Microfinancing seems like a good "third way" that could bring together liberals (who want to help the poor) and conservatives (who are true-believers in capitalism). Below is article about it, which includes links to two helpful websites:

Monday, March 26, 2007

You, Too, Can Be a Banker to the Poor

NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
The New York Times
March 27, 2007

For those readers who ask me what they can do to help fight poverty, one option is to sit down at your computer and become a microfinancier.

That’s what I did recently. From my laptop in New York, I lent $25 each to the owner of a TV repair shop in Afghanistan, a baker in Afghanistan, and a single mother running a clothing shop in the Dominican Republic. I did this through www.kiva.org, a Web site that provides information about entrepreneurs in poor countries — their photos, loan proposals and credit history — and allows people to make direct loans to them.

So on my arrival here in Afghanistan, I visited my new business partners to see how they were doing.

On a muddy street in Kabul, Abdul Satar, a bushy-bearded man of 64, was sitting in the window of his bakery selling loaves for 12 cents each. He was astonished when I introduced myself as his banker, but he allowed me to analyze his business plan by sampling his bread: It was delicious.

Mr. Abdul Satar had borrowed a total of $425 from a variety of lenders on Kiva.org, who besides me included Nathan in San Francisco, David in Rochester, N.Y., Sarah in Waltham, Mass., Nate in Fort Collins, Colo.; Cindy in Houston, and “Emily’s family” in Santa Barbara, Calif.

With the loan, Mr. Abdul Satar opened a second bakery nearby, with four employees, and he now benefits from economies of scale when he buys flour and firewood for his oven. “If you come back in 10 years, maybe I will have six more bakeries,” he said.

Mr. Abdul Satar said he didn’t know what the Internet was, and he had certainly never been online. But Kiva works with a local lender affiliated with Mercy Corps, and that group finds borrowers and vets them.

The local group, Ariana Financial Services, has only Afghan employees and is run by Storai Sadat, a dynamic young woman who was in her second year of medical school when the Taliban came to power and ended education for women. She ended up working for Mercy Corps and becoming a first-rate financier; some day she may take over Citigroup.

“Being a finance person is better than being a doctor,” Ms. Sadat said. “You can cure the whole family, not just one person. And it’s good medicine — you can see them get better day by day.”

Small loans to entrepreneurs are now widely recognized as an important tool against poverty. Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize last year for his pioneering work with microfinance in Bangladesh.

In poor countries, commercial money lenders routinely charge interest rates of several hundred percent per year. Thus people tend to borrow for health emergencies rather than to finance a new business. And partly because poor people tend to have no access to banks, they also often can’t save money securely.

Microfinance institutions typically focusing on lending to women, to give them more status and more opportunities. Ms. Sadat’s group does lend mostly to women, but it’s been difficult to connect some female borrowers with donors on Kiva — because many Afghans would be horrified at the thought of taking a woman’s photograph, let alone posting on the Internet.

My other partner in Kabul is Abdul Saboor, who runs a small TV repair business. He used the loan to open a second shop, employing two people, and to increase his inventory of spare parts. “I used to have to go to the market every day to buy parts,” he said, adding that it was a two-and-a-half-hour round trip. “Now I go once every two weeks.”

Web sites like Kiva are useful partly because they connect the donor directly to the beneficiary, without going through a bureaucratic and expensive layer of aid groups in between. Another terrific Web site in this area is www.globalgiving.com, which connects donors to would-be recipients. The main difference is that GlobalGiving is for donations, while Kiva is for loans.

A young American couple, Matthew and Jessica Flannery, founded Kiva after they worked in Africa and realized that a major impediment to economic development was the unavailability of credit at any reasonable cost.

“I believe the real solutions to poverty alleviation hinge on bringing capitalism and business to areas where there wasn’t business or where it wasn’t efficient,” Mr. Flannery said. He added: “This doesn’t have to be charity. You can partner with someone who’s halfway around the world.”

I've been going to synagogue more these days, and one practice that has stood out to me is that each week you read 1/52 of the Torah -- such that you read all of the Torah each year. This has made me question the parts of the Bible that are NEVER read in the Revised Common Lectionary at any time over the course of three years.

Following the lectionary isn't really a problem for me these days since I only preach about six times a year, but if I were to start preaching every Sunday, I don't think I would be content to preach the lectionary over and over and over, three-year cycle after three-year cycle.

A quick google search produced two articles along these lines:

“BCP and RCL Analysis”

“Limitations of the Lectionary”

If you know of other critical voices about the methodology/structure of the lectionary, let me know.

Shams gave Rumi "the choice between scholarship through text or living sacred experience" (Daniel Ladinsky, Love Poems from God).

I choose first-hand experience with God.

Presence of God in Spiritual Direction

The primary ways in which I understand God to be present in spiritual direction are (1) Presence and (2) Guide. First, I understand God to be present both within and beyond every aspect of the spiritual direction relationship – just as I understand God to be within and beyond every part of Creation. This means that God is part of what forms and maintains a spiritual direction relationship – as well as the seen (and unseen) effects of that relationship.

