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I leave Ukraine tomorrow and will arrive in the US on Sunday evening after a night in Frankfurt, Germany. I was busy helping to test interpreters and working with a vacation bible school in rural Ukraine these past two weeks and despite some setbacks I did enjoy my time. I think I enjoyed the interpreters camp a lot, because I got to tell my testimony. This included about how, during my time as a professor in Mexico, I became convinced that a good deal of the difficulties of their country were spiritual ones. The young people and future leaders of their country needed to care less about clubbing and more about the future of their countries. They also needed an injection of patriotism/nationalism, or an Orange Revolution of sorts of their own.

For me, it was a special moment because it was the closest I have been to being able to teach college age students again since my job as a professor came to an end and I found I enjoyed it still. Some of the interpreters also came and told me that they thought I was a good teacher later on, too.

We’ll see what happens, my plans on arrival from Ukraine is to start writing a paper for an independent study on Swedish Baptist Pietism, to start to write articles from my interviews in Ukraine and to start to research and work with the Affiliation of Christian Engineers. Classes don’t begin til September and I suppose I will need to look for some part time employment for the coming year, as well, but I’m wary of part time academic work because it takes so much time and pays so little.

We will see. I have more posts on my time in Ukraine that I will write when I’m not paying 9 dollars an hour to use the internet.
dlw

I’ve been reading, Understanding Third World Politics, a book that Christian musician Steve Camp should read before he starts to speak out on int’l politics…In its chapter on political instability and revolution it discusses the importance of political cultures for political stability.

Political culture is usually defined as the way people evaluate and judge political acts and institutions. It is a system of beliefs, values and ideals about the way a system of government should function. It also is the standsrds of evaluation for the rules of the political game. This includes the means for transferring power, the legit boundaries of the state, who is entitled to participate politically and whether political action is likely to be effective within a given system. It also includes people’s attitudes toward other participants and their roles as political actors.

This matters because political cultural “conflict” is seen as a significant source of serious political instability. Although, stability is not just due to shared values, but whether the right values are shared. I.e., if everyone believes that you need to monopolize political power to protect your interests, rather than trusting the other group to share some power with you, it will cause longstanding political instability. And that will kill the possibility of significant economic development in your country for perhaps an extended period of time.

We definitely have very heterogenous political cultures in our country and this raises the notion of what may happen if we do not seek a detente in the cultural wars or a reduction in the acrimony between the different cultural groups within our system. I think there is obviously a need for cultural change on both sides. I have been rereading Jim Wallis’ book, “God’s Politics” and, to his credit, he definitely does call for political cultural change from both sides, particularly in his chapter on poverty. Wallis promotes a form of political cultural change by leading by example and pointing to the ethos he and others have perpetuated at Sojourners for more than thirty years.

Wallis is right in that a theological change is needed to improve US Christianity’s witness before the world. A key theological change that is needed is for us to escape from the secular/sacred dichotomy embraced by the neo-pietism that has prevailed in the US for so many years(see Mark Noll’s address on the matter.). This includes the church decrying clearly sinful acts conducted in public service as well as people’s private lives. This includes us seeking to hold politicians from all parties accountable for their conduct during elections and to oppose corruption with the support of organizations like Transparency International. It also includes supporting individuals like Joe Carson engineer and head of the Affiliation of Christian Engineers who has accepted hardship for his decision to become a whistle-blower and who has recently been nominated for Transparency International’s Integrity Awards.

I hope people can try and email TI in support of Joe or at least post a comment supporting him for his actions.

dlw

Ukrainians need to learn habits of more effective political activism on the smaller stuff. This is natural for a country where they have had no experience with real democracy for a long time and the weight of having others do everything for you from Communism is still present.

Last week, right after my last post, I started up a conversation with a couple of protestors outside the mayor’s office. Apparently, they were concerned about the Mayor using the park lands for personal profit and wanted a new mayor. They believed that just as with the OR they could acheive this through rallying others into protest. I suggested that they offer the Mayor the possibility that they would not rally as much for his replacement if he left their parks alone. This seemed a novel approach to them.

