The Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) confirmed that players' memberships would be suspended if they don't learn to speak English and pass an oral evaluation. 

Yuck.

In reality, many believed it was inevitable because there are so many South Korean women (45) now on the LPGA tour, and truth be told, they're simply kicking some serious butt. On any given tournament, it's not surprising to see half of the leader board peppered with the names of Korean golfers. And while I know that there are 121 foreign players on the LPGA, this was indirectly aimed at the Korean golfers -- as evidenced by the "mandatory" meeting South Korean golfers had to attend recently.

The LPGA is a private association so they have the right to make certain policies, but suspending memberships isn't the answer. It's a double bogey.  

The LPGA is an association that prides itself as being the premier women's golf tour in the world -- and rightfully so. This is why it attracts the greatest female golf players in the world.  And as long as these international players meet the high LPGA "golfing standards," it doesn't seem right that they also have to pass a language exam.

But, wait -- according to LPGA officials, the international players were hurting the marketability, and thus the bottom-line Benjamins, of the LPGA.

Now, I'm not naïve. I understand this thing called the Benjamins, the mighty dollar, the bottom line, and the economics. So having said that, I fully agree and understand that players ought to learn and attempt to speak a certain level of English and assist in helping "market" the LPGA. But making it mandatory? Suspending their memberships, and thus their livelihoods?   

When you make it mandatory, it stinks of the whole "colonialism" junk so many have complained about from Western powers: "Fit in or else."

Let me put it another way. What if the LPGA started a new policy where a weight limit was imposed on female golfers because LPGA officials complained that heavier golfers can't be marketed -- thus hurting the economics of the LPGA. Wouldn't we all raise a stink? 

This reminds me of when the National Basketball Association (NBA) came down on some of its players several years ago because they didn't dress a certain way. It was a general policy, but it also seemed to be indirectly aimed at the younger black players.

So, we want you to be a part of the NBA -- we'll use you to market the NBA, we'll use you to elevate the game and competition, we'll use you to sell tickets, but we don't want you to look too black. Wear a suit. Take off the chains. Loosen the cornrows. Easy on the tattoos. Blah blah blah.

Fit in or else. Double bogey.

Enough of my nonsense. What do you think?  Here's the article from ESPN:

The LPGA will require its member golfers to learn and speak English and will suspend their membership if they don't comply.

The new requirement, first reported by Golfweek on its Web site, was communicated to the tour's growing South Korean membership in a mandatory meeting at the Safeway Classic in Portland, Ore., on Aug. 20. Connie Wilson, the LPGA's vice president of communications, confirmed the new policy to ESPN.com.

Players were told by LPGA commissioner Carolyn Bivens that by the end of 2009, all players who have been on the tour for two years must pass an oral evaluation of their English skills or face a membership suspension. A written explanation of the policy was not given to players, according to the report.

Eugene Cho, a second-generation Korean-American, is the founder and lead pastor of Quest Church in Seattle, and the executive director of Q Cafe, an innovative nonprofit neighborhood café and music venue. He and his wife are also launching a grassroots humanitarian organization to fight global poverty. You can stalk him at his blog eugenecho.wordpress.com.

Evangelical women and minorities, it seems, exist on the muted margins of political discourse in America. If a justice revival is to sweep over America once more, from the suburban megachurch to the urban storefront church, then Christians must pursue a vision of the common good for all -- and not the common good of a few.

The public narratives of the media often chronicle the broadening social concerns of white evangelical males such as Rick Warren and Richard Cizik -- and rightfully so. Their story deserves to be told. But their story is not the only one.

As an African-American summer intern at Sojourners, I labored alongside two African-American women, two Asian women, and four white men and women -- all of whom persistently link spiritual renewal and social justice. To borrow an image from Gabriel Salguero, this technicolor portrait of evangelicals critiques the Alpine storyline, which is the subtle suggestion that only the broadening social concerns of progressive evangelical white males is newsworthy. Meanwhile, the stories of progressive evangelical minorities and women, the stories I heard at Sojourners, remain as invisible as the protagonist of Ralph Ellison's famous novel.

