Speaker 1:	Tonight's event has been co-sponsored by, and I want you to give it up for, the Department of Religion, the Interfaith Center, the formidable Lang Center for Civil and Social Responsibility, the world famous Peace and Conflicts Studies ... no it is world famous. And [inaudible 00:00:37] Progressive Christians. 
	Here's the thing, last year I'm teaching a seminar at Temple University for grad students called, "Good and Evil". Actually, it was called, "Radical Good and Radical Evil". We didn't think the "radical" would fly around here so we cut it out. We read all sorts of classics of sort of radical Altruism and radical evil of the 20th Century and we explored issues about goodness, but limits of agency and responsibility and what we can do for each other. And also the perverse limits of evil and cruelty and what people have done to each other. 
	The book I chose was a theologian's mediation on Christian forgiveness and charity, which didn't fly. And I was really disappointed it didn't fly and then a few weeks later I happened to pick up Shane's book, which is actually on sale afterwards, in the back, the Irresistible Revolution. And I said, "This is the book I should've assigned to these graduate students." I have not read in years, a book of Christian faith that speaks so much to my non-Christian soul and still non-Christian soul. This text and Shane's world is and inspiration. An inspiration like his inspirations, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day and other sort of saintly figures of the good life. 
	I started recommending it to all of my friends as an example of an image of Christians, activists on the move, living a life, struggling to think and feel and discern what it means to be responsible in an Urban American environment. I can think of no other privilege than to actually have Shane Claiborne here and my students who have read his book this week, here in the audience to talk to us about his life, his mission and what's happened since this book has come out. Shane will tell you a little bit about his community, the simple way in Philadelphia and I have made up some little sign up sheets because they are very tech savvy. You can follow them on Facebook, Twitter, their website or just get an email from them. 
	Please lets give a big Swattie welcome to Shane Claiborne. 
Shane Claiborne:	Well I'm thrilled to be back at Swarthmore and I'm excited about the conversation. In a little bit, we're just going to open it up so I'm giving you the heads up. These are my notes, there's about six words on there, so it's like I really believe in conversation. I'm honored to be homework for some of you and to open up conversation tonight. I grew up down in Tennessee, which is why I talk so cool and it was the Bible Belt and I grew up very immersed in Christianity, but I began to feel a little bit of a disconnect as I had my eyes opened up to the world a little bit because a lot of what it seemed like ... at least the version of Christianity that I saw was offering was like, life after death. Whereas like it seemed like half the world was wondering if there's life before death, you know? Kind of wondering how do we survive in the world and if our faith isn't relevant to the world that we live in then what good really is it? 
	You know that old saying, like my Grandmother used to say, "If you're not careful, your faith becomes so heavenly minded, it's no earthly good." I saw a lot of Christians that we're kind of using our faith just as like a ticket in to heaven and a license to ignore the hells of the world around us. And yet, then I started reading my bible and almost every time Jesus opens his mouth, he's talking about the kingdom of God, a very peculiar kind of phrase that "kingdom" was the same word as empire and it was this idea of sort of God's dream coming but it wasn't just something that we hope for when we die but something that we're actually to be a part of inaugurating on earth as it is in Heaven, as Jesus said. I started seeing that and going, "Wow, this is a beautiful vision for how we can live." It kind of went a lot deeper. 
	We used to have this thing in youth group called "Heaven's gates and Hell's flames". I'm just going to give you a little flavor of it. If you've ever seen like youth groups ... I know a lot of you didn't grow up in the youth group world. But if you want to see really bad theater, there's nothing worse than a junior high skit. You'd be driving the bus and then, I mean this is before an audience and the bus would wreck and like everybody would die and demons would come and drag everybody that didn't know Jesus to Hell and my friend's dad was the Devil and he was really good. And afterwards, they'd invite everybody to know Jesus and I mean everybody got saved, even the Pastor got born again, again. 
	I started seeing that and going, "Well, I'm not sure where all this fits in." I came up to Philly, in part for me it was to get out of that world and see the world a little bit and so I wanted to study Sociology. So that's what I majored in but I also wasn't quite ready just to throw out my faith and I loved how Karl Barth said, "We've got to read the bible in one hand but we need to read the newspaper in the other." Our faith isn't just a ticket out of the world but it's fuel to engage injustice and the brokenness of the world that we live it. That's what I studied. I studied the Bible and I studied Sociology, but everything really kind of ignited for me in 1995 when I was studying at Eastern. 
