merefaith: two friends on pilgrimage

Garden update

2009-07-07T21:36:00.000-04:00

Today I had the good pleasure of plucking 47 cherry tomatoes from my four plants. All together, I've pulled off nearly 100 tomatoes so far with a good chance I can double that amount before the plants are shot. I also pulled off the second and final round of bush beans (a much smaller crop) and the last of the peas, yanking those plants off the trellis and piling them for compost. Right now, I have some surprisingly resilient lettuce that hasn't been killed off by the heat. Some strawberries are appearing at a strangely late time of the year. My onions continue to sit there and I keep wondering whether I'm doing a good job with them or not. The single eggplant apparently refuses to grow past the sprout stage, with my pepper plant as a comrade in stubbornness. Chives, mint, leeks, and basil continue to do fine. I wonder when my okra will start significant growth....

Kelly and I also successfully planted shrubs in our new sheet-mulched beds around the edges of the house. Significant members include a juniper bush, butterfly bush, and a camellia. Two quince plants will provide fruit that, while bitter raw, makes great preserves. And it finally RAINED so our rain barrels are recharged again. We will get two more in the near future, though.

I need to order some seeds and plan for my fall crop. I hope to grow kale and pumpkins as new crops. I'm also going to order Gene Logsdon's Small-Scale Grain Raising. Imagine growing your own grain crops in your backyard!! I personally find that quite exciting...

Global Warming Legislation in the House

2009-06-26T16:46:00.000-04:00

Believe it or not, it's been kind of entertaining to watch the debate about the American Clean Energy and Security Act. The House of Representatives is about to close debate on the bill and vote and I've been watching on C-SPAN online. I sure hope this moves forward, whatever the merits of all the bill's specifics. While I am pretty much disdainful of both political parties, the Republicans are really looking like the Flat Earth Society in their denial of global warming and their refusal to consider doing anything about it at all.

Is farming evil?

2009-06-24T22:02:00.000-04:00

Or, to put it another way, was agriculture the "worst mistake in history"?

This article from the Telegraph notes the problems that arose when humanity transitioned from being hunter-gatherers.

Cf. Richard Manning's "Against the Grain" and his podcast interview with Agroinnovations.

Test

2009-06-11T08:39:00.000-04:00

This is a test. Am I still "blocked" or have the powers that be at Blogspot determined that I am, in fact, a person?

Raymond James: Oil production peaked in 2008

2009-05-11T12:03:00.000-04:00

Interesting post at the Wall Street Journal's Environmental Capital blog.

You'll also find a lively debate in the comments section!

What is Jerusalem worth?: Secunda Pares

2009-04-29T21:49:00.002-04:00

"What is Jerusalem worth?"

This question is asked near the conclusion of the film Kingdom of Heaven (2005). The Christians are about to surrender Jerusalem to Saladin and his army. The main character, Balian of Ibelin (Orlando Bloom), has successfully resisted the siege long enough to reach favorable terms for the city's inhabitants. Long since disillusioned about the purported holiness of the Holy Land, Balian wonders what justification may be offered for the carnage that he has witnessed.

"Nothing," Saladin replies as he turns to walk away. Then he stops and looks back.

"Everything."

I guess this is supposed to be profound. So is the rest of the movie. Unfortunately, Ridley Scott has given us banality and simplicity rendered within an ahistorical mess. We get it, Mr. Scott, we get it. The "idea" of Jerusalem, a place where one has equal standing before God, where one finds grace and enlightenment and warm fuzzies, that is worth everything. The brick-and-mortar city is no more important than any other. Next episode of "School House Rock," please.

Kingdom of Heaven tries to say something about our current global situation by illuminating the past, but it fails on both counts. This is largely the fault of its moralizing anachronisms. The protagonists of the film are too busy sounding like 21st-century multiculturalist progressives to be believable. Some critics who have reviewed the film suggested that it may be impossible to make a Middle Ages movie that is both generally faithful to the period and yet palatable to modern film audiences. Becket, anyone?

While the film is a general disappointment, one thing I have gained from it is an ongoing fascination with the realm whose collapse it narrates: the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem that was established after the First Crusade. When I saw the movie in theaters, it was the first time I really understood that something more happened between this crusade and that. I had never thought about what life in the region was like after the Western Christians captured and held Jerusalem.

There were other states established after the First Crusade as well: the counties of Edessa and Tripoli and the Principality of Antioch. But Jerusalem was the largest, most prestigious, and longest-lasting of these states. And, of course, the Kingdom encompassed the holiest and most contested sites. In this kingdom one could encounter a strange, dynamic, complex mix of Christian sects and Muslim communities and multiple languages and ethnicities. It wasn't a harmonious melting plot, but it was anything but bland. Here, West and East found themselves face-to-face long before free trade and globalization.

Kingdom of Heaven, ahistorically, portrays the Latin Kingdom as generally being that melting pot - a place where Jews, Christians and Muslims live together in peace and with respect for each other. Good King Baldwin IV ensures this harmony and works hand-in-hand with Saladin to keep tensions from boiling over into open conflict. That peace is only disturbed by the unhappy fundamentalists on both sides, whether the Knights Templar and newcomers from Europe on the one hand or the religious advisors to Saladin on the other.

