Romney Doesn’t Get It

Mitt Romney used to live in my town—Belmont, Massachusetts—but I am not rooting for the hometown boy.

Romney and his wife Ann raised their five sons in a big mansion on Marsh Street on Belmont Hill, which they sold in April 2009 for $3.5 million. The house has 6,434 square feet of luxury living space with 7 bedrooms and 6.5 bathrooms, situated on 2.44 acres. I live down the Hill in a middle-class neighborhood and take the bus to go to work.

I have passed by Belmont Hill many times and I always marvel at the huge mansions. Needless to say I have never stepped inside the Belmont Hill Club for the super rich.

Before last Monday, almost all forecast said that Romney was poised to win South Carolina and cruise to nomination.

Yet a few hiccups on the way have upset his game. I am betting the Patriots beating the Ravens in the AFC Championship football game this Sunday. Will the hometown Mitt beat the surging Newt Gingrich? It is too close to tell, according to the many polls I have seen.

So what happens to Romney? You have to understand that for people who live in humongous mansions (his New Hampshire mansion worths $10 million and the one at La Jolla, CA worths $12 million) and frequent exclusive country clubs, $374,000 is a very small sum. That’s why he said, “I get speaker’s fees from time to time, but not very much.”

It is outrageous that Romney’s tax rate was about 15 percent because most of his income came from investments, while I paid tax at a higher rate. Romney’s wealth is estimated at about $250 million. He will be the richest presidential candidate if nominated.

Last night, when Romney was asked in the debate when he would release his tax returns, he was very awkward and seemed annoyed. Did he have something to hide? When his father George Romney ran for president in 1968, he released his past 12 years’ tax returns.

His failure to release his tax returns has spawned many rumors: he has parked his money in tax havens such as Cayman Islands and he has put millions in the IRA retirement account, which he is not supposed to. Much more damaging is that he might have invested in companies that outsource their jobs to other countries.

He said people who criticize him are simply envious of his success. He has earned it through hard work. He might be implying that we are just too lazy if we have not achieved his level of success.

He criticized President Obama for inciting “class warfare” and said it is divisive to speak of the one percent versus the 99 percent. Well, Mitt, we did not start the warfare. For three decades, the super rich has waged a war against the poor and the middle class. Between 1979 and 2007, incomes in the U.S. grew by 275 percent for the wealthiest 1 percent of households, 37 percent for the middle 60 percent of households, and 18 percent for the poorest 20 percent of households. Today the top 1 percent of Americans holds 39 percent of the nation’s wealth and takes in 25 percent of its annual income.

Talking about economic justice is different from creating class warfare. Buying and selling companies for personal profits is not the same as creating jobs. We still have to know more about his business practices at Bain Capital.

But one thing is clear. Romney only cares about those who live up the Hill in Belmont. He speaks for them and to them. He has tin ears to those who live down the Hill. For the first time living in Belmont for the last 16 years, I received a paper bag left on my foyer last November soliciting for donations for the Belmont foodbank. Even in middle-class suburban towns like Belmont some people have to choose between paying mortgage and buying food.

Romney just doesn’t get it.

How Blogging Has Changed My Thinking and Writing

I wish I could say I start blogging to change the world. No, I started blogging with a very modest aim.

On January 23, 2011, I posted my first blog on this site. My aim was rather simple. I would ask students in the Spirituality of Contemporary World class to create a blog and post their journals there. Since I did not have the habit of blogging, I wanted to see how this worked. I created this blog and posted regularly in January and February. I posted 26 blogs in February alone. Then the number of blogs tapered off.

Many students in the course did not continue blogging after the class was over. But I carried on and had great fun writing it. In the year 2011, I posted 66 blogs. The number of words amounted almost to that of half a book.

Now with a year of blogging under my belt, I wish to look back to see how blogging has changed my thinking and writing.

First, blogging is thinking on the fly. You don’t have to do all the research in order to write a blog. If you do, it will be more like a research paper and not something instant. In the blogosphere, time is of essence. When Rick Perry drops out from the presidential race today, you can’t wait till tomorrow to write if you are a serious blogger. I sometimes wonder how Andrew Sullivan and other bloggers can comment so fast. This means you have to attend to current news and affairs if you want your blog to be fresh and relevant.

