Canada's Push to Claim the Arctic? The WSJ Says "Yes."

Today's Wall Street Journal carries a story about Canada's attempts to "burnish its position as position as [an] Arctic Power", which returns us to themes discussed in chapter 9 of the book and discussed last week here. Unlike the Foreign Policy story that I covered last week, the Journal story takes seriously Canada's military muscle-flexing. I'm just glad to see that my brother-in-law's favorite publication supports my position in the book!

Global Ecology and Food

In Chapter 4 of the book, I focus on how our current eating habits are putting serious pressure on global ecological constraints. It's always nice to know that other people share similar concerns.

Last week's New York Times carried a review of a book by Julian Cribb, The Coming Famine: The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do to Avoid It, which makes a similar case.

One of the most striking passages in the review came toward the end:

“Even if North Americans and Europeans halved their meat and dairy consumption,” Mr. Cribb writes, “the saving could be completely swamped by the demand from six hundred million newly affluent Indian and Chinese consumers.”

The rise of India and China complicates the idea that the switch to more sustainable eating (eating less, eating locally, eating organic) will avoid a global crisis. Of course, population pessimists since Thomas Malthus have been worrying about the outstripping of food resources by population growth. Thus far, the globalized food system has been able to produce a seeming abundance of food through industrial methods. But at some point we really could run out of earth to sustain the kind of high calorie, high animal protein eating that millions of people now expect.

Eating locally and growing your own garden is a good start, but maybe we can all learn from the Amish (for more on this, see chapter 4). Simple practices of stewardship bear witness to the belief that God's Creation participates in his goodness. Living out stewardship is a practice that demonstrates hope to the world.

Sad day! Fun day!

The sadness of dropping off my son at college today was mixed with some excitement about recording an interview about the book with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Encounter Program -- a weekly program that focuses on theology and public life. It's sort of like the Australian version of Krista Tippet's Speaking of Faith program, which, if you haven't listened, promotes intelligent conversations on matters of faith. The list of programs on the Encounter site humbles me. I'm thankful to have been included.

I was impressed with the questions that the interviewer, Margaret Coffey, asked. She'd read the book carefully asked about the deeper theological questions it raises. She says that the soonest that parts of this would air would be in early October. Once I hear anything, I'll put up links here.

Apart from getting to talk about the book, the other thing that was exciting was the chance to get inside the studios of WKSU, my favorite NPR station--actually, my favorite radio station, period. After hearing their voices on the radio all these years, it was cool to meet some of the programming and news staff.

Like I said, it was a day of mixed emotions. At midday, we left one-fifth of our family, our first-born, at the University of Pittsburgh. Three hours later, I was in Kent talking about the book with Margaret in Australia--actually practicing the kind of "healthy globalization" that the church has been modeling for over 2,000 years.

The Arctic Gold Rush

In chapter 9 of the book, I use the thawing of the Arctic region as a thought-experiment to think about the globalization of politics. This was the most difficult chapter to write, because the politics of globalization field is the one closest to my training. But the future of the Arctic region, I thought, helped to clarify three important issues: 1) the "tragedy of the commons," or the failure to protect collective resources (the polar environment); 2) the importance of territoriality, or states claiming earthly land or seabeds (Canada vs. Russia); and 3) challenges to state power and identity (global problems like climate change and the rise of global identities outside loyalty to the state).

(Whew! That was supposed to be a simple summary of the chapter!)

Anyway, the most recent issue of Foreign Policy magazine has a very interesting opinion piece by a geographer from Alaska who is an expert on the region. What I found interesting is that he affirms the importance of the oil, gold, and diamonds that lie buried under the region's melting ice. While he is sanguine about the possibility of territorial conflicts emerging there, and he says the climate change is only partly to blame for the warming, his description of the environmental situation is hardly encouraging. Because we are desperate for more natural resources and fish, corporations and governments are driven to exploring for them there (or so he contends). Overfishing and resource depletion are driving the "business opportunities" that NPR described a couple of years ago.

The Arctic gold (and oil and fish) rush is on. Is that a good thing?

Durkheim on Sacred Time

In a previous post, I reviewed Judith Shulevitz's The Sabbath World, a lovely book on the personal and corporate meaning of Sabbath practice. While reading it, I noticed that Shulevitz draws on the work of the late 19th/early 20th century French sociologist Emile Durkheim, specifically, his classic text The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.

My office neighbor, the wonderful sociologist of religion Mal Gold, lent me his copy so I could track down Shulevitz's references. Now, if I were a real scholar, I would have read the whole thing cover to cover, but instead I looked up Durkheim's reflections on time. (Mal assures me that even sociologists of religion don't enjoy plowing through the entire 450 page, densely packed tome.)

