So, on Monday as I was driving back to DC from a weekend in Pittsburgh, I spent some time listening to some low-on-the-dial radio as I made my way through Western Maryland. At first I thought I was listening to an all news network, but eventually it became apparent that I was listening to an evangelical station. I usually skip over the Christian rock when I drive, but often I stop to listen to the Christian talk material–it’s sort of an anthropological exercise.

So, this time I ended up with a broadcast from Focus on the Family Radio. Very interesting stuff. The main broadcast, aptly titled “From Jihad to Jesus,” was a testimony, given shortly after September 11 by a Dean from Liberty Theological Seminary (Jerry Fallwell’s institution), Ergun Caner. Though this fellow teaches systematic theology and church history, he isn’t your average evangelical Christian. Rather, he was raised as a Muslim and his father was a prominent mwazien. So, he addressed a Texas congregations in an effort to explain to them how the 9-11 terrorists, and other suicide bombers, could do what they did. Of course, he was also testifying about his conversion.
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This has to be the best story I’ve seen in a really long time. Imagine the revolution that this stuff can make in famine situations. Fortified peanut butter. What could be better than this?

Interesting how this article managed to coincide with the arrival of a solicitation for donations from Doctors Without Borders in my mailbox today. I just might send them a check.

Hope for Hungry Children, Arriving in a Foil Packet
By MICHAEL WINES
Published: August 8, 2005
New York Times

MARADI, Niger, Aug. 7 – In the crowd of riotously dressed mothers clasping wailing, naked infants at a Doctors Without Borders feeding center just west of here, Taorey Asama, at 27 months, stands out for a heart-rending reason: she looks like a normal baby.

A mother feeding the food supplement Plumpy’nut to her child in Tibiri, Niger. It is distributed to mothers of severely malnourished children.

Many of the others have the skeletal frames and baggy skin of children with severe malnutrition. The good news is that a month ago, so did Taorey.

“When she came here, she was all small and curled up,” said her mother, Henda, 30. “It’s Plumpy’nut that’s made her like this. She’s immense!”
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The mortgage documents are signed, copied, and on their way back to the loan officer via FedEx.

I, on the otherhand, am trundling headlong into a disconcerting sea of debt five miles further into the Commonwealth of Virginia, a place that cultural critic Lisa Duggan has repeatedly referred to as the “vortex of hell”.

Closing: August 30.

A few posts ago, I mentioned my friend Terry, and promised I would say more soon. Terry and I have been friends since we were in seventh grade, and she has a long and enthralling resume that mostly revolves around progressive politics and social entrepreneurship. Right now she’s running a consulting firm from Sierra Vista AZ, called Islay Consulting, that is doing work for the Governor of Arizona and the Gates Foundation and some other people.

I had drinks with Terry, her husband Brian, and a bunch of their buddies last night–all new folks whom I’d not met before.

Interestingly, I spent some time talking to Kelly Young, who is the Executive Director of 21st Century Democrats (they train campaigners and send them out to support progressive candidates; did a lot of work with Paul Wellstone). So, Kelly was saying that in the wake of the 2004 election that they’re pulling back for a serious regrouping–something called The Principles Project. In effect they are on the mission to invent a soul for the Democratic Party. Some of this thinking is being spurred by a book that I’ve not yet read called The Soul of Money, by Lynne Twist. The gist of the argument seems to be that we’d be better off if we learned to live in a paradigm of sufficiency, rather than one of scarcity–some of us DO have enough, and we would have a better relationship to the world and one another if we could recognize that. The supporters of this shift are betting that launching a progressive campaign in American politics on this basis, rather than the laundry list of issue-stances that currently parade as the Democratic identity, might actually result in a cohesive movement.

At anyrate, this sounds appealingly like a preferential option for the poor, and a communitarian ethic. I’m intrigued and I want to know more, ’cause lets face it — we’re a long way from Jefferson’s self-sufficient yeoman farmers. We have some obligations to one another–as Linda Kerber points out in No Constitutional Right to be Ladies, as citizens, we have rights and responsibilities, and we must all have the freedom and obligation to experience them. This inevitably leads to some notion that we have obligations to each other. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all get behind a politics that called for a just distribution of resources and respect for the rights and obligations of citizenship? What’s the use of zealously pursuing the single issues, if we’ve got no conceptual framework that structures those struggles?

Okay, rant over.