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Donald E. Mitchell, was one of the founders of DisciplesWorld, serving for almost a year without pay, selling advertising to help birth the magazine. Don died April 28 after a long bout with lung cancer. He was 81.
For more than 30 years, Don was known across the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) for his work as public relations director at Church Extension. He won numerous awards, particularly in photography, from church professional groups. He previously had been a newspaper and TV photographer in West Virginia.
Don, thank you. You will be missed.
(This appeared as my newspaper column, “Notes From My Knapsack” in the Granville (OH) Sentinel 4-23-09, just before Ms. Saberi was convicted and sentenced, and word came out of her planned hunger strike pending an appeal in the Iranian court system. Please keep her in your prayers! No word in subsequent coverage about whether she got her books, but i’m praying for that, too.)
Roxana Saberi is a freelance reporter whose work has been on NPR along with other national venues.
Her profile may have gotten a small boost from being Miss North Dakota over a decade ago, and her ethnic background with Iranian parents led her to try to cover the story of women’s lives in Iran from the inside.
If you’ve heard her story, it’s likely because she’s been arrested by the Iranian government on suspicion of espionage; which friends, family, and most recent employers all agree is balderdash. Sharing accounts of how women have to live in the Islamic Republic of Iran may be as worrisome to authorities there as the possibility of spies checking out their atomic program, since neither issue gains them much favor around the world.
What caught my attention about Ms. Saberi’s story is a recent development, when her parents traveled to Iran and finally got the chance to visit her in prison. They asked her what they could bring her, and she asked for books.
Specifically, she requested Plutarch’s “Lives,” a biography of Gandhi, and a French dictionary, since many Iranians speak that language (odd quirks of colonial history pop up across the Middle East – lots of older Iraqis speak German, especially if they worked on the railroads).
Still no word (as of this writing) about whether she will be allowed these books in her cell, but it set me to thinking “what books would I ask for if I had a long undefined stretch ahead of me?”
For myriad reasons, I’d ask for a Bible, ideally with the Apocrypha (extra books, y’know), but it isn’t clear whether that would be allowed in any case, just as they are entirely and shamefully illegal in Saudi Arabia.
Beyond that Book full of books, what else would I request? If I could only have, say, five other books, what would I pick? “Tristram Shandy” would top my list, and then . . . this gets hard! They would have to hold up under re-reading, not just be long, although length would have to be a criterion.
Herodotus’ “The Histories,” Dickens’ “David Copperfield,” “PrairyErth” by William Least Heat-Moon, where he does for Chase County, Kansas what I hope to do for Licking County someday, and then I think “Walden” by Henry David Thoreau.
When Shannon Lucid was up on the Russian “Mir” Space Station in 1996, and the internet was new, there was an interactive feature on a NASA website that allowed you to click through a series of pictures showing life during her then-record-setting nearly 200 days in space.
In one shot, within a mesh bag near her berth, I could make out the distinctive cover design of the Penguin Classics edition of “Walden” and I thought “Brilliant! The perfect book to take on such a trip.” When the Mir was “de-orbited” in 2001, I wondered, as we saw the footage of the burning hulk slash into the South Pacific on TV, did anyone bring that copy of Walden back home?
Having said all that, I wonder if poetry might not be a better choice for re-reading: a volume of Shakespeare’s plays (his birthday today!) and a collection each from Frost, Maxine Kumin, Jaroslav Seifert, and Billy Collins. What five books would you pick, in a prison or for a season in space? It’s an interesting thought experiment.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; toss him a list of books at knapsack77@gmail.com or on Twitter at “Knapsack.”
Photo: Foxtongue (Creative Commons license)
One of the best things about blogging (especially when it’s Friday and you’re a little tired of writing) is that you can read other people’s blogs and link to what you find. Here are a few interesting posts for your afternoon or weekend reading:
Danny Bradfield over at the Field of Dandelions blog posted this great photo in Earth Day. His blog’s got a new look. While you’re there, read about his recent adventures as a judge for the school’s science fair.
What do Disciples of Christ, the Vineyard churches, Mormons, Frank Viola and the house church movement, and the Orthodox Church have in common? They’ve all grown, to some extent, out of “restorationist” principles – the idea of restoring the New Testament church. Blogging from Bridgeport wonders if the New Testament church needs restoring, after all? He makes an interesting point – go read his post on the quest for the New Testament church, and comment.
Bob Cornwall rarely lets a day go by without updating his Ponderings on a Faith Journey blog, and he’s always got something interesting to say. This week, he’s written twice about the use of torture as an interrogation tactic. I especially like this post, though, about interpreting the Koran.
