In Praise of Toyohiko Kagawa

He is no longer well known in the U.S., but there was a time, especially up to the early 1940s, when Toyohiko Kagawa was the best-known Japanese in America, except for Emperor Hirohito.

Kagawa was born 125 years ago today, on July 10, 1888. Although sickly from the time he was a young man, he lived until April 1960. During his lifetime of nearly 72 years, he was creatively involved in a wide variety of activities.

He was a Christian evangelist, social reformer, labor activist, author, and peace activist. Because of his contributions in the two latter arenas, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947 and 1948 and for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1954, 1955 and 1956.

Kagawa studied at Princeton Theological Seminary from 1914 to 1917 and later made several other trips to the U.S., the most extensive one being for more than six months beginning in December 1935.

In the spring of 1936, he delivered the Rauschenbusch lectures at Colgate-Rochester Divinity School. (Those lectures were named for Walter Rauschenbusch, whom many consider the most prominent Baptist theologian of the 20^th century.)

Kagawa’s Rauschenbusch lectures were published later that year under the title “Brotherhood Economics.” Even though (or because?) he was a Christian evangelist, Kagawa was deeply interested in economic matters, especially the plight of the many people in Japan (and the world) who were living in poverty.

He knew about being poor from his own experience.

When he was still a seminary student in 1909, he moved into the largest slum area of Kobe and lived there for years. He freely shared what he had, including his small house, with needy people.

As a result, he contracted trachoma (a serious and contagious eye disease) from one of the poverty-stricken people he took into his home.

Because of his concern for the poor, Kagawa was active in the founding of the first labor unions in Japan soon after his return in 1917. Over the next several years he worked extensively in forming unions and cooperatives, and that was a major topic in his 1936 lectures.

Kagawa has been called a “reverse missionary.”

Bo Tao is a doctoral student at Yale University. His master’s thesis at a university in Shanghai was on Kagawa, and his article in the July 2013 issue of “International Bulletin of Missionary Research” is titled “The Peacemaking Efforts of a Reverse Missionary: Toyohiko Kagawa before Pearl Harbor.”

Tao tells how President Roosevelt personally asked for Kagawa to be allowed to enter the United States after he had been detained by immigration authorities in San Francisco in 1935. He was held, ostensibly, because of fear that his trachoma might be transmitted to others.

There were some, though, who opposed his involvement in labor unions and cooperatives. They were the same ones who objected to President Roosevelt’s implementation of New Deal policies during the Depression years of the 1930s.

A few years later, after being arrested and detained in Japan for nearly three weeks in 1940 because of his anti-war activities, Kagawa again visited the U.S. from April to August of 1941 in a “last-ditch” effort to avert war in the Pacific.

Unfortunately, as we know, his peace activities were unsuccessful. But not because he didn’t try.

There is much more I would like to write about Kagawa, who as early as 1939 had been deemed one of three “modern saints”—along with Gandhi in India and Schweitzer in Africa.

After all, I included Kagawa on my list of “top ten Christians” in my Sept. 15, 2010, blog posting.

In Praise of Lottie Moon

“Southern Baptists have only one saint and her name is Lottie Moon.” So wrote Texas pastor Chuck Warnock in his fine review of Regina D. Sullivan’s book Lottie Moon: A Southern Baptist Missionary to China in History and Legend (2011). 

I am writing this in praise of “St. Lottie” (she has never actually been called this), whose full name was Charlotte Digges Moon, and in commemoration of her outstanding work and life, which ended soon after her 72^nd birthday 100 years ago, on Christmas Eve, 1912. She was on her way back from China to the U.S. and died on board the steamer Manchuria as it lay at anchor off Kobe, Japan.

At the beginning of the 1870s, Southern Baptists did not think single women should be appointed as missionaries, but in 1871 Lottie argued publicly that women should be allowed to do paid religious work.

