“The Hope of Forgiveness“

A Review of
As We Forgive: Stories of Reconciliation From Rwanda.
by Catherine Claire Larson.

By Laretta Benjamin.

As We Forgive:
Stories of Reconciliation From Rwanda.
Catherine Claire Larson.
Paperback: Zondervan, 2009.
Buy now from:
[ Doulos Christou Books $13 ] [ Amazon ]

“Not only is another world possible, she is on her way.
On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”     – Arundhati Roy

“Through compassion we also sense the hope of forgiveness in our friend’s eyes and our hatred in their bitter mouths.  When they kill, we know we could have done it; when they give life, we know we could do the same.  For a compassionate man nothing human is alien.”           – Henri Nouwen

One of the most powerful kingdom-stories of our time is unfolding today in the small African country of Rwanda. Inspired by the documentary, “As We Forgive” –  produced by Laura Waters Hinson – Catherine Claire Larson built upon Laura Hinson’s research and has created a compelling book of the same name.  She gives us a powerful picture of what is taking place in Rwanda today, after the hellish events that took place there almost 15 years ago.

As many of us will remember, in April of 1994, a genocide of incredible proportions began in the small nation of Rwanda.  Over a period of 100 days, it is estimated that 800,000 to 1 million Rwandans were brutally murdered, approximately 300,000 of whom were children.  Neighbors killed neighbors and those once known as friends slaughtered each other.  In the opening pages of As We Forgive, the author lays out before us the key events that led to this human tragedy.  Her very helpful timeline traces events back as far as 1885 to the days of the European powers and their control of much of Africa.  The seeds of tension and division were being planted even then.

Ms. Larson writes with great truthfulness and emotion as she shares with us the events of the past few years in Rwanda’s little corner of the world.  This book’s story begins in 2003, when, because of prison overcrowding and with a desire to promote national reconciliation, the president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, ordered that “elderly, sick and low-level killers and looters from the 1994 genocide who had confessed their crimes” be released from the prisons.  As of January 2008, an estimated 70,000 prisoners had been set free – back into the communities and neighborhoods where the atrocities were committed – to live side-by-side with the people they had sinned against.    “If they told you that a murderer was to be released into your neighborhood, how would you feel?  But what if this time, they weren’t just releasing one, but forty thousand” (16)?  For many of us this question might be just a philosophical one for casual discussion, but for Rwandans, it is real.  They are being called upon to face the reality of what happened among them 15 years ago and look into the faces of those responsible for that reality.  They are being asked to embrace forgiveness, healing and wholeness – God’s shalom. It is a picture of the kingdom of God coming, a compelling display of the way of the cross.  This story is a real life drama of “overcoming evil with good” that is being called “one of the most closely watched experiments in forgiveness in our world today.”  As We Forgive  gives us a wonderful glimpse of the unfolding story.

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Land of No Imagination

Kevin Book-Satterlee

Out to enjoy exhilaration
Adventure on two wheels
I find myself riding
Pedal over pedal into the wind
Thunder-pumping in suburban utopia
With my tight jersey shirt

I turn those carbon fiber wheels round
Three hundred yards to the next red light
Stop
Surrounded by generic paradise
Complete with its drive through Starbucks
(The third one in my 10 minute journey)
The fleets of SUV’s whiz by
Allowing enough cushion for me to ride safely
Safety, space, cushion, ease
I am adventuring in an insufferable land
One of no imagination.

(c) 2007, Kevin Book-Satterlee. Used with permission.
Kevin Book-Satterlee:  http://www.getok.net/poetry/

Our favorite music critic Andy Whitman
reviews U2′s new album NO LINE ON THE HORIZON

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/februaryweb-only/108-41.0.html

“Time is irrelevant, it’s not linear,” Bono proclaims near the beginning of No Line on the Horizon (4 stars), U2′s 12th studio album, which releases March 3 but is already posted on the band’s MySpace page. When you’ve spent 30 years in the circus, are well into middle age, and are still working the territory most commonly associated with preening 20-year-olds, it’s a reasonable stance to take. Fittingly, it’s a preoccupation Bono circles back to again and again, and it results in the band’s most thematically rich album in a storied career.

…

Read the full review:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/februaryweb-only/108-41.0.html

NO LINE ON THE HORIZON.
U2.
Release Date: 3 March 2009
Buy now:  [ Amazon ]

When the lights go down in Colosseum, Katie Ford’s second collection of poetry, we find ourselves in the poet’s cranial theater, an old-fashioned movie palace of flickering reels and irregular splicing. It is here that the book’s preoccupation unfolds: a remembering of New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina. And it’s here that the memory landscape shifts from history book to watercolor dream cycle, nightmarish in its images and vagaries. Showing a deft sense of humor, or perhaps just irony, Ford includes a poem about the late great New Orleans movie theater lost to fire months after the hurricane, the “Coliseum Theatre”—it is, of course, an elegy.

