As the US battles with itself over the debt crisis, and Europe struggles to get to grips with economically weaker nations threatening the Euro, I’ve been mulling over a conversation I had with Tom Sine and another significant leader who’ll I’ll call B at Wild Goose a month or so ago (I won’t name him, as I feel it might be unfair to put his name to a conversation he didn’t know I might share). Tom Sine has long worked in ‘futures’ – helping community groups to think about the sort of future that they want, and how they might achieve it, and is essentially an optimist. B, who’d I’d not met before, but with whom I enjoyed a number of very interesting conversations, lives and works in a very poor city in the US, and is pretty pessimistic about where things are going.

To summarise his position: there are a number of ‘triggers’ – economic, environmental, political – which could pull the US and other parts of the world into a scenario where the normal societal structures collapse. Food distribution, welfare payments, fuel networks, healthcare and policing – all of these could effectively cease functioning (and with some US cities close to bankruptcy, how far off is that?).

The problem that B sees is that the US has developed a new type of poor person: one who is not simply economically poor, but seemingly incapable of existing independently of state welfare. Unlike the poor of, say, Malawi, the unemployed urban poor of the US have no knowledge of agriculture nor any ability to innovate with basic tools and technology. They simply await their welfare payment, and that’s it, and the huge amount of charitable money that has been put into this demographic group has done little to really change the core problem of zero positive engagement with education or labour. What this means is that if these state systems do collapse, these people will be totally incapable of supporting themselves, other than by looting.

Some people in the community B is part of run a community garden, from which they harvest vegetables etc. B’s point was this: what happens when the hungry urban poor march on the garden, demanding food from it? The garden cannot sustain everyone in the area, and if the garden is ravaged by a mob it will cease to sustain anyone in the area. So he’s foresees a scenario where he would have to train Christian people to take aim and fire on the poor – in order to survive themselves.

Both Tom and I were pretty shocked by his analysis. But on reflection, I’m not sure quite how far off he is. For those of you who have read or seen The Road, any major collapse is going to throw up terrible ethical questions. And what I like about what B is doing is that he’s not afraid to get people thinking about them now.

There’s a call to arms here: whether you are going to start making swords or ploughshares, it’s going to pay to be ready.

Really pleased to announce that the UK edition of ‘Other‘ is available in the US and Canada as an eBook via Amazon (as it is in the UK too.) As I’m sure you know, you don’t need an actual Kindle to read Kindle downloads – you can get the software for free on your Mac or PC or mobile. I’ve got a copy on the Kindle app on the iPad, and it looks great.

If you’ve got an iPad, it’s also in the native iBookstore too, but I can’t link to that – sort it out Apple!

As for a print edition, negotiations with a US publisher are in (hopefully) the final stages, and a US print edition should be available in a couple of months, which will be great.

If you’ve not read it yet, ‘Other’ is an attempt to unpack what Jesus’ summary of the law might mean in the politically complex and technologically advanced world we are living in:

Noisy neighbours, international terrorism, racism, teenage violence and religious fundamentalism … from the personal to the local to the international and theological, it is our failure to engage ‘the other’ that is at the heart of so many of the problems we face.

It draws on a huge variety of sources, taking in pirates, AA Milne, Zizek, Facebook, Heidegger, Celebrity culture and video gaming…all spiced with some original poetry too. And some great people have said some great things about it:

Brian Mclaren:

With his new book Other, English author Kester Brewin joins Peter Rollins from Ireland and David Dark from the US as leading public theologians for a new generation of thoughtful Christians. He moves gracefully from Scripture to philosophy to pop culture to sociology and back to Scripture again, offering fresh, honest, and needed insights at each turn.

Pete Rollins:

In our socially networked and technologically advanced world we remain surrounded by mystery: the mystery of others, the divine mystery and mystery that we are unto ourselves. OTHER masterfully explores how we might embrace this often complex reality and draws out how love of that which is other is central to the Christian experience. This is a work of rare beauty.