Second, blogging means writing fast. Although I consider myself a fast writer, blogging makes me type and write even faster. Sometimes it takes me less than an hour to write a blog. My colleagues and students are surprised that I have found time to do this, and they do not know that I sometimes blog at the end of day before I go to sleep. Since I don’t have much time, I just write what is in my mind to share with my readers. It may be the book I have just finished reading, the concert I attended, or anything I have read on the Internet. A blog is about 700 words. It's no big deal.

Third, I begin to pay attention to the craft of blogging. This is not a genre I was familiar with, since I write primarily for an academic audience. I look at how other popular bloggers start their first sentence, develop their narrative arc, and end on a high note. I learn to write in simple sentences and use simple words. I imagine my readers are from all over the world and may not know the U.S. context as well as I do. Indeed I was surprised to find that I have readers from Inner Mongolia, Iraq, Egypt, and so forth. I know not a single soul from these countries and am delighted to know that they have found me on the vast Internet.

Fourth, I learn that blogging can reach far more people than my books. For example, my most popular blog to date is “How to Read a Theological Book,” which has 4,179 pageviews, and the second most popular “Architecture of the Mind” has 2,330 pageviews. Many people have sent the links to their friends on Facebook, Twitter, and other networking sites. I encourage other academics to start blogging to popularize their ideas and to reach a much broader international audience.

Fifth, I cannot explain why some blogs are more popular than others. “Architecture of the Mind” is not a “popular” title and I was amazed to find that during one particular week 240 Russian readers read this and my other blog posts. I guessed a Russian professor might have found this interesting and assigned it to his or her students.

Sixth, even though I have written and edited numerous books, I am still intrigued by responses of my readers. Blogging allows me to gauge readers’ responses—number of pageviews and readers’ comments. After I post a blog, I check periodically to see how many people have read it and delight in seeing the number of pageviews grow. Blogging creates a virtual community. I envy bloggers who can post everyday and have many longtime readers who constantly give feedback.

Seventh, blogging changes my way of looking at the world. I become more alert to what is happening around me because I now have a medium that can capture snapshots in my life. It takes years to write a book and perhaps months to write an academic article. Blogging distills the moment.

Seven is good number and perhaps I should end here. How long does it take for me to write this? 34 minutes.

Prophetic Activism Is Not Dead in the U.S.

In case you are wondering what progressive Christian communities are doing to promote justice in the United States and the world, the book Prophetic Activism is for you.

The author Helene Slessarev-Jamir is the Mildred M. Hutchinson Professor of Urban Studies at the Claremont School of Theology. She worked as a union and community organizer in Washington, D.C. and Chicago prior to graduate school. She is familiar with congregation-based community organizing and activism in support of worker justice and immigrant rights.

I came across this book when I searched in Amazon.com for a book that gives me a history of American churches’ involvement in social movements. This book does not so much tell me the past, but it provides a snapshot of the present.

The author notes that prophetic activism has arisen as a response to globalization of capital and production and the huge gap between the rich and the poor in wealthy countries and the deepening economic crises in poorer countries. This is in direct opposite to the Christian Right who gained national power by vilifying the welfare queens, urban black and Latino men, gays and lesbians, undocumented immigrants, and Muslims.

Prophetic activism is characterized by: 

• A commitment to nonviolent social change: influenced by Gandhi’s concept of satyagraha or active nonviolence and Martin Luther King Jr’s civil rights movement.
•  The incorporation of aspects of liberation theology, especially among the Catholics. 
• The openness to diverse spiritual practices and to working with people of other faith traditions. 
• The use of popular education and bottom-up organizing to bridge the gap between the marginalized and the privileged. 
• A concern for the well-being of the marginalized and for upholding basic human rights for all.

After elaborating on how prophetic activism is grounded in the Hebrew Bible and Jesus’ teachings, Slessarev-Jamir discusses five arenas of prophetic activism in the United States: congregational community organizing influenced by Latin American liberation theology, religious worker-justice work, immigrants rights (activism along the border with Mexico and the new sanctuary movement), religious peacemaking, and finally global justice.

As I am working on a book on the Occupy movement, I find the chapter on global justice particularly illuminating.

Slessarev-Jamir uses the examples of Bread for the Word, Witness for Peace, Jubilee 2000, ONE campaign against global poverty, Save Darfur and Invisible Children in this chapter. She provides the background of these organizations and interviews staff and workers to offer a rich narrative.

