What Does the Rainbow Signify?

A rainbow is a fairly rare natural phenomenon that brings delight to anyone fortunate enough to see one. After the Great Flood, according to Genesis 9:13, God said to Noah and his sons, “I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth (NIV).”  

The Rainbow Flag

Presently, perhaps the primary use of the rainbow emblem is with regard to LGBTQ people. The rainbow flag was created in 1978 by artist Gilbert Baker. Upon Baker's death in 2017, a California state senator remarked that Baker (b. 1951 in Kansas) “helped define the modern LGBT movement.”

In June 2015, the White House was illuminated in the rainbow flag colors to commemorate the legalization of same-sex marriage in all 50 states, following the Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court decision.

The rainbow flag is now seen around the globe as a positive representation of the LGBTQ community.

The Rainbow Coalition

Earlier, the rainbow was used in a different manner. In April 1969, Fred Hampton of the Black Panther Party founded an antiracist, anticlass movement called the Rainbow Coalition.

That original Rainbow Coalition was a multicultural political organization that included the Black Panthers, Young Patriots (poor whites), and the Young Lords (Hispanics), and an alliance of major Chicago street gangs to help them end infighting and work for social change.

Hampton (b. 1948) was assassinated in December 1969—and that is the climax of Judas and the Black Messiah, the 2021 American biographical crime drama film about the betrayal of Hampton by an FBI informant.

Many years later, in Nov. 1983, Jesse Jackson launched his campaign for the 1984 presidential election, claiming to be fighting for the rights of a “Rainbow Coalition” of Americans—including Blacks, Whites, Latinos, Native Americans and Asian Americans; men and women; straight and LGBTQ.

The Rainbow Division

As many of you know, for ten years now my wife and I have been members of Rainbow Mennonite Church (RMC) in Kansas City, Kansas, (KCKS). Before we attended there for the first time in 2011, I sent an email to the pastor, asking, among other things, about the name.

We had heard that RMC was a church that welcomed and affirmed LGBTQ people, so we wondered if the church’s name was related to that stance. It turned out that there was no connection.

RMC is now located on Southwest Boulevard, but the church’s first location was on Rainbow Boulevard, a KCKS roadway that was renamed that in 1919 in honor of the 42^nd U.S. Infantry Division.

That 42^nd Division was formed 105 years ago, in August 1917, at the beginning of U.S. engagement in the First World War. It was created by combining military units from 26 states and D.C.

Douglas MacArthur said that such an organization stretches “over the whole country like a rainbow.” As a result, the 42^nd came to be known as the Rainbow Division.

Several of those who served in the 42^nd Division were from the small city of Rosedale (which was annexed by KCKS in 1922). Rosedale welcomed local veterans home from the war with rainbow colored bunting, and then Hudson Road, a major street in Rosedale, was renamed Rainbow Boulevard.

In 1957 a Mennonite church was organized in Rosedale. When it merged with another Mennonite congregation in 1964, the name was changed to Rainbow Boulevard Mennonite Church. Then when the church moved to its present location in 1969, “Boulevard” was dropped from its name.

Mennonites have mostly refused to serve in the military, and during WWI many conscientious objectors were harshly treated and some were jailed. Thus, it is somewhat ironic that our church’s name comes from the “Rainbow Division,” the 42^nd U.S. Infantry Division.

Nevertheless, we members at RMC are proud of our name and the larger meaning of what “rainbow” signifies.

And most of us believe that “The moral arc of the universe is long and bends toward justice.” Maybe that moral arc, which is shaped like a rainbow, is also colored like a rainbow and is, indeed, bending toward justice and equality for all the diverse people represented by the colors of the rainbow.

Punitive Justice vs. Restorative Justice

As you may or may not know, I was a sociology major in college and Criminology was one of the memorable courses I took as such. But that was a long time ago, and since then there has been an important change in emphasis (in some circles) from punitive justice to restorative justice. 

My Time in Jail/Prison

The first time I was ever in a prison was when my Criminology class at William Jewell College made a field trip to the United States Federal Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas. At that time, it was the largest maximum-security prison in the United States.