Ironically, this progressive movie has adopted a reactionary portrait of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. A number of postwar French historians argued that the kingdom was, in fact, an integrated society. This offered a convenient justification for the contemporary French colonial holdings in Syria and Algeria. If their Frankish forebears could humanely rule foreign territories in the past, why couldn't they do so again under de Gaulle? Let's all get together and sing Kum Ba Yah...or at least La Marseillaise.

The pendulum soon swung the other way, and around the 1970s medieval historians argued that Jerusalem was something else entirely: a completely segregated society in which the Frankish lords kept their own institutions and customs, remained aloof from the native population, and treated their colonized subjects with disdain. The contemporary parallel shifted from Algeria to minority-rule apartheid in South Africa.

These historians had good reason to argue thus. The supposedly enlightened and tolerant Baldwin IV of the movie was nicknamed "the pig" by Muslims in Galilee. The Code of Nablus, a body of laws drawn up in 1120, forbade intermarriage between Christians and Muslims. The latter were banned from owning property in the cities and, like the Christians under Muslim rule, paid an extra tax.

However, the record is not uniformly oppressive. First of all, the simple question of Christian-Muslim relations ignores the fact that perhaps up to half the population of Palestine when the crusaders arrived was still Christian. They weren't Catholic Christians, mind you. Some were Greek holdovers from Byzantine days and thus were Eastern Orthodox. But most were Syrian Christians who belonged either to the "Nestorian" or the "Monophysite" church. While the Frankish rulers and settlers may have been inclined to view the Syrians and Greeks as heretics or schismatics, some historians have recently begun to speak of a fairly well-integrated Franco-Syrian society in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The Franks adopted the local dress and some local customs. They also intermarried with Syrian Christians at all levels of society, including the royal family. Peasant immigrants from Europe settled in Syrian Christian villages or started new villages nearby. Franks and Syrians often shared public spaces such as churches.

But was there any assimilation with the Muslim population, or at least any genuine efforts at understanding or coexistence? While archaeological surveys suggest segregation in rural areas, the cities were genuinely cosmopolitan. While Muslims were disallowed from owning property in the cities, there were plenty of renters. Muslim traders, merchants and artisans (and, unfortunately, slaves) mingled in close quarters with the Franks as well as Italian merchants and seamen. Although Muslims were initially banned from Jerusalem, by the time of its fall to Saladin several thousand lived there - enough that Balian of Ibelin supposedly threatened their massacre if favorable terms of surrender were not reached. However, it should be noted that in legal documentation, the kingdom recognized in principle that the Saracens "are men just like the Franks." A Muslim could sue a Frank over unpaid debt. Some Frankish knights gained battle experience by serving in Muslim armies. Mosques and shrines in the Kingdom of Jerusalem were open for worship and, according to historian Jonathan Riley-Smith, there was even a mosque-church. Tolerance in some form, if not principled, was at least beneficial both to business and security.

Meanwhile, there are various accounts of friendship and respect between Muslims and Frankish Christians. Perhaps most of these exchanges were characterized by a deep ambiguity inherent to the geopolitical circumstances. Examples include the Muslim merchant Usama ibn Mundiqh, who could describe the Franks as animals in one paragraph of his autobiography and in the next praise their religious devotion, or at another point laud a Frankish knight for rescuing an associate from a lynch mob in Antioch and then entertaining him at his home. Or consider the aforementioned Balian. The same man who threatened massacre was also apparently a friend of Saladin. After escaping Hattin, he swore an oath not to take up arms against the sultan, only to have the citizens of Jerusalem prevail upon him to lead the defense of the city. Balian wrote a letter to Saladin explaining why he broke his promise. Saladin forgave Balian and allowed him to go free once Jerusalem surrendered.

A purportedly less ambiguous figure was Raymond III of Tripoli, a leading noble in the kingdom and competitor to Guy of Lusignan for succession to the throne in 1186. Raymond had spent eleven years in captivity under the Muslims, learned Arabic, and grew to respect his adversaries. He may have believed that genuine coexistence was possible, and he also counted Saladin as a friend. By contrast, Reynald of Chatillon also spent several years in captivity and learned to hate Muslims with a tremendous ferocity.

In the end, however, a genuine pluralism was impossible. The founding ideology of the Kingdom was the crusade to liberate territories that were considered rightfully Christian. Any respect that Muslims developed for the Western settlers was limited by Islam's own claim to superiority, particularly its inherent conviction that the world is irreconcilably divided into two realms: the advancing Dar al-Islam (House of Islam) and the chaotic, degenerate Dar al-Harb (House of War). The Kingdom of Jerusalem was certainly a fascinating mosaic of cultures, languages and traditions, but it was doomed to be a only a fleeting and tense one.

Quote of the day

2009-04-28T09:22:00.001-04:00

"Fairy tales do not teach children that dragons exist. They already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales teach children that dragons can be killed." - G.K. Chesterton

What is Jerusalem worth?