Most political activism is inevitably not revolutions and involve swaying existing politicians to act differently on the basis of a combination of carrots and sticks. As I said before, many youth here in Ukraine are eager to promote more and more changes in Ukraine with the approach of the OR. But for this drive for political change to be sustained, they are going to need to learn to pick their battles better. In the US’s history, when groups have made acheiving a dramatic and difficult political change into a crusade(Abolitionism, Prohibitionism, ProLife Activism for the past 30+ years), it has often resulted in extreme political fatigue and a decidedly mixed net result. We can learn from these experiences and, hopefully, share them with others so they don’t have to go through the same learning curve as we did.

I get concerned about the Supreme Court Justice nomination process. I fear the cultural wars issues and the hype surrounding them will inflame the cultural wars and lead to a breakdown in the ability of our gov’t to function in dealing with all the other matters it has before it.

Ideology matters and a good deal of this has to do with economics. The issues surrounding what the Supreme Court does and its controversies are rather esoteric and poorly understood by most people, which is why they should not be encouraged to base their votes based on the Supreme Court. I’m thinking here of my mother who voted for Bush because she thought he had better values than Kerry and that in the selection of the next Supreme Court Justice(s) would have a long term impact on our country and halt the decline of moral values.

Yet this shows a lot of fallible associations and very selective perceptions about what the Supreme Court does and does not do. Some court “activism” is inevitable inasmuch as the rules that collectively govern our economic, political and social relations need to change as these relations are changing for a number of reasons. For USXtns to halt the decline of moral values in the US requires for us to escape our cultural captivity and improve our witness to others in our private and public lives. That includes replacing a reliance on ideological shortcuts with more time spent on deliberating on what right conduct is politically.

Finally, I’m thinking about whether to start a blog entitled, The Christian Pragmatic Progressive Party blog that would have a number of posters and be geared to discussion about how we Christians can change the dynamics of politics in the US through changes in people’s habits and changes in the rules. It may feature more debate on my own ideal-type party platform but would not be limited to that. We’ll see what happens.

Anyways, I need prayer that I will find work for this coming year. I have had some strong personal convictions about my need to develop a more balanced lifestyle involving more excercise and a better diet and a more discipline prayer life and reading and writing life. I will need to sustain this passion to develop a more rounded base for my life in the months to come.

dlw

It doesn’t take that many days to “see” Kyev, but I would not trade for the world the feeling of what it was like last night to sit up on the hill overlooking the Maidan as the sun was setting. We just sat silently and reflected on the event that had happened. For me, the hope that was ignited among so many Ukrainians here was rekindled in me. It was easier for me to have hope. Hope for a future where existing extreme concentrations of so easily abused power will be reduced so that we don’t see as many man-made disasters like Chernobyl.

I went to the Chernobyl museum today and it was well worth the time. I think everyone who goes to Ukraine needs to be reminded of what the consequences of that terrible event were like and how many lives were lost. They have exhibits about 9-11 at the museum, since NY firefighters sent a plaque and letters following the Chernobyl event when so many firefighters died and they reciprocated. It was odd and yet very heartwarming to unexpectedly see pictures of my home country in such an unusual place.
I did some brief interviews today in Kyev. I talked with a group of pagan priests protesting on the Maidan. They are trying to keep people from violating the laws in building bridges to an island, Khortycia, on the Dnieper. This island is the largest in Europe and is a national reservation, but people are building their own bridges to it and that is making it unmanageable for them to try and preserve it. Apparently two of them are on a hunger strike and on their 10th day. They are not getting the support they want from Yuschenko. Part of the problem may be the way their belief system is linked with their activism. Much of what they said to me, seemed a bit out of left field and I encouraged them to seek broad support for their task without trying at the same time to propagate their entire belief system. But it was interesting, because this is the sort of political activism that needs to try and find more of a chance of success in Ukraine now.

I also talked with a Yanukovich supporter. For her, an engineer it was all meat and potatoes, though she supported the OR supporters right to protest, but she didn’t think anything good came of it, though that was mainly because her own welfare had not changed. Though this no doubt stems from the inflationary printing of money by Yanukovich, a fact that she acknowledged.