Even before that unforgettable experience, though, I was concerned about prisoners in local jails. While still in college, I became pastor of a small mission church, and soon I began taking high school kids from church to the Henry County (Mo.) jail to conduct monthly “jail services.”

Several years after going to Japan, I visited people I knew, or knew of, a few times in detention centers (jails), and then multiple times I went to several different detention centers and penitentiaries to visit one man charged and then convicted of murder.

Since retirement, I have visited one young man held, at separate times, in the Clay County Jail & Detention Center here in Liberty, Mo.

In all these cases, the prisoners were incarcerated as a form of punishment. They were the target of what is often called punitive justice. That is, they were being punished for breaking the law and committing crimes against society.

From the time I took the Criminology course to the present I have always thought that the primary purpose of incarceration ought to be rehabilitation, not punishment. Accordingly, I have long been an advocate of indeterminate sentences.

It has only been in recent years, however, that I began hearing/learning about an alternative to the traditional practice of “penal justice.” This innovative approach is called “restorative justice.”

Meet Howard Zehr

More than any other living person, the new and growing emphasis on restorative justice is due to the teaching and writing of Howard Zehr.

Zehr (b. 1944) is currently the Distinguished Professor of Restorative Justice at Eastern Mennonite University's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. He is also the co-director of the Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice.

Zehr has often been called the father—or the grandfather—of the restorative justice (RJ) movement. His first book introducing RJ was Changing Lenses: A New Focus for Crime and Justice (1990).

Now, The Little Book of Restorative Justice, Zehr’s book first published in 2002 with the revised and updated edition issued in 2015, is more widely known. The current Amazon.com website for the latter indicates that over 150,000 copies have been sold.

Zehr has been a lifelong Mennonite, and his work in developing the concept/practice of restorative justice is in keeping with central tenets of that form of the Christian faith.

The Goal of Restorative Justice

An editorial review of Zehr’s 2015 book states:

Restorative Justice, with its emphasis on identifying the justice needs of everyone involved in a crime, is a worldwide movement of growing influence that is helping victims and communities heal, while holding criminals accountable for their actions.

All the people I have visited in jails and prisons were incarcerated primarily for punitive purposes. They were there to see that “justice was done,” but that was only punitive justice. There was nothing being done, it seems, that would help victims and communities heal.

RJ, though, is designed to promote three interlinking goals: offender responsibility, victim reparation, and community reconciliation.

In my research for this article, I watched “How to Love Your Enemy: A Restorative Justice Story” (2020), a YouTube video of what has been done in Longmont, Colorado, a city of nearly 100,000 about thirty miles NNW of Denver. Their Community Restorative Justice program dates back to 1994.

Their website now states: “Longmont Community Justice Partnership provides restorative justice services to the Longmont community and offers training in restorative practices throughout Colorado and the United States.”

This is the type of program that needs to be encouraged and supported across the country. 

Lying Down with the Lions

Although perhaps he is now not widely known or remembered, this article is posted as a tribute to Ron Dellums, a man whom I long admired—and who died a year ago today, on July 30, 2018.  

Ron Dellums (1997 portrait by Andre White)

Who Was Ron Dellums?

Ronald Vernie Dellums was born in West Oakland, Calif., in 1935. Following a stint in the Marine Corps from 1954~56, Ron earned the B.A. degree from San Francisco State University in 1960 and his Master of Social Work degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1962.

After working for a few years as a social worker and a community organizer, in 1967 Dellums won his first political election and became a member of the Berkeley [Calif.] City Council. Three years later he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served for the next 27 years without interruption.

Dellums decided to retire from the House in 1998, although he would undoubtedly have won re-election for another term had he wished to remain in Congress. Later he did run for another political office and consequently succeeded Jerry Brown as Mayor of Oakland (Calif.), serving in that office from 2007~11.

At the age of 82, Dellums died of complications from prostate cancer.

Why Praise Ron Dellums?

You might wonder why I was such an admirer of Congressman Dellums and why I am writing about him now. In the early 1970s, I became aware of, and appreciative of, Dellums because of his thoroughgoing opposition to the war in Vietnam/Indochina.

(I probably first heard of Dellums from reading The Post-American, which began publication in 1971 largely as an anti-Vietnam War tabloid and which later became Sojourners magazine.)