2009-04-26T22:23:00.000-04:00

That's a question I asked myself as I bid in one of a series of auctions on eBay for some ancient and medieval coins. This particular coin was listed by the seller as "Broken Silver Crusaders Coin from Holyland Jerusalem." There was no identification as to the date or authority under which this coin was minted. I considered this coin and another "crusader coin" and commenced with Google research.

The other "crusader" coin I was able to identify as struck under a 13th century king of Cicilian Armenia and not one of the Latin Christian states created in the aftermath of 1099. Interesting, yes, but not what I was looking for. The "Holyland Jerusalem" coin, however, proved to be just as was claimed:
Despite the break at the top, this denier coin is readily identifiable. The reverse side, shown on the left, depicts the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and reads De Ierusalem (Jerusalem) around the edge. The obverse has a cross in the middle and, while the letters are harder to make out, they should read Amaulricus Rex or King Amalric. In short, this is a coin minted in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, the "crusader" state created in 1099 and which lasted in some form or another until the fall of Acre in 1291.

The name "Amalric" invokes some ambiguity, however. King Amalric I reigned 1162-1174, a period that could be considered the apex of the kingdom's security and power. His only major successor before the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin was Baldwin IV, an effective ruler in spite of his leprosy from childhood. The child-king Baldwin V was dead within a year and then Guy de Lusignan led the kingdom to disaster. Of these rulers from the period of the original kingdom, only Guy appears to have minted his own, distinct coin. The Baldwins continued to use Amalric's denier.

Moreover, a King Amalric II ruled over the post-1187 Kingdom of Jerusalem, a much-reduced coastal strip of cities, in the years 1197-1205. He issued a coin that is, as far as I can tell, identical in design to the first Amalric's coin. So I was left with a bit of confusion: which Amalric minted this coin? And, if it was the first, was this particular coin struck under Amalric himself or one of the late Baldwins?

I may never get an answer to the second question, but the first has been addressed to my satisfaction. I queried the seller as to the place where this coin was found. He replied that it was uncovered in southern Jordan. We know that territories east of the Jordan River were controlled by Latin Christians only during the early Kingdom of Jerusalem. After 1187 I find it unlikely that a Frankish coin would be considered necessary or useful that far from the Mediterranean coast. So I think it's a safe bet to conclude that this coin, which I now own (pending successful delivery!), dates from the early Kingdom of Jerusalem between the years 1162 and 1186.

A kingdom which, for various reasons, I find to be a fascinating subject in itself. But I will have to save those thoughts for another time.

NYTimes: Natural Happiness

2009-04-20T09:08:00.000-04:00

An interesting piece in the New York Times Magazine about how humans are wired to benefit from nature:

You might think that technology could provide a simulacrum of nature with all the bad parts scrubbed out. But attempts to do so have turned out to be interesting failures. There is a fortune to be made, for instance, by building a robot that children would respond to as if it were an animal. There have been many attempts, but they don’t evoke anywhere near the same responses as puppies, kittens or even hamsters. They are toys, not companions. Or consider a recent study by the University of Washington psychologist Peter H. Kahn Jr. and his colleagues. They put 50-inch high-definition televisions in the windowless offices of faculty and staff members to provide a live view of a natural scene. People liked this, but in another study that measured heart-rate recovery from stress, the HDTVs were shown to be worthless, no better than staring at a blank wall. What did help with stress was giving people an actual plate-glass window looking out upon actual greenery.
All of this provides a different sort of argument for the preservation of nature. Put aside for the moment practical considerations like the need for clean air and water, and ignore as well spiritual worries about the sanctity of Mother Earth or religious claims that we are the stewards of creation. Look at it from the coldblooded standpoint of the enhancement of the happiness of our everyday lives. Real natural habitats provide significant sources of pleasure for modern humans. We intuitively grasp this, and this knowledge underlies the anxiety that we feel about nature’s loss. It might be that one day we will be able to replace the experience of nature with “Star Trek” holodecks and robotic animals. But until then, this basic fact about human pleasure is an excellent argument for keeping the real thing.

Myths about the Middle Ages

2009-04-16T09:53:00.002-04:00

Myths about the Middle Ages

(found here)

James Franklin

There are so many myths about the Middle Ages, it has to be suspected that the general level of "knowledge" about things medieval is actually negative.
Here are some of the more famous ones.

