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.