Religion is for people who are afraid of going to hell. 

Spirituality is for those who have already been there. 

 -Vine Deloria

We ourselves will be remembered as a collective, for what we did and failed to do together. 

-John Green

Fire & Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if I had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice. 

-Robert Frost

Drew Dudley: Leading with Lollipops

What does it mean to be a leader?  Drew Dudley tells us in under six and a half minutes.

We've made leadership about changing the world, and there is no world.  There's only 6 billion understandings of it.  And if you change one person's understanding of it, one person's understanding of what they're capable of, one person's understanding of how much people care about them, one person's understanding of how powerful an agent for change they can be in this world, you've changed the whole thing.  Its a simple idea, but I don't think its a small one.

Telling Stories About the Stories We Tell

The following interview with Philip Gourveitch, staff writer for The New Yorker and author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, originally appeared in the Boston Review.  In it, Gourevitch discusses "the challenges of writing about the history we are in the midst of making, the burdens of memory and the appeal of forgetting, the dangers of narrative simplification, the limits of humanitarianism, and the messiness of politics."

Cécile Alduy: In your writing, you always find a balance between bringing in the long history to understand the way things develop over time and the very detailed hour-to-hour reporting on how it happened. How is your job different from that of an historian?

Philip Gourevitch: Above all, I suppose, to be a good historian you don’t necessarily have to be a good storyteller. You can be a good historian by virtue of making a contribution to the field without making a direct contribution to literature or public understanding. What historians, or anthropologists, or political scientists are interested in can overlap considerably with my interests, but the methodology, discipline, and long-term purpose are really different. I mean, I’m first and last a writer. If I weren’t writing about Rwanda right now, I’d be writing about something else entirely; and if I weren’t writing reportage, I would be writing fiction or plays. That’s not true of most historians who are going to write about Rwanda. They’re going to be coming at it as Rwandanologists. They’re going to be Africanists. They’re going to be Genocide Studies people. They’re going to be legal scholars or professors of postcolonial studies. And their frame of reference will be largely prescribed by that academic discipline—which is, I guess, as it should be.

Another big difference is that as a writer-reporter I’m not so concerned with making explicit reference to the existing literature, the way academic writers are. I’m much more interested in what I see and what I hear directly; I work in a documentary vein. For instance in recent conversations about current affairs with senior government officials in Rwanda I started to notice that a number of them, completely unprompted, began making references to late-nineteenth century events in Rwanda. That’s the time when Rwanda, which had been a proudly isolated country, was colonized, and lost its self-determination as a state. So I started mentioning this to the people I was interviewing, “You know, it’s funny that you are all bringing up that same period.” And they all expressed complete surprise. “Really, who else?” Then I would maybe mention someone, and they’d all say, “Really? He was talking about this?” So, I thought, that’s interesting, there’s this common reference that each person thinks is his own, and which each uses to make different points. And then I thought, well, is this history they are talking about reliable? Are these stories they’re telling me correct?

Grown Strong with Love

In those days, we finally chose to walk like giants and hold the world in arms grown strong with love; and there may be many things we forget in the days to come, but this will not be one of them.

-Brian Andreas

"Dr. Mukwege Fights Back"

This article by Dr. Denis Mukwege, Medical Director of the Panzi Hospital in the Democratic Republic of Congo, originally appeared in On the Ground.

For the past 16 years at the Panzi Hospital in the Democratic Republic of Congo, my staff and I have been treating women who have been victimized by sexual violence, which has been systematically used as a weapon of war in the armed conflict that has ravaged our country.  Rape is one of the most deadly weapons of war, destroying families and communities and future generations, as well as the women brutally targeted.  Last year I had some hope that the situation was improving, but since the beginning of this year the security situation has again deteriorated and victims of sexual violence have started coming to the hospital again in great numbers.

"An Attack on One of My Heroes, Dr. Denis Mukwege"

This article by Nicholas D. Kristof originally appeared in his blog On the Ground.

One of my heroes is Dr. Denis Mukwege, a Congolese doctor who repairs fistulas and is a ferocious advocate for women and for his country.  I've suggested that he deserves the Nobel peace Prize - and I was horrified to learn that tonight four armed gunmen attacked him at his home, murdered his guard and shot at him.  He seems to have narrowly escaped death.

Dr. Mukwege presumably was targeted because of a strong speech he gave at the United Nations last month, denouncing mass rape in Congo and the impunity for it.  President Kabila has long been angry at Dr. Mukwege, and the UN speech can't have helped.  Meanwhile, Dr. Mukwege has also offended Rwanda with his denunciations of Rwanda's role in the slaughter and rape in eastern Congo.

Although he is a skilled surgeon who could easily have left for other countries, Dr. Mukwege has toiled in Congo at the hospital he started in Bukavu, Panzi Hospital.  Here's an article I wrote about his work repairing fistulas there.  But Dr. Mukwege doesn't just repair individuals: He concluded that "there is no medical solution," and so he has become an advocate for peace and for his country.

I hope the UN force in Bukavu will rpotect Dr. Mukwege and the Panzi Hosiptal for the time being.  I hope foreign ambassadors will visit his hospital to show solidarity.  Here's a statement by Physicians for Human Rights, which works with Dr. Mukwege at Panzi Hospital.  And I hope that Dr. Mukwege some day will get the Nobel Peace Prize for the humanitarian work he continuously risks his life to advance.

The Pulse of a Story

If you listen to the wind and don't hear at least a thousand years of music... then you're not listening hard enough.

The theory of six degrees of separation was never meant to see how many people we could find.  It was a set of directions for how to find the people we have lost.

Michael Lee writes of the pain of loss, of the beauty of the wind, and how we are never created or destroyed... we are simply energy, changing forms.

We are vessels, we are rooms, we are so much less important than the things inside of us.

Kindness

The regular exercise of choosing kindness over cruelty would change us.
-Jonathan Safran Foer