Life is But a Stream

I can’t help trying to find puns for the titles of posts. I apologize.

We are back from Houston where I helped the Texas Hunger Initiative with a workshop at the BGCT’s Stream event. Here’s the back of my head in the photo at the left talking to a fellow Truett grad after the workshop.

What was most fun about the trip was getting to bring my family along and seeing Houston with them. We hung out for an afternoon at the Discovery Green across from the convention center. They have an awesome exhibit of 50 globes with different themes related to global warming. Tuesday we went to Hermann Park for a couple hours and enjoyed the playgrounds and a really nice urban park. We were too exhausted to visit the Japanese garden at the end of our walk.

I was already antsy driving in to the nation’s 4th largest city, but the green spaces made it all better for me. Urban centers are not going away any time soon. So, it seems crucial that we spend a good amount of energy greening them up.

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 Gospel of Compost Tea

In our recent class on compost tea we looked at the benefits and the mystery of this microbial brew. Many claims are made about the benefits of compost tea. A while back our executive director had heard so much about it that he decided to look into it himself. He went to the library and did a thorough literature review to see which claims had merit and which were not backed by any evidence. What he found was that there was strong evidence for suppression and control of soil-borne and foliar fungal diseases, both when added to the soil and sprayed on the foliage of plants.

The Compost Tea Brewing Manual (which I have not read) makes claims about compost tea “adding biology” to the soil. Some people use compost tea by broadcasting it on a field to jump start the biology in the soil. Using the numbers in the book, it is clear that this claim is ridiculous. The amount of microbes in the compost tea is so miniscule that it is silly to claim it can boost the biology in an entire field. You’re better off using a broad range of holistic practices to improve your soil health and fertility overall. This is a slow process and anyone that tells you they can jump start is likely a card carrying member of the agricultural Amway. Run the other direction.

This same manual gives recipes for compost tea targeted at bacteria or fungal problems. This is where the gospel of compost tea rises to the surface. This way of thinking applies a modern scientific approach to agriculture while trying to use a holistic method. It’s new wine in old wineskins and you know what happens there right?

The whole point of compost tea is NOT that you are targeting a specific problem. In fact it should be a preventative measure applied before you have a problem. It can help with specific problems, but the benefit is the well-rounded additions to the soil that come from brewing up a mysterious batch of good bugs and microbes. The good microbes will out compete the bad ones, some of them actually parasitize the bad microbes. The brew also creates some compounds that have anti-microbial (antibiotic) properties.

Don’t we do the same thing in the church, for many of the same reasons? We target specific problems and think if we just apply the right complex of programming we will emerge victorious. Meanwhile, the whole system is deteriorating around us because we have not cared for the health of the soil and paid attention to the important things. The gospel of compost tea tells us that we should be brewing up people who look like Jesus, whose hearts beat for the things his does. Then those problems will resolve themselves. Healthy soil is made up of people who are being transformed into the likeness of Christ.

In the same way that the large scale of agricultural forces farmers to practice agriculture in ways that are fundamentally opposed to nature, mega churches and the large-scale thinking that goes on in churches forces people into practicing their faith in ways that are fundamentally opposed to the kingdom of God. The beauty is that we can take our decomposing methods and programs and pile them together until we get some good finished compost. Then we can brew up some sweet tea out of our old crappy ways.

photo from flickr user badalley.

Talk Talk and More Talk

In honor of Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize I will be listening to some people talk a lot about ideas and not necessarily do anything. Don’t get me wrong. Talk is important. Ideas are important. When the other nominees included Chinese dissidents, an Afghan human rights activist and Morgan Tsvangirai, the Zimbabwean opposition leader, who all have much more hands-on experience making peace through struggle and conflict, it seems odd for such a young president with great ideas and oratory skills to be named. Anyway…

I will be attending a lot of lectures over the next week. None of them are directly related to food production or issues, but if they are interesting enough I will certainly find a way to make them relevant to this blog.

