The John Perkins Center

Let's Move On

2012-01-04T22:08:00.000-08:00

Recent demeaning attacks on our President and the First Lady prompted me to invite a response from Tamura Lomax, PhD. In brief,I thought Dr. Lomax might illuminate this behavior in regards to reconciliation.

Last week Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner was overheard saying that First Lady Michelle Obama should attend to her “large posterior” before lecturing Americans on eating right. Of course this was a swipe against Obama’s Let’s Move campaign. How dare the FLOTUS suggest we inclusively get off our growing posteriors and get moving, and how dare she tell American men what to eat!

Correct me if I’m wrong but First Lady Obama isn’t the first spouse to lead a national initiative while in the White House. Laura Bush partnered with the Library of Congress to launch the annual National Book Festival to increase parental and child literacy. And, as part of her Women's Health and Wellness Initiative, First Lady Bush served as the ambassador for The Heart Truth, an organization that “gives women a personal and urgent wake-up call about their risk of heart disease.” And who can forget Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No campaign?

It’s funny, I don’t remember conservative lawmakers (or media pundits) attacking Bush for telling Americans to read or “wake-up” about heart disease, nor do I recall them lashing out at Reagan for commanding us not to use drugs. And I certainly can’t imagine a public official, regardless of party affiliation, publicly suggesting that Bush or Reagan were unfit to lead their causes due to personal or physical reasons. Picture a Democratic Representative telling First Lady Bush to make sure her husband was well read before lecturing Americans on reading and literacy, or articulating that First Lady Reagan, given her petite frame, looked like a “skinny wealthy cocaine-head,” incapable of lecturing the rest of us on the dangers of drug use.

Inflammatory? Yes. Dehumanizing? Absolutely. Well, so are the constant personal attacks on Michelle Obama. How many times will her capacity to lead national initiatives and embody the FLOTUS be measured by conventional standards of beauty? How many times will the FLOTUS be called ugly, a monkey, angry, or manly? How many times will those deeming she is unfit to represent the US censure her physique while simultaneously working out what seems to be a personal fixation? Moreover, how many times will the FLOTUS’s derriere serve as an alibi for undue attention, fears, fetishes and repulsions?

Whatever one may think about Michelle Obama, at least her initiative is all encompassing. For those who’ve missed it, Let’s Move is another way of saying let us move. Let us all treat our bodies better by exercising and eating healthier. And most importantly, let us ensure that everyone, regardless of socio-economic status, has access to these options. Perhaps therein lies the real issue: a black woman in Washington telling mainstream American what to do regarding class disparities, or really, telling those use to directing others anything at all?

For those thinking Sensenbrenner’s comments had nothing to do with race (or the location where race meets gender in the bodies of black women), please ask yourself why Reagan and Bush weren’t admonished for their initiatives—in a similar fashion. The difference lies in not only language (I don’t recall these women using the pronoun “us” when advocating their moralist platforms) but in their privilege and strategic targeting. Reagan emphasized drug use and trafficking in urban areas while Bush placed emphasis on women, children and the impoverished. White men, especially the wealthy, were left alone.

Of course Sensenbrenner has apologized by now, however, only after attempting to put Obama in her place. And what better way to do that than to police her daily habits (i.e. eating and exercising) while reducing her to her bottom and deeming it abnormal? Doing so allows Sensenbrenner to maintain a position of power, reaffirm conventional notions of beauty, and play undisturbed in his little “primitive paradise.”
Unfortunately, Sensenbrenner isn’t the first nor the last to embody such racist and sexist ignorance, and the FLOTUS isn’t the only member of the First family to be subject to its wrath.

Tamura A. Lomax, PhD, studies specializes in religion, popular culture, and race, gender and sexuality in the Black Diaspora. She hosts a cyber series, “Women, Politics, and Feminism” for The Feminist Wire, a cyber news-site co-founded with Hortense Spillers. She is currently at work on a monograph Bishop T.D. Jakes’ Woman, Thou Art Loosed Phenomenon, and the co-edited collection Womanist/Black Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry’s Cultural Productions.

Hip-Hop, Post 9/11

2011-09-27T20:25:00.000-07:00

Autumn 2011 Perkins Perspective marks the beginning of its fourth year in existence. In this e-newsletter, we have tried to model Reconciliation 2.0. In this issue, that means our feature articles represent collaborations between Seattle city government, an affluent urban Presbyterian church, a community development organization, and church in a low-income community in the process of gentrification. Another article introduces you to a former student and staff member involved in urban missions.

All of these pieces coalesced in the midst of my contributing to a Seattle Times' piece on the 10th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center. As I look at the images of the Palestinian rappers and the iconic RUN-DMC, I'm reminded of the weeks and months following the fall of the Twin Towers.

On September 12, 2001, I was in Kobe, Japan, taking a brisk walk outside in preparation for a long flight back to Seattle. It had been a whirlwind week of taking care of immigration issues with my pregnant wife. As I walked along, the villagers bowed deeply and said, “Ohayo Gozaimasu,” the most polite morning salutation from the same people who had all but ignored me on prior walks. (I was used to being ignored by strangers on previous trips, unless they were drunk and wanted to tell me that I looked like MC Hammer or Michael Jordan.)

Not long after, my wife and I were preparing to leave for the airport when a neighbor arrived with a newspaper. She held up the front page, blaring the news of the World Trade Towers’ destruction.

That week, as I haunted train stations and malls in Japan’s Kansai area waiting to return home alone, I‘d occasionally run into talkative Middle-Eastern men who wanted to chat about being in the States. Once back in Seattle, I found a parallel phenomenon: Young Middle-Eastern men were now greeting me with the universal black salutation: “What’s up brother?” They said it with a look of sadness and solidarity. These emotions, and their implied politics, emerged from their recognition that they, too, would experience unfettered racial profiling.

Here I have to explain: When I was dating my wife, Risako, she was an exchange student fresh from Japan. Watching my interactions, she thought I was in some sort of (black) secret society or a special agent, because whenever I passed another black man on the street, or encountered them at the bus stop, or in a restaurant, we’d give each other a head nod and a silent, “what’s up?” Now I found myself receiving this old-school greeting from my new found Middle-Eastern brothers. It was intriguing.

I developed a theory. Following the attack on the World Trade Center, men with Middle Eastern backgrounds began experiencing the same stigmatization and public scrutiny as black men had for centuries in the United States, and they with a greater intensity. Now, under increased scrutiny in our surveillance society, racial profiling caused them to feel the ever-present burden of their race and religion.