Consequently, Lottie became one of the first single Baptist women to be appointed as a missionary—with the understanding that she would be involved only in “women’s work for women.” Among other things, that meant not preaching or engaging in any kind of public activity when men were present.

But Lottie soon began to ignore the restrictions. As Sullivan says, “Moon was never one to be dissuaded by an argument that centered on gender.” Her breaking with her culture and board policy culminated with her, alone, beginning new mission work in the city of Pingtu. It was the first time for a Southern Baptist woman to start a new mission point.

As Southern Baptist missionaries for 38 years, June and I were indirectly linked to Lottie Moon, for in each of those years the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering (LMCO) was a major source of funding for the Foreign (later International) Mission Board that provided our support in Japan. And I have spoken in numerous churches through the years, encouraging generous giving to the LMCO.

In July 2004 when June and I left Japan as missionaries for the last time, we spent a few days in China before coming on back to the States. Our most memorable time there was seeing the places where Lottie Moon had lived and worked. We visited the church where she had worshipped soon after her arrival in Tengchow (now Penglai) in 1873. And then we went to Pingtu (now Pingdu), where Lottie had lived and worked from 1886 to 1891.

We visited a church in Pingdu that resulted from Lottie Moon’s work there. Appropriately, the senior pastor there is Wang Xia, a woman—and a fourth-generation believer whose ancestors were among the earliest Christians in the city.

The picture shows Pastor Wang on the left and the couple who were living on the property by the house where Lottie had lived—and which we are standing in front of. 

For a long time Lottie Moon has often been considered “saintly” because of what was written about her sacrificing her food, and ultimately her life, for the sake of the poverty-stricken people of China. According to Sullivan, those stories are likely fabrications for the most part. (Writing as a scholar rather than as the promoter of a cause, makes one more objective—and more nearly accurate.)

Lottie Moon deserves our praise, though, for her courageous work for gender equality among missionaries and for sparking the formation of the Woman’s Missionary Union among Southern Baptists as well as the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering, which has raised more than $1.5 billion for missions since its inception in 1888.

We may not want to call her St. Lottie, but she is well deserving of appreciative remembrance on this 100^th anniversary of her passing.

In Praise of Clarence Jordan

Who are the top Christians of all time (after the New Testament and the period of the early church)? I presented my list of “top ten Christians” on this blog in September 2010 (check it out here). Although I modified it some after the original posting, Clarence Jordan continues to be on that list.

Jordan was born 100 years ago yesterday, on July 29, 1912. Born in west central Georgia, he completed a degree in agriculture at the University of Georgia in 1933. He went on to earn his Ph.D. in New Testament at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

Four years later, in 1942, he and Florence, who had married in 1936, and another couple created an interracial, Christian farming community near Americus, Georgia. They named their experiment Koinonia Farm, using the New Testament Greek word meaning fellowship as used in Acts 2:42 (and elsewhere). The Koinonia partners committed themselves to the ideals of equality of all persons, rejection of violence, ecological stewardship, and common ownership of possessions.

Jordan and the others were pacifists and in the years following World War II were advocates of racial integration and equality when such ideas were not popular—especially in the South.

The story of Jordan and the Koinonia Farm is told well in Dallas Lee’s The Cotton Patch Evidence: The Story of Clarence Jordan and the Koinonia Farm Experience (1971, republished in 2011). It is a book I remember reading with fascination in the 1970s, and writing this makes me want to read it again.

Cotton is one of the crops grown on farms in Georgia, and the Koinonia farm was founded to be a demonstration plot of how the Kingdom of God looks if people take seriously, and live by, the teachings of Jesus. Thus, Lee’s book presents the “cotton patch evidence” of that noble experiment.

Jordon’s experience of seeking to communicate the ideals of Jesus in rural Georgia motivated him to use his considerable knowledge of the Greek language to translate large parts of the New Testament into what came to be known as the Cotton Patch Version of the Bible.

The first book of Jordan’s “cotton patch” paraphrase, the letters of Paul, was published in 1968, just the year before he died in October 1969. It was a sudden and unexpected death of a man who was only 57 years old.