The book summarizes research on traditional, aboriginal religions of Australia, which Durkheim considers a good baseline for comparison with other forms of religion elsewhere. Leaving aside the validity of his methods and his larger thesis about religion, I found several of his points about time to be interesting (as did Judith Shulevitz). Durkheim helps us discover what the fullness of time might mean.

1. Time is a social and collective reality first and foremost 
This contention is central to Durkheim's whole thesis about the collectivity of societies defining what religion is. He argues that individuals alone would not have consciousness of time. Instead, the regular intervals of time marked out by society give rise to time consciousness. All the divisions of time come from social life (p. 9-10).  "Every call to a feast, hunt, or military expedition implies that a common time is established that everyone conceives in the same way" (444). Society comes first, constructing how individuals think.

2. Divisions of time into sacred and profane are basic in aboriginal religion and therefore in all religious practices
Durkheim says that Australian aborigines divided all of life into material pursuits (hunting/fishing/war) or religion (p. 311). Separate holy days for religious life allowed the time to be marked as different. "Ritual cessation of work is thus no more than a special case of the general incompatibility of that divides the sacred and the profane . . . (p. 312). As he puts it,

Religious and profane life cannot coexist at the same time. In consequence, religious life must have specified days or periods assigned to it from which all profane occupations are withdrawn. Thus were holy days born. There is no religion, and hence no society, that has not known and practiced this division of time into two distinct parts that alternate one with another according to a principle that varies with peoples and civilizations. In fact, probably the necessity of that alteration led men to insert distinctions and differentiations into the homogeneity and continuity of duration that it does not naturally have (p. 313).

3.  Religious festivals and holy days instill a collective "effervescence" (p. 385-86)
As Durkheim puts it, religious ceremonies "set collectivity in motion; groups come together to celebrate them" (p. 352). During ordinary times, we focus on "utilitarian and individualistic affairs. Everyone goes about his own personal business; for most people, what is most important is to meet the demands of material life" (352). By contrast, on feast days the people focus on "the beliefs held in common: the memories of great ancestors, the collective ideal the ancestors embody--in short, social things" (352). People feel "reborn . . . reanimated . . . reawaken[ed] . . . regenerated" (353). But this energy cannot be sustained forever, so society must return to ordinary times.

Seasons of feasting and fasting go way back to aboriginal practice. However, we've moved away from that practice. The philosopher Charles Taylor believes that the rejection of such "higher times" eventually led to a flatter kind of secular time (see chapter 1 of my book). I argue that we have flattened our experience of time to one dimension, cutting off our collective connection to higher, sacred times.

4. "The more societies develop, the less is their tolerance for interruptions that are too pronounced" (354)
In other words, the higher times of feasting and the lower times of work are less extreme in their highs and lows, "the contrast between them is less marked" (354). In the modern world we preferred less of a roller coaster and more of a flatness in our experience of time, with fewer highs and lows. Homogeneity, rather than differentiation between sacred time and secular time, became the norm.

But, as I noted in my post on Shulevitz, postmodern time, organized by cellphones and mobile electronic devices, may become more fluid than modern time. So are we headed back toward a more individualized experience of time, or are we opening up spaces for collective interruptions again? How are we experiencing time these days?

Pope Benedict XVI on Globalization

Another small summer project of mine was to read through Caritas in Veritate (Charity in Truth), an encyclical letter released last summer by the Vatican. Despite the abstract title, it is really all about globalization and human development, returning to themes first laid out by Pope Paul VI in his 1967 encyclical Populorum Progressio and by Pope John Paul II in a variety of settings. Ignatius Press has a nice hardbound volume of Caritas in Veritate, which I enjoyed reading a few weeks ago (much more fun than reading the Vatican website version).

I found a few key themes informing what the former Joseph Ratzinger (now Benedict XVI) and the Vatican think about globalization. Many of these are worth pondering (even if one might disagree with them). Here are some of my favorite passages and themes from the letter.

1. Globalization is unifying humanity and "to some degree" helping to advance the Kingdom.

Man's earthly activity, when inspired and sustained by charity, contributes to the building of the universal city of God, which is the goal of the history of the human family. In an increasingly globalized society, the common good and the effort to obtain it cannot fail to assume the dimensions of the whole human family, that is to say, the community of peoples and nations, in such a way as to shape the earthly city in unity and peace, rendering it to some degree an anticipation and a prefiguration of the undivided city of God (Paragraph 8, p. 16, emphasis in original).

"To some degree" is a key qualifier here; otherwise, I think we are in danger of rendering globalization as a kind of natural force, like gravity, that advances the Kingdom. I am suspicious of such claims, since they can baptize social or economic systems that might be quite harmful to the advancement of God's reign on earth (see my book).

