Chesterton’s Fence: Understanding the Why of the Status Quo before Seeking Change [—at A Life Overseas]

The traveller sees what he sees; the tripper sees what he has come to see. —G. K. Chesterton (Autobiography)

G. K. Chesterton, the turn-of-the-20th-century English author, journalist, and Christian apologist, first came to my attention through quotations on travel taken from his writings. Along with the one above, there’s also

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land. (—Tremendous Trifles)

and

They say travel broadens the mind; but you must have the mind. (—said by the character Gabriel Gale in “The Shadow and the Shark”)

While these aphorisms apply to travelers and “trippers,” they also are relevant to movers and shakers, those who relocate to other countries and cultures in order to make a difference there. In that vein, I’ve recently found another idea from Chesterton—often referred to as “Chesterton’s fence”—that can relate to the life of cross-cultural workers. Before explaining it, here’s a little background.

Chesterton, born in 1874, was well known in his day as an influential defender and explainer of the Christian faith. C. S. Lewis, a major Christian apologist in his own right, credits Chesterton for impacting his conversion from atheism. In his memoir, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, Lewis writes that in reading Chesterton’s Everlasting Man, he “for the first time saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense.” And the prolific Christian author Philip Yancey writes that if he were stranded on a desert island and could have “only one book, apart from the Bible, I may well select Chesterton’s own spiritual autobiography, Orthodoxy.”

Chesterton began his faith as an Anglican, later converting to Roman Catholicism, with this conversion being the subject of his book The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic. It’s in this work that we find Chesterton’s fence. That concept in a nutshell is this:

When you come across something that you think needs to be changed, you should first find out why it is the way it is. Only after understanding why it came to be can you then follow through with the change.

To read the rest of this post, go to A Life Overseas. . . .

(C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, Geoffrey Bles, 1955; Philip Yancey, Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Church, Doubleday, 2001)

[photo: “The Fence Line,” by Alan, used under a Creative Commons license]

How to Do Life during a Pandemic—Cross-Cultural Workers Can Add to the Discussion [—at A Life Overseas]

Lately, my wife and I have been video chatting with two of our sons, their wives, and our four little grandkids. That’s what you do when your children are serving in a faraway land. That’s what you do, too, when your children, like ours, are close by but COVID-19 protocols tell you to stay home.

When we started out overseas, our parents didn’t have computers and Skype hadn’t even been invented yet, but I know how important video conferencing has become for ocean-separated families wanting to stay in touch. And my recent experiences back in the States have got me thinking about what cross-cultural workers (CCWs) can teach the rest of us about life under the cloud of a pandemic. While people all over the world are scrambling to overcome challenges in a matter of days or weeks, CCWs have been tackling similar problems for years.

Now I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but I’d like to consider the things that CCWs often take for granted that those “at home” can gain from. It’s not too common for senders to seek your input. “What is there to learn from people who do abnormal things because they live in abnormal places?” But as we all get used to a new normal, at least for a while, we all have things to learn.

There’s a lot of dialogue going on now about how to cope under “social distancing,” “sheltering in place,” and “quarantines.” I hope those of you working abroad are invited to give your input. You have a lot to share.

Here are some examples I’m thinking of:

You and your loved ones have dealt with extended separation and have navigated holidays and special events at a distance. You are masters at video chatting online, wrestling into submission Facebook Messenger, FaceTime, Skype, Zoom, and the list goes on. And you’ve developed your own ways of connecting grandkids to Grandpa and Grandma when face-to-face isn’t an option.

Continue reading this post at A Life Overseas. . . .

[photo: “DSC06088,” by Nickolay Romensky, used under a Creative Commons license]

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Headlines

camera lens

Yeah, I know that the saying isn’t “A picture is worth a thousand headlines,” but for photos from the Associated Press, with all the news stories they get attached to, that might be the case.

I’m not sure how I’ve missed this before, but I just found AP’s online photo site, with tons of timely pics from all over the globe. I’m going to add AP Photography to my news bookmarks.

