Hello! I’m Brooke De Jong, and I am very excited to join the ELCA World Hunger team as the Program Assistant for Hunger Education and share my diverse work background with the team. I can’t wait to see what new things we can do together. Most recently, I served as the Director for Youth, Family and Community Outreach at St. John’s Lutheran Church in Wilmette, Ill. Prior to my work at St. John’s, I worked as a chaplain on an adolescent behavioral health unit, a grant writer for Heartland Alliance Health and as the ELCA’s Coordinator for the Observance of the 500th Anniversary of the Reformation. I have a Bachelor of Arts in Religion and German with a minor in Ancient Languages from Augustana University in Sioux Falls, S.D. I am currently working on my Master of Divinity and in the process of becoming a deacon in the ELCA.

I have a passion for faith formation that is culturally sensitive, socially responsive and aimed at creating lifelong, engaged members of the ELCA. I am looking forward to assisting the ELCA World Hunger team in creating resources that foster the growth of a faith that is active in love and seeks justice. I also look forward to hearing from you about how you are using ELCA World Hunger education resources and what your hopes are for the future of these resources.

When I am not in the office, I can often be found doing CrossFit, hiking, backpacking or biking. My last hiking trip was to the Grand Canyon (see photo). The last backpacking trip I took was to Colorado, where I did the Marron Bells Four Pass Loop. I traversed four mountain passes in five days! I am looking forward to exploring Zion National Park or more of the Rocky Mountains next.

This blog originally appeared on the Huffington Post Impact site: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ryan-p-cumming/end-hunger-the-single-mos_b_11136672.html.

A few years ago, I was at the World Food Prize in Des Moines, Iowa, for the Borlaug Dialogues, an annual international conference on food security, agriculture, and food science. Representatives from NGOs, businesses, local communities, and national governments offered their solutions to hunger around the world, from encouraging young agri-entrepreneurs to shipping fish heads to Africa. There was no end to creative (and, at times, dubious) solutions to world hunger.

What is the right answer? Maybe, like many at the Borlaug Dialogues argued, the solution is to increase agricultural output, since we have too many people and not enough food. On the other hand, some argue that we already produce more than enough for everyone, so food waste is the real issue. Maybe the answer lies in the science of GMOs that can “save the world from hunger, if we let them.” Perhaps the solution is more straightforward—give hungry people peanut butter. Or, it could involve transforming economic opportunity through social enterprise, the “only” solution to global poverty according to the author of that article. And so on and so on.

About the only thing most folks seem to agree on is that the answer isn’t more relief but more development. Figuring out which path toward development to take, though, is another matter. Even the best routes aren’t perfect. Increasing agricultural output doesn’t address rampant food waste. Developing more GMO seeds doesn’t address lack of clean water or lack of jobs. Microlending can provide huge benefits, but it doesn’t work everywhere and doesn’t work everywhere in the same way.

But there is a single step we can take to end hunger for good around the world and in our own communities: listening to one another. Too often, the “solutions” to hunger and poverty come down from the “top,” rather than rising up from the ground. Those of us in developed countries are moved by the problems we see in developing nations and bring our own solutions to bear in communities that are not our own. At its worst, this feeds the sort of “savior complex” on prominent display recently in the controversy over Louise Linton’s new memoir. At its best, this top-down model proffers solutions that simply don’t work.

The kind of meaningful listening that builds relationships between and within communities helps solutions arise that are effective and sustainable. This model “challenges one-sided, top-down, and donor-recipient approaches…and emphasizes the need for developing mutual relationships in which all are considered teachers and learners,” says Rev. Dr. Philip Knutson, the regional representative of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) in Southern Africa. Knutson warns that without cultivating relationships through listening, development projects can lose sight of context and “may be short-sighted, benefiting some but excluding others.”

