Last night was the New England stop on the Jesus For President tour, the vehicle for Shane Claiborne and his traveling band of raggamuffin evangelical radicals.  Well - actually, the vehicle for Shane Claiborne and company is a grease-powered, repurposed school bus painted black with gold "Jesus for President" signs.  The event was at an inner-city elementary school, and attended by a strange mix indeed - a handful of country UCCers (that came in my minivan with me), a large helping of young evangelicals, a smattering of little old ladies who walked in by themselves, and contingents from the Salvation Army (in uniform) and the local Catholic Worker House.  It was a blend of people as colorful and strange and hard to define as the movement currently being driven by Claiborne - a rowdy mix of evangelical fervor, passion for peace and social justice, world music, Bible reading, standup comedy and a kind of 21st century liberation theology.

What Would Jesus Buy is now on DVD.

(Get it here)

About a week or so ago, an absolutely stunning report came out from the Pew Center on States about the rate of incarceration in America today.  The report's jaw-dropping finding - one in every 99 adults in America is currently behind bars - made a tiny blip in the blogosphere and then sunk into the abyss under the weight of the primaries.  But I for one have not been able to get this statistic out of my head.  

1 out of every 99 adults in America is incarcerated.

That's 1.6 million people.

More red meat for you all - today we have Beliefnet interviewing Huckabee on his goals for the Constitution.

In which, the Huckster clarifies:

Well, I probably said it awkwardly, but the point I was trying to make– and I’ve said it better in the past – is that people sometimes say we shouldn’t have a human life amendment or a marriage amendment because the Constitution is far too sacred to change...It’s an issue that goes to the very heart of our civilization of all people being equal, endowed by their creator with alienable rights of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That was the point. The Bible was not written to be amended. The Constitution was. Without amendments to the Constitution, women couldn’t vote, African-Americans wouldn’t be considered people. We have had to historically go back and to clarify, because there’ve been injustices made because the Constitution wasn’t as clear as it needed to be, and that’s the point.

Where to begin?

My dear assorted Street Prophets of assorted hermeneutics and, ah, species...

Can anyone explain what the heck Mike Huckabee was talking about yesterday?

Per Think Progress:

I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution. But I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And that's what we need to do is amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than trying to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view of how we treat each other and how we treat the family.

Link with video here.

UNICEF has announced their 2007 Photo of the Year, by US photog Stephanie Sinclair.

Her photo shows a wedding couple in Afghanistan who could not be more opposite. The groom, Mohammed, looks much older than his 40 years. The bride, Ghulam, is still a child; she just turned 11. "The UNICEF Photo of the Year 2007 raises awareness about a worldwide problem. Millions of girls are married while they are still under age...

According to UNICEF, there are about 60 million young women worldwide who were married before they came of age, half of them in South Asia.

Here's the pic.

Please take a moment to visit the site and peruse the other pictures chosen for recognition.  The holidays are a good time to look back on the year that was - even for the poorest among us.

I was especially moved by pictures of Hartmut Schwarzbach of children of a charcoal burners’ camp in Manila.

Peace.

(via Boing Boing)

Hey SP -

Can we exchange gift ideas?  I know it's kind of last minute, but I could really use some help with finding good ideas.  I like the idea of green or progressive gifts, but don't want to be too preachy or overbearing (so, sorry, no carbon offsets for grandma).  I am feeling a bit Reverend Billy this year, though, so I'm trying to eschew most any kind of infantile, junky gifts.  But I gotta find something for family.

So, here's the deal - since I figure I'm not the only one looking for new ideas - please post a progressive holiday gift idea below.  Post an idea, find an idea... hopefully this will help out all our resident procrastinators (and not just me)...

Tomorrow morning, I will have the opportunity to participate in the reading of the following pastoral letter on the iraq war at the beginning of our worship service at the local UCC.  This letter will be read at UCC churches throughout the country this week.  It makes a prophetic call to end the war immediately - and is just one of many reasons I'm proud to be a part of this religious community.

You can read the letter in its entirety at the link above, and sign a petition calling for an immediate cease fire in Iraq.

Excerpts from the letter follow:

Via Huffington Post, the LATimes is reporting the Alberto Gonzales is being given special new powers to end the appeals process for prisoners awaiting capital punishment.

"Under the rules now being prepared, if a state requested it and Gonzales agreed, prosecutors could use "fast track" procedures that could shave years off the time that a death row inmate has to appeal to the federal courts after conviction in a state court.

The move to shorten the appeals process and effectively speed up executions comes at a time of growing national concern about the fairness of the death penalty, underscored by the use of DNA testing to establish the innocence of more than a dozen death row inmates in recent years."

Sounds like Gonzo "doesn't recall" all of Bush's bull about compassionate conservatism or the sanctity of human life.

Some related facts beneath the fold, to jog his memory...

He actually said it.

"If it is up to me, we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland of that nature would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina," Tancredo said. "That is the only thing I can think of that might deter somebody from doing what they would otherwise do. If I am wrong, fine, tell me, and I would be happy to do something else. But you had better find a deterrent, or you will find an attack."

Hi gang.  Raise your hand if you think of American history as a great symbol of pacifism in action.

No one?

Well, okay, the vast military industrial complex notwithstanding, allow me to start this little aska diary by illuminating at least a little of America's role in the history of Pacifism.  America's most well-known pacifist was Martin Luther King - and while many don't know of his courageous stance against the Vietnam War, many do know his nonviolent tactics against the machinery of American racism, and many know that he was influenced greatly by Mahatma Gandhi.

There's a good chance that you also know that no book, it seems, was a greater influence to Gandhi than Leo Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You (1893).

Something you may not know - to bring this story back to America - is that Tolstoy begins his book by quoting extensively from a proclamation written in 1838 in America by the father of William Lloyd Garrison.

(I'll excerpt just below the fold...)  

I am a HUGE Yankees fan.  The only blogs I follow daily involve progressive politics or New York Yankees baseball.  I watch every single game that's on TV - and the ones that are not on TV, I watch on MLB's glacially-paced GameDay.  I realize my allegiance to the Yankees makes me suspect among other progressives - but if I'm going to support a multi-zillion dollar organization, at least it's only a baseball team.

(A liberal Yankees fan.  Imagine how my year went in 2004.  Not good.)

It's only with much trepidation that I post this article then from today's NY Times.  Basically, fans at Yankee Stadium are being chained into their seats during the prolonged 7th-inning stretch so they can meditate on a tinny recording of Kate Smith's blaring, screamy rendition of God Bless America.