I first heard about Clarence Jordan when I was in seminary in the early 1960s, and his life and work was highly admired by some of my professors. It was not until a number of years after his death, however, that June and I were able to visit Koinonia Farm for the first time. We were happy to meet Florence, who didn’t pass away until 1987, on that visit.

I am sorry that I never got to meet Jordan or hear him speak in person. But I did buy several LP records of his sermons and greatly enjoyed listening to them. Not only was he a great Christian, he was a gifted preacher as well.

Clarence Jordan proclaimed, and demonstrated, that faith is life lived “in scorn of the consequences” (Lee, p. 143). That is one reason he made my list of the top ten Christians: he lived faithful to the teachings of Jesus Christ as he understood them in spite of the persecution and opposition that faith elicited.

If a saint is an extraordinary person who helps us know God better, Clarence Jordan was a saint. And I am happy to write this in praise of Jordan, the saint from the cotton patch who was born 100 years ago yesterday.

In Praise of Adoniram and Ann Judson

Two hundred years ago this month, the first foreign missionaries from the United States arrived in India. The famous “haystack prayer meeting” in 1806 led to the forming of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) four years later. In 1812 three couples and two single men set sail for India. One of the couples was Adoniram and Ann Hasseltine Judson.

The ABCFM was a Congregationalist organization, and Adoniram was also commissioned by the Congregational churches. Back then only men were appointed/commissioned as missionaries, and the wives went with their husbands to be homemakers. Some, such as William Carey’s wife, were not at all happy with becoming a missionary’s wife and having to go to a “foreign” land. But Ann Judson became a very effective missionary in her own right.

 The Judsons were married on February 5, 1812, and exactly two weeks later they boarded the ship for India. They arrived in Calcutta (now Kolkata) on June 17, 1812. Since they were Congregationalists and knowing they would encounter William Carey and other Baptist missionaries from England, while aboard ship en route to India the Judsons did a focused study on the theology of baptism.

Baptists have long rejoiced that the Judsons came to the position that believer’s baptism was theologically valid and should be done as a matter of obedience to the command of Jesus. Consequentially, they were baptized by immersion less than three months after their arrival in India.

Luther Rice, another ABCFM missionary who arrived in India in August 1812, also became a Baptist soon after arriving there. Rice, who was single, returned to America to break ties with the Congregationalists and to raise support for the Judsons from the Baptists. As a result of his efforts, “The General Missionary Convention of the Baptist Denomination in the United States of America for Foreign Missions” (later often called "the Triennial Convention”) was organized in May 1814.

It is amazing that Rice was so successful, for all this activity raising support from Baptists was during the War of 1812. The organizational meeting was held at the First Baptist Church in Philadelphia. Just three months later the British invaded Washington, D.C., and burned most of the federal buildings. And just four months later a decisive battle was fought in the harbor near Baltimore, only a hundred miles from Philadelphia.

The Judsons went on to Burma (now officially Myanmar) in 1813 and began a long and effective ministry there. Today, only about 5% of the people of Myanmar are Christians, and they are mostly among the Chin, Kachin, and the Karen ethnic groups. But about 1/3 of Myanmar’s Christians are Baptists, and they are the greatest legacy of the Judsons.

The Chin, Kachin, and Karen peoples are also those who have been most at odds with the military government which changed the English name of the country from Burma to Myanmar in 1989. The Karens, especially, have long been most opposed to the central government. In fact, they began seeking political independence in 1949.

Now there are tens of thousands of Karen refugees here in the U.S., including a sizeable number in North Kansas City. Many of them are Baptists, and the Grace Baptist Church, near where most of them live, has done a commendable job of ministering to them. I am disappointed that I have not been able to follow through on my original intention of helping with that ministry—partly out of appreciation for the praiseworthy missionary work of Adoniram and Ann Judson.

