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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.
Scott Elliott is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He writes about education, city and suburban issues, politics, business, workforce and consumer issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2009 > July > 08 > Entry
Martin Gottlieb: Dayton peace prize reading suggests links among the good guys
Fourteen years after the signing of the Bosnia peace accords in Dayton, the most visible local legacy of the community’s brush with history is perhaps the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
Every year, organizers ask the nation’s publishers to submit fiction and nonfiction entries. There’s also a lifetime achievement award.
The contest has stretched the definition of “peace,” partly because there’s a limit to the number of great books that are written specifically about wars and how to avoid and resolve them.
So, for example, Taylor Branch won the lifetime award for a trilogy on Martin Luther King Jr.
I’m one of many “first readers,” that is, local people who each screen a handful of entries for relevance to the subject and for competitiveness. The prize winners are chosen by others and announced later in the year.
This year my reading kept bringing to mind the name Tony Hall.
The Democratic congressman from Dayton (from 1978 to 2002) is actually mentioned in one book. It’s by a former Republican congressman, Mark D. Siljander, of Michigan. They knew each other from a prayer group in Washington. They share a lot, but there are differences.
In 1984, Siljander said Americans “are literally in … an ideological battle and war over inalienable rights given to us by our Constitution. Humanists are shoving their narrow, distorted, perverted self-loving concept down our throats.”
Not the Hall style. But now Siljander seems a changed man. His book — “A Deadly Misunderstanding: A Congressman’s Quest to Bridge the Muslim-Christian Divide” — is all about healing and “reconciliation.”
He insists the divisions between the religions are not fundamental. He says the “misunderstanding” stems from bad translations.
He claims, apparently with considerable justification, a certain talent for languages. And he says that the original languages used in the major religious books were basically saying the same things about the biggest theological questions.
He takes the argument to the point of suggesting that Christians and Muslims aren’t even all that far apart on the divinity of Jesus Christ, which, of course, Muslims deny. So he has a tough sell.
There’s something Hall-like about the effort: the passion, the deep faith and the need to manifest that faith in worldly acts for mankind’s benefit.
Siljander says he takes inspiration from Hall’s pursuit of a congressional apology for slavery. He also mentions Hall’s hunger strike against fellow House Democrats who eliminated his committee on hunger.
Another book on my assigned list is by Muhammad Yunus, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. He’s the founder of the micro-business, or micro-credit, idea. He began lending tiny amounts of money to dirt-poor women in Bangladesh to begin their own one-person businesses. They made furniture, fixed clothes, nurtured tiny crops. Hall has long promoted the micro-business, having seen it at work in Bangladesh and having known Yunus.
The Yunus book — “Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism” — takes micro-business as a starting point. He stresses that the loans get paid back. He refers to his lending operation as a Social Business, the idea of which is not to make a profit (all profits get funneled back into the business), but to make an impact on some social problem. But, unlike traditional philanthropy, the project must be self-sustaining.
Yunus’ original operation, the Grameen Bank, gets cited in another book on my list. “A Crime So Monstrous,” by E. Benjamin Skinner, is a partial survey of world slavery. The author travels to Haiti, Africa, India and Romania.
The book’s a shocker. There are more slaves today than ever, millions (though they’re a smaller percentage of the world population than ever). And we’re talking actual slaves, not badly paid workers.
The author meets sex slaves, debt slaves (people who are in bondage because they owe a tiny debt, sometime incurred by a grandfather) and child domestic slaves (including in this country). He also deals with the people who buy, sell and enslave them.
Skinner explores what’s being doing by Christian evangelical groups, other nonprofits and the U.S. government, offering useful conclusions (and a gripping story).
To the consternation of some, the author unavoidably concludes that poverty is at the heart of the problem, and he holds out micro-business as part of the solution.
My reading journey didn’t leave me hopeful that the world’s huge humanitarian issues are moving to solution, just aware that some excellent people are doing their best, and struck by the connections among them.
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