New Project: After Hours

I've been busy building/posting at this site: After Hours, which is a new project being soft-launched in the last quarter of 2009 by Cardus staffers and associates. It will hard launch (with hope) in January 2010, but in the meantime it's an interesting space to play in. You're all welcome to check it :)

Thesis

Justice, for the victim of a murder, is a misnomer.

Discuss.

Finding Meaningful Work

The Facebook update of a friend of mine today reminds me of the perennial struggle of young people (like me): how do you get paid (lots of) money for doing things you love?

Many of my peers are engaged in this challenge and - as one privileged to have found both meaningful work and compensation for said work - it has led me to a few reflections.

First, the young especially can struggle to find meaningful work because they don't know what they find meaningful. To get paid to do what one loves one must know what one loves and - further - acknowledge that no career, skill or vocation comes without serious challenges and, if it's something worth doing, a high and long learning curve. There is the old principle of dedicating 10,000 hours but what that principle doesn't always suggest is that many of those hours can suck. Finding meaning, like finding what we love, is a process filled with the virtue of patience. And it is aided, I might add, to no small end by tough minded thinking and thorough-going prayer, such as that facilitated by friends like Steve Garber. Wisdom, as Gideon Strauss loves to recall, cannot be taught - but it can be caught; it's contagious.

Second, I am reminded continuously that my generation - and I mean myself particularly here - have hard lessons to learn from Brother Lawrence. The apprenticing curve for my own work in policy and academia is pretty high, but it's also pretty unpleasant at the start (and I count myself still on that curve). As Ecclesiastes admonishes, it is good for a young man to bear his burden in his youth - I can't imagine the first 2000 hours of developing expertise are nearly as pleasant as the last 2000.

Maybe part of finding meaningful work - work that we love - is about finding work we come to love, rather than expect to find excellent from Day 1. Maybe instead of coming in with our skills, ideas and preferences we let the work we do find shape those things, and take - as Brother Lawrence did - each day as a gift of grace, to learn to find the divine in new and unexpected ways; ways that at times defy what we consider our gifts, strengths and loves.

Aids, Africa, Religion

It is natural for anyone facing a terminal disease to ask, Why me? This is an
exasperated, unanswerable cri de coeur in the rational West—one of the steps of
the grieving process, we are told, that we all just need to get through. But
many Africans have their own kind of answer to that question.
African tribes
are not a homogenous, undifferentiated mass, but the vast majority traditionally
held in common a worldview of causation very different from our own. With
reference to illness, it is called the personalistic theory of disease. Even
today, most Africans believe that any major occurrence, good or bad, has two
causes. The first might be called physical: for instance, that a retrovirus
causes AIDS by destroying the cells of the immune system. The second is a
spiritual, less tangible cause, but is perceived to be no less real. Edward
Evans-Pritchard, whose ethnography of the Nuer people of Sudan is a foundational
work of anthropology, put Africans’ cosmological outlook this way: One might
understand that a house collapsed because termites damaged it. But the more
important question is, Who sent the termites?

and

As an evangelical Christian, Dahlman believes that the witch doctor’s
powers may well be real but that Christ’s are potent above all others. “There
are powers for good and powers for harm,” he says. “Our Western, Hellenistic
view says that doesn’t exist, so we can safely put it off the map. But I can
bring you people who would tell you otherwise, for whom the spiritual world is a
real, day-to-day concern.” In his years in the field, Dahlman says he has seen
an exorcism that reversed the curse of a laibon—a powerful spiritual figure in
Masai culture—as well as a prayer session that healed a woman whose femur was
fractured by a cape buffalo. She could not walk and, because night had fallen,
could not be evacuated. But as daylight broke after an all-night vigil, “the
American, board-certified doctor who had diagnosed the fracture came to the
woman’s house, and she walked out and greeted them,” Dahlman says. “So you can
say there never was any break, contrary to what this physician said and saw,
with this lady unable to walk or bear any pressure on that leg. Do you mistrust
that easy diagnosis, or do you believe that something else happened?”

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/aids-relief-and-moral-myopia, as found on Rod Dreher's site.

