Urban Onramps

That was said by Shimon Peres at Davos.

Peres also said, People would rather remember than think.”

This one caught my eye:

Time and again, this has happened at Davos:

A journalist (usually British or American) will ask a question loaded with anti-American bias. And the leader being questioned will say something defensive about America.

I will briefly recapitulate a most memorable instance: Americans had just conducted a strike on a target in Pakistan; the Pakistani leadership had not been told in advance about this strike. Someone asked Pervez Musharraf, “How can you tolerate such arrogance and cowboyism from the Americans?” (Again, I am paraphrasing.) “They did not inform you; they violated your precious Pakistani sovereignty. And you are quite rightly a proud people. How can you stand these Americans?”

Then there’s this:

A journalist asks why in the world Western countries are bombing innocent people. [President of Afghanistan] Karzai answers with perfect composure: Such bombings are happening much less often now; the coalition is making a big effort to be careful. One reason they have bombed from the air is that ground forces have been too few. And mistakes are made all the time, in war. Just last night — as recently as last night — the coalition killed nine members of the Afghan armed forces. (By accident, of course.)

But you know? The coalition has suffered too: Americans, Canadians, others. Men and women from many countries have died in accidents. It’s not just Afghans who are paying a price.

I have seldom seen a leader so cool, so unhistrionic, so un-demagogic — so mature.

Musharraf answered essentially as follows: “Yes, it is true that we would have liked to know about the strike. And it is true that we are a proud people, jealous of our sovereignty. But what about al-Qaeda? They are all foreigners — from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Chechnya, and all over. They have no right to be on our territory. They are violating our sovereignty. How come no one ever mentions that? And the Americans are helping us get rid of these foreigners.”

Here’s a slogan: America - it ain’t that bad!

I knew it:

The average length of time users spend on all of the top three sites is on the slide. Bebo, MySpace and Facebook all took double-digit percentage hits in the last months of 2007. December could perhaps be forgiven as a seasonal blip when people see their real friends and family, but the trend was already south.

The story year-on-year is even uglier for social networking advocates. Bebo and MySpace were both well down on the same period in 2006 - Murdoch’s site by 24 per cent. Facebook meanwhile chalked up a rise, although way off its mid-2007 hype peak when you couldn’t move for zeitgeist-chasing “where’s the Facebook angle?” stories in the press and on TV.

You can survey the full numerical horror for youself here at Creative Capital.

I check my Facebook on and off. I don’t have a MySpace. Don’t have a Bebo. Check the LinkedIn less than Facebook. I hit my email like the proverbial Pavlovian rat, though. Hit me via email if you are trying to reach me, cuz emails go straight to my Sidekick. If you email me via the Facebook messaging thingy, well, uh, I’m not sure what to tell you…

ALSO: Social networking not monetizing well

I’m going to repost the entire original post (via Anglican Mainstream):

Dr Vinay Samuel responds to Bishop Tom Wright

The Church of England Newspaper

Sir, Since I am now 65 and have not been active in Church of England affairs for some time, my letter needs an introduction to your readers. I was General Secretary of the Evangelical Fellowship in the Anglican Communion between 1986 and 1989. I acted as consultant to the Lambeth Conference on Mission in 1998. For many years I have been secretary of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Mission Theologians which included mission scholars from the “south” and the “west”, for example Dr Ron Sider. I also helped to found and led an institution in Oxford which has produced significant scholars for the non-western world.

I have read the concerns raised in the press by Bishop Tom Wright of Durham about the emerging network of orthodox Anglican primates, bishops and mission activists, especially in Africa and the “western” world who are calling a Global Anglican Future Conference. He has suggested in particular that that this whole movement is now following the lead and the agenda of three white men, Bishop Martyn Minns, Archbishop Peter Jensen and Canon Chris Sugden.

I am part of the leadership team of this movement. I have known and worked with Archbishops Akinola, Kolini, Mtetemela, Nzimbi and Orombi and Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali for many years. I have to say that if the scenario were as BishopWright imagines it to be, neither I nor any leader of Christians in the non-western world who have stood for years for the identity, selfrespect and dignity of Christians from the “global south” and their right to self-theologise and organise their own networks independent of influence from the former metropolitan centres of power, would have anything to do with it.

