Back after finals and family. Thanks for the patience. I'll be getting back into the swing of things shortly.

For the time being, here are my three seminars this spring:

African History. Professor's specialty is precolonial Buganda; focus of seminar is on research skills, especially those involving non-written sources.

European Intellectual History: Focus is Martin Heidegger and Leo Strauss.

European Political and Social History: Focus is on core documents since 1815.

I'm really excited for the Heidegger one; I've struggled with Heidegger in the past and have never really grasped him; now it's sink or swim.

Even as the Christmas Culture Wars chug along for the umpteenth year running, German and Austrian Catholics have their own version going: opposition to Santa Claus.

They're probably correct that Santa Claus is capitalist project with nothing to do with Jesus, but it's still funny to me: promoting "Christmasman-free Zones".

Below is a download from their website, which translates as "Nothing but the Original for Me," thus tapping into the same motive force as slow-food and the like.

The Maldive Islands is one of the countries whose very existence is threatened by global warming. The land mass of the entire country is at sea level, and is forecast to disappear under the waves within a few decades.

Global Warming debates in the West tend to unfold as ecological issues, with charismatic polar bears as the emblems. But in the developing world, global warming is a human issue. Entire cultures are at risk as people flee their traditional homes.

Below: Hulhumalé, a 3 meter-high artificial island being built in the Maldives to provide refuge for the country in the coming years.

Note: in the center of the picture, a golden-domed mosque.

Photo: Credit Saudi Aramco World Magazine

The Berlin Wall was opened twenty years ago next Monday.

If you are old enough, what do you remember? What do you feel?

Mr. President is visiting my neighborhood. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised; presidents are always going and reading books to schoolchildren. Obama just happened to pick the one 300 yards from my house—the one for which they’re shutting down one of the two access roads out of our already isolated and (but not today) forgotten neighborhood.

I usually don’t take that road anyway. I usually cut across the tracks and slip between the sub-station and the factory, emerging from the trees right by the wastewater pump. But I imagine secret service won’t dig people walking out of the woods right next to where the president is speaking. It’s not their fault that locals improvise paths where urban planners hoped for barriers. That’s life. But still, I’m going the long way out today, just to be on the safe side.

It also shouldn’t come as a big surprise that Wright Middle School was picked. It’s the most representative of America’s breadth and depth of any school in the country: a huge immigrant population, mostly of Latin American (Mexican and Honduran, mostly) and Southeast Asian (Hmong, mostly) extraction, but also from Eastern Europe and Africa.

I used to walk the halls of Wright—we held our church services there for a few years—and pray for the children whose names were on the lockers, and marvel at this strange world.

Having grown up in Switzerland in rapidly-integrating Europe, I lived as a foreigner in a place where 20% of the population was foreign. Wisconsin doesn’t come close. But Burr Oaks Neighborhood, were I live, does. And nearly 40% of Wright Middle School does. It’s amazing and it’s really fun.

What’s not so fun is the poverty here. 85% of Wright’s students qualify for food assistance; people here are poor, unemployed or (far more frequently) underemployed, often on parole or with pasts. There are drugs here, of course, and the legal ones (cheap booze) dominate. Prostitution is all over.

But this is also a happy neighborhood. Probably not unrelated to the poverty, there are tons of children here, who play all over the streets, because they’re not, like so many middle-class children these days, being enslaved in endless after-school activities. That may be what it takes to get to college these days—cultural capital, they call it—but the poor never know these secrets. So the neighborhood is full of children’s laughter.

And people help each other. My next door neighbor borrowed my drill without saying what for, and used it to fix my gate. People walk around giving each other food all the time. The local crack-dealer, who was also a handiman, used to plow all our driveways in the winter, without being asked. That was before he died. I’ve signed court documents for neighbors, vouching for their good behavior.

