"No Such Thing As Coincidences" -- by Carl Hooker

A couple of months ago I had coffee in St Louis with a man named Mike who is now a prayer partner and is also a fellow diocesan coordinator for EGR. We were discussing a spiritual path journey I wished to take and had been searching out for some time. In the process I discovered he and I shared our EGR involvement as well as he being a member in the order I was contemplating discerning. In that context, and obviously with much detail I am leaving out here, he said to me, "there are no such things as coincidences".

I am something of a news junkie. My Firefox browser 'home page' opens tabs for CNN, the New York Times, Reuters, Episcopal Life and of course the EGR Blog. I read these sites after I finish my morning ritual for the online economics classes I teach. I also read while eating my breakfast and lunch in my office, 5 days a week and a bit less but also on Saturday. I tend to ignore the Internet world on Sunday. I print the ones that fascinate me to pdf format and then file them away in my documents database on my Mac (DevonThink is the name, sorry no Windows version). Why do I save these things? It is not like I am ever going to read them all again. I do write an occasional paper, and now a regular blog piece, so maybe they will survive; it is not like digital space is as precious as the shelves for my books, and surely I am not killing trees to print them, this must be a good thing.

I imagine sometimes that in 10 or 12 years when one of my grandchildren has an assignment for school and I get hit up for some insight I will readily be able to pull Obama's speech on race from a week or so ago, or better yet link them up with the video. So when I come across a piece like this one from Reuters, I also pdf print it, file it and then think about it. Go ahead and read it, I will wait.....

So what am I to do with this new-found knowledge? 4% of Americans donate to political races apparently, to the tune of $1 billion so far for the presidential cycle. Several African countries have a lower GDP than $1 billion and maybe a portion of the political money could have been spent on a more noteworthy and humanitarian endeavor. Wow, that is a lot of guilt to carry around. I tell you what I am going to do about it, I am going to somehow rant about it, point out the injustice and get a little worked up.

So I do all that, formulate what I want to say, commit it to the screen in my Google Documents pages, save and close. Open it up later to proofread and realize..... I have not made any contributions to any of the candidates at this point, but neither have I sent any money to help work the MDG's this year. I feel a lot more guilt about the latter than the former, but I am taken down a few pegs. It has to be one of these common reasons I keep telling myself as I make a list:

• I just have not had time to write the check.

• Maybe I can blame it on the wide number of potential locations for the donation, I mean hello, there are tons of places I could send a check to that will put it to good use, so many to choose from, which one(s)?

• Maybe I can blame the economy, we are after all in a recession (I am an economist - trust me; if it walks like a recession and quacks like a recession, then it probably is a recession) =;>)

• I just do not have the resources right now.

So I spend all this time thinking first about the huge waste of money for one thing and not enough for the other, my head spins several times before I finally get quiet enough to hear God. You see I am putting my socks on the other morning and since that is such an automatic thing at my age my mind is clear and I hear in my mind, "rebate check". It takes me about 2 seconds to figure out the "voice" means I should do something with my upcoming rebate check. No more reason to put it off, no more excuses, done deal. And to think I started off by evaluating the article based on the abuses of politics and ended up seeing the proverbial three fingers that were pointing back at me. Don't you just hate it when that happens? You climb up on a great old soapbox, ready to preach the vileness and corruption of sin you see all around you and humility creeps in while you are putting on your socks. So I delete key what used to be on the screen and write this.

Afterthought.
My current understanding is that about $167 billion will be sent out in rebate checks, 0.7% is $1.2 billion, probably roughly equal to the amount that will have been spent on the campaigns by the time the rebate checks have all been dispersed. Mike was right, "there are no such things as coincidences".

Editor's Note: -- EGR is right there with you, Carl. Look this week for the launching of our Give It For Good Campaign ... a movement to take your economic stimulus check and choose compassion over consumption. There are different levels of commitment so everyone can participate -- even if you really need the check to put food on your table. Give It For Good is still gearing up, but you can see the "work in progress" home page and even take the Give It For Good pledge before the official launch date of April 2.

Choose compassion over consumption. Take your stimulus check and Give It For Good.

Carl Hooker is an economist employed in an academic healthcare system. He is an EGR diocese coordinator in the Diocese of Missouri and currently studies in the diocesan school for ministry.

