Gestures Matter!

Spiritual leaders must learn that there is a difference between spirituality and spiritual influence. Spirituality is internal, spiritual influence is external.

It is not enough to develop internal spirituality, spiritual leaders must also learn how to express their spirituality externally in order to gain spiritual authority.

Tom Peters has a great example from the current auto industry crisis.

Violence Against Christians in India

Condensed from a longer, detailed and disturbing report:

For the last 11 months, Christians in India's Orissa state and elsewhere have been the objects of hateful persecution. A report by internationnal human-rights investigators, lays out the mistreatment and abuse in unsettling detail.
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In Orissa State, 65 identified people have been killed and 85 are still unaccounted for.
Among those killed were one man buried alive near the village of Rudangla; several
people burnt to death and others cut into pieces.
- 117 churches of all Christian denominations destroyed. Not a single Hindu temple has
been destroyed – despite allegations of retaliation by Christians.
- Approximately 5,000 homes destroyed.
- An unspecified number of Christian businesses destroyed, with the loss of livelihood for
their owners.
- 54,000 people displaced from their homes, forced to take shelter in 14 State-sponsored
Relief Camps in Kandhamal District; together with many hundreds living in non-State
camps, including 2 ‘camps’ in densely overcrowded buildings in Cuttsack town.
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- It is estimated that about 20,000 are still living in the jungle or have fled to big cities.
Some may be living with relatives elsewhere.
- In addition to the violence in Kandhamal District, 2 other Districts, Japati and Baragras
District, have also experienced similar atrocities, including killings, looting and burning
of churches and homes. 2 Relief camps have been established for approximately 2,700
people who have had to flee their homes.

Faith-based Counseling in China

Following the Sichuan earthquake, there is more openness to spirituality in helping people recover from trauma. This article has a couple of interesting observations:

But on December 28, 2007, President Jintao relieved some of China's cultural schizophrenia: He signaled a move from atheism to secularism—from "no God" to "a non-political role for God." He called an unprecedented Politburo session on religion, telling his top 25 leaders, "The knowledge and strength of religious people must be mustered to build a prosperous society."

"People in power realize the [success of] economic systems of the West. Intellectuals in China are aware of ties between religious prosperity and economic prosperity. … But while Buddhism and Confucianism [China's dominating schemas] are fatalistic and passive, Christians have a sense of justice and social action."

World War I

Tuesday marked the 90th anniversary of the end of World War I, with the handful of surviving veterans at the vanguard of commemorations for the fallen of "The War to End All Wars."

Leaders from the powers that fought the war, now allies, gathered at the site of the 1916 Battle of Verdun, where 300,000 men were slaughtered over 11 months of bloody trench warfare.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy paid homage to the sacrifice and suffering of the war's "eight and a half million dead, 21 million wounded, four million widows and eight million orphans."

What's Wrong with Democracy

Can the majority be counted on to choose what is right? I go along with Abraham Lincoln - it is doubtful.

It is disappointing to see politicians making decisions for their people based on whether or not they will be re-elected as a result. The world needs leaders who will choose to do what is right, not what is most popular.

This from the Financial Times regarding the failed vote on the economic bailout package in the US House of Representatives yesterday:

Indeed, regardless of party, most congressmen facing difficult re-election fights in the November election voted against the legislation, with the two parties’ drive to win support focused on members in safe seats or those about to retire.

Higher costs

Yikes! A bad time to be moving back to Singapore from the US. In addition to inflation listed below, US dollar is down about 15% in the last year : (

Overall, Singaporeans paid 9.2 per cent more for food than they did a year ago because of more expensive items such as cooked food, rice, milk products, fresh poultry and vegetables.

Housing costs also went up by 13.4 per cent on year because of higher accommodation costs and electricity tariffs.

Sports reflect society

This LA Times article compares the three big medal-winning countries at the Olympics:

Crystal-ball gazers expect each of the three sports powerhouses to do well next month in their traditional areas of strength -- table tennis, badminton and diving for China, swimming and track and field for the U.S. and boxing, wrestling and other "combat sports" for Russia -- with all three elbowing one another in gymnastics....

The sports systems that produce Chinese, American and Russian Olympians reflect their nations' cultures, experts said. In the U.S., sports are fun, there's a lot of participation and athletes have a lot of choice over the sport, coach and training method they pursue.

In China, with its 1.3 billion potential recruits, most people don't participate in sports. There isn't enough land or money. But its elite, state-run system is also more seamless.

Recruits are plucked from regular schools and from their families at 6 or 7 years old and placed in one of 3,000 special sports boarding schools after passing height, body mass and related physiology tests. Training is intense, and youngsters are expected to spend years doing what they're told without complaining, in the interest of regional and national glory.

"The view is that the state paid for you, and you pay back in gold medals," said Brownell, who trained in the heptathlon at a Chinese sports university in the 1980s. "It's generally seen in a positive way: The country is your mother -- don't let your mother down."

Russia is a blend of the two. Its state system has become increasingly market-oriented since the breakdown of the Soviet Union. Its coaching is world-class, and the system has been energized by oil wealth and national ambition, although it's struggling to recover after losing a lot of talent.

The World Gets Taller

"...the world is in the midst of a huge wave of tall building construction, both in number and in size. Some 36 buildings rise more than 300 meters, or roughly 1,000 feet, the threshold generally used to define “supertall” buildings, according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, a nonprofit organization based at the Illinois Institute of Technology. An additional 69 supertalls are under construction, the council estimates....

"'It is the modern equivalent of New York in the 1920s....'

"the center of gravity today has shifted from North America and Europe to Asia and the Middle East, where supertalls are rising at a frenetic pace."