	A group of homeless families, some of y'all on the little of the older side will remember this that dozens and dozens of homeless families had moved into an abandoned cathedral at 8th and York in North Philadelphia and they were living there. This is a time where there were 3,000 families on the waiting list for affordable housing. What happened was heart breaking. The Archdiocese that owned the Catholic cathedral gave the families and eviction notice and told them that if they weren't out within 48 hours then they could be arrested for trespassing on church property. Something about that just didn't feel right and you know there's kind of moments when you go, "God why don't you do something?" And we sort of felt God go, "I did do something. I made you. Get out." 
	We went down and we found the cathedral that night actually and on the front of the cathedral the families had hung a banner that said, "How can we worship a homeless man on Sunday and ignore one on Monday?" And it really opened our eyes both to kind of seeing Jesus and our faith differently and also to seeing the struggle of homeless families and that lasted not for 48 hours but for months and months and months and was kind of a whole movement on Eastern's campus. I'm happy to say we also had some Swarthmore students involved and that stand off ... there's all kinds of stuff that happened. The media got pretty involved and made it look like the church was kicking homeless people out and that's cause the church was kicking homeless people out and so what we always track as kind of this spark that lit the fire. 
	That was the seed that turned into what we now have in our community and out of that, a group of college friends and I, we just moved in together and we continued living in that neighborhood. In fact, just a couple of years ago my wife and I got married in the old abandoned cathedral and it's been an incredible struggle. Not my marriage. It's been entering in to some of the injustice and the pain but it's also a place where we found hope. A lot of times I say neighborhoods that are economically struggling are often community rich and likewise, neighborhoods that are often community rich or economically rich are community poor. You don't know all your neighbors. So our neighborhood is post-industrial wreckage of urban America. We've lost over 150,000 jobs. We've got 700 abandoned factories, 20,000 vacant houses, so that's our little world. 
	When we moved in, we found that when you move into a neighborhood that's got so much abandonment, there's a lot of room for resurrection and we found that we can buy a house for a dollar. Not bad. Little different from Swarthmore, but anyway, so we're pulling our money together and we've been moving into abandoned houses and planting gardens on vacant lots, so now if feels a lot like we've been building a village together and we've been trying to grow a neighborhood in the midst of that industrial ruins that we live in. 
	Our latest project is we've ... some of you are smarty pants, if you've studied urban farming or urban gardening, one of the cutting edge sort of things is aquaponics and so that's what we've been doing now. We dug down into the basement of an abandoned house and the house was leveled cause there was a fire and we dug down and we've created a 1800 gallon fish pond where we can raise about 1,000 fish and then that water pumps through and we've got solar panels and all that stuff and it's filtered through raised bed gardens back to the fish and so it's a really beautiful way of growing food in the nutritional desert. We picked a carrot this morning in 20 degree weather in Philadelphia. But that's part of what we get to see you know, is we get to see life flourish again and there's something I think to be said about neighborhoods that have had the life sucked out of them, like much of Kensington and so if you grow up in a neighborhood where a lot of what you look at is ugly, it's hard to be convinced that there's a beautiful creator, you know? 
	When we lose connection to life, then a culture of death kind of often prevails and so part of what we do as Theologian Wendell Berry, he calls it "practicing resurrection" you know is that we practice resurrection by trying to bring dead things to life and make ugly things beautiful so we paint murals on walls and we make gardens out of vacant lots and bring dead houses back to life and I guess try to love each other back to life too. When kids pick a carrot out of the ground, it's like magic to them. Some of the kids in our neighborhood have seen gardens, but others, they haven't, so we asked one of the kids, "What grows on an egg plant?" And they're like, "eggs of course." But seeing that connection happen, this year one of the kids ran down like ballistic, he was like, "Come here, come here, come here." I'm like, "What?" And he said, "You got to see this." He pulled me down and was like, "What is that?" I'm like, "That's a firefly." And I thought, how awesome. Right? They said, "What is a firefly?" And I'm like, "A firefly was just a really, really creative day for God. God was like, 'I'm going to make a bug that's butt glows.' That's what it is." 
