The Justice Project

The Justice Project is the latest book in the Emergent line from Baker Books. I think it’s important that a movement often accused of some sort of absolute moral relativism has come out with a book about justice. It’s also important that many of the voices in the book are not well known and many translated from Spanish. The book has a lot going for it.

Brian Mclaren starts out the book with an important caveat about the difficulty of defining justice. This notoriously difficult concept has troubled humanity at least since Socrates came up empty searching for a good definition. All Socrates found was a lot of people who thought they knew what justice was, but didn’t. They claimed knowledge that they didn’t have. It seems we haven’t come so far after all.

My favorite chapter, of course, was “Just Countryside: How Can Justice ‘From the Roots Up’ Affect Life in Rural Areas?” by Sarah Ferry. While many of the other chapters touched on problems with climate change, environmental degradation and the need for creation care, this chapter got closest to answering the question why. Taking care of our planet doesn’t make much sense unless we understand why. Unfortunately I think a lot of people that see the need to take care of the planet believe that others will intuitively understand why this is important if they can show them the devastation. Again unfortunately, I don’t think that this is often the case. We are so far detached in our understanding of ourselves as creatures subject to the limitations and laws of nature that it is difficult for many to make the connection between the planet and themselves.

The biggest downside I see is that the scope is just too big. Most of the chapters are only 5-7 pages. Each chapter has an important element to add to the concept of justice in the Christian tradition, but just about the time you start getting into that particular issue the chapter is over. Most of the book, therefore, only remains at the very surface of justice, never dwelling long enough on any one element to go deeper. One might argue that this is an introduction to the project of justice in the world. Introductions are necessary, I suppose. It just feels like too much of the conversation about justice never moves beyond the surface. That is why I still hear Christian musicians encouraging people at their shows to sponsor a child with a certain organization that will remain unnamed. This book points us beyond the surface, but it never quite goes there. Each chapter and topic deserves an entire book to explore the implications.

While perhaps the title is a little hyperbolic, this is a needed book with many new voices.

The Original Sin of Agriculture: Population Control Revisited

In the initial series I summarized the argument in Ishmael by saying

The expansion of agriculture to feed the population serves to enlarge the population necessitating the continued expansion of agriculture to feed an ever-growing population. The result of the ongoing “progression” and evolution of agriculture has not actually resulted in fewer people going hungry.

The Story of B goes further in exploring some of the implications of this idea. He uses the analogy of mice in a cage. If you feed the mice a certain amount of food they will reproduce and grow in population size as long as the amount of food is able to sustain the number of mice. If you then increase the amount of food the population will continue to increase. If you stop increasing the food the population will level off and remain basically static. If you incrementally decrease the ration of food the population will decrease. When that idea is translated to human beings it sounds very unnerving, callous and disturbing.

The productivists argue that agricultural production has continued to increase and keep pace with world population. There is no real conversation about the relationship or correlation between production and population. We know that the world hunger problem is not a production problem, but a distribution problem. The world now produces enough food for every human being on the planet to have 3,500 calories per day, which is more than the recommended amount. So, why do we continue to push for higher production and greater yield to solve the population problem? Are we in fact fueling the population crisis by continually increasing our production?

Some will question how this can be true when population growth is correlated to other factors like income or education. The character B’s response in the book is over and over again to ask what people are made of if they are not made of food. If the population continues to increase, then the larger population must sustain itself somehow and the only way that is possible is by eating something. That certainly doesn’t mean the larger population is eating well, but they are eating enough to survive.

Whether production increases or decreases, distribution is the real problem. Either way inequality will continue as long as food is not distributed equitably. The underlying question concerning population growth is whether we can actually deal with the problem if we are continuing to fuel it by producing more and more food. When I mention the possibility of decreasing production as a way of dealing with the population problem, it sounds like I’m recommending starving the marginal brown people of the world. As the system currently stands that would certainly be the case if we simply decreased production overall. A decrease in production would have to go hand in hand with an overhaul of how our food system functions. This is a long term problem that requires long term thinking and solutions.

