2. the poor will always be here. Giving us plenty of opportunity to minister in the model of Isaiah 58. There are many emergent blogs currently linking to an organization called Make Poverty History (http://www.makepovertyhistory.ca/e/home.php)

On the surface this seems to be a noble effort, but in reality it is a work in the mode of Babel (Genesis 11,) as it only exalts man and his efforts, and not Christ. I am not saying that we do nothing. The sin and shame of the Church has been our in-action on behalf of the poor and needy. However all our work must be done in accordance with Scripture, and must glorify God (Isaiah 41:17)

Becky, I am not surprised that you took those statements out of the context they appear in.

I repeat, in Matthew 26, JESUS says,
“Why are you bothering this woman? She has done a beautiful thing to me. 11The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me. 12When she poured this perfume on my body, she did it to prepare me for burial. 13I tell you the truth, wherever this gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.”

This is a statement of fact. HE is not saying the poor will always be here until the more enlightened emergent/liberals come upon the scene and end world poverty.
The church was always meant to minister to the poor, needy, and homeless, without fanfare, without boasting. (Isaiah 58)

Babel is any effort to place man as the center, man as the seeker, man as the do-gooder. Where all Christendom has wrecked itself is in the mindset that like the government, we just throw money at the problem amd let the specialists do the work, while we get about our lives. I have read emergent blogs that proclaim Bono and Kofi Annan and Nelson Mandela as "prophets"

These men are only prophetic in the sense that Balaam, his donkey and Caiphas the high priest were prophetic. (Numbers chapters 22-25 and John 11:47-53)

If Jesus said we will always have the poor with us, is it not the epitomy of arrogance to believe that WE will end poverty? Notice HE didn't say to do nothing. The make poverty history website makes no acknowledgement of a sovereign God at all.]
Babel is man's attempt at self-exaltation whenever and wherever it appears.

[...]Hey, I pray that these men feed thousands of people. The fact that I don't support them financially, or by putting a "white band" on my blog, is no indicator of a lack of caring and concern However, don't tell me that this is the Kingdom of God. Good works of men are not the eternal fruit. The good works predestined by God, performed by the people of God, are. Ephesians 2:10

The church in America has sadly dropped the ball. So we are stuck with government agencies etc. doing the work that we are told to do.

• There's something about being at school so early that you're the only person in the computer lab -- and the hallways are still dark. I can't wait for summer term, when this place is deserted once again.

• No more jackets for me! It's plus temperatures all week, I'm wearing a sweater -- and loving the new-found freedom of a winter jacketless life. Snow is melting all around, which means I can drive on the actual road again, in addition to seeing grass peeking out around the melting mounds of snow. Maybe this winter will actually end sometime soon.

• Just getting over a round of sickness in our little slummy apartment. New found energy and appreciation for food abounds. (just in time to enjoy hearing our drug-dealing neighbors crank up the tunes at 11:20pm, and then skid out of the parking lot. Joy.)

• Saw Hotel Rwanda yesterday with hubby and Ang. One hard movie to watch, and with the book I'm finishing up, I spent most of the movie either in tears or fuming at the inaction of the world during this atrocity. When the film was over, the theatre sat in a stunned silence. It's sad that it take Hollywood to educate the Western world about matters of world history. Hopefully everyone will remember this beyond this Oscar season.

• Taxes are done! Thank goodness I have Marc to consult in matters of income taxery. I miscalculated my return, and had myself paying the government $1300. After he worked his magic, I had $70 coming back to me. Much, much better. (he rocks)

• Lots of new things on the horizon for me. Exciting stuff. I love Spring.

• And with that, up to my stuffy little graduate student cubicle, so I can stare at my laptop screen until I'm motivated to write something that may come off as intelligent.

But for those who prefer to see conflict play out in a more public, exterior arena, there's The Amazing Race. The two-time Emmy-winning competition show narrows the sphere of conflict even further, confining it to pairs of people, but completely discards the domestic setting and instead unleashes the dyads onto a global game board in pursuit of a million-dollar prize. It's Xtreme Eurailing meets The Beach.

[...] [the producer's] misusage of the term "foreigners" pretty much sums up the ethos of the racers: They rarely seem to understand that they are the ones who are out of their element. In other words, The Amazing Race showcases American belligerence, narcissism, and ignorance at their most shameless. Set loose in unfamiliar lands, forced into extremely stressful situations, with little guidance, very little money, and no advance preparation, it's no wonder that the races tend to become hysterical and less than well mannered.