Secularization and Revival: The Fate of Religion in Modern Intellectual History is the topic for the Third Annual Baylor Symposium on Faith and Culture. This afternoon I will be hearing Philip Jenkins speak. His lecture is titled “A Little Leaven: From Mass Church to Creative Minority in Contemporary Europe.” I have read his book The Next Christendom.

Saturday a good friend of ours from UMHB, David Holcomb, will be speaking. His lecture is titled “Religion in Public Life: The ‘Pfefferian Inversion’ Reconsidered.”

Finally, I will get to hear one of my new heroes, William Cavanaugh, who inspired my Eucharist as Eat-In post as well as the series on his book Being Consumed. His lecture will be on “Violence and the Religious/Secular Distinction.”

Next week Lamin Sanneh will be at Truett Seminary for the Parchman Lecture Series. The topic for his lectures is “Connecting World Christianity: New World Parameters.” The three lectures will be on “Antislavery and Mission: American Prelude, 1770-1783,” “Evangelical Movement and the New Society,” and “Christianity and the Moral Empire: America’s Role.” Should be very interesting stuff.

It seems I often come at things from the food side and then tie in the faith and theology, even when I’m blogging through the Bible. It will be interesting to hear some very academic theological lectures and reflect on their application to food and justice issues. Stay tuned…

Food in the Bible: Exodus 23:10-13

Exodus 23:10-13 For six years you shall sow your land and gather in its yield; ¹¹but the seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow, so that the poor of your people may eat; and what they leave the wild animals may eat. You shall do the same with your vineyard, and with your olive orchard.

12 For six days you shall do your work, but on the seventh day you shall rest, so that your ox and your donkey may have relief, and your home-born slave and the resident alien may be refreshed. ¹³Be attentive to all that I have said to you. Do not invoke the names of other gods; do not let them be heard on your lips.

This is the commandment for the Sabbatical Year. It is followed by a list of the annual festivals to be observed and then a promise that if the Israelites followed the commandments that YHWH would conquer Canaan for them, the Promised Land. It’s important to recognize that this covenant is conditional, “But if you listen attentively to his voice and do all that I say, then I will be an enemy to your enemies and a foe to your foes” (Ex 23:22). So the giving of the land to the Israelites is contingent on them following particular agricultural practices.

I don’t know what the agricultural practices of their neighbors in the Ancient Near East were (Philistines, Egyptians, Assyrians or Babylonians). It would be interesting to study that and compare it to the biblical commands. We do know that the recommendation to let fields lie fallow for one year out of seven is better for the land than the intensive production schedules of industrial agriculture today.

As I mentioned in my sermon, the Sabbath commands often combine the ecological and the economic. Let the land lie fallow (good agricultural practice) so that the poor will be taken care of (just economic practice). We have done everything we can to create a division between the economic and the ecological. No matter how hard we try, it appears that this is impossible. Since economics is the way that we order our lives together, it follows that it must involve the ecological. Our lives cannot be ordered together without affecting and connecting to the earth. If we choose to order our lives in such a way that we ignore the ecological, it follows that there will be consequences in both the economic and ecological realm. And that seems to be the case today.

I included the last verse of this passage on purpose, because this is another area that we tried to make into a separate sphere of life. The last verse connects the ecological and economic to idolatry. Augustine talked about the right ordering of love. The problem was not that material things were evil. The problem was that we put them in the place of God. All love properly ordered finds its ultimate place in love for God. Idolatry is not about choosing the wrong religion or worshipping too many gods (though that might be part of it). Ultimately idolatry is about misplacing our allegiances and putting things out of order.

So this command, which tells the Israelites how they need to rightly order their agricultural practices and their social relationships, puts both things under the umbrella of rightly ordering their allegiances. I often hear people say that you should, “Put God first.” This notion puts God somehow in a category that is abstracted and detached from the reality of the world we live in. Here we see that putting God first clearly involves ecological and economic action and right relationships. God does not simply appear at the top of our checklist. Our allegiance to God orders the way we eat, the way we shop, the way we talk, the way we answer the phone, the way we do our job, the way we live our lives and the way treat others.