Debating Fair Trade

I have become deeply concerned with the economic orthodoxy developing in the Christian sub-culture in North America regarding so-called fair-trade. My own denomination - the Christian Reformed Church of North America - has recently published an issue of Justice Seekers on the importance of buying fair trade.

But this is pop culture international political economy, and nothing I've read and understand of economics seems to confirm this enthusiasm. What it confirms is an uncritical embrace of Wendell Berry's idyllic mode of production. Fair trade fits with the popular imagination of Africa needing essentially small-scale "mom and pop" stores, which fetch fair prices rather than being driven out of business by the conglomerate chains, like we all witness far too often here in North America.

The problem with this nostalgia is that it does not actually generate wealth. If it did, "mom and pop" stores wouldn't have gone out of business. Artificially floating unprofitable systems of production is as good a way as any to ensure that Africa (and other regions) stay poor; it ensures that single-industry economies continue to linger on, artificially stimulated by the latent guilt of the global north, when such economies could be differentiating, producing and even competing with the global North. What keeps this dream from happening is not paying higher prices for your coffee, but a profoundly broken system of international trade and global financial institutions.

I embrace Fair Trade as essentially a glorified public-relations campaign. It alerts us depth of our economic and political problems, but solve global economic disparity? Nonsense. The reverse is more true. We do need fairer trade - something tied, I believe, to freer trade. And, as both Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Collier agree, the problem with free trade is that it's never been tried.

* Further reading: I recommend here Collier's much lauded book The Bottom Billion, or his TED talk.

Amazing Grace (with Garlic)

I've been reading a lot of high literary theory as well as systematic theology and philosophy recently and in tackling the grand, abstract questions I sometimes forget the blessings of embodiment. This could be due to the fact that unlike others of you out there with lean abs, a love of physical activity, and metabolism to burn, I bear the burden of being portly, born with a loathing of physical activity that seems unable to be exorcised even with much fasting and prayer (okay, the fasting part is a lie). And yet, today I was able to take a moment to reflect on the embodied life God has given me and how good that can truly be.

I didn't make the chicken stew from scratch but I did authentically defrost it in the microwave and put it to boil on the stove. And before she left for work, my wife pulled out a recipe of drop dumplings from her favourite cookbook, Food That Really Smecks! I should have known or felt that some divine encounter was going to take place because such things happen when making, eating or even thinking about dumplings. While the stew was coming to a boil I mixed the cup of flour with 1.5 teaspoons of baking powder and the same amount of salt, cut 2 tablespoons of margarine into the mix, added a teaspoon of parsley and several good shakes of oregano. I was about the add the half cup of milk when I felt called by the Spirit to grab the garlic powder and give it a few good shakes over the mixture.

By this time the stew was boiling so I put it down to simmer and dropped the dumplings into the pot, put the lid on for 15 min. and sat back on the couch. The busyness of my past week seemed to crash through the windows at that point and I found myself again swept away in a tide of "lofty" concerns.

Then the timer went.

I grabbed a bowl and scooped myself up a good portion of chicken stew and parsley-garlic dumplings and went back out the couch to look out over the cityscape out our third story window. The smell of the stew would have been enough to tempt me to break my fast (that is, if I ever actually had the self-discipline to fast in the first place).

I held up the bowl in front of the window and watched the steam curl in on itself and dissipate even as I tuned into the words of the song I had playing on the CD player, "Amazing Grace, I feel you coming up slowly now, like the sun is rising, heat on my face...".

And I was truly thankful for my meal, even the bit that I dumped down the front of my shirt. Thankful in a way I haven't been for a long time. The words "amazing grace" have many connotations for me and many memories associated with the singing of those words but now I have a smell to go with them... garlic.

God of all Creation, thank you for garlic, and dumplings, and re-heated chicken stew! Amen.

[NOTE: To my Reformed friends, cooking with garlic won't turn you into a Pentecostal... think of it as, say, Creational].

Gross, gag-worthy, healthy

Following up on my "On shit" and "On shit II" posts, here is another unsexy, gross, but seemingly very effective thing that would help those in need.

I will file this under unsexy=effective.