More than half of the world's population already lives in cities, and another 2.5 billion people are projected to move to urban areas by 2050. The way we build new cities will be at the heart of so much that matters, from climate change to economic vitality to our very well-being and sense of connectedness. Peter Calthorpe is already at work planning the cities of the future and advocating for community design that's focused on human interaction. He shares seven universal principles for solving sprawl and building smarter, more sustainable cities.
3 September 2017
The New York Review of Books: Kenya: The Election & the Cover-Up
Signs that something weird was going on emerged well before the election. A month earlier, Kenya’s electoral commission contracted Ghurair, a Dubai publishing firm, to print ballots. Newspaper reports linked the company to Kenyatta’s inner circle, and Kenyan courts ordered the electoral commission to use a different firm. The order was ignored, and the electoral commission issued a single-source contract to Ghurair anyway, citing time pressure. Then the accounting firm KPMG reported that more than a million dead people might still be registered as voters. NASA officials complained that Ghurair could print extra ballots to be used to create pro-Kenyatta ghost votes. Kerry dismissed these concerns, quipping after the election, “The people who voted were alive. I didn’t see any dead people walking around.” [...]
People who have witnessed election fraud in other African countries have told me that it’s normally done by making small changes to large numbers of tallies and this appears to have happened in Kenya, where there were over 40,000 polling stations. After NASA submitted its petition, a team of American experts led by University of Michigan Professor of Statistics and Political Science Walter Mebane volunteered to conduct a forensic analysis of the results. Results that have been tampered with show patterns and Mebane’s computer program identified over half a million fraudulent votes in this manner—almost certainly an underestimate of the true number. [...]
Another rigged election in Africa is not news. But that US election observers were so quick to endorse it is shocking. Perhaps they believed that wrapping the election up quickly would prevent violence. After Kenya’s 2007 election, which most observers have since concluded was rigged against Odinga, some of his supporters went on a looting and killing spree in ruling-party strongholds. Gangs backed by ruling-party officials fought back and the ensuing mayhem left more than a thousand people dead, caused hundreds of thousands to flee their homes, and nearly shut down the economy of much of eastern Africa, which relies on transport from the Kenyan coast. Members of Odinga’s coalition were quoted making ethnically charged statements, but it was Kenyatta and his current deputy, William Ruto—who was then allied with Odinga, but has since switched sides—who were charged by the International Criminal Court with crimes against humanity for organizing and supporting the violent gangs. (The cases against them collapsed after witnesses were intimidated or died under mysterious circumstances.) [...]
A far more troubling possibility is that the US wants Kenyatta to remain in power, at the expense of democracy. Kenya lies in one of the most volatile regions of the world. Its neighbor Somalia has been a war zone for a decade; conflict in South Sudan has sent more than two million refugees scrambling to neighboring countries, including Kenya, since 2013. Two of Kenya’s other neighbors, Uganda and Ethiopia, are ruled by US-backed autocrats who have instigated or worsened these conflicts. Ethiopia’s US-assisted invasion of Somalia in 2006 set off the mayhem there, promoting the rise of the Islamist terrorist group Al-Shabaab. In 2014, Uganda entered the South Sudan civil war on the government’s side. Humanitarian organizations called for an arms embargo, which would have made Uganda’s involvement illegal. The UN Security Council, including Russia and China, seemed open to an embargo, but the Obama did not pursue it.
Vox: Major evangelical leaders just signed a controversial document on sexuality and the church
The 14-article document, dubbed the “Nashville Statement,” was released by the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW) on Wednesday, focusing primarily on issues of gender and same-sex marriage. The first article in the document affirms that "God has designed marriage to be a covenantal, sexual, procreative, lifelong union of one man and one woman, as husband and wife” and not for “homosexual, polygamous, or polyamorous” relationships. The document follows a meeting in Nashville at the Southern Baptist Conference’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission's (ERLC) annual conference.
The statement also condemned Christians who expressed support of LGBTQ issues, saying: “it is sinful to approve of homosexual immorality or transgenderism and that such approval constitutes an essential departure from Christian faithfulness and witness ... [we deny that it is a matter of] moral indifference about which otherwise faithful Christians should agree to disagree.” [...]