Second, one of most important ways in which God is present (especially from the perspective of the spiritual director) is as a Guide. In the spiritual direction relationship, God is the true director – thanks be to God! I hope to become increasingly sensitive to the ways that God is moving in the spiritual direction relationship – specifically in the ways God speaks through the mind, feelings, and body.

Cognitively, many different thoughts and images occur to me during a spiritual direction session. It has been helpful (as was suggested in class) to bracket a concept the first, and even second, time it occurs – only saying it aloud to your directee if the thought or image arises a third time. This allows time to discern if an idea is from God or merely a projection of one’s desire to be wise or helpful.

Emotionally and somatically, the situation is subtler. But there are times in direction when I experience a deep, empathetic emotion, which can be a signal from God to invite the directee to explore the affective dimension of her experience further. Similarly, when a directee says a particular word or phrase, I sometimes feel a brief blunt force (almost like a gust of wind) against my chest or in my gut. My internal response is usually something like, “Woah. There’s something there.” But aloud I would only repeat the word or phrase as a way of inviting the directee to delve deeper into that part of her experience.

Assumptions and images about/of God

In the large-steeple Southern Baptist Church, where I was raised, almost all public prayers began the same way: “Dear Heavenly Father.” The preponderance of male imagery did not cause me to think of God as an old man up in the sky with a white beard and a penis – although part of me wishes that it had because that would be a hilariously tragic image to remember. Instead, the effect was much more insidious.

Because I so frequently heard God referred to as a male, my understanding of God was shaped by the stereotypes of men that were all around me: white, middle-class men who were stoic (“boys keep their emotions bottled up inside”), workaholics (with the glaring exception of cooking, cleaning, and childcare), and successful (“the man is the breadwinner and must provide for his family”). Thus, I thought of God as the exemplar of all these male characteristics: unemotional, omnipresent, and perfect – kind of like Santa Claus, but more serious and a lot less jolly. Both Santa and God “see you when you’re sleeping…[and] know when you’ve been bad or good,” but I was never worried about Santa leaving a lump of coal in my stocking. There was, however, some level on which I was fearful of divine punishment – especially punishment of the “eternal separation from God” or “lake of fire” variety.

Then, when I was a freshman in high school, my father died of esophageal cancer. The absence of my earthly father has affected my understandings of my “Heavenly Father” in ways that I will probably never fully comprehend. But, to give one example, my father’s death may be a reason that as an undergraduate I was drawn to hyper-skeptical, nihilistic, “death of God” philosophers like Nietzsche. Moreover, being a philosophy major allowed me to think about God in detached and intellectually satisfying ways without having to worry about how I felt about God. As a college student, this dynamic was, for the most part, unconscious. I can now see that by focusing on the development of my mind, I could repress my emotions.

I recovered both emotions as well as positive language for God thanks to feminist theology. As an alternative to unhealthy masculinity, I encountered healthy femininity. These women prayed, “Loving God” or “Mother God.” Feminists helped me to experience God as emotional, nurturing, and caring. I am also deeply indebted to many gay and lesbian Christians who transgressed gender stereotypes in ways that challenged me to expand my understandings of God to account for the diversity of humankind, all of whom are created in God’s image.

Again, however, as I reflect retrospectively, I can now see that feminist theology also caused me, for a time, to overcompensate: to believe that because our world is so deeply patriarchal, God should either be referred to in either feminine terms or gender-neutral terms. I still respect this argument – and think that, ideally, any masculine reference to God should be balanced with an accompanying feminine image. However, in my own prayer life, I am finding it increasingly important to reclaim healthy masculine imagery for God in addition to using female imagery. As part of living into this reclamation of masculine imagery, I am discerning a call to participate in one of Richard Rohr’s five-day, “Men’s Rites of Passage” retreats as a transformative way of celebrating my 30^th birthday, which will be on March 10, 2008 for those keeping score at home.

Since both males and females are created in the image of God, we can find some knowledge of God through the lenses of masculinity and femininity. Nevertheless, my concern ultimately is first-hand knowledge of God’s Presence that is inclusive of both genders and beyond both genders. This is the same impetus that caused me to seek spiritual direction. I felt called to ground my theology (“words about God”) in first-hand experiences of God, not just second-hand descriptions of God.

With the help of spiritual direction, I have experienced first-hand my own belovedness by God, but I feel called to experience God even more fully, deeply, and intimately. God is love, but love is not all of God. I continue to have many assumptions about God (including that God is love, peace, justice, grace, and freedom), but I also feel called to continue to grow in knowledge of God though contemplation of God’s Presence that is more than and beyond all of those assumptions. I do not know – nor do I think I can ever know or comprehend – all that God is, but I assume, at least for now, that to know God more and more is a vocation worth spending a lifetime pursuing.