We stand at a critical moment in the socio-religious history of America. And before us lie two roads. One path pursues the common good of white evangelical men, while relying on the common labor of evangelical women and minorities. This path is marked by denominational positions that define minstry by gender and not gifting (shout-out to Dr. Mimi Haddad of Christians for Biblical Equality), theology that clarifies doctrine while obscuring the correlations of race and poverty, and well-intentioned civic disengagement that nevertheless stacks an already tilted deck of cards against the marginalized.

The other road, a glimpse of which I saw at Sojourners, relies upon the common labor of all evangelicals to pursue the common good of all. This pathway also has signposts: more women serving as bishops and pastors; theology that rhythmically alternates between digesting scripture and dismantling the poverty-race correlation; and wise engagement that represents the broad concerns of the evangelical constituency to the public and private sector. If we take creation care as a representative example, following this path would mean, amongst other things, advocating for green jobs as a response to structural inner-city unemployment.

For understandable and yet lamentable reasons, some evangelicals head down the first pathway; precious few are moving down the second. Of course this ''two roads'' dichotomy simplifies the complex phenomenon of American evangelicalism. Hopefully, however, it also underscores the urgency of now. Christians must toil for, and not just wish for, a technicolor justice revival that pursues the common good of all.

Andrew Wilkes is a policy and organizing intern at Sojourners. He is currently pursuing a Masters of Divinity degree at Princeton Theological Seminary. He offers reflections at Foursquare, a blog that encourages abstinence as a spiritual discipline with social consequences.

What have you heard about the paramilitary leaders extradited to the U.S. on drug trafficking charges? As formally demobilized paramilitary, they were being processed under what is known as the "justice and peace law" and were in the midst of hearings. Their confessions of macabre acts, partial at best, evolved to include naming ties with the Colombian government and international corporations. Testimonies revealed strategies, intellectual authors of crimes, and kingpins of paramilitary structures. These truths fed the "para-politics" scandal, and, at that moment, the Uribe administration effectively cut off the hearings by allowing the U.S. to whisk them off to be processed for drug trafficking. It left me sputtering, "What!?" As the paramilitary leaders are now under U.S. jurisdiction, they are only being tried for drug charges and not for the countless instances of torture, homicides, and other war crimes committed.  

But they may not even be the big "winners." As the notorious paramilitary leader from northwestern Colombia, Ever Veloza Garcia -- alias "HH" -- said in a radio interview last week,

the only ones that won are the rich of this country. The ones who invested in the war, who paid money for us to kill. ... The majority of the people who died in this war are innocent.

In another radio interview, he shared "how the security forces coordinated the movement of troops and helped us move weapons. We paid them to give information and cooperate."

One victim of the paramilitary exclaimed at church recently, "I feel like I'm being whitewashed from history. But look, touch me, I do exist!"

Janna Hunter-Bowman works for Mennonite Central Committee in Bogotá, Colombia, as the coordinator of the Documentation and Advocacy Program for Justapaz.

I am now in Denver for the Democratic National Convention, and I will be in the Twin Cities next week for the Republican National Convention. I am speaking at both about the moral issues the faith community believes are important -- among them poverty, the environment and climate change, a consistent ethic of life, strong families, pandemic diseases, human trafficking, war, and peace. The Democrats are, for the first time, having "faith forums" to discuss those issues, and I will be moderating two of those forums -- one on the meaning of "the common good," a central religious concept. There will also be issues forums at the Republican Convention on the connections between faith and politics, which I am looking forward to participating in next week. At both conventions, the media is showing great interest in the connection between religion and the election, and that's the other reason I will be at both places.

The proper relationship between faith and politics is a critical issue. In recent decades, religion has often been used, and even abused, by politics and politicians. There is now a legitimate backlash to the exploitation and "politicizing" of religion among many in the churches -- especially a new generation. But the backlash could also lead to a new form of the old private piety or a new communal piety -- that the only important relationship is the one between "me and God" or in the churches' "service" to their own communities (an improvement over mere personal piety, but far short of the biblical call to justice). See Brian McLaren's post yesterday on the dangers of the new piety.

