The Possibility, originally uploaded by AjDele Photography.

Spring has finnally found us here in Chicago. This flower is open now….and plucked. I had wanted to get it in bloom as well …. I hope it made someone’s day. It wasnt in my garden or anything but in front of the building across the street so I dont really have a right to be upset about it.

My semester is over. This last couple months was strangely difficutlt for me. The lagging winter combined with my fluctuating health made it seem to go on forever even though I only took three classes. But I am feeling better now to a large degree. The doctor’s latest theory on what was causing my stomach trouble was stress which was my initial thought all the way back in december.

By the way, I really think taking three classes a semester is a much better way to do graduate school. Four pushed me to the limit (and apparently over it) last semester. This time around I was able to take time and do some things that I found to be personally and socially enriching in addition to my studies. Most of that time was taken up with one class which I would have liked to have spent more time on. This was my religious education class focusing on teaching in an environment of religious diversity. We read some great books and had better conversations. It was a shame to stop at the end of the semester.

The above image is my hope that better things are coming. For myself in improving health and a internship this summer when I will be able to build interfaith immigration education curriculum. For the Chicago area as everyone here looks happier for about a week when the weather first breaks (thats about how long it takes to forget how much it sucked). For Dave and Tanya and Jaden as he learns how to do fun things like breath and look at things and pass gas.

For our country that is presently screwing over the world by taking their food (for humans) and making fuel for us (cars). As fuel and food prices rise here we have the posibility of realizing that we are not divorced from the rest of the world and that our actions and consumption directly affect them with the reprehensible trade systems we have set up. Our insistence on over production is begining to bite us and everyone else, hard. Read this the Gospel of Consumption, the whole thing. It is a little bit of truth and a little bit of truth goes a long way. As words like this get out over the interwebs and into people’s heads and habits, there is hope for us.

Pray for peace for all.

I am a little dissappointed in the response to an article I wrote for the Herald, McCormick’s weekly student newspaper.  I put it up here as What to do With Diversity.  As a matter of fact I am also disappointed there were no comments on the blog post.  I thought that what I was writing was pretty controversial, I guess not.  I had wanted to call out the (especially white) students who complain and therefor probably care about how their educational experience has handled the present diversity.  We really need to start talking about this.  By we I mean white people.  Just like an occupying foreign power has obligations to the people that they occupy to make amends under international law, I think we who have enjoyed the up side of white-privilege have an obligation to at least think about what that means for the people who are on the down side.  Even if you don’t believe that white-privilege exists (quite a few white people don’t) it should still be talked about.  Invite a guest hispanic to talk about it or something!

The only person who has spoken to me about the article is an African-American female student who agreed that we (at McCormick) need to be more intentional about how we handle and engage the diversity we have among us.  It got me thinking…..I feel like most of us have been looking at our community variably as a community of friends or family or maybe fellow learners.  These are all good things.  It seems that we rarely approach each other thinking about what we can learn from each other.  And even more rarely thinking about what can I learn about myself in my interactions with another person.

What really frustrates me is that I want to do something be I don’t have the answers.  I dont think I can find the answers on my own.  This will be a community project, it has to be.  White privilege is perpetuated on a systematic scale.  There will be no chance of doing anything about it unless we can approach it systematically.  Which really should be something that white people would be all about; doing things systematically.  In the meantime and as soon as my school reading for the semester is done (the end is in sight) I am going to start working on the Michael Eric Dyson Reader that I have been meaning to read.  Maybe he has the answers.

I am working on an exegesis paper right now and having a hell of a time with it. I really should be writing but I am hoping that maybe getting some frustration out will make it easier for me to make some headway.

So the format we are asked to write in is really throwing me. In my undergrad education I did several pretty descent sized exegesis papers. I would look at the given text and after thinking about it come up with a thesis. I would then plan an argument, outline it, and write my paper citing primary and secondary sources. I don?t know what has happened since then but this is totally different. For some reason I am being asked to write this one as a series of mini papers looking at the text from several different interpretive frames. Using different interpretive frames is not a problem but doing each of them individually of each other is making my head hurt. I feel like I am being asked to write a commentary on the verse instead of a paper that argues a thesis. We had to write a thesis but to what end I am not sure, how does this all work together? Does it work together?

Right now I am going to do as much research as I can tonight and write it all up and try to break it down into the requested categories. But I don?t know what the hell the point is of that. Why do all this work and reading if I cant put it into my thesis? For its own merit?

Sigh?

I have noticed an ongoing conversation at McCormick and a rumor of discontent.  Regarding a topic that seems to be on everyone’s radar, and this, is no coincidence.  I have had some thoughts on it myself and so I thought it appropriate to join the great and noble undertaking of publicly voicing my thoughts on diversity.  It is my hope to give voice to many conversations I have had in mostly informal settings, my own observations and feelings and the quiet hope that I think we all share that someone will get off their ass and do something about it.

