Crossposted from As of Yet Untitled.
This past month has been a busy one for me, starting with two and a half weeks in Chicago to help lead training for new trainees joining Christian Peacemaker Teams. One of the highlights was this video of the public witness to close Guantanamo and end torture in which I did some videography and my first ever voice over narration.
This past weekend was the first in our two weekend Peace, Pies and Prophets west coast tour. On Friday night, Jan. 25, we raised over $5,000 at Seattle Mennonite Church. It was a rousing good time, with Tim Ruebke at his most hyper auctioneering level that I’d seen yet.
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TimN
January 28, 2013
humor, Peace & Peacemaking
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Crossposted for As of Yet Untitled
For each of the 12 days of Christmas, Christian Peacemaker Teams is honoring a specific CPTer for their peacemaking work. Here are the first six honorees. I wrote the first three and the last three were written by Sarah Thompson, CPT’s outreach coordinator:
Pierre Shantz
For the first day of Christmas we’re thanking Pierre Shantz for his 15 years of full-time service with CPT, working for peace and justice first with the team in Hebron, then in Chiapas and, since 2001, in Colombia. Pierre is the longest serving field-based peacemaker, and also the silliest CPTer. Here’s a portrait I took of him while I was visiting the Colombia team this summer. (more…)
TimN
January 1, 2013
activism, christmas, Peace & Peacemaking
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As I am sure we all know, there was a tragic shooting in an elementary school up in Connecticut. This is not the first shooting in this country either — not at all. It seems like every week or so that there is a major shooting in the United States. Not all of them make national news, but they always make it to the local news. I have heard many different reactions to these tragedies, but I feel that I must address the typical reaction that I see from Christians, especially conservative ones.
I know this particular approach well because it is the view of my father. He feels that all of life’s evils can be solved by violence. He says we should bomb the Middle East, bomb China, reinforce Israel, and increase private ownership of guns. To put some icing on the cake, he also works for the Department of Homeland Security/Transportation Security Administration.
In addition to my father, a classmate of mine, who sits behind me in English, often talks about guns with another classmate of mine. He feels that all of these massacres could just be stopped if people carried guns. His logic is that if someone starts shooting, everyone else can just fire back and kill him. I am sure that we can all agree how flawed this logic is, but it nevertheless makes sense to him.
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KevinD
December 16, 2012
Anabaptism, Conscientious Objection, Ethics, Guns, Hate, Love, Nonviolence, Peace & Peacemaking, Tolerance, warAnabaptist, Christian, Guns, Jesus, Nonviolence, pacifist, shooting, Violence, war
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Michael J (MJ) Sharp, was an occasional contributor here in the early days and the founder of a precursor to YAR, the Mennonite Progressives list. This week he was tweeting from Goma in the far east of the Democratic Republic of Congo as M23 rebels closed in on the city. It’s a great example of how Twitter can be used for first hand, grassroots reporting in conflict areas with a two way component not found in conventional media. (more…)
TimN
November 24, 2012
Change, Democratic Republic of Congo, MCC, Military, Peace & Peacemaking
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Crossposted from As of Yet Untitled.
Two weeks ago, Newsweek published a calculatedly inflammatory cover story in response to the “Innocence of the Muslim” protests in the Middle East. The cover featured a photo of protesters faces contorted in anger with the caption “Muslim Rage”. Newsweek also started an accompanying Twitter hashtag: #Muslimrage. Newsweek was fueling the flames that we already there: U.S. righteous disdain and disgust for the anger of Muslim protesters in response to a Youtube video.
For those of in the United States, I think this is a Matthew 7:5 moment. It’s comforting to settle into our moral high horse as we look at the killings in Libya of the U.S. ambassador. Certainly these deaths are tragic and wrong. But let’s consider what the plank in our own eye might be in this situation.
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TimN
October 1, 2012
International Relations, Peace & Peacemaking, US Military, war
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As the sun hovered at the horizon, I got into the big canoe with 20 people from Las Pavas. We were mostly men with a few woman and one young boy. We pulled away from the bank of the river and began motoring towards the sunset, racing against the light.
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TimN
June 25, 2012
Corporations, Peace & Peacemaking, Politics, Power
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Crossposted from As of Yet Untitled
I’ve been here in Colombia with Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) for a week and a half. This week I’ll be visiting Las Pavas, where CPT has been working with 123 families since 2009. They have been struggling to get title to the land where they have lived for decades while A palm oil company has been trying to push them off.
My colleague and I will be a presence with Las Pavas during an official visit by INCODER, the Colombian agency who grants land titles. I’m looking forward to meeting the community personally for the first time since I’ve been hearing about them for so many years.
Here’s a brief summary of the Las Pavas story from an article last year by the Colombia team.
The people of Las Pavas are a sustainable farming community in the southern Bolivar department (province) of Colombia. Through the years, paramilitary violence has forced community members to leave the land but each time they have returned. In 2006, the community was in the process of claiming its land rights under Colombian law when a Daabon consortium bought the land from absentee owner, who had lost his rights to the land due to years of abandonment. On 14 July 2009, the Colombian riot police forcefully removed the community of Las Pavas.