"Jeffery Sachs visits The Daily Show with Jon Stewart"

A little video to pick you up on "low Sunday." Economist Jeffrey Sachs, author of The End of Poverty and one of the world's most influential proponents of the Millennium Development Goals, dropped by The Daily Show with Jon Stewart this week to talk about his latest book, Common Wealth, and what we -- and our governments -- need to do to make poverty history. It's a little under 6 minutes, entertaining and informative. Enjoy!

"Women join demining charge in south Sudan" -- by Skye Wheeler, Reuters

This excellent article from Reuters and the International Herald Tribune details just one aspect of everyday life in Southern Sudan -- women ... sometimes pregnant women ... working to remove mines from roads. As I traveled in southern Sudan you could see the places where mines had been removed from the road ... and then occasionally you would see a large crater (sometimes accompanied by the charred wreckage of a vehicle off the side of the road) near it.

Skye Wheeler of Reuters does a beautiful job reporting this horrific situation. For more excellent reporting on Africa, be sure and visit africa.reuters.com regularly.

MILE 38, Sudan: Seven months pregnant Opayi Mary stands half a metre away from a mine made expressly to blow anything over 3 kg to pieces. For her, it's just part of a day's work.

Mary leads an all-female team of deminers working for Norwegian People's Aid (NPA) in one of south Sudan's most dangerous areas: the civil war battlefield Mile 38.

The location, 38 miles (61 km) from the southern capital Juba, was on the frontline in a decades-long conflict between mainly Christian and animist southern rebels and the Islamist government in Khartoum.

The war, fought over ideology and ethnicity and fuelled by oil, killed 2 million people and displaced 4 million before a peace deal was signed in 2005.

Now, south Sudan's semi-autonomous government, which will hold a referendum on secession in 2011, is trying to rebuild a region where even the most basic infrastructure is lacking.

Clearing the thousands of mines is an important part of efforts to rebuild the devastated region, where mined roads have made travel and transport of goods difficult.

"I was so afraid of my first one," Mary admits. Two years later she is now in charge of her group's safety and for exploding the mines taken from this empty scrubland.

"Now I have taken more than 20. I can even hold them with my hand," Mary grins. She is short and seems all burgeoning bump but walks fast between cordoned off areas.

Under Mary's watch, Joanne Jenty slides a prong into a marked-out area in front of her that she has already wetted. In the hot silence of the bush and on her hands and knees, she is feeling for the side of a mine that she will then delicately unearth.

People used to live along this major trade route but have been slow to return since the war ended, deterred by a lack of infrastructure, worries of a return to fighting and the lines of hidden explosives buried just inches under the earth's surface.

The UN Mine Action Office, which coordinates demining projects run by dozens of groups, says more than 2,000 people have been killed or injured by mines since the end of the war. The cost for farmers and communities is incalculable, it says.

STILL A STRUGGLE

With a new administration and funds of between $1.5 - $1.7 billion a year from the region's share of oil revenues, many southerners were expecting dramatic peace dividends for communities long alienated from basic services by war.

They have been disappointed. The daily struggle for survival has not changed for most rural populations and returning refugees put more pressure on scant resources. A government study showed around 90 percent see corruption as a major problem.

And the peace is still shaky.

In December and January, Misseriya tribesmen fought southern soldiers in the Abyei area, an oil-rich region straddling northern and southern Sudan. The distribution of oil revenues and border demarcation remain contentious issues.

But Mary, who fled the war to neighbouring Uganda, believes passionately that peace will hold.

"My work is like a soldier," she explained.

"When we are in training we learn: your first mistake is your last," she said as she showed her simple bush tent that contained a fancy handbag and a bottle of nail polish.

So far, Mary's team and another NPA team have removed 205 antipersonnel mines and 96 anti-tank mines from around the main road that links neighbouring Uganda to Juba, the capital of a vast and wild region that still has no large commercial farming or factories.

For Mary, who feels her baby move as she works, the job just has to be done, inch by gruelling inch in prickling grass.

"We have to work hard to develop our country, even if it is hard," she said. "We have to clear. For my children and for others."