[...]While this may not be a picture of a train conductor who was just doing his job, or of the scared Americans who believe that a man on a train platform with an antique camera and a cable release is a terrorist, it is a picture of the sad, desperate, hate-filled state of my country's paranoia, which, with each televisable missive from that little house on the prarie of Pennsylvania Avenue, is turning its citizens into fear-based automatons that only respond to what's on cable, (as long as it's a station owned by Rupert Murdoch).

All hail the message when the message keeps you incurious, complacent, and scared straight out of your little, stupefied minds.

A symbol of Christianity that sits atop church steeples, dangles from necks and hangs on walls is now ending up in the mouths of the faithful, over the objections of some religious officials.

A mass-produced chocolate cross is being sold this Easter by Russell Stover Candies Inc. in about 5,000 stores nationwide, which experts say is apparently a first for a major American company.

"Obviously they've seen that there's a market for chocolate crosses at Easter," said Lisbeth Echeandia, a consultant for Candy Information Service, which monitors candy industry trends. "I don't see it growing tremendously but I think there would be growth in the Christian market."

However, not all Christians are happy about it. Chomping on a chocolate cross can be offensive to some, said Joseph McAleer, a spokesman for the Roman Catholic diocese in Bridgeport, Conn.

"The cross should be venerated, not eaten, nor tossed casually in an Easter basket beside the jelly beans and marshmallow Peeps," he said. "It's insulting."

Russell Stover President Tom Ward doesn't expect the chocolate cross to overtake the chocolate bunny, but he does expect it to bring in new customers who "wouldn't buy rabbits." Ward said Russell Stover considered making other traditional images out of chocolate but eventually opted not to.

"A molded Jesus, for example, would not be a good call and a cross with Jesus on it wouldn't be a good idea either," Ward said.

It is unclear how pervasive the slavery problem is in cocoa harvesting. There is little documentation beyond anecdotal evidence that the problem is occurring. Efforts are under way to conduct surveys in Ivory Coast to gain clearer information on the extent of the problem and possible next steps to end the abuses.

In July 2001, Knight Ridder Newspapers across the country ran a series of investigative articles that further uncovered this modern day slavery. The series profiled young boys who were tricked or sold as slaves to Ivory Coast cocoa farmers. The articles are riveting in detailing the trickery, threats, and abuses associated with securing and keeping these young workers.

Washington - In a continuing effort to bring pressure to bear against the Sudanese government to stop the ongoing violence in Darfur, two U.S. senators introduced a bill March 2, the Darfur Accountability Act, that would renew U.S. and multilateral sanctions against those responsible for the atrocities.

Senators Jon Corzine (Democrat of New Jersey) and Sam Brownback (Republican of Kansas) put forward the bill as a follow-up to a resolution they pushed through the Senate in July 2004. That measure declared the atrocities in Darfur to be genocide and called for appropriate diplomatic action, including sanctions. The House of Representatives and former Secretary of State Colin Powell drew the same conclusions about the region.

Despite public outcry and months of sanctions against the Sudanese government for its support for the Jingaweit militias, Corzine said, the atrocities in Darfur have continued.

This ongoing violence and genocide in Darfur, he said, "is really, at least from my perspective, probably the single largest moral challenge of our time. It is absolutely essential that we respond to it."

The exhibit opens March 23, 2005 in the Women In Military Service For America Memorial at the gateway to Arlington National Cemetery and will be on display through September 5, 2005. It features over 1,000 portraits of America's fallen heroes, representing those who have been lost through November 11, 2004. More than 150 American artists are working from previously published photographs to create the images. Personnel for whom photographs are not available will be individually identified and represented by service-appropriate silhouettes.

Well-known Washington portrait artist Annette Polan, inspired by the newspaper photos and the stories that accompanied them, conceived the project and recruited the artists. Polan explains that portraiture is a time-honored way to pay meaningful tribute to the dead. She quotes Vincent van Gogh who believed that portraits are a way into the heart and soul of the subject. "I would sooner paint people's eyes than cathedrals, for there is something in the eyes that is lacking in a cathedral, however impressive it might be."

On March 22, both CNN's Live From... and Fox News' Fox and Friends aired interviews with Carla Sauer Iyer -- a former nurse for Terri Schiavo who in 2003 submitted an affidavit with inflammatory accusations against Terri's husband, Michael Schiavo -- but failed to report questions about Iyer's credibility. Judge George W. Greer, the Florida circuit judge who has presided over several aspects of the Schiavo case, dismissed Iyer's allegations as "incredible" and noted in a September 17, 2003, order that not even Terri Schiavo's parents sought her testimony in the case.