In Praise of Daniel Berrigan

Daniel Berrigan, the anti-war Jesuit priest who turned 90 in May of this year, has been a fervent advocate of peace for decades. As I have been thinking about him recently, I am writing this as another posting of my “in praise of” series. (Click on “praise” in the label column on the right to see other postings in this series.)

Especially you who are 60 or older doubtlessly know something about Berrigan, who first became widely known in the late 1960s. He and his brother Philip (1923-2002) became highly visible anti-war/peace activists during the Vietnam War. After that war ended, they continued to oppose nuclear weapons.

Some of you may harbor a fairly negative image of Daniel and Philip Berrigan. For several years up to the end of the war in Vietnam, they were greatly criticized by the media as well as by many within the Catholic Church. (Like his older brother, Philip was also a priest.)

The Berrigan brothers, with a few others, engaged in numerous acts of civil disobedience to protest what they believed to be an unjust war. They were two of the “Catonsville Nine,” nine people who in May 1968 went to the draft board in a Baltimore suburb, took 378 draft files, brought them to the parking lot in wire baskets, dumped them out, poured homemade napalm over them, and set them on fire.

They were arrested, of course, and after a few months as a fugitive, Daniel was in prison from August 1970 to February1972. Earlier, in 1967, he had been the first priest in U.S. history to be arrested for a protest against war. He was in jail for only five days that time.

Then in September 1980 the Berrigan brothers and a few others began the Plowshares Movement. They illegally trespassed onto a nuclear missile facility in Pennsylvania, where they damaged nuclear warhead nosecones and poured their own blood onto documents and files.

Earlier this month I finished reading Daniel’s autobiography, To Dwell in Peace (1987), and I was much impressed by his life story and especially by his dedication to peace and justice. (I was also impressed by the splendid prose in which the book is written.)

In the book,  says that when the church yields “before the politics of the virtuous versus the ‘kingdom of evil,’ we become, willy-nilly, the spiritual arm of ever-renewed violence” (p. 156). Unfortunately, that seems to have been the case often and is seen in the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I am now reading Daniel Berrigan: Essential Writings (2009), selected with an introduction by John Dear, who was mentored by Berrigan. Dear (b. 1959) is also a Jesuit priest and an avid anti-war/peace activist; he has been arrested more than 75 times.

Dear writes that Berrigan “remains a beacon of hope to peace-loving people everywhere” (p. 24). For that reason, I am happy to post these few words in praise of Daniel Berrigan, who for far more than half his ninety years has been an extraordinary prophet and peacemaker.

In Praise of Pope Leo and Labor Unions

One hundred and twenty years ago, on May 15, 1891, Pope Leo XIII issued the momentous encyclical Rerum Novarum (“Of New Things”).

Leo XIII, who had been the pope for twenty-five years when he died in 1903, began his 1891 encyclical (formal statement sent to the bishops) by talking about the problem of “the enormous fortunes of some few individuals, and the utter poverty of the masses.”

While opposing socialism and affirming the right of private property, Pope Leo also recognized the right of workers to unite in labor unions. The latter was a significant new emphasis and one reason there have been special activities commemorating the 120th anniversary of Rerum Novarum. One such activity was held earlier this month at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., a university founded in 1887 with the approval of Pope Leo.

Even though issued 120 years ago, Pope Leo’s encyclical speaks directly to matters facing the nation at the present time. As you know, back in February there was a clash between the public-sector unions and Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin. In a highly politicized confrontation, the labor unions were demonized by one side and strongly supported by the other.

As you might guess, Rush Limbaugh was stanchly on the side of Gov. Walker and strongly against the position of the union leaders. But it was laughable to hear Limbaugh criticize the “greedy” union members of Wisconsin (and other states) when he has reportedly signed (in 2008) an eight-year contract for $400,000,000! How can anyone who makes $137,000 a day (!) have the gall to call to people greedy who make far, far less than that a year?!

