By Dennis Gruending

Bob Carty is an Ottawa-based journalist best known for his consummate radio documentaries for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation but he has another skill as well. He is a fine musician and singer and has released an album called Desert Eyes: Songs of Justice and Spirit. They are songs about justice with a Christian sub-text carrying titles such as Let Justice Roll and lyrics such as this: “Let justice roll, like a mighty river/A-movin’ fast, down to the sea/It will erode, all our foundation/Touch every heart and every nation.” Carty launched his album in Ottawa to an audience of about 200 people in March. He said at the time that the songs had been many years in the works and that it was a great joy to present them - “especially after a couple of difficult years.” Those who know him are aware that Carty has been dealing with cancer during that time, although he plans to go back to work for CBC Radio’s The Sunday Edition this fall.

Carty says that he began to write songs in the 1960s, a time of social protest. “My early influences included Woody Guthrie, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Pete Seeger, and John Prine, and my musical skills were honed at coffee houses, protests, grape boycott pickets, folk masses, and coffee houses.” He performed for events with Jean Vanier, Mother Teresa and Cesar Chavez.  Prior to entering journalism, he spent a decade working on human rights and international development in Latin America. In the 1980s, he says, “the new music of Latin America became a strong influence”, reinforced by his living in the region for five years, reporting for the CBC.

Carty says in a booklet packaged with his album that he draws its Desert Eyes title from a philosopher, ecologist and sanctuary activist named Jim Corbett, who used to take people into the Arizona desert for retreats. For several days they would be depressed and desperate, perceiving nothing, Carty writes, but “parched barrens, bleached out colours and the lack of life.” But then they develop “desert eyes”, seeing plants, seeds, animals, a full spectrum of colours by day and wonderful stars at night. “They’d begun to understand,” Carty writes, “that even in the most desperate of times – even in time of great evil and death – there is still life and hope.”  It is the  world’s structural evil, confronted by life and hope, that Carty writes and sings about in his Desert Eyes title song: “We live in a time so dry and forsaken/Empty of joy, full of such greed.” The temptation is to avoid it all and to retreat into personal comfort, yet we are drawn to the desert life: “Embracing a God who embraces the homeless/We reach for the cup we can share/trusting the hand of a sister and brother/we work for a world that is fair.”

Carty wrote most of the 21 songs on the album and he produced it along with James Stevens. The Ottawa launch featured Carty and half a dozen other musicians, including Stevens, but it didn’t end there. Two young women singing harmonies and members of a children’s choir accompanied him at different times during the evening. “If you have great kids,” Carty  says, “it means you have a great community.”  He was accompanied in his finale, We Are Love, in the concert (and on the album) by perhaps 20 members drawn from among his friends and people at his Catholic church in Ottawa. There is a strong justice theme running through the album, but there are also two Psalms put to music and other songs as well. Carty has done a modest amount of touring with Desert Eyes and plans to do more. His website indicates that he is available to perform house concerts.

By Dennis Gruending

The federal New Democratic Party wants to reach out to faith-based groups and religiously motivated individuals through its recently created Faith and Social Justice Commission. Joe Comartin, NDP MP for Windsor-Tecumseh, is chair of the Commission’s provisional steering committee. “We are going back to our roots,” Comartin says. “The CCF-NDP was created in large measure by people who were trying to put their religious faith into action, and for many of us faith remains the main motivator for how we practice politics and make policy.”

Comartin says the FSJC was approved in principle at the party’s 2006 convention and officially recognized by the federal council late in 2008. The Commission will present its bylaws and elect officers at the party’s federal convention in Halifax August 14-16, 2009. Comartin says that the Commission has been somewhat slow to get going because there was a federal election in 2008 and a decision not to hold a convention in that year. But he says the Commission has proven worthwhile. “The Commission has already accomplished one major goal and that is to raise the profile of individuals within our party who come to their politics from the perspective of a religious faith.”

The FSJC arose partly from the realization that most often people and groups claiming a religious motivation for their politics in recent years were supporting right wing parties, particularly Reform, the Canadian Alliance, and now the Conservatives. The Harper Conservatives court the religious right and hope to incorporate them into a governing coalition that will wean Canadians from their essentially social democratic tendencies. Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff has also appointed an Ontario caucus member to lead in outreach to faith-based groups. Ignatieff recently participated in what was billed as a session of dialogue and debate organized by the Canadian Council of Churches.

Pierre Ducasse is a former contender for the NDP leadership and now a staffer who also acts as secretary to the FSJC. He says, “Some people believe that if you come from a faith perspective, you are inherently a conservative, but as social democrats we believe that the central religious message is one of justice and being our brother’s and our sister’s keeper.” Ducasse agrees that the Commission’s activities have so far been sporadic, but he adds, “The very fact that we exist is important. When our MPs meet with people who come from a faith perspective, we tell them about the Commission. For example, when MP Tony Martin meets with groups about poverty issues they are often people of religious faith and they are pleased to hear that we have this Commission.”