Mary initially wanted to be a doctor but could not afford the training. But her pragmatic mind has adapted well to clearing contaminated earth.

Read the rest of the story here.

(Writing by Skye Wheeler; Editing by Alastair Sharp)

"My brother is dead ... and I helped kill him" -- by the Rev. Mike Kinman

Author's note: If you're coming to this post from a link somewhere else on the internet (and it's getting linked lots of places), welcome. My hope is that in some small way this can put a human face on the tragic destruction of life that is happening in Iraq in a way that will spur people to thoughtful and prayerful action. The end of this post has specific action steps that I have committed to take and an invitation for you to join me in them. I hope you will consider that invitation seriously. If Ali's story merely makes you shed a tear before going on with your life as before, then this has accomplished nothing. Nothing can stop Ali's death from being a waste, however we can honor him if we let this story change us in ways that will prevent more death.

I invite you also to consider What One Person (You!) Can Do to prevent another tragedy -- the 30,000 children under 5 who die each day not from shrapnel or guns ... but from the scourge of extreme poverty. Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation has embraced the Millennium Development Goals as a structure for living out Christ's call to seek and serve him in those 30,000 children who die each day (one every three seconds). I invite you to visit our website to explore answers to that question" "What Can One Person Do?"

The answer is -- a lot!

Christ's peace,
Mike+
-------------------------
Midday yesterday, this email popped into my inbox.

Mike,

Mohammed's brother Ali died of his wounds today courtesy of shrapnel and flames caused by US missile strike.

He was 9.

Don't expect to hear anything from Mohammed until 40 day of the mourning period is over. XXX* says US soldiers shot at Mohammed as he approached a roadblock they had set up and that he was carrying Ali in his arms trying to get to hospital. He also says that Ali was very badly burned and died screaming.

*Co-worker of Mohammed's, name removed for security reasons

The words cut through my heart to read. Not because they should have been surprising ... although maybe because I had been living in denial of how predictable they were. But mostly because the friend who sent me this email was telling me my brother was dead, and he died in my other brother's arms -- my brother, Mohammed, who was experiencing pain I could not even imagine ... and not for the first time.

The words cut through my heart to read because I knew.

My brother is dead ... and I helped kill him.

A little background for the perplexed...

I first "met" Mohammed a little more than a year ago. Looking for information about what was really happening on the ground in Irak, I found this website set up by an Irish former UN Peacekeeper who spends a great deal of time there. They set up people on the ground in Irak with laptops and digital cameras to document what is really happening there.

I read this post by Mohammed and was immediately struck by his eloquence and the power of his writing. I quoted it in a sermon I preached the next Sunday and then posted on my blog. Through the wonders of Google alerts, Mohammed found my sermon and commented on it, which started a conversations of posts and comments between us.

I learned that Mohammed was 16 years old, that he worked not just for Gorilla's Guides but also doing things like delivering food to people in refugee camps. I also learned that I couldn't know his real name or any other details that might identify him because their lives were in danger if they were identified as being Gorilla's Guides bloggers.

I learned that Mohammed hated America because America had invaded and occupied his country and killed his people. At the same time, he was willing and even eager to be in conversation with me because of his respect for whom he refers to as the Prophet Jesus (Praise Be Unto Him) and his teachings. That my Christian faith and priesthood and his submission to Islam were a common ground for conversation. So we made plans to begin an online conversation on a private, secure channel.

But before we could begin, I got this email:

Most of Mohammed's remaining family killed in Arbaeen massacres.
Father killed on Tuesday. Mother died of wounds incurred same attack yesterday. Little brother wounded same attack but now released from hospital. One other sibling in refugee camp uniinjured.

Mohammed now head of family in "nuclear family" sense of expression.

Mohammed and brother on pilgimage

The "little brother" was Ali.

When our conversation began again it was hard going. We started from the relatively safe ground of what we each believed as Muslim and Christian, but the conversation quickly turned to Irak and the U.S. I said I hoped we could become friends. He had serious doubts about that but always assured me that we were brothers. "My brother in humanity," he calls me ... and I call him the same.