Politics is important. Wilberforce could not have ended the slave trade in England without politics. And it would not have been enough for Christians to just not have slaves. Martin Luther King could not have achieved the victories of civil rights without politics. It would not have been enough for the churches to just disavow segregation. (In fact, as King reminded us, the most segregated hour in America was and still is 11 a.m. on Sunday mornings). Gandhi could not have freed India from colonialism, nor could Nelson Mandela have ended apartheid in South Africa without politics. Politics is supposed to be about the common good, about the moral values we want to guide our civic life, even though the practice of politics often makes many people cynical.

But politics is broken in America, as I have often said. And it will take social movements, with clear spiritual values, to change politics in America. That is what genuine revivals have always done -- changed hearts and changed society. And that is still my best hope.

There are many people of faith here at this convention in Denver, as there will also be in the Twin Cities. The important thing for us as people of faith at both conventions is to make sure that our "politics" are more "prophetic" than "partisan." As I have continually repeated, God is not a Republican or a Democrat, and people of faith belong in no party's political pocket. The danger at both conventions is that religion will be exploited -- again -- this time by both sides. So I will be reporting to you on how that goes, whether the people of faith who are here are able to offer that prophetic role that faithfulness requires, that would hold politics accountable to real moral values, and would offer the best hope of social change. Stay tuned.

There can be no evangelization without incarnation.

- Alvaro Barreiro
Brazilian Catholic theologian

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Depart from me, all you workers of evil,
for the Lord has heard the sound of my weeping.
The Lord has heard my supplication;
the Lord accepts my prayer.

- Psalm 6:8-9

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It was only last month that Sydney newspaper The Herald Sun's Faithworks blog carried a post with this paragraph:

There is an amazing moment on the latest Hillsong DVD, This Is Our God, when Michael Guglielmucci, stricken with cancer, walks on stage with an oxygen tent to boldly sing his song "Healer." He doesn't know how long he has to live, but still proclaims the goodness of his God.

Earlier in the year, Mike's overtly Christian worship song "Healer," which he said was inspired by his struggle with a deadly form of cancer, debuted at number two on Australia's official music charts.

Tragically, last week another news source headline read: "Pop star pastor lied about cancer."

I feel a deep sadness for Mike and all affected. I continue to pray for him and those who are hurting in the wake of his pain. Mike was not just some fringe player on the Australian Christian scene. In Australia's prominent churches (including world-famous Hillsong), this passionate, talented, and broken 28-year-old was not just a hero but a superstar. Until he confessed to the lies about his terminal cancer and his addiction to pornography, all of which have come as a painful shock to those closest to him. ...

I understand the sentiments shared by many voters in the recent Pew poll on faith and politics. The Chicago Tribune reports:

Social conservatives are growing more wary of church involvement in politics, joining moderates and liberals in their unease about blurring the lines between pulpit and ballot box, a new study found.

Churchgoers across the country are looking at the ways in which religious leaders and communities have been used by political parties – and have used them as well -- and they think, “Let’s just pull back and not talk about faith and politics in the same breath any more.” As the survey's overview states:

Some Americans are having a change of heart about mixing religion and politics. A new survey finds a narrow majority of the public saying that churches and other houses of worship should keep out of political matters and not express their views on day-to-day social and political matters.

One key term in both of these statements is “church,” along with the related terms “pulpit” and “houses of worship.” The other key term is “politics," with related terms “ballot box” and “social and political matters.”

If people are saying they’re tired of pulpits and churches becoming the field for proxy battles between Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, I couldn’t agree more. And if they’re saying that pastors and other religious leaders should try to throw their weight around in the political arena, bypassing normal debate and discourse by making theological pronouncements, again, I couldn’t agree more.