In the Middle Ages it was believed the earth was flat.
There's a whole book devoted to refuting this one: J.B. Russell's Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (New York, 1991) (review; also `The myth of the flat earth'.)
The facts are that the Greeks knew the earth was spherical from about 500 BC, and all but a tiny number of educated persons have known it in all times since. Thomas Aquinas gives the roundness of the earth as a standard example of a scientific truth, in Summa theologiae bk. I q. 1 art. 1.
The scholastic philosophers of the Middle Ages debated how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.
This has not been found in any scholastic, nor has the allegation been found earlier than in a Protestant writer of 1638. See `Heads of pins'; further; discussion.
Aquinas does discuss "whether several angels can be in the same place at the same time" (Summa theologiae bk. I q. 52 art. 3), but that does not quite have the farcical ring of the original.
Medieval lords had a ius primae noctis: a legal or customary right to sexual relations with the newly-married wives of their underlings.
There's a whole book on this one, too: A. Boureau, The Lord's First Night: The Myth of the Droit de Cuissage. In short, there's nothing in the story.
(The same author wrote The Myth of Pope Joan but I don't include this myth as I don't think it's ever been seriously believed.)
Some medieval Pope (unnamed, of course) instituted fasting from meat on Fridays to help the fishing industry of the Papal States.
Mediev-l archives `Fish on Fridays' thread.
The alleged fragments of the True Cross would have added up to a whole forest.
In a truly obsessive piece of scholarship, Charles Rohault de Fleury's Memoire sur les instruments de la passion de N.-S. J.-C. (Paris, 1870) counted all the alleged fragments and showed they only added up to considerably less than one cross ... more
Vikings wore helmets with horns
How would you know Hagar the Horrible was a Viking if he didn't have horns? ... the facts
Spices were used to cover up the taste of rotten meat
Rotten meat with spices is as dangerous as rotten meat without spices ... discussion
Chastity belts.
A report; an article.
An early medieval church council declared (or almost declared) that women have no souls.
History of the error.
"In the times of St Thomas it [woman] was considered an essence as certainly defined as the somniferous virtue of the poppy ...St Thomas for his part pronounced woman to be an imperfect man"
These claims are made in the introduction to Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, one of the founding texts of feminism. Aquinas believes all humans have the same essence. Though not exactly a believer in the equality of men and women, he did not call women imperfect men. details.
Religious taboos prevented medical dissection of bodies
Katherine Park's book on late medieval dissection
The medieval burning of witches.
Medieval canon law officially did not believe in witches. There were very occasional individual witch trials in the Middle Ages, but the persecution of witches only became a mass phenomenon from around 1500. The height of persecution was in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries ... article; resources.
The feudal system.
Depending on how strictly it is defined, the feudal system, in the sense of a hierarchical system of property-based legal obligations between lords and vassals, is a later invention. This is argued in S. Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals (reviews). However, it is true that there was a manorial system or generalised protection racket, something like the "feudal system" of popular imagination.
The Renaissance.
The thesis that there was a rebirth of learning in Europe in or around the fifteenth century, after a thousand years of darkness, is too diffuse to admit of clear agreement or disagreement. Nevertheless, the claim that the "Renaissance" is almost entirely a beat-up, put about by a gang of anti-Catholic art historians, has much to be said for it. See `The Renaissance myth'.
There's more ... and yet more ...
A book, Regine Pernoud's Those Terrible Middle Ages: Debunking the Myths tackles a number at once ... review.

The $64000 Question about Old Scratch

2009-04-15T21:27:00.002-04:00

One of the greatest mysteries of biblical theology that still puzzles me is this: What is the Devil, really, and where did it come from?

While asking this question, I am imposing one limitation and one assumption. First, I am not concerned about potential historical-critical reasons or sources for the development of the concept of Satan in Jewish and Christian theology. The only significant element of this enterprise that factors into my question, an element a good reader recognizes without need for critical scholarship, is the stark difference between the minimally-present prosecutorial Satan of Job 1-2 and Zechariah 3 and the malevolent force of evil in the New Testament. The Satan who is a bit player in Yahweh's covenant becomes the opponent of the Son of God's redemptive mission.

My assumption for exploring this question is that there is indeed a real entity, intelligence, what have you, to which the biblical witness points. The discussion from here is moot if "Satan" is really a label for a metaphorical personification of all that is antithetical to the will of God. I have heard too many testimonies of the demonic to discount the notion of supernatural evil embodied in living beings of some sort, so why not a particularly prominent being among their number?

I used to have a straightforward answer to this question - one common to evangelical American Christians. The Devil was previously Lucifer, a perfect being who was glorious in splendor and chief over all the angels. At some point in the primordial past - perhaps before the creation of the world, perhaps just before or after the creation of human beings - Lucifer became filled with pride and led a rebellion of 1/3 of the angels to unseat God as god. Lucifer and his angels were cast out of heaven, they to become demons and he to become the Devil, the adversary of God and human beings. The Devil or Satan ("accuser") took the form of a serpent to deceive the original humans, and out of his jealousy has been tempting those who are made in God's image that they may suffer with him in the miserable perdition he knows awaits him.

There is a certain mythical elegance to this story that makes it grand fun when one is reading Milton's Paradise Lost, and yet it is so full of exegetical and theological holes that it looks like Charlie Brown's ghost costume on Halloween night. The "fall" of Lucifer cobbles together Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28, two imagery-rich declarations of judgment on human kings (of Babylon and Tyre, respectively), and adds them to anachronistic intepretations of a statement by Jesus in the Gospels ("I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven") and Revelation 12 ("the dragon's tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky...and there was war in heaven"). Never at all is Satan identified as an angel in Scripture - even if he has an entourage of evil angels, as Jesus indicates ("the fire prepared for the devil and his angels"), that no more proves it is one of them than the many biblical statements about God's entourage. Nor, for that matter, are the demons equated with the fallen angels. That is also an assumed connection that, while plausible, is not itself stated in the Bible.