I talked with a pagan, who said that he was with the OR in his spirit and that believed that a renewal of the spirit of people in Ukraine was needed. Later he started asking me about my views about GWII and I shared with him my view that there was no basis for immediate regime change and that Saddam’s regimes days were already numbered and we could easily have afforded to wait for it collapse as he had always proven himself to be mainly a local bully whose misactions could be contained. I also got the chance to share a little about the radically nonviolent political person of Jesus with this man and expressed that my hope for the future was based on more people believing in and emulating that Jesus.

Later, I got a chance to talk with a missionary from the Southern Baptist Church, temporarily located in Ukraine, though he plans to be deployed to Kazakhstan eventually. He shared about how things were for them during the OR. Apparently, they supported the OR supporters, but also tried to support the other side, too. This seemed unfortunate to me, as the matter did not really entail supporting one side over the other, but rather supporting the fairness of the elections and I don’t see any reason why churches should not be fully in support of ensuring the fairness of conduct by the parties during elections so long as all sides actions are held accountable in the process. I talked to him some about the possibility of translting the Politics of Jesus, or some other more popular work by Yoder on biblical research into who Jesus was, into Ukrainian and he suggested that Russian would be the better language. I need to check to see if such a translation has not already been done and then it would probably be necessary for free copies to be distributed for them to make much of a difference in the former SU.

Yet, I am starting to think that describing the nonviolent political nature of the historical jesus in simple terms would be a great way to foster political and religious changes throughout the former SU. And, of course, now, or in the near future, is the right time to do this. I even talked with a woman from Pakistan whose husband works for a western bank in Kyev. She said that the people in her country were very interested in the events in the OR. It seems that we may be seeing some political spillovers from the OR coming about in the rest of the world. There still are young people trying to replicate the success of the OR here in Ukraine, protesting the mayor of Kyev here, in a nonviolent manner. I’m told the same group, PORA, was responsible for the replacement of the president of a university in Cherkassy who had ruthlessly forced students and teachers to vote for Yanukovich. I met and talked with some of them yesterday and got a free bright yellow t-shirt.

In other developments, my friend told me that some USAmericans and Ukrainians are buying newspapers and television channels in Russia, laying the ground for Russia to have its own OR or other political change. It may be that the globalization of journalism is taking off as a serious component of int’l political manipulations.

All of this makes the need for reform of the UN more urgent. Unfortunately, the way the UN is set up now only promotes its paralysis and marginalization. Some reforms are needed to prepare it for the post-cold war world. I think one reform would be to make it so that the five permanent members of the UN security council no longer had vetoes and instead there was a need for a 9-country out of 15 for action to be taken. This would check both the US and Russia’s influence and permit it to be a more influential part of the developing field of int’l governance.

dlw

(thank God!)
I received a letter from Jim Wallis about the One campaign to cancel debt among the highly indebted really poor countries. I signed the petition and would encourage others to do so too. But I was kind of disturbed by a paragraph in Wallis’ letter.

At heart, I am a 19th-century evangelical; I was just born in the wrong century. The evangelical Christians of the 19th century combined revivalism with social reform and helped lead campaigns for women’s suffrage and child labor laws, and to abolish slavery. One of the most famous revivalists, Charles Finney, developed the idea of the “altar call” in order to make sure he signed up all of his converts for the abolition movement. Today, poverty is the new slavery - imprisoning bodies, minds, and souls, destroying hope and ending the future for a generation.

As Mark Noll points out, there were serious problems with how the 19th ctry white USEvangelicals sought political changes. Their actions led us into the civil war that extinguished the reformist spirit in much of the US and led to the regionism that contributed to the Fundamentalist-Modernist schism, recently reincarnated with the cultural wars, whose effects Wallis is really against.

