"I was more fearful of perpetuating a barbarism [in grammar] than, having done so, of envying those who had not."

This afternoon I attended a superb lecture given as part of Mayo Clinic’s ongoing Spirituality/Medical Grand Rounds: “Acts of Faith: Interfaith Leadership at a Time of Global Religious Crisis.” The speaker was Eboo Patel, founder and director of the Interfaith Youth Core, based in Chicago.

Patel, a Muslim, argued that we are in a dangerous period of history where religious rivalry often ends in violence. He pointed out that the media tends to portray religion in terms of conflict, often ending in sectarian violence. This need not be, Patel said, the only narrative that is told. The Mayo Clinic, he said, in contrast demonstrates how people of multiple faiths or no faith can respect one another and can work together for the common good. This story needs to be told more widely since religious faith, globally, is not diminishing but is increasing.

During the Q&A following his lecture, Dr Patel was asked about evangelism and whether his vision of “proactive cooperation” among believers of various faiths conflicted with their mandate to proselytize. His answer was, I think, both personal and very wise.

Patel said he respected his friend’s faith commitment that included the mandate to pray for his salvation and to evangelize him. That conversation should occur, he said, but it shouldn’t be the only conversation that occurs. We also need, Patel said, to get to know one another; to listen and ask questions; to learn each other’s traditions, ideas, and beliefs; to respect one another; to learn from one another; and to work out how we can live and work together for the common good.

I like that way of putting it: evangelistic conversations should occur but they shouldn’t be the only conversations that occur.

I learned that from a Muslim, and am glad to say so here.

[Thanks to my good friend, David VanNorstrand for alerting me to the lecture.]

In an article in the New York Times, “Cleaning Cairo, but Taking a Livelihood,” Michael Slackman reports from Cairo, Egypt about he zabaleen (garbage collectors) of that sprawling city. (You can read his report here.) Turns out the zabaleen are not simply business owners but a community—a community of Christians.

CAIRO — The garbage collectors of Cairo live in neighborhoods spilling over with trash. The children play with the trash and in the trash, when they are not helping to sort or collect the trash. The women sit right in the trash, picking out rotten food with their hands and tossing it to their pigs, which live right there in the neighborhood with them.

It is a world of shocking odors and off-putting sights. But it is their world, the world of the zabaleen, hundreds of thousands of people who have made lives and a community by collecting Cairo’s trash and transforming it into a commodity…

“It is not a job, it is a life,” said Isat Naim Gindy, grandson of one of Cairo’s original zabaleen, who now runs a nonprofit organization to help educate the children of garbage collectors.

The beginning of what they fear is the end started with the government’s reaction to news that a swine influenza was spreading around the world. Egypt decided to kill all its pigs, about 300,000, although there have been no cases of swine flu in Egypt. International agencies quickly criticized the authorities, saying that pigs were not spreading the illness.

But Egypt did not stop the huge pig cull...

The government said that it was no longer acting just to prevent swine flu, but that it was carrying out part of a plan to clean up the zabaleen, to finally get them to live in sanitary conditions. Egypt has tried this before. Several years ago the government tried to hire private companies to collect the trash. But the waste of Cairo overwhelmed the private companies, and little changed for the zabaleen.

“We want them to live a better life, humanely treated; it’s a very difficult life,” said Sabir Abdel Aziz Galal, chief of the infectious disease department in the Ministry of Agriculture.

Then the government came up with a new strategy: take away the pigs.

The zabaleen are Christians. Egypt is a majority Muslim country. The zabaleen are convinced that the government wants to use the swine flu scare not to help improve their lives but to get pigs out of Egypt. Islam prohibits eating pork.

“The bottom line is pigs are not welcome in Egypt,” said the Rev. Samaan Ibrahim, a priest in one of the largest zabaleen neighborhoods in Cairo…

As is often the case in Egypt, this crisis started with a decision that came unexpectedly, without consultation, and without consideration for how drastically it would affect about 400,000 people in zabaleen families.

The zabaleen and their supporters argue that if the people of Cairo could be taught to separate organic and inorganic waste before throwing out their household trash, the problem could be solved. The pigs could be raised in farms outside of the city and the organic waste could be carted out there daily.

But that does not appear to be under consideration….

Zabaleen voices will be part of that myriad song of praise when representatives of every language and tribe and nation praise the One St John saw enthroned on high (Revelation 5:9-10). In the meantime they suffer, and many of their brothers—like me—didn’t even know of their existence.

