the city. They were neighbors and co-workers, cousins and clients.

There was an immediate intimacy between the audience and the performers because of their local character. It was incredibly easy to be swept into that feeling. The small theater area helped to highlight that feeling of intimacy. One night, my camera battery had run down, and I didn’t have any extras. I allowed myself to enter that world. Coming from a South Asian cultural context, I have to say that the ritual did not taste right on my tongue, but that didn’t mean that I did not relish every moment of it.

The invocations and formulas the Sufi groups used were known to all the locals. They participated with the people on stage, not just “singing lyrics” but entering the ritual themselves.

A Sufi group from Ouazzane, Ahl Touat Dar Dmana, performs with Driss Abou Sabr Zerhouni.

Young children entered the ecstatic states of coming nearer to God, moving their bodies and calling out the names of God. The adults took a little longer, but they too participated in the rituals, entering those moments of nearness to the Divine. Tears ran down people’s faces as they approached the ineffable, and smiles lit the ground as though reflecting the divine light they were seeing. It was being in a timeless, placeless space that continued for an eternity and ended in an instant.

Except, you realize that the performance ended, but the moment did not. The songs are popular ones. Young men continued singing after concerts were over.

You would go into the old city, where the stores were, and hear these songs played in shops alongside the latest Shakira tune. The difference between the sacred and the profane is much more porous in these contexts. Here, popular does not mean a-religious, and religious does not mean private. No one was forced to believe or practice anything; stores would remain open during prayer time, sisters would walk down the street, one in hijab and the other not. As a result, people lived and expressed their faith at every moment.

The great secret of the Fes Festival are the Sufi Nights. It is the bridge that the organizers so desperately want to build. You cannot be unaffected by the experience. If you have an open mind, it helps you to see the world a little differently. It’s the one part they do not put on CD; nor should they. I am too young for Elvis, too young for The Beatles. I did get my Fes Festival and I am looking forwarded to going again.

Hussein Rashid is a native New Yorker and proud Muslim. Currently an instructor at the Center for Spiritual Inquiry at Park Avenue Christian Church and based at Hofstra University, he is deeply committed to interfaith work and is passionate about teaching. He believes we need to start talking more intelligently about Islam specifically, and religion generally.

We welcome your reflections, essays, videos, or news items for possible publication for the On Being Blog. Submit your entry through our First Person Outreach page.

by Kate Moos, managing producer

Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr teaches a class at Union Theological Seminary. (photo: Gjon Mili/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Richard Crouter’s elegant, concise book on Reinhold Niebuhr’s thought and legacy is a magnificent introduction to the life and work of this 20th-century theologian and public intellectual. I’ve been an armchair aficionado of this major thinker since the early days of this program when we produced a show and a magnificent (if you can forgive me for saying so) website we entitled “Moral Man and Immoral Society,” after one of Niebuhr’s significant works.

I was struck then, and remain transfixed, by Niebuhr’s ability to articulate the moral dilemma of human beings: the necessity of moral action, the certainty that moral action will not only fall short but often result in unanticipated harm. Niebuhr came strongly to mind at the end of this week’s show when New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof spoke of his regard for another philosopher, Isaiah Berlin. Niebuhr’s thought recommends to us a humility not native to our age.

Reinhold Niebuhr on Politics, Religion, and Christian Faith renders the complexity of Niebuhr’s thought light, and it makes for a wonderfully entertaining read. Crouter’s prose beautifully captures and translates Niebuhr for a casual reader, as in this representative sample:

“As we reflect more on Niebuhr, we discover even more practical reasons why it’s important to have a sense of history. We deepen our experience of history through encounters with ideas and events that reflect our stories, told in other times and places. We do this amid our present surroundings. Coming to grips with history deepens our grasp of present reality, while chastening our specific hopes for the future.”

Richard Crouter agreed to take our questions about Niebuhr and his meaning for the 21st century.