To say the poems in Colosseum record anxiety, trauma, and a stunned sense of coping might belittle Ford’s surprising chemistry in mixing the loss of New Orleans with the destruction and devastation of the classical world. At first it might seem that the thematic thread is a project, and arbitrary—why Rome? Why not Rhodes? Only after reading and re-reading Colosseum did I see Ford’s book as an attempt to honor New Orleans by placing its destruction into the tradition of the great dead: Athens, Rome, Carthage, Alexandria. Is Ford’s point that every vanquished city is worthy of such high simile, or is it just New Orleans? Feeling runs so high in this collection that I must admit that reading it put me in mind of testimonies from Vietnam War veterans

…
Read the full review:
http://www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=634

COLOSSEUM.
Katie Ford.
Paperback: Graywolf Press, 2008.
Buy now: [ Doulos Christou Books $12 ] [ Amazon ]

…

If you’ve ever read Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, finding it hard to put down, then Nature’s Second Chance is your chance to witness the ecological wonder as Steven Apfelbaum transforms his tired farmstead once used to grow corn crops into a Midwestern paradise: a biologically diverse and healthy prairie, with wetland, forest and spring brook. Leopold’s writings culminated in the land ethic philosophy. Nature’s Second Chance puts it into practice, not only at Apfelbaum’s eighty acre Stone Prairie Farm over a period of thirty years, but at the Prairie Crossing “conservation development” north of Chicago and, perhaps, in a community near you though projects spearheaded by the now internationally-acclaimed, multimillion dollar ecological restoration business, Applied Ecological Services.

Writes Apfelbaum: “I envisioned a network of restored lands that would reconnect dispersed and isolated habitats. This may be viewed as an ecological systems approach to rethinking the landscape or a community land ethic where the health of the land — not just of individually owned parcels — is a measure of land community vitality.”

This highly readable treatise on a more ecologically mindful approach to living on the land provides both enlightening anecdotes and descriptive policy changes needed that will allow us to restore the health of diverse ecological systems on which our own very survival is based. Through his work both at Prairie Stone Farm and with Applied Ecological Services, Apfelbaum rekindles the spirit of service to all of creation, with humans, themselves, playing the central role in nurturing the renewal work so crucial in this Century and in the emerging restoration economy.

…
Read the full review:
http://sustainablog.org/2009/01/14/book-review-natures-second-chance/

NATURE’S SECOND CHANCE:
RESTORING THE ECOLOGY OF STONE PRAIRIE FARM
Steven Apfelbaum.
Hardcover: Beacon, 2009.
Buy now: [ Doulos Christou Books $21 ] [ Amazon ]

…

As explained by Livio, the history of mathematics is partly a struggle between these points of view: that math is how God (or nature) organizes the world, or it is simply a human tool to understand that world.

Livio comes down in the middle, contending that math may well be both invented and discovered. He points, for instance, to the eternal truth contained in the geometry formulated by Euclid 2,400 years ago. By the 19th century, however, iconoclasts had posited and established a whole new world of non-Euclidian geometry. Livio writes about the symmetries of the universe: the immutable, if incompletely understood, laws of math and physics that make a hydrogen atom, for instance, behave in the same way on Earth as it acts 10 billion light years away. Another sign of universal structure, as teased apart with the help of math? No, Livio writes, it is more likely a sign that “to some extent, scientists have selected what problems to work on based on those problems being amenable to a mathematical treatment.”

The author acknowledges that some readers will find his inconclusive conclusion to be unsatisfying. I didn’t. Sometimes the adventure, the intellectual ride, is more important than the final destination.
Read the full review:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/05/AR2009020502876.html

IS GOD A MATHEMATICIAN?
Mario Livio.
Hardcover: Simon and Schuster, 2009.
Buy now:  [ Doulos Christou Books $21 ] [ Amazon ]

Mark your calendars!!!

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
will be at Englewood Christian Church
Wednesday evening May 6

Leading a conversation on his book:
NEW MONASTICISM:
WHAT IT HAS TO SAY TO TODAY’S CHURCH

Facebook Invite and More details:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=50272647267

“The Revolution that Started in the Stars“

A Review of
Pluriverse: New and Selected Poems.
by Ernesto Cardenal.

By Brent Aldrich.

Pluriverse: New and Selected Poems.
Ernesto Cardenal.
Paperback: New Directions, 2009.
Buy now from:
[ Doulos Christou Books $15] [ Amazon ]

Reading through Ernesto Cardenal’s poems as gathered in the new book Pluriverse has been both wonderful and challenging; wonderful in the complexity of content and lyric form, but challenging as a reader in the United States, to begin to comprehend a history of violent relations with Cardenal’s native Nicaragua. Additionally, this collection spans Cardenal’s nearly 60 years of poetry, making for an expansive body of work to read, from man who has been, at various times, a Catholic priest, a Sandinista revolutionary, Minister of Culture, and a contemplative after living as a novitiate under Thomas Merton; he has his eyes toward the complexity and diversity of life, but through the form of the poem, a wholeness is achieved.