Currently, AP’s main topic is the effects of COVID-19, and below are some of its latest photo links. Click through them and you’ll find a lot of “small” images to personalize the big headlines. For instance, in the first link, there’s a busker playing his violin in a Budapest subway station, the feet of Indonesian shoppers lined up on social-distancing stickers in a mall elevator, and a vendor in Morocco wearing a makeshift mask created from fig leaves.

Great stuff here:

[photo: “Fisheye,” by Winnie Liu, used under a Creative Commons license]

Golden Doors

When it’s time to paint your front door, choosing a color can be a big decision. Do you go with traditional or bold or trendy? Do you stick with white or black or make a statement with bright blue or red or teal?

My wife and I were at the house of some friends not long ago, talking about remodeling, previous and planned. We brought up some projects that we’d completed at our house, including painting our front door. After a lot of Pinterest searches we’d settled on a deep, dark blue-green that the paint company called “obsidian.”

Our friends’ front door is yellow. But it isn’t just any old yellow. It’s yellow with a story. Our friend told us that the door was that color when they bought the house and they’d decided to leave it that way. “Do you know the poem ‘The New Colossus’?” she asked. While the title sounded vaguely familiar, I had to say “No.”

She went to the door and took a framed print off the wall, and there it was—the sonnet written by Emma Lazarus as a tribute to the Statue of Liberty. Oh, yeah, that “New Colossus.” Cast in bronze and hanging inside the statue’s pedestal, it ends with

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Our friends have worked overseas and now minister here to refugees, some from the part of the world where they used to serve. Gold is their statement color. They want visitors from all over to know that they are welcome in their home.

In February of last year I wrote about the global refugee crisis in “Why I Don’t Pray for the Syrian Refugees.” Since then, the number of people worldwide forced from their homes has grown even larger, in part due to the tragic civil war in Yemen. At the end of 2015, as reported by UNHCR, there were 65.3 million people displaced by war or persecution. At the close of 2017, that number had risen to a record high of 68.5. That includes

40 million displaced inside their home countries
25.4 million refugees, and
3.1 million seeking asylum

I guess here’s where I could ask a challenging question, such as “What color is your door?” But my asking might be a little hypocritical, what with my door being obsidian and all.

Instead, I’ll just let the question in this song be the challenge, for you . . . and for me.

“Figures at a Glance,” The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), June 19, 2018)

[photo: “yellow-giallo-jaune-gelb,” by vavva_92, used under a Creative Commons license]

Getting Religion in Cross-Cultural News

Have you every been to GetReligion? Edited by columnist Terry Mattingly, it’s a site that covers news coverage of religious issues. The authors, journalists themselves, point out areas where media personnel ignore or play down the spiritual aspects of news, fail to pursue spiritual leads when they are uncovered or hinted at (they call those “holy ghosts”), or demonstrate an ignorance of things religious. On the other hand, they also draw attention to journalists who show a keen understanding of religion and its impact.

The title of the site comes from a former senior political analyst at CNN, William Schneider, who once said, “On the national level, the press is one of the most secular institutions in American society. It just doesn’t get religion or any idea that flows from religious conviction.”

GetReligion wasn’t set up to target today’s much-referenced idea of “fake news,” as the blog’s origin in 2004 easily predates Donald Trump’s accusations. Its authors are also too broad and nuanced in their viewpoints to simply parrot political (or presidential) perspectives. And the stories they comment on reach well beyond the boundaries, and national concerns, of the US.

Every so often, GetReligion writers delve into their “guilt files,” where they keep stories that they’ve wanted to write about but haven’t gotten to yet. I have my own guilt file for GetReligion, as over time, I’ve collected bookmarks from their site for posts that I’d like to comment on, all of which deal with cross-cultural issues.

Here are a few of them. If you’ve not been over there before, may these serve as entry points into the territory of GetReligion.