Why another book about Niebuhr, and why now? What’s behind the apparent Niebuhr revival, if that’s not too strong a word?
A revival of interest in Niebuhr is real, even if mainly among intellectual elites. An urgency to hear Niebuhr again arose among political commentators amid shock waves unleashed since 9/11: American hubris in launching the Iraq war, the apparent quagmire in Afghanistan, and a flattening of the U.S. economy that affects all but the super rich. Because he’s on Barack Obama’s reading list (“one of my favorite philosophers”), the return to Niebuhr deepens our musings regarding presidential policy and leadership. When I began the book, Obama and financial collapse were not on the horizon. In the process of writing, even I was surprised by how often Niebuhr’s views shed light on the ongoing headlines and fears of our day, including the association of religion with violence. As in his lifetime, Niebuhr’s reception among American churches is more nuanced and mixed, for reasons that are examined in the book.

You propose that Niebuhr is concerned with, and particularly insightful about, the topic of “human nature,” and you assert that “He did so in the awareness that Christian teaching about human sinfulness is often despised and little understood, even by Christians who are regular church-goers.” So many modern and post-modern thinkers would reject the idea that thinking about sin could be in any way useful in the 21st century. Other loud voices in our world choose to focus on the perceived sins of others, rather than their own sinfulness, or on sinfulness as a quality that makes us distinctly, tragically human. What makes Niebuhr’s thoughts about sin distinct and useful in our sophisticated, technological age?

We ignore at our peril what Niebuhr means by sinful humanity, even if we choose to describe this reality differently. Self-preoccupation that leads to moral blindness among individuals and groups is undeniable in human affairs. Less obvious is the fact that for Niebuhr the thrust of moral good is ever present among us. That’s why the labels “pessimist” and “optimist” don’t work for him. Though the names and ideologies that shape history change, Niebuhr is a perennialist.

“Taking the Long View of History” (chapter 2) directly opposes being mesmerized by obsessive 24/7 news cycles. Having a large picture of human grandeur and folly puts our aspirations and losses as individuals, families, and nations into fresh perspective. Stated differently: Niebuhr speaks to our era because he never restricted himself to his own era. We gain courage to act and to persevere when we see how his view of human complexity addresses the deepest problems of our own time and place.

In this chapter on sin, you cite Augustine and say he “was aware of the fickleness and fragility of the will, its easy ability to follow a disordered desire.” Disordered desire, arguably, is the engine — or a significant driver — of the consumer economy. Is there room for this sort of insight in our daily lives? How does Niebuhr help make room for it?
It’s natural for us to resist Niebuhr’s insight into our precarious condition. Yet his acerbic wit regarding our pretension and avoidance of self-knowledge is the perfect antidote to the blustering of ideology in our day, whether from the right or from the left. Like the longshoreman-author Eric Hoffer, he knew that “true belief” without any self-doubt leads to fanaticism, both in religion and in politics. Niebuhr’s analysis of human avarice perfectly captures the financial debacle and lust for consumer goods of the 21st century. He didn’t write about ecology. But his insistence upon learning to accept limits fits our need to care for the Earth more radically than at present. His sayings and wry allusions jar us into self-recognition: taking the first step towards hopeful realism is a powerful impulse towards approximations of justice in our diverse and fractious society.

One of the great services your book provides is to be a pocket-sized compendium of some of Niebuhr’s pithiest and most penetrating writing, as well as a lens into how he was viewed in his time by other thinkers and writers. I especially enjoyed the chapter “Connecting with Wit and Words” for the light it shed on his role not as a theologian and pundit and policy thinker so much as a man of letters who knew Auden and Trilling and Archibald McLeish. Auden is another 20th century figure whose once mammoth influence is not much celebrated these days, and you point out he became a thorough Niebuhrian. That put me in mind of the lines in Auden’s poem in memory of Freud: “to us he is no more a person/ now but a whole climate of opinion” True of Niebuhr?
In a word, yes. Thinking about Niebuhr as a writer (“Connecting with Wit and Words”) arose from an awareness of the frequency that his sayings and aphorisms appear among pundits, not to mention devotees of Twitter and Facebook. In writing the book, I felt an acute need to bridge the gap between casual acquaintance with Niebuhr’s name and the work of specialists. Auden’s lines, penned in memory of Sigmund Freud, are most apt. Written a year after the psychiatrist’s death, the same insight applies to my effort to bring Niebuhr alive amid the clamor of opinion that surrounds his name. One of the underlying points of the book is that the dead, whether major scientists, composers, psychiatrists, or theologians, are never really gone. Being alert to their legacy is part of what it means to have a sense of history. What Niebuhr really stood for matters, even if his teaching is surrounded by a divergent and contradictory climate of opinion.

