Rev. Danny Fisher

This week, the Buddhist Channel posted a story from the News Blaze about Sgt. 1st Class Stephen Y. Chinen, the chaplain’s assistant noncommissioned officer at Camp Anaconda in Balad, Iraq, who is in charge of the base’s Buddhist group.

On Anaconda, some Buddhist soldiers felt a lack of guidance in their faith while deployed, so they approached…the installation chaplain’s assistant noncommissioned officer in charge…

Chinen, with the 657th Area Support Group, was interested in Buddhism himself, and agreed to mediate a discussion group not only for Buddhist soldiers, but for those interested in finding out more about the religion.

“The role of the chaplain is not only to care for soldiers, but to make sure all of their spiritual needs are met,” Chinen said.

Since the group’s inception, about five to seven participants have met once each week to “discuss one of the religions’ major themes, and bring their personal experiences and views to the group.”

The article ends with this quote:

Chinen noted that Buddhism is growing rapidly in the United States, and it’s important to be sure that soldiers from all faith backgrounds are catered to spiritually.

This is a provocative statement, considering all that has been happening within the armed forces around the issue of chaplaincy: in the last eighteen months, there has been quite a bit in the news about the problems of religious bias and proselytizing in military chaplaincy.

The 2006 calendar year started with the Air Force bowing to pressure from evangelical Christians and <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/09/AR20060
20902211.html”>revising standards they had set following reports of the high level of religious intolerance at the Air Force Academy. (The new standards permit superior officers to discuss their faith with cadets and excuse chaplains from the responsibility of offering nonsectarian or interfaith prayers.) Then in June, after the House of Representatives passed a defense appropriations bill including a provision that would allow military chaplains to lead prayers “according to the dictates of the chaplain’s own conscience,” the Senate <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/15/AR20060
61501958.html”>approved their own version of the bill without the provision. At the year’s end, army chaplain Don Larsen (who was also stationed at Camp Anaconda) received a discharge ostensibly because he was unable to provide a formal ecclesiastical endorsement when he converted from Pentecostalism to Wicca. (Though some say that the dismissal has more to do with religious intolerance than the lack of an endorsement: as the Post article about Larsen informs us, despite the presence of nearly 2,000 self-identified Wiccans in the armed forces, even George W. Bush, our commander-in-chief, is on the record saying, “I don’t think witchcraft is a religion, and I wish the military would take another look at this and decide against it.”) Earlier this year, Lt. Gordon J. Klingenschmitt, the Navy chaplain court-martialed in September 2006 for wearing his uniform at a White House protest against professional guidelines protecting religious pluralism, was <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/11/AR20070
11102063.html”>discharged.

After all the stories that have suggested the pervasiveness of an exclusivist approach to chaplaincy in the military, it is heartening to see a profile of a chaplain who is trying to honor the reality of religious pluralism in the U.S. armed forces. Chinen, a non-Buddhist, clearly understands and appreciates the professional mandate of military chaplaincy: “to care for [the] soldiers [and] make sure all of their spiritual needs are met” (emphasis added).

As you can tell from yesterday’s post, I’ve got Michael Moore on the brain.

The auteur/provocateur’s new film Sicko recently enjoyed its world premiere at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. With even Fox News calling it “brilliant and uplifting,” I suspect that it will be as much an event as each of his past films. Its subject is health insurance (or the lack thereof) in the U.S. I can imagine, then, that the film will be interesting for chaplains (particularly those who work in health care) to watch and discuss.

The trailer is below. For more information, visit the official Sicko website here. The film opens nationwide on June 29th.

At the time this post was being written, the Department of Defense had confirmed 3,448 U.S. military deaths in the current Iraq war (with another seven pending). In addition, as of this evening, a minumum of 64,405 reported civilian deaths have occured as a direct result of “the U.S.-led military intervention of Iraq.” (It’s very likely, however, that the actual number of civilian deaths is significantly higher than what has been reported.)

The reasons for waging this war–specious at best in 2003–have been shown to be completely unfounded. There are no weapons of mass destruction. Iraq had nothing to do with September 11, 2001. Furthermore, despite the absolutely ridiculous attempts of people like John McCain to suggest otherwise, things have clearly not “gotten better” since 2003.

As if serving on the front lines of an unwarranted and deservedly unpopular war was not difficult enough, our young soldiers and sailors have had to put up with extended tours, cuts in their pay, and some pretty bleak health care prospects.

Musing on our military servicemen and servicewomen in his film Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore said:

They serve so that we don’t have to. They offer to give up their lives so that we can be free. It is remarkable–their gift to us. And all they ask for in return is that we never send them into harm’s way unless it is absolutely necessary.

As we observe Memorial Day today, we do well, I think, to use our freedom and demand that our government honor this contract. You can start here.

I dedicate the merit of my practice to those who mourn personal losses today, and I pray for a day when humanity will no longer be engaged in war.

“In times of war
Give rise in yourself to the mind of compassion,
Helping living beings
Abandon the will to fight.”
- the Kutadanta Sutta

I recently visited the Toledo Museum of Art with my friends Phil and Katy, who I also just enjoyed a spirited back-and-forth with in the comments of a recent post. I was quite taken with some of the pieces in the museum’s collection of Asian art, and I thought I would share them with you here. Please enjoy!