Going back to last month, The Ageing Xperience writes about the donation of organs – and various other items – to a church, and what kinds of obligations and issues this occasionally creates, even if the donor’s intentions are good. Anyone who’s a pastor or has served on a church’s board or as a trustee can probably relate.
In closing, from Nathan Day Wilson’s blog, a word from Thoreau. As much as social media has opened up the floodgates of self-expression, there are others out there (on the internet, yes, and in “real life”) whose songs go unnoticed. May we listen well, and may we help others to make their lives sing.
Okay, I realize that many in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) still don’t know about the Mission Alignment Coordinating Council. Others, frankly, don’t care all that much about the effort to align the general (and probably soon, the regional) church’s structures with its mission and to better serve congregations. But they should (IMHO).
The MACC is an 11-member group that has been working for about a year to figure out what needs to be done to improve the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). That’s an extremely general description of their work; click here if you want specifics.
Today they made their report to the denomination’s General Board and asked for feedback. Now, the report’s been out for about a month — most General Board members have probably read it. So the biggie today was the feedback. Given the responses via Twitter and email, I wondered how this would go, because the responses I’ve seen and heard to the MACC’s proposals have been all over the map.
First off, let me just say that the MACC’s members have done a lot of difficult and thoughtful work, and have tried to look to God to guide that work. Everyone we’ve heard from has also noted this, and I want to reaffirm it. No doubt, these folks have invested a lot of time and energy into trying to move the church forward, and forward in the right direction.
My own concern with the MACC is that, while they identified the need for transparency as paramount, their proposal doesn’t say much about it. And they didn’t model it for the rest of the church — DisciplesWorld wanted to attend their final meeting in January — and we were informed in no uncertain terms that the meeting was closed. We at DisciplesWorld have addressed that in an editorial, which will appear in our May issue. ‘Nuff said about that, for now.
One of the most interesting things today was how the MACC solicited comments and questions about its work. Instead of doing the traditional, Roberts’ Rules-governed practice of having people step to the microphones to speak, they asked people to get into table groups of 4-5. People were directed to comment on what struck them most about the MACC’s proposals, and what questions they have. After about 15 minutes of discussion, people switched to another table, with one person from each table group, who had taken notes, remaining behind to ‘host’ the next group. After two rounds of table discussions, table recorders were asked to come and report one item from the table discussions. Here is what they reported:
1 – Liked the proposal to extend the timeline and the feeling of not rushing anything.
2 – we can’t determine structure of domestic ministries without talking about the content and purpose of those ministries.
3 – “Our church needs bolder vision and bolder action.”
4 – “Change brings conflict and these proposals bring major change” Let’s walk through conflict with courage.
5 – The MACC is doing good job of identifying problems and naming outcomes. But they are failing to ask individual entities to come up with the structure to accomplish the outcome. Feels like the oppressor telling the oppressed how to come up with the outcome.
6 – Who will be accountable to whom, and can there be action after dialogue with the General Board?
7 – For these things to be effective and foundational, we need relationships that lead to trust and to accountability.
8 – This seems like an indirect effort to shut down Disciples Home Missions. And NBA (National Benevolent Association, now Disciples Benevolent Services) is perceived as the problem, and it feels punitive.
9 – It was felt that it began with a theological basis but the theology is not carried out in proposals. They should be more theologically considered.
10 – How does this proposal resource the regions in the “movement toward wholeness,” in support of the 2020 Vision, etc.?
11 – Appreciation that we’re dealing with systemic change, rather than personalities.
12 – “This is an approach avoidance document.”
13 – An acknowledgment of the amount of work that was accomplished because of [MACC’s] intent and intentions to include all persons.
14 – Seems like technical fix rather than a mission-driven and delivery fix.
15 – There’s concern about how many next steps are lodged in Office of General Minister and President’s office – are we overburdening, and also, how much does that centralize a church-wide conversation.
16 – There’s a need for clarity about what General Board can recommend and what it can mandate among these proposals.
17 – What is the expected outcome for justice and advocacy?
18 – Questions about the pastoral table – who is at it and are we inadvertently locking in 2009 agreements? And where are women, Haitians, regional ministers, etc.?
19 – Proposal #8 regarding new churches should be under the second desired outcome (celebrating and affirming diversity) – as opposed to grouped with programmatic issues in third desire outcome.
20 – Perhaps MACC assumed that general units’ work is still necessary to local congregations?
21 – We question the purpose of the pastoral table being fulfilled by being entirely race-based in its membership.
22 – “Turf protection dimishes ministry.”