The planet we live on has a limit to the amount of life it can sustain. Like an elevator or bridge that is only built to handle a certain weight, the earth has certain limits built into the ecosystems. We can push those boundaries with technology and science, but eventually they will break. For many in the world they have already broken, and they suffer the consequences of our over extension of the planet’s resources.

We don’t like to think that we are responsible or in control of other people dying. The truth is we already are responsible for that. Our (American) culture has an uneasy and unnatural relationship with death. Death is a natural part of life. Decreasing food production (in concert with reorganizing our food system) may in fact be the most ethical and just choice given the trajectory of human society. This would, of course, be a long gradual process in which the reduction of food production and slowing of population growth would happen naturally over many decades, if not centuries.

Please share your thoughts and objections. I know this probably sounds scary and crazy to some, but a lot of it makes sense to me. I would appreciate thinking it through more thoroughly with your help.

This is the continuation of a series exploring basic assumptions about agriculture, history and our relationship to creation: The Original Sin of Agriculture Part I, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

The Story of B

I just finished The Story of B the sequel to Ishmael, which inspired The Original Sin of Agriculture series. The second book has more of a plot, but less in the way of new ideas. What it does is spin out the ideas in Ishmael. The further exploration is certainly worth the read. I’m still processing it.

Initially, I didn’t want to start another series on the ideas and implications of this book. However, it has stuck in my mental craw. It is haunting me wherever I go and posing questions to other ideas I hear (See Religion, Violence and Agriculture?). So, it appears that an old school Holy Ghost revival of the Original Sin of Agriculture series is imminent.

I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but here’s a sneak preview of what I’d like to think more about:

The Story of B covers more in depth the ideas that were most controversial last time around concerning population control and the relationship between increasing production and increasing population. The deeper explanation was helpfully thinking through the implications, objections and possible solutions to the relationship between production and population.

While Ishmael pointed out a lot of our modern assumptions, The Story of B sometimes sought to go behind those assumptions and ask what people were like before agriculture, their religion and their relationship to the earth and each other. If everything before the rise of agriculture is “prehistory,” then it is a vast unknown territory where people that we can barely understand live. Trying to understand them may help us overcome ourselves.

Finally, I’m fascinated with the sequel’s take on religion, because I both agree and disagree with it. I think the author vastly oversimplifies things and ends up dismissing the world religions entirely. At the same time I agree wholeheartedly with the critique of my own religion, Christianity. I just think that Christianity holds the possibility of embracing the truth that Quinn reveals in his book.

So… here we go again…

The Gospel of Guerrilla Gardening

I’ve been reading Guerrilla Gardening: A Manualfesto by David Tracey. It’s been fun to read, very informative and very inspiring. Many of the nation’s oldest established community gardens were started by a group of people that claimed some abandoned space or vacant lot and started planting something there. I love the idea of sneaking life into dead places. It sounds a lot like the gospel to me. It really simplifies the idea of urban gardening. Your main tool is a good shovel. All you need are seeds or plants to put in the ground, and many of these are found for free.

There is something inspiring to me about looking around you at an urban landscape and seeing, not the endless sea of concrete, but the possibility of grass breaking through the sidewalks. I’m almost halfway through the book and I can already whole-heartedly recommend it to you. It’s full of great quotes, sidebars, lists and tips. Enough to keep the most ADD of us interested and inspired. I see urban landscapes and abandoned places in a whole new light when I can imagine them becoming life-giving gardens.

Tracey’s definition of guerrilla gardening is “gardening public space with or without permission.” I like that it is both “with or without permission.” He points that a lot of times if you ask the city or owner would be happy to let you garden in certain places. It’s not about being anti-government or only working with the system. It’s about another way of life. One that transcends whether or not you have permission. I think the mark of something that truly transcends our current systems and forges a path forward to new ways of being and living might just be something that is not so much concerned about whether or not the Powers sign on to the movement, but interested in embodying the reality of another possible world. If the Powers become converted, subverted or join us along the way so much the better.