All along I liked Dellums’s consistent opposition to increased military spending and support for more spending on anti-poverty programs. And then later I—and Nelson Mandela!—applauded his pivotal part in helping to end apartheid in South Africa.

Overall, I was an admirer of Dellums because of his commitment to the implementation of principles he learned from Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1967 he heard King give a speech in Berkeley. In that talk, King argued that “peace is more than merely the absence of war, it is the presence of justice.”

Dellums accepted the truth of what King said. He realized (as recorded in the book cited below), “By working for peace you must work for justice; by working for justice you work to bring about peace” (p. 49). His whole political career was rooted in that realization.

When he announced his retirement from Congress in 1997, he said that he knew he had “maintained faith.” He stated, “I had been comprehensive in my moral concerns; I had sought to live and work from a perspective of peace; I had sought to link the quest for peace with the quest for justice” (p. 198).

When he left his congressional seat, Dellums was succeeded by Barbara Lee, whom he mentored and whom I have also admired over the last 20 years. (Lee, b. 1946, still is serving in the House.)

Why Read Ron Dellums?

Dellums’s political memoir was published in 2000 under the title Lying Down with the Lions. It is an engrossing book that I greatly enjoyed reading.

Written with the assistance of H. Lee Halterman, a white man who was his chief aide for 28 years, Dellums’s book details the inspiration behind, the struggles in, and the accomplishments of his political career up to his departure from the House.

The title apparently comes from Isaiah’s vision of the peaceable kingdom (see Isaiah 11:6-7). It was inspiring to me and many others to have a U.S. Congressman with that kind of vision. May his tribe increase!

TTT #10 For Christians, Jesus Must be Lord as Well as Savior

In the ninth chapter of Thirty True Things . . . (TTT), I emphasize that Christians must be careful when they call Jesus “Lord,” but the following chapter accentuates what seems to be just the opposite: Christians must be careful to call Jesus “Lord” and to mean it. In other words, for Christian believers, Jesus must be Lord and not just Savior.

Confessing Jesus as Savior

For historic Christianity, nothing in all the world—or in the world beyond—is more important than being “saved” by Jesus. Although there are differences in interpretation and implementation, confessing Jesus as Savior has been the fundamental basis for Christianity through the centuries.

Beginning in New Testament times and continuing to the present, salvation in Christianity has regularly been interpreted as the redemption of human beings from the punishment of sin (eternal death, Hell) and the gift/promise of everlasting life (in Heaven).

While the Catholic Church has interpreted salvation as the result of receiving, willingly or otherwise, the sacrament of baptism, the Protestant tradition has emphasized personal confession of faith in Jesus as the means of salvation.

In both cases, though, the result of salvation was essentially the same: escape from eternal torment which awaited all the “unsaved” at the time of death.

Objecting to Jesus as Savior Only

Especially in much traditional evangelical Christianity, salvation was (is?) largely presented as a type of “fire insurance.” It was/is a very good policy to have so one will not “fry when they die.”

When I was a boy attending a conservative Baptist church, many of the revival preachers I heard were related, religiously, to the legendary “fire and brimstone” evangelists who did so much to expand the membership of evangelical churches in England and especially in the United States from the 1730s through the 20th century.

They were quite successful in expanding the number of Christians—but they were also responsible for fostering a limited view of what salvation really means.

The revivalists, as well as many (most?) local evangelical pastors, preached effectively about the certainty of escaping Hell and going to Heaven through faith in Jesus Christ. Their main message was almost exclusively individualistic and otherworldly; that is, it was about the salvation of individuals from damnation upon death.

The emphasis was mostly on Jesus as Savior. Little, if anything, was said about the importance of Jesus being Lord now. Similarly, there was hardly any emphasis on the Kingdom of God. Its presence in the present world and the necessity of Christians being a conscious part of that Kingdom was seldom mentioned.

Confessing Jesus as Lord

It was the more liberal churches, and church organizations, that began emphasizing the Kingdom of God and the Lordship of Christ in ways that were largely absent in the conservative, evangelical Churches. That contrasting emphasis led to the formation of competing world organizations of churches.