Last Monday we had a U2 Eucharist at our school and we were introduced to the ONE campaign. A student from Iowa brought a quilt for the altar made by the young people in her church depicting the vision for the ONE world and the presider wore a similar stole. It reminded us that congregations can be important sites for mobilizing for action and worship can unleash the power of prophetic activism.

The Occupy movement can be seen as a continuation of the global justice movement: the linkage of the local and the global, the use of the Internet and social networking sites, the creation of songs, symbols, and popular culture, the horizontal organization, and networking with religious communities (e.g. the use of church space for meetings after the tent-cities were raided).

The book gives us a lot of hope, knowing that activism is alive and many churches and organizations are heeding the call to prophetic justice. At a time when cynicism runs deep and many people have lost much faith in political and economic institutions, I hope the churches can continue to signal to the world that God’s people are not frozen. They are still at the frontline, fighting for a better world.

The book concludes: “prophetic activism greatly enriches religious life in America by creating meaningful opportunities for religious people to connect their spirituality to a variety of just causes.” Faith without action is dead, the liberation theologians have taught us.

A New Wave of Scholarship

I came to the United States in 1984 to begin my doctoral studies at Harvard Divinity School. It was an exciting time to do feminist theology and religious studies. Womanist ethics just began to emerge, as Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon had just completed a dissertation on the subject at Union Theological Seminary in 1983. I count it as a blessing that she was teaching at the Episcopal Divinity School, on the other side of the Cambridge Common.

The mid-1980s saw the paradigm shifts in feminist studies in religion, as womanist, mujerista/Latina, Asian and Asian American women began to articulate their own theological understanding. If Womanspirit Rising (1979) was a reference text for our field, which contains essays by white women, we had the first reader by radical women of color, This Bridge Called Our Back (1981).

We began to discuss multiple oppressions and multiple identities, and the need to integrate race, class, and gender into our analyses. We challenged white women who have universalized their middle-class, white experience as if women are all the same.

In the past several years, I participated in a group investigating the intersections among race, sexuality, and postcoloniality, since we were using critical race theory, queer studies, and postcolonial theory in our work. We wanted to see what are the commonalities and differences if we looked at the intersections through different racial lenses, sexual practices, and (post)colonial experiences.

I am glad to see many new works have been published that push us to see the intersections in radically new ways. The subtitle of Strange Affinities is worth paying attention to: “The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization.” The cutting-edge essays explore the production of racialized, genderized, and sexualized difference, and the possibilities for progressive coalitions or the “strange affinities.” Even the headings of the different sections make me think, “alternative identifications,” “undisciplined knowledges,” and “unincorporated territories, interrupted times.”

If you are one of those who think psychoanalysis is nothing more than a mind trick of middle-class Europeans, think again. Unconscious Dominions says, “By the 1920s, psychoanalysis was a technology of both the late-colonial state and anti-imperialism.” In Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism, Ranjana Khanna reveals “the psychical strife of colonial and postcolonial modernity.” The collection of essays in Unconscious Dominions pushes the envelope even further, with the ambitious subtitle “Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties.” The contributions touch on French West Africa, Algeria, Australian aborigine, India, Brazil, Indonesia, and Haiti. It is nothing less than “psychoanalysis writing back.”

If you are puzzled by why the police and officials used so much force to harass and arrest the peaceful Occupiers, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State will offer you much food for thought. Chandan Reddy examines “a crucial contradiction at the heart of modernity: the nation-state’s claim to provide freedom from violence depends on its systematic deployment of violence against peoples perceived as nonnormative and irrational.” Remember that Newt Gingrich told the Occupiers to “go get a job right after you take a bath”?

If I belong to the generation that has pushed against the boundary of the white canon and scholarship, I see a new wave of scholarship is on the horizon. This new wave radically interrogates assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, culture, national citizenship, global sovereignty and global futures. Brilliant and groundbreaking, these new works stretch our static concepts and methods, introduce the new vocabularies of globalized unconscious and fragmentation of sovereignties, and investigate the connection between violence and social formations of difference. It theorizes the nation and the global in ways much more sophistically than what our generation has done.

There is a time lag between religious scholarship and scholarship in other disciplines, usually about 10-15 years. Edward W. Said published Orientalism in 1978, and the first essay on postcolonial biblical criticism by R. S. Sugirtharajah was not published until 1994. The first book on postcolonial theology appeared in 2004.

I sincerely hope that the upcoming generation of religious scholars will catch up sooner and engage with this new wave of scholarship in earnest. 