Phllyis Tickle:

This is a brilliant work. Half-mystic and half hard-core intellectual, Brewin here offers us an intimate, personable, completely accessible and, at times, hauntingly beautiful engagement with the hard questions of emergence theology. It illumines with reverence and care the paradox that is faith, even as it speaks, always with vigour, of love and the reality that lies at the centre of our not-knowing.

Hope you enjoy reading it – all being well I’ll be in the US in the next few months with a little tour, so be great to meet people then and engage with the ideas face to face.

Have to say, I’m totally bemused by American politics. A banking crisis caused by a too-lightly regulated financial system totally screws the economy under a dumb Republican administration… and then the Democratic one subsequently voted in is punished for not fixing it quickly enough, battered by a movement who want… much lighter central control.

Give Obama a chance, I say. From this side of the pond he’s doing his best to sort out the sins of Bush. And stop presenting socialism as some sort of evil. Sharing stuff and mucking in to help one another is pretty close to Jesus’ manifesto if you ask me. Not quite sure he was a ‘help myself and screw the rest of you’ right-wing, gun-toting, consumer capitalist. But maybe I’m reading my leather-bound, words in red Bible wrongly.

BTW, I wrote you a letter… but that’s enough ranting for now. Just…don’t vote in Palin, please. We’re begging you.

Mine’s now on YouTube, and carries a simple message: if you want to find the Kingdom of Heaven, you’re going to have to abandon your pursuit of paradise. In other words, the purified utopian ideal is dangerous; God is found in the dirt of the incarnation.

The unfolding drama about the potential burning of copies of the Qu’ran tomorrow throws up some very very interesting issues. The wonderfully-tached Terry Jones has named 9/11 ‘International Burn A Koran Day’ but the event appears to be on hold for a while while he fields calls from high-ranking government officials and leading Muslims. Not bad for a pastor of a church of 50 people.

The question I’d like to ask him is this: what does he think he is going to achieve by this? Historically, public burnings like this have been about destruction of harmful material in a display of corporate rejection. Albums by The Beatles were burned in 1966 in the deep South of the US – presumably to rid the area of the devilish music they were playing, and show them that they were not more popular than Jesus.

What confuses me about this Qu’ran burning is that I would wager that everyone who is going to get involved in the event will actually have to go out and buy a copy of the book in order to burn it. Sales of the Qu’ran will thus rise, and in no way will the number of copies of this ‘corrupting material’ decrease in the general populus. Jones’ burning then must be about pure symbolism, rather than purifying combustion, and thus must be designed to stoke the fires of anger.

He is thus reducing himself to the mob-mentality of flag-burners we see on our television screens: stamping on a barely smouldering stars and stripes as an act of media-focused hatred. Achieving nothing.

More importantly though, Muslims have a very different relationship to the Qu’ran as a physical text than Christians do to the Bible. Far more Muslims know long passages of the Qu’ran off by heart. As one scholar put it recently:

‘the Quran cannot be burned; the text of the Quran is just ink and paper’

In other words, you can burn as many of these physical objects as you like – the Qu’ran will remain inscribed on the heart. This seems to be a far more healthy relationship to a holy book than the hefty, leather-bound, Jesus-words-in-red fetish many Christians seem to have with their ‘swords.’ Jones’ burning will achieve absolutely nothing other than fuelling hatred. It will not convince anyone of the ills he perceives in Islam, nor of the love that Jesus is meant to show.

Despite the enflamed preaching of the hell-raisers and sin-friers, God is not interested in fire or burning. I think Jones would do well to read 1 Kings 19:

“After the earthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.”

Occasionally two things from the news catch your ear and resonate together. Today it was the news that Obama has cancelled Nasa’s new moon programme. And [ht Barry Taylor] that Gil Scott-Heron is back with a new album.

The connection? I’ve always loved Scott-Heron’s early, hard-hitting social commentaries. And the lyrics of ‘Whitey on the Moon’ just seem so appropriate in these tough economic times – especially post Haiti’s earthquake – that I wondered if Obama had been listening when he made his decision:

I can’t pay no doctor bills
But Whitey’s on the moon
Ten years from now I’ll be paying still
While whitey’s on the moon

You know, the man just upped my rent last night
Cause whitey’s on the moon
No hot water, no toilets, no lights
But whitey’s on the moon…

The racial context of 1974 America, into which the album The Revolution Will Not Be Televised was clearly different to that of 2010. But ‘whitey’ still exists in other guises: the greedy bankers, the tight landlords, the traffickers and corrupt politicians – all of those who would divert money away from just causes to fulfil their own agendas.