Moreover, the "fall" story raises a number of theological difficulties. Did spiritual death enter the world through "Adam," that is, through the actions of human beings, or was it already present through the agency of the Evil One? How could the chief angel in the presence of God come to believe it might somehow defeat the One who is the very ground of all being? Why would a malicious opponent of the people of God arise all the way back at the dawn of time and yet its true character would remain unknown until, at the earliest, a few centuries before the birth of Christ?

So what we're left with is a mysterious personality that Jesus and the New Testament writers clearly identified as a force to be reckoned with by the people of God. This same personality, however, is given no discernible history or clear biography. I grant that this can be for good reason. It is better to focus on resisting evil than feeding curiosity about it. And yet, we still wonder.

I would love to hear some feedback before I proceed with speculation of my own.

"The old fields are dying...save, save, save"

2009-04-15T08:45:00.002-04:00

In current discussions about energy use, of which the great majority of Americans remain ignorant, the pessimists of peak oil theory are arguing that oil production may have already peaked (2005 and 2008 are the two years most frequently identified) or will peak shortly (2010, 2012). On the other end, most energy analysts and corporations insist that oil production will continue to rise and will meet demand long enough to enable a steady transition to a post-hydrocarbon, renewable energy future. However, estimates concerning that future have been revised downward recently by typically optimistic groups such as the International Energy Agency and Cambridge Energy Research Associates. See, for example, George Monbiot's report in the Guardian about the difference between the IEA 2007 and 2008 reports as well as IEA economist Fatih Birol's expectation of a plateau in oil production around 2020.

Somewhere in the middle between the optimists and pessimists has been the French oil company Total. CEO Christophe de Marguerite has stated that he believes oil production will never rise above approximately 90 million barrels per day. To put that in perspective, the most recent peak in July of last year was close to 87 mb/d, and after production cuts the current rate is 83. The German magazine Der Spiegel posted an interview yesterday with Michel Mallet, the manager of Total's German operations. While Mallet expects a higher peak figure than Marguerite, he does think that the cheap, accessible oil has already been found and that intensive conservation needs to begin now. Some snippets from the interview:

Mallet: There are hardly any readily accessible oil fields anymore. The fields on the floor of the North Sea, for example, are practically empty. New reserves are only being found deep in the ocean, in remote regions like Kazakhstan or in the form of oil sands. None of this is cheap to produce.

[...]
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Is it even possible to increase oil production anymore?

Mallet: About 87 million barrels a day are produced worldwide. In the past, it was believed that this number could be increased to 130 million. I consider that an illusion. Realistically, the capacity is less than 105 million barrels.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: It sounds like the peak oil theory, which isn't very popular among your competitors. It holds that maximum production will be reached soon.

Mallet: The old oil fields are dying. In the future, we will have to invest more and more just to maintain existing production.
[...]

SPIEGEL ONLINE: So how much longer will the oil last?

Mallet: We won't have any problems for the next 20 years. If we handle demand responsibly, it could even last another 40 or 50 years.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: But what if demand increases, particularly in Asia?

Mallet: That's why we have a clear message: We have to save, save, save.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Total is the only oil company that is predicting stagnating production. Are the others ignoring the truth?

Mallet: I don't know. But I do know that anyone who encourages people to buy big cars to increase his oil sales is making a big mistake. I myself walk to work.

Abba Poemen (desert father) on practicing generosity

2009-04-14T15:43:00.002-04:00

A brother said to Abba Poemen, "If I give my brother a little bread or something else, the demons tarnish these gifts saying it was only done to please men." The old man said to him, "Even if it is to please men, we must give the brother what he needs." He told him the following parable, "Two farmers lived in the same town; one of them sowed and reaped a small and poor crop, while the other, who did not even trouble to sow, reaped absolutely nothing. If a famine comes upon them, which of the two will find something to live on?" The brother replied, "The one who reaped the small poor crop." The old man said to him, "So it is for us; we sow a little poor grain, so that we will not die of hunger."

Iraqi Christians celebrate Easter in Baghdad neighborhood again

2009-04-12T22:44:00.001-04:00

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!

In Iraq, an Easter resurrection for Christian communities

"We got to do something with these young people..."

2009-04-02T16:16:00.002-04:00

Since half of my job description is the youth ministry at our church, I often get a lot of questions or comments along the lines of:

"We appreciate all that you're doing for our young people."

"How many young people do we have showing up?"

"We're just so glad we have someone who can help our young people."

"Young people" seems to be the phrase of choice. I'm just glad it's not "little people" or else I might have to say something about my lucky charms.

Our elders in our churches want to have something available for the "young people." They want the program or ministry or fellowship or whatever it is called to be instructive, spiritual, relevant and accessible. And they hardly ever want to have anything to do with it. Not because they don't like the young people, mind you. They just imagine they would get eaten alive. Who would listen to a technologically-ignorant, culturally-backwards old-timer? Well...more youth are willing than they realize. More than even the youth themselves realize. The key, of course, is building relationships.

So check out this great article, "Engaging Young Baptists," at the CBF blog. It'll be applicable for all other traditions, of course.

