On the fourth Friday of Lent in Oaxaca, Mexico, it is the custom to hand out glasses of Aguas Frescas to anyone who passes by. We had no idea that we were about to encounter La Dia de La Samaritana…

From an agrarian point of view, the Exodus was a movement from the flat, easily tillable land of Egypt to “the narrow and precariously balanced ecological niche that is the hill country of ancient Judah and Samaria.” The people of Israel had to re-make their economic life to conform to a landscape that allowed “only the slightest margin for negligence, ignorance, or error.”

“The organic and urgan agriculture revolution that is under way there is nothing short of amazing, but what a lot of people don’t know is the amount of hardship Cubans have been through to get to where they are. Unlike with most people in the US and other wealthy countries, growing their own and doing it organically were not really choices for Cubans: they did it to survive. Or to put it more flippantly, when life gave the Cubans limes (mint and rum), they decided to make mojitos.”

“It’s not fair to take from the rich and give to the poor in a Robin Hood-type way, but it’s certainly not fair to take from the poor to give to the rich… and that’s what we’re doing now. That’s…

You might feel differently if you’ve been stung by one, but there are few things I find sadder than honey bees dying in mass numbers. So why are they dying? Pesticides Action Network provided this explanation. Finding an average of…

spend a week in deep conversation, shared worship and focused learning with a vibrant community of ministry practitioners, theologians, and lay Christians. The Institute will focus on the theme “The Ministry of Reconciliation in a Divided World” and will be held from May 31 – June 5, 2010 on the campus of Duke Divinity School.

Today is World Water Day! “Water is essential for life. Yet many millions of people around the world face water shortages and a daily struggle to secure safe water for their basic needs. Millions of children continue to die every…

The Swedes are labeling some food items with the amount (estimated) of greenhouse-gas emissions the production of the food puts into the atmosphere!If this experiment is effective, they estimate the country’s emissions could be reduced by 20-50 percent. One Swedish burger chain, Max, offers beef alternatives and signed on enthusiastically to the new recommendations. It became the first restaurant chain to publish carbon footprints of menu items to encourage people to eat less beef.

“It’s very simple. The system that we have in place is totally upside down and backwards. We know how to feed the world. We know what the developing world needs to do, and yet we keep hearing more and more…

Bill Gates thinks he’s got a brilliant idea: fighting malnutrition abroad by fortifying food. The scheme, backed with $50 million from the Gates Foundation, in part encourages Proctor & Gamble, Philip Morris’ Kraft, and other companies to develop vitamin and iron-fortified processed foods. It then facilitates their entry into Third World markets. Gates seems to believe we don’t have time to address the complex social and political roots of malnutrition. But in opting for this single-focus, top-down, technical intervention, Gates can end up hurting the very people he wants to help.