Is there one particular story or anecdote about Niebuhr you find most useful or enlightening about the man himself?
One incident remains indelible in my mind and pops up in the book at various points. It’s an image of Niebuhr — the tough-minded critic of U.S. arrogance and of Communism — emerging from retirement to stand in the Social Hall of Union Theological Seminary in 1967 to address students on the folly of the war in Vietnam. He began his criticism of the war by peering into his (mostly) youthful audience and slowly intoning the words, “History always repeats itself, but never in the same way.” At the time I had no idea the underlying thought would become so deeply etched in my mind or provide so much food for thought for me as an interpreter of history. It was his way of wrestling with the perennial problem of continuity and change, the repeated and the novel aspects of our unfolding human story. Looking back I see the Niebuhr book as a meditation on the permanent value of his teaching on politics, religion, and Christian faith, even if Niebuhr’s perspective — true to his adage — asserts itself in diverse and surprising ways.

Richard Crouter is the John M. and Elizabeth W. Musser Professor of Religious Studies Emeritus at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. His book “Reinhold Niebuhr on Politics, Religion, and Christian Faith” was recently published by Oxford University Press.

by Ann Milliken Pederson, guest contributor

When I first lived in the upper Great Plains, I did so as a freshman at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. I still remember the day when my parents’ car pulled away and I was standing by my dorm wondering why I had decided to move almost 800 miles from my home in Montana. While I would miss my parents and friends, I began to miss the mountains almost immediately.

I felt like Beret, the female protagonist in Giants in the Earth who left her home in Norway and moved to Dakota Territory. The vast grasslands and harsh climate nearly drove her mad. When I would look outward, I would think, “There’s nothing to see.” Flat land seemed to stretch everywhere and yet nowhere. Corn fields and soy beans. 

Almost 15 years later, I moved back to the Dakotas, this time as a professor in a small Lutheran college in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Once again, I found myself reading Giants in the Earth, wondering if I would go insane from looking at “nothing.” The prairie winds blew hot air all summer long, and in the winter I found it difficult to ski or be outdoors because as soon as it snowed the snow was blown into crusted ice piles.

Then, bit by bit, we became acquainted with new friends whose love for the prairie challenged my notion that it was “full of nothing.” My husband and I began to walk the prairie landscapes with our friends Janet and Ross, who is an environmental biologist and knows the names of every plant, bird, and tree.

I learned about the mating dances of prairie chickens, about the oak stands in Beaver Creek Nature area, and how to listen to the multiple calls of cardinals. Naming the multiplicity and buzzing life forms on the Dakota prairies drew me into what I now see as a change of view. “Nothing” has become “something.” And that something has slowly become a perspective on the Dakotas that has me calling this landscape “home.” It’s a different home than the mountains. But it’s home.

My eyesight has changed — thanks also to my friend Sheila. She’s an artist whose recent works feature the upper Great Plains. I have several of her paintings in our house, including two large prairie landscapes in my home office. When I write or prepare for teaching, I need to have “space” — openness where ideas can move around, where I can take a deep breath.

Since the actual office space isn’t very large, I find that her paintings create that space for me. The painting right above my computer is my favorite of hers. Large boulders are in the foreground of a prairie horizon. Two tree trunks frame the view through which I look into a receding horizon. I have always thought it was late summer or early fall when the ground is browned by the sun and the sky is dotted by a few white clouds. I always want to enter that place, sit on one of the rocks, and look into the spacious expanse of prairie. The view begs one to take ample time, time that is as plentiful and full as the panorama. When my life gets full of too much — iPods, voicemails, emails — then I come to this view to redesign my life, to change my surroundings.

Sheila’s views have become my spiritual lens for a geographical restructuring and transformation of my life. I hope that while on sabbatical I can find more views, and maybe even offer to others what Sheila has offered me.

Who we are is where we are. Or at least where we have been and where we are going. I think about time: When? How long? I have been thinking a lot about the boundaries, borders, situations, dimensions, and locations of our lives. When and where are interrelated. When and where is a complicated plot between local and global, then and now, over and under. What are the maps that we take through these journeys? What does it mean to map the human genome? What are the cartographies of our culture? What are the maps that bypass the “underground” places? Recently, I drove to such a place.

