I can’t lie, I am sitting in an air-conditioned coffee shop in an expat community center trying to escape the heat and connect to some fast free wifi (almost unheard of here)… and I am getting homesick because they are blasting Katy Perry’s teenage dreams, Carley Rae’s call me maybe, and Gotye’s somebody I used to know.
notes from the desk of a writer/lawyer/advocate/work-in-progress - on hope, waiting, social justice, and a better world.
Ask me anything
July 28, 2012
a confession
June 15, 2012
"Our nation’s immigration laws must be enforced in a firm and sensible manner. But they are not designed to be blindly enforced without consideration given to the individual circumstances of each case. Nor are they designed to remove productive young people to countries where they may not have lived or even speak the language. Discretion, which is used in so many other areas, is especially justified here."
— Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on President Obama’s executive order which would stop the deportation of hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants and allow them to obtain work permits. (cont)
(via theatlantic)
June 2, 2012
"Christians are constrained by the imperatives of this gospel, the good news of a God who had a bias for sinners contrary to the normal standards of the world. This God in Jesus Christ scandalized the prim and proper ones, the orthodox religious leaders, because he companied not with the respectable, not with the elite of the society, but with the scum and the dregs, those occupying the fringes of society - the prostitutes, the sinners, the ostracized ones."
— Archbishop Desmond Tutu on the theological underpinnings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in No Future Without Forgiveness
June 1, 2012
"…we were operating on the premise that people could change, could recognize and acknowledge the error of their ways and so experience contrition or, as the very least, remorse and would at some point be constrained to confess their dastardly conduct and ask for forgiveness. If, however, they were dismissed as being monsters they could not be definition engage in a process that was so deeply personal as that of forgiveness and reconciliation."
— Archbishop Desmond Tutu on the theological underpinnings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in No Future Without Forgiveness, p. 83-84.
May 31, 2012
"Ubuntu is very difficult to render into a Western language. It speaks of the very essence of being human. When we want to give high praise to someone we say, “Yu, u nobuntu;” “Hey, so-and-so has ubuntu.” Then you are generous, you are hospitable, you are friendly and caring and compassionate. You share what you have. It is to say, “My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours.” We belong in a bundle of life. We say, “A person is a person through other persons.” It is not, “I think therefore I am.” It says rather: “I am a human because I belong. I participate, I share.” A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed, or treated as if they were less than who they are."
— Archbishop Desmond Tutu, on ubuntu, or botho, in No Future Without Forgiveness
May 30, 2012
"Our nation sought to rehabilitate and affirm the dignity and personhood of those who for so long had been silenced, had been turned into anonymous, marginalized ones. Now they would be able to tell their stories, they would remember, and in remembering would be acknowledged to be persons with an inalienable personhood."
— Archbishop Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness
May 29, 2012
"And that suffering on behalf of others gave him an authority and credibility that can be provided by nothing else in quite the same way. The true leader must at some point or other convince his or her followers that she or he is in this whole business not for self-aggrandizement but for the sake of others. Nothing is able to prove this quite so convincingly as suffering."
— Archbishop Desmond Tutu, on Nelson Mandela’s suffering and leadership, No Future Without Forgiveness
May 28, 2012
May 28, 2012
"Such utterly futile drudgery could have destroyed lesser mortals with its pointlessness… Everything had been done to break his spirit and to make him hate-filled. In all this the system mercifully failed dismally… He emerged a whole person. Humanly speaking, we would be inclined to say those 27 years were utter shameful waste; just think of all he could have contributed to the good of South Africa and the world. I don’t think so. Those 27 years and all the suffering they entailed were the fires of the furnace that tempered his steel, that removed the dross. Perhaps without that suffering he would have been less able to be as compassionate and as magnanimous as he turned out to be."
— Archbishop Desmond Tutu, on Nelson Mandela’s 27 years of imprisonment on Robben Island as depicted in the famous photograph of Mandela and Walter Sisulu in the prison courtyard where they and the other prisoners sit in a row breaking rocks into small pieces. p. 39, No Future Without Forgiveness
May 27, 2012
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Ace Palm Springs, posted to twitter by Jennifer Emerling.
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Wrocław, Poland (by 89t)
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Cinque Terre, Italy (by elaineflynn)