Many of us came to McCormick because of this very issue.  We were told that this is a school with no racial or denominational majorities.  At McCormick we will find diversity.  And who can argue with that.  If one were to group all the students, faculty and staff into the common room with little signs that claim geography and religious background of origin it would be a wonderfully diverse picture.  Where I have heard disappointment arising is in the next and necessary step of figuring out what to do with that picture.  Many of us feel that we have not been given the tools to engage this diversity in a way that is healthy and mutually fulfilling.  I believe that underlying this disappointment is the fact that many of us have seen this need in our home and educational communities and we want to do something about it.  This impulse is a very good thing and represents energy that we need to capitalize on.  Simply wanting to do something about it is good but not good enough; we need and desire concrete action and real answers.  These will simply be handed to us from our school’s administration, they can put us in a room together but they can’t make us talk to each other.  And I do not think it is as simple as just talking to each other either.  I do have a suggestion (for some of us) but bear with me for a bit, I’m getting there.

We have been brought up to believe that different kinds of people do not get along together.  The overt idea that one is superior to another is mostly passé in the public sphere.  Culture now tends toward the idea that different kinds (though equally valid in their own right) cannot and should not get along together.  We are asked to buy into a standard of coexistence and tolerance instead of collaboration and genuine community.  The Muslim way of life and the Christian way of life cannot be reconciled.  White people should not live in the south side (with the exception of Hyde Park) and straight people should not live in Boystown.  The claim is not based on an objective fact of difference but on the idea that a defined group’s way of life is so subjective that someone from another group cannot possibly understand or live in genuine community with them.  This line of thinking has been identified as the post-modern version of good old fashion Civil Rights era superior/inferior style racism.  As we see it today it is often applied not only to difference in race but in any definable characteristic that might be used to draw identity based lines between people.

I don’t buy that.  I really don’t think that our differences need to separate us that much.  As a matter of fact I have had valuable relationships with people who are in another kind category than myself.  With women, GLTB people, people of other religious backgrounds, and even with people of color.  In case you don’t know me or haven’t figured it out; I am without color (more and more the longer winter lasts) that is, white.  Diversity comes in many forms (more than I would consider trying to list) but for many of us racial diversity takes center stage in our minds and hearts as a question that we need the tools to address.  We have seen it the lives of communities that remain hurt and segregated as well as in our parents’ stories of struggle or lack thereof.  We, as people who care about each other and the church, are frustrated that the truism is true: Sunday morning is the most segregated time of the week.

We all need to do something about this.  Since McCormick has no racial majority, I don’t know what most of you need to do but for those of us who are white I have an idea.  I am interested in doing something about our concerns and I think that it needs to start with white people thinking about white culture.  I feel like I don’t have a good idea of what white culture means and I don’t think I am alone.  The phenomenon of white culture being socially enforced as normative is a self-perpetuating phenomenon that cycles around the lack of white awareness of it.  It has created a monolithic structure that white people cannot see, maybe because we stand on top of it.  We need to intentionally talk about it, flesh out the bad and good in it.  We need to think about values that we hold how those have been imposed on others.  We need to do this work first for ourselves, to understand who we are and to make sense of our own racial identity.  Part of that will be asking people who have been compelled to conform to white culture to accompany us in our journey and compassionately help us understand.  If we can get at some of the truth behind our culture I believe that appropriate actions will be easier to find; though probably not easier to undertake.  We will be trying to wrap our minds around and begin dismantling white privilege in our school and community.  Unless white people do the hard work of looking at ourselves there will be no hope of scraping its surface.  White people cannot hope to speak truth to power unless we first confront the power that is represented in our own selves.

So if you are interested in doing this then talk to me.  Email me, talk to me around campus. Talk to other people too.  We need to connect, set a time and actually do it.  I think first it should be people who identify themselves or have been identified by others as white.  The first voices we need to hear are our own.  We need to closely follow that with non-white voices that want to help us understand the truth.  Maybe then together we can build a more hopeful future than we currently stand to inherit.

 [article has been prepared for print in the McCormick Herald] 

I am surprised that Jeremiah Wright’s recently dug-out-of-archives statements are so inflammatory.  I had forgotten that it is not common knowledge that the United States is a mostly racist environment unless you are not white.  Racism persists beyond Civil Rights.  Just because it is not popularly accepted for black people to be lynched anymore does not mean that racism is gone.  Come on now: Jenna, MS, remember that? A noose is hung from a tree in the south and its not a hate crime?!  Sure, arrest the arrest the black kids who may have reacted violently.  But you can’t really blame them when that kind of thing is practically a death threat. We still have quite a ways to go.  I have not heard much of Sen. Obama’s reaction today about the controversy but I have high hopes.  I have heard Rev. Wright a couple times and am acquainted with his work at Trinity.  People in the rest of the country have to recognize what the church and its ministry represent.  It is an afro-centric community in southside Chicago.  He preaches to a congregation that lives daily with the reality of racism that is alive and well.  Rev. Wright has a responsibility to empower his congregation to understand and do what they can to work with that reality in a Christ-like way.  Anyone who has ever heard a sermon before knows that you can not understand the whole message by only listening to the emotional climax. I hope that this can serve as a reminder to us all that racism is real. Avoiding it will get us absolutely nowhere. Forget the democrat/republican division, the experiential division among races is far more pernicious.