It’s true that you “have to see it to believe it.” Or in other words, to step into this place is to step into the stories it tells. A few months ago, I drove to the golf course in Canton, South Dakota. Between the third and fourth hole on the Hiawatha Golf Club is a small cemetery with the bodies of those who had been kept as inmates in the Hiawatha Asylum for Insane Indians.

I’ve read a lot about this place, but still had not been to the site. It’s not easy to find. Surrounded by a split rail fence is a large grave marker with the names of dozens of American Indians who died at the asylum. There are 121 bodies buried in the graveyard — in the middle of a golf course — on the outskirts of Canton, which is the seat of Lincoln county. In 1899, a local U.S. senator, Richard Pettigrew, brought the federal funds to start this institution. A large historic district in Sioux Falls is named after Pettigrew. When the newly developing field of eugenics was coming of age, many people in the United States believed that one way to rid the country of “troublesome Indians” was to claim that they were “insane” and could be sent to the asylum. Hundreds of American Indians from around the U.S. were sent to the Canton asylum.

The Hiawatha Asylum for Insane Indians was intended to be a hospital dedicated solely to the “mental illness problem” among Native Americans. What it became was a kind of warehouse for storing “problem” Indians. When the asylum was visited in its later years, the following was noted in a report from Minnesota Public Radio: “The Indian affairs commissioner under President Roosevelt called reports of the asylum reminiscent of the terrible indictments Charles Dickens leveled against English poorhouses and schools.”

More information about the asylum’s operations came from the writings of Dr. Samuel Silk, the clinical director of the country’s premier psychiatric hospital, St. Elizabeth’s in Washington, D.C. He wrote that children were abused; adults were secluded in isolation for years. The asylum did not even meet minimum standards of care.

On the fairway between the third and fourth holes on this golf course, I wondered how my ancestors (Norwegian Lutherans) could live nearby and not know what happened to all these people at the asylum. “Good Norwegian Lutherans.” A “good South Dakota senator.” A history that is painful, ominous, and only 30 miles or so from where I live.

Where do I walk today, in these times that I don’t want to know about? That I turn a blind eye to? Shame won’t do me any good. But a guilt that is confessed, that motivates me to tell this story might help me to do something about all of those whose lives are hidden, not made visible, covered by those in power who don’t want to know. Maybe this wound on the South Dakota landscape can somehow become an anchorage — a reminder of where we are, who has lived here, and most importantly, the suffering of those who went before and whose stories need to be told. I’m learning a lot about the stories that this prairie landscape is telling me.

Ann Milliken Pederson is a professor of Religion at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran in America. She loves to walk with her dogs in the country, hear stories about middle school band students her husband teaches, and read mysteries.

We welcome your reflections, essays, videos, or news items for possible publication on the Being Blog. Submit your entry through our First Person Outreach page.

by Trent Gilliss, senior editor

Thursday, September 23rd, 2010
9-10 a.m.

We’re streaming live video of Krista leading a plenary session on enhanced access to modern technology at the Clinton Global Initiative. With all the new ways of leapfrogging over old models of infrastructure and bureaucracy, this is an era rife with possibility for deeper civic engagement and better ways of doing business and helping others.

Krista will be joined by five of the foremost thinkers on this topic:

• John Chambers – Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Cisco
• Jack Dorsey – Co-Founder and Chairman, Twitter
• Ory Okolloh – Founder and Executive Director, Ushahidi
• Zhengrong Shi – Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Suntech Power Holding Company
• Ratan N. Tata – Chairman, Tata Sons

Please join us and share your thoughts and feedback by commenting here or on Twitter!

by Nancy Rosenbaum, producer

A 2008 Tashlikh ceremony is performed on the banks of the Mississippi River in St. Paul, Minnesota. (photo: GSankary)

We’re now on the other side of the Days of Awe — the ten-day period starting with Rosh Hashanah and ending with Yom Kippur. This year I participated in a Tashlikh ceremony for the first time since my childhood Hebrew school days. Tashlikh (also referred to as Tashlich) is a ritual of reflection and repentance where people throw shards of bread gather into a flowing body flowing water, symbolically casting off their sins from the previous year.

