John M. Perkins

Recently Rachel and I had the opportunity to see Dr. John M. Perkins speak at South Highland Presbyterian Church.  Perkins was born to a family of black sharecroppers in rural Mississippi.  After his brother was shot by a sheriff, Perkins realized he needed to get out of Mississippi and headed to California.  In California, he became a Christian and soon realized he was being called back to Mississippi in the heat of the civil rights movement.  There he has labored for years, fighting for civil rights and community development.  He has played an integral role in Christian Community Development Association.

Now in his ninth decade, Dr. Perkins remains vibrant and sharp.  His message was particularly challenging in his charges of how we have shaped Christianity to fit within our culture.  I am a white southern Christian, he is black southern Christian.  We use our faith to support our -isms: capitalism, communism, socialism.  We pick and choose what scriptures we need to endorse our political party.  In the words of Jesus, this should not be so!  Dr. Perkins calls us to Christianity first and foremost.

I wrestle with this: how can I engage my culture in a redemptive but a-political way?  So many political issues are tied to the gospel.  How do I stand for for these issues without attaching myself to the machinery around them?  Currently Rachel and I are reading through Ched Meyer's Binding the Strong Man in a book group.  Meyers argues that the gospel is absolutely political in nature.  We are called to challenge American imperialism, to advocate for the poor, to fight for a consistent ethic of the sanctity of life, and to stand (and ultimately die) with the oppressed.  Meyers shows how Jesus's fight was not only spiritual in nature, but also political.  My immediate inclination is to attach myself to a political system that advocates for these issues.  But Perkins pushes back, as politics will inevitably tempt me to mistake my politics for my faith.  Apparently fleshing this out is a bit more difficult than I hoped it would be.

Hooray for Railroad Park

Birmingham recently opened Railroad Park, a green space offering playgrounds, trails and an amphitheater situated near the heart of the rail lines that were once the heart of the Magic City.  In between sifting through vegan recipes and learning to plant heirloom vegetables, voters at The Daily Green (the self-proclaimed "Consumers' Guide to the Green Revolution") selected the park as the 2011 People's Choice for Best New Park in the US.  So that's good.  You can read more at al.com.

A moral budget

For years in church, I have heard that if you want to see where your priorities lie, look at your budget.  Hannah Lythe, blogging at Jim Wallis's God's Politics Blog, comments here on budget cuts proposed by the House on international development and public health programs.  The head of USAID suggests that scaling back current programs for malaria, vaccinations and provision of skilled birth attendants will result in the death of 70,000 children.  70,000.  How can Republicans, the chosen party of the "religious right," be allowed to even suggest such cuts without a deafening outcry from the church?  Is maintaining tax cuts really our chief priority?  If these are where our priorities lie, may God have mercy on our souls.

Nuclear Meltdown and Libertarianism

Harold Meyerson recently published an editorial in the Washington Post on three supposedly infallible structures - the American financial system, deep-water oil drilling and nuclear power.  He sites our current faith in the infallibility of science and technology as a potential Achilles heel, as evidenced in the recent economic recession, BP disaster and Japanese nuclear crisis.  He sites the danger of a hands-off, libertarian policy towards such structures, calling instead for regulation in the realms of food safety, economic and environmental policy.  A quote:


"The market may in time punish bad actors, which is the ostensible safeguard that libertarians prefer to regulation. Yet as the people sealed inside their homes in the vicinity of Japan’s malfunctioning nuclear plant could tell us, untold numbers of innocents may pay a much higher price, more quickly, than the executives and shareholders of offending companies. "


While I believe his calls for "active, disinterested government regulation" are a bit naive (government is never disinterested), I think he makes a sound point against libertarian philosophy that assumes inherent morality in the free market.


So, the question remains, what do we do with nuclear power?  Many of the old-guard environmental activists have, in recent years, converted to a pro-nuclear stance.  They site the cleanliness of the energy and rising energy demands fueled by development and population growth.  I am reluctant to make decisions on policy in the midst of turmoil, but in the wake of Japan's emergency, what do we do with the obvious risks posed by nuclear energy production?


Props to Jim Rice of God's Politics for the Meyerson link.

The End of Poverty

One of my winter reads was Jeffrey Sachs The End of Poverty, a book promoting a worldwide plan to end extreme poverty by 2025.  The head of Columbia University's Earth Institute, Sachs is an economist who stumbled somewhat backwardly into the realm of international economic development.  He has since become a leading voice calling for debt forgiveness and other policies aimed at freeing the poorest countries from the cycle of poverty.  Sachs plays an interesting role: on the one hand, he is a harsh critic of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the wealthy countries that use foreign aid to accomplish their political ambitions, and on the other hand he is an unashamed capitalist singing the praises of industrialization and free-trade.  He is a firm believer in the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (he helped draft them), and much of the book is dedicated to calling rich countries to fulfill their promises to the rest of the world.


