by UrbanFaith Staff | Sep 24, 2013 | Headline News |
c. 2013 Religion News Service
(RNS) Angélique Namaika, a Roman Catholic nun, rides a bicycle on the rutted roads of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s northeastern province of Orientale, which is plagued by rebel violence.
On these same roads, the Lord’s Resistance Army, a Christian rebel group led by Joseph Kony, a self-proclaimed prophet of God, has been killing, abducting and mutilating women and children.
But none of that has deterred Sister Namaika from helping displaced women learn trades, start small businesses and go to school.
For her fearlessness and dedication, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees last week awarded her the 2013 Nansen Refugee Award.
The award, established in 1954, recognizes extraordinary humanitarian work on behalf of refugees, internally displaced or stateless people. It comes with a commemorative medal and $100,000, which she will receive Sept. 30 in Geneva. She meets with Pope Francis in Rome two days later.
Through her organization, the Centre for Reintegration and Development, Namaika has changed the lives of more than 2,000 women and girls forced from their homes and abused by the LRA. Many of those she helps recount stories of abduction, forced labor, beatings, murder, rape and other human rights abuses.
Namaika teaches them cooking, baking and sewing. The women grow vegetables on a communally owned field.
“When they work together on the fields, they are able to stay together,” she said.
She also instructs women and children in the less tangible but as important skills of negotiation and marketing.
“I teach them how to communicate in the local language so that they can be able to sell their products in the markets,” she said. “If their cooking is good, they can find jobs in local restaurants. If they can bake every day they can have a consistent income.”
Namaika was herself displaced by the violence in 2009. She had been living in Dungu in the province of Orientale but was forced to flee to the camps by the LRA’s persistent attacks.
The LRA got its start in northern Uganda, but it has been pushed out and now straddles a remote and densely forested border region of Congo, the Central African Republic and South Sudan.
Some of its captives escaped to find refuge in the villages or in towns like Dungu. Many of the traumatized survivors, who need support and skills to start a new life, have turned to the 46-year-old nun who came to the region in 2003 from the capital, Kinshasa.
The announcement of the 2013 Nansen prize coincided with the release of a report about life for those displaced by LRA violence.
According to the report, since 2008, more than 320,000 people have been forced to flee the province of Orientale — in some cases several times. The report says LRA violence has created severe and long-lasting trauma for both the abductees and those who fled, many who are still too afraid to return home.
Namaika said she is looking forward to meeting Pope Francis.
“I will ask him to help bring peace in my country,” she said. “I want him to talk to leaders here so that they commit to peace. I am going to ask him to pray for Kony, so that he confesses his sins, gives up the violence and goes back to his community.”
With the prize money, Namaika hopes to develop a semi-industrial bakery for the women, which will supply its goods in Dungu and the surrounding areas. She also hopes to acquire more land so each woman can farm her own plot.
Copyright 2013 Religion News Service. All rights reserved. No part of this transmission may be distributed or reproduced without written permission.
by UrbanFaith Staff | Sep 23, 2013 | Feature, Headline News |
WASHINGTON (RNS) The deadly mall attack in Kenya on Saturday (Sept. 21) is a sign that the al-Qaida-affiliated group that carried it out has been dealt a blow in Somalia and they are looking to generate headlines with more high-profile attacks in the region, a regional expert says.
The militant group that carried out the attack, al-Shabab, wants to establish an Islamist government in Somalia.
In recent years, however, African Union troops in Somalia have driven the militants out of most parts of the capital city of Mogadishu as a U.S.-supported government there has attempted to establish control over the country. At one time, al-Shabab controlled parts of Mogadishu.
The attack in Nairobi underscores al-Shabab’s organizational skills and their commitment to die for a cause, said David Shinn, a former U.S. ambassador to Ethiopia and a professor at George Washington University.
But it also highlights that the group has to rely on high-profile terrorist attacks that generate headlines because they lack popular support and have failed in any direct fights with African Union forces in Somalia.
“Increasingly, al-Shabab has alienated the average Somali,” Shinn said.
The Kenya attack came shortly before a deadly attack against a church in Pakistan, but analysts warn against concluding that radical Islam is gaining strength. A faction of the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for it.