The World Council of Churches (WCC) was established in 1948, and the World Evangelical Fellowship was established in 1951 and its name changed to World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) in 2001.

Through the years, the WCC put more and more stress on social justice issues, but the WEA continued to emphasize that the central mission of the church should be for the primary purpose of evangelism in the traditional sense, that is, saving people for eternal life in Heaven.

As I point out in a later chapter in TTT, the best choice, in this case as in most others, is both/and rather than either/or. That is why I like the following diagram—and why I think emphasizing Jesus as Lord is important for moving traditional evangelical Christians toward the middle. 

[Please click here to read the tenth chapter of Thirty True Things Everyone Needs to Know Now (TTT) upon which this article is based.]

In Praise of a “Half-naked Fakir”

A tragic assassination occurred seventy years ago next week, on January 30, 1948. That was the day that Mahatma Gandhi was shot and killed by a right-wing advocate of Hindu nationalism. This article is written in praise of Gandhi, whom Winston Churchill called “seditious” and a “half-naked fakir.”

The Life of Gandhi

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born in 1869. He came to be called Mahatma, which is not a name but rather a term of respect. (“Mahatma” is Sanskrit for “Great Soul” and is similar to the English term “saint.”)

After studying law in England for three years, Gandhi returned to India in 1891 but then two years later went to South Africa where he lived and worked as a civil rights activist until 1914.

The first part of the movie “Gandhi” depicts his struggles for justice in South Africa. (My respect for Gandhi was so great that I went to a showing of the movie on its opening day in Japan, where I was living in 1983; it is still on my list of “top ten” movies.)

Following the end of World War I, Gandhi began to protest Great Britain's control of India. By 1920 he was the leader of the movement for Indian independence, which he finally saw come to fruition on August 15, 1947—just 5½ months before his assassination.

The Work of Gandhi

The lifework of Gandhi was multifaceted, but perhaps of greatest importance is his role in leading India’s struggle for independence from Great Britain.

In 1930 he launched a mass protest against the British salt tax, including civil disobedience activities such as leading the Salt March to the Arabian Sea where they could make their own salt by evaporating sea water.

That march galvanized opposition to Britain’s rule over India, and it resulted in Gandhi and some 60,000 others being arrested.

In 1931 Gandhi was released from imprisonment and allowed to attend the Round Table Conference on India in London as the sole representative of the Indian National Congress.

Earlier that year, Winston Churchill had referred to Gandhi as a seditious, half-naked fakir. (According to Merriam-Webster second definition, a fakir is “an itinerant Hindu ascetic.”)

Upon his return to India, and after being jailed and released again, Gandhi continued his work as the leader of the independence movement based on his core value: satyagraha (truth-force), which basically means non-violent resistance toward that which was considered evil.

Here is a picture of Gandhi in 1946 at an All-India Congress committee meeting with Jawaharlal Nehru, who became the first Prime Minister of India the following year. 

Gandhi’s long, hard, non-violent work led to India gaining independence in 1947.

The Influence on and of Gandhi

Gandhi was a Hindu, and remained so throughout his lifetime, although generally there is little difference between being Indian and being Hindu. But he had great admiration for Jesus Christ and in many ways lived and acted like a follower of Jesus.

A Methodist missionary to India has shared (here) these words he heard Gandhi speak:

I have a great respect for Christianity. I often read the Sermon on the Mount and have gained much from it. I know of no one who has done more for humanity than Jesus. In fact, there is nothing wrong with Christianity, but the trouble is with you Christians. You do not begin to live up to your own teachings.

As is widely known, Martin Luther King, Jr., was influenced by Gandhi and his practice of satyagraha.

There are many reasons to praise Gandhi, who, like King just 20 years later, was tragically assassinated in spite of his non-violent activities for truth and justice.

Standing with the Losers

The long, acrimonious U.S. presidential election is over—and with an inexplicable result. The man whose election was unexpected by most and unthinkable by many is now two months away from becoming the 45^th POTUS.

Winners and Losers

Who are the winners and losers of Tuesday’s shocking election? You know how the election turned out for the candidates, but who are the groups of persons who won and lost?

It seems quite clear that the main winners of the election (by how they voted) are white men, conservative Christians, and people with limited education. More than those of other demographic groups, they seem to be the victorious ones.