I am loosing my hair.  It is happening for real and I feel like I need to claim it.  So here I am, claiming it.  I knew it would happen sooner or later.  I guess I should consider myself lucky.  My dad started going bald at 19, I’ve got a good 8 years on that.   Youth is leaving quickly and my hair is in retreat. I had been growing it long over the winter, thinking that I might not have it for much longer.  That, I see now, was a prophecy as much as a plan.  So some of you who have not seen me in a while might be surprised when you see me next.  Depending on how this plays out I may have to take the plunge and do the bic thing.  We will see. 

I think distraction is contagious.  I know distraction is contagious in devious ways.  It spreads not from one person to another but from one part of your life to others.  Distraction is not just the lack of focus but is an active force pulling at the corners of thought, at the corners of our minds.  My generation has been raised on TV, flashing images, intensity in sensory perception….many things happening at once.  I am beginning to see that this is not good for anyone.

It is hard for me to do one thing at once.  I have other thoughts that and interests that pull me away instantly.  There, right there, another one!  I just wanted to stop doing this and make some changes to my flickr site.  I am resisting, right now I am not doing it but continuing to write.

I wonder if focus is just as contagious.  Does focus in one area of your life spread focus and the ability to concentrate into other areas?  I feel like I used to be more focused when I prayed more, when I tried to follow a spiritual discipline more carefully.  I have to fight against the impulse to do everything at once, accomplishing nothing.

Now to flickr…

I have been very interested in interfaith work lately.  I used to think of it as a mark of the end times, that one of the signs of the end was the mash-up of all religions into one practice that makes everyone happy.  Thinking of that image now, something like that would make no one happy.  Except for the people who see religion as only a dividing force.  I would picture a priest like person dressed up with a little bit of the garb of religious leaders from all the major faiths.  And he always had a fancy had.  you know, I think the Left Behind books were primarily responsible for that image.  But really, who among those for whom their faith really means something, would want to trade that for a an artificial mash-up religion.

Sufice it to say that I do not believe this is what interfaith work is about.  I am realy starting to see it as one of our major hopes for peace.  And I like peace.  Religious/worldview conflict is purported to be the biggest cause of violence in the world.  We are lead to believe that Christians, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Hindus will simply not be able to be in genuine relationship.  We are all fine and equal as long as we stay separate.  That does not make sense to me.  I fail to understand how people who believe in working toward love, treating people well and a lot of other good things that coincide with each other cannot be in relationship.  I do not think that the core of all world religions is the same, or even the same message.  To say so simplifies and downplays the significant and subtle differences of the different faiths.  But they dont have to be the same.  If each of our ideal worlds involve people getting along together, why cant we start getting along together?

I have been really interested in the Interfaith Your Core recently.  We are reading two books directly related to the organization in my education class; Acts of Faith and Building the Interfaith Youth Movement.  Very interesting so far, I will write more about all this soon.

BacklightingOriginally uploaded by ajdele

I went shopping with my boss at school last week for some more photo gear and we bought no less than 3 pocket wizzards! I am fully equiped now to do some killer lighting. If only I knew how to actually do killer lighting….This was my first attempt. I have 1 SB-800 at 1/16 aimed directly at my head, the beam was narrowed but in the tiny room that is the media office bounced it all around pretty well. I dont know how people do good self portraits, it took me quite a while just to learn where to place myself so as to be in focus. A little larger space might have helped.I took some pictures of Julie last night using two strobes, one snooted, one flagged. I am looking forward to processing them. Check flickr for those when they come up.

Obama!Originally uploaded by ajdele

Politics is such a wild bag. I feel like Obama has managed to attract a following from a large portion of the left center of the country’s mental landscape. And as someone who is being pretty damn successful at what he is trying to do he is criticized by people on either side. Republican/conservative criticism is expected. I am just a little surprised that there are people on the far left who dont like him. Ok I take that back, I am not surprised at all.The criticism that has surprised me on the left is a response to the expectation that some seem to have that Obama will save the country from the evil of George Bush, white privilege, and lobbyists. To me he seems like the most likely to make a real difference and to understand the importance of helping people without money. To me, it is important that he is an african american and I am amazed and thrilled and encouraged that he has made it so far into the presidential process. I did not think that I would see a black president in my lifetime. It means that our culture might not be as racist as I thought it was. Though race as been the forbidden issue to far in the election it means that Obama has probably had a different experience than the white majority currently in office. I have hope that he will have a more acute sense of how his actions as president affect those who are still the recipients of systematic oppression. maybe, just maybe, he can take some real action to dismantle some of these systems.Check this out if you have a minute, the author really did her research:I Refuse to Buy into the Obama Hype (now a supporter)