23 – Are we doing what we always do – talk things to death – or will there really be substantive change in moving us forward?
Here’s what I see as a challenge. How does the MACC take in such a broad range of critiques, suggestions, and questions, and narrow those down? Are they really listening, or just letting people vent? Which comments will impact their proposals and the future direction of their work (they’ve asked for another year to continue meeting, and the General Board will most likely approve that request)?
And then, their next step is to go back to congregations during a conference in June, and find out what those congregations need to be resourced for ministry. This is a critical step for the MACC, because they didn’t get much feedback from congregations and individual Disciples last fall. One of the main objectives of their work is to better equip congregations for mission.
It seems (from this meeting) that regional and general ministry heads are quick to offer up their suggestions, and that’s great. But if the MACC’s work becomes dominated only by the concerns of general and regional ministries, then it’s not going to do what it set out to do.
Ironically, I don’t think that a failure of the MACC would impact Disciples congregations all that much. Many congregations figured out long ago how to “resource” themselves. The big loser here will be the general church. As I see it, the MACC process is about how to make the general church relevant to congregations. To succeed, they need to stay focused and may need to say “no” or “not yet” to much of what they heard today.
Photo: TheGiantVermin (Creative Commons license)
Confession: I’m not a fan of crowds. I’ll do just about anything to avoid them. Mostly I don’t like the physical aspect of crowds – the ever-present threat of having my toes stepped on, catching an elbow in the kidney, or of simply being wedged together with people I don’t know.
Another reason for avoiding crowds is the crowd mentality — the tendency for emotion and action to become magnified and transmuted. If you’ve ever seen a bar fight or been to a rock concert, you know what I’m talking about.
This same tendency exists on the Internet, where “buzz” often trumps believability and we lose the combination of reasoning skills and intuition that would make us say “bullpucky” if we heard or read the same thing from a single source. We ought to take anything buzzworthy with a grain of salt (just one example: the thousands of “Obama is a Muslim” rumors that made the rounds before the election).
I like a lot of things about social media, but Twitter and Facebook can amplify our human tendencies to behave like lemmings headed toward the proverbial cliff. What’s new with social media is that you can actually watch it happening.
Over the weekend, the Twitterverse was abuzz with news (marked with the #amazonfail hashtag) that Amazon.com reclassified as “adult” some of its books and other materials, especially those dealing with LGBT concerns and feminism or even having gay fictional characters. Not only that, but Amazon removed their sales rankings. Media outlets including the Wall Street Journal picked up the story, and so did bloggers (see here,and here). From what I understand, Amazon’s actions meant that reclassified materials (including Augusten Burroughs’ memoir Running With Scissors and an autobiography of Ellen Degeneres) would not show up in Amazon’s search results. This is a big deal – with the number of items Amazon carries, not showing up on the first or second page of search results can mean a significant drop in sales. Your product is rendered all but invisible unless someone knows exactly how to find it.
Now, no one at Amazon is denying what happened. What’s troubling is how quickly an explanation for this turn of events spread – an explanation that’s maybe a little too convenient. More or less, the explanation is that Amazon secretly caved to pressure from the Religious Right and reclassified/deranked these materials to stave off a boycott, and keep the fundamentalists at bay.
It’s hard to believe Amazon would cave to this type of pressure, while completely underestimating the backlash not only from the LGBT community, but from the hundreds of thousands of grown ups who deplore censorship and value freedom of expression. Amazon is a business — a publicly-traded company. They’re not immune to making mistakes, but I doubt they’d make such a stunningly bad business decision. Much as I’d like to know what the heck happened, I just can’t buy this explanation. It’s way too simple.
Amazon called it a “glitch” but the Twitterverse and blogosphere have mostly dismissed this explanation (and it IS lame — Amazon should give people a little more credit and a more detailed explanation, even if it’s incomplete).
Prediction: as the long arc of this story develops, look for alternative explanations that are complex but make more sense, like this one from tehdely at Livejournal, who worked for SixApart when something like this happened to them.
To paraphrase H.L. Mencken, for every problem there’s a solution that’s neat, plausible, and wrong. And in this case, I can’t believe the solution is to blame and flame Amazon. Let’s resist the buzz and put the outrage on ice, at least for a few days. The truth will eventually come out. Until then, pass the salt.
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Rebecca Woods is news and website editor for DisciplesWorld magazine.
Just on down the road, a dust devil swirled into mad, manic life, and skittering across the dusty pathway, spun out into nothing among the rocks beyond.