Doubtlessly there have been excesses in some of the demands and practices of labor unions through the years. But many of the things that we take for granted now were due largely to the efforts of the labor unions and their work since 1891, things like the forty-hour work week, child labor laws, unemployment benefits, factory safety laws, and the like.

It is widely recognized that labor unions tend to support the Democratic Party, so Democrats are charging that Gov. Walker and others are opposing the unions primarily to lessen financial contributions to Democratic candidates. Conversely, the Republicans are charging that the Democrats, and the President, are supporting the unions mainly in order to reap financial rewards for upcoming political campaigns.

But labor unions are not primarily about politics; they are about the welfare of workers. Thanks to those labor unions—and their support in Pope Leo’s 1891 encyclical—the workers of the nation are far better off, and far less exploited, than they would be otherwise. In the U.S. and other industrialized countries of the world “the enormous fortunes of some few individuals” still exists. But, thankfully, partly due to the labor unions, it is no longer necessary to speak of “the utter poverty of the masses.”

The Amish Beard (In Praise of Art Gish)

Arthur G. Gish became influential in my life nearly forty years ago, so I am writing this to praise his life and work—and partly to talk about his beard.

Gish was born on August 15, 1939, in Lancaster County, Penn., where many Amish people live. As a youth he became a member of the Church of the Brethren (CoB) and graduated from Bethany Theological Seminary, a CoB school in Richmond, IN. Gish’s first book was titled The New Left and Christian Radicalism (1970). That book was written when he was about thirty years old and very much involved in the anti-Vietnam War protest movement.

Gish’s next books were Beyond the Rat Race (1973) and Living in Christian Community (1979). “Simple Gifts,” the old Shaker hymn that begins, “It’s a gift to be simple, / It’s a gift to be free,” appears at the top of the very first page of text in the former. (Those same words are also quoted at the beginning of “Enough Is Enough,” the sixth chapter of Jim Wallis’ new book, Rediscovering Values, which will be discussed on October 13 at the Vital Conversations meeting at Antioch Public Library.)

In his first book, Gish contrasts the political “new left,” which was very active in the late 1960s, with Christian radicalism, especially as seen in the Anabaptists. I had long been a “fan” of the Swiss Brethren of the sixteenth century and others in that pacifist tradition, but I became even more enthusiastic about them after reading Gish’s book.

At the beginning of the chapter on Anabaptism, Gish writes,

The beard of the protester gave me a new appreciation for my Anabaptist grandfather’s beard. His beard symbolizes for him something very similar to what the beard means for the protester. When I asked my grandfather why he grew a beard his reply was that it was to show that he was different from the world. The beard of the protester is to demonstrate that he is not a part of the establishment. My own beard is a conscious attempt to bring together these two radical perspectives (p. 49).

Even though he was not Amish, Gish had an "Amish beard" which he kept to the end of his life, as you can see from the fairly recent picture on the left. And even though I have never been, or had any relatives who have been, Amish, I have worn a similar beard since 1972—and I made the decision to grow an “Amish beard" partly because of reading what Gish said about his beard.

Just two or three weeks ago I heard the sad news that Art Gish had died earlier this year in a farm accident. For decades he had lived and worked on his farm in Ohio growing organic food. But in July the tractor he was driving turned over and caught fire, and he died in that tragic accident.

Thank you for allowing me to share these few words in memory of, and in praise of, Art Gish (and his Amish beard).

In Praise of Dorothy Day

This is my fourth “in praise of …” posting, and I am now happy to be able to pay tribute to Dorothy Day (1897-1980), a person I have long admired and recently learned a lot more about.

Last week I finished reading Love Is the Measure: A Biography of Dorothy Day (1986) by Jim Forest. It was a very helpful book that greatly increased my understanding of Day’s life, thought, and actions. On the evening of the same day, I enjoyed seeing “Haunted by God: The Life of Dorothy Day,” a one-woman performance by Lisa Wagner-Carollo staged in the Mabee Theater at Rockhurst University.