So, then my son came home from the library with a wonderful book called The Curious Garden by Peter Brown. It was guerrilla gardening for kids. It starts off with a dreary urban landscape. The kid in the story goes to play on the abandoned railroad tracks where he finds some plants growing. He begins to take care and nurture them. Slowly his garden takes over the entire railroad tracks. Eventually it spills over to the rest of the city. As everything greens up other people become gardeners too.

Planting life, beautifying ugly places and making the world a better place should never be against the law. I have no problems teaching my kids that Jesus would be a guerrilla gardener, because he most certainly would.

A Prayer to Our Father

A Prayer to Our Father is written by an African-American Pastor and a Jewish Hebrew Scholar about the prayer that Jesus’ taught his disciples and followers to pray. It’s written as a sort of DaVinci Code mystery suspense thriller. Unfortunately, it also tries to be a scholarly analysis of ancient texts, Hebrew and Greek grammar, a tale of overcoming prejudice and religious difference and a popular theology/devotional book. This is too much weight for a less than 200-page book to bear. It’s not all bad, it just lacks focus and thus never succeeds on any of the levels it tries to reach readers.

As a thriller it is pretty lame. There are a couple points at which the author(s) try to build suspense, but the reveal is as disappointing as the lack of real tension. There are no earth-shattering revelations here about The Lord’s Prayer. There are some interesting thoughts and ideas, but not much proof or evidence. I was left wondering what the mystery was and when the real suspense would start.

As a scholarly book it fails miserably. At one point the Hebrew scholar argues that Hebrew was the first language spoken by humanity because it was what everyone spoke in Genesis 1-11. That would not pass muster in an undergrad logic class, much less the realm of biblical scholarship. The arguments for where Jesus taught the Lord’s prayer build and build as if the true location will be revealed without doubt. None of the arguments are conclusive and the final analysis speculative. I did find it interesting that there is a long tradition of some of our New Testament books, particularly the Gospel of Matthew, originally being written in Hebrew. I do think that the kind of work these two men were attempting to do is important. I value the roots of the New Testament that run deeply into the Old, but not at the expense of good scholarship and reasoned argumentation.

On another level, the book tried to show how Jews and Christians can come together to study the Bible without trying to convert each other. I think that’s great. There should be more of that. I also thought we were a little beyond Jews and Christians studying the Bible together. I’d like to read the Bible with Muslims. Heck, we’d all benefit from reading the Bible with some homeless people, maybe a prostitute. It’s not that I don’t believe anti-semitism exists. It certainly does. It’s that we sometimes ignore other prejudices and people, because of our collective guilty conscience concerning the way we treated and allowed others to treat Jewish people through Christian history.

Finally, I will say that this book could be consider successful as a popular devotional book. Scrap the scholarly stuff and the air of proving something that has hitherto remained a mystery and you have some nice meditations on the Lord’s Prayer. The thing that bothered me most about the last half of the book, which breaks down the Lord’s prayer, is that it always interpreted the prayer “spiritually.” It was not the earthy prayer that I know and love. Perhaps this is where my review connects with my blog.

The Jewish scholar claims to come from a school that interprets scripture using the most plain meaning that a peasant Jew would have grasped from hearing the words read aloud. Yet he chooses to spiritualize parts of the prayer that have a plain meaning. Not that scripture can’t hold multiple meanings and interpretations, just that his method was inconsistent. For example, the authors over spiritualize the meaning of “give us this day our daily bread” to mean primarily something spiritual about how the spirit is more important than the flesh. This flies in the face of my understanding of Hebrew thought being very grounded in an every day earthly existence. (They didn’t believe in an afterlife for crying out loud!)

I gave the book away to a friend of mine who is a “Messianic Christian” because I knew she would enjoy it and hopefully get something out of it. However, I can’t recommend the book to anyone else. You’re better off just reading your Bible… or the newspaper, preferably both.