“These bombings are so common now,” Shinn said. “I would attribute it to happenstance and coincidence.”
Both attacks were conducted by groups with regional grievances, though some within the groups have more global aspirations.
Al-Shabab, for example, is primarily Somalis, though there is a smattering of foreigners in the leadership ranks, Shinn said. They are divided among those who envision a more global jihad and those whose goals are limited to ruling Somalia.
The Kenya attack may be a sign that al-Shabab will attempt more high-profile bombings, but their capability to do so is in question.
The last high-profile attack the group was associated with was in Uganda in July 2010, suggesting it takes the group time to get the training, financing and other support necessary to conduct a major attack. In between they have claimed responsibility for smaller attacks.
The 2010 attack killed at least 74 people and was aimed at two locations where people gathered to watch a televised World Cup match.
The latest attack comes as the United States has shown support for the government of Somalia in their fight against the militant group.
Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mahamud was in Washington recently and met with top U.S. officials, including Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and National Security Adviser Susan Rice.
(Jim Michaels writes for USA Today)
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by UrbanFaith Staff | Sep 10, 2013 | Headline News |
c. 2013 Religion News Service
A stained glass rosette and twisted metal from the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. The memento was donated to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture by the family of a white Baptist minister on September 9, 2013. (Photo Credit: RNS photo by Adelle M. Banks)
WASHINGTON (RNS) They were among the youngest martyrs of the civil rights movement, four young black girls — three 14-year-olds and one 11-year-old — whose deaths in a church basement horrified a nation already torn apart by segregation.
This week, 50 years after the Ku Klux Klan bombing at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., shook hopes for a colorblind country, the four girls are getting their due.
Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair were posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal on Tuesday (Sept. 10), a day after a piece of shattered stained glass from the church was donated to the Smithsonian.
“This was just a little over two weeks after the March on Washington, which had generated so much optimism for progress of civil rights,” recalled Randall Jimerson, who was 14 when his white minister father scooped up the shards of glass from outside the bombed Birmingham church on Sept. 15, 1963.
“And, now for this event to take place, it just was shattering for us to hear about.”
Jimerson and his siblings made the donation to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which is scheduled to open in 2015. The museum’s deputy director, Kinshasha Holman Conwill, said the donation fits the museum’s mission of reconciliation and healing.
“This is an extraordinary object in and of itself, commemorating one of the most searing and profoundly shocking moments in our country’s history,” she said.
On Tuesday, U.S. House Speaker John A. Boehner led the congressional ceremony at which the medal was bestowed. Some 300 people, including family members of the bombing victims, attended the ceremony. The medal will be kept at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute across the street from the Baptist church.
“These perpetrators of really what was the worst day in the history of Birmingham…they meant evil,” said Rep. Spencer Bachus, an Alabama Republican. “They were filled with hate. But God took those actions and took that tragedy and turned it into something still tragic, still heartbreaking but resulting in a civil rights movement and a movement for good, for peace, for love.”
President Obama’s speech at last year’s groundbreaking for the museum prompted Jimerson, director of archives and records management at Western Washington University in Bellingham, to make the donation of the broken stained glass.
For most of the past five decades, the family kept the rosette — with bluish-green and cream tones — and its twisted pieces of lead in the family’s dining room hutch as they moved from state to state.
He said his jaw dropped when Obama specifically cited “the shards of glass” from the Birmingham church as objects his daughters should see in the forthcoming museum.
“That’s us,” he thought. “That’s what we have.”
His father, the Rev. Norman Jimerson, an American Baptist minister who became executive director of the Alabama Council on Human Relations, died in 1995. On the day of the bombing, he and his wife visited the church when they could find no other white ministers to join them.
“She would show this glass and say the twisted glass here is the symbol of twisted minds that would hate people so much to cause such a tragedy,” said Jimerson, recalling the activism of his mother, Melva Brooks Jimerson.
His sister, Ann Jimerson, who has created a website about children who lived in Birmingham in 1963, said the memento’s move to the museum will honor the four girls who died as well as two black boys who were killed in the aftermath of the bombings.
