brethren priestess online

Do you know who wrote the hymn Amazing Grace, and why? I do.

Last night, I saw the sneak preview (especially for seminary students like me) of the movie Amazing Grace, about the activist life of William Wilberforce. He was the man the British abolition movement coalesced at the turn of the 19th century, the movement that eventually (through two decades of work) did get the slave trade banned in the British Empire. I heartily recommend the movie, which lived up to even its producer’s hype for it. It comes out February 23, and YOU should go see it.

February 17-18 (including Transfiguration Sunday) is Amazing Grace Weekend, so if you’re in a church, either Adventist or normal, you should lobby to get the folks singing the song that day. Ideally, you could also to tie the song into its origins as a voice of protest against slavery, and use the song as a protest against modern-day slavery - 27 million people enslaved today.

Movie website: www.amazinggracemovie.com

Movie’s modern-day abolition campaign website: www.theamazingchange.com

Official book of the movie, about modern-day global slavery: Not for Sale, by David Batstone

Film clips about the book and campaign: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=NotforSalecampaign

One of the most remarkable strengths of the movie is that, like ‘Iron-Jawed Angels’ (about US women’s suffragists), it glamourizes political activism without obscuring the realities of the difficulties of the struggle. There is pain, there is hopelessness, there is self-doubt, there is loneliness, there is mistrust among the community. There are people saying ‘Go slower,’ ‘It’s bad for the economy,’ ‘People are too fearful for change,’ ‘You’ll be called a traitor,’ and, the most damaging of all, ‘Yes, I agree with you, but I don’t think yours is quite the right way to act, so I will work against you and support the status quo out of my own unoriginality.’ But in the end, you are right, and you make it through because you knew you would be.

The story also makes a great case for overcoming the typical division between political life and spiritual life. It shows convincingly that the best way to live as a Christian is to struggle to end injustice - that political activism is no less a Christian life than a life of solitude, and often an even ‘more’ Christian life, depending on the specific gifts of the Christian in question.

The parallels between the movie’s time in history and our own are incredible. I don’t know how hard the makers had to work to draw out those matches, but it’s pretty blatant. There’s a world power defending its empire abroad in a war against rebels (these ones are in America); the people are kept in too much a state of fear to be amenable to social change; economic hardship is cited as a justifiable excuse for inaction against injustice; understanding the evils of chattel slavery leads activists to realize the evils of the entire economic system that creates rich and poor; anyone who speaks out against the national leader is labeled unpatriotic and seditious; people are always hatin’ on the French….

The movie is also PACKED with tight one-liners. I may have to watch it again with a pen and notebook in hand to jot them all down.

Of course, it’s a shame that the movie focuses so much on white people’s work to end slavery, and that there is all of one African character. Presenting the good activism of white abolitionists is the goal of the movie, and it meets its goal successfully, but I am consistently disappointed in white people that we seem to need to have our hands held through anti-racist work: that we can’t just hear the stories of racist oppression and figure out how to act, but we have to have it spelled out for us with models of white historic leaders we can feel good identifying with.

The make-up in the movie is amazing - the actors really do look 20 years older than their younger selves. And, yes, the movie has a love story, and yes, the movie has busty cleavage and tight pants, if you need that sort of thing in your movie-going ventures.

Oh, and about the song? It was written at the end of the 18th century by John Newton, a former slave ship worker, who wrote it as a sort of confession about the sins he had committed against fellow creatures of God. Newton was one of Wilberforce’s friends and role models, and the song became an anthem for the movement. Watch the movie and you’ll know even more.

Various interesting articles popped up from my beloved agency Burma Issues, in this week’s news update. First, the junta is attempting to eradicate Christianity from the country. Second, the UN Security Council failed to pass a resolution calling for an improvement in the human rights situation in Burma, with no votes (/ vetoes) not only from the expected spoilers China and Russia, but also from temporary member SOUTH AFRICA. And Desmond Tutu is pissed.