Most Americans believe that upwards of 20% of our federal budget is dedicated to foreign aid.  With disasters like we've seen in the Haiti earthquake and Indonesian tsunami, the US is on the forefront in promising emergency relief.  However, Sachs points out that despite all of our promises, the US gives only approximately 0.2% of our Gross Domestic Product to international economic development.  In fact, the US agreed in 1993 to raise expenditures in foreign aid to 0.7% of GDP, a standard that the rest of developed nations agreed to in the 1970s.  Since pledging that number, foreign aid has actually declined, and much of that which is given funds "consultants" from the World Bank or IMF.  For those of you who prefer visual aids, the budget office provides a lovely pie chart here.


Sachs also does a brilliant job of outlining the need for economists who think like physicians.  Economic emergencies require experts that can examine a country, develop a diagnosis and apply a specific treatment plan for the country.  He outlines how this model was used with success during the Bolivian tin crisis and in Poland during the fall of the Soviet Union.


While my optimistic/pragmatic side agrees with many of Sachs' assertions and his overall plan, I must confess that his relentless industrial capitalism is a bit concerning.  My thoughts immediately return to the voice of Wendell Berry:

"We must see that the standardless aims of industrial communism and industrial capitalism equally have failed. The aims of productivity, profitability, efficiency, limitless growth, limitless wealth, limitless power, limitless mechanization and automation can enrich and the empower the few (for a while), but they will sooner or later ruin us all. The gross national product and the corporate bottom line are utterly meaningless measures of the prosperity or health of the country."

Despite my fondest affections for philosophy of Berry, I will admit that his calls to agrarianism are, unfortunately, unrealistic.  But I do believe his call to reflection is a critical component of any plan for development.  Sachs' unashamed cry that capitalism holds the answers left me uncomfortable throughout the book.  Over the years, he has been a voice crying for justice, fighting against the structures and powers of oppression.  And while his plans couple the words development and sustainable, I question whether the marriage between the two are realistic.  I think the fundamental question lies at how one defines development in the first place.


All in all, the book is challenging and encouraging, and despite my mistrust of some of his underlying premises, I believe he raises important issues and calls for movement in a necessary direction.  What say you?

Growing community

This past semester, a class assignment required that I present a local organization working to improve community health.  Fortuitously, I arbitrarily selected West End Community Gardens. The gardens are located in Birmingham's West End, which has the largest concentration of urban poverty in Alabama.  The gardens were started in 2008 as an outreach of Community Church Without Walls, a local house-church congregation also located in West End.  I had the pleasure of spending a morning with Ama Shambulia, a master gardener and slow-foods chef who runs the gardens. I loved her vision for the garden: "Rekindling the memory of growing food and where food comes from."

West End Community Gardens aims to grow food and grow community, and they approach their mission through numerous avenues.  Individual planters can rent 4x8 foot plots, and volunteers work in common areas dedicated to growing food to sell at the biweekly summer curb market and to local restaurants.  Gardening classes are offered, and they are occasionally paired with cooking classes emphasizing healthy eating habits.  Ama was most excited about the internship program for area teens, offering them training in horticulture skills that she hopes will transition into career opportunities for the interns.

The fruits of the gardens are spreading to the community.  Local elementary schools have partnered with Ama to start school gardens, and juvenile offenders from Judge Brian Huff's Family Court regularly volunteer.  Ama notes how near neighbors have begun cleaning up their yards and taking ownership of the gardens.  Improvements in the neighborhood follow the theory of collective efficacy advocated by Robert Sampson and colleagues in their 1997 Science article.  If we are to hope to life to wilted communities, it must come with words and with actions.

The visit was motivating; perhaps this season I will move from killing cilantro and tomatoes on my balcony to killing them in a plot at West End.

The Changing Race of American Cities

NPR's Morning Edition is airing a week-long series on the changing demographics in US cities.  One of the driving forces of these changes is gentrification, as this segment on Washington, D.C. highlights.