(You can also find more images from the museum’s collection at their website.)

A Japanese statue of the historical Buddha.

A Japanese wood carving of a Buddhist priest.

A Chinese statue of Guan Yin.

A Chinese painted mural of a bodhisattva with food offering.

In a post at the ONE blog, Regional Field Organizer Annisa Wanat aptly describes the mood in Chicago, IL, last Friday night:

It was a beautiful Friday evening in Chicago with much of the town’s attention turned to their favorite baseball team in the first “cross-town rivalry” of the season…

That was exactly where my attention was, anyway, as I had just come from seeing the Cubs-White Sox game with my old and dear friend Phil. Chicago interleague games tend to be a lot of fun to watch, and last Friday’s was certainly no exception: it was a terrifically exciting game on an absolutely beautiful Chicago day. If you’re a baseball fan, it’s the kind of day you really relish.

Wanat continues, though:

But ONE and World Vision supporters decided instead to show their support for more than one billion people in the world that don’t have access to clean water and sanitation.

In a rally held in front of the Alexander Calder’s “Flamingo” sculpture downtown, on the corner of Adams and Dearborn, the ONE Campaign and World Vision International (a Christian relief and development organization) hosted a range of speakers, distributed information, and gathered signatures for a petition calling on the United States government to earmark an additional $300 million to improve health standards for people in the developing world who do not have access to clean water and basic sanitation.

In one their handouts, the organizers write:

• Every 15 seconds, a child dies from a disease associated with lack of access to safe drinking water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene.
  
• Of the 1 billion people lacking access to clean water, approximately 314 million live in sub-Saharan Africa.
  
• Everey $1 invested in water yields an economic return worth $8 in saved time, increased productivity and reduced healthcare costs.
  

Phil and I signed the petition and caught a couple of the speakers, who included Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), Consul General for South Africa Yusuf Omar, World Vision water expert Emmanuel Oppong, and ONE volunteer Morgan Granata. (In this picture, which I took, you can see Omar speaking. Durbin is seated behind him to the left, and Granata to the right.)

If you would like to get involved with this campaign, I would encourage you to visit both the ONE Campaign and World Vision International online at http://www.one.org and http://www.wvi.org, respectively.

While we’re on the subject of what you can do… Phil brought up an interesting question as we left the rally: in all the talk about what one can do to help, where was the mention of vegetarianism?

I’ve been a vegetarian for almost ten years, and for eight of those years a vegan. At this point, I guess it doesn’t surprise me very much that the environmental benefits of vegetarianism are either played down or not mentioned at all in campaigns like this one: generally speaking, it’s not a popular subject. People don’t like to have it suggested that they ought to reconsider eating things that they like to eat, no matter how compelling the reason. It is also, as Phil put it, a “big responsibility” to be a vegetarian. Perhaps even more than meat-eaters, who also need to be mindful about what they eat, vegetarians have to make sure to eat specific, well-balanced meals to stay healthy. Vegetarians have to be quite careful, vigilant even. That can seem off-putting too. I get it.

The problem, though, is that we’re at a sort of breaking point. Consider the statistics above about the lack of access to clean water. Now consider a few more statistics. A Wikipedia entry on “environmental vegetarianism” excellently synthesizes and translates information from Marlow Vesterby and Kenneth S. Krupa’s Major Uses of Land in the United States, 1997, a report of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service:

…Growing crops for farm animals requires nearly half of the U.S. water supply and 80% of its agricultural land. Animals raised for food in the U.S. consume 90% of the soy crop, 80% of the corn crop, and 70% of its grain.

In their book Taking Stock: Animal Farming and the Environment, authors Alan B. Durning and Holly B. Brough continue:

In the United States…animals account for 70 percent of domestic grain use, while India and sub-Saharan Africa offer just 2 percent of their cereal harvest to livestock.

This is an enormous and alarming disparity. Taken with the statistics presented by the ONE Campaign and World Vision International, it all demonstrates that food preparation and diet must be discussed if we’re going to talk about environmental crises such as the lack of clean drinking water in the developing world. Phil is absolutely right. Indeed, as Henning Steinfeld, Pierre Gerber, Tom Wassenaar, Vincent Castel, Mauricio Rosales, and Cees de Haan write in Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options, last year’s report of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations:

[The raising of animals for food is] one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global. The findings of this report suggest that it should be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution and loss of biodiversity. Livestock’s contribution to environmental problems is on a massive scale…

Going vegetarian may sound like an abstract response, but it really is not. It’s estimated that 95 animal lives are saved each year by one vegetarian. With several million vegetarians in the United States alone, the meat industry has had no choice but to scale back on the slaughter. More vegetarians equals less animals killed equals less water and grain used to overfeed them.

Signing petitions, raising awareness, and lobbying will all help to address the the lack of clean water and basic sanitation in the developing world. There’s even more that we can all do, though. I believe that going vegetarian is one of them. For more information about taking this step, I recommend the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine’s Vegetarian Starter Kit, which you can download here.

Was there anything else…?

Oh!–returning to the wonderful world of frivolity for one last moment: In case you didn’t hear about the baseball game, it went to the good guys…