In speeches and print, the burden of blackness has been articulated by black leaders from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King Jr. In our hip-hop era, commercial and conscious African-American rappers have used hip-hop as their version of a “black CNN” to communicate the sense that being a black man in America has led to a social dynamic that made them public enemy number one.

While African-American men had experienced slavery, legal segregation, Driving While Black, and the War on Drugs (now known as the New Jim Crow) for years, after the attack on the World Trade Center, Arab and Muslim men were suddenly under the glaring spotlight as we moved towards a War on Terror, stigmatized as potential extremists and profiled in public and private.

Unexpected Shifts The War on Terror began during my graduate school years while I spent my time in seminars and libraries thinking about numerous social and medical issues lens of race. These experiences have culminated in my ability observe a common perception among some Arabs and Muslims and African Americans in the global hip-hop nation. While on Hajj, Malcolm X began to recognize the humanity of Arab and non-Arab Muslims, 9/11 provided a deeper and more politicized context for reciprocity on a deeper level.

My observations are tied to my encounters with Arabs and Muslims following 9/11. Yet, they go back even further, to my experiences on the street and in academia. My first-hand familiarity with hip-hop and training in cultural and race studies has allowed me to see something new among some Arab and Muslim youth, and those that identify with them.

That is, the appropriation of hip-hop and their stigmatized identity as a means to speak back to mainstream society.

As a young man, I listened to hip-hop music during the War on Drugs, when neo-black nationalism emerged in hip-hop’s golden era it seemed to reconcile our past and present moment in dystopia for many young black males in the age of crack. Likewise, this music resonated with young Arabs and Muslims. Prior to 9/11, hip-hop music had deep roots in Islam; in fact, Islam has been called hip-hop’s “unofficial religion.” But whereas Islam’s influence on hip-hop originally came primarily through African-American Muslims and other black religious cults, as described in Arthur Huff Fauset’s Black Gods of the Metropolis, now we see Arabic, Muslim, and Jewish youth appropriating hip-hop language, music, and style to subvert narratives that criminalize them, and as a tool for reconciliation.

In 2008, Naeem Mohaiemen wrote about this shift in hip-hop culture using in DJ Spooky’s book, Sound Unbound. In an article whose title is lifted from the hip-hop neo-black nationalist group Public Enemy, "Fear of a Muslim Planet,” he concludes:

One of the most overused phrases is "after 9/11." Yet we can at least say that the new realities have brought a change to Muslim hip-hop.

For Muslim youth, there were two new forces in their lives. First, there is the crackdown on Muslim civil liberties, expressed through the Patriot Act, INS deportations, "special registrations," "extraordinary renditions," no-fly lists, and torture memos. Second, there are the continuing U.S. wars of occupation in Afghanistan and Iraq. All this has inspired the rise of new Muslim-identified hip-hop bands. Many of these are now Sunni affiliated and some are led by children of Muslim immigrants. Hip-hop remains the singular voice of black America, but that core is now made larger by Arab, Asian, African, French, and British Muslims.

These youth have developed a distinctly assertive identity under the descriptor "Generation M[uslim]," a movement that has gotten the attention of bloggers. Groups with identifiably Islamic names — Sons of Hagar, Arab Legion Divine Styler, Halal Styles, Iron Crescent, Mujahedeen Team, Native Deen, the Iron Triangle, and Young Messengerrzz — are defining themselves both as traditional Muslims and as multiracial.

Prior to 9/11, politically conscious African-American rappers tended to focus their subject matter on a derivative form of Islam, secret knowledge of the 5 percenters, and American racial politics within the black-white binary. Things have changed. One anthropologist of education interested in “hiphoporaphy” has tracked how shifts in the hip-hop nation are coinciding with globalization and the War on Terror, a phenomenon which in turn tracks with old-fashioned American racial attitudes.

In a recent fracas at the Rye Playland amusement park in New York, 15 people were arrested and the park shut down after a fight broke out between police and a group of Muslims. The Muslim patrons became incensed when a group of women were barred from certain rides because of their headscarves. In brief, these patrons felt that they were being profiled due to their conservative attire, which reflects Muslims enduring social aggression in the form of profiling and exclusion that African-Americans have endured for years. It was the ability to presage these kinds of experiences that led young Arab and Muslim youth to pick up the frustration among non-white American hip-hop artists and devotees.

Political Shifts, Media Transformation, and Cultural Transformations
A number of observable causes have led to this synthesis of Arab, Muslim and African-American cultures in the realm of hip-hop.”First, we are witnessing an increasing fluidity in identity performances among many Arab youth outside the United States who are identifying their experiences with the War on Terror and global warfare with those of African-American communities that have lived through, and rap and write about, the War on Drugs, urban poverty, police brutality, suspicion, and surveillance. Second, through art, music, film, and the Internet, we find black speech, culture, and ideologies being absorbed in the Middle East and Third World. Black youth identity politics have become mobile in such a way that transcends pop or commercial culture. Finally, African-American urban (or street) and Middle-Eastern identities are being projected across global geographies.

Here in Seattle, our own Ishmael “Butterfly” Butler of Digable Planets has reinvented his act under the moniker Shabazz Palaces. His artwork incorporates pseudo-Middle-Eastern imagery. No longer “cool like that,” when performing, he often wraps his head and breast in the Palestinian kuffiya, a scarf that indicates solidarity with Palestinians, which have become synonymous with the ubiquitous hoodie seen in the recent London riots. After 9/11, high profile and street black males appropriated the scarf into their wardrobe for both superficial and political reasons. Similarly, Israeli rappers DeScribe and Remedy sell the scarves to fund their efforts. Two years ago, while a student, Ha Neen combined the scarf into urban fashion.

In 2010, Ha Neen’s activism at the University of Washington revealed how hip-hop devotees were using the music and culture to respond to racial profiling and the War on Terror. As a leader with Students for Justice in Palestine, she helped to sponsor two global hip-hop events: Brooklyn Beats to Beirut Streets and Writing’s on the Wall. In the first show, hip-hop artists Nizar Wattad and Omar Chakaki (hailing from Palestine and Syria, respectively) cultural activists and spoken-word performer Mark Gonzales, an Alaskan-born Mexican-American who identifies with Arabs and Muslims interrogated identity, hip-hop culture, and growing up as an "other" in the United States. In the first performance, they reveal how hip-hop and social justice created the context for reconciliation and healing.