Jesus Would Have Been Born in the Camp

Occupy Wall Street. Occupy London. Occupy Harvard. Occupy your school. Occupy your office. Occupy everything.

Occupy Christmas? Yes, Jesus would have been born in the camp.

On October 27, the Rev. Giles Fraser, canon chancellor of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, spoke about his resignation because of his objection to the use of force to evict the protesters of Occupy London Stock Exchange, who have camped outside St. Paul’s Cathedral.

He said, “What the camp does is challenge the church with the problem of the incarnation – that you have God who is grand and almighty, who gets born in a stable. St Paul was a tent maker. If you tried to recreate where Jesus would have been born, for me I could imagine Jesus being born in the camp.”

Even if Jesus was not born in the camp, he would certainly join the Occupy movement, for he was part of Occupy the Temple of his day.

Really? 



Jesus and the Disciples in an Occupy Drum Circle by Sudeep Johnson

When I saw this picture with the article on The Huffington Post, I began to laugh. Yes, Jesus and the moneychangers. How could we have forgotten?

Don’t the conservatives always ask, “What would Jesus do?” Tell them, Jesus overturned the moneychangers’ tables and drove them from sacred ground. As Richard Eskow said, “It’s hard to describe Jesus’ action against the moneychangers in today’s terms without calling it ‘Occupy the Temple.’”

Now the police and officials have raided the tent-cities in the U.S. The once vibrant encampment at Dewey Square in Boston is no more. When you pass through it today, the ground has been resodded and you would have not guessed that some 100 tents were there just over two weeks ago.

So this is it? Not quite.

I went to the general assembly at the Boston Common the night after the campsite was raided at 5 a.m. on December 10 to support the Occupiers. The Dewey Square camp was the longest continuous campsite in the U.S.—for 72 days. It was a peaceful demonstration and yet the authorities would not allow it to continue. 

But the Occupy movement was never about seizing public lands and establishing tent-cities. In this new Occupy 2.0, the movement depends on community and grassroots support. In Boston, St. Paul’s Cathedral was the first to open their sanctuary for the Occupiers to meet on December 13. Dean Jep Streit said that the church is not taking sides, but wants to provide a space for the important conversations for economic justice to continue.

In England, Occupy London Stock Exchange continues to camp outside St. Paul’s Cathedral. They will remain there until January 11, 2012, when the High Court makes its decision on eviction. The camp now has about 150 tents.

Asked in Radio Times what Jesus would do in response to the Occupy group, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said he would be there “sharing the risks, asking the long and hard questions.”

At the Christ Church Cathedral at St. Louis, Missouri, the Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori of the Episcopal Church, USA, also made connection between Jesus and the Occupy movement. She said in her sermon “I am profoundly struck, however, by the parallels between the Occupy movement and Jesus’ band of homeless wanderers. . . The Occupiers have shared food, cared for each other, and challenged the rest of us about justice in the size of paychecks.  Now those who have been evicted are struggling with how to continue their global demonstration.”

Churches in the U.S. have long been involved in social movements: anti-slavery, temperance, women’s liberation, and gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender liberation. On this Christmas day, I hope churches will provide hospitality for this movement to continue.

Postcolonial Theory and Newt

Who says that postcolonial theory is too difficult and abstract, and can only be discussed among the academics in their ivory tower?

No, it is discussed on the pages of the New York Times, in the heat of presidential politics. By whom? By the witty, irreverent, and red-hair op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd.

The same Maureen Dowd who wrote about the spellbound love story of Patti Smith, the volatility of Steve Jobs, and the sexual abuse at Penn State?

It is sometimes easy to forget that she was a winner of the Pulitzer Prize on commentary, and has been a White House correspondent and covered four presidential campaigns. She is so smart and covers much more than politics.

She knows Newt, in depth. Many of us know that Newt Gingrich, the frontrunner in the GOP presidential contest, is a historian—a pricey one at that. He charges about $1.6 million from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae for consultation fee as a “historian.” The American Historical Association should crown him its Patron Saint or give him a Life Achievement Award.

Well, what does the professor write on? Novels and serious non-fictions. But he cut his teeth as a historian writing on Africa. On Congo to be precise. His dissertation at Tulane University submitted in 1971 was entitled “Belgian Education Policy in the Congo 1945-1960.”