It also seems quite clear that the main losers of the election (by the voting results) are women, the poor, African-Americans, Hispanics, LGBT people—and probably the U.S. as a whole.

In his infamous statement regarding John McCain (in July 2015, here), the President-elect said, “I don’t like losers.”

It remains to be seen how the new President will treat, or mistreat, my list of losers. Perhaps it will not be as bad as many of us fear. Perhaps it will be a lot worse than those who voted for him think. Only time will tell.

Standing with the Losers

Since my prior article was about voting for justice, I here state clearly that I am standing with the losers that I mentioned above and am committed to continuing work for greater justice for those in each group.

Perhaps it somewhat overstates my stance, but I agree with the following statement which I saw on Facebook early Wednesday morning: 

Speaking of Facebook and one group of losers, LGBT people, here are posts from two Facebook friends. One, a gay college student, wrote to his family members who voted for Trump: “I hope your racist bigotry toward Mexicans was worth risking my livelihood as a gay man. You frankly disgust me.”

Then there is this that Robert, a gay Hispanic man who attends the same church I do, posted on Facebook: “If you voted for Trump . . . delete me from Facebook. . . . . a vote for him is a vote for my destruction as a human being.”

I stand with these two friends—and with other losers in Tuesday’s election. I will continue to advocate social justice for them all, and I hope you will, too.

The Arc Bends toward Justice

On Wednesday morning I read an excellent article on Vox.com: “America is not, it turns out, better than this.” At the beginning of that piece the writer tells about President Obama’s new (2010) Oval Office rug.

There are five quotations embedded in that rug. One is that of abolitionist Theodore Parker as paraphrased by MLKing, Jr.: “The Arc of the Moral Universe Is Long, but It Bends Toward Justice.”

In my book The Limits of Liberalism (see p. 106) I was a bit critical of Parker’s words as they tend(ed) to feed into the over-optimism of some forms of liberalism. Things are not inexorably getting better and better every day in every way.

As the writer or the Vox article acknowledges, sometimes there are “kinks in the arc.” Tuesday’s election was, I fear, a major kink, a sizable setback for justice in this country—and I may not live long enough to see all the negative effects of this election bent fully back to even present-day justice levels.

So, while I am greatly disappointed in the outcome of the election, my disappointment is not primarily that Ms. Clinton and the Democrats lost. My great sorrow is for the losers who will quite likely encounter increased injustice.

"Nightmare in Maryville"

Maryville is a county seat town in northwest Missouri. It is the home of Northwest Missouri State University, and as we lived in the neighboring county that is where several of my high school classmates went to college.

Outside of those familiar with northwest Missouri, though, not many people have heard much about Maryville. But that recently changed.

But since the appearance of “Nightmare in Maryville,” the front page article in the Oct. 13 issue of the Kansas City Star, the town of some 12,000 people has been in newspapers as far away as Los Angeles, on national TV news programs, and on prominent websites like HuffingtonPost.com (at least nine times, first at this link).

It all centers on Daisy Coleman, a 14-years-old girl who in Jan. 2012 was allegedly raped by a high school senior. But no one was convicted of the crime against Daisy—mainly, it seems, because the guilty young man was from a prominent family who was able to get the charges dropped.

On Oct. 18, Daisy divulged “what really happened” in an article posted on the Internet, and it seems to be in basic agreement with the Star’s article. It seems clear she did some things she shouldn’t have done.

She shouldn’t have been drinking alcohol with her 13-year-old friend, as that is illegal. She shouldn’t have sneaked out to “have fun” with older boys in the middle of the night. And she shouldn’t have drunk the “bitch cup” when she got there.

But what she did pales in comparison to what happened next. It seems quite clear that she was sexually abused—and then dumped back outside her house and “left for dead” in the freezing cold. None of the foolish things she did can possibly justify the criminal action taken against her.

Neither can anything excuse the crassness of the people in Maryville who turned against her rather than blaming those who grossly mistreated her.

Unfortunately, rape cases are not terribly rare, and if it had “only” been that, it would not have been widely reported in the media. In 2011 there were over 1,450 cases of forcible rape in Missouri, including four in Nodaway County, where Daisy lived with her mother and three brothers.