In the aftermath of 9/11, Nizar Wattad truly heard the music for the first time. He went on to become hip-hop producer and screenwriter. He also helped fund Slingshot hip-hop, a documentary film on Palestinian hip-hop. The film has been called straight of out of Palestinian, which reveals its connections to black rap classics, Straight Out of Compton and Matty Rich’s Film Straight out of Brooklyn. In Slingshot a Palestinian rapper says, “We are the black people of the United States.” In 2009, the documentary New Muslim Cool detailed the struggles of Puerto Rican American rapper Hamza Pérez, a former drug dealer, who attempted to turn his life around and redeem incarcerated me through introducing them to Islam.

On numerous levels, these artists work and testimony reveals how they see hip-hop as a subversive truth-telling medium connected to the African-American experience. The ability to tell their story provides the opportunity for empathy, dialogue, and reconciliation.

A naturalized citizen of the United States, Wattad became a devotee of hip-hop after hearing the music in Palestine. When talking about his movement toward identification with the black experience, he says the attacks on 9/11 motivated him to form a hip-hop group as a means to produce a counter-narrative to the mainstream media’s portrayal of Arabs and Muslims as “billionaires, bombers, and belly dancers.”

In Writing’s on the Wall, Gonzales, and other performers sought to “build a united front to bridge communities affected by physical barriers. The wall in Palestine, the U.S.-Mexico border, and the struggles against injustices [against all people] for human rights.” Gonzales believes that many non-white communities have experienced many "9/11s.” Gonzales has a valid point. However, I see something new here.

From my perspective, the ongoing War on Drugs and War on Terror, creating what many perceive to be state-approved terrorism in age of increased surveillance, are blending with memory and the poetic possibility of the creation of a community through hip-hop. New York City has hip-hop and tourist units. Following 911, for those affected disproportionally globalizing racial profiling based on race and the micro-physics of surveillance, hip-hop culture and Web 2.0 provide the mediums for the voiceless to contradict mainstream media.

In brief, the tragedy of 9/11 has-re-politicized the art, culture, and worldview of many participants in hip-hop culture in a manner that creates the context for reconciliation beyond the dividing walls that Christ eliminates.

Organs for Sale!?

2011-03-30T08:23:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking about the fact that the field of American bioethics was established upon the principles emerging from the Belmont Report partially in response to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. A study predicated upon overriding patient or subject autonomy.

When it comes to organ donation in the United States, truth is stranger than fiction. Almost 8000 individuals are on an organ donation waiting list in New York City alone. Although a few hundred fortunate individuals will receive organs in the span of a year, hundreds more will die waiting. Of late, economists have been exploring the idea of “adjusting the supply-and-demand problem through market incentives. Instead of asking people to donate their organs, why not just pay for them?” This practice would put a new face on neo-liberalism. In brief, I'm worried that this practice would leave us in ethical quicksand.

Emotional reasons, practical motives, and comparable situations inform the current discourse on moving towards paid organ donations and the need for caution.

First, critics of the current system argue that altruism as a motive hasn’t worked in alleviating the problem. On an average day in the United States, at least 110,371 people are waiting for an organ, and each day approximately 18 of those waiting will die before receiving a donation. Second, while the federal courts make it illegal to sell organs for many reasons, we don’t prohibit individuals from selling blood, plasma, semen, and eggs. Indeed, newspaper ads solicit Ivy League women to sell their eggs for $5,000-$100,000.

Third, in countries like India, organ sales are the norm, and kidneys are a hot commodity. These statements about the existing state of affairs seem to provide reasons for moving beyond what Leon Kass calls the “Wisdom of Repugnance” or the “Yuck Factor.” Yet let us look at these motives again and ask ourselves, as others have in the past, if “saving lives is [really] more important than abstract moral concerns.”

In a brave new world where the market ruled and individuals were allowed to sell their organs, our present ethical and practical dilemma would only worsen. To begin with, if altruism hasn’t motivated individuals to part with their organs, then should we appeal to baser human motives? I think not. In fact, one can imagine that paying for organs would increase the existing racial disparities seen among organ recipients of different races. According to a 2008 article in The Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, “black patients with end stage renal disease comprise more than a third of the kidney transplant waiting list but are 2.7 times less likely to receive a kidney transplant than their white counterparts.”

Purchasing organs sets up further barriers to egalitarian organ donation, “group[ing] life-giving organs with other most basic goods that should not be available to the rich when the poor can't afford them.” In addition, the possibility of exploitation and corruption arises from the commodification of the body, notably “exploitation of the poor and the unemployed, and the dangers of abuse—not excluding theft and even murder to obtain valuable commodities.” Research also reveals that in countries where organ transactions are condoned in order to help the poor get out of debt, the donors usually end up right back in their previous financial circumstances.

Clearly, one can find as many arguments against paid organ donation as for it. However, the temptation to err on the side of profit is too great to allow in the medical arena, where physicians should prioritize the care of the patient. While medicine is a lucrative field, organ sales would have a negative impact on vulnerable populations and sick patients.

We can imagine websites and personal ads soliciting healthy donors, and the poor seeking relief by selling their organs. Moreover, organ donation for profit would lead to new questions about end-of-life care that few of us are ready to address. Considering the difficulties that our government has encountered in regulating other industries, changing the law to allow the market to reign in organ donation programs will leave us slowly sinking in ethical quicksand.

Death of the Christian School Movement

2011-01-06T21:33:00.001-08:00

I've asked invited Historian Ed Carson to share a recent blog entry with us over here at the John Perkins Center.

Ed inspires me on a number of levels. To begin with, Ed runs as much as I did before Risako and I started growing the kingdom organically (i.e., having children), or more. More importantly, Ed is a committed teacher at an elite Christian high school in Texas, who has resisted the tempatation to rest on his laurels. He keeps pushing his students, colleagues, and himself to think critically and puruse excellence. Last, but not least, he is an active blogger.

I believe that Ed's thoughts on the Christian School Movement has implications for how we think about diversity at Christian Universities, and our own hidden transcripts. Of course,in our pluralists society,Christian universities play an important role within the ecology of higher education. However, we can never reflect too deeply on how trends outside of our Christian enviroment have shaped the way in which we have reshaped our missions and constituted our institutions. I invite you to reflect on some of Ed's conclusions based on his research, and join him over at The Professor.

Ed has written:
While doing some reading on why the Christian School Movement is now dead , I have listed the following as my conclusion:

1.) It grew out of religious fundamentalism and weak academics.

