Nuggets of Information/Inspiration

1.  By Haitian Didi Bertrand Farmer, anthropologist and wife of medical doctor, Paul Farmer:

    "I knew when I moved here in 2006 that I had a lot to learn from Rwanda, but I could not have expected just how valuable these lessons would prove to be in Haiti.  In March 2011, just over a year after the [Haiti] earthquake, a Rwandan colleague of mine put it this way: 'Rwanda and Haiti, they are the same.  People lost family members.  They lost husbands.  They lost wives.  They lost children.  People's homes were destroyed and everything they owned was taken away from them.  And afterward, people had to keep on living.'  My colleague is a warm and generous Rwandan woman with a ready smile and an indefatigable spirit.  Even after her husband, a Tutsi, was killed by a neighbor during the genocide, she took in six Hutu orphans to live alongside her own five children, and has supported all of them ever since.  When I asked her how she kept on living in the wake of so much loss, she responded simply: 'I worked.'  And she smiled as she said it."

     "As of 1994, 70 percent of Rwanda's population was female.  It was largely on the backs of these women---victims of rape and physical violence, wives abandoned by husbands imprisoned or fleeing imprisonment, women who had lost family members, friends, neighbors, lovers, children---that Rwanda was rebuilt.  And as Paul [Farmer] often likes to say, it was built back better.  In Haiti, we often wax poetic about the role of women as the centerpost of the nation, but Rwanda has actually put this idea into practice, with an emphasis on female leadership, economic empowerment, and education."

From Haiti: after the earthquake, the chapter titled "Mothers and Daughters of Haiti."

2.  By Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking:

     "My parents never acted mean to black people, even though they never questioned the system of racial discrimination that permeated every aspect of life.  Daddy, an attorney, represented a slew of black clients, charging them five dollars for his services.  It would take me a long time to understand how systems [of oppression] inflict pain and hardship in people's lives and to learn that being kind in an unjust system is not enough."

3.  By Wilbur T. Dayton, author of an article, "The New Testament Conception of Flesh,";  he writes about the Greek word 'sarx' which occurs 145 times in the NT and is often translated as flesh in English.  A common misinterpretation is "that evil is inseparable from flesh, and that, therefore, the flesh is incurably evil."  But "there is no uniformly evil reference in the NT use of sarx."  In redemption, "it was not flesh or humanity that was destroyed.  It was the sin that was in humanity that had to go. . . . Christ came in the flesh and redeemed flesh."  So a person in a human body can be an instrument of evil or an instrument of good; redeemed flesh can be a temple of the Holy Spirit.

4.  The American Paradox by Ted Halstead:

     "The country with the most patents, Nobel laureates, and millionaires is also  the country with the highest levels of poverty, homicide, and infant mortality among modern democracies."

5.  The Cultural Subversion of the Christian Faith by James Smart:

     "an authoritative Bible, wrongly interpreted, can have disastrous social and political consequences."

     "we have not yet captured the meaning of biblical words in our sermons unless it is as dangerous in our situations as it was for the original biblical spokesmen."

6.  Jeff Madrick in the July 2010 issue of The Nation:

     "The financialization of the economy is a major cause of the soaring incomes at the top.  Financial companies account for about twice the proportion of GDP as they did thirty years ago [they are parasites on the economy, unneeded], and up to 40 percent of corporate profits. . . .  In 2006, at least fifty people at Goldman Sachs made $20 million or more. . . .  Wall Street paid $150 billion in salaries in 2009, when the rest of America was mired in the worst recession since the 1930s and one out of six Americans couldn't find a full-time job."

7.  Black pastor Marvin McMickle, author of Where Have All The Prophets Gone?:

     "The [American black] church is becoming a place where Christianity is nothing more than capitalism in drag."  Neo-charismatics have combined, praise, prosperity and patriotism, neglecting justice and the love of God.