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TimN
June 17, 2012
Corporations, Peace & Peacemaking, Tactics
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PART 1. INVITATION AND REFLECTION
So, you have read about intentional community in Shane Claiborne’s The Irresistible Revolution years ago and new monasticism has now become a part of your everyday vocabulary. Maybe you are nearing the end of your college career, or maybe you are facing another life transition and wondering how to integrate your values in to those exciting next steps. In other words, what now?
Or, perhaps you are someone who has been living “in community” for some time now, but the experience has increased your skepticism and cynicism rather than given you new life-giving perspective. Your expectations were not met, probably because you carried too many expectations with you. Your impression of “community” has officially been sobered. As Bonheoffer says in Life Together, the earlier a community can let go of its wish dream, the better for the community.
This post is for the excited college graduate, eager to combine faith and practice. It is also to the sobered young adult who has already faced some of the world’s harshest realities, and to anyone in between who is still somehow interested in this word (more…)
LizzS
March 19, 2012
activism, Books, Community, Contemplation, New Monasticism, Peace & Peacemaking, Young Folks
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On March 10, I visited my uncle Dennis Maust in his studio in northern Lancaster, Pa. It was a beautiful sunny day and the windows of his studio look out across rolling farmland to the hills of the northern border of the county. While he worked on his latest pieces, I asked him some questions about his work as a ceramics artist. But first I had a read through his essay “Living the Patchwork” in the latest issue of The Studio Potter for some background. This interview draws on themes from that piece. Dennis’s next show is in Lancaster for the month of July at Laporte Jewelers on Harrisburg Pike in Lancaster (across from F&M University). It is opening July 6th.
Found somewhere near Father Abrahams birthplace (unexploded), 2004. Photo by Dennis Maust
Tim: In the article in Studio Potter you talk about the period where you were building “protest-oriented pieces.” Can you say more about this?
Dennis: During the lead up to the latest Iraq war and during the early stages of the war, I was looking a lot at historic Iraqi pots and thinking about the tremendous loss of the antiquities when the U.S. troops first went in and didn’t protect the museums. So I was thinking about both the loss of antiquities and the human loss. And I was doing this series of pieces that were based loosely on historical Middle Easter forms and that particular piece seemed to be a bomb canister form, so I thought about where Abraham was born and the thought that something of this sort may have been found unexploded as a bomb canister. It’s about the loss and the danger and the cost of this war. I wanted to have people look at it as something that could have been found.
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TimN
March 16, 2012
Art, Peace & Peacemaking
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One of the most attractive features of our Anabaptist tradition is that it doesn’t take tradition too seriously. Of course, Anabaptists have their own traditions, but they can – and have been – shrugged off when necessary. That’s one of its hallmarks, saying: “Okay, this or that praxis may have been useful and good way back then, but let’s go a different way now, in the full confidence that God’s creative spirit will lead us in the footsteps of Jesus.” Some examples of traditions that Anabaptists have occasionally dumped: paid church leaders (bishops, priests, pastors)? Don’t need ’em. We’re all priests of God. Liturgy? No, it stifles creativity. Creeds and confessions? They shackle our minds and hearts.
One of the areas where Anabaptists in the past proved more timid was in their use of Bible translation for challenging the powerful. At the beginning that wasn’t true. Luther basically copied Hans Denck’s and Ludwig Haetzer’s translation (1527) of the major prophets for his new translation. Denck was a politically engaged Anabaptist rebel: at that time translating the Hebrew prophets was considered a risky political action. It was a means of obliquely criticizing contemporary politicians and thereby fomenting rebellion. But those were the early years. Later, under pressure to defend their orthodoxy, Anabaptists held on to traditional translations – where they did offer some new emphases, it was usually in internal matters (internal church relations). (more…)
JaJaFe
March 5, 2012
Peace & Peacemaking, The Bible
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Picture this:
As the new millennium dawns, anabaptists do a new thing in the city: Build a communal neighborhood populated by tens of thousands of simple-living sectarians.
The project is initiated by the Bruderhof and some Old Order Amish, partly for practical reasons: (1) the Amish and Bruderhof population explosions, making it necessary to continually branch out and establish new settlements; and (2) the shortage of affordable farmland, making it difficult to maintain a rural way of life.
More importantly, the initiative stems from a “quickening” amongst these plain people, who realize they’ve lost their ancestral impulse for going into the marketplaces & street corners, inviting others to become co-workers in God’s kingdom. They also realize geographical isolation no longer protects them against worldly influences. So they branch out to the Bronx, where they can influence the world instead.
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CharlieK
January 18, 2012
Anabaptism, Awesome Stuff, Change, City, Civilization, Community, End Times, Ethics, Group Identity, Love, Nonviolence, Peace & Peacemaking, Sex, Tolerance, Urban Ministry, Wealth, Young Folks
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On Dec. 16, I went to see The Interrupters. It follows three violence interrupters who work on the south and west sides of Chicago with Ceasefire—an organization with a proven record of reducing shootings in neighborhoods around Chicago. The Englewood neighborhood saw a 34% reduction in shootings through Ceasefire’s work.