2.) After Brown v. Board in 1954, racism championed its cause. Many southern churches opened their basements and Sunday school classes to allow parents an option. Many parents from the South sought options that would protect their interest from that of the federal government. By creating a school in a church, the federal government could not invoke its voice.

3.) The movement promoted and endorsed unqualified teachers. Many were not academics, but Sunday school teachers with a single agenda.

4.) Fundamentalism has shifted to the home school movement due to the financial uncertainty of the schools that made up this movement, and the limited options of other types of Christian schools that did not compromise to an overly conservative audience. Many Christian schools seek to expand the knowledge of students by recruiting an elite faculty. Of course, such faculty members tend not to have a singular agenda. Many are highly academic. Case in point: This creates a conflict between the mission of parents who believe Bible classes should be taught like a Sunday school class, and not like an academic discipline.

5.) It lacks racial, cultural, and intellectual diversity. With small endowments and the inability to raise money, schools of this movement fail to attract a diverse population. Such schools also struggle in attracting faculty members that are both racially, politically, and intellectually diverse.

As noted in Pearl Kane and Alfonso Orsini’s work, The Colors of Excellence:

People of color, be they African-American, Native American, Asian, Middle Eastern or whatever ethnic group, have spent years discovering their roots, developing a keen pride in their heritage, and accepting who they are. So don’t expect the current crop of prospective faculty to fit into your conservative profile. Many of them will not, and, frankly, I don’t think they should even try! Is that shocking? Is that unacceptable to you and your clientele? Then, perhaps, diversity is really not for you. If a turban or a dashiki pants suit offends, then so will diversity! Diversity by definition implies that the status quo will be upset.

6.) Schools try to be and function like a church. Thus, there are too many single denominational schools with little academic focus. A school cannot be nor should it be a church.

7.) Status usurped that of faith. Some parents have learned that schools cannot be a church. Schools must be institutions that will offer the greatest opportunity for the future success of their student. Thus, it is the job of parents to teach their faith, not schools. Now, this does not mean a school should lack a spiritual component. Many of the best sectarian and nonsectarian schools in the nation offer this.

8.) Schools that were or are a part of this movement have invested poorly. They were satisfied with sub par facilities and little to no endowment. Because of race and the radicalism of the 1960s, the movement lacked a vision beyond that of dogmatism. In essence, their alums are not in a position to contribute to the present cause of the school.

9.) Pluralism is highly significant to the 21st century student. Schools of this movement tend to subscribe to a wholly protective way of thinking.

Disclaimer: I am not talking about Christian schools here; I am more concerned with the movement born out of the 1950s. Schools like Houston Christian and the Wesleyan School of Atlanta are grounded in the Christian faith; however, they seek a much wider mission than those of the Christian School movement. Keep in mind that a school can be religious and academic. But, the school’s mission must call for it.

The topic of faith and race is one of great interest to me. I want to use this post to jump-start an online discussion of Divided by Faith. The above topic fits in very well with much of Emerson’s historical analysis. If you are interested in participating in this forum, I will use the following two dates as days to address the book: February 10th (Intro. to Ch 5), and February 24th (Ch. 6 to conclusion. The work is not very long. I believe the first 5 chapters are only 93 pages long. Fire me an email or leave a comment if you think you would like to participate. I will open the discussion with my own reflections from the reading. Then, I hope to have some conversations not just about the book, but about Christian education, Christian schools, nonsectarian independent schools (many grew out of racism too), and faith. You can order it here. Below is a summary of the work:

Here is a summary:

Both religion and race have played important — and sometimes deeply interconnected — roles in American history. Religion was used to justify both slavery and abolition; likewise it was used to justify both segregation and desegregation. Today even conservative Christians support equality between the races, but that doesn’t mean that everything is settled or peaceful. In truth, evangelical Christianity continues to reinforce racial divides.

Edward Carson is currently an instructor in the Department of History and Social Sciences at Houston Christian, a nondenominational independent day school in Northwest Houston. He teaches courses in the areas of American Studies and European History. He holds multiple memberships in various historical societies, and has delivered conference papers at a number of different venues that focus on matters of race, class, gender, and instructional pedagogy. He is currently co-authoring a book on W.E.B. Du Bois.

Literacy and Race in America

2010-09-16T18:06:00.000-07:00

I believe that knowledge is a key to reconciliation and social harmony. Martha Nussbuam's book, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, suggest that the literary imagination has profound implications for whether or not we honor the subjectivity of others. Imagining the other, (i.e., empathy)is necessary for just policy decisions, institution building, and ethical deliberation. Along those lines, this year, I will share short pieces on literacy and race in the black male experience. This vignette provides a peek into my own journey.

In the early seventies our family lived in a small apartment in Los Angeles, California. At my first school, Manchester Avenue Elementary, I mostly learned how to avoid unsolicited fights and getting into trouble. My mom moved our family to San Diego, California near the end of my second grade year. In my new class, I discovered that my spelling was limited to two words: my first name and the first month the school year. A Filipino classmate’s mother who volunteered at the school helped me begin to learn to read by giving me a small cardboard box of used books. The next weekend, for the first time I noticed that my grandmother had beautifully bound books around her well-furnished house in addition to old text books stored in the garage. These were curious artifacts for a caramel colored woman who was barely literate and whose parents signed their checks and legal documents with the mark “x.” I wanted to know why my grandmother, who was barely literate, had so many books in her home.

I asked Grandmother about the books one day while she and I were washing her Ford mustang. She understood where my question was coming from and, although she did not tell me directly that she was illiterate, she explained that she had had to leave the schoolhouse to work in the cotton fields and the homes of nice Christian ladies. Her work in the fields and strange kitchens made Grandmother a hard worker and an amazing cook, but it left her with bruised shins and without an education. After she shared her story, Grandmother retrieved from the garage a box containing a matching set of children’s books with browning pages. She had ordered the set of books during my mother’s pregnancy with me. Even as a young boy I comprehended that the books she gave me that day conveyed a hidden transcript containing trauma, loss and unspoken hopes related to literacy and the possibilities that it allows. My grandmother had dreamed that I would learn to love read the books that she had only been able to use to decorate her home. Whereas destiny had forced her, a Black child who lived under a racial caste system, to pick cotton and cook and clean for white women, I, her favored grandchild, born a year before the Civil Rights Act was passed, would live in a world full of promise and have opportunities to read that she had been denied. Thus began my own literacy narrative defined by a quest which, though as directionless as a ship without a rudder, nonetheless put me at odds over race and class with many of my peers and family. Indeed, my mother, best friends, and school house acquaintances overtly and covertly discouraged my love of reading and pursuit of knowledge. According to them, literacy was an effete habit of the rich. They thought I should be practical and get a job working for the city or the war industry. Nevertheless, I persisted in my quest for literacy and came to appreciate why it is a consistent trope in the African-American canon. Literacy signified hope for social progress and human formation. This knowledge has sustained me in my own literacy journey.

