Even as a young child I was aware of various political conflicts. As a South African I was aware of apartheid and the struggle for justice. Being British, I was knowledgeable about the conflict in Northern Ireland. Growing up in a Jewish community in St. Louis, I was conscious of the Israeli occupation. Even today, I am reminded of my time in St. Louis as I scroll through my high school’s Facebook contacts, many who now live in Israel.

This knowledge has grown with both time and experience, and the details of the three experiences weave in and out of mind. In these three conflicts, walls divided people, religion fueled conflict over identity, land, and power, and division became a birth right.

The escalation of events in Gaza has led me to a difficult question: what makes Israel different from South Africa?

The art world in Los Angeles has spent the last two months watching the unfolding financial crisis at the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). In a nutshell, the museum outspent revenue for several years and borrowed from its endowment to cover expenses. With a recent drop in donations and the endowment depleted, the museum could have run out of money in the spring of 2009.

Like much of the country, MOCA was living on credit. The good intentions of significant exhibitions ran into the reality of fiscal irresponsibility. In theory, the museum’s blockbuster shows should have attracted new donors to cover the additional cost. In reality, the donations never materialized and the bills kept coming.

A Christian Post article has been rising up the ranks of news stories on Conversant Life, “Salvation Army Leader to Lose Job for Violating Marriage Policy”. On the heels of the Proposition 8 battle in California, and a renewed exploration of marriage, any article on the rules of marriage will attract attention and interest.

I knew exactly what the article was about before I opened the link. I have had the fortunate experience of working for The Salvation Army for the last 3 years; including over a year working for Corps Officers (note the plural). When I interview new employees I always ask them what they know about The Salvation Army? The typical response revolves around thrift stores and Christmas bell ringing.

What the average person doesn’t know is that The Salvation Army is an Evangelical Church that combines faith and social service around the world and has evolved a particular culture born out of tradition and action. Many leadership positions are held by ordained clergy called Officers who are either single or married. The particular rule that married couples must both be officers is rooted in the strong distinct ministry of the churches founders, William and Catherine Booth. While William Booth was grounding his ministry in the slums of East London, Catherine Booth was a successful preacher whose ministry helped support the family financially. Their example was followed by an aggressive expansion of both churches and social services around the world.

The poems of Rainer Maria Rilke helped me understand how difficult it is to enter the experience of another human being. We spend so much of our day alone in our own thoughts, that when confronted with another person, we are so feeble in our ability to affectively communicate. Twelve years into my marriage I am still surprised at how easy it is to miss communicate, for my words to be so ineffective at expressing my inner reality.

In our work at The Salvation Army Alegria we are aware of this challenge. Our ability to “know” the person we seek to help is critical in our ability to sensitively guide them towards “wholeness”. At times it is a frightening scenario, one human influencing another; because our actions are based on the premise that we know what the person we are helping needs. Sometimes we are right, sometimes we are not.

Can a diverse America meaningfully embrace Thanksgiving in its traditional form?

Working in homeless services through countless years of Thanksgiving dinners has left me empty of any celebratory sympathy for the false traditions that surround Thanksgiving. I don’t believe for one minute that the “First Thanksgiving” was a sunlit banquet of settlers and Native Americans enjoying turkey, mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie at the table of friendship. I understand the reason why the mythology of Thanksgiving has developed: supporting manifest destiny and creating an ethical framework for European American expansion. I just don’t like this quasi meaningful excuse of a holiday which has become a vehicle for creating consumer demand and white washing the reality of history

In Faith Ringgold’s Born in a Cotton Field, a painted quilt, the nativity narrative fuses to the experience of African Americans in the south. The work of art creates a secondary context to over lay the biblical story. The voyage to Bethlehem is replaced with the fraught voyage of slaves travelling the Underground Railroad; Jesus born in the open cotton fields.

When I moved to the United States from Belgium and South Africa, I was introduced to the particular history of America. The experience of slavery and the civil war created contact points between the struggle of racism in my birth place and the colonial roots of institutional slavery around the world. The school I attended in America included a reminder of slavery’s legacy through a bussing program that brought African American’s from St. Louis’s city center to the suburbs were I lived. I grew up confronted by the reality of segregation; whether it was socially enforced or politically enforced, the impact was often the same.

Kehinde Wiley is a vastly popular painter working in New York and Los Angeles. A new exhibition of paintings, The World Stage: Africa Logos-Dakar, recently closed at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Wiley is known for his realist paintings that reflect historical portraits combining contemporary figures and stylized backdrops. In the recent exhibition, the paintings incorporated African cloth printing with youth in poses borrowed from historical public sculpture in the African countries he visited.

The combination of ordinary people, the grandeur of public portraiture and sculpture, and the bright floating backgrounds of his paintings has translated into rapid success for the artist. With his most recent exhibitions he is demonstrating an evolving maturity backed by the global relevance of synthesizing historical pomp and ordinary importance. Wiley's celebration of the ordinary with eye popping visuals subverts the historical precedence of celebrity, without a simple critique that would doom his art to slick propaganda or a bright remix of a useless genre.

The staff of Slate Magazine recently posted an article detailing each staff person's vote in the upcoming Presidential Election. Maybe the Conversant community should follow their lead. Over the last month there have been numerous articles about the candidates and robust conversation about their positive and negative attributes. There has been concern that Conversant is both too liberal and too conservative. This is our opportunity to reflect the political diversity of this community.

This is our opportunity to share with each other who we are voting for and why, in six sentences or less by adding a comment to this blog. Please do not reply to any comment (any reply to comments will be removed). One vote, one comment.

Some may choose to not comment, and I respect their desire to vote without comment.

Once in a while the odd economics of the art world hit mainstream media and cause the average citizen to shake their head in bewilderment and think about the last time they were in a museum or gallery. I would imagine the average American visits a museum only a handful of times in their life. They wonder from room to room and enjoy the content, colors, and composition of different paintings. The time spent in the contemporary art section might leave them bewildered. Overall, it is a solid two to three hours of quiet contemplation and they walk away a little more relaxed and looking for something a little more exciting to do.

Art is as relevant to a lot of Americans as Church is. Not much.

I recently read the book, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Art by Don Thompson. The title refers to the sale of a Damien Hirst installation that includes a stuffed tiger shark floating in a tank of formaldehyde. The book does an excellent job of balancing the particular economics of art collecting with anecdotal stories that add life to the book. It is a great read for anyone curious about the business of contemporary art.

I will always remember the sharp rebuke from my grandmother to be quiet when I asked her and my other relatives to speak English at the dinner table so I could take part in their conversation. It was a pivotal year when my next brother and I began to wear the trappings of our acquired American culture. It was the year we showed up in South Africa with banned Midnight Oil cassette tapes, long hair, and new attitudes. As a monolingual child of pop culture I stood out in sharp contrast to the Afrikaans identity of my Mother’s family. Every summer we would relief drop into a white washed world of mountain views, vineyards, and institutionalized segregation. I grew up a South African whose cultural identity was only an illegitimate government’s passport deep. Passports are pretty thin documents that can open doors or get you kicked off trains (I can tell that story another day) but don’t tell you much about a person’s soul.