Last month I heard on the radio about an event taking place at The Forks in Winnipeg. Turns out that Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) was running a tour that would be in town that weekend — the event was to set up a refugee camp and give tours of it so people could get a feel for the facilities and the conditions in one of the many refugee camps in the world. We decided it’d be good for the whole family, so we all headed down to check it out. Unfortunately, the SD Card with the photos was corrupted, but there are other photos online of the event, and you can preview it online as well to get a sense of the different stations on the tour and the information presented at each. The preview sets you in the role of the refugee — or IDP, Internally Displaced Person, since “refugees” are technically people who have crossed a border; IDPs may be in the same position, but have not actually left their country.

• Grace: “Hype: Myth-telling that manipulates herd mentality that desperately needs a metanarrative to indulge its gross egocentrism.”
• Bono: “It’s extraordinary to me that the United States can find $700 billion to save Wall Street and the entire G8 can’t find $25 billion dollars to saved 25,000 children who die every day from preventable diseases.” … “‘Bankruptcy is a serious business and we all know people who have lost their jobs,’” Bono said, referring to the bankruptcy declared by Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. ‘But this is moral bankruptcy.’”
• Julian, the last Roman Emperor: “Nothing has contributed to the progress of the superstition of these Christians as their charity to strangers, the impious Galileans provide not only for their own poor but for ours as well.” — Tim Keller: “The early Christians were promiscuous with their charity.”
• Sara Savage and Eolene Boyd-Macmillan, from The Human Face of the Church: A Social Psychology and Pastoral Theology Resource for Pioneer and Traditional Ministry: “”…The sociologist Max Weber observed a cyclical process among religious movements that he called ‘the routinization of charisma’. Weber argued that any great vision requires a human process to carry it through time, sometimes in the form of ‘a man, a mission, a movement, or a monument’. Even with the Body of Christ, the life-giving charism has to be embodied in a routine – in some form of human organization. Yet, life-giving visions do not fit easily into neat boxes. So, the very process that gives the vision continuing life also begins to kill it. When the maintenance of the institution (which protects the charism) becomes the institution’s primary purpose, the death of the charism is on the horizon. Only a spiritual revival or reform will re-ignite the gift. In our era, fresh expressions of church and the re-traditioning of familiar forms of church march alongside many initiatives to re-ignite the gift…”
• Len Sweet: “So far… rather than reach back into 2000 years of Church history, Emergent stopped at the ‘liberal turn’ wherein the Gospel became all social and no gospel.” and “The emerging church has become another form of social gospel. And the problem with every social gospel is that it becomes all social and no gospel. All social justice and no social gospel. It is embarrassing that evangelicals have discovered and embraced liberation theology after it destroyed the main line, old line, side line, off line, flat line church.”
• Len Sweet (via Jordon Cooper): “…musing about how I am SO tired of the church viewing the world more as a market than as a mission.”
• via Frank Viola:
  “The real trouble is not in fact that the Church is too rich, but that it has become heavily institutionalized, with a crushing investment in maintenance. It has the characteristics of the dinosaur and the battleship. It is saddled with a plant and programme beyond its means, so that it is absorbed in problems of supply and preoccupied with survival. The inertia of the machine is such that the financial allocations, the legalities, the channels of organization, the attitudes of mind, are all set in the direction of continuing and enhancing the status quo. If one wants to pursue a course which cuts across these channels, then most of one’s energies are exhausted before one ever reaches the enemy lines.”
  – John A.T. Robinson

I tend to forget how deeply spiritual U2’s Joshua Tree album was… hey, it was 20 years ago, but it was also one of the greatest rock albums of all time. Like many others I’m sure, I was glad to see that the album has been remastered and is to be re-released on November 20^th as a double CD or double CD with DVD (click to order/pre-order). The re-release includes previously unreleased tracks that were written for but not included on the original Joshua Tree album release. One of these, “Wave of Sorrow” is now circulating via the wonder of Internet video, this time at iLike.com/u2. Wave of Sorrow was written out of Bono’s experience in Ethiopia with World Vision. The video is below, with Bono continually interrupting to explain the lyrics, which draw on several biblical allusions, including Solomon and the Beatitudes. And matches them with extreme poverty.