“It was a hard decision for our family to let go of the glass,’’ she said, shortly before she blew a kiss to it as Smithsonian officials packed it up for safe keeping. “I have at least one good friend who kept saying to me, ‘That glass does not belong to you and the Jimerson family it belongs to the nation.’ … It will have a much broader audience here.”
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by UrbanFaith Staff | Aug 28, 2013 | Feature, Headline News |
WATERBURY, Conn. (RNS) The remains of an 18th-century Connecticut slave whose abuse continued long after his death will finally be given a dignified burial.
On Sept. 12, more than two centuries after his death, a slave known as Fortune will be interred at Waterbury’s Riverside Cemetery with all the trappings of a state funeral.
It will be a ceremonial end to the life of a man whose mistreatment serves as a reminder of the North’s participation in slavery.
Fortune died in 1798. His death is clouded in lore and speculation. Did he drown in the Naugatuck River? Was he fleeing and fell and broke his neck?
What is certain is that Fortune’s master, a Waterbury bone doctor by the name of Preserved Porter, stripped Fortune’s skin, boiled his bones and used his skeleton as a medical specimen. The mistreatment of the slave was recorded in a book about Waterbury’s history by Joseph Anderson.
The indignity continued well into the next century. Porter is believed to have opened an anatomy school in Waterbury where bone surgeons studied Fortune’s skeleton. In 1910, the slave’s skeleton surfaced in a closet in a Waterbury building.
It was then donated to the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury where it hung in a glass case with the name “Larry” scrawled on its skull, horrifying and entertaining curious schoolchildren on field trips. Museum curators realized the display was in poor taste and took it down in the 1970s.
There he remained boxed up, his story untold, until museum officials began researching the history of African-Americans in Waterbury and received a letter from a city resident urging them to look into “Larry” the skeleton at the museum.
What followed was a decades-long Fortune Project for the museum as scientists and anthropologists examined and studied Fortune’s bones, most recently Quinnipiac University. All the while, many debated how best to serve his legacy.
For Maxine Watts, the chair of the African American History Project, which partnered with the museum, Fortune’s bones serve as a reminder of the flawed slave ideology that considered African-Americans subhuman.
“His living and his death were not in vain,” said Watts, former president of the Waterbury chapter of the NAACP. “Slaves were not considered totally human. Yet Fortune’s bones were used as a teaching tool for human anatomy. Fortune is proof that we are all equal underneath the skin.”
The Rev. Amy Welin, who will preside over Fortune’s funeral at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Waterbury, said the way the slave’s master used his bones is hard for her to fathom, even after studying the cruelty of slavery. Fortune was baptized in St. John’s in 1797, where Porter’s wife, Lydia was a member.
Welin said she won’t eulogize Fortune’s life, but will preach about God’s justice
“The service will be for the rest of us,” she said. “What are we supposed to do with what we’ve learned about Fortune? What are we supposed to do with the racial injustice around us now, the ghosts of slavery that still haunt us?”
Fortune and his wife, Dinah, had four children. But because Fortune’s descendants can’t be found, members of the Southern Connecticut chapter of the Union of Black Episcopalians will accompany his casket down the aisle of the church during the funeral.
Steven R. Mullins, a founding member of the chapter, will serve as master of ceremonies during the funeral.
“I hope that the Waterbury community comes out to the burial,” said Mullins. “I hope people realize that there was slavery in Connecticut. Fortune’s burial will be a learning and teaching moment.”
Connecticut abolished slavery in 1848, but it provided gradual emancipation for persons who turned 25 prior to 1784.
The funeral will be held at 4 p.m. Sept. 12 at St. John’s Episcopal Church.
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by UrbanFaith Staff | Aug 26, 2013 | Headline News |
(May 10, 1963) The “Big Three” of the Civil Rights movement get their heads together here just before releasing a statement that accord had been reached on their grievances. (Left to right) Martin Luther King, Jr.; Fred Shuttleworth; Ralph Abernathy (Photo Credit: Religion News Service File Photo)
(RNS) It may be the most famous speech of the 20th century.