But the timing of the document — as churches grapple with much more pressing national conversations on issues like racism — has made it particularly jarring, especially to its critics. After all, the US Supreme Court ruled to establish same-sex marriage across the country two years ago. Meanwhile, in recent weeks and months, America’s Christian religious leaders have faced a number of politicized challenges, from the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, to how to respond to the Trump administration’s more controversial statements and actions. [...]
In other words, the evangelical community as a whole has seen a shift in recent months and years, as the conflation of Republican Party values and Christian values is no longer as straightforward as it once was. To an extent, the Nashville Statement thus seems like something of a reactionary gesture — an attempt to foster unity in the evangelical community (uniting, say, pro-Trump figures like James Dobson with critical firebrands like Russell Moore) by appealing to a doctrinal issue — sexual ethics — that still unites many of them. [...]
he “queer theology” movement of the late twentieth century, inspired by similar social justice Christian movements like liberation theology and feminist theology, featured thinkers like John McNeil and Marcella Althaus-Reid. They didn’t just argue that being queer was acceptable in Christianity, but rather that the very nature of Christianity — following a radical divine being who was willing to upend the whole social hierarchy in pursuit of justice — demanded that we reassess how we think about gender, sex, love, and desire outside of wider “cultural norms.” For these thinkers, racism, sexism, and homophobia were all themselves part of human “culture;” something that Christianity should resist. This thinking come to influence later progressive Christian approaches to social justice.
Vox: The Summer of Love ended 50 years ago. It reshaped American conservatism.
Yet the utopia called the Summer of Love wouldn’t last, and, after the movement faded out, not all of them went back to professional career paths. Disillusioned by bad trips and a sense that their pursuit of hedonism had been empty, thousands of burned out hippies soon experienced something possibly even more revolutionary than tuning out and turning on: a born-again religious conversion. [...]
While they would give up their drugs and promiscuous sex, the Jesus People retained much of their countercultural ways, bringing their music, dress, and laid-back style into the churches they joined. Their influence would remake the Sunday worship experience for millions of Americans. As the historian Larry Eskridge has argued, today’s evangelical mega-churches with their rock bands blasting praise music and jeans-wearing pastors “are a direct result of the Jesus People movement.”
But aside from the praise anthems and the casual preaching styles that have come to characterize contemporary evangelicalism, the Jesus People also reshaped American politics. They helped to inspire the birth of the religious right. Many conservative evangelicals had long avoided politics, believing it would corrupt their spiritual lives, but the Jesus People contended that Christians couldn’t keep their spiritual and political lives separate. “I think everybody should be a full-time Christian,” the Jesus People rock singer Larry Norman once said. [...]
The message that countercultural evangelicals delivered to their peers represented a radically different version of Christianity than preached in most churches at the time. Most repudiated institutional churches and their weak and vapid “Churchianity.” Instead, Ted and Elizabeth Wise, and others, stressed the need for a personal relationship with Jesus, who, in their telling, was not far from being a hippie himself. [...]
By the mid-1970s, the Jesus People had largely faded as a visible movement as the counterculture aesthetic fell out of fashion — “Where Have All the Jesus People Gone,” Eternity magazine asked in 1973 — but the reality was their deeper influence on American evangelicalism was just beginning to be felt. With their folk music, casual dress, and chill vibe, the Jesus People helped redefine the Sunday morning worship experience across American evangelicalism. For better or worse, the “Jesus Rock” that the Jesus People created and popularized led the way to the contemporary Christian music now embraced across many American denominations.
The Conversation: A Byzantine ancestor to same-sex marriage?
Spiritual brotherhood in the Byzantine Empire of the Middle Ages is an ancestor to our same-sex marriage. In the Byzantine Empire men became spiritual brothers and some scholars believe that sexual intimacy did or could occur. There is some controversy about this. For some it is a bridge too far to speak of sex, for we cannot know for sure. My position is that it was a possibility at all times and the Byzantines were aware of this.
First, how did men become spiritual brothers? In church two men would be blessed by a priest who would say a prayer over them. Many of these prayers survive and more are being located all the time. Spiritual brotherhood was popular. [...]
Experts have been divided about the question of sex between brothers joined in the rite. While there is not a lot of evidence and the rite was clearly not meant to allow men to have sex with each other, there is enough evidence to suggest that Byzantines thought affection and sexual feelings were possible. [...]
But that is not all. Just as we see in the histories, surviving letters that men wrote to each other show a culture of great warmth between men. The old language of male love that goes back to the ancient Greeks was used constantly. A handsome physique could inspire male desire.
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