Actually, I think the original Apollo missions turned out to be good value, but I can’t see that these would be. So it’s a good decision by Obama. Let’s just hope the money that is saved goes into welfare programmes, not weapons.

[ Laws and Packaging 1 ] [ Laws and Packaging 2 ]

I the previous two posts I’ve been trying to set out something of what it feels like being a stranger in the US. The stranger is at the boundary – neither fully in nor fully out – and can thus help those who are in to see what may be hidden to them.

Two things have hit me in particular: the excessive laws, and the excessive packaging. And I want to argue that they are connected in some way via the idea of dirt. The over-keen legislating is a way of avoiding contact with the other, by deferring to the authorities when conflicts occur. The over-keen packaging is a way of assuring people that what they are in contact with is ‘clean’ – untouched by any other.

Now here’s the odd thing: both of these attitudes are counter-productive. By any measure the US has extremely poor levels of community cohesion, high levels of anti-social behaviour, high levels of violent crime, high levels of imprisonment, high levels of depression. In a country that is meant to be so Christian, I am constantly amazed at the way it defaults to law rather than grace. If the gospel has one thing to say, it is surely about the inefficacy of the law to save us. But here laws are piled upon laws… and, as St Paul pointed out, that only leads to people feeling oppressed and criminalised – and this actually leads to violence/violation.

This has recently been shown to be true in the brilliant book The Spirit Level – Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. Inequality causes anxiety and stress right across society, and this leads to bad outcomes for everyone. Excessive legislation only adds to this stress.

The same is true with cleanliness. A little dirt is actually very good for us. If we totally sterilise ourselves – become obsessive and compulsive about cleanliness – we actually lower our immune system’s ability to deal with the inevitable dirt we face. There’s no point trying to stop my children catching all the colds and bugs at school: catching them will actually strengthen them.

So here’s a stranger’s word of advice to the US – which comes right back at me with the UK always following so closely behind:

- let’s try to create the conditions within which people want to do the right thing, and commit to trying to engage the other rather than default to the law when conflicts arise.

- let’s try to bring more dirt into our sterilised worlds, because it is only in these dirty places that things can grow, and that we can overcome our fear of the contaminating effect of the other. It is not contamination; it’s cross-fertilization.

Look forward to some strangers head to the UK to help us reflect back in turn…

I’ve been in New York a few days now, and part of me feels it’s too short a time to make any sense of what I’m seeing, too soon to have any valid critique. But then I read Georg Simmell, who notes that the stranger in our midst is important because they ‘hold up a mirror to the society in which he or she enters, since [they] cannot take for granted ways of life that seem to natives just natural’ – and think that perhaps my raw strangeness in this place is a good thing.

The stranger is an interesting character – they are recognised, denominated as ‘someone’ – but not known. I am a stranger here. But I’ve come here. So don’t take this the wrong way… I do love NY. But…

So here’s two things that immediately spring to mind as a stranger in the US: you have excessive packaging, and excessive laws.

First, the laws. As soon as the plane landed the announcements and signs begin: this is against the law, we have the power to remove your mobile device, we have the power to keep your mobile device, the law states that it is dangerous and unlawful for more than 178 people to be in this room… and so it goes on and on.

One of my first thoughts here was this: rather than legislate for every last thing, why not work to create the conditions within which people will want to do the right thing? I think the answer is that legislation means that we can avoid contact with the other. If it is against the law to do something, then I can call the police and make it their responsibility to sort out. Rather than go to my neighbour and try to sort it out between us, we call 911 and get law-enforcement in.

Why? Because we are afraid of engaging the other. Afraid of what they might do. The other is dirty, is dangerous. We need to push them away, outside of our gated communities and below us in the mean streets.

And that, I think, is actually linked to packaging. Which I’ll get to tomorrow.