	I love the magic. That's part of what we get to participate in and so above all the big ideas and academic stuff, I think that's really, really important and that's why I come to fine places like this but really to me, my heart's there in the neighborhood and what we're doing is very, very spiritual. It's connecting to God and loving or neighbors and trying to imagine what it would look like if God's dream really did come to Kensington. What if God's dream really did come on earth? What would that look like? All of the other stuff that we do as far as like social justice stuff and peace stuff, I saw the poster so I've got to mention those a couple of times and it's bubbled up out of living in the neighborhood, you know? 
	Personally, I think that, to being a Christian to me, part of what I love and I identify with is the story of Jesus, to me is about God moving into the neighborhood. A neighborhood where people said, "Nothing good can come." That's exactly what they said in Nazareth, right? Nothing good can come out of there so, when people refer to my neighborhood, as they often do, as the badlands. That's what a lot of folks called Kensington right? I'm like, "You better be careful if you call a place that because that's exactly what they said in Nazareth." And I'm like, "look what showed up."
	I believe that beautiful things kind of come out of the abandoned and broken places and part of what Christ compels me to is to move closer to the suffering, closer to the pain of the world, rather than further away and everything in our world is compelling us the other direction. To move away from pain, to move away from suffering, to move away from neighborhoods where there's high crimes or there's people that don't look like us. But that compelling sense that God is in touch with the pain and enters into the pain is really what we're up to and then other stuff comes out that. 
	One of the first things that we begin to encounter as we lived in Kensington and Philadelphia in general was anti-homeless laws that were specifically target the homeless and this swept across the country. There's 50 cities that have very particular laws that make it illegal to sleep in public parks, illegal to lie down on the sidewalk or ask for change on the streets and things like that. Philly has kind of constantly been passing laws like that that we've kind of tried to raise questions about. This past year, Mayor Nutter declared an anti feeding ordinance. Do you remember this? This was last year and so we were a big part of trying to raise attention around that cause the band would have been that you can't feed more than four people in a public place. We found that problematic. 
	What was beautiful though was that people of faith and conscience really came out of the woodwork to protest that food band and last I heard, we actually won on, but from a federal judge that said it was a violation of religious freedom. Because what we were saying that is to share food with the hungry is a fundamental practice of our faith and to say that we cannot feed a homeless person is to say that we cannot feed Christ because in the end, we believe, I believe that that's part of what we're participating in. I thought it was kind of interesting that was religious freedom that we got that on. 
	Those laws, we kind of see them everywhere. In fact, another really great story from our neighborhood was there's a Pentecostal church around the corner that was welcoming homeless folks and the city cracked down on them and said, "You don't have all the permits and licenses to run a shelter, so we're shutting this thing down." And these guys are Pentecostals. You don't mess with the Pentecostals. So they're like, "We'll pray about this. We'll talk in a week." Or something, you know and so they came back, the city and they said, "We want you to know that we respect you and we hear what you have said that we can't run a shelter so we're not going to run a shelter, but we are going to be the church and the church welcomes people. We won't call it a shelter though. We'll call it a revival." They said, "We're going to have a revival and it's going to start every night at about 8:00 and it'll go to the next morning." And they said, "Anybody will be welcome." 
	And it was great cause I went to the revival one night and it was like two hours of singing and people sharing their stories and some reading from scripture and then after like two hours, one of the pastors said, "Okay, that concludes our formal service. The next eight hours will be silent meditation. Everybody have a good night." Far as I know, that revival is still going, you know, but it's that courage and imagination that I think is so beautiful. We've been able to see expressions of that bubble up. 
	Another big one for us over the past few years have been around gun violence and as many of you probably know, there's just an epidemic of gun violence in Philadelphia and around the country. It's about 10,000 murders a year in the US and we've been having almost one a day in Philadelphia. Many of those are in our zip code and there was a study that was just done that showed, it's more likely for an African American man to get killed in Philadelphia than it is in Afghanistan or Iraq. There is that violence that we see on the streets is not just a debate about gun violence, but it's a 19 year old kid that we saw shot on our front steps. 