This concern is addressed in paragraph 42, where "the breaking-down of borders is [seen as] not simply a material fact: it is also a cultural event both in its causes and its effects. If globalization is viewed from a deterministic standpoint, the criteria with which to evaluate and direct it are lost" (p. 85).

The solution, argues Benedict, is "to promote a person-based and community-oriented cultural process of worldwide integration that is open to transcendence" (p. 85), and "to steer the globalization of humanity in relational terms, in terms of communion and the sharing of goods" (p. 87). This latter process, he contends, will come through grasping the theological dimensions of globalization (a challenge that a number of Christian thinkers are undertaking).

2. The cultural dimension of globalization is important (paragraph 26).

Today the possibilities of interaction between cultures have increased significantly, giving rise to new openings for intercultural dialogue: a dialogue that, if it is to be effective, has to set out from a deep-seated knowledge of the specific identity of the various dialogue partners (p. 49).

3. The commercialization of cultural interaction threatens cultural flourishing (paragraph 26)

Benedict describes two dangers here: cultural eclecticism, which views cultures as "substantially equivalent" but separate blocs (shades of Samuel Huntington); and cultural leveling and "indiscriminate acceptance of types of conduct and lifestyles" (para. 26, p. 49). Similarly, chapter 10 of my book spends a few pages worrying about the shallowness of electronically mediated cultural communication, and about the clash of civilizations or global cultural hybridity.

4. Alternative business structures should be considered (paragraphs 38 to 41, also paragraph 46)

The Pope has put his teaching authority behind the efforts to build social responsibility into corporate structures, promoting what he calls "civilizing the economy" (para. 38, p. 76). Managers, he says, must not just focus on the interests of shareholders but on "all the other stakeholders who contribute to the life of the business: the workers, the clients, the suppliers of various elements of production, the community of reference" (Para. 40, p. 79). This puts the Church squarely behind the Corporate Social Responsibility movement.

5. "Development" must focus on true human flourishing, which includes the environment and not just technological growth (paragraphs 43-77)

This was a particularly lucid passage on this, the central theme of the whole encyclical:

True development does not consist primarily in "doing". The key to development is a mind capable of thinking in technological terms and grasping the fully human meaning of human activities within the context of the holistic meaning of the individual's being. Even when we work through satellites or through remote electronic impulses, our actions always remain human, an expression of our responsible freedom (para.70, pp. 141-42).

And "development," of course, goes far beyond mere physical or material improvement. "There cannot be holistic development and universal common good unless people's spiritual and moral welfare is taken into account, considered in their totality as body and soul" (para. 76, p. 151).

Above all, says the Pope, development requires "Christians with their arms raised towards God in prayer, Christians moved by the knowledge that truth-filled love, caritas in veritate, from which authentic development proceeds, is not produced by us, but given to us" (para. 79, p. 155). That is, we can only receive "truth-filled love" as a gift--a gift which can give us the courage to keep working to help all peoples move toward the love of God (para. 78, p. 154).

All in all, this was an interesting restatement of John Paul II's views on globalization, with some updating to take account of the recent global financial meltdown, making this analysis quite timely. For those who care about thinking Christianly about globalization, this is worthy summer reading.

Martyrdom in Afghanistan

Today's New York Times has a sympathetic portrait of the ten civilian aid workers who were recently killed by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Here's the Associated Press photo and caption from the Times:

The 10 civilian aid workers killed Thursday in Afghanistan, from top left: Glen D. Lapp, Tom Little, Dan Terry, Dr. Thomas L. Grams, Cheryl Beckett, Brian Carderelli, Dr. Karen Woo, Daniela Beyer, Mahram Ali and Ahmed Jawed. (New York Times)

I had heard that these folks were with a Christian organization, but today's story mentioned the NGO they were working for--the International Assistance Mission--and it makes clear that these were not crazy or naive Christians trying to convert Muslims by preaching. Instead, the father of one of the victims made clear that they were savvy.

Even Charles Beckett, the father of one of the victims, defended his daughter’s colleagues. “These are brilliant people,” he said. “It’s not like they’re naïve and uneducated and have some fantasy about going on trips to help some people in dangerous areas.”

This was a terrible tragedy: brilliant people with medical knowledge and good hearts trying to demonstrate God's love by binding up wounds and healing diseases.

Two thoughts come to mind at this sad time. First, I don't think it's a stretch to name these ten as martyrs who died for the faith, like Tom Fox, who died in Iraq in 2004 (his story is described in chapter 7 of my book). Unlike so-called martyrs (shaheed) in radical, sectarian Islamic groups, who kill others in suicide attacks, these folks were trying to heal. Second, this demonstrates the increasingly multinational, global nature of the Christian church (a theme of chapters 9 and 10 of the book).