Interview with Vandana Shiva

2009-04-02T08:26:00.002-04:00

Vandana Shiva, the Indian environmental activist and agrarian researcher, has done a recent interview with the Baltimore Sun's Urbanite magazine. It is reproduced for you below.

[original article]

Vandana Shiva, India’s leading environmental activist, says that the industrialized West is literally consuming the developing world. We eat cinnamon that comes out of Thailand, bananas from Central America. To feed our ever-growing appetites, we push industrial agriculture methods on once-traditional agrarian societies, and now we want these faraway lands to produce a different kind of food: biofuel, to feed the West’s automobiles. At some point, Shiva argues, we’re going to have to choose between sacred cow and sacred car.

Shiva founded an organization called Navdanya to promote research in organic agriculture and saving heirloom seeds. In her 2008 book Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis, she argues that the rebirth of sustainable, traditional agriculture offers the best way forward, in both India and in the West.

“There is a myth that there are agricultural societies, and then there are industrial societies and service societies, as if when you become an industrial or service society you don’t need food,” she says. “As we hit climate chaos, as we hit peak oil, assuming that you can get your food from far away and use fossil-fuel-intensive systems to produce food is totally not sustainable. Bringing food security close to home will have to be the project of the future.”

Q Soil Not Oil seems to be about the tension between traditional agriculture and industrial agriculture. How is this playing out in India?

A It is playing out in a very tragic way. An imposed, fossil-fuel-driven industrial agriculture, which has been globalized through the World Trade Organization rules, has pushed hundreds of thousands of Indian farmers to suicide.

The suicides as an epidemic started in 1998. That is the year that the new seeds were brought into India in a large scale—the genetically engineered seeds. That is the year that the World Trade Organization was used by the United States to remove import restrictions. The combination of high-cost, nonrenewable seeds [that produce sterile fruit]—under the monopoly control of one company, Monsanto—and the falling price of cotton with the subsidies that the United States gives its cotton growers is really the squeeze that forced Indian cotton farmers into debt. And that unpayable debt is what has pushed farmers to suicide.

Q But if you have to feed more than a billion people, as farmers in India do, isn’t it impractical to hang on to traditional farming methods?

A Here, they want to connect all of India with superhighways, and 90 percent of the roads haven’t been built. They won’t be built because of the financial collapse. So this huge dream of a totally motorized world and tractorized agriculture is already failing in front of our eyes. It failed in Cuba under very tragic circumstances—under [the U.S.-imposed] trade embargo. But they rebuilt their agriculture [based on] principles that ancient cultures practiced. Now I don’t call that being locked into tradition. It’s highly innovative.

I see fossil-fuel-free farming as a future of agriculture—not because of nostalgia, not because of romanticism, but because of a very hard-nosed realism. If your fertilizer prices have tripled in the past year, there is no way to carry on depending on chemical fertilizers. If your phosphate requirements in chemical agriculture are going to run out in the next twenty years, you’d better get ecological, organic sources. To depend on an agriculture that requires oil inputs at every step would be developing a system at this point that has no future.

Q Beyond the farm, how has the push for an industrialized culture affected the developing world?

A Third-world cultures are very culturally diverse, and India is really the home of diversity. It is our strength, as long as there is peace, justice, and sustainability. But when the stresses of the globalized war economy start to impinge on a diverse culture, we see more of the Mumbai kind of phenomenon. [The terrorist attacks in] Mumbai ended up being world news, but there have been a hundred Mumbais in the past decade in India. They didn’t become big news because they weren’t at hotels where Westerners stay; they were on trains and buses where ordinary Indians travel.

Just like a field cracks up when it is dry, our societies are cracking up because they are being dried up economically. I can see that if we don’t have a major shift toward equality and justice, we will not be able to hold our societies together. This cracking up shows up as ethnic conflicts or regional conflicts, but at the root of it are two issues everywhere: access to resources and access to livelihood. As that access shrinks because of a globalized economy and a limitless appetite for growth, people start looking at their neighbors as a problem.

Q Tell me about your agricultural organization, Navdanya.

A “Navdanya” means both “a new gift” as well as “nine seeds.” I started it in 1987 when I first realized what the agenda of the chemical and agribusiness companies was, in terms of controlling the seed through genetic engineering and patenting. Their vision was one of dictatorship over life, not just dictatorship over people or one country. I wanted seeds and life forms to evolve freely and not be forced into genetic engineering or into patenting. The original idea was to create seed banks that farmers could access, get seeds from, and continue to grow crops in diversity. Of course, this led very quickly to an organic movement.

The fascinating thing about saving seeds and biodiversity that I have learned is that you conserve biodiversity by eating it. Now that sounds paradoxical, but it is true. If you continue to eat amaranth, you will grow amaranth. If you eat two hundred kinds of rice, you will grow two hundred kinds of rice. So eating is literally shaping the landscape and ecology of our planet.

Q Practically speaking, how do you get back to a soil-based, rather than oil-based, society, culture, and economy?

A I wouldn’t say “get back to.” I would say “go forward to.” Going forward to a soil-based society means building economies of place, and economies of place means recognizing the ecological limits of the place where you are. It means grounded economies. The financial collapse is going to compel us to look for livelihoods beyond the false speculations and the credit spending, where you spend more than you earn.