While the days of "white flight" into the suburbs are ostensibly coming to an end, the inverse is now happening in equally damaging ways. Generation Y is filtering back into the urban neighborhoods abandoned by their parents and grandparents in the face of forced segregation in the 1960s and 70s.  Drawn by numerous factors, including the charming convenience of the city and the opportunity to participate in restoration, gentrifiers are allowing "market forces" to force low-income residents out of areas with rising property values and taxes.  The gentrifiers don't mind.  Just as the generations before them, they manipulate noble virtues to create homogeneous communities, typically with just enough diversity to satiate their politically correct consciences.

As a resident of downtown Birmingham, how can I abstain from the harm gentrification brings?  How can I participate in Christ-like community development without reshaping my neighborhood according to my white, middle class values?  How can those interested in improving schools and cleaning up neighborhoods (like the East Lake group from the Church at Brook Hills) do so without evicting those residents they theoretically want to help?

On Haiti and Hope

Each semester, UAB School of Public Health Dean Max Michael puts together what he calls "Flash Talks," which brings together experts from various places in the university to discuss a current public health topic.  Last week, the topic for the Flash Talk was Cholera in Haiti, with discussion headed by Mindy Lalor, professor in the School of Engineering, and Craig Wilson, professor of epidemiology and head of the Sparkman Center for Global Health.  The discussion was remarkably disheartening.  Haiti has spent the past 206 dysfunctional years as the slum of the Western Hemisphere.  When the earthquake struck in January, Haiti was already riddled with HIV, TB, poor structural facilities, a corrupt and impotent government and a myriad of other blights.  When the rains came this summer, disaster piled upon disaster which piled upon Haiti's baseline of crisis.  And now cholera, the pathogen perhaps responsible for more deaths in the history of mankind than any other, has decided to get in on the act.

In short, Haiti is in such a state of disarray that even the most organized and well-funded interventions seem to be inadequate.  Even after working to coordinate disaster relief from organizations all over the world, experts are perplexed as to how to even begin fighting the issues faced by Haiti.  One million people remain dislodged from their homes, and sanitation is virtually impossible.

One of the participants in the discussion posed what seems to be a very logical question: "Why do anything?"  Resources are unquestionably being wasted away as more and more dollars are poured into a disaster area that could barely function before the earthquake.  In addition to the geographical, social, political and health issues facing the country, Haitians face the additional challenge of psychological dependence on their aid workers.  Dr. Lalor relayed a story from Tom Corson, executive director at SIFAT, an Alabama-based NGO that works to promote sustainable solutions for the poor in the developing world.  Mr. Corson spent weeks in a Haitian village working to teach villagers how to use a water purification system provided by SIFAT.  Despite being fully competent to maintain the system, villagers contacted him two days after he left, complaining that they no longer had any clean water.  Despite working all over the world, Mr. Corson described this as his first truly disheartening experience with SIFAT.  A man who has dealt with the poor the world over, and Haiti is the place where he loses hope.

Amidst this discussion, which seemed only to deepen the dilemma while failing to provide answers, I too began to lose heart.  I have spent the past few years trying to understand how I can use training in medicine and public health to fight poverty and oppression.  My time in the School of Public Health has been encouraging, and I am beginning to understand how I can use my skills to carve a career that brings the gospel of hope, healing, mercy, justice and salvation to those who most need it.  But this conversation of Haiti leaves me despairing.  Even the help provided to Haiti seems to deepen their problems, and no solutions can be found.

Thankfully, after a few days of despair, my Father graciously reminded me that He is the God of the despairing.  He directed me to Mark's gospel, where Jesus miraculously provided bread to the hungry masses.  After partaking twice in such feedings, the disciples found themselves hungry and worried afloat the Sea of Galilee, having forgotten to bring bread.  And it is here that Christ rebukes them, reminding them of the miracles they had already forgotten.  He teaches that in Him we have left the reign of scarcity under the rule of Egypt and Rome; we are now in the Kingdom of abundance.  For Haiti, the church is not bound to a resource allocation plan, and we are not at the mercy of logic.  The God of the sick and hungry is still the God of miracles, and in His Kingdom there is abundance.

In this, the Church is called to Haiti.  Empowered by abundance of the Kingdom, and we are called to fight for the poor and oppressed, even when there is no hope.  May He fill Haitian baskets.

Developing Community

An interesting post today by Birmingham Is Open, a collaboration of Birmingham, Alabama businesses and community development organizations.  The post is a link to the John & James L. Knight Foundation's Soul of a Community, which identifies the importance of attachment to one's community in regards to community development.  The foundation was surprised to find that despite the location, a homogeneous group of qualities attach individuals to their community: acceptance of diversity, social outlets and aesthetics.  I am curious to see how Birmingham will implement such knowledge in its effort to develop the city.