Listening to Community

2010-04-07T22:36:00.000-07:00

All of us have heard it said that God gave us two ears and one mouth for a good reason. My grandmother would say that we were supposed to listen to others twice as much as we share our own thoughts. If you could call what we talked about as kids "thought."

When I first came to the John Perkins Center, I spent the first summer reflecting on a related concept in Christian community development: Listening to Community. This idea is related to the felt need concept and asset-based community development. The former is connected listening to community for a number of important reasons:

"As we listen to their stories and get to know their hopes and concerns for the present and future, we also begin to identify one another person's deepest felt-needs; those hurts and longings that allows us opportunities to connect with people on a deeper level, which is always necessary for true reconciliation to take place."

Listening helps locate the community-based assets. These assets provide a launching pad for self-directed community improvement. The Christian Community Development website states:

"Asset-based community development focuses on the assets of a community and building upon them. When fused together through Christian Community Development, they can have extremely positive results.Every community has assets, but often these are neglected. When a ministry utilizes Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD), it names all of the assets in the community that helps the community see its many positive characteristics. It is through these assets that people develop their community."

I thought listening to community seemed great in theory. We Americans, however, believe in relying on experts to lead us in the most rational and efficient direction towards our goals. These experts—our doctors, teachers, ministers, therapists and government officials—tell us how to improve our lives and our communities. So, I thought that listening to community sounded great, but it’s not best practice. In other words, we need some experts to help us out, I would have argued back then.

After working and teaching at Seattle Pacific for almost two years,I have grown a lot in this area. While I bring a degree of subject matter knowledge to bear on my work, I’ve learned to listen to my colleagues and students.This might seem counter-intuitive when thinking about community development involving poor communities. In my mind, wherever we work or live, as Christians, we are all involved in reconciliation. Paul writes:

"All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation...We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf: Be reconciled to God." 2 Corinthians 5:18-20 (New International Version)

Being reconciled to God involves human reconciliation. I'm learning that the reconciliation the leads to developing communities involves listening to and honoring the thoughts of others above my own While my colleagues at other universities find no repugnance in trying to insinuate themselves, and their ideologies, into institutional policy and their students' belief systems, I’m more interested in dialoguing around the material that I teach or institutional issues.

Dialogue requires a generous conception of the other that leads to generous listening. On the one hand, trying to change others is hard work. In fact, I’ve been trying to lose 10 pounds for a year, only to gain 10 more pounds. In other words, changing oneself is difficult enough. Letting go and listening to others allows me to understand their goals and to try to support them, where I can.

Generous listening requires trying to understand what the other is attempting to communicate. It requires forgetting about inserting one’s opinion when our conversation partner takes a breath, but honoring their words and thoughts by allowing them to speak without imposing our own thoughts on their communication.

On the other hand, developing a generous conception of the other is critical to reconciliation.This requires recognizing the sacredness and dignity of others based on their being made in the image and likeness of God. This attitude should lead to our treating the other with dignity while acknowledging the integrity of their thoughts, beliefs, and perspective.

When reading Kat Charron’s book, Freedom’s Teacher, I was surprised to hear the same concept emerge in her biography on the grassroots educator and activist Septima Clark. As an educator Clark learned to listen to parents and meet her adult and school-aged students where they were. As a young brash teacher and community organizer, she experienced negative consequences for her presumption and then began to take this more wholistic approach more seriously. She also learned to listen to her white political mentors, the Warings, discovering that listening led to gaining their ear, and the ear of others.

Clark began to appreciate this concept, around 1918, at the beginning of her teaching career. Clark learned this skill among the poor black farmers who spoke Gullah on St. John’s Island outside of Charleston, South Carolina. Eventually, she became a leader at the Highland Folk School. Afterward she would return to St. Johns, for intermittent periods, to teach in the black community and help residents with their economic, social, and political goals. This work would continue until the grandmother of the Civil Rights Movement passed in 1987.

Charron’s narrative helped me to appreciate how empowering education has always been mutually constitutive. It educates and empowers both student and teachers. Its power comes from the teacher's recognition that the all students is bring a mind, ideas, and a wealth of knowledge to the table. This awareness leads the educator to pay attention.

When it came time for Clark to choose a collaborator on a return trip to St. John, listening was the most important skill that she looked for. Consequently, she chose Bernice Robinson, a former beautician. Clark explained, “We felt that she had the most important quality; the ability to listen to people.” Robinson had learned to do so in her beauty shops in New York City and Charleston. We might find this an odd choice, but Clark's and Robinson’s ability to listen to community allowed them to train and influence thousands upon thousands of activists and educators. Many were practitioners themselves such as Rosa Parks and the great Fannie Lou Hammer .

"Where I'm From": recognizing one's social location as preparation for reconciliation

2009-12-18T11:55:00.000-08:00

This past summer, Dean of SPU’s School of Education Rick Eigenbrood(on the right with my girls and busy bee) offered me the opportunity to teach a diversity course to students entering the Teacher Education Program at SPU. So beyond editing the newsletter and hanging out and conspiring with art studio director Katie Kresser at the Seattle Art Museum, last fall,I’ve been spending time stretching and being stretched by our students. It's been transformative for me as an educator. Part of helping students to understand the perspectives of others requires helping them to understand their own social location. In order to do so, we have included a literary exercise in the course that involves writing a poem titled: "Where I’m From.” The first time 'round in class, our students provided some of the most transparent writing that I've heard in a while. What follows below are poems from three brave and brilliant students who were willing to share their thoughts.
Please scroll down to read our students' poems. I'm sure that you will be moved.

Anna Coulson

2009-12-18T11:44:00.000-08:00

Life Hasn’t Always Been so Easy

I am from the Sun Shine State,
lived there a long time
Grew up on many streets;
Thought that was fine.

From rich to poor my roots are defined broad,
that’s OK cause’ in the center there was always God.