But if they’re saying, “Let’s go back to the good old days where in church we talked about ‘us and Jesus’ and nothing more,” I couldn’t disagree more. To talk about “us and Jesus” alone is unfaithful to Jesus, who linked love for God with love for neighbor. To exclude from our circle of concern the well-being of neighbor and enemy means that we aren’t following Jesus’ way, but some other way under “Christian camouflage.”

I grew up in those “good old days,” and I can tell you they weren’t so good. It wasn’t good when racism and concern for the planet were excluded from consideration because they were “social and political matters.” It wasn’t good when poverty couldn’t be addressed directly or in a sustained way – in spite of the fact that the Bible says so much about it – because it was “political” and “social.” It wasn’t good when we couldn’t talk about peacemaking in a violent world because to do so was “too political.”

It’s true: when you let your faith be trimmed, stretched, and shrunk to fit as a nice rug on a party platform, you’re being a faithful partisan but not a faithful Christian (or Jew, Muslim, or whatever). And it’s also true: when you limit “church” and “pulpit” and “house of worship” to private personal piety, to “us and Jesus,” you have a safe, domesticated, irrelevant, and unfaithful religion -- not the way of life Jesus launched.

The misadventures of the Religious Right are many, and their consequences are far-reaching. It would be doubly sad if in the aftermath of the Religious Right, we add another negative consequence: to react to an unwise mal-engagement of faith with social and public life by choosing unfaithful disengagement, instead of wise and proper engagement.

Brian McLaren is an author and speaker and serves as Sojourners' board chair.

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I'm not much for talismans or religious tokens in the usual sense of those things. I wear around my neck every day of my life a chain with four emblems or medals on it. One is a Celtic cross given me on my 65th birthday by my favorite college chum from more than a half-century ago. One is the shield of the Episcopal Church, whose way of being Christian stole my heart away when I was 17 and has never let go of it or me in all the years since. One is a Jerusalem cross that Sam bought for me in the Old City in 2000 when we were there in conjunction with John Paul II's papal visit. And the fourth is one my number three daughter, Laura, bought for me in a little shop near the Cathedral in Canterbury when we were there for a meeting of The Canterbury Roundtable. She snuck away to buy what she had earlier seen me fingering with no small amount of desire.

All in all, however, and despite their overtly Christian character, those beloved pieces of silver that hang daily around my neck are not religious items or even talismans. They are a remembrance from, and of, those whom I have deeply loved in this life. Admittedly, they find their shapes in the iconographic forms of that which I have most completely sworn my life to, but they are not themselves truly icons. No, the only talisman or icon -- if indeed it be one -- that I carry, I carry in my wallet. It is a piece of paper, and it is there for two reasons.

First, it defines better than anything else I own how completely short of the mark I and most of my co-religionists are. Second, it demands that I never forget and never give quarter to those of whatever time, country, or persuasion who would forget, not the events it stems from, but the purity of soul generated by them.

The words in my wallet were found scratched on a wad of old wrapping paper in a bunkhouse at Ravensbruck Concentration Camp when it was liberated in 1945:

Lord, remember not only the men of good will, but also those of ill will. But do not remember all the suffering they have inflicted upon us. Remember rather the fruits we brought, thanks to this suffering: our comradeship, our loyalty, our humility, the courage, the generosity, the greatness of heart that has grown out of this. And when we come to judgment, let all the fruits that we have bourne be their forgiveness.

May such grace attend us all now and in the hour of our deaths.

Phyllis Tickle (www.phyllistickle.com) is the founding editor of the religion department of Publishers Weekly and author of The Words of Jesus: A Gospel of the Sayings of Our Lord and the forthcoming fall release, The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why.

[...continued from part 1]

The meaning of evangelism is the proclamation of good news to the world. How can we continue to exclude and avoid those with whom we are not comfortable and live into our evangelical calling at the same time? If we do not shed this primitive tendency, and yet heed the call to be evangelical, do we not risk exporting our ecclesial tribalism far and wide? How can we say we are evangelical if the good news is not good for the whole world? If the gospel is proclaimed under the rubric of the homogeneous unit principle, I would argue that this is distorted news, even false news. The acid test of evangelism must be: Is this good news for the poor?