Dorothy Day is best known as the co-founder (in 1932) of The Catholic Worker—a newspaper that from the beginning has sold for one cent a copy—and the Catholic Worker (CW) movement, which has established houses of hospitality for the poor in many American cities. When June and I visited the CW-related Holy Family House on E. 31^st Street in Kansas City a couple of years ago, we were quite impressed with the loving service being rendered there.

I have long admired Dorothy Day because of her commitment to the poor and mistreated people of the world. Forest points out that she often said, “Those who cannot see Christ in the poor are atheists indeed.” And then he remarks: “She was a Christian missionary, not to heathens but rather to fellow Christians, hoping to convert them to a faith they thought was theirs already” (p. 105).

Dorothy Day was not baptized as a (Catholic) Christian until she was thirty years old, but she increasingly became a believer who tried to live out what she understood to be the teaching of Christ and the Bible. She often cited the words of St. John of the Cross, “Love is the measure by which we shall be judged,” and the title of Forest’s biography of her was from that statement.

I also have long been a “fan” of Dorothy Day because of her unswerving commitment to pacifism. Forest reports, “Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the U.S. declaration of war, The Catholic Worker published a banner headline which indicated that Dorothy’s pacifist commitment was unshaken” (p. 102). The headline was,

WE CONTINUE OUR CHRISTIAN PACIFIST STAND

As I was reading Day’s biography while at Windermere (see the previous posting), during the (to me) offensive general session, I was thinking not just WWJD (what would Jesus do, or say) but WWDD (what would Dorothy do, or say). Although I was not able to come up with a good answer to my questions, I am sure she (or he) would not have been silent in face of what seemed to be the glorification of war.

So, I want not only to praise Dorothy Day, I want to continue to think about WWDD as I try to try to decide what Christ wants me to do in the many situations where there is an absence of peace and social justice.

Here is a picture of Dorthy Day in her latter years.

In Praise of Lesslie Newbigin

In the Jan. 8 posting on this blog, I made reference to the prevalent worldview of India. I do not know a lot about India, and, unfortunately, nothing from first-hand knowledge; I have long had the desire to go to India, but have not yet (and may never have) the opportunity to do so. But I have read rather extensively about India and the religions of India, and through the years I have been an appreciative reader of one who spent nearly four decades in India.

Lesslie Newbigin was born in northern England on December 8, 1909, so this past December there was some recognition in the media about the centennial observance of his birth. After completing his education at Cambridge University, he was ordained by the Church of Scotland in 1936 and sent as a missionary to Madras, now Chennai, the fifth largest city in India. In 1947 he became one of the first bishops in the newly formed Church of South India.

After serving a few years as the Executive Secretary of the International Missionary Council, Newbigin went back to India and continued to serve there until his retirement in 1974. But after returning to Great Britain, he continued an active life of teaching and writing. An article about him in the January 2010 issue of Christianity Today is titled, “The Missionary Who Wouldn’t Retire.” He had years of meaningful ministry back in England before his death in 1998.

I am particularly fond of Newbigin because of his book Honest Religion for Secular Man (1966), which I read during my first year in Japan, in late 1966 or early 1967. Since then I have profited from other books written by Newbigin, particularly The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (1989), which I have just finished for the second time.

In my Jan. 22 posting, I wrote about contextual theology. That is the subject of the twelfth chapter of Newbigin’s 1989 book, in which he writes, “True contextualization accords to the gospel its rightful primacy, its power to penetrate every culture and to speak within each culture, in its own speech and symbol, the word which is both No and Yes, both judgment and grace” (p. 152).

And then last fall, there was some discussion on this blog about religious pluralism. In that regard, I am in full agreement with Newbigin who contends that “we must reject the ideology of pluralism. We must reject the invitation to live in a society where everything is subjective and relative, a society which has abandoned the belief that truth can be known and has settled for a purely subjective view of truth” (p. 244 of the same book).