Millions of American schoolchildren who never experienced Jim Crow or whites-only water fountains know the phrase “I have a dream.”
And many American adults can recite from memory certain phrases: the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s use of the prophet Amos’ vision of justice rolling down “like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream,” or the line about children being judged not by “the color of their skin but the content of their character.”
Emblazoned on T-shirts, reprinted on posters and in textbooks, the speech has become an iconic part of the American experience. As the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington approaches Wednesday (Aug. 28), many Americans will participate in a series of events, including a commemorative march on Saturday.
To many in this country, “I have a dream” has a place of honor next to the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address. It celebrates the lofty ideals of freedom.
Over the years, the speech has become part of the nation’s civil religion — a set of beliefs, and rituals that are partly religious and partly political and inform the country’s core values of freedom, equality and rule of law.
Its place in America’s common creed is perhaps best symbolized by the oversize statue of the slain civil rights leader on the National Mall, not far from the Lincoln Memorial where he delivered his famous oration.
But scholars say it would be a mistake to celebrate the speech without also acknowledging its profound critique of American values.
“On the one hand, he appeals to Scripture and the Constitution,” said Josef Sorett, professor of religion and African-American studies at Columbia University. “At the same time he’s also critiquing those texts because the nation has not lived up to what it professes to be.”
King begins his speech “Five score years ago” echoing Lincoln’s famous “Four score and seven years ago” from the Gettysburg Address.
He then talks of coming to the nation’s capital to cash a check, a promissory note that the country owes blacks because of the Declaration’s promise that all men are created equal and have inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
But there’s a subversive subtext in that promise; the founders never envisioned equality for African-Americans.
“King embraces American values not to celebrate it, but to point out that we’ve never fulfilled those values,” said Jonathan Rieder, a sociologist at Barnard College and the author of “Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail and the Struggle That Changed a Nation.”
“He’s saying if you believe these things, then you have to act to cure your sinfulness.”
Historians of the era say King was angry with government, churches and society for their unwillingness to challenge black inequality. But as he prepared his speech on the Mall, he had to dial it back for pragmatic political reasons, including the Kennedy administration’s initial opposition to the march.
“King didn’t want to do anything that was going to spoil the chances of the civil rights bill or create a backlash with Congress,” said Rieder.
And so he wrote the address with Congress and Northern white supporters in mind.
Like other statesmen before him, he frames the struggle to achieve equality in religious terms, by invoking the book of Exodus, the account of God guiding the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt and toward the Promised Land.
“One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land,” King said.
But in the second and most popular part of the speech, King abandoned his careful notes and swerved into a call-and-response motif from the black church — the “I have a dream” sequence.
Scholars say this dream sequence did not originate in Washington. King had delivered versions of it in such cities as Rocky Mount, N.C., and Detroit. It was a part of his repertoire that year.
Invoking the biblical prophets Isaiah and Amos, the sequence marks a shift toward the future where King invokes God’s vision for America.
Just as the prophets were called seers, “one has the sense King is seeing things the rest of the country can’t make out,” said Richard Lischer, professor of preaching at Duke Divinity School who wrote a book on King. “He’s looking out on the horizon with a prophetic imagination we don’t have.”
In that famous sequence, King sees a future where the descendants of former slaves and former slave owners can share a meal, where white and black children can walk together as brothers and sisters.
Neither of those things was possible in 1963, especially in the South with its segregrated restaurants, schools, movie theaters, basketball courts and swimming pools.
“The celebration of ‘I have a dream’ often has as its condition a failure to take seriously the prophetic vision that was central to King that was not comforting, was not convenient, was full of rebuke and didn’t celebrate the nation,” said Rieder.
And while some might point to President Obama’s election as proof that the dream has been realized, many scholars point to disparities between whites and blacks in education, employment and incarceration as proof that there’s still a lot of work to be done.
The speech is even more significant now, said Lewis Baldwin, a professor of religion at Vanderbilt University “because poverty is much more pervasive than it was in King’s time. Homelessness is much more pervasive than the problem was in King’s time.”
“The American dream is still something that we have to work toward and we have to struggle for,” added Baldwin. “We have to be on a mission to achieve it.”
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