Trying to follow

I recently finished reading Rapture Ready!: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture, by Daniel Radosh. It was another Ooze Select Blogger book that I received. I really enjoyed this book and I think it lent some great insight into the Christian culture in the United States.

Radosh is a self-proclaimed humanistic Jew. His search into christian culture was not some spiritual journey, nor was it a witch hunt. It was both an honest journalistic insight into the culture and at times an insightful critical commentary on it as well.

I really liked Radosh’s writing style, as he traveled the country investigating facets of the parallel universe as far reaching as christian wrestling to the pinnicale of Christian marketing, the CBA Christian Retail Show. The book draws you in, and even if your well aware of the culture, you interact with it in a new and different way. If anything, I think it’s a great book for ‘insiders’ to read, because it will give you an opportunity to listen and hear things from a different perspective, and allow your self to think critically about Christian Pop Culture.

I’d definitely recommend this book to anyone, particularly Christians, because of the critical insight in lends. Radosh is balanced and has a number of touching commentaries that are quite positive about Christians he met. The really thought provoking stuff to me was the constructive critiscism so I’ll leave you with a handful of quotes I enjoyed…

Evangelical blogger Fred Clark has written one of the most effective (and hilsrious) critiques of Left Behind, a page-by-page dissection of the first book that has taken him, at the time of this writing, about four years. The level of detail gives Clark space to build a devastating case that the book’s glaring absence of sympathy for anyone other than its main characters is not just a failure of imagination on the part of the authors but a form of hatred. The heroes of the book, Clark declares, are sociopaths. They are men who arrive at an airport an hour or so after billions of people have vanished without a trace- with countless hundreds or thousands more dead or dying in the wreckages of suddenly pilotless planes- yet who make no attempt to help or even inquire about the feelings of, a single person they meet. Instead they focus relentlessly on their own travel plans, jobs, and lives…
“The authors behave as they imagine God behaves,” Clark writes, “They have a plot that must move forward and they will advance that plot even if it means causing, then callously disregarding, the suffering of billions of people. Plot trumps — and tramples on, and violates — character. Here, once more, Bad Writing and Bad Theology intersect.”
-p. 79-80

“I think if there’s a legitimate indictment of the church today, it’s that we’re subcultural rather than countercultural. A subculture, sociologically, speaking, buys into the vast majority of the values of the surrounding society but tacks on its own things. We buy into the same materialism, we say, ‘Nope, money won’t make me happy,’ and then we go out and work sixty hours a week to buy stuff, because we act like stuff is going to make us happy, and we go out pursuing stuff- just like the rest of the world does” -p. 169 (from interview with Jay Howard, author of Apostles of Rock)

I think that might be it for the quotes for now. I had a few more, but my wonderful daughter pulled the sticky tabs right out of the book and now I can’t find the pages I marked any longer. If anyone has read the Left Behind series or any of Frank Peretti’s novels, I’d love to hear your opinion on them. And if you want to borrow (or have) this book just let me know, I’d be glad to pass it on.

A while back I had a brief reunion with some close friends and the controversial topic of abortion came up. Sparing the details, it prompted me to find this amazing piece of writing (in my opinion) that flips some of the thinking on it’s head and gets us to at least start to try and consider things from different angles then we have in the past.

The article below is written by Katha Pollitt and this is my first introduction to her. It was written in 1995 but is relevant to today’s debates as well I think. My wife first read it in her Bio-medical Ethics class at Wheaton College in a great book of essays (I might post others). Anyways, it’s been titled a number of things, here it was called A Modest Proposal. Please read it below, or click the links to read it larger, but do come back and discuss.

I little while ago I talked about one of the things I think we should all do, know your neighbors. I think it might be necessary to add a qualifying statment to that: that we need to meet, know and build relationships with people that our different then us (and I don’t just mean different gender). Get to know people who differ in their political views, their religious background, their culture, ethnicity, race. There are obvious reasons for this, it shouldn’t take too much convincing. However, the reason it’s been on my mind lately as because of some recent tragic stories I’ve come across.

The first happened in my own neighborhood. A SWAT Team entered a house on a ‘no-knock’ raid based on information that a gang member lived there.

But minutes after a SWAT team entered the house about 12:30 a.m., things went awry. The homeowner, a father of six, thinking the intruders were burglars, fired at them through a bedroom wall. He hit two officers, one in the back and one in the head, but both were uninjured because they were wearing protective armor. Police shot back, but did not hit him.