Fyness Phiri of Chithope Village

When listening is authentic, though, programs can respond to a host of needs, including practical needs for economic empowerment and personal needs like recognition of self-dignity. In Malawi, the Evangelical Lutheran Development Service (ELDS), supported in part by the ELCA through ELCA World Hunger, is working with women and men to build community and overcome the challenges of hunger and poverty. (ELDS is the diaconate arm of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Malawi, led by Bishop Joseph Bvumbwe.) Fyness Phiri, one of the participants in the “Livelihoods Improvement and Empowerment Project,” recalls, “I was one of the poorest people in the village…before ELDS introduced this project.” Fyness used to ask her neighbors for money to buy food for herself, her husband, and their four children.

At a community meeting in 2013, Fyness joined other women to start a village savings and loan group. After some training and community-building meetings with ELDS, the group gave out its first loans. Fyness and the other women were able to start small businesses and purchase seeds and fertilizers for their farms. Eventually, the start-up money helped Fyness produce enough food to feed her family, pay back her loan, and sell some of her surplus at market. “Since I joined the project,” she says, “my life has completely changed. I have food in my house, and I’m able to send my children to school. Because of the knowledge [I’ve gained], I will be able to continue and help others even if the project phases out.” Because ELDS invested in the community and the relationships formed among the women, the impact is not only sustainable but replicable.

Extension worker Chesterman Kumwenda demonstrates how to use a treadle pump.

Microlending worked wonders for the women in Fyness’ village, but for Charles Chikwatu’s community, the problem was not access to funds but lack of water for their fields. Charles and other participants worked together to learn how to use efficient treadle pumps to increase the land they could tend for maize and tomatoes. The benefits of the new method are huge, Charles says: “I easily find money through sale of my crops [and] I have managed using the money from irrigation to send my children to secondary school. I have also started a grocery with the money from this farming.”

New irrigation systems wouldn’t help Fyness, who didn’t even have money for seeds. A village savings and loan wouldn’t have helped Charles’ community address lack of access to water. But by listening closely, ELDS helped Fyness, Charles, and their communities transform their own situations.

And because of this, the benefits extend far beyond the immediate needs for food, according to Knutson. “[C]ollaboration between individual members in a community has enabled the individuals and the community to gain in knowledge and confidence to leverage other benefits enabling them to start new business and advocate for government support for local clinics and other rural development projects,” he says.

New, creative solutions to hunger and poverty abound, and many offer much promise. When these are employed in the context of relationships where participants become leaders and vision is built from the ground up, effective action can take root and grow. Sometimes, the answer is reducing waste. In some places, the answer is increased production. With some groups, the answer is enterprise. But in every time, place, and case, the best response is to listen.

Photos: Gazeli Phiri and Dickens Mtonga, courtesy of ELDS

Ryan P. Cumming, Ph.D., is program director of hunger education with ELCA World Hunger.  He can be reached at Ryan.Cumming@ELCA.org.

The Results Are In!

As the professional football season winds to a close each winter, fans across the country start planning parties large and small, usually with an abundance of pre-game snacks and treats, for the Big Game.  Jersey-clad diehards and fair-weather fans alike break bread, or more likely, wings and nachos, as they cheer on their favorite teams.  Amid piles of chips, dips, and rib tips, it can be easy to forget that so many people around the world and here in the United States often struggle to fill their own plates, let alone the plates of families and friends visiting for the Game.

This year, ELCA Lutherans worked to change that.  Team Carolina and Team Denver took part in ELCA World Hunger’s “Big Game” Synod Challenge to raise awareness and dollars to support ELCA World Hunger’s work in nearly 60 countries, including the United States. And the results are in!

It wasn’t quite the thumping we saw on the field, but Team Denver edged out Team Carolina to win this friendly competition.  Together, the teams and their supporters raised over $70,000, with Team Denver bringing in $35,621 and Team Carolina following closely with $34,672. Together with a few gifts that came in after the competition, over $77,012 were raised for ELCA World Hunger!  These gifts will support food pantries, jobs programs, shelters, health clinics, agricultural programs and much, much more.