I have a list of the ten philosophers/theologians I have been most influenced by and most appreciative of. Newbigin is on that list, so I am happy to share this posting with you, in praise of Lesslie Newbigin.

Here is a 1996 picture of Newbigin: 

In Praise of Martin Luther King, Jr.

I have long been a fan of Martin Luther King, Jr. I thrill every time I hear his “I Have a Dream” speech. I am moved whenever I read his writings, and I have just finished reading his powerful little book, Why We Can’t Wait (1963). But in light of all he did in 1963, I am somewhat embarrassed at what I didn’t do then. 

I once had the opportunity of hearing King speak in person, but I was a bit disappointed. When I was a student at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1961, he came to Louisville and spoke in a regular chapel service at SBTS. It was a fine talk with excellent content, but it was not delivered with the oratorical power of many of his other sermons and speeches that I had heard snatches of. Thanks to the Internet, last week I was able to hear that chapel talk again. I probably enjoyed and appreciated hearing King’s talk more this time than I did back when I was a busy, and sleep-deprived, seminary student.

In Why We Can’t Wait, King tells what he was thinking about and how he was involved in “the Negro Revolution” of 1963. Much of that revolution then was centered in Birmingham, Alabama, where King was arrested and jailed on Good Friday of that year. Chapter 5 of his book is his remarkable “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” written on April 16.

Among the many important statements in that powerful letter, I was particularly impressed by these words: “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice” (pp. 72-73).

In April 1963, I was a full-time graduate student, a pastor, and a husband and father of two young children I was struggling to support financially. My plate was quite full. Still, as I look back to that time I am embarrassed not because of what I did but because of what I did not do. I was not completely uninvolved in the struggle for freedom and justice, but I did little to help those who were suffering from racism and racist-related poverty in the U.S. (or elsewhere).

During the Martin Luther King Day celebrations this year, I want to think deeply about what to do in response to his insightful words, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly” (p. 65).

In Praise of Eboo

Dr. Eboo Patel is an impressive young man. (I say young, for he was born in 1975 and that makes him seem quite young to me.)

Eboo is the Founder and Executive Director of the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC). He is also a member of the President's White House Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and last month he was named by U.S. News and World Report as one of the twenty-three "Best Leaders" in the United States.

Tomorrow, November 10, Eboo will be the speaker at the Festival of Faiths gathering in Kansas City. I very much would like to attend that meeting and hear him speak. Unfortunately, that is the same night Dr. James Cone speaks in Gano Chapel on the campus of William Jewell College, and I feel a greater need to attend that lecture. (Dr. Cone's talks at 7:30 Tuesday evening and 10:15 on Wednesday morning are open to the public, and I would encourage those in the area to attend, if possible.)

I am especially appreciative of Eboo's work because of what I read in his book, Acts of Faith (2007), the book we will be discussing at the Vital Conversations meeting this week: Wednesday, Nov. 11, at Antioch Library. (Those living in the North Kansas City area are heartily invited to attend this meeting.)

In his book, Eboo tells about April Kunze, an evangelical Christian, becoming IFYC's first full-time staff member. In the hiring process, he said to her, "We can both believe our religions are true, we can even privately hope the other converts, and we can work together in this organization to serve others. In that way, we, an Evangelical Christian and a devoted Muslim, can model what we say this organization is about: people from very different faith backgrounds finding common purpose in helping others" (p. 163).

That is the kind of pluralism Eboo propounds, and that is the kind of "pluralism" I applaud. Even though he calls his position pluralism, I think it is more an attitude of accepting and respecting plurality. As I have written before, I am generally opposed to any ism, so I am wary of talk about pluralism. But I think that understanding, respecting, and working with people of other religious traditions or expressions of faith is very important.

Thus, I praise Eboo for the significant interfaith work he is doing. He is an excellent example how one can be a dedicated believer of a particular faith tradition and also respectful of other traditions. And his call for working with people of other religious beliefs for the betterment of society is one I pray will be heard and heeded by more and more people.