But the church has largely forgotten the poor, instead focusing on the perceived poverty of individual rights driven by debates over human sexuality and ordination. What about plain old poverty driven by the historic legacy of racism, a politics seemingly motivated by a preferential option for the rich, and the exploitation of the newly arrived on American shores?

I don’t believe that the church’s mission is to broker the competing claims of “rights” among various factions. In our local church context, the power-brokers are the Korean-Americans since the Church of All Nations emerged from the Korean immigrant context. As we moved at increasing speed toward embodying the multicultural vision, the collective response I seemed to get from that group was: “We work for Dow Chemical, 3M, General Mills, and the University of Minnesota. Although we have well-paying jobs we are not really leaders in these places. We still have to live and work under the overarching white power structure. Now we come to a Korean-American church, the one place where we have power, where we have leadership, where our culture is affirmed, and you want to take that cultural hegemony away from us? You want to take away the one last refuge where we can be ourselves?”

My answer is “yes.” Yes, we lay down our lives for our friends. Yes, we love our neighbors as ourselves. Yes, we care for the widows, orphans, aliens, and strangers in our midst. Although we have painstakingly constructed foxholes and bird nests for our security, we choose with our Lord Jesus to be homeless wanderers on this earth, to have nowhere to lay our heads (Luke 9:57). I have compassion for my fellow 1.5- and second-generation English-speaking Korean-Americans who must choose between comfortable and affirming spiritual fellowship and the daring work of the ministry of reconciliation. I myself have worshiped and worked in the Korean church context all my life. I understand the need for the church to be a place of comfort; surely that is one of the roles of the church. But is God calling us to something higher than religion for our particular group? Can the Korean-Americans be evangels who, having achieved majority status and cultural dominance in the local congregation, willingly lay that down so that other cultures may be lifted up and affirmed? Can we be a mosaic of believers who witness to the God who reconciles all things to himself?

Jin S. Kim is pastor of the Church of All Nations in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

On Aug. 19, 2008, Zambia President Levy Patrick Mwanawasa died. His death was a loss not only to his nation but to the region. He was outspoken about the situation in Zimbabwe. It is ironic that his death was followed in a few days by the "death" of negotiations in Zimbabwe.  The government has refused to concede power and will be opening parliament next week --"back to business." It is not clear at the moment what options the opposition party has and what the best way forward will be. Giving up is not an option, but the way ahead requires renewed vision and courage. Thank you for your prayers. Please continue to pray.

Nontando Hadebe, a former Sojourners intern, is originally from Zimbabwe and is now pursuing graduate studies in theology in South Africa.

In a few weeks, I will make a life-changing journey. After 33 years of living in Northern Ireland, and for very good reasons, I am about to become an immigrant. I'm excited about this move, not least because I believe that doing something new is one of the best ways to grow as a human being.

But two questions come to mind as I prepare myself for leaving home.

The first is, "What will it feel like to be an immigrant?" Will I be welcomed by the people in my adopted country? Will I stand out? Will I have to sell newspapers at traffic lights or wait tables in restaurants where the indigenous population refuses to work? Will I have slogans painted on the wall of my house telling me to leave? Will I have to rely on churches and charities to defend my human rights? If there is something wrong with my visa, will I be handcuffed and detained indefinitely?

In considering my own imminent immigrant status, I am very aware of how often I have failed to welcome the people who have migrated to Northern Ireland in significant numbers recently -- especially from African countries and Eastern Europe. I have not always sought to see the good in the faces of people who have arrived here, often coming from difficult circumstances. I hope people will respond differently to me as I move overseas, and help me find a sense of home when I get there -- that along with my own hopes of being treated with respect, I will learn to offer more sanctuary to people I meet.

The second question is, "What I will miss when I leave?"