He stepped cautiously forward, walking steadily but with hesitations, almost as one with a lame ankle or a sore toe. It was a fact that going up to Jerusalem necessarily meant going down as you left, whether to the east and down the rocky defiles leading to Jericho, or the longer and less steep decline to the west, on towards the Roman’s Mare Nostrum, the Great Sea, the Mother of Storms.
There had been great storms yesterday, and a shaking of the earth, but the western sky had not foreshadowed with “a cloud the size of a man’s hand” on the horizon. It came up suddenly, full of lightning and wind, but who had really been watching the skies off to one side?
Shaking his head, he banished the vision of Friday’s events from his mind, and went back to watching the ground closely, for loose rocks that could make his already shaky legs twist right out from beneath him. One sandal was already mended with cordage, where the leather had torn as he ran up the side of the olive tree covered slope, stepping on a rock in the late Thursday darkness. He’d been able to find the lost sandal and keep running, hopping, ludicrous in his fear mixed with anxiety over having to purchase a new sandal.
Even with Roman soldiers at his back, imagined in pursuit, poverty squeezed his thoughts into their mold. It was a puzzle still that they had not followed anyone, but the teacher, their leader, was apparently all they wanted.
A scrap of cord in a gardener’s shed near the top of the mount let him find his footing and his dignity of a sort. Back to their Passover throng’s campsite among the olive oil presses, the “gethsemane” workshop busy during the fall harvest, but where springtime visitors to the Holy City were welcome as out of season guests.
Among the rattled, confused followers of the Galilean rabbi whom he had recently joined, all that he could make out was that an arrest had happened, spurred by the betrayal of one of the core followers, the students, the “discipuli” who came to Jerusalem from the north.
Some said the soldiers had taken their captive to the main fortress overlooking the Temple Mount, the Antonia, others said it was to the Chief Priest’s palatial home at the other end of the city walls. Most went back to a troubled sleep.
By noon the next day there was no question where the focus of attention had turned, to the Romans’ preferred killing ground just west of the city’s exit to the west, the main road of commerce and travel, where most of the visitors for this sacred week would leave and have to choose to turn away, or to glance up, cringe, and keep moving.
He had stayed far away, but his wife joined a group of women who stood near the condemned man’s mother – odd how it was hard to think of him as a teacher, having been refuted and rejected and tormented to such a shameful death. He was the condemned man, innocent though he might be, but if Rome said he was guilty, then who . . .
Stumbling forward, starting at any sudden movement in the brush or stony slopes on either side, he kept his unsteady route to Ein Kerem. His wife had family there, and when they met near the city gate, after the dead body had been removed from the cross and carried to a nearby tomb, she told him they would meet at Ein Kerem tomorrow, and then Sunday walk on down to Emmaus, and from there back to Joppa. The women would grieve together, while the men scattered.
Cleopas thought about the hope for God’s active working in the world that he had felt so strongly just days before, and how hopeless he felt now, fearful again of bad luck, dust devils in his path, the weight of Roman rule hard across his shoulders.
He was glad the two of them were walking, not paying to rent a mule, but just taking one step at a time, quietly letting the miles wear the sadness down. There was an inn at Emmaus where he had known comfort before, and hoped to enjoy again; there they might find a measure of peace.
That was his prayer, as he walked away from Jerusalem on a Saturday afternoon.
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Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow on Twitter at “Knapsack.”
So, clergy and congregational leaders — Easter Monday is an official holiday still in parts of Europe, but sadly it never caught on in this country. Except among exhausted church leadership who have worked themselves to a frazzle over the last eight days and simply collapse in a heap somewhere around 3:30 pm on Easter Sunday and don’t want to stand erect until late in the day that follows.
But my question isn’t “do you catch up on your rest Easter Monday,” since we all know the answer is “probably not,” with folks in hospitals still needing a visit and the last twelve lilies not delivered like someone, you forget whom, said as the Sunday service was ending that they’d take care of (et cetera, ad nauseum).
What i’m wondering about is, given that religious leadership spend so much of Palm Sunday and Maundy Thursday and Good Friday and Egg Saturday and Resurrection Sunday “doing” worship, what devotional practice or re-centering approach do some of you use to celebrate the Easter we often kinda miss while everyone else is experiencing Easter?
Are there particular prayers you go to, books you pick up and read from (other than Luke 24), places you visit (in person or in your mind), retreat practices alone or with others, or anything else you do to “get your Easter on,” on Easter Monday?
I’d love to hear about in the comments what some of y’all do, so others of us can pick up some clues as we groggily recover from the excess of joy, programming, and sugar over these next few days. Plus i’d love to see Easter Monday be a recognized holiday . . .
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