NorCalUrban

It's been a crazy couple of weeks. The Yankees are surging, travels, visits to Napa... A more personal update is forthcoming... In the mean time, I came across this book review in USA Today and ordered the book. Here's a couple of quotes from the article and book: "Go out into this newly globalized world you're profiting from," he writes, "go visit the people being 'lifted' out of poverty, the workers who are making your products. Go live in their huts, eat their rice and plantains, squat on their floors, and listen to their babies cry. Sniff some glue and pray with them. Try to get justice from their police if someone hurts you. And then come back and let's talk about freedom." "If you can read this page, you are on top of the world and billions of people are beneath you. Your ignorance and your lack of a program will likely equal the squalor of your grandchildren's existence." Wow! Got the book today... I'll let you know...

Dr. Canales wrote an excellant piece at the Out of Ur Blog. Here's an excerpt: Throughout our history there have been times when non-Christians see through our hypocrisy. They recognize that not everyone is truly welcome in our churches. These are times when we’ve worried about being politically right when we should be focused on being biblically correct. The root of American evangelical hypocrisy is smugness; a historical inability to understand God’s unfailing mercies for the immigrant, his unfailing love for the poor among us. If our sense of worth is measured by privatized religion and political culture—from our color, to our work ethic, to the neighborhoods we live and worship in—we remain independent of God and self-sufficiently smug. Christ cannot help us. We are not being his church. So the question I ask myself, and pose to every pastor, is: Shall I build a church that isolates us from immigrants, or should I embrace God’s story of welcome? It is easy to raise a church w...

Time reports. on an innovative program teaching urban students financial literacy in Chicago. ... Ariel Community Academy is unusual. Its 420 students, nearly all black and about 81% from low-income families, are testing an intriguing proposition: Can teaching urban black kids finance and economics help some of them escape poverty — and shake African American skepticism about Wall Street? Despite the growth of the black middle class, the percentage of affluent blacks investing in the stock market is actually falling, while such investment by their white peers remains steady. That's partly because blacks have historically relied on real estate as a primary wealth builder. Plus, blacks save far less than whites for retirement. That's why John W. Rogers Jr., CEO of the company that backs the academy, says, "The issue of financial literacy in our schools will hopefully avert a crisis." The experiment began in the early 1990s. A young Chicago executive named Arne Duncan...

I've been reading the book, "The Lessons of St. Francis" by musician John Michael Talbot. This morning I read the chapter on joy. It struck me that with the pace and intensity of my life I sometimes lack joy and the sense of the present moment. Having an entrepreneurial spirit, I tend to focus on what is next and how to get there. This can be a very joy robbing life when I let it out of control. This attitude can be particularly hard on my wife and son. Today, being the 6th anniversary of 9/11 it seems especially poignant to reflect on how to maintain joy in an ever changing and difficult world. To summarize the chapter Talbot reflects on how to cultivate joy in our lives: * Don't Worry About Tomorrow - ...in small and big ways, (St.) Francis sought not to be distracted from the responsibilities of today by worrries about tomorrow. The Jesuit writer Jen Pierre DeCoussaid describes this kind of attention to the here and now as 'the sacrament of the present moment...

Came across this today... "Christians pride themselves upon an ethic that exceeds the requirements of law. But it is significant that Jews, schooled in their legalistic tradition and also the inheritors of the prophetic spirit, are on the whole more depth in the field of justice than Christians. They might well say to Christians what Cosimo de'Medici said to Catholics in the Renaissance: "You have built your ladders into the heavens. We will not seek so high or sink so low." Christian businessman are more frequently characterized by a spirit of philanthropy than by a spirit of justice in asserting the claims and counterclaims of economic groups. Love in the form of philanthropy is, in fact, on a lower level than a high form of justice. For philanthropy is given to those who make no claims against us, who do not challenge our goodness or disinterestedness. An act of philanthropy may thus be an expression of both power and moral complacency. An act of justice on the ot...

New York Times Article on the debate regarding the societal benefits of non profit donations. It's a somewhat rambling article, but my feeling is that this is a brewing debate. Eli Broad, a billionaire businessman, has given away more than $650 million over the last five years, to Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to establish a medical research institute, to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and to programs to improve the administration of urban schools and public education."What smart entrepreneurial philanthropists and their foundations do is get greater value for how they invest their money than if the government were doing it." "I got a plaque in the mail and an invitation to an awards ceremony. I never gave them another nickel. What were they spending money on plaques for?" The rich are giving more to charity than ever, but people like Mr. Broad are not the only ones footing the bill for such generosity. For every three dollars the...