On the second day of Rosh Hashanah, as joggers and power walkers streamed by, I gathered with a few others by a lake in Minneapolis to recite prayers and sing songs including one of my favorite melodies, Avinu Malkeinu. Later that evening, a larger group of mostly strangers assembled for a Rosh Hashanah potluck featuring sweet kosher wine and home-baked challah. I learned about both of these events online and decided to show up even though I didn’t know anyone. With my family back on the East Coast, I didn’t want to experience the High Holy Days alone.

To break the ice, we introduced ourselves along with the name of a Jewish food that shared the first letter of our first name. When my turn came, I couldn’t think of anything. The group rescued me with “noodle kugel.” I wasn’t the only one who got stuck. A Unitarian woman needed the group to brainstorm a Jewish food for her too.

The experience of these rituals surfaced a mix of emotions. It was nice having a place to go on Rosh Hashanah where I was received with openness and warmth. And yet, I didn’t feel exactly at home. In theory, I feel like I should experience a meaningful bond with other Jewish people based on the fact of our shared Jewishness but, in practice, it’s not necessarily enough.

I didn’t grow up reciting prayers or regularly attending services (or even eating noodle kugel for that matter, although my mother makes a mean matzoh ball soup). I’m embarrassed by my hazy recollections of the rituals and prayers and my inability to read Hebrew, much less make out the transliterations. I know that no one is judging me, but it’s difficult to feel estranged in situations that should be like a kind homecoming.

by Krista Tippett, host

Recently back from a vacation I needed — and with fresh eyes on the intensity of the present moment — I think the most surprising thing about our name change process is how big and dramatic it feels. Names matter, and as clear as I am that our content won’t change moving forward, we are in fact changing our identity. I feel that personally — a little off balance, a little shaky, a little scared. I’m also feeling the upside of those same elemental human emotions: recharged, excited, expectant. But I have had the benefit of nearly two years of thinking about making this change, brainstorming it, seeking counsel about it, and finally reaching a decision.

I realize that most of our listeners have experienced this as sudden, without all that time and deliberation. This is one of those life lessons: the stressfulness of change, good or bad, is something that we have to re-experience and re-learn again and again and again. I want to thank everyone who has shared their thoughts and reactions across the board. We are listening, reading, and absorbing all of this into the ethos and attitude with which we will inhabit our new name. I often refer to SOF/Being as an adventure as much as a program. This process brings home anew — in a way we could not have imagined when we started — that this is very much a collective adventure.

One other dimension of this experience has struck me with surprising force: a sadness about relinquishing the word “faith.” And I want to acknowledge that there is grief in this for me too, mixed in with all those other emotions I named above. I’ve thought a lot about the limits of words in the years before and since Speaking of Faith began. I thought we could fill that phrase with connotations beyond those that had been imparted by the culture wars, and we have for many. But there are words we have to let go of, at least for a time, when they cease to carry the meaning they have for us in the ears of others. The positive challenge of letting go of the word, however treasured, is that we are then liberated and compelled to find fresh, varied, vivid language to say what we mean — not relying on shorthand that isn’t shorthand after all — and to show rather than tell.

Most of the grief we’re hearing is from Christian listeners, and I have had some interesting and heartening exchanges with Christian theologians and religious leaders — people who have a stake in the “faith” word. This came from a very esteemed Christian church historian and theologian:

1. Naming is always hard. I sometimes find it easier to write a book than to name it.
2. The old name and the surrogates admittedly don’t work well in our culture. “Faith,” “Religion,” “Spirituality” can confuse or alienate or distance some potential listeners.
3. We have to admit, then, though, that no replacement can please all or serve all; solutions have to be partial.
4. The name has to be inclusive, but also say something. “Being” is about as inclusive as anything can be; ask Paul Tillich or Martin Heidegger or other out-of-reach beings. (We Lutherans are trained to say of “church” etc that it is not a “being” but a “becoming,” but that wouldn’t be becoming for your purposes.
5. I think you and your conversations partners will give flesh to this spirit in countless variations. You can even allow some existentialists on, “being” being their specialty.
6. So I’ll be listening and watching!

I am very aware, as we have finally moved into this transition last week and this week and next week, that it is up to us to fill this new name with connotations and meaning. I think we’re up to it, and I know and trust that our listeners/readers will hold us accountable!

by Shubha Bala, associate producer

“If I look at the mass I will never act.”
—Mother Teresa

It’s hard for people to relate to statistics and big numbers when hearing about disasters and people suffering. The question for advocates, and journalists, is how big is too big? Paul Slovic says the magic number is two.

