The Shifting of global economic power?

Most of our attention is focused on the power, good or bad wielded by huge trans-national corporations (TNCs) and governments in the West. What's going on in the East, though? Here are couple of interesting articles:

China's push into Africa: Who really benefits?

Soft power, hard deals as China-Africa forum opens

about race, the world, and much more

Interesting thoughts about race i stumbled upon from a blog i like to read...
Like the bible, you can twist anything to be anything.

Here's an article about the tragic airplane accident that happened October 29th, in Nigeria ADC's Final Nightmare – A Fatal Air Crash. The current aviation fiasco in my home country is ridiculous and just shows you what happens when corruption is left unchecked.

How the internet is affecting education in parts of Africa (mp3 file) Bringing the Internet to Schools in Africa October 19, 2006. Cliff Missen—Director, WiderNet Project, University of Iowa.

imagine. . .

Imagine living in a world where each day you wake up to a new experience and worldview.

Imagine waking up each day in a new body, with new memories while retaining the old.

Imagine waking up and knowing that the decisions you make that day will affect forever the body you inhabit but you won’t be there the next day to see what the consequences will be.

Imagine waking up each day in a new body realizing that you'll have to deal with the consequences of the decisions the person who inhabited the body you are in the day before made.

Imagine waking up each day to speaking a different language and interpreting everything around you through a set of different lenses.

What would you do? Would you live differently? Would the decisions you make be considered more carefully?

Lately, I've been thinking about our human nature, how we tend to look at everything we do and the results from the stand point of "us". All our decisions are almost always made within the context of how the results will affect us, directly or indirectly. Even when we do good it's often tied to what I call a "reward stimulant," i.e., we partly do it for the afterglow of feeling good about ourselves for a good deed done. I'm not saying this is a good or bad thing. It's just something I, and I know tons of others, have observed about humanity.

So what's the point? No point. Just an observation.

I'll have points about other things very soon.

epiphany. . .

By their very nature epiphanies tend to occur few and far between but when they do, the paradigm shift in the microcosm that up until now was your worldview is usually dramatic, a severe tectonic shift and far-reaching.

"You shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall set you free." - jn 8:32

I guess for all practical purposes my whole philosophical and intellectual paradigm has been more Plato then Kant, the belief in a reality outside of our existence of which we can only see the shadows of and which we interpret through what we see. In other words, what goes on around us, the decisions we make, our triumphs and failures are all based on a higher, perfect ideal that we cannot hope to achieve or interpret rightly in this world because we are a deeply flawed and fallen race. My faith has been bolstered by (and pinioned to) the belief in a Truth that is infallible, outside the confines of our finite minds, a Truth that exists completely within God, a Truth unassailable and unaffected by our decisions, are beliefs, are perceptions. This is Truth that IS regardless of whether we accept it or not, a completely objective Truth that cannot be tainted by the travails and travesties that occur each day in our world.

This has been manifest in the way I approach the practical application of my faith. It didn't matter how I felt, what mattered was, what is the Truth, that objective ideal that is affected by nothing except for itself, in the issue at hand. I've always felt that it was important to put aside the feelings of the situation and to look objectively at the facts of what was taking place to give a clear, fair and unprejudiced assesment.

So whenever I've thought of the verse, "You shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall set you free," I have held in my head a picture an esoteric, irrefutable final knowledge; a knowledge of which had the ability to shatter whatever chains were bound around me. It seemed to me that Jesus was saying when you get to know this Truth that I bring to you, this message, this gospel, that knowledge, will set you free and you will get to experience life the way it was meant to be.

I've discovered now that this is only partially right.

My epiphany was precipitated by readings from "Colossians Remixed: subverting the empire," a book sometimes a little heady but guaranteed to cause you to think and think hard (*now for some of you what I'm about to write down may be highly anti-climatic, something that you've already known for years, but I can't help that. You'll just have to bear with me. For others, well, I'll let you decide for yourselves) and it suddenly became clear what, or I should say whom, the Truth was that Jesus was talking about.

He was talking about Himself.

That's it. Not a message, not a high ideal, not the knowledge of knowing Truth. Why is this so monumental to me? Well all of a sudden my many conversations about the relational aspect of Christianity with several friends are now viewed through a completely different soul-piercing lense. If Christ is saying, "You shall know ME, and I shall set you free," then he's not saying when you acuquire the knowledge of the Truth then that knowledge will set you free. He's saying, "When you experience Me and the relation of being in communion with Me, then you will be set free." The foundation of my faith is relational, everything else, all my knowledge, the intellectual discourse I engage in, my activities, my desire for social and economic justice, my hobbies, everything, must stem from this one central truth. It's not the knowledge of Truth, the understanding of the gospel message that sets me free. It's Jesus.

There's so much more to this and the implications for how I approach my friendships, manifest my faith and so many other things are bound to be impacted mightily by this. I really do need more time to process this. I'll probably add more thoughts after I've mulled a little more over this. There's so much moreI've had to reevaluate: what does "objectivity" really mean; what defines what between faith and logical thought; what comes to mind when I utter the phrase, "defender of the faith"'; et cetera, et cetera.

In the meantime, there's a whole lot of relational living to be lived...

deciphering life

At a certain point in life we find ourselves trying to figure out why we're here, what we're doing and ultimately what we're going to leave behind (our legacy; this is especially evident among us males). In my life it's about that time. I've been looking back at what I've accomplished so far and quite frankly, I'm not all that impressed by what I see.

So the question is: What is it I want to see happen in my life over the next year? Or maybe a better question would be, "What are hieroglyphics on the wall of my life that I need to decipher to understand what direction i feel i need to take in my life. In other words what's the Rosetta key to deciphering my life?

I was deep in conversation with a friend today discussing why in life we need to make an effort to figure out the personalities around us to be able to truly communicate and connect with each other. As we continued to talk we got into how we treat each other and how we sometimes blame our personalities for certain quirks in our behavior. Which prompted this statement: "Just because you've got a certain personality type doesn't give you the right to be an a$$hole." Amen and amen.