Helpful Links

For those of you about to set your closets on fire, I wanted to give you a few links to read through over the next few days.  I'm no expert and will never claim to be one.  We're one family trying to live out the heart of God towards our fellow man.  It's okay if you come to different conclusions than we do about responsible consumerism.  I would hope that since we serve a God who loves justice, that we would be informed about these issues and approach the topic of protecting the poor with a lot of fear and trembling.  Thanks for walking with us through these hard, complex ideas.

Unraveling the web of Spain's Sweatshops (from CNN)
If you're new to this whole idea, this is a great, recent article that describes some of the conditions people are living in who make our clothing.  Eye opening.

Many of you may be asking, "Well, I know sweat shops are not ideal, but what if those sweat shops close down?  Then what will people do?"  This is a great question.  Smarty pants people who are doing this stuff for a living are asking these same questions.  

Where Sweatshops Are a Dream from The New York Times
Kristoff, one of my favorite humanitarians and author of one of my favorite books, Half the Sky argues for more sweat shops.  To be fair, I wanted to include his opinion.

Why Jeffrey Sachs is Wrong about Sweat Shops from Mail and Guardian Online.
This is another smarty pants article that argues against what people like Kristoff are saying.  Interesting.  I asked my brainiac business friend about this article and he had some great things to say.  Maybe I can get him to write up his thoughts.

Have we mentioned that we're not experts in any of this?  We're not economists, we're not attacking any one political party, and we'd never claim that solving poverty-related problems are easy.  Poverty is complex.  We live in a country where we see this firsthand.  There are no easy answers.

What we are asking ourselves are these questions:  "How can we stand before the Lord with clean hearts as we consider the poor...particularly the laborer?" "How can we ensure, to the best of our abilities, that we did not deny the laborer their wages for the products we purchase?"  "In the words of Mother Theresa, how can we live simply so others can simply live?"

This means, even though we respect a lot of what Kristoff (author of Half the Sky) has to say about poverty, women's rights, and slavery, as believers who desperately want to live out God's heart towards the poor, we can't agree that the answer to poverty is more sweat shops.  We'd never go so far as to say the answer to poverty is consumer responsibility.  Poverty is vast and complex.  We can dress it up all we want, but I think if we're honest, we can all agree that the human heart, and our inherent greed is one of the biggest driving forces behind poverty.  Maybe that's why Jesus talked so much about the poor and our response to them.

We want to be honest about our own sinful hearts as a couple, and so what we can do is ask ourselves some hard questions about our constant pull towards materialism, and then try to wisely decipher how to shop in a more responsible way.  We can ask the church, the very people God has commanded to live out His heart of justice towards the poor and oppressed what we're doing to fight this injustice.

For those of you asking for some resources to use when deciding how to shop, I'll hopefully be talking more about this soon.  I was going to post the resources later, but I've gotten several emails and a couple comments from women who are about to go insane if they don't know how to start making some progress in this area A-sap.  You girls are ferocious, justice-lovers.

One of my favorite resources is "The Better World Shopping Guide."    The author, and researcher, Dr. Ellis is allowing us to give one away.  Stay tuned!

"Most people know that Jesus came to bring forgiveness and grace. 

Less well known is the Biblical teaching that a true experience of the grace of Jesus Christ 

inevitably motivates a man or woman to seek justice in the world." 

-- Generous Justice by Tim Keller