The conversation was challenging and convicting. Mohammed continually said things that were and are difficult for me to hear as someone who loves my country and believes deeply in the ideals upon which it was founded and to which I believe our better angels still strongly aspire. At the same time, I was carrying on an email conversation with a former student of mine, Paul, who was an Army Ranger stationed in Irak. Paul is one of those people who represents to me the desire to follow our better angels, someone willing to live sacrificially for what he believes in.

The stories and perspectives I was getting from each of them sometimes converged but more often than not were poles apart.

I cannot even begin to go into what Mohammed has taught me not just about what is going on in Irak, but about Islam ... and about my own Christian faith. Holding his story in tension with Paul's was almost always difficult, but I became convinced that no matter how well intentioned and good-hearted soldiers like Paul were (and Mohammed and I went back and forth on that one!), our presence there must end and it must end totally.

I spend my life trying to follow Christ and working for God's mission of global reconciliation. I speak about and work for the Millennium Development Goals as a structure for living out that discipleship and achieving that mission. It's what Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation is all about. Christ's life is about healing and bringing abundant life to all humanity. The MDGs are about healing and removing poverty and disease and environmental destruction from humanity ... and doing it in a way that draws us together in a common effort.

Through Mohammed and even through Paul, I have come to believe that our presence in Irak works completely counter to these goals. We are not wanted there. Our presence there is an affront to the deep faith of many of the people. Our presence there has caused -- either by us directly or by the forces destabilization has set loose -- countless civilian deaths (Iraq Body Count gives a VERY conservative estimate) and untold more displaced persons.

Our presence there and our foreign policy of imperial domination continues to undermine our standing in the world and continually diminishes our power and authority to lead the world in working to achieve the MDGs.

I have come to realize these things. I have come to believe them strongly. I have even occasionally, as I did at the Diocese of Iowa's convention, spoken them out loud in public by sharing Mohammed's difficult words with others.

But I have not done enough. I have not done nearly enough. Edmund Burke was right when he said "all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good (people) to do nothing." And I have not done even the least I can do, not by any stretch of the imagination.

It was a realization that came with a conviction as I read the email in my inbox yesterday.

The email that brought to my mind an image of Mohammed, "my brother in humanity," carrying his dying little brother, just nine years old, having to deal with dodging bullets from American soldiers as he tried to get him to a hospital. How terrified everyone must have been -- Ali, Mohammed, even the soldiers at the roadblock. The confusion. The pain. The screams. The terror.

As I was reading it, I heard a voice from the other room, my own nine-year-old son, Schroedter, home from spring break and playing with his younger brother. The face on the boy being carried, screaming, through the gunfire and the confusion changed to his.

I thought of Mohammed, "my brother in humanity," once more having to bury a member of his family ... but because of his new role as head of his family this time it being much more like burying a son than a brother. I thought of his pain ... and of Ali -- my brother's brother is my brother. And the words came into my heart like a dagger.

My brother is dead ... and I helped kill him.

I did not launch the airstrike. I did not fire the shots at Mohammed as he carried his brother desperately toward the roadblock.

But I did not do nearly enough to stop it.

So What Can One Person Do?

It is a question I have been pondering through a largely sleepless night. And what I have to offer is still not enough. But it is a start.

And I invite you to join me.

PRAY - I will pray daily for wisdom and peace. Pray for the people of Irak. Pray for the dead, pray for those in refugee camps. Pray for those who have fled the destruction and long to return home. Pray for an end to the occupation.

LEARN - I will continue not to trust what the mainstream media is telling us about Irak. I will augment that with international sources like Reuters and BBC World ... but also with grassroots news organizations like Gorilla's Guides.

GIVE - Giving is tricky because Mohammed and others see even well-intentioned giving as "blood money" and as a way for us to try to assuage our guilt. But giving is still a way we can use our power. The best way to give to help the people of Irak is to give to the International Red Crescent.- they are the best, most reputable group on the ground actually helping the people of Irak. Go to this site and select "Iraq humanitarian response" when given a choice to direct your contribution - I have and will continue to do so.

ADVOCATE - Every day from now until the end of the occupation, I commit to email or call my senators and representative and urge them, as a constituent, a person of faith and someone who loves and wants the best for this country, to remove our military presence from Irak. It is not just killing them, it is killing us and killing the world. It is debilitating not just the Iraki people but our best ability to make wonderful things like the MDGs happen. Making an email or call like this takes 2-3 minutes. 2-3 minutes a day is certainly the least I can do.