I have worked for years in global Christian networks, and more recently in the global corporate world. In these two worlds, the equal partnership and interaction of people from different cultures and economic backgrounds is a daily reality. If there were any sniff of cultural superiority that assumed that the involvement of white people meant that they would inevitably take the leadership role, or exercise dominant power, these movements would have died. Those who display that spirit have no place in the new global realities. That spirit is one of the reasons for the demise of the British Empire.

To see GAFCON primarily as a product of manipulation and power-play is an offence to those who lead Churches with millions of members faithful to the Christian faith and growing in the midst of the most difficult challenges in the world. What drives them is the desire to continue to make the gospel relevant and accessible to a needy world. This is the motivation behind the calling of this global gathering. This same gospel encourages them to believe that the relationships between people of different cultures can be transformed from power-play to partnership.

BishopWright makes his case in defence of the leadership of his superior, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in calling the Lambeth Conference for all bishops in the current state of the canyon of division that separates the liberals and the conservatives in the communion. It is my hope that his superior distances himself from the spirit evidenced in Bishop Wright’s remarks. If he fails to do so, then those who have accepted the Archbishop’s invitation to go to Lambeth have every reason to believe that they will be entering a world dominated by the spirit of cultural superiority that marks Bishop Wright’s article.

Canon Dr Vinay Samuel Director, Oxford Centre for Religion and Public Life Oxford

Good stuff in this interview of McLaren by the Charlotte, NC newspaper. The following piece of the interview makes a powerful point, and I’m marking it because I rarely have a reference point on this topic:

Q. Today, many evangelicals are fascinated with the end of the world. There’s the popularity of the “Left Behind” books. And talk about the Rapture. Their belief is: Things will get worse, we will have world crises. They say that’s part of God’s plan, to have Armageddon. Is that biblical or is that thinking part of the problem, in your opinion?

A: I write a good bit about this in the book. And on the tour, one of my talks will be devoted to this subject. I think this is an incredibly important subject.

What a lot of well-meaning, committed evangelical Christians don’t realize is that the view of the end-times that they believe is biblical and the historic Christian view is actually a newcomer and an anomaly in Christian history. That view of the end-times was never, ever thought of in Christian history until the 1830s. Now, that doesn’t make it wrong. But it does make it suspect.

Whoa - I just googled “the rapture” 1830s. Lots of stuff, including lots of bright colored pages, emphatic use of ALL CAPS, and folks I’ve never heard of. Here’s one of the more (seemingly) reputable: Reformed Library Online, wherein the writer notes the following:

Whenever a Christian encounters a doctrine that has not been taught by anyone in any branch of Christ’s church for over eighteen centuries, one should be very suspect of that teaching. This fact in and of itself does not prove that the new teaching is false. But, it should definitely raise one’s suspicions, for if something is taught in Scripture, it is not unreasonable to expect at least a few theologians and exegetes to have discovered it before. The teaching of a secret pretribulation rapture is a doctrine that never existed before 1830.

Nearly all the sources I read point to some dude named Rev. Darby who pushed the concept of the Rapture in the 1830s, and then this concept exploded in the early 1900s with the publication of the Scofield Reference Bible.

This topic interests me because I grew up in a church that had a lot of folks who believed dispensationalism, pre-trib rapture, and assorted other stuff. It was hard to turn away from that type of belief, because there is a lot of fear in the position and you can think something bad will happen to you if you quit believing that doctrine. But that was years ago when I struggled with that issue, and I don’t believe in pre-trib rapture anymore. (One thing I like about McLaren is that he grew up in a really conservative church, too, so he’s very familiar with - and addresses in his writings - doctrines and worldviews that I grew up with.) Most days I’m pan-trib (it will all pan out in the end), but frankly it’s not something I think about very much. I’m with McLaren, thinking lots about the fact that Jesus did a lot of stuff for people in his time on earth, and wondering what a similar posture looks like for Christians today. I believe in heaven and hell, and that salvation comes through Jesus Christ, and so I’m always trying to put together my beliefs about eternal destiny with what Jesus actually did with his life. His big fights with the Pharisees and others were about how they lived in the here and now. Whenever I come across preachers or churches that exhibit a heavy emphasis on New Testament letters but not on the Gospels (nor The Prophets), I proceed with caution. In fact, if you are not washing your mind, your heart, and your actions through the words of Jesus - the red letters in some Bibles, or even just focusing on the Sermon on the Mount (for starters) - then it’s easy to get off point in your Christian walk and begin believing all sorts of unique things. You might even believe it’s OK to be unconcerned and inactive regarding the poor. (Message: Go read the words of Jesus in Matthew, 25th chapter, verses 31-46 for a taste of what I mean.) Ultimately, if you get away from Jesus himself, you’ll find yourself lobbing it in - thinking about Christianity and stating positions, but not actually loving “the least of these” or responding to human misery in a personal way, with a personal touch, like Jesus did.

