Photographing Rwanda

Posted by Paul | Filed under web sights

Over on look both ways, Richard Hanson has a great post on his experiences as a photographer at the time of the Rwanda genocide — DR Congo :: Kibumba revisited. I meant to point this out when he first posted it, but never got round to it. Now he has re-posted I get another chance.

What I find really interesting is the lesson he learnt from the experience. After having a hard time taking photos surrouded by this tragedy, he talked with someone who

impressed on me was the point that the only reason I was there was to get the picture back, the story told. There was no point me driving some Landrover around, or trying to help sick people – those weren’t my skills. What I could do was tell the story, and that might make a difference if it made people think and respond.

Sometimes we have to remember what our gifts are and work with those, rather than trying to cover everything, no matter how urgent it might seem.

Have a look at the other posts in his Behind the Page series. There are some great images…

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Read more | Comments (0) | October 31st, 2009

the gospel and economic liberation

Posted by Paul | Filed under work

I’ve been reading Miroslav Volf’s Work in the Spirit. Hard work to read (at least on the train), but interesting. One side point that stood out was this…

Economic alienation … often directly or indirectly causes alienation from God. We read in Exodus, for instance, that the oppressed and exploited Israelite slaves “did not listen to Moses on account of their … cruel bondage” (Exod 6:9). Economic alienation hindered their believing God and grasping the promise of liberation.

I found this fascinating and it brings out something that I’d never heard anywhere else. (Oh, I’m sure someone has covered it, probably in one of the books on my shelf, but I wasn’t paying attention…)

In the frequent discussions of the relationship between the gospel and social justice, I’ve seen few, if any, consider the possibility that social justice might, in some cases, be an important first step for people to hear the good news. We discuss whether social justice might be a significant consequence of the gospel or whether it provides some demonstration of God’s liberation, but we don’t consider that it might need to come first in some situations, that people might need to be helped at a more basic level before they can hear what we have to say.

But if we truly believe that life is not divided into the material/secular and the spiritual, is it so unreasonable that alienation in economics, work or daily life can make it hard for us to grasp the deeper ‘promise of liberation’?

And if we take serious what we see in the story of the Moses, then how should this affect our actions? Perhaps it should make us re-consider our attitude to third-world debt or fair trading or oppressive work environments…

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Read more | Comments (2) | October 1st, 2009