	Eventually, I think what happens is we start to ask fundamental questions right? Like Dr. Martin Luther King said, "We're called to be the good Samaritan and lift our neighbor out of the ditch." You know referring to the old story in the scripture. "We're called to be the good Samaritan" says Martin Luther King, but he says, "after you life so many people out of the ditch, you start to say maybe the whole road to Jericho needs to be rethought." We start to say what's landing people in the ditch? It was Dr. King that also connected the culture of violence in the world and he said, "I've told kids in the ghettos that violence won't solve their problems, but then they ask me, 'Why does our government use massive doses of violence to try to bring the change it wants in the world?'" And Dr. King said, "I knew that I could no longer speak against the violence of the ghetto's without speaking against the violence of my government." 
	So that connection to us is a local one of trying to cut down the violence on our streets and we've tried to do a lot around that. We've protests outside of the gun shops and we've lobbied and done all this stuff but at the end of the day we're teaching our kids non violence and that non violence is rooted in Jesus and what we see Jesus interacting with when He's on the cross as people are pouring out tremendous violence He says, "Forgive them, for they don't know what they're doing." And it's that powerful non violence that we see, it's possible that love can conquer hatred and as the early Christians said that grace can dull even the sharpest sword. 
	But then also takes a witness outside the neighborhood which, one of the kids, right after September 11th, I was talking to one of our kids that had seen a lot of violence and it was September 12th. Right after the attacks of 9/ll and I said, "What do you think we should do about this?" And he was like nine years old I think at the time and Stephen, young kid, he goes, "Well, those people did something very, very evil and wrong." And I said, "Yeah they did, someone did." And Stephen said, "But I always say" He's nine. "But I always, two wrongs don't make a right. It doesn't make sense for us to try to hurt them back to show what they did to us is wrong." Beautiful right? 
	After that I began to also hear about victims of 9/11 that had gone to Iraq and Afghanistan to try to build bridges and be reconcilers and so I was kind of commissioned from our community and neighborhood to go to Iraq. The first time I went was in March of 2003. It was exactly ten years ago, next month and that was during the Shock and Awe bombing of Baghdad. I was there during the bombing, I lived in Baghdad and saw some of the hardest things you know I've ever seen in my life and yet it was there, just like in my neighborhood that I saw hope and grace and compassion in ways that I think sometimes in the darkest spaces we find the brightest hope. 
	As we were there, really the kind of pentacle story for us was is we were there for a whole month and leaving Baghdad and we had a car accident and these Iraqi doctors saved our life. Two of my friends had head injuries after the car accident and so they were taken in and these doctor's saved our life only to tell us minutes later that two days before our country had bombed and hit their hospital and so the hospital had been destroyed in the bombing and yet these doctor's saved our lives, you know? 
	Those experiences have been so moving. It's actually been, that experience ten years ago was so amazing that our friends down in North Carolina in Durham, they started a community named after the town. It's called Rutba House and it's named after a little town [inaudible 00:26:40] in Iraq and committed to reconciliation and so it's always been our dream to go back so just a couple of years ago we got to back to Iraq and we found those doctor's that had saved our life and when we came back, they threw us like the biggest party I'd ever seen in my life. Like the whole town had gathered and they brought us in and are like, "You don't understand. We don't get many visitors." Then they said, "Now there are a few people that would want to kill, but not many." And they said, "So we'll take care of you." And they slept by our beds with AK-47s and I'm like, "that doesn't fit in to my theology, but man I'm grateful for your hospitality." 
	We had these conversations and we met with the Mayor of Rutba and the mayor's like, "This is the stuff that remakes the world." And he's like, "We need to keep these friendships going and then he said, "We need a sister city in the United States." And I'm like, "Philadelphia." He's like, "No, no no. Philadelphia. Our town is just a little bitty town." He said, "We need a little town in the United States." And then he starts talking to his friend in Arabic and he says, "There's one little town I've been to. Have you every heard of Durham, North Carolina." And I'm just like, immediately tears start rolling down my face and I'm like, "Are you kidding me? There's a community in Durham, North Carolina called Rutba House, named after your town." And then mayor's like, "Then it's done." And then the mayor goes, "And we will have a community for peace in Rutba, called Durham House." I'm like awesome, you know? 