Wallis espouses nowadays a tempered form of sixties idealism. He and Sojourners have kept such idealism alive where it has flagged seriously elsewhere in the US probably because of how it has become welded to their faith. But idealism just gives a vision of how things might be different/better, it doesn’t by itself suggest the right way to change the status quo and it does not help to analyze the status quo. This was the serious failing of the Abolitionists and it may also be a failing of Wallis.

In God’s Politics, he talks about the need to give the UN a more prominent role in int’l governance, but he does not talk about the institutional changes that would be needed within the UN to make it capable of more than paralysis in the post-cold war world. He(and many others) are on the debt-cancellation bandwagon, but they are not thinking and speaking about the need to further reform the extant and emerging institutions of world governance, including the World Bank, IMF and GATT. He talks about changing the wind in US politics, but spends his considerable organizational energies trying to make Kerry move to the left economically, a move that did not help Kerry win the election. This did not deal with the root of the problem in US politics, the cultural wars.

As I’ve argued before, Wallis could have spent some of his energies coaching Kerry to watch his language to avoid some serious guffaws that were easy for the religious right to spin to increase their side’s turnout on election day. But he did no such thing and when Kerry lossed he declared that Kerry had not really truly embraced their issues sufficiently anyways. A statement that is very much in the spirit of 19th Ctry white USEvangelicalism, and very much against the Christian Pragmaticism that I espouse.

For example, Wallis’ God’s Politics does not deal with the wars, for the most part. It is not written for people who have not been “born again” into accepting the “Social Gospel”. He denies that religious right’s values and politics are truly God’s politics, but he does not deal with the sort of reasoning and relatively shallow habits of political deliberation that lead so many to support the issues of the religious right. I liked a good deal of what was written in “God’s Politics” but my problem with it is not what it says, but what it does not say and I fear the sustainability of Wallis’s attempt to change the direction of the wind. As I fear the unintended consequences of whenever Christian or Non-Christian absolute-speak is used in the advancement of fallible policy changes. You can find more interesting comparison and contrast of Wallis and other Christian writers on the ethics of political involvement here in an essay done by James Skillen.

dlw

I unfortunately temporarily(and perhaps permanently) misplaced my glasses when I was in Pridniprosky this weekend. I was going to wrestle some of the local youth and took off my glasses and then got going on some other games and did not put them back on and later that night I could not find them, as well as the next day, yesterday. And so I spent yesterday picking cherries, mainly. It was relaxing activity and something I was pretty good at as I’m taller than most Ukrainians and like pulling down those really high branches that are very much ladened with cherries.

Ukraine is amazing in the fertility of its soil. Most people are poor here when you measure their incomes in dollars, but they have a lot of local natural assets that are undervalued because of the difficulty of shipping local produce abroad and they are primarily for local consumption, keeping people alive. But they are blessed with much local fruit. I earlier had the blessing of working at one of the gardens of my family here and I started off with picking mulberries, a very remunerative work, and later helped to pull some weeds in their garden where they grow the potatoes they eat so often(I recently introduced them to ketchup as the condiment of choice for fried potatoes and hamburgers, but they use it on pretty much anything including mashed potatoes and spaghetti.) and grass to feed to the rabbits they raise for personal consumption.

I am now in Kiev. I am comparing Kiev to Mexico City in my mind. I think it is very clear that there are many advantages in Kiev over Mexico City. It has not suffered from a longstanding policy of courting extensive migration from the rest of the country. It, and Ukraine in general, does not have as serious of a population problem and generally has a higher level of education. I got a chance to see a “high school” graduation the past weekend. The age level was fifteen, but that is still a pretty high level of education relative to many poorer countries. The music was a crude imitation of western music with ukrainian/russian lyrics. Though, I’m told that since the OR, there has been better Ukrainian music, as people in general have become more patriotic and their musicians have found better things to sing about besides their latest relationship or what not.

I probably have seen mainly the better part of Kiev, but I only really saw the better part of Mexico City. I have to confess I avoided the not-so-great part of Mexico city like a plague/tourist. Yet, Mexico City is such an enormous city that the nice looking part of it is pretty big and one can take a safe airport taxi to that part and avoid the rest of the city for the most part if you want.