My parents are Stanford grads, they wanted a better life for me,
So instead of sending me to school, they taught me how to read!

Being home-schooled was such a great way to learn,
Taught by my parents, respect was earned.

I have been blessed to have the parents I have had,
because if they hadn’t adopted me, life could’ve been pretty sad.

I have brothers from different backgrounds, I never saw the difference,
Because my parents taught us - it wasn’t about appearance!

From the streets in California to the green Irish land,
I love the variety of where I come from- but prefer the beach and sand!

I am from the moments that show up in family pictures,
Bright eyes and happy smiles are remembered through the years.

Life hasn’t always been so easy,
I struggled with abandonment,
Because I had those birth parents
who did not want to commit.

God has taught me to forgive, move on, and be grateful
Because some kids don’t ever get the blessing I have had, ever at all.

Trace the history and you’ll land in Ireland and England,
Although that’s “where I ‘m from,” I have never been.

Jenny Braun

2009-12-18T11:19:00.000-08:00

A Yearning for Difference

Growing up had blessings and disappointments.
From Buckley to Bonney Lake back to Bonney Lake, WA.
That’s where I lived with
a family who cared and always loved deep.
Minus the fact that sister smoked crack,
and my brother, just a pothead who was mean.
Parents always there with insurmountable support.
There is nothing you can’t do, seek the Lord and go, be you.

All white, though sister looked Mexican.
Never knew why, that’s just how it is.
Longed for difference, always attracted to people different.
Then nephews were born.
Beautiful with skin so smooth,
Could hold him for hours mesmerized by those deep brown eyes
Touching that curly brown hair.
Looking at that creamy brown skin.
World was changed when another one came
They looked just the same except for the name.
My heart yearned for more difference

Always grew up in a white society
Where money was always there and education was in front of me.
School was easy, never got pushed.
Until Mr. Waz you are too smart not to go and be “gifted”.
Taking his advice, going for the challenge,
Hated the place and the people were vicious.
What are you too smart or something? We don’t wanna play with you!
Confidence all gone, just wanted to be social.
Went back to the place where I could be me with people who weren’t mean.

Missing the innocence of life.
Playing with neighbors, riding on quads, up and down on the teeter totter
Playing paintball with brother
Making memories in Sunday school, trusting in God
Only care in life was getting up for school
And occasionally getting the owie that mama nurse had to fix.
Blessed with athleticism so played every sport,
Always got made fun of cause I was always too short.
That’s how God made me and now I see, his glorious workings in simple old me.

To see the importance of where you are
Don’t forget to look back from where you were from.
Past is the key to understanding the story of the person in the present.

Chester Pineda

2009-12-18T11:08:00.000-08:00

Born by the Wedding Band

A switch or belt
Football pads and soccer cleats
The lingering sting of defeat
I’ll always remember how it felt

Vicks cured all that ills
Blistering fever or freezing chills
(I’ll always remember my grandmother saying, “you’re not sick till you’re dead or dying")

Family comes first
Just after God

From Spain to Mexico
Pineda grew
Viermas (that’s Friday) from the Philippines flew

A rosary hung from my great grandmother’s hand
To Saint Rita she prayed and prayed
For the great grandchild, born by the wedding band

It is my job to prove
To the Saint of lost causes
I’m no lost cause
But how, how do I choose?

Shake it off you’re not hurt
Nothing is bleeding, broken or burnt

According to Chester Pineda, writing this poem required a little trip down memory lane for me. I recalled some of my most prominent childhood memories, soccer, football, and martial arts. But what I remember most is always what my mother told me, "Unless something is broken, or you're bleeding; you're not hurt." He can still hear these words ringing in his ears today.

Got Plums?

2009-10-05T11:52:00.001-07:00

During the spring, our two girls wanted to run a lemonade stand in the community. Risako and I weren’t sure about it. Then in August, a neighbor shared how her 12-year-old son bought a laptop and iPod with money earned at his lemonade stand on Queen Anne. A few days later, Risako, my partner, asked me to clean up the fallen plums from our yard. As she watched me work, she came up with a brilliant idea. The girls would sell the Italian plums from our tree, before they fell off the tree and rotted on the ground. I suggested adding water and doggie treats to the menu as well. People in Seattle just love their dogs.

Well, the first weekend the kids made $135 dollars. They definitely had a grace on their business; Risako reported making $60 dollars within the first two hours, while standing near a public restroom at Green Lake. The following week was quite different. They first day, after their return, it took six hours to make $4 dollars. The team returned home demoralized. Poor sales had taken the wind out of their “sales.”

The following evening, the nonprofit that I volunteer with invited us to join them for Childhaven night at a Mariner’s game in Safeco field. During the game, a vendor came by with cotton candy, announcing that it would cost $5 per child; they coolly waved him away. I was impressed. Instead, our three entrepreneurs decided to share nachos. While remaining silent at the start of this adventure, their budding awareness of finances moved me toward seeing things Risako’s way. But why had I been so ambivalent about the whole enterprise anyway?

After reflecting on the matter, my thoughts went back to returning with my mother to San Diego from Los Angeles to live near my grandmother, and my “grandma” having me help her clean offices — her second job. Worn out from the work, I had spent many a day sleeping during class in elementary school. Later on, when I was in junior high, my mom sent me to shine shoes with my grandfather. I continued to work and run small family businesses through high school and the first year of university. I learned a lot of valuable lessons about life and work during that era in our lives.

At the same time, I thought, every American is captured by the idea of social mobility, and every parent wants better for their children. But what does better mean? A great education at a good school, ballet and music lessons, I thought. What about the good that comes from real time encounters with the world? For example, shining shoes gave me the opportunity to engage all kinds of people. I wanted them to have a good education and the ability to understand the experience of poverty without being poor.

Risako put me to work despite my doubts. The following Friday night, I found myself out there on the trail at Green Lake. I also found myself quietly rationalizing the whole thing. Wasn’t it right for dad to support and protect his kids? I could teach them how to interact with their customers, I thought. As the day began to fade away, my doubts dissipated giving way to calm as peace began to prevail.
It sort of felt like I was back at the shoe-shine stand on Broadway in downtown San Diego, or at our ice cream shop, Papa Sweet’s. I found myself striking up conversations with the local folks. Even visitors who weren’t buying anything at all wanted to talk.