Along with thoughts of my friends and loved ones, in my mind's eye I'll visualise the natural landscape -- from the reward of the view after the walk up the Silent Valley, to the way evening light hits the lough shore in Randalstown Forest. (To readers who have not yet been able to make a pilgrimage to my home country, check out this image of the Silent Valley reservoir, nestled in the Mourne Mountains of South Down. Not exactly a Himalayan range, but it's home.)

And, of course, there is our extraordinary political experiment -- the attempt to resolve a violent conflict, which at the risk of oversimplification could be described as being between Protestants who feel their identity to be British, and Catholics who consider themselves Irish, without victory or defeat, but through agreeing to disagree, to put the past behind us, and to share power for the sake of all the people.

It's got its teething problems, of course, but we are also often very hard on our politicians.  This culture of "criticise first, ask questions later" is not only relevant to Northern Ireland, for we live in an age where cynicism so often trumps hope that it seems any talk about the humanity of our "enemies" is the interest only of a very small, very strange minority.  But those of us who believe in the possibility of resurrection must resist the relentless undermining of kindness, hope, and the common good that appears to drive so much of our culture. And so I dare to risk the sin of overstated arrogance -- and to suggest that the land I am leaving may well have a useful story to share with the people in the land I am going to. So I want to end this post, in the midst of the busyness of putting books in boxes and finding people to whom I can donate my furniture, with the hope that we in Northern Ireland might, after decades of complicated and painful relationships, be able to commit ourselves to something simple: To decide always, before we start complaining, to try to see the good in each other.

Dr. Gareth Higgins is a writer and broadcaster from Belfast, Northern Ireland, who has worked as an academic and activist. He is the author of the insightful How Movies Helped Save My Soul: Finding Spiritual Fingerprints in Culturally Significant Films. He blogs at www.godisnotelsewhere.blogspot.com and co-presents "The Film Talk" podcast with Jett Loe at www.thefilmtalk.com.

"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God" (Matthew 5:9).

Peacemaking is an important responsibility of people who follow Jesus, the Prince of Peace.  Christianity requires that we, ourselves, become the living, breathing, flesh-and-blood manifestation of the teachings of Jesus. Our calling is to a radical obedience to Jesus' call to follow him (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship). The teachings of Jesus are extreme and difficult: "Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you" (Matthew 5:44). This teaching is the pathway to peace.

Sept. 21 is the International Day of Peace. It is a day set aside to focus our attention on a global ceasefire, peacemaking, nonviolence, and the goal of creating a culture of peace. We hope and pray that it will be a day when bombs and guns are silent, where knives and machetes draw no blood, where we cease our verbal violence, where we each hold our peace in the name of peace. Most of us cannot through the power of our own decisions stop the violence in faraway places, but we can stop the violence of our own speech. We can dedicate Sept. 21 to the peace we can make on the earth beneath our feet, in the world within our reach.

Religion has often been blamed for violence and war. In my opinion, this is a mistake.  Religion intends unity. It at once provides a means whereby humanity can experience the ties that bind us and a means to know transcendence. Religion takes us to love through faith (Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity). However, when religion stops at faith, when it stops at a particular tradition, doctrine, tribe, nation, or historical moment, it becomes a way to define our identity, to set us apart, to separate us from humanity, creation, and God.  It is at this point when religion becomes dangerous and violent.

The radical love of Jesus requires us to not only love the people who are like us, those who love us, but to love the Other, even the enemy Other that hates us. Our command to do good is without exception. Thus, the way we ought to respond to our enemy is with love, blessing, good deeds, and prayer. This is our imperative for both personal and national enemies.

So let us remember Sept. 21, the United Nations International Day of Peace. Let us remember it in our homes and churches, but most especially in our secret prayer closets, looking forward to the day when God's kingdom of peace will come on earth as it is in heaven.

Dr. Valerie Elverton Dixon is an independent scholar who publishes lectures and essays at JustPeaceTheory.com. She received her Ph.D. in Religion and Society from Temple University and taught Christian Ethics at United Theological Seminary and Andover Newton Theological School.