But in the case of Daisy, the crime against her has been aggravated by what seems to be a failure to prosecute adequately the perpetrators of the crime, as well as by the negative reactions toward Daisy and her family.

A special prosecutor from Kansas City has now been appointed to re-open the case. Several months from now there may be “justice for Daisy,” such as many people locally and nationally are calling for.

In reading Daisy’s own version of what happened on that night 21 months ago and since, I was sorry to see that she wrote, “I quit praying because if God were real, why would he do this?” I can understanding something of the pain and hurt Daisy has experienced, on various levels.

But why blame God? How did God have anything directly to do with her own misbehavior, the criminal behavior of those who abused her, or the failure of the legal system?

I wish Daisy could read the helpful new book with the pungent title “How to Pray When You’re Pissed at God” (2013) by Ian Punnett.

At any rate, I want to say, “Daisy, don’t be so quick to give up on God. You badly need God’s warm embrace and the support of a community of faith. And it is possible for you to find both.”

The Levellers

This article is being posted on the 370^th anniversary of a battle you may never have heard of as an excuse to write about a group you may never have heard of. But there is some value in knowing about First Battle of Newbury (fought on Sept. 20, 1643) and especially about the group known as the Levellers.
 

(The group I am writing about, though, is not to be confused with the English rock band founded in 1988 and named the Levellers.)

While most USAmericans know quite a bit about the Civil War in the U.S., most of us don’t know much about the English Civil War, which was fought in the 1640s. One of the major battles of that war was fought at Newbury, about 60 miles west of London.

That First Battle of Newbury was led by King Charles I, who ended up losing his head (literally, in Jan. 1649) in the civil war. He was the leader of the Royalist forces, but the Parliamentarian forces won the battle.

Thomas Prince was on the side of the Parliamentarians in the English Civil War, and he was badly wounded at the Battle of Newbury. In the late 1640s, Prince, along with John Lilburne and Richard Overton, became a leader of a political movement that came to be known the Levellers.

If you have read “A Thicker Jesus: Incarnational Discipleship in a Secular Age,” Glen Harold Stassen’s 2012 book, you know something about these matters, for he narrates how Overton and the other Levellers were “pioneers of democracy.”

Stassen also explains that the Levellers group was one of the “free-church sects,” along with the Anabaptists, Baptists and Quakers, which had considerable influence on the development of democracy in England and then in New England and the other Colonies.

While there is some confusion about the origin of their name, it is clear that the Levellers believed all people should be equal before the law; that is, the law should equally protect the poor and the wealthy. They were also advocates of the complete freedom of religion.

Overton (1599-1664) was a Baptist during the “contentious days” of the English Civil War. According to Stassen, “He strongly advocated the human right of religious liberty on the biblical basis of following Jesus” (67-68). In 1647 Overton published the first comprehensive doctrine of human rights.

Overton first made a confession of faith and was baptized at the Waterlander Mennonite Church in Holland in 1615. (The Waterlanders had broken off from the main Mennonite branch in 1555, and by 1615 they were comprised of about 1,000 baptized believers in Amsterdam.)

But back in England he became a Baptist, and also became friends with Roger Williams, it seems. Williams left England for Boston in 1630 and founded the first Baptist church in North America later that decade. In the 1640s he was writing the same sort of thing about religious liberty in New England that Overton and the other Levelers were writing in England during that same decade.

Stassen links the central emphases of Overton to the American Pledge of Allegiance, saying that the words about “liberty and justice for all” were central in Overton’s writings. (It is estimated that Overton wrote about fifty pamphlets arguing for political and religious liberty.)

Thinking about the Levellers and their emphasis on equality and justice reminded me of this cartoon, which you may have seen on Facebook where I found it.

Or maybe there is not much difference between equality and justice, if you are talking about eye level rather than where one’s feet are.

If You Want Peace . . .

Forty years ago, in his World Day for Peace message on January 1, 1972, Pope Paul VI declared, “If you want Peace, work for Justice.” Those were very significant words that, for good reason, have often been quoted throughout the last four decades.

