Tim: Do you have hope the talks that are currently happening between the Zanu PF and the MDC can bring positive change for the people of Zimbabwe?

Joy: I have learned from Zimbabweans that the only safe place to put our hope is in God. Almost a year ago when the 36,000 members of the Brethren in Christ Church (BICC) in Zimbabwe gathered for their annual conference, their leader Bishop Danisa Ndlovu, who is also president-elect of MWC, encouraged the crowd with these words, “In the oppression we are in, where our dreams for our children have crumbled and families are lost, we must vow to draw closer to God who is our hope and our peace.”

But you asked, do I have hope in the talks? They are quite amazing. Many Zimbabweans are cautiously hopeful; others are extremely frustrated and disheartened. Others are starving to death as I type.

Information flows across our broken bodies
an anesthetic to the pain we thought we didn’t have.

Incorporated corps and professional profs
prove points we thought we’d never hear
let alone understand

A thousand thoughts on invisible wings
rise and fill the air with inaudible sound.

This afternoon when I arrived at the CPT office I got word that my friend Joel Gulledge had been attacked by Israeli settlers in At-Tuwani. Joel was escorting some Palestinian children home from summer day camp when they were threatened by a masked settler with a slingshot. Jan Benvie, a friend and CPTer from Scotland, rushed the children away while Joel filmed what was happening. The settler caught up with Joel, grabbed his video camer and began beating him around his head with it while he punched him with his other hand. Joel didn't fight back, but yelled for help.

Two weeks ago Mennonites from Canada and the United States gathered at the People's Summit for Faithful Living. I wasn't personally able to attend gathering, but heard from a friend about the Postcard Project which was on display across the street for the summit. I asked Jacob Quiring, a member of the committee that organized the project, to write a guest post telling about the project.

Early this July Mennonite Church Canada held its annual general meeting. For the second half of the week MC USA members were invited for a joint People’s Summit. It was a special gathering focusing on the theme of “the church living faithfully as a contrast community in our global reality”. Across the street from the Summit grounds, the Postcard Project was on display as a call for faithfulness to a covenant the church made over twenty years ago in the Saskatoon and Purdue Resolutions to have ongoing dialogue about the inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Mennonites. A number of people who came to see the postcards commented on the irony that the Summit attendees should be discussing how to do church when it was too controversial to allow space for people to express their views on the inclusion of LGBT people.

Last week Charletta and I spent 5 days at the Cornerstone Music Festival in southern Illinois promoting Christian Peacemaker Teams. For me, it was an inspiring awakening to the "Revolution in Jesusland" as Zack Exley calls it. That is, the increasing openness of young American Evangelicals to God's vision for shalom. It's an awareness that Jesus' redemption is not just an individual soul thing, but an invitation to transformation of relationships, communities and creation as a whole.

From Thursday through Saturday of last week, Charletta and I attended PAPA festival. This is the People Against Poverty and Apathy festival that is a "convergence of communities and movements coming together to share, dream, and create." The gathering has happened twice before, first in 1997 and then again in 2006.

Plow Creek Mennonite Church and Fellowship hosted the event on their. I've visited Plow Creek a number of times over years, but the PAPAfarians had trasnformed the place. When we arrived on Thursday morning, the stubble on the oat fields was still visible between the veggie fueled bus campers and the 500 gallon water tank. But by that evening, the fields had sprouted tents like mushrooms in warm manure. Over 750 people showed up for the four day gathering that all told. Our entrance fee was on a donation basis since the event was run completely by volunteers, including most of the attendees themselves.

Last week on Thursday, Charletta and I began hearing from her family about the devastation in Cedar Rapids and Iowa City as the Iowa River and the Cedar River crested. This weekend Charletta and I visited Iowa and I saw a few scenes from the aftermath of the flooding. I've never seen a flood large enough to warrant sand bags before, so even though the waters are far below their crest, it was quite striking for me.

Since I caught some flack from readers in May when I published old letters claiming that Ramen Noodles was better then my mother's soup on Mother's day. How embarrassing. In order to remedy that blunder in some small way, I'm dedicating this blog to my dad. He brought me up to think of bicycling as the norm. Without him I probably would have took the trian this afternoon and missed this whole adventure...

This evening I decided to slow down and enjoy my ride down the lakefront path. Summer has finally arrived and it felt like the whole city had come out to play. The path runs past what feels dozens of playing fields for soccer, baseball, hockey and even dodge ball. Last week I stopped to watch a game one evening. It was delightfully entertaining to watch grown adults scampering across the court earnestly ducking and weaving multicolored gym balls.

I never thought I would be so happy to watch someone eat tapioca. I was with Dale, who for the last month and a half, has not been able to move the right side of his body much at all. I haven't written anything about Dale here since the end of April, mainly because I haven't known what to say. I've visited him twice a week and watched his gradual progress as he moved out of bed and into a wheel chair and begin occasionally saying one syllable words. But in the last few weeks I'd seen only very incremental changes. Until Tuesday.

This is a much delayed second part to my review of What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire, from last December. In the first part I looked at four major limits that our world is running up against: species extinction, climate change, population explosion (of humans) and mass extinction (of everyone else). But how did we end up here? The short answer: blind faith in progress.

I first became aware of the “myth of progress” in high school when I read Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, a novel about a gorilla teaching a single student. Sounds like a sketchy plot? It's mainly just a vehicle for challenging the ideas that we humans are the pinnacle of evolution. For me, it was a new idea. You mean this world isn't just here for us? I'd never really thought about the way this idea underlies everything we do.