Ok! Not sure what all that’s about. Not sure why I woke up early today. I’m guessing my own snoring woke me up. It’s about 6:10 p.m. I’ll go put on the pot of coffee and also put on my Morning Game Face. I’ve found that if I treat the morning Carrasco Family Routine like it’s a high school basketball playoff game - lots of energy, adoring fans (Sam, Micah, Gabrielle), a cute cheerleader (Kafi) - then the wakeup, get dressed, eatyourbreakfast, brushyourfacewashyourteeth, getyoursnack routine goes well and ends on time.

If you haven’t checked out the Emergent Village blog lately, there’s a lot of good and interesting stuff there: Updates on the “Everything Must Change” tour, including notifications of live blogging and webcasts; weekly roundups of Emerging Women in the blogosphere; news of youth pastor and other affinity group gatherings; and links to interviews with assorted EV characters. I like the site’s tagline: “A node in the emerging church.”

“Will Latinos vote for a Black candidate?” is the meme making the rounds among Latinos in America. Gregory Rodriguez wrote about this topic in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, and Ruben Navarrette, Jr. weighs in today via the Washington Post syndicate.

Rodriguez: Clinton’s Latino spin:

If a Hillary Clinton campaign official told a reporter that white voters never support black candidates, would the media have swallowed the message whole? What if a campaign pollster began whispering that Jews don’t have an “affinity” for African American politicians? Would the pundits have accepted the premise unquestioningly?

A few weeks ago, Sergio Bendixen, a Clinton pollster and Latino expert, publicly articulated what campaign officials appear to have been whispering for months. In an interview with Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker, Bendixen explained that “the Hispanic voter — and I want to say this very carefully — has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.”

The spin worked….

The spin also helped shape the analysis of the Jan. 19 Nevada caucus, in which Clinton won the support of Latino voters by a margin of better than 2 to 1. Forget the possibility that Nevada’s Latino voters may have actually preferred Clinton or, at the very least, had a fondness for her husband; pundits embraced the idea that Latino voters simply didn’t like the fact that her opponent was black.

But was Bendixen’s blanket statement true? Far from it, and the evidence is overwhelming enough to make you wonder why in the world the Clinton campaign would want to portray Latino voters as too unrelentingly racist to vote for Barack Obama.

Navarrette: A Campaign about Race:

We’re being told that Latinos won’t vote for Barack Obama because he’s black. The implication is that Latinos are racist….

In 1968, Richard Nixon embraced a Southern strategy that used the race issue to carve up the electorate and scare up support from white voters. Republicans turned to the strategy time and again until the South was largely in their hands.

Well, with Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and California all holding primaries or caucuses next week, this could be the Clintons’ Southwestern strategy – an elaborate racial bank shot that is just as divisive and unsavory as its predecessor.

My on-the-ground opinion, living in a Black and Latino community, is that I haven’t heard anything about Latinos not wanting to vote for Obama because of race. But I’m not a political pollster, and besides - ahem - I don’t quite run in the circles that debate the merits of Obama over Clinton.

Both of these articles are helpful because they contain lots of data about past voting patterns, Blacks represeting heavily Latino districts, etc.

Good news in Pasadena (via PasadenaNow):

The Pasadena City Council last night approved spending $130,000 to continue and expand the gang-intervention Neighborhood Outreach Workers Program.

Formed as a pilot program to combat gang violence last August, the program exhausted its initial $25,000 funding in December. It’s workers have been working without a contract since then….

The $130,000 approved last night will fund the program through June 30 and expand the number of hired workers to 12….