Anyway, Obama is, through no plan of his own (his people most likely were looking for a school with a photo-op’s worth of diverse children), shining a light on a forgotten, cut off, segregated-away neighborhood—the neighborhood in which I’ve worked, lived, voted, shopped, attended church and at times all of the above for twelve years.

I use the occasion to welcome you.

I’m reading Hermann Hesse’s Demian for class right now. It was a sensation when published, right after WWI; it’s a spiritual coming of age story for a young man who looks an awful lot like the author himself.

Hesse was born to returned missionary parents, who had served in India but ran a missionary printing house near Stuttgart in southwestern Germany. Hesse’s was a rebellious adolescence. Nothing terribly remarkable there; that’s the tragedy of human life period: broken family, lost love, generational contempt.

But Hesse actively didn’t like the Christianity of his upbringing, a robust version of Pietism, any of several spiritual movements in German-speaking countries, movements with some analogies to fundamentalism and evangelicalism in the Anglo world.

Although he professed some interest in Catholic praxis, especially the smells-and-bells parts, which seemed so different from the bare-bones Pietism he was fleeing, Hesse never returned to his roots. He experimented all over the place, and his seeking resulted in part in his Asian-spirituality novel Siddhartha and his psychedelic novel Steppenwolf, both of which were big in the English-speaking world among the sixties countercultures.

But—here’s the point—Hesse’s story is deeply moving to me, because, as a missionary-kid myself, I understand him in a deep way, even as I disagree with him and regret his decisions.

Missionary kids, turned adults, are a different breed, marked for life with the field of tensions intrinsic to missions: on the one hand, the embrace of the world, and on the other hand, and quite often as a result of that worldliness, an impossibility of living a quietly rooted life. Many MKs marry people with deep roots; many become cosmopolitans. Very few grow up to be “normal”.

More importantly, very few Missionary Kids grow up to be nominal Christians. They’re either deeply committed (as am I; as is Urbana director Jim Tebbe), or they’re actively, even urgently NOT-Christian. Hesse certainly belongs to that camp.

Why? There are probably dozens of answers, but parenting is a big one: some MKs resent their parents’ ministry. They’ve been robbed of normalcy. Missionary kids may be children of the world, but natives of nowhere. And some people hate the feeling, and can never build a whole soul.

For myself, I remember taking the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator once, during an InterVarsity training camp. I tested kind of funny, and the instructor suggested, rather indelicately, that I was either double-masking, or worse—or: was I by any chance a missionary kid? That explained everything.

I love what God allowed me to experience. I feel like a happy, whole, and continually growing believer. But I know many others who’ve walked away from faith altogether. Nominal faith, crowded with busyness, is simply not an option for them. They’ve seen Christianity in its heart—meaning its frontiers, where our intentionally global and cross-cultural faith is most acute—and they either love or hate what they’ve seen.

My Church is fasting  this month, as part of our annual Oktoberfast. (Yes, we live in Wisconsin.) Tomorrow begins the most rigorous of all, the five-day, no food at all, “Lawd ha’ Mercy” fast.

Fasting without prayer, my pastor likes to say, is just not eating food. So we’re also holding a 24-hour prayer room open at our church building, with people booking one-hour slots all around the clock; and we’ve got a devotional booklet as well.

We’ve been stripping things away all month; the first fast was from meat, media (much harder than meat for me), and other delights like sweets. The idea was to learn to see the world without the little distractions we fill our lives with.

Next came a dinnerless fast, where we didn’t eat after 6 PM; then a no-food-before-six fast. Each of these extended from Monday through Friday.

Now the Lord Have Mercy fast, with no food (liquids are fine) till a corporate lunch at noon on Friday, where we’ll be break-fasting with stories from our month.

It’s important to remember throughout this whole list: it’s prayer that holds this all together.

Fasting gives us little pangs of desire, all the time. The empty stomach, the howling empty silence where I normally gorge on media, and the impulsive, popping nice things in my mouth. (For instance, I’m currently trying to bribe a toddler out of diapers with chocolate chips for every successful use of the toilet; when I give him a chip, it’s almost natural to eat one myself, because it’s there.