I feel that the combination of climate change, peak oil, and the financial collapse provides an opportunity for us to build economies of place that will shift not just from oil to soil, but it will shift from financial capital to people as the real wealth—people as both the generators of wealth as well as wealth of communities. If we can get there, we will have a future. If we can’t get there, we will see more and more conflicts emerge around the world in conditions of new scarcity.

I did get something done...

2009-03-28T20:45:00.006-04:00

Although we couldn't mix the soil for the veggie garden, (my #1 priority!), we did go to the garden center and get some ideas for ornamentals and fruit trees. We also went to Lowes and picked up two tan, 48-gallon rain barrels. I managed to set one up before the rain started. I couldn't believe how quickly the run-off from just a portion of the roof filled it up! Light rain started about 3:30 and when I checked the barrel at 8:00 it was about two-thirds full. I did some Google research (what a scholar I am..) and found out that a 1,000 sq. ft. roof could run off 600 gallons of water during a one-inch rainfall! I think we're going to need some more barrels! All I need now is a garden big enough to get just the water from one of these barrels...

This is the barrel...well, not our barrel...you get the drift.
Visit Rain-Barrel.com to learn about it.

Stephen and Rebekah Hren have this to say about rainwater collection in The Carbon-Free Home:

Letting water fall on your roof and run off your yard into the storm drain, and then pumping an equivalent amount of water from miles away for use inside your home doesn't make a lot of sense. Like other wasteful and inefficient modern city systems, the failure to harvest and use the water that rains down on our houses results in wasted energy, almost invariably fossil energy, with the concomitant carbon emissions.

Much urban and rural water arrives at taps after being pumped (using fossil energy) from underground aquifers. Some of these aquifers are now stranded, meaning they are not being recharged. Water from these aquifers is often referred to as fossil water, because it accumulated over thousands if not millions of years and will not be replenished in a humanly relevant time frame once depleted. Aquifers that are capable of being recharged do so faster when water is released slowly over a long period of time so that less is lost to runoff.

It's a shame we don't have the money or time to make the advanced system they have that collects rainwater from their metal roof, treats its, and pumps it through the house! Baby steps, my friends...

Delays, delays...

2009-03-28T10:23:00.002-04:00

I got right out of bed this morning to put together my new garden beds. I was hoping to put the boxes together and get the soil mixed before the rain this afternoon. Unfortunately, it turns out that my order of vermiculite at the garden center, 1/3 of the Square Foot Garden "Mel's Mix," has not come in like it should have.

I feel like Marvin the Martian, puttering and muttering "delays, delays..."

Culture of the Land: A Series on New Agrarianism

2009-03-27T13:58:00.002-04:00

I was very pleased yesterday to discover a series of books on the new agrarianism that has been published by the University of Kentucky Press over the past three years. Entitled "Culture of the Land," this series is edited by the Christian philosopher and agrarian (and a Baptist, to boot!) Norman Wirzba, who began this academic year his tenure as Professor of Theology, Ecology and Rural Life at Duke Divinity School. You can read Divinity Magazine's article on Wirzba's work here. The advisory board for the series includes another Dukie - Ellen Davis, Old Testament professor and author of Scripture, Culture and Agriculture. The members of the board have a range of experience and education in the physical sciences, agriculture, and law and policy. Among their ranks one will find Bill McKibben, Wendell Berry, Michael Pollan, Wes Jackson, and Vandana Shiva.

According to the series web page, its purpose is the following:

This series is devoted to the exploration and articulation of a new agrarianism that considers the health of habitats and human communities together. Far from being a naïve call to return to the land, and thus merely a reverse exodus to the country, the books in the series Culture of the Land show how agrarian insights and responsibilities can be worked out in diverse fields of learning and living: history, politics, economics, literature, philosophy, urban planning, education, and public policy. Agrarianism is a comprehensive worldview that, unlike other forms of environmentalism that often presuppose an antagonistic or exclusive relation between wilderness and civilization, appreciates the intimate and practical connections that exist between humans and the earth. It stands as our most promising alternative to the unsustainable and destructive ways of current global, consumer culture.

Books in the series include and Ents, Elves and Eriador: The Environmental Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien and Beyond Biotechnology: The Barren Promise of Genetic Engineering. I have ordered Eric Freyfogle's Agrarianism and the Good Society, for which used copies in good condition are available for eight bucks at Amazon. You can get the complete list of advisors and books at this page.

Waterless urinals: not just for Duke Divinity anymore...

2009-03-19T19:43:00.002-04:00

When I arrived at Duke, the Divinity School premiered its new, third building. We had a beautiful new chapel, state-of-the art classroom electronics...and waterless urinals. A great way to save water, but they certainly seemed a little gross. And, to be honest, I was never convinced that a certain aromatic issue was properly addressed. But, on the whole, waterless urinals are a good idea - and apparently, they're more hygenic, too. Check out this piece at the Christian Science Monitor.

The Inflection/Disruption Consumption

2009-03-09T07:38:00.002-04:00

One thing I don't like about the time change is getting up while night is still with us.