                Pluriverse is divided into four chronological sections, the earliest beginning in 1949, and the most recent right up to 2005, which is helpful when considering the broad reach and development of these poems. Early on, Cardenal begins with some themes that continue throughout, drawing historical events and characters from Nicaraguan history alongside love poems and astronomy, but always infused with the rhythms of nature and life specific to Nicaragua – the wildlife, geology, weather, stars, people; there is always a strain of natural history running parallel with the history of imperialism, revolution, or daily life. Describing the relations of the US and Nicaragua in light of the Nicaraguan landscape:

                “Oak trees in Solentiname bloom in March above the lake with

blossoms rosy as girls’ lips.

And in summer: the chichitote sings the loveliest

                song of any bird in Nicaragua

and the cucurruchí sings its name in summer nest building

while the shellfish are harvested in Bluefields Bay –

                in March and April – and

in Ocotal, in April, the quetzal rears its young.

But another country found it needed all these riches.

To obtain the 1911 loans Nicaragua had to cede her customs rights

also the running of the National Bank

to lenders who reserved the right

to take it over…”     (126).

(more…)

I thought this was intriguing and funny and thought our readers might too…

So, on Wednesday, I logged into our Sitemeter account to see what kind of traffic we’ve been getting here.  This is what I saw:

 So, I ask… Does the Pope read the Englewood Review? And if so, what is he (or one of his associates at the Vatican) reading here?   Apparently, this visitor from the Vatican did a YAHOO! search for “theology of martyrdom” which turned up the December 2008 review that I did of two recent books on martyrdom.

Who knew?

Lent: Ash Wednesday
George Herbert.
1593-1633.

[ In remembrance of Ash Wednesday, next Wednesday, February 25... ]

Welcome dear feast of Lent: who loves not thee,
He loves not Temperance, or Authority,
But is composed of passion.
The Scriptures bid us fast; the Church says, now:
Give to your Mother, what you would allow
To every Corporation.

*  *  *

It ‘s true, we cannot reach Christ’s fortieth day;
Yet to go part of that religious way,
Is better than to rest:
We cannot reach our Savior’s purity;
Yet are bid, Be holy ev’n as he.
In both let ‘s do our best.

Who goes in the way which Christ has gone,
Is much more sure to meet with him, than one
Who travels the by-ways:
Perhaps my God, though he be far before,
May turn, and take me by the hand, and more
May strengthen my decays.

Yet Lord instruct us to improve our fast
By starving sin and taking such repast
As may our faults control:
That ev’ry man may revel at his door,
Not in his parlor; banqueting the poor,
And among those his soul.

 A Brief review of  The Urban Homestead by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen

 By Chris Smith

Readers who are familiar with the new monasticism will recognize that urban neighborhoods represent many of the “abandoned places of Empire.”  The new monastics are marked by their call to such abandoned places and in settling there, they prayerfully seek the transformative wisdom of God that will redeem these presumed wastelands.  Although the language of new monasticism is probably foreign to the authors of the new book, The Urban Homestead, what they offer in this excellent work is a similar vision of the holistic redemption of urban wastelands.  The authors, Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen, describe their vision in terms of:

• Growing your own food
• Urban Foraging
• Raising Livestock
• Revolutionary Home Economics (Preserving and Preparing Food)
• Water and Power for the Homestead
• The Transportation Triangle (Walking, Biking, Mass Transit)

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The ORION magazine review of
A NATURAL SENSE OF WONDER:
CONNECTING KIDS WITH NATURE THROUGH THE SEASONS
by Rick Van Noy

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/review/4269/

RULE NUMBER SEVEN in our shaggy tiny house crammed with three lanky children: one hour of screen time per day, you choose the screens. Rule Number Eleven: yes, you can vanish all weekend on your bike whipping through the woods with your buddies, and yes, you can putter around in the creeklet all you want, and yes, you can wander along the riverbank looking for minks and money, just be home by dark.

And yes, there is daily wailing and gnashing of teeth about the television/ video/computer rule, but the queen of the house agrees wholeheartedly with Rick Van Noy, who says that any natural setting is better than the “flickering waves of TV and the electrifying boing of video games.” So out into the unkempt yard go the children, and to the creek, and to the river, and to the vacant lot by Mrs. Walsh’s house, which isn’t vacant at all, of course.

