Human Trustees

The contemporary Fair Trade concept dates back to British Quakers networking with some social activists and Oxford University academics to found the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief in 1942. The next year this group incorporated as Oxfam with a driving passion to eradicate poverty everywhere. After the war, the Mennonite Central Committee and the Church of the Brethren found ways…

My purpose here is simple – to get you to listen to the 54-minute Middle East Eye interview with Oxford historian Avi Shlaim. The first part concerns Shlaim’s biography and the second, as the title suggests, captures his view as an Israeli historian of the current protests and the future of the Israeli state. How did a Jewish boy born…

Payton Gendron, the 18-year-old shooter who killed ten people in Buffalo last weekend, posted a 180-page manifesto two days before. In it, he said he would target the Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, because Blacks seek to “ethnically replace my own people.” The code word here is “replace,” and refers to the “great replacement theory,” which targets equally Black and…

The Apostle Paul, a diaspora Jew from Tarsus (today’s Turkey), was also a Roman citizen. Perhaps that is partially why he writes to the church in Corinth, Greece, “Everyone must submit to governing authorities. For all authority comes from God, and those in positions of authority have been placed there by God” (Rom. 13:1). Jesus too, when faced with a…

The three Abrahamic traditions picture a Creator God who will judge individuals and nations with perfect justice. After all, He masters all the facts of each case, and He knows the secrets of every human heart. In my last post, I pointed out the positive achievements of J. William Fulbright in sending out thousands of young Americans to create goodwill…

Two nights ago I gave a very short presentation on this topic as part of an hour webinar sponsored by our Fair Trade committee in America’s First Fair Trade Town, Media, Pennsylvania. Let me unpack that statement. Bruce Crowther, a British veterinarian and practicing Quaker, was leading a chapter of Oxfam (an anti-poverty, pro-justice NGO founded in Britain in 1942)…