Entitled “Programme to destroy the Christian religion in Burma”
‘The military is intent on wiping out Christianity in Burma, according to claims in a secret document believed to have been leaked from a government ministry. Entitled “Programme to destroy the Christian religion in Burma,” the memo contains point by point instructions on how to drive Christians out of the state. The text opens with the line “There shall be no home where the Christian religion is practiced”. Human rights groups said that the treatment meted out to Christians, who make up six percent of the population, is part of a wider campaign by the regime, also targeted at ethnic minority tribes, to create a uniform society in which the race and language is Burmese and the only accepted religion is Buddhism. The document, shown to The Sunday Telegraph by human rights groups, may have been produced by a state-sponsored Buddhist group, but with the tacit approval of the military junta.’
- “Burma orders Christians to be wiped out”, Sunday Telegraph , January 21, 2007

Jose Ramos-Horta’s view of failed vote
‘East Timorese Prime Minister and Nobel peace laureate Jose Ramos-Horta was disappointed that the United Nations Security Council failed to pass a resolution on criticizing Burma ’s military government. Mr. Ramos-Horta said that some Security Council members may be right when they say Burma is not a threat to regional security because it does not possess biological or nuclear weapons capability. But Burma’s human rights situation, rampant drug trafficking problem, unchecked HIV rates, and high internally displaced populations do pose a threat to regional, if not, international security. Mr. Ramos-Horta also argued that the inability of the U.N. Human Rights Commission to address the problem should also be a wake up call to the Security Council.’
- “E. Timor PM regrets failed Security Council resolution on Burma “, VOA News , January 18, 2007

Deeply disappointed with South Africa ’s vote against UNSC
‘Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu has expressed his deep disappointment at South Africa ’s vote to block a U.N. Security Council resolution demanding an end to human rights abuses in Burma. Tutu said in an e-mail to The Associated Press that he was deeply disappointed by their vote. It was a betrayal of theirs own noble past. Many in the international community could hardly believe it. In its first vote since it secured a non-permanent seat on the Security Council last year, South Africa joined China and Russia in opposing the resolution proposed by the United States and backed by Britain and France.’
- “Desmond Tutu deeply disappointed with South Africa ’s vote against U.N Security Council resolution on Myanmar”, AP Via International Herald Tribune , January 21, 2007

Some of my observations:
1. Even under W, the US is doing something good for human rights internationally.
2. Those UNSC members better watch out - if they continue to make the UN ineffective in preventing human rights abuses, it will be a lot harder for peace-lovin’ folks to point fingers at the US’s unilateral actions against dictatorships, claiming that they should have worked with the UN first. We do not want to prove those USAmerican UN-haters, with their signs stuck by the highways in the middle of Missouri, right.
3. As Ramos-Horta observes, human rights disasters (with their resulting refugee populations and environmental impact) and public health crises and trafficking (of drugs, weapons, contraband ecological resources, and human beings) ARE international concerns, because the world is much more interconnected than we might like to think.
4. Here is further proof that any world religion can be exploited to justify violent oppression, even compassionate Buddhism. Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam are apparently not alone.

Want more on Burma? Go to www.burmaissues.org.

HOW OLD IS THE GRAND CANYON? PARK SERVICE WON’T SAY — Orders to Cater to Creationists Makes National Park Agnostic on Geology

http://www.peer.org/news/news_id.php?row_id=801

“As one park geologist said, this is equivalent of Yellowstone National Park selling a book entitled Geysers of Old Faithful: Nostrils of Satan.”

Down here in the Ecologist, there is a pretty good article, that, while falling into some of the same ‘fat is always bad’ assumptions, does an important thing in shifting blame for global obesity from personal ‘bad habits’ (not exercising enough and eating ‘too much’) to the systemic culprits: hormone-disrupting chemicals, most common in industrialized areas (like, say, the United States, where cancer rates are also eight times above base cancer rates, in less industrialized nations….). The article indicates that the obesity scares are another example of the mainstream elite response to problems: blame individuals for their personal failures, so as to shift blame from the systems they exploit to maintain power, the systems that are the real cause of the problems. It makes a lot of sense that, when something pops up as nationally or globally common, it’s probably not just a coincidence that lots of people are making the same ‘mistakes’ at the same time, but that there is, at least in part, a deep systemic, institutional problem.

http://www.theecologist.co.uk/archive_detail.asp?content_id=646

“It’s an all too familiar scenario when faced with difficult cultural problems, where challenging the status quo could raise uncomfortable questions. Consider the way that individuals are encouraged to switch off standby electronics and change to energy efficient lightbulbs in order to ‘do something about’ climate change, or to recycle to end waste. Focusing on individual efforts – and failures – in this way deflects attention that away from bigger, and arguably more powerful influences, such as the government subsidies that keep polluting airlines and industries in business.” - article by Pat Thomas, for The Ecologist