Urbana.org All Things New Blog

Signs: Global Warming Refugees

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 02:01:00 -0600

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

Signs: the fall of the Berlin Wall

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 02:01:00 -0600

The Berlin Wall was opened twenty years ago next Monday.

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

Obama in My Hood

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 09:39:00 -0600

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.

The Tragedy of MKs

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:39:00 -0600

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.

Lawd ha' Mercy!

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 11:22:00 -0600

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.

Non-Ironic Cigar Smoking

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 02:01:00 -0600

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?

And the Nobel Prize goes to ...

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 21:08:00 -0600

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.

Can Leaders Be Victims?

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 02:01:00 -0600

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?

White Guilt: Still Going Strong

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 02:01:00 -0600

For the first month of grad seminars, I’ve made occasional use of my fairly deep understanding of the issues of race and ethnicity, in contributing to conversations at which I’m a total newbie, like conversations on gender. For instance, I might use race by analogy to see if it might shed light on a gender problem.

But the other day, something gave me some pause in my (all-white) seminar on war and gender. A book we were discussing on the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, which had a running theme of African-American women’s experiences within the WAC, felt somehow wrong to me: the black women in the story were heroic and unchanging in a way the white women weren’t, and so I asked.

Invoking my newcomer/outsider status, I bluntly asked if white guilt is debilitating within the department, or the university at large. By debilitating, I meant that it prevents people from being free to think clearly. Everybody awkwardly waited for the professor to field that one, which she did, and in the affirmative.

Which gives me pause about invoking race for the future. White guilt can be a bludgeon and an obstacle to racial healing. White guilt developed, I’ve come to understand, in the aftermath of the civil rights movement, when real healing and unity began to devolve into the politics of scarcity and institutional access.

I consider myself fairly free from white guilt—not in the sense that I have discharged whatever duties may befall to owners of white privilege—but in the smaller sense that I am no longer ashamed of being white when race is the elephant in the room.

It’s been a long-term growth for me, not the least of which relates to my twelve years at a numerically majority-African American church. I know who I am, and know what I’ve earned, and what has come to me for free, and I’ve dedicated the bulk of my adult life (I’m in my mid-thirties) to bringing racial healing to one particular congregation. I’ve been called names by black people and white people alike, and I just don’t care. Which is to say: if someone tries to bludgeon me with white guilt, it doesn’t really impress me.

That’s not to boast. A better man would have reached this stage years ahead of me. It’s a reflection of how much heart and pain I’ve put into the matter, and nothing more.

But it gives me pause to realize many of my white colleagues in the university may be subject to crippling fears whenever race comes up.

As a Christian who believes that some healing is instantaneous and some healing is a process, I must think twice before invoking race again. It could easily stifle people’s creativity and, more importantly, short-circuit their thinking about race. People don’t like to brush up against the same electric fence that has shocked them in the past, and if you zap people in a place they’re inclined to protect, they might learn to avoid the topic altogether.

And that’s not where hope lies.

Botched Revolutions

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 02:01:00 -0600

I’ve been boning up on my revolutionary history lately with a great account of the wildest European year of the nineteenth century: 1848.

There were attempted revolutions nearly everywhere in Europe, from France to Romania. It was the year of the Communist Manifesto. It was the most important year in the abolition of serfdom.
And yet, most of the revolutions failed, with for the most part, after a “Springtime of Peoples” and riotous summers, the monarchs holding on to power and ultimately prevailing.

Author Peter Rapport does a really good job of holding the myriad simultaneous uprisings together in one unified narration. At first glance, the Parisian events have nothing to do with the Prussian war in Denmark, or the Neopolitan supression of Sicilian organized crime, or the Romanian peasant revolt against Hungarian landlords. But Rapport pulls it off.

Structuring the story in seasons—the Red Summer, the Counter-Revolutionary Autumn, etc.—Rapport can dart between hotspots in such a way that he can show commonalities across the continent, while returning to the same subplots and characters lets him go deeper in the particular places. It works.

Rapport expresses sadness that democracy by and large failed in 1848, a victim of popular (and justified) fears the revolutions would go too far (meaning Communist). Because although most of 1848’s revolutionaries were aware of simultaneous events around Europe, they were in the first instance local affairs. The common engine of revolution was consciousness-raising of local identities against distant and absolute rulers, with the exception of France—where a republic was replaced with a dictatorship.

It was this local consciousness, the Springtime of Peoples, that was certainly the most ominous development, as the communists at this point were bumbling idiots. But human flourishing was envisioned in ethnic terms, and the bloody wars and genocides of Europe’s awful 20th century are present here. Rapport never lets the spectre of genocide slip from view.

Oil in Africa

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 02:01:00 -0600

Halfway between exotic travelogue and economics field report, John Ghazvinian’s book Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil is a terrific story about the next frontier in petroleum exploitation.