Joan Acocella reviews some books on parenting in “The Child Trap,” which appeared in the November 17, 2008 issue of The New Yorker. (You can read her piece here.) She begins by pointing out a simple fact—it’s not called “spoiling” anymore:

We’ve all been there—that is, in the living room of friends who invited us to dinner without mentioning that this would include a full-evening performance by their four-year-old. He sings, he dances, he eats all the hors d’ oeuvres. When you try to speak to his parents, he interrupts. Why should they talk to you, about things he’s not interested in, when you could all be discussing how his hamster died? His parents seem to agree; they ask him to share his feelings about that event. You yawn. Who cares? Dinner is finally served, and the child is sent off to some unfortunate person in the kitchen. The house shakes with his screams. Dinner over, he returns, his sword point sharpened. His parents again ask him how he feels. It’s ten o’clock. Is he tired? No! he says. You, on the other hand, find yourself exhausted, and you make for the door, swearing never to have kids or, if you already did, never to visit your grandchildren. You’ll just send checks.

This used to be known as “spoiling.” Now it is called “overparenting”—or “helicopter parenting” or “hothouse parenting” or “death-grip parenting.” The term has changed because the pattern has changed. It still includes spoiling—no rules, many toys—but two other, complicating factors have been added. One is anxiety. Will the child be permanently affected by the fate of the hamster? Did he touch the corpse, and get a germ? The other new element—at odds, it seems, with such solicitude—is achievement pressure. The heck with the child’s feelings. He has a nursery-school interview tomorrow. Will he be accepted? If not, I how will he ever get into a good college?...

Overparented children typically face not just a heavy academic schedule but also a strenuous program of extracurricular activities—tennis lessons, Mandarin classes, ballet.

It’s interesting how closely today’s Christians mirror cultural values and practices when it comes to parenting. In fact their anxiety is actually heightened, since on top of everything else they must also protect their children from the dangers of an increasingly post-Christian society.

It’s also interesting how St Augustine and Katherina von Bora—to name just two out of the myriad who could be named—did so well without having any of these childhood advantages. Must have been a fluke.

In a thoughtful column, “The Rhetoric of the Rant,” published in the Washington Post (and available here), Michael Gerson reflects on the plague of incivility practiced in the American public square. He is concerned about “not the blunt earthiness of the farmer or the unguarded political overstatement among friends,” he says. What he wishes us to consider rather, “is a practiced form of verbal aggression, combining harshness and coarseness to shock and intimidate.”

This sort of incivility is indeed rampant in political circles. Conservatives and liberals alike engage in it, and cheer on the verbal excesses of their favorite pundits. (Sadly, though they should know better, Christians engage in it too.) Here is an excerpt from Gerson’s piece:

The practitioners of the rant have their own television shows, radio programs and Web sites. And now it seems they will have their own elected representative, the author of Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot. Al Franken has made a career of such rants, supposedly asking “Isn’t Cardinal O’Connor an [expletive]?” calling opponents “human filth” and suggesting that his next book might bear the title: I [expletive] Hate Those Right-Wing Mother [expletives]! Which many Minnesotans apparently found refreshing.

The advocates of this approach often describe it (and themselves) as courageous. Franken explains, “My dad did say, ‘If you stand up to bullies they usually back down.’” But those who make their living beating up others to take their lunch money must eventually be categorized as bullies themselves. They take perhaps the most common human vice—self-indulgent anger—and cloak it as a rare virtue. But it is a strange moral inversion to talk of the “courage” of the raised middle finger. Perhaps adolescent rudeness. Maybe boorishness. Not courage, which involves standing up for a belief, not dehumanizing those who don’t share it. America doesn’t need another scolding lecture on the importance of civility. Well, apparently it does. So here goes.

The practice of civility is important to democracy. In his book, Civility: Manners, Morals and the Etiquette of Democracy, Stephen L. Carter defines civility as “the sum of the many sacrifices we are called to make for the sake of living together… We should make sacrifices for others not simply because doing so makes social life easier (although it does), but as a signal of respect for our fellow citizens, marking them as full equals, both before the law and before God.”

Respect makes cooperation for the common good possible. Civility acts like grease in the democratic machine; disdain is sand thrown into the gears. But civility is also a direct reflection of our belief in human equality. Even people we vehemently disagree with on the largest issues possess a democratic value equal to our own. Carter argues that this recognition does not preclude “passionate disagreement,” but it does require “civil listening.”

[Thanks to my good friend Steven Garber who alerted me to Gerson’s column.]

“God with his infinite perspective, and for reasons known only to himself, knows that we finite human beings cannot, indeed must not, ‘make sense’ of evil. For the final truth is that evil does not make sense. ‘Sense’ is part of our rationality that in itself is part of God’s good creation and God’s image in us. So evil can have no sense, since sense itself is a good thing.”

[From The God I Don’t Understand by Christopher J. H. Wright (Zondervan; 2008) p. 42.]