“Should Amazon Tribes Be Allowed to Kill Their Young? Foreign Policy Editors Aren’t Sure” (June 6, 2018)

Julia Duin’s subject is a Foreign Policy article that discusses a bill currently under debate in Brazil. If passed, the law will aim to stop indigenous tribes from committing infanticide and killing certain older children. That’s because, writes Cleuci de Oliveira, some Amazon tribes in Brazil see disabled children, the children of single mothers, twins, and children who identify as transgender as “bad omens” and believe they should not be allowed to live.

Not only is this practice controversial, but so is the law opposing it. On one side are those who agree with YWAM missionaries Marcia and Edson Suzuki. The couple helped formulate the bill and have founded a nonprofit to save endangered children from death. On the other side are those who see child-killing as a part of the tribes’ cultures and, as such, something that should be protected. The Brazilian Association of Anthropology says that the law would continue a history of colonization and violence toward indigenous peoples, “the most repressive and lethal actions ever perpetrated against the indigenous peoples of the Americas, which were unfailingly justified through appeals to noble causes, humanitarian values and universal principles.”

Duin wonders, what with today’s atmosphere of advocacy journalism, why Foreign Policy seems to play it down the middle rather than taking the side of the disabled children. She asks, “Isn’t infanticide one of those issues that doesn’t require debate?”

“Reporting on the Unthinkable: Ancient, Multicultural Roots of Female Genital Mutilation” (June 9, 2018)

In this post, Terry Mattingly highlights an essay in The Media Project on the violent and oppressive practice of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), writing, “Reporters and editors will want to file the information, and the sources, for future reporting projects on this issue.” Mattingly cites several “stunning facts” from the article, written by Jenny Taylor, which include the following:

FGM predates both Christianity and Islam, with Egyptian mummies showing clear signs of the practice.
In areas of Sudan without access to antibiotics, up to one-third of girls who are subjected to FGM will die.
UNICEF reports that 200 million women and girls living today have undergone FGM, with more than half living in Egypt, Ethiopia, and Indonesia.
In Tanzania, more Christians than Muslims practice “female circumcision.”
Even though FGM has been outlawed in the UK since 1985, no prosecution against it has succeeded. Tayor writes that this is because “the West is slow to tackle it for fear of being accused of racism.”

And chief among the article’s sources is Ann-Marie Wilson, founder of 28 Too Many, a British nonprofit with the goal of eliminating FGM in the 28 countries that allowed it at the time the charity was formed. (Since then, six have made it illegal.)

“The root of the problem is beyond just the physical,” says Wilson, “the root is spiritual and religious and that can only be approached in love.”

“Jehovah’s Witnesses: Why Some Persecuted Faiths Grab Consistent Headlines and Others Don’t” (August 7, 2018)

“The world is inundated with sad examples of persecuted religious, ethnic and racial minorities,” writes Ira Rifkin for GetReligion. So he asks, “Why do some persecuted minorities trigger persistent journalistic attention while others do not?”

Rifkin looks at an article in The Los Angeles Times about Jehovah’s Witnesses who have fled Russia and are seeking asylum in Finland. This is the result of a 2017 decision by the Russian Supreme Court to outlaw the religion, saying that its adherents are members of an extremist group. This has resulted in persecution and the threat of imprisonment for Russian’s approximately 175,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses. Geraldine Fagan, author of Believing in Russia: Religious Policy after Communism, calls this “easily the worst attack on religious freedom in post-Soviet Russia.”

But while there has been sporadic coverage of the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ plight in the news, journalists in the west have given more attention to groups such as the Muslim Rohingya in Myanmar, European Jews, and Tibetan Buddhists. Why is that? The “short answer,” writes Rifkin, is

Groups that are relatively small and politically insignificant or are oppressed by powerful governments—Russia in the case of Jehovah’s Witnesses—get far less ongoing coverage than groups connected to globally significant constituencies. Think Christians in North Korea and China, for example.

Take a look at the rest of Rifkin’s post for the long answer.

And take a look at GetReligion for a religion-informed take on the news.