Singapore Centre in Shanghai

I kinew there were a lot of Singaporeans in Shanghai, now I have a statistic from Channel News Asia:

"With 7,000 Singapore residents, Shanghai has the largest population of Singaporeans in China....

China is also Singapore's second largest visitor-generating market, with Singapore welcoming some 1.11 million Chinese visitors in 2007, a 66 per cent increase over the last five years"

China is the New Texas...

...everything is BIGGER

Beijing airport’s new Terminal 3 — twice the size of the Pentagon — is the largest building in the world....

The developers call it the “most advanced airport building in the world,” and say it was completed in less than four years, a timetable some believed impossible.

No Slowing Down

As the Chinese become more affluent, they are going to start gobbling up world resources like the Americans have been...

China has overtaken the USA to become the world's No. 1 industrial source of carbon dioxide, the most important global-warming pollutant, according to a scientific study to be published today.

The study and two others — one recently published and another coming — agree that China's carbon-dioxide emissions surpassed those in the USA in 2006. That's decades earlier than had been predicted by the International Energy Agency four years ago.

Management Skills in China

NYT article, on visiting a huge bookstore in China:

On shelf after shelf, I could see copies of Jim Collins’s “Good to Great,” Jack Welch’s “Straight From the Gut,” Tom Peters’s “Re-Imagine!” and just about everything the late Peter Drucker ever wrote. There was no management topic, no matter how arcane — the science of H.R. anyone? — that didn’t have its own section.

There’s a good reason for this. In the West — not to mention Japan and South Korea — management skills are a given. Graduate schools of management churn out M.B.A.’s, while instilling the basic processes and systems that virtually all multinational companies rely on. People who rise to the top of companies are the ones who have mastered the art of management. But there are also many first-rate managers who populate the middle ranks of companies. They are the lifeblood of most big companies.

Not so in China. “The shortage of managerial talent is huge,” said Zheng Yu-sheng, the associate dean at the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business. In the course of my two weeks in China, I heard this refrain constantly — and not just from business school professors. “We are constantly looking for chief financial officers who can speak Mandarin,” said Thomas Tsao of Gobi Partners, a Shanghai-based venture capitalist. “There just aren’t very many people here who have the range of skills you need in that position.”

Besides noting the huge appetite for management learning, he goes on to point out some of the hurdles facing business development in China: corruption, personal interests, relationship issues, and need for accountability.

There must be some applications here for people that want to help Chinese society develop and have management or literary skills that could use them to develop relationships with Chinese people.

Books on Global Christianity

I've only read one of these books, by Jenkins. Martin Marty is well-qualified to give us a comprehensive list like this.

My Top 5 Books on World Christianity
By Martin E. Marty, author of The Christian World: A Global History

A World History Of Christianity
Edited by Adrian Hastings
The fourteen historians who contribute to A World History of Christianity do what no single historian could do with much detail: write about Christianity in places far from Europe and North America, while doing justice to the places that have engrossed most historians of Christianity.
* * *
Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity
Lamin Sanneh
Gambia-born Sanneh, now teaching at Yale, does important work to place the story of Christianity in the Southern world in the minds of Westerners. Disciples of All Nations is the kind of comprehensive work that informed Christians and the community of historians can use as a guide.
* * *
The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, Revised and Updated
Philip Jenkins
Jenkins is the exemplar of the "new kind" of church history, which deals with the background to the way the church is "going South." Like Sanneh, Jenkins dramatizes and, some say, over-dramatizes the meanings of this epochal shift in Christian locations and energies.
* * *
The Story of Christianity from Birth to Global Presence
Jakob Balling
Balling, a Danish historian, spends as much time reflecting on the story as he does writing his narrative. Sometimes sociological concepts crowd out elements of The Story, but his work will no doubt prompt others to take new looks at power relations in the churches, and help them assess their direction.
* * *
Christianity: A Short Global History
Frederick W. Norris
Norris knows where the Christian power shift is taking the church, and helps account for it. For Norris and many other historians (including Balling), the global story in the last two centuries is preoccupying. They provide charters for those who will bring new curiosity to the longer, wider Christian story.

They Love LA

More Chinese tourists are headed to America, thanks to new agreements between US and Chinese governments. And when they come to the US, they come to California.

"The Chinese are surprisingly big spenders when they come here, doling out about $6000 each -- more than visitors from any other nation. They also tend to stay longer -- a California state tourism agency study found that Chinese visitors spend 24.3 nights in the country and 15 in California, on average, while most overseas visitors spend about 10 days in the state.

"Big cities will benefit most as the ranks of Chinese tourists to the U.S. grow by an expected 80% over the next three years, to 579,000 visitors from 320,000 last year. As a favored destination for the Chinese and the only American city served by all three Chinese airlines, Los Angeles could cash in the most."

Beijing Blue Sky Days Hit 244

Beijing is like an athlete trying to get into shape by walking on a treadmill yet eating double cheeseburgers at the same time. Polluting factories have been moved or closed. But auto emissions are rising as the city adds up to 1,200 new cars and trucks every day. Dirty, coal-burning furnaces have been replaced, lowering the city’s sulfur dioxide emissions. But fine-particle pollution has been exacerbated by a staggering citywide construction binge that shows no signs of letting up.

China’s unsolved riddle is how to reconcile fast economic growth with environmental protection. But Beijing’s Olympic deadline means the city needs an immediate answer. The ruling Communist Party envisions the Games as a public relations showcase and is leaving no detail untended. Scientists are cross-breeding chrysanthemums to ensure that flowers bloom in August.