For a moment, I had the sense that I was being placed back in the marketplace for some unknown reason. When I first moved to the Emerald City, 20 years ago, I sold T-shirts on the corner of 23rd and Union, as well as in Seward Park and on Capitol Hill. I spent a lot of time talking to Seattleites and transplants from other cities. Looking back, some of my most enduring relationships are people that I hung out with back then: Maria Kang, Inye Wokoma, Caroline Scott, Efrom Howard, and tons of folks from the music scene.

Yet and still, this time around, it was indeed a humbling experience. Back then, I was a new to Seattle, and had blown into town wearing red, gold and green. My revolutionary "look" was accentuated by natty dreadlocks and a beard. At the time, I lived in a share house of other social outcasts in Wallingford.

This time around, I had returned to teach at an excellent Christian university, after spending almost seven years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while earning two degrees at Harvard. In other words, something else was going on. It wasn't merely child's play at business that led me to submit to Risako's request. Now, I was straddling the tension between privilege and disadvantage.

My time in New England involved rubbing shoulders with the intellectual, social, and financial elite. However, in reality, I hadn’t moved far up the socioeconomic ladder. While standing at Green Lake, I was forced to admit to myself we could use a hand to pay for the kids' extracurricular activities and the technology they craved. But it was also an adventure, often it felt like a parable come to life.

On the one hand, I will never forget when a major televangelist walked past us. I yelled out, “Hey kids, look that’s the preacher mom likes on television.” He and his wife looked up for a minute and walked to the edge of the sidewalk and passed us by, twice. Like others, he had mistaken us for panhandlers.

On the other hand, unexpected people stopped to bless us; people with obvious ideological differences from the evangelical views that give shape to our lives. They offered their own fruit and friendship. One day, a homeless man gave our children money from his cup. They hesitatingly accepted it hoping that it would lift his spirits. In the end, we found ourselves in the car driving home asking, “Who had acted as our neighbor?”

At the end of our journey, during the month of August, I had a great deal of peace and some joy to go with it. On sales days, we would develop a gathering of folks who weren't even thinking about ending our conversations. These folks included lawyers, professors, teachers, graduate students, business people and a financial planner. One night, as a gift to themselves, the girls decided to go to the local Korean beauty shop for a cheap haircut on their dime. Another night, they wanted to purchase sushi. We were bonding as a family in unexpected ways.

A number of interesting interactions followed our business encounters.

One night I checked my email to find a message from our church. We had met a local scientist who had written to say that he wanted to get to know me better. He thought that we could run at Green Lake or I might attend a bible study. Wow! I had two other powerful moments that involved people on the streets of Seattle.

My girls began to ask us to help others, the poor, the homeless. One Saturday, they wanted Maestro, a dreadlocked shoe-shine man downtown, to polish their soccer cleats. I’ve known Maestro since my early days as a wannabe Rastafarian when I first arrived in Seattle, back in ‘88. His street pose had always signaled a cool indifference. While cleaning the girls' shoes, Maestro told them about how doing honest work allowed him to awake in the morning to a person who he had no problems facing: himself. After they paid him for their shoe shines and his wisdom, Maestro looked me square in the eyes and quietly said, “I love you man.”

It would be impossible for me to convey to you, my dear reader, what these words of reconciliation meant to me. I had sought some kind of a connection with this man for decades, but he had remained aloof despite all my gestures. Twenty one years later, providence had intervened unexpectedly as we aimlessly walked down the street. My children’s concern and tolerance had melted his facade. Reconciliation didn’t stop there.

The following week, I was exiting a grocery store where a woman, though I'm not sure, was selling the homeless newspaper. She seemed a little scattered and disorganized. Without my eyeglasses, I stared trying to discern whether or not she was sober. Walking over to the corner, I gave her a dollar, she looked at me and said, “Thanks for seeing me and coming over to help me.”

In that moment, I realized the treasure of our experience, as a family. To begin with, somehow it felt as though we had become more of a family. More importantly, our light and momentary struggles had opened our eyes to the pain of others, their humanity; their poverty became more real to us. If I had returned to Seattle to a cushy job and lots of money, I might have become smug and raised children who would overlook the poor. This possibility had quietly been a constant fear. At this point, however, I’m certain that my girls will continue to see those who are in need. My hope is that they will continue to have an amazing capacity for empathy.

Watch This! The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism

2009-07-22T09:49:00.001-07:00

I began reading Jonathan Walton's new book, Watch This!, on the night before last. His prose is amazing--both academic and readable. It's a must read, I want to share a bit of it, and will write more later. The introduction concluded with an application of Roland Barthe to the author's subject matter.

Before doing so, I will share why I found this passage interesting. Walton's thesis struck me because I have been thinking about a recent conversation with someone with a lot of influence about new visions for our society. My conversation partner deployed an argument that implied our current society, with all its beauty and blemishes, is simply the natural product of time and human activity.

Moreover, they seemed unable to imagine further evolution. In my mind, this kind of thinking creates the context for an unconscious apathy that leads to half-hearted approaches to adressing social (in)justice. Anyway,after reading the following excerpt in Watch This!, I went to slept with a new insight into how we tend to believe that culture is static. Walton writes:

… Roland Barthes has argued that when cultural myths become naturalized over time and become that which is taken for granted, they serve a legitimating role. Whatever systems of relations are in place are deemed natural and legitimate—what has always been will always be. Appeals to cultural myths of American success, black victomology, and the Strong Black Man legitimize conservative and anecdotal based views of wealth distributions, racial discrimination, and gender hierarchy that contradict the liberating intent of televangelists. They (cultural myths) may also serve to anesthetize participants [in institutions advocating social change] to the unjust ordering of the larger society even as persons seek to revolutionize their own world. So while the ritual of self-affirmation may inspire hope and optimism about achieving the ends of individual liberation, the competing ritual of social accommodation can frustrate the televangelist's professed aims by encouraging viewers to appeal, adjust, and adapt to ideological conceptions of an unjust society. (Walton, 2009).

Mental Baptism

2008-12-12T16:05:00.000-08:00

“I am a rationalist. For me reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.”
-C.S. Lewis

After returning to Seattle to work in the John Perkins Center at Seattle Pacific University, I have been baffled when pondering our interracial family’s ability to mingle with just about everyone, and yet the city has enduring racial divisions — both in our neighborhoods and our churches. While I love my work and Seattle, as a result of these observations, I’ve begun to wonder if we’re suffering from a lack of imagination.