(Terry Mattingly, “The Mainstream Press ‘Just Doesn’t Get Religion,'” GetReligion, March 7, 2004; Cleuci de Oliveira, “The Right to Kill: Should Brazil Keep Its Amazon Tribes from Taking the Lives of Their Children?” Foreign Policy, April 9, 2018; Jenny Taylor, “Fighting FGM Is a Spiritual War,” The Media Project, May 2018; Sabra Ayres, “Facing Religious Persecution in Russia, Jehovah’s Witnesses Find Refuge in Finland,” The Los Angeles Times, August 3, 2018)

[photo: “Newsstand,” by Thomas Hawk, used under a Creative Commons license]

Beetles, 2, 3, 4

“Loveland Woman Creates Insect Farms to Feed African Orphans”

Loveland resident Amy Franklin found a solution for the hunger and malnutrition besetting Congolese orphanages in a delicacy that thrives in the wild in the African country—the palm weevil.

With no land for traditional farming, she has created small “farms” inside plastic containers to raise larvae, which are a protein-rich food source that can be farmed inside small rooms within the orphanages themselves.

“These orphanages are blocked in on every side by concrete and buildings,” said Franklin, who established Farms for Orphans, a nonprofit, with her husband, Alan. “They don’t have any land. They can’t even grow a small garden or any type of livestock production.”

. . . . .

The palm weevil is a beetle native to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The larvae, which thrive within readily available sugar cane, are packed with protein as well as other nutrients, said Franklin.

. . . . .

They taste like breakfast sausages, Franklin said, and 10-12 grubs can meet a child’s daily recommended nutritional needs.

Pamela Johnson, Loveland News, Reporter-Herald, July 29, 2018

Have a Taste for Cross-cultural Movies?

I’ve not had much time to write lately, but I did take a few minutes to browse some movie trailers. There are quite a few films making he rounds that deal with cross-cultural themes, and some for which the culture crossing comes (at least from an American’s point of view) in the act of watching the movie itself.

I probably won’t end up seeing most of these, but in the absence of a full meal, appetizers can hit the spot.

The Syrian Refugee Crisis: Stories and Faces to Put with the Headlines

I want my daughters to tell people how we ended up here, whether it’s in a book, in a film, or just an answer to “What’s wrong?” That’s all I want.

—a Syrian refugee in Greece, in Refuge

22527575640_ce96708328_z As I’ve read, and watched, more about the Syrian refugee crises, I came across two powerful videos. I decided not to include them in my post last week, because they’re on the longer side (around 20 minutes each), and I wanted to bring more attention to them in a post of their own.

The first one, Refuge: Human Stories from the Refugee Crisis, lets a number of Syrian refugees speak to the camera. In Making Refuge: Behind the Scenes of the Refuge Project, the film’s director, Matthew K. Firpo, tells why he and his crew made the trip to meet the Syrians in Greece:

We wanted to focus on the simple, important fact that every refugee is a human being, with hopes and losses and families just like each of us. And in sharing their stories, we wanted audiences to understand what it means to leave behind everything you know, to finally have faces to put to headlines.

In the next video, The Island of All Together, Syrians who have arrived on Lesvos (Lesbos) as refugees sit down to talk with Europeans who have come to the Greek island as vacationers. What a wonderful idea.

They pairs converse on a range of topics, some profound, some mundane, all poignant in their simplicity and touching openness. In one conversation, Otis asks the Syrian Rashad what he would do with a million Euros.

Rashad: A million Euros? I would help all of the people who have not been able to flee Syria.

Otis: That’s beautiful.

Rashad: And what would you do with a million?

Otis: I would buy a nice car, pay for my education, and give the rest to charities.

Rashad: I hope that God gives you a beautiful car. . . . I had to sell my car in Syria to get the money to come here.

Otis: What kind of car did you have?

Rashad: I had a Kia Morning.

Otis: I now have a Citroen Saxo.

[photo: “Refugee Crisis in Europe,” by CAFOD Photo Library, used under a Creative Commons license]

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