A Movie Called "The Witness"

Eddie Lama is a hip, charismatic, street-smart Brooklynite who owns a small construction company. He admits that he reached adulthood without any "animal consciousness"—he had never had pets and just considered animals to be dirty, troublesome, and a world apart from him. Until a kitten changed his life.

The Witness is an award-winning 2009 documentary ("Winner/Best" awards at 10 different film festivals) about the transformation of Eddie Lama. The last guy in the world you would think would develop a heart for animals did—especially animals raised for the fur trade. He devised a unique way to take his message to the streets of Brooklyn, showing film footage of animal abuse to NYC passersby—with amazing results.

This is a powerful and well-made documentary. Lama is honest, transparent, and funny—the kind of guy everybody would love to have as a friend. It's powerful for two reasons: First, it shows the impact any one person can have in trying to fix a broken part of our culture, and second, it dramatically illustrates how unaware the average person on the street is concerning the abuse of animals. When passersby in NYC stop out of curiosity to watch the video Lama is showing, the looks on their faces speak volumes—they had no idea something so barbaric happens every day in America.

I was especially touched by his telling of his awakening to the fact that animals are "beings." In simple, touching, but articulate terms he recounts his discovery of the disconnect between eating some animals and not eating others. We eat chickens but not kittens, and this made no sense to him—so he stopped. Other than the weak defense of "wild" versus "domestic" (all animals were once "wild," so there's nothing natural about domestication), I've never come across a good explanation of who decides which animals are acceptable as food and which aren't. Eddie and I came to the same conclusion, I guess, and both stopped eating them. For a street-smart Brooklyn guy, he has a tender spirit, and I've never heard a better story of how anyone has yielded him or herself to what is obvious and logical without creating cultural or disconnected defenses to preserve the status quo.

I hope you'll take time to watch this movie—it's available in its entirety online here. (Word of caution: The movie is streamed from Vimeo which, imho, always produces very unsatisfactory results. However, if you do this, the movie will play fine: Click on "Play," then click the "Pause" button until the entire movie downloads. Then come back and watch the movie and it plays fine. Maybe it's just me, but Vimeo video streams are always very "jerky" if you try to watch them while they're downloading. So wait 'til the movie downloads completely before watching it and you should be fine.)

(The image above is used without permission from the web site of Tribe of Heart, the production company that produced the film.)

Food Beware: The French Organic Revolution

The movie Food Beware: The French Organic Revolution is a documentary about a small French village's efforts to preserve the health of its citizens by switching to organic methods of viti- and agriculture:

Peaceable Kingdom: The Journey Home

Following is the trailer for a new documentary, Peaceable Kingdom—The Journey Home, the story of a number of farmers who transitioned out of traditional farming environments to a more compassionate view of animals, farming, and themselves:

Return to Eden

Sent to me by a friend—shades of Eden:

Exposing (and Avoiding) Deeds of Darkness

Take no part in the worthless deeds of evil and darkness;

instead, expose them.

(Ephesians 5:11, NLT)

There is such a thing as visual pornography, colloquially illustrated by man's inability to turn away and not look at a train wreck. Some people will object to the video I'm posting here for that reason. But higher concerns make it justifiable.

First, it is not that visually offensive. Rather, the offense is in the practice it illustrates—the cruel practices, standard in the industry, associated with producing baby chicks for the factory farms that house hens for egg-laying purposes. I dare say the VAST majority of Americans have no idea that their breakfast eggs (unless produced under non-factory-farm conditions) have such a sordid heritage. It is a heritage that the owners of these chick-producing companies, along with all factory farms, want to keep in the dark. It's why they don't allow cameras or reporters inside their facilities; why films such as this one have to be shot under cover. One would think that, if they were proud of what they did, factory farm companies would welcome public exposure.

The fact that 150,000 male chicks are destroyed each day at the Hy-Line Hatchery chick factory in Iowa, and how they are destroyed, is a deed or darkness that needs to be exposed.