Pope Paul’s peace proclamation was based partly on Isaiah 32:17 (“justice will produce lasting peace and security,” CEV). It also reflected the sentiments expressed in “Justice in the World,” a 1971 document drafted by World Synod of Catholic Bishops.

In that document the bishops pointed out how Jesus “proclaimed the fatherhood of God towards all people and the intervention of God’s justice on behalf of the needy and the oppressed.” They went on to declare, “Christian love of neighbor and justice cannot be separated. For love implies an absolute demand for justice, namely a recognition of the dignity and rights of one’s neighbor.”

Since 1968 the Catholic Church has designated the first day of every year as “World Day of Peace.” Pope Benedict XVI has chosen “Educating Young People in Justice and Peace” for the 2012 theme. In his 1/1/12 message, already made public, Pope Benedict declares, “Peace for all is the fruit of justice for all,” words resembling those of Pope Paul VI forty years before.

Not everyone likes the Church’s stress on justice, though. Back in March 2010, Glenn Beck, the well-known ultra-conservative political commentator, publicly criticized that emphasis. On his daily (at that time) TV and radio program, Beck even urged his listeners to leave churches which preach social or economic justice.

Since just before the presidential election in 2008, Barack Obama has been much criticized by some (mostly Republicans) for his supposed support for “redistribution of the wealth” in this country. Glenn Beck said that those words, as well as “economic justice,” were a part of the philosophy of both the Communists and the Nazis.

But Pope Benedict has just used those same words, “redistribution of the wealth”—and the Catholic Church has certainly never been a supporter of Communist or Nazi ideologies.

In his January 1 message the Pope stresses “the importance of seeking adequate mechanisms for the redistribution of wealth.” Those words were in the paragraph just before the one declaring that “peace is the fruit of justice for all.”

I am not a Catholic, but I wholeheartedly agree with the words of the popes cited above. I am quite sure that there will be no lasting peace in the world as long as there is widespread injustice, such as that seen in attitudes and actions of discrimination (of any kind), oppression, or marked inequality. The latter includes economic inequality, especially when that is caused by exploitation, which is often the case.

Both domestically as well as internationally, creating a more nearly just society is the only way to peace. Thus, all of us who truly want peace in the world must be active in working for justice.

I earnestly pray that you, your loved ones, and people around the world will have a Peaceful New Year.

Liberty and Justice for All

Justice Summit

Last Friday and Saturday the Center for Justice and Sustainability (CJS) at William Jewell College sponsored their first annual Justice Summit. The leaders of the conference were Ellis Jones and Brett Johnson, two of the three authors of The Better World Handbook: Small Changes that Make a Big Difference (New Society Publishers, 2007).

Dr. Andy Pratt, the Executive Director of the Center for Justice and Sustainability (as well as Dean of the Chapel and Vice President for Religious Ministries at William Jewell College) was the primary planner and facilitator of the Justice Summit, and I think he is probably pleased with the outcome. There was a good mix of Jewell students, faculty and staff members, and people of various ages from the community, some coming from quite a distance. (I talked with one participant who lives in Branson and teaches at MSU in Springfield.)

One of the main goals of the program leaders was to get people to be more active in working for justice and sustainability. To a limited degree, they succeeded with me. Though June and I have been fairly involved in justice and sustainable activities, since the close of the Summit on Saturday, we have become a members of Peace Action, “the nation’s largest grassroots peace network,” and ordered checks from www.messageproducts.com with the Peace Action logo on them.

In keeping with my previous posting about injustice, June and I also joined the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the largest national lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender civil rights organization. HRC “envisions an America where LGBT people are ensured of their basic equal rights, and can be open, honest and safe at home, at work and in the community.”

We also made (small) loans through www.Kiva.com to a group of twenty-one Cambodians who needed the money to buy piglets to raise and to a man in Kabul, Afghanistan, who needed money to expand his general store in order to better support his six children. If you are interested in learning more about micro-lending, check out the Kiva website.

I have also become a follower of the CJS blog, and I encourage my readers to do the same (as long as that doesn’t interfere with your reading my blog!).

The top quote on page one of The Better World Handbook is one of the oft-cited statements made by Gandhi: “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” As I have written before, we each one may not be able to do much, but we can do something.