Call + Response

“…never forget, justice is what love looks like in public…”

Call+Response is a first of its kind feature documentary film that reveals a terrifying secret: there are more slaves today than ever before in human history. In 2007, slave traders made more money than Google, Nike and Starbucks combined. Call+Response goes deep undercover where slavery is thriving. First hand accounts from luminaries like Cornel West, Julia Ormond, Madeleine Albright, Daryl Hannah, Ashley Judd, and Nicholas Kristof provide the backdrop of for this 21st century nightmare. Grammy-winning and critically acclaimed artists including Moby, Natasha Bedingfield, Cold War Kids, Matisyahu, Imogen Heap, Talib Kweli, Five For Fighting, Switchfoot, members of Nickel Creek, Rocco Deluca, move this information into inspiration offering this century its first abolitionist songs.

Watch the trailer here:

Visit the Call + Response website for more information: www.callandresponse.com

What does the LORD require?

7 Terrible Abuses Suffered By Women Around The World

For most of us in the West, the biggest troubles in our lives are petrol prices, long working hours, and increasing food costs. For many women in the world, these are the least of their concerns. Terrible atrocities are committed against untold numbers of women around the world every day and for most of these women, justice will never be served. This is a list of the worst of the atrocities. In no particular order:
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Gender equality

We need to be concerned about gender inequality because the majority of the world’s poor are women: around 70 per cent of the 1.3 billion people who live in extreme poverty, on less than one dollar a day, are women and girls. Gender discrimination, or the denial of women’s basic human rights, is also a major cause of poverty. Men and women experience many aspects of poverty differently and ignoring these differences risks further entrenching poverty and the subordination of women.
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Stop Female foeticide campaign-The Aadhar Association,Cannes winner,2008

In India, every year 1.1 million unborn baby girls die before they are born. A disturbing print ad to raise awareness of female foeticide from Contract Advertising Mumbai:

How to Buy a Child in 10 Hours

ABC news has an excellent story about child slavery. Link to the article here complete with compelling video footage, or for convenience the entire article is copied below:
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Gentrification With Justice

Gentrification With Justice

By Bob Lupton

Building a new home in a run-down neighborhood in Atlanta was a decision that neither of our parents supported. It was a bad financial move, they counseled us, not to mention the danger. But my wife Peggy and I were not relocating into the inner-city for economic reasons. We had finally come to the conclusion that our ministry would be more effective if we lived among the people we felt called to serve than continue to commute from the suburbs. And so we graciously thanked our parents for their love and concern and went ahead with our construction plans.

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Dean Kamen’s Solution to the World’s Water Problems

In the News: There is a lot of buzz surrounding the water-purifying machine that Segway inventor Dean Kamen demonstrated on the Colbert Report recently (clip below). Everyone has been trying to find out more about his claim that “you stick a hose into anything that looks wet … and it comes out … as perfect distilled clean water.” So far, it looks like it is all true.
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12 Principles for a Just Society

12 Principles for a Just Society, an excerpt from Just Generosity by Ron Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action:

1. Made in the image of God, every person enjoys an inalienable dignity and worth that society must respect.
2. Persons are not just complex socioeconomic, materialistic machines: they are also spiritual beings enjoying God given rights and responsibilities. Each person is a body-soul unity made for relationship with God, neighbor, and earth.
3. Because the Trinitarian God created persons for mutual interdependence in community, society must be organized in ways that nurture the common good. Since persons reach their potential only in multi-layered community of diverse institutions (family, church, school, media, business, government), society must promote policies (consistent with religious freedom for all) that strengthen all institutions to play their full proper roll.
4. Every policy, both public and private, must be measured by its impact on the poor and marginalized because biblical faith teaches that one of the central criterion by which God judges societies is how they treat the least advantaged.
5. Both because God wants all persons to be dignified participants in their communities and because centralized power is always dangerous, we must strengthen the economic and political power of the poor.
6. Renewing the family must be a central goal for both government and civil society. (A family is that set of persons related by marriage, blood, or adoption.) While recognizing that today’s families come in many shapes (two-parent, single-parent, blended), all policies, both public and private, should promote the biblical norm of mother and father (united in lifelong marital covenant) with their children, surrounded by a larger extended family.
7. Every Person and family should have the opportunity to acquire and use (without discrimination based on religion, race, or gender) the productive resources that, if used responsibility, will enable that person or family to earn a decent living and be a dignified participating member of the community.
8. Everyone able to work has an obligation to do so, and society, where possible, has the responsibility to make work opportunities available to all. Everyone who works responsibly should receive a living income.
9. Society should care – in a generous, compassionate way that strengthens dignity and respect – for those who cannot care for themselves.
10. Quality education must be available to all, regardless of family income.
11. Quality heath care consistent with society’s present knowledge and resources must be available to all, regardless of family income.
12. Every community must enjoy public safety. Communities should be places where people feel physically secure, violence is rare, and the police and courts function without bias for or against anyone.

We must, as the Call to Renewal covenant insists, stop making false choices “between good values and good jobs, between personal responsibility and social justice, between rebuilding families and rebuilding neighborhoods, between sexual restraint and educational opportunity, between good parenting and livable family wages, between individual moral choices and government responsibility. Every institution in society must do its share and each one must do what it does best.”

Supply Side Jesus

I came across a comic commentary entitled “The Gospel of Supply Side Jesus,” and to be honest, I am not sure what I think about it. “Supply side” refers to supply side economics, and for those who have been around the justice conversation for a while the strip hits a bit close to home. Is what is referred to as “supply side Jesus” the daily practical response to justice issues some are proposing? Does this strip simply take unfair shots from the other side of a political/religious perspective? Can you embrace supply side principles of economic development without buying into a “prosperity gospel?” For that matter, what do you think about a gospel of prosperity? The entire comic is copied below:
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Top 10 Facts about Modern Slavery

Our friends over at Free The Slaves (freetheslaves.net) have provided a lot of great resources about modern slavery. Begin with the “top 10 facts about modern slavery,” watch two great videos about human trafficking, preview the interactive map, and visit Free the Slaves for more information…

Top 10 Facts about Modern Slavery:

• Slavery: Forced to work without pay under threat of violence and unable to walk away.
• 27 million slaves in the world today
• Slavery is not legal anywhere but happens everywhere.
• The majority of slaves can be found in India and in African countries.
• At least 14,500 slaves are trafficked into the US each year.
• Slaves work in fields, brothels, homes, mines, restaurants, — anywhere slave owners can feed their greed.
• Human trafficking is the modern-day slave trade.
• $90 is the average cost of a human slave around the world.
• Slave owners use many terms to avoid the word slavery: debt bondage, bonded labor, attached labor, restavec, forced labor, indentured servitude, and human trafficking.
• It is possible to end slavery in 25 years. Everyone has a role to play – government, business, international organizations, consumers, YOU.

Kevin Bales, explains how we can end slavery and human trafficking:

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