I asked my friend if they had any problems with taxi drivers kidnapping passengers in Ukraine, like there is a problem in Mexico. He said there is no such thing, so it seems that the level of corruption(a prerequisite to have a thriving taxi-kidnapping business) is nowhere as serious in Ukraine as it is in Mexico. In Mexico, the police get paid very little and they have to buy their own bullets and so corruption is pretty much a necessity. I am told that when they had Rudy Giuliani come to visit in Mexico, they pretty much had him just repeat a large number of reforms they had been advocating for quite some time and the groups of very rich mexicans paid for his visit. It seems that some people are willing to listen to foreign celebrities, but not the local people who understand the system and how things can be made better. I guess there is always resistance to change in all bureacratic systems and an external shock to the system usually is needed to make serious change happen.

But as a Christian, I think it is wrong to leave such change to the haphazard whims of history. We should be able to internalize the need for ongoing reforms. I’ve been thinking some about how one could help to make more changes happen in Ukraine. I think one thing churches could do here is come out publicly in declaring that it is a sin to decide who you are going to vote for based on a bribe. This is very common and widely accepted and so it will take a serious theological argument to counter it, but such sort of behavioral change is needed both in Ukraine and Mexico(where you only get paid a torta rather than 4 dollars for your vote) for further political changes to be made possible.

I think the theological base will have to be that the essence of the law is for us to love God and Neighbor with how we act politically being an essential part of how we love our Neighbor. For we may not all called to be extensively involved in politics( or political bloggers) but we are called to participate in ways we have been blessed with, such as with the right to vote. As such, to decide the vote based on a bribe is a sin, because you only care about yourself and mammon and not your neighbor.
One can use some promises of reasonable benefits for your household as a criterion for deciding whom to vote for, but these benefits should be determined officially by legislation and mandate people to support intermediary organizations to hold politicians accountable for their promises. When people only care about their immediate bribe/torta, they are not compelled ethically also to participate somehow in the ongoing debates within various intermediary institutions. They do not participate in the process of determining whose interests are going to be protected by the gov’t and, not surprisingly, their own interests are often given the shaft as a result.
But this sort of argument will probably need to be championed by the protestants in Ukraine first, as, unfortunately, many of the Orthodox/Catholics have the view that one can “sin” and then light a candle to repent for such a sin. But to sin and repent as such does not exhibit much love for one’s neighbor. But maybe if this catches on, they will be forced to take a stand. I don’t know, but I think that is one way that Churches here in Ukraine can foster more political change without getting too close and cozy with any political party.

dlw

Its becoming apparent from my interviews that something very special was happening spiritually during the Orange Revolution, particularly in epicenters like the Mydan. Ukrainians started smiling when they saw each other, something that they normally do not do. The feelings of patriotism swelled and are evincing themselves in little ways, like picking up a piece of trash on the street. Though, Ukrainians do not seem to appreciate the importance of intermediary institutions between gov’t and the people and generally think that if better people are in the gov’t that it will do better. Its hard to imagine it doing worse.

I have been sharing about some of the books that I brought with me. Among them is Let Justice Roll Down by John Perkins. I shared about Christian Perspectives on Politics by Phillip Wogaman. And I shared some about Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by another John Perkins.

I recently had one of my ex-students from Mexico write to me. He told me that he now works in the local gov’t and that while there are many good things, its kind of difficult because there is so much corruption. I didn’t really know how to respond to him. It’s really easy to come across as superficial when you are far removed from such an ethically difficult situation. This is what I wrote to him,

As for corruption, I think one has to keep things in perspective and try one’s best to do one’s job in as professional of a manner that avoids such corruption and by example tries to encourage others to do likewise. I’m sorry if that sounds like I have no idea what it is like for you right now but I think it’s important to find hope that people’s priorities in life can be changed for the better and they can care more about how their actions affect their neighbors.

I don’t know what else can be said. There are things that can be done to set up fire walls against corruption, but what is needed first before the political will to do that is generated is ultimately changed hearts, not unlike what may be happening in Ukraine.

dlw