Africa has long been known to hold vast oil reserves in a few regions (principally along the western coast); but a mixture of obstacles have made these reserves unappealing (high population, at least compared to Arabia; powderkeg politics; fragile ecosystems; and very deep ocean floors for offshore drilling).

But long-term high oil prices, the spectre of terrorism, and increased competition for new leases from China and India—and the race is on for Africa’s Oil.

Ghazvinian travels from Nigeria to Angola to Sudan, among other places, visiting impoverished neighborhoods adjacent to compounds, skyscraper offices, and interviews people at all ends of the ladder.

Nigeria’s story was the most interesting—because it’s so wrapped up in all of Nigeria’s other problems. The gist of it is that the federal government and the local tribes have been quarrelling over the money for many years, with the most of the oil benefits accruing to the government, and disappearing in corruption.

Nigeria’s oil is concentrated in the delta of the Niger River, a singular patchwork of small waterways, jungles, and fishing villages on stilts. Transportation is by small boat in narrow creeks—which opens the door to guerilla attacks and vandalism.

Ghazvinian hires a boat into one of the villages, but has to travel in secret, because the government, the oil companies, and the rebel armies alike all take interest in foreign journalistic snooping.

The fishing villages are destitute, with their livelihood at stake whenever oil is spilled. Ghazvinian describes half-hearted public works projects sponsored by oil companies: foundations poured and never completed, and so on.

This is where the internet works best. Flickr user Justice In Nigeria Now! has published several images from the Delta (including both of these), which made me believe the stories a little more.

Back Online

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 16:43:00 -0600

I’m back, after a four-week exile from my computer. Thanks for the patience! I’ll start up again on Monday.

My computer spent nearly a month in the shop, a period coinciding with my first month in grad school. During that time, the best I’ve been able to do is give you token reading material, written from infolabs and kiosks. It’s been unnerving to discover how dependent I am on fragile machines.

Signs: Find the Indian Reservation

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 02:01:00 -0600

If you ever wanted a visual from outer space (courtesy of Google Maps) of the consequences of politics on land usage in the US, here's one: it's the boundary between the Menominee Indian Reservation (to the right) and the neighboring communities.

The Menominee resisted, at some cost to their short-term wealth, the lumbering craze of the late 19th century, as their ancient forest got clear-cut all around their small reservation. But over time, they've gotten much greater wealth from that same forest, through selective logging. After all, the wood from a three-foot-diameter tree is much more valuable than the same board-footage from one-foot-diameter trees.

Today, they operate a tribal college with an internationally recognized sustainable forestry program; when I visited a few years ago, students from East Asia were taking classes there.

Rurbanism in Asia

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 18:05:00 -0600

I’ve just attended a series of terribly fascinating lectures on the geography of the Indian Ocean world—the area from the Zambezi River on north, through Swahili, Arab and Persian lands, to India and Southeast Asia.

Building off a terrific paper he wrote on the topic, professor André Wink was trying to correct two main errors in Western understanding of Asia:

That stable landscapes are needed for stable societies; and
That cities are the engines of civilization.

Especially when compared with the Mediterranean world, the Indian Ocean area has an incredibly unstable landscape. Catastrophic floods and Earthquakes, along with shifting rivers make for a very small number of permanently inhabited cities; the exception, perhaps, Varanasi.

Up until modern times, cities rarely lasted many centuries: Calicut, Malacca, Angkor: these are, for the most part, insignificant places today, and largely because of natural disasters.

Second point, related to the first: Cities have never looked, to visitors from Europe at least, like “cities”, until the 20th Century, that is. There was no real boundary between city and country; houses were made of perishable materials, and even the densest populated areas retained a degree of agriculture in the middle of all the hubbub. It makes more sense to speak of densely settled villages for most of Indian history. Hence the neologism “rurban”.

What this means, then, is that few cities are “eternal” like Rome. India is a massive graveyard of cities, and yet: Indian Civilization is unbroken from ancient times. What this means is that we have to drop our western prejudice toward cities as engines of civilization: Indian civilization wasn’t reliant on cities.

Wink proposes an alternate lens to replace the two he’s just done away with: the interplay between settlement and mobility. On two fronts—in sea-travel, and in nomadic grasslands and deserts—the collision between peasant societies and mobile societies provides the greatest impetus for change in this part of the world.

Signs: College Football

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 02:01:00 -0600

Once upon a time, a friend and I were discussing our entertainment-saturated culture, in which people increasingly seem to view themselves through the hypothetical lens of a camara, and we came to the question of authentic experience, which neither of us really understood, at the philosophical level, at least.

To the question, do we have authentic experiences anymore, we posed the crowd-and-tribal experience of a Badger home game (we were both living in Wisconsin at the time).

Is there any truth to that (or is that a bunch of humbug)? How important is a college football game?

[photo credit uwbadgers.com]