• "Ethical and Moral Issues in Literary Communication: A Possible Anatomy" by Winston Weathers

Unfortunately, writers using the commentary of shock run the risk, in their enthusiasm to overwhelm the reader, of slipping into a kind of pornography that can militate against serious and effective communication. And what is pornography? I like the definition suggested by William Styron, during a discussion of "Violence in Literature," sponsored by The Authors Guild in 1965. Pornography, Styron says, is the result of too strong a dose of anything -- a rubbing of our noses in the facts of life for too long a time. Styron refers to an Andy Warhol movie that spends ten minutes showing a man eating a ham sandwich, the camera focused on just the mouth. The scene becomes pornographic, Styron suggests: "It has to do with closeness and we're bored by it, and eventually repelled."

Styron and other discussants with him came to recognize a pornography of violence, a pornography of sex, and a pornography, we may suppose, of almost any human activity. Pornography, these people felt, is the undisturbed, unvaried, close-up of a human activity, unrelieved by distance, carried on to the extent of boredom. When this pornography takes place, the moral impact of the commentary of shock is reduced -- it ceases to be commentary altogether.

Grace, she takes the blame
She covers the shame
Removes the stain
It could be her name

Grace, it's the name for a girl
It's also a thought that changed the world
And when she walks on the street
You can hear the strings
Grace finds goodness in everything

Grace, she's got the walk
Not on a ramp or on chalk
She's got the time to talk
She travels outside of karma
She travels outside of karma
When she goes to work
You can hear her strings
Grace finds beauty in everything

Grace, she carries a world on her hips
No champagne flute for her lips
No twirls or skips between her fingertips
She carries a pearl in perfect condition

What once was hurt
What once was friction
What left a mark
No longer stings
Because Grace makes beauty
Out of ugly things

Grace makes beauty out of ugly things

Yet often we could with more accuracy speak of persuasion "to attitude," rather than persuasion to out-and-out action. Persuasion involves choice, will; it is directed to a man only insofar as he is free. This is good to remember, in these days of dictatorship and near-dictatorship. Only insofar as men are potentially free, must the spellbinder seek to persuade them. Insofar as they must do something, rhetoric is unnecessary, its work being done by the nature of things, though often these necessities are not of a natural origin, but come from necessities imposed by man-made conditions.

[...] Insofar as a choice of action is restricted, rhetoric seeks rather to have a formative effect upon attitude (as a criminal condemned to death might by priestly rhetoric be brought to an attitude of repentance and resignation). Thus, in Cicero and Augustine there is a shift between the words "move" (movere) and "bend" (flectere) to name the ultimate function of rhetoric. This shift corresponds to a distinction between act and attitude (attitude being an incipient act, a leaning or inclination).

October: Oh, it's getting colder, the leaves are falling. Thanksgiving! Will there be snow in time for Halloween? At this point, after an amazing prairie summer, everyone has forgotten the woes of the previous winter.

November: Time to break out the winter jacket. There's probably some snow on the ground by now, but it's still a novelty. Everyone is still pretty happy with the weather, with only the occasional cold snap.

December: It's almost Christmas, and we all know what a drag that holiday is without snow. Soon, everyone is wishing for all the white stuff, if only for nostalgic reasons. It's definitely becoming nippier outside, but between all the spiked cider and all the Christmas goodies, your winter fat layer keeps you quite warm. Of course, it's a bit of a drag having your legs freeze in your New Year's dress outfit, but it's the holidays, so it's ok.

January: Now we're talking WINTER. -30 and -40 days hit you and your postholiday depression hard. It's one thing to feel all your joints progressively freeze as you trek to school -- but you know it's really cold out when any liquid present in your nose freezes, and your eyelashes crack whenever you blink. Winter starts to feel old.

February: The University mocks us all by having "Spring Break" in the midst of the coldest month of the year. There's a reason why February is the shortest month -- I think if it were any longer, most of us wouldn't make it. By this time, not only is winter starting to feel old, but YOU are feeling old, sluggish, and dried up due to this neverending season.

March: Proof that the gods have a sense of humor. They tease you by having it above zero for the first half of the month, only to SLAM you with winter again in the middle. It's now the official first day of Spring -- but looking outside, it looks and feels like the middle of Winter. Grrrr. By this point, you've forgotten the feel of grass under your feet, and the mere appearance of green outside. VERY ready for winter to be over.