One thing I do like, however, is watching the Sun emerge behind a stand of trees at this moment.

Contradiction? You bet.
Wanna watch me turn this into a metaphor?
It will either be really lame or totally awesome...take your pick. No middle ground.

When crisis appears to be looming in the future, "waking up" to it early, before others do, means that one will feel surrounded by utter darkness. It's coming - there's no hope. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

But this awakening also gives one the privilege of seeing the opportunity hidden behind the crisis, of perceiving how a new dawn could be possible.

Commence the rolling of the eyes!

I wouldn't be so bold to claim any real prescience. Environmentalists, climate scientists, Catholic economists and social thinkers, and neo-agrarians have sounded alarm bells for years. Nature and economy are interconnected and we manhandle both in consequential, unsustainable malpractice. I think I'm only "early" in the sense that the large majority of Americans still believe we can get back to "business as usual" in a year or so, climate change is a relatively low priority that we can push to the back burner for now, and we can go on living pretty much the way we supposedly "always" have. And I'm "early" because of a steady stream of braver and more thoughtful voices than my timid, wavering self.

The Australian environmental business adviser Paul Gilding calls it The Great Disruption. Thomas Friedman has just written an op-ed in the New York Times calling it The (near?) Inflection. Physicist Joe Romm at climateprogress.org calls it a global Ponzi scheme. Maybe we could go back to the old use of the word "consumption" for tuberculosis, because our situation looks something TB did - the body eating itself up.

All three express what I would say is my own guarded optimism. I think our future will be better, although our scales of measurement may look different. And there will probably be plenty of rough turns on the road in the near future.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss...

2009-03-06T12:51:00.001-05:00

Change we can believe in?

Over at CNN.com, one commentator points out a number of Dubya's policies that Obama has kept in place.

This Agrarian Wife

2009-03-05T22:07:00.000-05:00

In our life together my wife and I are earnestly striving, however haltingly and bumbling, to make life choices and engender habits that I would call "agrarian," following Ellen Davis' definition:

"Agrarianism is a way of thinking and ordering life in community that is based on the health of the land and of living creatures." - Scripture, Culture and Agriculture

Others may wish to call this "going green" or being environmentally sensitive, but I think that the goal is more sophisticated and holistic than the mere avoidance of harm to the natural order we inhabit. Rather, I hope we are reaching for the kind of creaturely disposition that exhibits both humility before God and wise stewardship/dominion among all other created things.

I have tended to be the more outspoken cheerleader of the two of us, but my wife certainly put me to shame this week. A couple of days ago she studied our More-with-Less cookbook more carefully and quickly set about making a number of staples from relatively raw materials. I came home from an evening meeting to find she had experimented with making our very own corn chips and "wheat thins" from scratch and she had also mixed together a hearty and tasty cereal (her most successful result). Yesterday she made some delicious balled honey snacks and tonight she experimented with homemade granola bars.

If we get these recipes down pat, they will certainly be a help to the pocketbook. But they will also lessen our dependence on questionably-nutritious processed foods, the majority of which are grown by environmentally and socially destructive agribusinesses. Not to mention that we would cut out some of our domestic waste because we would no longer be getting cereal, granola bars, etc, in plastic and paperboard packaging.

I guess it's time for me to step up my work on the garden. Spring's almost here anyways.

Afghan Christians worshiping in secret

2009-02-26T19:02:00.002-05:00

There is a short article at the Christian Science Monitor based on the reporter's encounter with an Afghan Christian worshiping at a military facility in Kabul. Take a look.

Anna Trapnell, apocalyptic prophetess

2009-02-19T08:28:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I was reading about early Baptists in preparation for a youth lesson when I came across a comment in one book about an "All Hallows Church" in the City of London (that is, a central district of London called "the City"). All Hallows, traditionally a Church of England parish church, was a "gathered church" or Independent congregation during Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate. During the 1650s the church was led by a lecturer named John Simpson, who came to Baptist convictions while maintaining a stance of open communion with paedobaptists.

Much thanks goes to Dr. Freeman for pointing out how Simpson was a leader among the Fifth Monarchists, a radical dissenting group proclaiming the advent of Christ's millennial kingdom, the "fifth" world empire, in the year 1666. Freeman also directed me to the booklet The Cry of a Stone, a pamphlet written by All Hallows member and purported prophetess Anna Trapnell. Trapnell was severely critical of Cromwell and apparently a proponent of greater rights for women. The Cry is an account of her apocalyptic visions she received over the course of a twelve-day trance. Here is a selection:

A third vision followed, wherein I saw great darkness in the Earth, and a marvellous dust, like a thick smoak ascending upward from the Earth; and I beheld at a little distance a great company of Cattel, some like Buls, and others like Oxen, and so lesser, their faces and heads like men, having each of them a horn on either side their heads; For the foremost, his Countenance was perfectly like unto Oliver Cromwels; and on a suddain there was a great shout of thsoe that followed him, he being singled out alone, and the foremost; and he looking back, they bowed unto him, and suddenly gave a shout, and leaped up from the Earth, with a great kind of joy, that he was their Supreme...

Should be an interesting read!