The Committee on Youth Development and Violence Prevention had recommended to the City Council that it expand the NOW program.

During a December meeting of the youth committee over two dozen high school students and young adults who have participated in the NOW program praised it. They said it was reaching people not reached by other programs, was working to turn their lives around, and should be expanded.

Tony Massengale, Los Angeles County racialized gang violence prevention coordinator, had also advised the youth committee to expand the NOW program.

He told the committee on Nov. 1 that there are about ten gangs that impact the Pasadena/Altadena area. Ultimately, the community needs a team of two intervention workers for each of them, he said, recommending that NOW be expanded to do the job.

At the time he asked: “Are you willing to invest in gang-involved young people?”

Last night the City Council gave its answer.

Gang intervention is not often understood but desperately needed. I wrote about it here.

Stratfor (via Tigerhawk):

Many see Bush as constrained by his lame duck status, his unpopularity and a Democratic majority in Congress. Stratfor disagrees. We see these factors as empowering the White House.

Bush is not running for reelection, so he need not cater to the polls. He has no clear successor to support, so he need not spare the lash for fear of harming an ally. A Democratic Congress combined with a general election in November means that all of his initiatives are dead on arrival on the House and Senate floor, so he need not even spare a glance in the direction of domestic policy.

All the pieces are in place for a no-holds-barred executive with very few institutional restrictions on his ability to act. Foreign affairs require neither popular support nor Congressional approval (emphasis uo)

The president’s primary goal in 2008 is simple: reaching an arrangement with Iran. Ideally, this would be a mutually agreed upon deal that splits influence in Iraq, but we have already moved past the point where that is critical. Al Qaeda, the reason for being involved in the region in the first place, is essentially dead. The various Sunni Arab powers that made al Qaeda possible have lined up behind Washington. Iran and the United States may still wish to quibble over details, but the strategic picture is clearing: a U.S.-led coalition is going to shape the Middle East, and it is up to Iran whether it wants to play the role of that coalition’s spear or its target. And the Bush administration has the full power of the United States — and one long year — to drive that point home.

Interesting. I’ll keep this in mind as 2008 progresses.

a mole

digging in a hole

I’m doing some heavy lifting on my book manuscript that was due, er, uh, a little while back. It’s pretty — hmm, choice of words — “interesting” to work on something as large-scale as a book while also running an urban ministry and seeking to be a proper husband and father to a wife and three little ones (one of whom is just about a month old). It’s also “interesting” (hey, I’m tired) to go back and look at stuff I wrote years ago. I’ve got a book deal with Regal Books (Gospel Light) and they’ve been supportive. I look forward to seeing the thing in print and getting you, gentle reader, to own a copy of your own.

Launching today is TheRoot.com. Here’s the Washington Post story.

UPDATE: Here’s the full video. Dig it.

After reading Jay Nordlinger’s account (scroll down) of Rice’s keynote at Davos on January 23, I felt like taking sections of the text and reading them aloud in the center of my city.

And I (sort of) gasped (in a good way) when I read this:

SEC. RICE: Yes, our ideals and our optimism make Americans impatient, but our history, our experience, should make us patient at the same time. We, of all people, realize how long and difficult the path of democracy really is. After all, when our Founding Fathers said “We the People,” they did not mean me. It took the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, to overcome the compromise in our constitution that made the founding of the United States of America possible, but that made my ancestors three-fifths of a man.

So we Americans have no reason for false pride and every reason for humility. And we believe that human imperfection makes democracy more important, and all who are striving for it more deserving of patience and support.

Think about this for a second. It’s Condi Rice, a black woman who represents the U.S. President. She’s at a gathering of the world’s top leaders. All eyes and ears are on her. She points out a simple truth that many American flag-wavers neglect or even deny: It was NOT all good at America’s founding, because Blacks were not even considered human. It was a great point to make in that context, one that underscores our understanding of both the limitations of our global aspirations and yet the importance of advancing democratic ideals in the world.