TALK - When you hear me speak, you will hear me speak about Irak. You will hear me invite people into a conversation about it. There will be fierce disagreement about what I have written here ... and that's OK. We must not be afraid of disagreement. We must realize that passionate people of good faith can disagree passionately and in good faith. We need to surround all our conversations in prayer so that together we can move beyond our own opinions and strive for God's greater wisdom. But I will no longer hold back out of fear of offending.

Finally, this day, I will say a prayer for Ali. My brother who is dead whom I helped kill. I hope you will join me in that as well.

+++

From the death notice posted yesterday on Gorillas Guides:

Ali Ibn Laith. Born December 14 1999 - Killed March 27 2008

Son of our much missed colleague Laith and his wife, last remaining brother to our greatly loved colleague Mohammed Ibn Laith and his sister.

O God! Pardon our living and our dead, the present and the absent, the young and the old, the males and the females.

and

May Ali's soul and the souls of all the departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.

The Rev. Mike Kinman is the Executive Director of Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation

"The Power of Together" -- by the Rev. Devon Anderson

On Easter, four Minnesota congregations completed a MDG pilot project designed to mobilize individuals within the congregation to collectively act in order to seed a parish global mission initiative. Powerful public narratives have been delivered, house meetings held, pledges received, funds gathered, decisions made, success celebrated.

All in all, the first phase of the pilot program has enjoyed a very good run. Those four congregations raised about $35,000 -- with 200 people participating (this out of $8,000 seed money from Diocesan Council!)

But the sweetest gift of these efforts has been the learning.

What has so nourished and enriched many of us is what we have discovered about ourselves, our parishes communities, our diocesan household, what we have learned about the way we relate to one another, and about the way we would like to relate to one another.

Through the many layers of learning has emerged one hard-earned revelation: We are better together than we are by ourselves. Even more than this, it is through our participation in, and commitment to, Christian community that we are best equipped to be faithful to the Gospel. It is when we work and minister together, when we gather our gifts and resources and pool them collectively, when we work across the congregations and the boundaries of theology and geography, it is in those moments that we are most alive, most effective, most faithful to the Gospel imperative to love one another and to love our neighbors as ourselves. Over and again we learned, despite our resistance and better judgment, that we are better off hashing it out in Christian community than enjoying the peacefulness (and some would argue, inertia) of our own company.

Standing at the conclusion of the Lenten MDG project, we celebrate the achievement of our measurable goals -- more than 200 people mobilized, tens of thousands of dollars raised and pooled, plans for relational global mission initiatives begun. And yet, these goals pale in comparison to the transformative experience of successfully working together toward a shared purpose in mission, the results of which were far more extensive and deep than any one human being could have exacted alone.

Through the power of together, the pilot congregations will have gathered needed resources to participate in the global movement to minimize human suffering and despair caused by extreme poverty. It is with hope and expectation that we offer this experience to the diocesan community, in the hope of inspiring a thirst for more and wider experiences of collective action and power to the glory of God.

The Rev. Devon Anderson is a priest, chair of the Diocese of Minnesota MDG task force, and a recipient of an Episcopal Church Foundation grant to develop models for equipping congregations for engaging global mission and the MDGs.

"Growing up too fast in Northern Uganda" - by Erin Bernstein

I have seen more children during my two weeks here in Gulu, northern Uganda than anywhere else in my entire life. Interestingly, though, I could say just the opposite: I have seen very few children since I arrived in the north.

How is this possible? Since the civil war began in 1986 and hostilities ended in 2006, children and teenagers in northern Uganda are just now learning what peace means, and for many of them, life in squalid internally displaced persons camps is all they know.

They grew up too quickly—the girls, especially. They had no choice. Rarely do I find a young woman without a baby on her back, and rarely do I find a girl my age or younger who will talk to me without looking away in discomfort. I have noticed that girls and women are more reserved than men in this culture, but the timidity in these young women is more evident than in the ones I met in Kampala and areas in southern Uganda.