Connecting personal responsibility to the deeds of others is a difficult issue. That is, if you are a consumer of meat or dairy products—eggs, in this case—what responsibility do you have not to support industries that are based on cruelty? The same question can be asked concerning the taxes we pay to our government when parts of those taxes are used to fund practices that violate one's conscious and personal ethics, e.g., abortion or war. Or when investors place money into a mutual fund, and their money is invested by the fund managers in "sin industries"—companies that promote ill health (e.g., the tobacco industry), moral decline (e.g., certain parts of the gaming and entertainment industries), or human rights abuse (e.g., companies located in nations that allow child labor or do not protect basic human rights).

Two considerations are obvious:

1. Degrees of choice. To use examples at opposite ends of the spectrum: On one end, we are required, under penalty of law, to pay taxes to a government that may violate our personal standards in the way it uses our taxes. On the other end, we are not required to eat food that is produced in inhumane ways. So the degree of volunteerism (or obligation, or choice) is different in each situation and must be considered when weighing our response.

2. Degrees of separation. There are varying degrees of separation between an individual and inhumane or unethical practices in different situations. If I pay a farmer, face to face, for animal products he has raised inhumanely, my complicity in his actions is clearer than if I purchase a similar product at a grocery store that has multiple levels of separation between a product's origin and my purchase of it (producers who hide or disguise their actions, wholesalers, distributors, retailers, etc.). It doesn't necessarily dilute my complicity, but it makes it harder to see. And out of sight usually means out of mind.

These two factors complicate one's response in any given situation, but we are required to do the hard work of consideration nonetheless. After viewing the following short video, I hope you'll give consideration to any part you may be playing in supporting this industry's profitability, and therefore its viability:

10 Cities for Real Estate Steals

In case you're free to move, or at least move some money, U.S. News & World Report has published a list of "10 Cities for Real Estate Steals" in this hurting housing market.

Commitments

It's often been said that there are no perfect churches—and if the one I have recently joined was before, it certainly isn't now that I am a member.

It's easy to be cynical about "church," but regardless of how man has mangled the institution it is still, at its core, something valuable and necessary: the expression of Christ's body in the world. I, along with 35 or so others, was presented last night at the Sunday evening service as a new member of Calvary Church in Charlotte. There is precious little (if anything) about church "membership" in the New Testament, but things were different in the first century. There was not the "salad bar" or "shopping mall" mentality that modern Christianity has produced with our churches on every corner. Today, when many Christians prefer to visit churches indefinitely and never make a commitment—being a consumer rather than a producer—I support the idea of asking Christians to commit themselves to serve Christ and His body in a particular church.

At Calvary, I attended, along with 84 other prospective new members, six hours of "orientation" on the church's vision and doctrinal commitments, and met with three good men (lay leaders at the church) for an interview, and then was presented as a new member to the congregation. (Fortunately, the congregation didn't get to vote. Ha ha.)

I have always believed strongly in the biblical imperatives about local church involvement and have felt adrift over the last year as I looked for a church home. Calvary is not perfect, but that's not what I was looking for. I was looking for a church where Christ is exalted and the Bible is viewed as a book from God that guides faith and practice. And Calvary (along with many others) is that kind of church.

Real Food Charlotte

My daughter, Elizabeth, and I ate lunch today at a new, small, vegetarian/vegan/raw restaurant—Real Food Charlotte. The food was GREAT! (Recommended by daughter Anna, by the way!)

We both had a vegan veggie calzone that came with a mixed greens/grains salad and shared a bowl of miso soup with noodles that came with small pitas and a dollop of the best almond butter I have ever tasted. Every time I eat food in this kind of restaurant I am blown away by the flavors. The calzone must have a dozen different raw veggies inside it and the mini-pitas had a flavor I had never tasted in a pita bread before. Really nice staff as well.

We had already started eating when I remembered to ask Lizzie to take some pictures with her phone-camera, so the plates are a bit messy. But the food was great!