In a study from the Decision Science Research Institute, Slovic and his team presented some people with the opportunity to donate to a starving girl named Rokia, and others to a starving boy named Moussa. People responded compassionately to their cause. He then presented a third group of people with the opportunity to donate to both Rokia and Moussa, helping both of them equally. Surprisingly, people were less likely to donate anything at all when they were presented with two starving children.

For New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, our guest on next week’s show, this has meant focusing on one person’s story. Devoted to raising awareness of human rights and poverty, he told Krista, “My job as a journalist is to find these larger issues that I want to address but then find some microcosm of it, some Rokia who can open those portals and hopefully get people to care.”

In the non-profit world, some organizations have found success by creating a model around this idea — child sponsorship organizations or Kiva, for example. Microfinance organizations weren’t new, but a model in which one could seemingly loan directly to an individual was. As a result, Kiva exploded onto the American donor scene. Even though in both of these cases donations aren’t going directly into the hands of the recipient, Kiva capitalized on the human instinct to take action to help one person in need. Organizations like DonorsChoose.org have used this same model to fund education projects within the United States.

It is not altogether shocking that we feel more compassion when we have relatable stories. But what stands out in Slovic’s paper is a study in which groups were either given the story of Rokia, a list of statistics, or the story of Rokia combined with more general statistics.

“Donations in response to the identified individual, Rokia, were far greater than donations in response to the statistical portrayal of the food crisis. Most important, however, and most discouraging, was the fact that coupling the statistical realities with Rokia’s story significantly reduced the contributions to Rokia. Alternatively, one could say that using Rokia’s story to ‘put a face behind the statistical problem’ did not do much to increase donations.”

And, this is one of the points Nicholas Kristof makes in next week’s show — how to make us care enough about massive, global tragedies to act.

by Cary Gibson, guest contributor

The view of the Greenbelt Festival grounds. (photo: Cary Gibson)

During the last week of August, 20,000 sojourners gathered at the 37^thGreenbelt Festival in Cheltenham, England. Greenbelt’s identity as a social justice and arts festival has always been firmly rooted within a Christian tradition that is world-affirming, politically and culturally engaged, seeking embrace over exclusion.

The program is so vast and diverse it’s impossible to encounter more than a fraction of what is on offer. There’s no single Greenbelt experience; there are 20,000 Greenbelt stories. This is just a thin slice of mine.

“GB10” marked my 18^th year at the festival, so it’s fair to call it something of a pilgrimage — to a sacred space that exists amongst the people in an atmosphere of intentional, mutual welcome. These four days each year have often been the closest thing I’ve had to church. And, for the friends with whom I make the pilgrimage, Greenbelt has an important role in our community: we gather from around the world to embrace togetherness, share meals that anchor our days, and have our ongoing conversations woven with new threads.

This year’s festival held personal significance for me. As I prepare to marry and immigrate to the United States, my best friend Jayne and I were on perhaps our last Greenbelt road trip together. This end of an era was salved with celebration of new beginnings ahead and the gratitude for all we’ve shared thus far. In recent years we’ve been attending as contributors with Ikon, an experimental arts collective from Belfast, Northern Ireland. Our summers are usually busy with creative planning for our festival events. Free of any such logistical responsibilities this year, I found myself looking to be provoked by others.

Greenbelt marks something of a New Year moment — an opportunity to reflect on the year since the last festival, to have one’s mindfulness reawakened, to be reinvigorated for the year to come. Contemplating the theme of “the art of looking sideways,” I found myself wondering, ‘Looking sideways at what?’

An art workshop, “I Draw To Know Myself Better,” opened with a brief reflection on the creativity all humans share: we create to know ourselves, our world, and our place in it. Making art is a constant process of asking: Who am I? Where am I? Why am I here?