Comartin says that he has seen a change occurring among faith-based groups in the past four or five years. “We are witnessing a shift from the primary focus of these groups being right wing and based upon what they call family values back to a more left of centre position. These people are increasingly concerned about peace, poverty and the environment and they are coming at it from a more progressive perspective.”

Ducasse and Comartin agree that Barrack Obama’s effective outreach to faith-based groups during his presidential campaign in 2008 was an important development. Comartin says, “Faith groups in the U.S. became active on behalf of the Democrats in the way that they had been for the Republicans in earlier times. This arose from pastors and others seeing the problems that people in their congregations and their communities were facing, and they became involved in politics because of their faith and their desire to create change. Political leaders are recognizing this.”

There was some criticism from within the NDP in 2006 about creating a party commission that was faith-based, but Comartin says the response has mainly positive. “Our MPs are reporting back from their ridings that a lot of people think this is something that needed to be done for a long time given the importance that religious faith and the social gospel played in the founding of our party.” Comartin says caucus members have been supportive as well and that nine or 10 NDP MPs (out of 37) regularly attend meetings of a faith and social justice caucus.

Comartin says that Rev. Eric Irvin, a Baptist pastor from Kentucky who was deeply involved with the Obama campaign, will speak to a luncheon sponsored by the FSJC at the Halifax convention in August.

By Dennis Gruending

You cannot be a person of faith without being political, says Paul Dewar, the New Democratic Party MP for Ottawa Centre. Dewar spoke to the Faith and Public Life class at the Ottawa Lay School of Theology on February 9th.  “Faith and politics are congruent and we have no option but to be political if we are going to live the gospel. We have to constantly question what the Christian message is, and we can never stop trying to change the way things are in society.” Dewar says that for him the word “political” includes electoral politics but also transcends it. “Our response to faith must be lived out in community,” he says. “Faith is something that we must do and not only think about.”

Dewar talked about how he grew up in a Catholic household in Ottawa in the post-Vatican II era in the 1960s. “My parents were both deeply involved in their church and they extended that into the community. Their faith, their community and their attempt to live the gospel were all of one woven cloth.” Dewar says that their parish priest, a member of the Basilian order, was also a valuable member of the community. “He was quiet and intelligent and able to work with others.” Through him, Dewar became involved in Alleluia House, a project inspired by Jean Vanier (who later created L’Arche) to have a community for people who were developmentally delayed. “These people were not unusual to me, they were my neighbours,” adds Dewar.

Dewar says that his parents’ participation in the Catholic Family Movement in the 1960s “levered their social action.” Initially it was Dewar’s father Ken who was the more political member of the family, but it was his mother Marion, a public health nurse, who eventually ran for public office. “She was involved in the church and extended that into the community and she got into public life in that way.” Marion Dewar became the mayor of Ottawa in 1978 and later served as an NDP Member of Parliament. “I was raised in the Catholic church but in the social democratic faith as well,” Dewar says, “but I would say that it was a 75-25 per cent quotient of faith over politics that influenced who I am.”

He says that it was not easy for Catholics of his parent’s generation to be social democrats (members of the CCF and later the New Democratic Party) because of opposition from many Catholic bishops. Dewar referred a book called Catholics and Canadian Socialism, written by former priest and academic Gregory Baum. In it Baum documents how bishops in Quebec and Saskatchewan in the 1930s and 40s forbade Catholics to support the CCF. The bishops’ in their criticism failed to draw a distinction between communism and the democratic socialism of people like J.S. Woodsworth and Tommy Douglas, who ironically were also religious ministers.

The bishops’ campaign was not entirely successful, Dewar says. “There were agrarian radicals like Joe Burton in Humboldt, Saskatchewan who challenged the church by running for the CCF. We also had Catholic labour people and activists in places such as Antigonish, Nova Scotia doing the same thing. The bishops neither welcomed nor expected debate on these matters but some people began to challenge the church and the Vatican.”

Dewar says that as he grew older and attended university he took a break from the church. “But it never left me. I kept reading and thinking and questioning.” At one point his mother introduced him to the mayor of Managua and following completion of his first university degree Dewar spent six months working in Nicaragua. “I was influenced by what I saw happening in the Christian community there. I saw how poor people who had been in a paternalistic relationship with the church used liberation theology to understand what the gospel was all about. They discovered that social justice and the sharing of resources was what Christ was talking about. I had never seen this manifested to such a degree. It was when I came back from Nicaragua that I came back to the church.”

Dewar became a teacher and later became involved in his union. He was vice-president of the Ottawa Carleton Elementary School Teachers’ Federation and helped establish the teachers’ Humanity Fund, providing donations to projects in developing countries. He was elected to the House of Commons in 2006 and again in 2008. He was asked following his presentation at the Lay School if he talks publicly about his religion in political settings. “Not often,” he replied. “I am prepared to talk openly about faith in settings such as this class, but when speaking in a political capacity I am reluctant to do so because I fear I could be misunderstood, and I do not want to use religion to score political points.”