Trauma, I have learned, is the contributing factor to this unusual behavior in children, causing several local education organizations to move their main focus from supporting high academic achievers to intertwining psycho-social support into the curriculum. Due to staff shortages, however, they have to train teachers in this field. Teachers become the trauma counselors, but they are teachers first, and above all that, they have their own trauma to conquer before they can help others.

Poverty presents another challenge. Availability of teachers is running low because funds to pay them are running low. Fewer teachers are willing to work for the current salary, which means that schools have more students than they would normally have per teacher. Quality of education thus decreases, making northern Ugandan schools even less nationally competitive than they already are.

Poverty in the north also affects the young people who want to attend school but cannot afford it. Last week, I met a boy who could not go to school because he did not have a uniform; it cost four dollars. I understand that schools have their rules and regulations, but I couldn’t believe that they would reject a child—an orphan living with his siblings in an IDP camp—wanting to learn because he didn’t own a uniform. The north is trying to rebuild itself. Recovering from over 20 years of war will take just as long, if not more. Why, then, deny the future generation of northern Uganda the chance to receive an education?

Even some families prevent their children from going to school. Many poor families force their daughters into early marriage so that her dowry will bring wealth to the family. These young girls do not typically return to school after marriage because their responsibility is now to their husbands and children, but what about the ones who do? They return, perhaps with their babies in the classroom, and present the message that it is okay to leave school to get married. A girl with children, though, cannot progress academically. Family is the top priority.

Whether because of trauma or poverty, children in the north are already marginalized and are at risk of permanent inferiority to their countrymen. A traumatized person, spending more time battling emotional issues than engaging in her studies, is less likely to perform well. A child who does not perform well is less likely to receive scholarship funding. A child who is neglected as a high achiever is less likely to maintain confidence, and a child who lacks self-esteem is less likely to stay in school.

Those who do not complete their education, though, are doomed to poor and mediocre jobs, widening the economic gap between the north and the rest of the country. Trauma, war-induced poverty, and education go hand-in-hand now. Schools are places for acquiring knowledge, but now they must serve an additional purpose. They must become safe environments for addressing mental health issues and sorting out the memories that run amok in people’s minds. They must encourage people to talk, and they must facilitate healing.

Erin Bernstein is a junior at the University of Tennessee, designing a major in the comparison of post-conflict education in Northern Uganda and education in inner-city Knoxville. Her passion for serving people has brought her to Hungary, Romania, and South Africa through the Rotary Club of Knoxville and to Botswana, Uganda, and back to South Africa through the Knoxville Jazz for Justice Project, which seeks to music as healing in war-torn Northern Uganda. She is currently in the middle of a two-month stay in Uganda for an internship at the Ugandan Parliament and to work on an art therapy project with young women in the north. Read more from Erin at her ongoing blog of her trip: Uganda 2008.

"The sin of inflicting poverty" -- by Andrew Langan

I recently read an article about how the Vatican, in order to shore up the lagging sacrament of confession, was considering adding seven new deadly sins to the boring, outdated old ones (like, seriously priest-dudes, what does does “avarice” even mean?). Skimming the list, a cynic might take the opportunity to exercise the muscles that make one’s eyes roll (are all drugs–including tobacco, caffeine, and alcohol–verboten now, or just the reeeeeally evil ones like marijuana and Adderall?), and as a dedicated cynic (so “morally debatable” experiments are no longer, um, debatable?) this was my first reaction. (Does this 20-inch golden chalice count as “excessive wealth”, your holiness?) But then I noticed on something that made me take this project a little more seriously. Included in the list of new mortal sins was this one: “inflicting poverty”.

Now, even this initially elicited my scorn. Besides your garden variety mustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash-type caricatures, the only instance of “inflicting poverty” I could think of was, perhaps, the collectivization of Ukrainian farms, and that’s not really a pressing theological concern for those of us who aren’t Soviet premiers. But the more I thought about what it might mean to “inflict poverty”, the more I thought back to this article –one that I’ve been intending to blog about here for some time–and to the time-worn maxim that ‘The road to Hell is paved with good intentions’.

The article linked above describes the reaction of Boston’s mayor, Thomas Menino, to a decision in January by a Massachusetts regulatory board to allow a major drug store chain to open up “MinuteClinics” in their stores where registered nurses or nurse practitioners would see patients on a walk-in basis to give basic preventative care and treat simple medical problems like poison ivy and colds.