I am one of those busy academics who have heard about this, but have not actually read it. But Dowd told us what Newt wrote in “Out of Africa into Iowa.” Newt said that colonialism under Belgium was both good and bad. Until the Congolese had been educated enough by the colonizers, they were not ready to rule themselves. He also said that we should not “generalize” white exploitation.

Newt is not the only historian defending colonialism. The British historian and Harvard professor Niall Ferguson is another one. In Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, he states that colonialism is a benign form of global government. The British Empire collapsed not because of decades of struggles of colonized people, but because of the overreach of the Empire. He bemoans the fact that the U.S. is not prepared to take up the mantle and finish what the British Empire has started.

Now back to Newt. Congo is a country that captivates all postcolonials. Why, because Joseph Conrad wrote The Heart of Darkness, based on Congo. Edward W. Said has written about the novella again and again. Did Conrad try to contrast the darkness of the continent with the “light of civilization?” Or did he try to demonstrate the brutality of the Belgian colonial regime and the self-doubt of Marlow? Where can we locate the “darkness”—in the natives or in the hearts of the colonizers?

As a historian, Newt fails repeatedly to read the signs of the time. At the height of the civil rights and Black Power movement and global protest in 1971, he sided with the colonizers. In 2011, forty years later, the former professor has not become wiser. At the height of the Occupy movement, he said that the poor people are poor because they are lazy. He said we should abolish children labor laws so that the poor kids can work as janitors. He sides with the 1 percent.

Newt, the 99 percent are not stupid. They are the ones who will decide whether you can become the president or not.

“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” said George Santayana. If the American people did not know the true color of Newt the first time he was around, they should know it by now. Otherwise, God save America.

Running for the President of the American Academy of Religion

“Pui Lan, would you be willing to run for the Vice-President of AAR?” the chair of the Nominations Committee of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) called and asked me back in April 2008.

The AAR, with 10,000 members, is the world’s largest professional organization of scholars in religion. The majority of its members are from the U.S., but approximately 17 percent are international scholars from over 70 countries.

It was a great honor to have been nominated—for the Vice-President would be in line to become the President in 2011. The problem was that there would be an election and I would have to compete with another candidate, who happened to be a professor at Harvard University.

I thought, “If I win, that’s good. But what happens if I lose?”

That spring Hillary Clinton was competing with Barack Obama to be the nominee for the Democratic Party. She lost to Obama in the Iowa caucus and fought back tears after being asked how she kept going in New Hampshire.

Although I was rooting for Obama, I was deeply impressed by Clinton’s courage to face defeat after defeat so publicly.

I asked myself, “If Clinton can face losses in such a public way, what do I have to lose?”

Yes, what have I got to lose?

I decided to run for the AAR presidency because I wanted to stand up for others. Even when I was a doctoral student, I was frequently invited to speak in meetings in churches and academia. I would be the lone Asian woman speaking on a panel.

I generally preferred to stand up when speaking so that the audience could see me. Very often after my speech, there would be a soft-spoken, timid Asian female student, who would come up to tell me that she was glad to see me standing and speaking. In the 1980s, an Asian feminist theologian was a rare sight.

So when I received the call, I remembered these Asian women students who once told me they were proud to see an Asian woman standing. When I said yes, I was answering to a larger call in life.

In a Wabash workshop for pre-tenured Asian and Asian American faculty, I said that as leaders, we have to bring the tribe along. Those of us who are pioneers have the responsibility of opening the door a little wider for others to come.

After Hillary lost, she told the misty crowd gathered at Washington’s National Building Museum: “Although we weren’t able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it’s got about 18 million cracks in it.” She also said, “And the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time.”

I have received many awards and recognitions in life. The AAR presidency would be like icing on the cake. Like Hillary, I want to make the path a little easier for others next time.

In the 102 years of history of the AAR, only seven or eight racial and ethnic minority scholars have been elected as President. I am the second person of Asian descent to have been elected; the first one was Professor Vasudha Narayanan of the University of Florida, who specializes in Hinduism. She was also the first woman of color to have served in this prestigious position.

Some Asian American scholars and students organized a banquet to honor me on the eve of the AAR annual meeting at San Francisco on November 18. I said to them, “Tomorrow night I will deliver the Presidential Address. I hope that many years later, you will remember that I stood up and spoke from the podium.” I wanted to encourage them to answer the call and accept invitations and challenges that come their way. If I can stand up, they can too.