The greatest virtue of Van Noy’s lean and thoughtful book isn’t his thesis, now proved by oceans of evidence about increased obesity and decreased attention spans, or even his graceful and penetrating prose; it’s the witty ways he draws his two children and their friends outside, away from the electric drug—taking the long way to school, poking headlong into every vacant lot, building a treehouse, wandering off on birding adventures, hiking with other families, so that the day isn’t a Boring Family Outing but motley play, skating, wading in creeks, salamandering, poking in tide pools, running around in the dark chasing lightning bugs, and, well, just puttering around with open eyes and ears.

…

Read the full review:
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/review/4269/

A NATURAL SENSE OF WONDER:
CONNECTING KIDS WITH NATURE THROUGH THE SEASONS
Rick Van Noy.
Paperback: U of GA Press, 2008.
Buy Now:  [ Doulos Christou Books $14 ]  [ Amazon ]

…
Orwell believed in 1936 that “the combines can never squeeze the small independent bookseller out of existence as they have squeezed the grocer and the milkman.” That “never” was a risky call. And on a larger scale, he believed throughout World War II that peace would bring the British revolution he desired, with blood in the gutters and the “red militias…billetted in the Ritz,” as he put it in private diary and public essay. And after the revolution:

The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will give way to the tractor, the country houses will be turned into children’s holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten….

One out of four on the vision thing; and tractors were hardly a difficult pick.

Against such a background, it would be rash to try to predict the continuing afterlife of Orwell’s work. Many of his phrases and mental tropes have already sunk into the conscious and unconscious mind, and we carry them with us as we carry Freudian tropes, whether or not we have read Freud. Some of those English couch potatoes watch programs called Big Brother and Room 101. And if we allow ourselves to hope for a future in which all Orwell’s warnings have been successfully heeded, and in which Animal Farm has become as archaic a text as Rasselas, the world will have to work its way through a lot of dictators and repressive systems first. In Burma there is a joke that Orwell wrote not just a single novel about the country, but a trilogy: Burmese Days, Animal Farm, and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Orwell shared with Dickens a hatred of tyranny, and in his essay on the Victorian novelist distinguished two types of revolutionary. There are on the one hand the change-of-heart people, who believe that if you change human nature, all the problems of society will fall away; and, on the other, the social engineers, who believe that once you fix society—make it fairer, more democratic, less divided—then the problems of human nature will fall away. These two approaches “appeal to different individuals, and they probably show a tendency to alternate in point of time.” Dickens was a change-of-heart man, Orwell a systems-and-structures man, not least because—as these essays confirm—he thought human beings recidivist, and beyond mere self-help. “The central problem—how to prevent power from being abused—remains unsolved.” And until then, it is safe to predict that Orwell will remain a living writer.

Read the full review:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22414

All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays.
George Orwell.
Hardcover: Harcourt, 2008.
Buy Now:  [ Doulos Christou Books $20 ]  [ Amazon ]

‘A History of the American Peace Movement from Colonial Times to the Present’ is a remarkable achievement, surveying the entire history of pacifist organizations and leaders in the United States from the beginning of its history to 2006. Moving chronologically from the original peacemakers of the country (Native Americans) through the religious pacifists of the colonial period to the religious and secular non-violent activists for peace and justice in the nineteenth century, to the myriad of peace and justice initiatives of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Howlett and Lieberman provide us with a comprehensive textbook history of the most important people, organizations, and ideas of American peace history. It should be required reading for any student interested in researching any aspect of peace history in the U.S., as it will place any specific peace worker or institution within its broader historical perspective. Indeed, it should be required reading for any specialist in American history because it fills in gaps usually left by history textbooks which focus primarily on wars and violent events, and usually pay little attention to peace movements. It effectively demonstrates how peace movements have always existed in American history, always opposed militarists and those who advocate violence, and effectively pressured for peace and justice at home and abroad. It also clearly shows the important role that non-violent activists for peace and justice have played throughout American history, not only in ending wars and offering peaceful resolutions to conflict, but also in supporting justice movements, such as the women’s rights, workers’ rights, and African-American civil rights movements.

…

Read the full review:
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24095

A History of the American Peace Movement
from Colonial Times to the Present.
Howlett, Lieberman, eds.
Hardcover: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008.
Buy Now:  [ Amazon ]

Mark your calendars!!!

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
will be at Englewood Christian Church
Wednesday evening May 6

Leading a conversation on his book:
NEW MONASTICISM:
WHAT IT HAS TO SAY TO TODAY’S CHURCH

Facebook Invite and More details:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=50272647267

Indy Food Cooperative
proudly presents
the Indianapolis Screening of the award-winning documentary:

HEART AND SOIL
( www.heartandsoilfilm.com )

Friday February 27
6-8 PM
Harrison Center for the Arts.
1505 N. Delaware St.    Indianapolis

FREE for Indy Food Coop members
Adults 18+over  $10 ea.

Family-friendly event.  Light Snacks.