Dewar says his mother was an example to him in this way as well. “Many people who attended my mother’s funeral and an associated event at Ottawa city hall were surprised to hear about the depth of her faith. She was profoundly spiritual but she was also aware of where faith belonged. She did not place her Catholic faith in the forefront in her public life, and she was also very open to all faiths and religions.”

By Dennis Gruending

The exercise of citizenship as ministry is rooted in the Biblical calling to do justice, says Kathy Vandergrift, an Ottawa-based Christian activist who has worked both within government and outside of it on behalf of religiously based and non-governmental organizations. She and William Janzen, long time director of the Mennonite Central Committee Canada’s Ottawa office, spoke to our Ottawa Lay School of Theology Faith and Public Life class on February 2. Vandergrift organized her thoughts under the rubric of what she called the Four P’s.

Principled engagement

Christians are called to principled engagement in public life. That engagement demands more, Vandergrift says, than just “working from the bleachers and voting every four years.” Principled engagement is more than mere action – it contains a qualitative dimension as well. “Elected politicians expect you to be self-interested and we are often conditioned in that way too. Look at coverage of the recent budget. Everybody responds on the basis of what is in it for them,” Vandergrift says. She adds that Christians can have a “profound advantage” if they choose to engage in a different way – on the basis of justice and not self-interest. But she warned against approaching politicians with pat solutions based on Biblical verses. “The Bible is not a political science manual. We have to be principled but not preachy.”

Practical

“I am a strong believer in incrementalism,” says Vandergrift. “It is important just to put an issue on the public agenda and keep it there. For example, it is hard to get children onto the agenda now, hard to promote solidarity with Aboriginal peoples and with refugees.” Vandergift says that it is important for Christian advocates to pick just a few issues and to campaign for policy changes on them. “I also like to present positive policy alternatives,” she says.

Prophetic voice

“If we want to provide a faith witness we should choose issues that lead to catalytic change,” says Vandergrift. “Such a moment exists now [during a time of economic crisis]. Our witness will make people uncomfortable – but in this way Christians can actually redeem the field of politics.”

Persistent and strategic

“Working for justice is like playing chess,” Vandergrift says. “We have to be strategic. Sometimes pawns can topple kings.” It is not enough, she says, to expound on what is right or wrong, or even to write fine position papers on issues. “We need a strategy on how we are going to promote our issues.” She talked about four current issues that demand our attention:

Creation care: “It needs a lot of work.”

Christian approaches to human rights: “We have to lift up the social and economic rights of people who are disadvantaged.”

Justice rather than charity for the vulnerable: Vandergrift says, for example, that food banks were created decades ago as a temporary response to hunger but now they have become a mainstay. Food banks are an example of charity but the existence of hunger in our communities is a question of justice.

Dealing with a diversity of faiths and cultures: These issues will grow as Canada becomes even more multi-religious and multi-cultural, Vandergrift says. “We have seen some of this over the so-called accommodation debate in Quebec.” The question became how much, if any, accommodation should be made, to take but one example, for female Muslim students who wear headscarves in schools or in sports events.

Vandergrift also commented on the situation in Bountiful, B.C. where polygamous men take young girls as wives.  “When the issue is framed as a debate between religious freedom and polygamy,” she says “the abuse of children’s rights is ignored. That should be of concern to people of faith, but because it is a question of religious freedom, we are afraid to engage in the issue and its implications. Perhaps the time has come when people of faith need to pay closer attention to the relationship between religious freedom and other issues in Canada.”

William Janzen, in his remarks, said that Mennonites in Canada have held a theology that makes them different from many other faiths in their dealing with government. He says that opening of an MCC office in Ottawa in the 1970s was a pivotal point for Mennonites. “Prior to that we mostly lived within our own communities. What we wanted from government was to have our own land and schools, and to be allowed to be conscientious objectors in times of war. We were hesitant to participate in the task of governing the larger society.”

Janzen says that when Mennonites did decide to begin advocating to government they thought it best to speak out of their own experience. “We would speak about what we had learned, but we would stop short of telling government what to do.” One of those areas of experience was work on behalf of refugees. Many Mennonites had been refugees, particularly after the Russian revolution and the World Wars, and the Mennonite Central Committee was actually founded to support refugee work. Janzen says this experience was valuable when MCC helped to negotiate a master agreement with the Canadian government to sponsor so-called Boat People from Southeast Asia in the late 1970s.

Janzen also points to the Canadian Food Grains Bank, which he said arose from a desire by Mennonite farmers in Canada to send food abroad to people who were hungry. The CFGB now receives support from numerous Canadian churches and religiously based organizations.

Janzen says that the traditional Anabaptist belief in pacifism has also helped to inform MCC’s witness. “We came to believe that we had something to say to the government about war and peace.” He believes, for example, that work done by his office (and by other churches) played some role in convincing then Prime Minister Jean Chretien to refuse American entreaties for Canada to become involved in Iraq.

Janzen adds, “In general, I have not approached the government with a view that it should not use force at all, even as a last resort. But I do have a high respect for the argument that once you do rule out military force, it is then that you become creative in looking at the options.”