	Out of that we started this whole movement called, "Friends Without Borders" to create friendships across conflict, but in the end, it's still really rooted in our neighborhood so now, last month, I got to go to Afghanistan and meet these youth in Afghanistan. They've got incredible dreams for a peaceful Afghanistan and they've got a campaign because you know for the last 30 years, Afghanistan has been at war and they've lost two million people there and so these young people have a whole campaign now, Friends Without Borders that's called, two million friends for the two million dead. They're kind of inviting all of us around the world to be their friends to help remake the world together. But what was cool was we had a Skype call, this is the technology isn't it, like where we had kids on my block in Kensington call kids in Kabul and they listened to these kids in Kabul share about their dreams for the world. A world where they don't have to worry about their friends getting killed and you know what the kids on my block are thinking as they hear that? Those are the same dreams. Right? We've got the same dreams not to see our friends killed on our streets. 
	It's that kind of stuff that intersects for us all in this kind of idea that we are to participate in the coming of God's dream in our neighborhoods and in our worlds and I was just with a Rabbi. Elliot and I were talking about Rabbi Michael [Loner 00:30:16]. He popped by the house and he says, "People sometimes will call you idealistic." And he says, "When they say that, you should say, 'You're darn right we're idealistic.' To be realistic is idolatry because it says that we can just allow what exists to continue to happen." And he said, "Idealism is about demanding the impossible and realizing that we have a God that is transforming the world." You know? So I love the verse in Hebrews that says, "We are certain of what we hope for and sure of what we don't yet see." Or as one of my friends says, "We believe despite the evidence and we watch the evidence change." 
	Folks would say that Kensington is beyond redemption or our world is beyond redemption or poverty is always going to exist or we can't live without war. We would say that that's idealistic to continue to spend $20,000 a second on war as we do right now is unrealistic, right? It's shameful. So what does God's dream look like? Well it looks different from $20,000 a second on war. It looks different from having what we have in the US which is 100,000 Hiroshima bombs. It looks different from a world where 5% of the world is consuming half the world's stuff. So what does it look like to reimagine the world together? I think probably one of the most memorable experiences in my life was when I was in Baghdad during the bombing and there was a doctor that was holding this kid that's body was riddled with missile fragments. And as he held this kid, the bombs were still falling from the sky and held his hands up and he said, "This is for a world that has lost it's imagination." 
	What I get excited about and why I come to groups especially love folks like you're young, you haven't been convinced that anythings impossible and I think that that's where each of us gets to ask is, "How do I fit in to that story?" Like I love how Fredrick [Beatner 00:32:48] says, "We've got to take our deepest passions and connect them to the world's deepest pain." So you take your gifts and you bring them to the world's pain and we begin to see things transform. You know, I met these robotics engineers the other day. They make robots. How cool is that? I'm sitting with them and they're like, "Yeah but we're not making robots just so we can make money. We thought we need to do something meaningful in the world." They said they're designing robots that can dismantle land mines. Cause they heard that little kids in Afghanistan were being paid to dismantle land mines. They get their fingers blown off as they do it. They said, "So we're robotics engineers in a think tank that are designing robots that can dismantle land mines so that we can send them over to Afghanistan." 
	I met these other folks that are Scientists that are deeply concerned that the biggest cause of death in the world is lack of access to clean water and they're like, "This is something we can figure out." So they're studying bacteria, they're studying clean water technology. As they're doing that these business folks came up and they said, "You know what? Here's the sad fact for you. In industrialized countries, we spend enough money on bottled water that if we just reallocated the money we spend on bottled water and we drink tap water cause it's usually a few feet away, we could provide water access for the rest of the world with indigenous labor." Now what they do is they started a bottled water company that basically bottles tap water and basically I mean they bottle tap water and they sell it and all of the money that they make goes to dig wells with indigenous labor and on every bottle of water it says, "When I was thirsty, you gave me something to drink." 
	Now they're working with those engineers that design playgrounds, like you know with the merry go rounds that pump water. They double as water pumps. So as the kids run on them, they pump water on them for the village and some things have worked and some haven't but they're like, they're doing it together you know? That's what I offer to you as we open it up for conversation is we get to bring our gifts to the story. I don't think everybody has got to do exactly what we're doing in North Philly you know? Actually I'm really, really grateful all the times we've got to jail that we got some good lawyers. Everybody gets to be a part of the story and bring their gifts and the things that you're learning to the remaking of the world. 
	So there you go. Some thoughts so we'll be still like good Quakers and then open it up for conversation. Oh that's so sweet, thanks.