Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
My father was a Korean Baptist Minister. When I was a child we did Bible study every day. I think people use the Bible for their own political agenda but the true message is one of hope.
Your dad is a Baptist minister. Does that explain your first choice – the Bible?
That explains a lot of it, yes. And I should clarify that he’s actually a Korean Southern Baptist minister. If you live in America that marks him out as the most zealous of all!
You say the Bible brings back childhood memories – can you tell me about some of those?
Every Sunday we would go to church twice. My dad would be preaching in the morning and then we would go to the evening service. And every day before we went to school we would have a Bible study group.
How did your Bible studies make you feel about being gay?
Well I think that today you see a lot of people using the Bible for their own political agenda. They interpret it how they want. For example, my room-mate at West Point was convinced that if you read the Old and New Testaments they are clearly against people being gay. But I don’t think that view is following what Christ is saying. Many people in lots of different situations have gone through so much pain and I think that comes from people using the Bible to pursue their own agenda.
For me, when we actually apply the lessons of that book to our lives, we see there is great hope because Christ is talking about those people who have been hurt. While I was going through college I had to apply that message in a very secret way, because I was gay. The politics of the day and the religious establishment of the day might be against you and can strip everything away from you. But Jesus’s message is one of hope and personal love.
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Under the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, gay men and women can only serve in the US military if they keep quiet about their sexuality. Dan Choi couldn't live with that secrecy and went public. He’s now campaigning for a change in the rules so that other homosexuals in the military can come out.
The Bible.
As Tony Hall and others note, there are more than 2,000 references to poverty, to ministering to the poor and the hungry in the Bible. The Bible is the scripture for Christianity, but hunger is an issue that is at the centre and core of all faiths and denominations – feed the hungry is a central command of all religions great and small. But the question is, if that’s the case, and it is, how have we come into the 21st century with one billion chronically hungry people?
How have we?
That’s one thing we try to address in the book. It is something I am still wrestling with. It is so important to get the entire faith-based community to address this issue. In the US, when you look at the formation of the Christian coalition and the moral majority as a political force in the 1980s, where was hunger on their list of so-called core values? It’s not there. Where’s the reduction of poverty? They were focused on issues of abortion, gay marriage, gay rights and those kinds of things instead of hunger and poverty.
Are you Christian yourself?
Yes, I’m a Lutheran. The Bible is very vocal on hunger. There is a multitude of passages in the Bible about poverty and hunger – how have they been missed? If we are to really have this grassroots movement to raise the clamour, to spark a momentum to end hunger, then the faith-based communities are very important – to say this is the essence of our faith. If you read the Bible, both the inspiration and the necessity are there, and the command to feed the hungry is a clarion call – Matthew 25/35: ‘For I was hungry and you gave me food.’
What is more powerful than that?
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Roger Thurow joined The Chicago Council on Global Affairs as senior fellow for global agriculture and food policy in January 2010 after three decades at The Wall Street Journal. He is the editor and principal contributor to the Council’s Global Food for Thought blog, part of the Global Agricultural Development Initiative. For 20 years he served as a foreign correspondent, based in Europe and Africa. In 2003, he and Journal colleague Scott Kilman wrote a series of stories on famine in Africa. Their reporting on humanitarian and development issues was honoured by the United Nations. Thurow and Kilman are authors of the recent book ENOUGH: Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty. In 2009 they were awarded Action Against Hunger’s Humanitarian Award.