The tragedy: The police had the wrong house.

As an aside, this is one reason I believe firmly that we need to address the disparities in the police force (less then 20% of the police in Minneapolis are people of color). The real tragedy to me is that we don’t really know our neighbors. When that happens, police end up following individual obscure tips and endangering a family (they weren’t even the same ethnicity as the person they where looking for). The story becomes only more disturbing when those police where recently awarded for their bravery in the situation.

The second story is even more tragic.

Just hours before he was savagely attacked by a pack of thugs here, a Toronto man had complained to police he was being harassed and accused of being a rapist.

When a 17-year-old girl later confronted him on a downtown street and made similar allegations, the man was attacked by as many as six youths and young men who stabbed him twice in the chest, once in the back, hit him with a piece of lumber and, according to a witness, “beat the crap out of him.”

The 42-year-old Toronto man is black. His attackers are white.

But Deputy Chief Bill Sornberger of Owen Sound police said the Wednesday night attack wasn’t racially motivated.

“He was absolutely innocent, simply in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Sornberger told the Star. “He was a victim of mistaken identity.”

Again, there are many facts about the story that are disturbing, but the tragedy to me again is that we don’t know each other. Stereotypes, racism, injustice, profiling, and more, I believe are all perpetuated in large part because we are unwilling or apathetic to meeting our neighbors.

Billy Graham interviewed by Woody Allen (ht. Pass the Salt)

Illegal Billboards (ht. AAA)

And some dancing (try watching this and not smiling)

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

From the NYT:

It was one of the worst sweatshops that state inspectors have visited in years, they said, sometimes requiring its 100 employees to work seven days a week, sometimes for months in a row.

The factory, in Queens — which made women’s apparel for Banana Republic, the Gap, Macy’s, Urban Apparel and Victoria’s Secret — handed out instructions to its workers telling them to give false answers about working conditions when government inspectors visited.

Wage violations were so widespread, state labor officials said at a news conference on Wednesday, that the factory, Jin Shun, cheated its workers of $5.3 million. The case made by the State Labor Department against Jin Shun is one of the biggest involving back pay that it has ever brought.

According to state officials, most employees, virtually all of them Chinese immigrants, were paid just $250 when they worked their typical 66-hour, six-day weeks, amounting to $3.79 an hour, far below the state’s $7.15-an-hour minimum wage. They received more when they were required to work seven-day weeks.

I’ve heard a lot of response to conversations as it relates to sweatshops, which might be summed up nicely in this comment on the story:

Let me try and address these briefly, one at a time…

1. “silly/desperate enough to accept the job” - This argument comes from the perspective that we all have complete freedom and an abundance of options in this country. Therefore, if we decide to work in deplorable conditions, then it’s our own fault.
   Besides being cold-hearted, this is a ridiculous argument when you try to apply it consistently. Would you say the same thing to an abused spouse who stays in the relationship? To a molested child? For a number of reasons: injustice, mistreatment, desperation, psychological trauma, lack of access to resource and more, many people do not have complete autonomy.
2. “People in China need jobs too” - This statement is made with the presumption that if sweatshops where not available to provide work things would be far worse in China and other countries then with sweatshops. Besides the fact that that is not necessarily the case, it miss the point. Simply because the hypothetical alternative is even more grime, that does not excuse unjust and unethical treatment in the current situation. (by the way the above story is about a sweatshop in Queens NY)
3. “goods that were cheaply made” - I’m not quite sure of the original commenters intent, but the argument is made on a pure economics level that this is no more then financial transactions, which is how we tend to think of our purchasing. We simply look at price tags and make decisions accordingly. In turn this affects the whole economic system as supply and demand align to provide us with the price we would pay for Gap jeans or VS bra. Where economics falls short is in it’s ability to account for and consider human rights and the implications sweatshops and unethical work conditions have on our society as a whole.

My goal isn’t to try and provide a definitive argument against sweatshops, but to simply encourage you to think and reflect on the impact situations like this sweatshop in the USA have on us. In the USA we have standards for working conditions, ethical standards that must be legally followed (one reason I’m extremely grateful to live in the USA). We as a society have made decision about what is fair and what isn’t, what is humane and what is unjust, and we’ve agreed to follow those regardless of what might be suggested otherwise. A situation of mistreatment in factories in our country should alarm us, because it is a reflection of our ability to uphold the standards, freedoms and liberties we believe in. That’s why stories like this are important, and why we should be conscience of where we shop and what we support with our dollars.