The movie is a slice of day-to-day life for Ceasefire staff, known as Violence Interrupters. From the summer of 2009 through the spring of 2010, we watch Ameena Matthews, Cobe Williams and Eddie Bocanegra as they seek to personally engage with victims and perpetrators and, perhaps most importantly, victims and their friends on the edge of becoming perpetrators.
All three of the interrupters have a personal history of involvement with gangs and violence themselves. They understand what’s going on for the kids and young adults (age 14-25), but they also have credibility. Ameena is the daugher of Jeff Fort, a high profile gang leader, and she made her own name for herself. Cobe and Eddie both served prison time. At one point at a staff meeting, a Ceasefire leaders says there is "500 years of jail represented here, that’s a lot of wisdom."
As someone who has spent my whole life in the Mennonite Church and many years with Christian Peacemaker Teams, The Interrupters is an introduction to peacemaking done in a very different way.
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TimN
December 20, 2011
Peace & Peacemaking, Tactics
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Last Friday, the city of Philadelphia handed out eviction notices to Occupy Philadelphia, notifying the residents that they had to leave by Sunday at 5pm, or they would be removed.
While, I haven’t been a part of this movement, I’ve been observing them from the edges. And, when I heard about the eviction, I was anxious. I saw the UC Davis footage, I read stories about violent evictions in other cities–I was worried about Occupy Philadelphia.
The Interfaith Clergy group called on Philadelphia pastors to go to City Hall on Sunday night, to stand as a witness and reminder that we are called to the way of peace. So, my colleague and I headed downtown.
It was obvious that we were clergy–some people would walk by us, and thank us for coming, but mostly we were relegated to the edges of the event. We were marginalized, and that was ok. We were observers, not participants.
When the Eagles football game let out, we saw more movement around the Occupy Philadelphia encampment. Disappointed sports fans were coming up from the subway, and streaming into the square. Many were intoxicated. A few were very angry with the Occupiers.
One group of young men concerned me right away. I heard them making plans to pick a fight with the protestors, to get themselves on the news. They were convinced that they would be hometown heroes.
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AmyY
November 28, 2011
activism, Anabaptism, Church, Conscientious Objection, Emerging Church, Faith, Nonviolence, Peace & Peacemaking, poverty, Power, Tactics, Young Folks
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This month Malcom Gladwell had an article in the New Yorker looking at the legacy of Steve Jobs. His central thesis is that Jobs’ gift was not originality, but rather tweaking: the ability to take the inventions of others and refine and improve them dramatically. Gladwell points out that the iPod came out 5 years after the first digital music players and the iPhone more than a decade after the first smart phones hit the market.
Gladwell is building on the work of economists Ralf Meisenzahl and Joel Mokyr who used this lens to look at the industrial revolution in Britain. For example, they point out the importance of the many engineers who improved on Samuel Crompton’s original invention of the spinning mule. These “tweakers” dramatically improving its productivity through minor changes.
Likewise, Gladwell says, “Jobs’ sensibility was editorial, not inventive. His gift lay in taking what was in front of him–the tablet with stylus–and ruthlessly refining it.” Gladwell makes his point with many episodes from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs. Job’s particular way of tweaking made him very difficult to get along with, even as he was dying of cancer:
At one point, the pulmonologist tried to put a mask over his face when he was deeply sedated… Jobs ripped it off and mumbled that he hated the design and refused to wear it. Though barely able to speak, he ordered them to bring five different options for the mask and he would pick a design he liked. . . . He also hated the oxygen monitor they put on his finger. He told them it was ugly and too complex.
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TimN
November 27, 2011
Anabaptism, History, Mennonite Church USA, Peace & Peacemaking, Power, Privilege
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(Revised November 2011)
The Sermon on the Mount is defined as the 40+ sayings of Jesus found in Matthew 5, 6 and 7. About half of those sayings are considered by scholars to be non-authentic (meaning they were likely created by the early church rather than originating with Jesus). Non-authentic sayings are not included here. Most Sermon sayings have parallels in other gospels (Mark, Luke & Thomas). Sometimes the parallels are in simpler form, and thus probably closer to what Jesus actually said. Listed below are 21 of the most authentic Sermon sayings, along with Torah passages that Jesus probably had in mind when formulating them. Similar sayings from other traditions are offered as well.
Luke 6:20: “Congratulations, you poor! God’s kingdom belongs to you.”
Compare to:
Matthew 5:3: “Congratulations to the poor in spirit! Heaven’s domain belongs to them.”
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CharlieK
November 13, 2011
Anabaptism, Awesome Stuff, Ethics, Fun, God, Group Identity, History, Interpretation, Judaism, Love, Mental health, Nonviolence, Peace & Peacemaking, Polemics, Pornography, Sex, Spiritual Life, Tactics, The Bible
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