But as one goes before God, and asks to be renewed, and asks to be shown what God wants to show me, fasting helps open ones ears and eyes. It’s hard, but it’s good, and time-honored, and it works so much better in community. I recommend it heartily.

But I can’t wait till Saturday. And I still resent you, flaunting your coffee on the street in front of me.

So I was in Alexandria, Virginia the other day, attending an academic conference. Specifically, this was in a hotel two subway stations away from the Pentagon. There were military contractors everywhere.

It was a good reminder of two fantasy worlds: on the one hand, I live in Madison, Wisconsin, hometown of the only Senator who voted against the Patriot Act, a city once described by a Wisconsin governor as “30 square miles surrounded by reality”. So every once in a while it’s good to get out; to see what the rest of America is up to.

But being a mile from the Pentagon is not the rest of America. The place is pulsing with power. Contractors eating lunch in a little park puff on cigars in a non-ironic way: they’re smoking cigars, and they mean it.

The most surreal was this: an advertisement for the Lupus Foundation, with a little boy, who wants you to donate so that he can get better. You’ve seen those posters. But this one said: “Some day he’ll fight for his country. Today he’s fighting Lupus.”

And that’s when I knew I was in a strange place. People talk about “inside the beltway,” by which they mean the political world alternate reality. How about the alternate reality of militant charity?

Just attended an academic conference in Washington DC, where I found myself in a two bizarre alternative universes: the academic one, and the Pentagon one. I'll talk about the latter tomorrow.

The isolation of the academy is no story here: everybody knows professors (I'm hoping to become one) are a little off-center to start with, so when you get a couple thousand of them in one conference center, their eccentricity magnifies. It's one of the few times a year where everybody is like them. This one was the German Studies Association.

So, when I got there last Friday, the conference was abuzz about the just-announced Nobel Prize ... for Literature. It went to Herta Müller, a German who grew up in the German diaspora in Romania. From all I can tell, this is a worthy prize winner, so I don't mean to dismiss it.

But that morning the Nobel Peace Prize had been awarded to the US President, whose residence was two miles away. All of Washington was talking about it. People were debating it on the subway, with strangers.

As soon as I got to the conference hotel, I heard the word Nobel in a conversation--but it was the literature one they were discussing. Sure, that's not remarkable, but it happened all day. Dozens of times, people were talking about the literature prize; not once did I hear mention of the peace prize.

This is neither good nor bad. For me it was mostly an impressive display of the power of community to shape reality. Washington DC is a strange place, and so is the academy. And when you only hang with policy wonks, politics can become the lens through which you view reality. The same holds for academics.

But rarely do you get to see such a fun showcase of professorial wierdness.

Pope Benedict 14 has opened a summit in Rome on the Catholic Church in Africa. After praising the African Church for its strength (spiritual vitality), he also rebukes them for their weaknesses (materialism and a penchant for extremisms).

All fine, so far. Everyone needs a little correcting. But Benedict, who is more than capable of choosing his words with care, lets his African flock off the hook:

But he said Africa has also been afflicted by materialism — the "toxic spiritual garbage" exported by developed countries. "In this sense, colonialism — while finished in the political sphere — hasn't really ended," he said.

African Christians remain children, apparently, innocent of their own excesses. Africans are good spiritual folk, but a little naïve about worldly materialism, and thus easily sucked in by imported garbage.

No: if Africa is going to be the spiritual home for Christianity for the 21st century, then let us (pardon the language here) let them stand on their own two feet and be men. Let us honor their strengths and rebuke their errors and above all, treat them as our equals or betters. Enough of this grasping for influence.

It may be true that materialistic faith comes from developed countries. So did the Pentecostalism currently dominant in Africa.

That doesn’t mean that African Pentecostalism has not in the meanwhile become fully homegrown; neither should it mean that Africans must forever remain simple victims of Western materialism.

Can they not also be complicit?