(I’m about to spill the family beans)

I’ve been cackling at Nacho Libre for the past 20 hours. As I watched the movie I had a sense that I had been to the particular cultural space that is depicted (lower class Mexico). Throughout my life I’ve known people who act like characters in the movie - literally. Then, a memory: My brother and I, at some early age, would use the term “Tijuanero” as a putdown. A Tijuanero is simply someone who is from Tijuana, or acts like someone from Tijuana. We meant to say you are jacked up, busted, ugly, poorer than poor, country in a city way - anything negative we could think of. Since we were from America, Chicanos, we thought ourselves better than people from TJ. We were just being mean kids who perpetuated stereotypes. Thing is, our sister Yolanda (who was raising us, a single parent more or less) would get really angry with us when she heard us using the term. It was improper, to be sure, but there was another edge Yolanda had. When Yoli was a child, our mother put her into a Tijuana orphanage, temporarily, because it was too much for our mother to cross the border and get her affairs in order in Los Angeles and care for my sister. Perhaps it was a common practice to leave your child in an orphanage for a couple of weeks while you handled business; I’m not sure. After 3-4 weeks our mother (Felisa) returned for Yoli and took her back to Los Angeles. I don’t know if Yoli was traumatized by the experience, or simply felt scared and lonely during those weeks which must have seemed like months. Yoli therefore had great sympathy for the thousands (tens of thousands?) of lonely little children in Mexican orphanages. That’s where her anger over the word Tijuanero came from. So I was watching Nacho Libre and it takes place in a Mexican orphanage, and the main character is himself an orphan. The stark surroundings, the bunk beds, the outdoor group activities with the beautiful mountains in the background - I’ve visited Mexican orphanages throughout my life, mostly with missions groups, and those images from the movie resonate. Well, all of that came back to me in the midst of out-loud cackles and chuckles and phone calls to my brother, who could truly appreciate the whole experience.

You know, people laud me for having achieved many things despite growing up without a father or a mother. But the real hero is Yolanda. She was also without father and mother by the time she was 20. But she also had full legal custody of three younger siblings. She still went on to graduate from Occidental College with a BA in Math, earned an MBA from USC, and raised three children/siblings who graduated from Pomona College, Azusa Pacific University, and Stanford University. Yeah, she’s the real hero. So the day I was honored at The White House with an award from the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, she was there. The good folks at HSF knew Yoli’s role in my life and were more than happy to accommodate her. Here she is with President Bush, October 2002. There I am in the background.

It’s time for the annual Davos Journal that is kept by National Review’s Jay Nordlinger. This is as close to someone blogging the Davos Summit as you can get. Here’s the first installment.

Brian McLaren is at Davos this year.

UPDATE: Davos is the short-term for the annual World Economic Forum meeting held every year in Davos, Switzerland.

UPDATE 2: Rick Warren is there.

A lot of people are receiving emails from me that are time-stamped “3:45am” and suchlike. I’ve been up late with baby Gabrielle. She’s sleeping, but you know when you get up then can’t get back to sleep? I’m thinking about the breakfast I’m going to make for the kids and Kafi. There is a bad episode of Cops on TV. My laptop battery will run out soon. I’m going to download Nacho Libre from iTunes movie store. I just saw the movie for the first time the other night. I was trying to explain the movie’s appeal to someone who didn’t think it was all that. I said that people are really like that. Mexicans (and Mexican-Americans) actually behave the way that many (not all) of the movie’s characters behave. Jack Black is his own unreached people group, so I’m not talking about. But Eskeletor (sp?), his buddy? I know people like that (grew up with them, at least). Then the townfolk, etc. Anyway, when I wasn’t laughing at the movie I was staring in raw fascination at the characters. And ol’ Black did a good job, too.

City Journal: The Rainbow Coalition Evaporates:

Though blacks have long worried that the country’s growing foreign-born population, especially its swelling rolls of illegal immigrants, harmed their economic prospects, they have also followed their political leadership in backing liberal immigration policies. Now, however, as new waves of immigration inundate historically African-American neighborhoods, black opinion is hardening against the influx. “We will not lay down and take this any longer,” says Anderson. If he’s right, it could upend the political calculus on immigration.

This is a very interesting article that Black and Brown leaders nationwide should read and take to heart. Keep in mind, however, that this piece is (a) focused on politics, as opposed to general human relations, and (b) does not draw a clear enough distinction between immigrant Latinos and native-born Latinos, i.e., I believe a lot of the numbers cited in the article would look different if it were native-born Latinos being polled.