April: Theoretically, by this time we'll be thawing, with wet pant legs and muddy cars. One can hope, anyway.

100_4784, originally uploaded by Jordon.

For Jordon's birthday, I wowed everyone with my balance-a-fork-on-a-toothpick trick.

It's a great icebreaker or a way to impress someone on a date -- though not as cool as my kung-fu banana abilities.

• Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair: Yep, that's right. Tarantino is going to release both films, patched together, the way it was originally intended (before the studio broke 'em up to make the big bucks). It's going to be an NC-17er, in order to get your gore on. Uma kicks serious ass in this movie, so I can't wait.

• Branaugh to do As You Like It -- his fifth Shakespearean play interpretation to film. I had such a thing for him in 10th grade World History, after I was introduced to his Henry V (his St. Crispin's Day speech gives me shivers!). Okay, maybe I still have the thing for him. Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing what he comes up with, this time around. (My favorite of his films is still Much Ado About Nothing -- sans the incompetant Keanu).

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie website is up and running! I need to wrangle some time in my schedule to reread this book before the film comes out.

• There's rumors of a Moulin Rouge 2?! That would be crazy and yet good (I think? hope?). Moulin Rouge is one of my top 10 movies, ever. Ewan McGregor is trying to convince the big movie dogs to do it -- may the force be with you in that task, Jedi Master.

• Again, with the rumors: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon prequel in the works, Ang Lee directing. I was reminded again of how much I enjoy this film, thanks to the newly instituted Movie Night in Canada (one great plus of the hockey lockout). "I am the invincible sword goddess!"
  

Plan to attend the third annual Solidarity and Justice Coffeehouse, an evening of international music, dance and art. Celebrate social justice activism, multiculturalism and the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

Admission is $5 ($4 for Newman Club and Development & Peace members), or bring an ethnic appetizer or dessert to share.

SASKATOON PEACE COALITION

March 19th is the second anniversary of the onset of the invasion of Iraq. The Saskatoon Peace Coalition will be holding a Rally at City Hall (Main Entrance) at 12.00 noon on Saturday March 19th. There will be a short address, singers, an open microphone and flowers will be laid at the Cenotaph, “In Memory of Soldiers and Civilians killed in Past and Present wars.”

Background: The Iraq conflict continues. Civilian deaths since the beginning of the conflict are estimated by the Harvard School of Epidemiology and Public Health to be over 10,000. There have now been over 1500 American military deaths and many more casualties. The US is currently threatening Iran if there is no reduction in Iran’s effort to build a nuclear energy capability. Russia responded by agreeing to provide Iran with uranium.

Donald Rumsfeld has recently told Congress that the US navy must be made more effective because China is beginning to revitalize its navy. Russia has announced that it has developed an anti-missile proof missile. The US continues the development of the bunker busting nuclear bomb and is researching the manufacture of smaller and safer nuclear bombs.

The present proliferation of threats and rearmament world wide makes it imperative for citizens to voice their opposition to any more wars. Canada should revert to its role of being a strong promoter of disarmament. An important step towards this was the decision not to join the escalating BMD system.

This effort should be continued at the five year Review of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, taking place at the United Nations in May. Canada should insist that the Nuclear Weapon States reaffirm and begin to implement the “unequivocal commitment to nuclear disarmament” made in the year 2000.

The Rally will begin at 12.00 noon. All are welcomed.

Please join the Save Darfur Coalition in calling for 100 Hours of Conscience - Voices to End the Violence in Darfur. Beginning with a minute of silence on college campuses across America on March 17th, and continuing over four days, we will be encouraging and supporting events to educate people about Darfur and give them the tools to take action.

We want people to learn more about Darfur and to support one another in acting to resolve the crisis. Groups will tailor their activities to suit their specific resources and backgrounds, but all will learn about the suffering in Darfur, and all will take action for change.

For most events, we ask that individuals write to Congress. We want each member of Congress to receive at least 100 letters from constituents with the message that Americans are appalled by the horrific conditions in Darfur. We ask Congress to call on President Bush to provide the necessary leadership, and to take immediate and decisive action to stop the killing, the rape, and the destruction of villages; to ensure that humanitarian relief reaches all those in need; to hold accountable those responsible for these crimes against humanity; and to ensure the safe, voluntary, and dignified return of the displaced to their homes.

Through our web site, www.savedarfur.org, the Save Darfur Coalition will support a wide range of activities, from individual letter writing to community-wide interfaith events.

We hope that you will participate, and we stand ready with support.