According to the article, “the mayor said the decision yesterday by the state Public Health Council "jeopardizes patient safety. Limited service medical clinics run by merchants in for-profits corporations will seriously compromise quality of care and hygiene. Allowing retailers to make money off of sick people is wrong." Menino called on the city's Public Health Commission, which meets this afternoon, to "look closely at limited service medical clinics and see how we can ensure that all healthcare facilities in Boston offer a comprehensive approach to health and wellness."”

The MinuteClinics concept (one might even go so far as to call it a “business model”) seems to me to be a clever one. Because of a variety of break-downs in the proper functioning of the American market for health care (we can talk about what those are another time), poor people have a difficult time obtaining medical services. Seeing this, the people behind the MinuteClinics thought up a way to provide a work-around. The potential here is that the poor could get cheap, convenient, not-too-bad medical care in the MinuteClinic world, whereas in current situation, they’re faced with being shut out from expensive, inconvenient, really-good medical care. Is that trade-off worth it? If the MinuteClinics idea is successful, it would suggest that its customers think so. And isn’t some health care better than none?

So what’s Menino’s beef? From my standpoint as a classical liberal, it’s easy to write him off as a knee-jerk leftist with a deep antipathy to commercial exchange and a congenital distrust of any company with more than three outlets. (I won’t say that wasn’t my first reaction.) But as a Christian and as a human being, I must realize that he means what he says with all sincerity, and probably with the best of intentions (though one never knows with a politician). And I see his point. We have the technology and the knowledge to perform medical miracles. If we had America’s GDP to spend on it, we could give every sick person in the country a bastion of advanced tests in pristine, well-staffed hospitals and still have big piles of money left over. Surely we can, at the very least, “ensure that all healthcare facilities in Boston offer a comprehensive approach to health and wellness”?

This is where the sin part comes in.

It’s tempting for us as well-to-do, well-intentioned Americans to think that we can solve all other peoples’ problems through our generosity. It’s tempting to think that, if only our favorite politician can get his or her really really important bill through Congress [without too many amendments or earmarks attached, of course], no one in America will ever have to worry about health care again. It’s tempting to think that, if only we can convince people to “buy American”, the nation’s textile mills and auto plants will roar back to life and people will move back to the Rust Belt. It’s tempting to think that, if only we give a really impassioned presentation during the coffee hour on Sunday, we can raise enough money that our adopted village in Malaysia won’t have to open a factory, that they’ll be able to keep practicing their traditional ways, and all their kids will be able to go to college. It’s tempting to think those things, but it’s virtually always incorrect, and it’s arrogant. And it’s sinful: it inflicts poverty.

Although we may have the best of intentions, anytime we boycott a company that pays its overseas workers less than what we think they should make or use our political power to preempt a discount chain-store clinic from offering so-so medical care, we’re inflicting poverty. We may well be liberating those foreign workers from dirty, bad-paying jobs, but unless we’ve got some great new money-making idea, we’re liberating them right into dirtier, worse-paying jobs. (Maybe that’s why the New York Times’ Nick Kristof discovered that the workers he spoke to in the developing world were often thrilled to get dirty, bad-paying jobs that few if any Americans would want.) And until the Congress can agree on an efficient, timely, politically satisfying solution to the health care problem, the poor in Boston, sadly, have either MinuteClinic basic care, or none at all. However much these half-measures may offend our aesthetic sensibilities, they’re bridging a gap. To deny the poor access to even these half-measures is to inflict poverty.

So looking back, I can appreciate the value in enumerating at least one of these new sins the Vatican has marked out for us. For what it’s worth, I think the old list of sins dovetails pretty well with the new: it’s prideful for me to fancy that my personal charity should be what saves the world, and greedy to want things done my way, to name just a couple. And it’s darn near blasphemous to think that God can’t bring good results out of an apparently bad situation without my good intentions directing the whole process. I’d just muck it up, anyway, and probably inflict some poverty, along the way.

Andrew Langan is an economist living in Arlington, Virginia. He graduated from Washington University in St. Louis in 2006, and works in Washington, DC.