Looking for New Metaphors

While most of us would argue that God called us to this or that church, in reality, our churches consist of individuals who look like us, ascribe to our cultural norms, and have found their way to our communities. The obvious adherence to a traditional approach to community formation suggests an inability, on all of our parts, to imagine a different world. I can only conclude that our culture has veiled and blunted the Gospel. The apparent racial divisions in our churches imply that our ministers have failed to find a metaphor strong enough to command “His will be done on earth on it is in Heaven,” along racial lines. Surely heaven isn’t segregated. What’s the answer?

It seems that we are experiencing a profound iinability to get beyond what academics have called “neoliberal multiculturalism.” This approach to diversity is based on a “get in where you fit in” mentality. Because my diagnosis reveals a poverty of imagination, I’ve begun to appeal to literary critics for a solution. My conclusion is that we need new metaphors to emblematize the radical egalitarian position found in Scripture.

In “Blusples and Flalansferes,” C.S. Lewis argues that metaphors are deployed for two reasons: the need to express poorly grasped concepts or communicate a mundane idea to the uninitiated. According to Lewis, metaphors create the context for exposing a truth and transforming the imagination (mind).

Wordsworth believed that a mind endued with a vital faith allows the individual to remove the curtain between this world and the celestial realm to absorb the mind of Christ. His poem “Cuckoo at Laverna” describes the imagination that has been immersed in God’s thoughts. Wordsworth writes:

He wont to hold companionship so free,
So pure, so fraught with knowledge and delight,
As to be likened in his Followers' minds
To that which our first Parents, ere the fall
From their high state darkened the Earth with fear,
Held with all kinds in Eden's blissful bowers.

Then question not that, 'mid the austere Band,
Who breathe the air he breathed, tread where he trod,
Some true Partakers of his loving spirit
Do still survive, and, with those gentle hearts
Consorted, Others, in the power, the faith,
Of a baptized imagination, prompt
To catch from Nature's humblest monitors
Whate'er they bring of impulses sublime.

James A. Heffernan has criticized the poet for the ubiquitous and imprecise use of the term metaphor in his writing. Nevertheless, Heffernan has been forced to recognize the emblematic power that metaphors give to Wordworth's poetry. In a statement that would resonate with Walter Benjamin’s thoughts on translation, Heffernan writes, “The primary effect of the imaginative powers is the evocation of meaning from the material world, the meaning of a visible object as the emblem of the invisible truth.” Like Heffernan, the church tends to think about faith as the faculty that allows us to grasp transcendent truths that elevate our own souls.

A “Mental Baptism”

I would argue that our inability to reconcile across class, gender, and racial lines emerges from the inability to develop the concepts, lexicon, and metaphors that articulate the Body of Christ.

We have sought to baptize the imaginations of others with the intent of transforming the lost, but based on the persistent racial segregation in our churches, we have fallen short in our mission; we must seek to discover metaphors that will baptize our imaginations — pierce our consciences and renew our minds — in order to re-imagine race relations.

Stated differently, the church needs a mental baptism that will allow it to radically re-imagine the entire social order. Our leaders must breathe new life into their messages to remove the cultural elements that cause Sunday services to mirror, instead of seeing the heavenly city, the divisions that we witness outside of our ecclesiastical gatherings on Monday mornings.

Because social stratification and racial isolation create material and spiritual poverty among the marginalized, our efforts to heal a broken world should transform us into an organic emblem — a living metaphor.

The Essential Tension II

2008-10-18T12:47:00.000-07:00

Kuhn went on to appropriate and deploy the paradigm concept to encapsulate the various collections of beliefs and shared agreements, about nature, that allow scientists to solve problems. According to Kuhn, "No natural history can be interpreted in the absence of at least some implicit body of intertwined theoretical and methodological beliefs that permits [problem] selection, evaluation, and criticism” (16-17). In my thinking, Kuhn's argument has repercussions for how we choose the social problems we seek to address, the strategies we develop to address them, and the kinds of arguments that we construct to justify and gain support for our decisions.

Initially, historians and philosophers of science found Kuhn's thesis problematic. Later, in the seventies, during a time of social turmoil, graduate students embraced Kuhn's relativism and made him a rock star. His arguments justified the impulse towards social change. Today, decades after the initial publication, SSR has sold more than one million copies and influenced generations of academicians.

As a Christian interested in the American church and reconciliation, Kuhn's thesis seems useful for thinking about our ability to make sense of and act in the world. While Kuhn was concerned with the advance of scientific knowledge, his psycho-sociological approach informs my perspective on the JPC’s reflection upon the origins of its mission and subsequent activities. Kuhn seems to suggest the need for developing new approaches to elaborate its mission. I would ask the following questions: How are SPRINT trips informed by the thinking of individuals like Josiah Strong? What are the consequences? Have we recognized the connection between urban involvement and the Social Gospel and progressivism? If not, how do these religious and social theories make a difference? How do ideas about redistribution reflect the Gospel of Wealth and Social Darwinism?

The Essential Tension I: social construction and racial reconciliation

2008-10-02T10:34:00.001-07:00

When reading the Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), as an undergraduate in the history of science, I stumbled upon a term—paradigm—that has been encroaching on my thinking about community development, diversity, multiculturalism, and reconciliation. Back then, after encountering what had become a “cocktail party” word, I began to rethink my understanding of the human mind, the growth of knowledge, and Christianity in general. Of late, I’m finding that Thomas S. Kuhn’s “paradigm" concept is informing my formative thoughts about the challenges that the John Perkins Center (JPC) and Seattle Pacific University (SPU) will face in walking out our commitment to “engage the culture, change the world.”

Kuhn, a historian of science at MIT, first appropriated the word “paradigm” in the 1960s. As a doctoral student in physics and Harvard Fellow, he became engrossed in Aristotle's work. Kuhn was helping James Conant develop a course on the history of science. During this period, Aristotle provided a conundrum for Kuhn. He was puzzled by how someone so brilliant could be so stupid when it came to physics. After thinking about the question for awhile, the young scholar had an amazing epiphany: Aristotelian physics made perfect sense for someone who had been born in Greece during Aristotle's lifetime.

Stated differently, Aristotle was operating under a paradigm that had been replaced with the emergence of modern physics. Kuhn's attempt to understand Aristotle, in absence of Aristotle's context, had led to his experiencing what he later would describe as "incommensurability." Kuhn was operating under a different "paradigm."

Questions:

Is Kuhn's experience useful for thinking about community development and religious issues? Why? Why not?

How would you define the term paradigm in Christian Community Development context?

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