Perhaps as a response, some words of the late John O’Donohue kept coming to mind:

“A review of life usually considers the facts of experience, the thresholds, the situations and the people who participated with us along the way. We take this to be the real material of our lives; it becomes the mirror that allows us to glimpse who we are and what meaning our lives have. The facts of what we have lived stand out. We take them as given and real. Yet all these facts have issued from that huge adjacency of possibility, that neighboring world that shimmers invisibly behind all that we take to be real.”
—The Poetics of Possibility

That adjacent realm is perhaps what lies close when one is in what the Celtic tradition calls “a thin place.” That neighboring world is one pregnant with possibility, and it is calling us to remember to look sideways. Looking askance, we might find a world of possibilities inviting us, and discover that maybe the stories we haven’t (yet) lived are the ones we haven’t (yet) heard telling themselves to us. If there is possibility that wants us to hear its invitation, tapping our shoulder so that we might notice and bring it into the visible world, to breathe its life, then maybe our alternative futures are with us all the time, walking beside us.

Greenbelt is a space in which people gather to think critically and its long tradition of social justice theology is rooted both in the realities of human experience and the hopeful possibilities of just peace. As the festival approached, I was troubled by ensuing religious controversies denying the freedom and dignity of the LGBTQ and Islamic communities. I’d been thinking a lot about Jesus’ parable of The Good Samaritan, conscious of how easy it is to walk on by in silence rather than serving those suffering on the roadside. The theme of the festival for me became one of living intentionally, mindful of possibility, seeking to turn and see the stranger in need who is my neighbor at my side. What alternative ways of being and action might I better embody? I found myself, once again, challenged to think through my own privileges — particularly of economic class, nationality, race, and education — but also inspired.

Dave Andrews stridently challenged the festival, and me, on the vital gospel response to poverty and injustice here on Earth with Jesus’ words in “The Be-Attitude Revolution.” My dear friend Pádraig O Tuama also explored “incarnational theology” in “How Do You Spell Hell?” — a mirthful, moving, and characteristically poetic sharing of real stories, which express what it means to be present to one another and recover our personhood in life’s most broken experiences.

In a thought-provoking panel discussion on musicians and artists as social activists, Dan Haseltine, founder of blood:water mission said, “Activism is in the DNA of the artist” — the artist’s prophetic role is to tell real stories that expose the beauty and life that persists in the midst of horror. I’ve been thinking a lot about his comment that any act of service done for another, however small, is a counter cultural act, because our culture isolates us. When we tell of the hell experienced by our neighbor-in-need, prophetic voices are not called to provoke paralysis. For even though so many of us in the Western church are living in the persistent contradiction of our prosperity, when we choose to think critically about the impact of our actions, he added, “It’s not everything. It’s not nothing. And that’s something.”

Greenbelt 2011’s theme is Dreaming of Home. There’s a tender kind of irony to think that I’ll be living far from many of these friends I love. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from Greenbelt, it’s this: There are thin places everywhere, where the unseen is palpably present, ripe with possibility and therefore hope. I can’t do everything but I won’t do nothing. If one remembers to look sideways and be wholly present to our neighbor-in-need and welcome the possibilities for alternative peaceful & just futures we might share, then this life can be it’s own kind of pilgrimage: an everyday act of something.

Peace be with you, neighbor.

(You can find Greenbelt all year on Twitter and Vimeo. Readers in the USA might be interested in the Wild Goose Festival, which is bringing the spirit of Greenbelt to North Carolina in 2011.)

The images above from the Greenbelt Festival are used with permission of Colin Fraser Wishart.

Cary Gibson currently lives in Dublin, Ireland. She explores theology through the arts and recently completed an MA in Women’s Studies at University College Dublin. She has a habit of blogging and tweeting.

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by Nancy Rosenbaum, associate producer

Reem El Shafaki, an Egyptian now living in New Jersey, stands in front of the proposed site of the Park51 mosque and cultural center in lower Manhattan. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

The news has been thick with polarized debates about proposed Qur’an burnings in Florida and the Park51 project. Tamara Lee, a listener from Hopewell, New Jersey, writes us looking for some advice:

“I’m increasingly frustrated by the inability of so many people, particularly Americans, to distinguish between the religion of Islam and the culture of some Islamic countries. I’ve long respected the religion even though some aspects of the culture are less appealing to me. Of late, I am particularly concerned that Muslims seem to be afraid of non-Muslims. I would like to become involved with a group that strives to combat this fear. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.”

If you have any recommendations to pass along to Tamara, post a comment here and we’ll be sure to relay them to her.