How Did They Do It?

The Rocky Mountain, North Carolina and South Carolina Synods shared photos, videos and social media posts to get the word out and gifts in.  (Check out the Team Carolina video here, and the Team Denver video here.)  Here is where donations came from:

Both teams took advantage of Team ELCA, a new online fundraising platform, that congregations, groups and individuals can use to support ELCA World Hunger.  By forming a team, you can invite friends, family and neighbors to join your efforts.  Team ELCA is a great way to draw others together in your event.  From birthdays to youth group overnights to synod-wide events like ELCA World Hunger’s Big Game Challenge, Team ELCA can be an important tool in expanding the reach of your efforts.  Learn more about Team ELCA with a handy tip sheet that can be found here (https://blogs.elca.org/worldhunger/files/2016/03/Team-ELCA-101-1.pdf).

Thank you to Team Denver and Team Carolina, and to everyone who joined in this tremendous effort!  Your support will help our church live out its call to be “church for the sake of the world” in communities facing hunger and poverty around the world.

Just last week in my local high school’s cafeteria, eager young volunteers stationed themselves with scales in front of garbage cans. Weighing and examining every item about to be thrown away, they came up with a gross tonnage of discards and determined that only 5% of the “garbage” needed to go to the landfill. The other 95% could be recycled or composted.

While some of the compostable items were napkins and paper plates, most of it was food.

Food tossed into the cafeteria garbage can is considered food waste— food wasted at the level of consumption, that we prepare and eat in our homes, stores, and high schools, the ELCA Churchwide Office, our congregations, offices, and countless other  institutions.

Food loss, on the other hand, takes place at the level of production. Failed crops are a good example. So are shortages triggered by hurricanes, typhoons, droughts, war and violence, and diseases like potato blight or wheat rust.

Through ELCA World Hunger, we’re all committed to addressing food loss. But the food waste that takes place in our own kitchens? Invisible, unchallenged, it’s our dirty little secret. Some might defend it as a privilege of our prosperity! Food loss happens everywhere. Food waste happens in high-income regions. Although this chart is a little hard to see, just look at the proportion of red to blue. Blue is food loss. Red is food waste. We North Americans have the biggest red chunk. (To see a larger chart, go to a cool blog called Discard Studies: Exploring Throw-Away Culture, also my source for the food loss/food waste distinction.)

So, fellow hunger advocates. What’s the plan for making our food waste as visible—and as reprehensible—as the world’s food loss?

For including our own shame in campaigns that focus on the world’s shame?

For adding a photo of our excess to the gallery of photos of other people’s lack?

For including our own practices in the hunger equation?

For looking at ourselves?

I can’t wait to hear.

Anne Basye, Sustaining Simplicity

I used to wish for a giant returns counter where I could exchange stuff I didn’t need  for stuff I did need. Behind the counter would be a system for redistributing, reusing, or recycling goods, so that no “returns” were ever junked. We’d all get what we needed, less perfectly good stuff would sit idle in closets and garages, and a lot less new stuff would have to be made.

My dream is coming true. It’s called “collaborative consumption” – a trendy new term for the timeworn habit of sharing.

For more details, watch this fabulous TED talk or read this Sunset magazine article on the economy of sharing. But the bottom line is, a world with too much stuff is an opportunity for people to share, swap or pool instead of buying more and more. We are born and bred to share and cooperate, says Rachel Botsman, the young economist leading the TED talk. Hyperconsumption interrupted that pattern, but the internet is bringing it back in a big way in three new forms:

1. “Redistribution markets” that are moving used or pre-owned items from where they aren’t used to where they will be used. Think Craig’s List or swaptree.com, whose slogan is “turn what you have into what you want.” (The 3 Rs are now five: reduce, reuse, recycle, repurpose and—implementing my returns counter—redistribute!).
2. “Collaborative lifestyles,” in which people work, live, and stay intentionally. Are you familiar with coworking, where independent workers share an office space and creativity? Couch surfing, which matches budget travelers and homeowners with rooms or couches to spare? Landsharing, which matches gardeners and small farmers with underused yards and acreage? They are fast becoming household terms!
3. “Product service systems” like car sharing that let people pay for the benefit of a product without having to own it  outright—a great option for things with “high idling capacity” like cars and power tools. The typical homeowner will use a power drill for 13 minutes in its entire lifetime. Says Botsman, “You need the hole, not the drill!”  So why not rent it from or to someone else?

Collaborative consumption built this community cooker in a Nairobi slum

Does this trend benefit only rich folks with video games to spare? No. Collaborative consumption relies on trust and has always been practiced in communities rich in trust and relationship. Check out this trash-burning community cooker developed in a Nairobi slum, and think about the state of our trust, relationships, and communities.

Collaborative consumption sounds like a basic Christian practice. It’s our job to give away our extra coats and sponsor food pantries. But I wonder whether all that giving keeps us locked in paternalism: I have something, you don’t, you can have mine and I’ll feel good. Collaborative consumption invites us into a more mutual model: I’ve got something, you’ve got something, let’s trade. We’re equally gifted: let’s share.

On the ground, hunger programs are brought to life less by money than by people’s dignity, resourcefulness, and willingness to work hard. Their assets contribute to a process you could call “collaborative construction.” But it’s funny how other people’s gifts vanish when we talk about hunger in congregations. We stick to the same old trope, contrasting our abundance with other people’s lack. We have money, they don’t; therefore they are needy and you should write a check.

I’ve got something, you’ve got something, let’s trade  or I’ve got something, you’ve got something, let’s create something new together frees us to see new, more collaborative ministries. Collaboration is harder. It takes a lot more time than writing a check. It changes the relationships between the people involved. It also changes the stories we tell about one another. (David explored this in his post contrasting two videos—one focused on a little boy playing in the dirt with a bleach bottle, and one in which “underprivileged” Native American teens named their strengths.) And it changes us.

The collaborative consumption concept is changing my vision of the giant returns counter. Now I see that showing up with a toaster I don’t need is just the first step. I have to be able to vouch for the condition of my toaster. I have to trust the person offering whatever I swap it for, be it a working radio, five pounds of green beans, or an hour of sewing. If I choose the hour of sewing, I might have to get to know someone new. And it will be slower than buying in the drive-through lane or pulling $20 from an ATM machine….but I think it will be a whole lot more satisfying.

Anne Basye, Sustaining Simplicity: A  Journal

I love the voices on this blog: Lana eating snow and shopping for a GMO-free meal; David probing our call to social justice; ELCA camp directors talking about the carrots and lettuce their campers are growing, eating, and giving away.

And then there’s me, carrying on about public transportation, old socks and shoes, and how, while we profess our belief in God, we act as if The Market is at the center of our lives.

“Maybe,” Nancy suggested gently the other day, “it’s time to remind blog readers what your topics have to do with World Hunger.”

What a good idea! Even I forget, sometimes, when I get carried away. So, here goes.

Most of my 33 posts since April 2009 focus on stuff: buying and selling stuff, storing stuff, having too much stuff, recycling stuff, giving stuff away, disposing of stuff, and transporting ourselves and our stuff. Recently I’ve looked at our notions about our economy—the role it plays in our lives; the assumptions we make about it; the possibility that the Market, not God, is the deity we really serve.

Figuring out how to reuse or recycle several hundred unmatched socks at Holden Village was my September stuff preoccupation.

My corner of the hunger discussion is our North American lifestyle. It’s about how our overstuffed lives keep us from walking our anti-hunger talk—and sometimes completely contradict the beliefs we profess to hold.

Consider this: Statistics show under our present system, a child born in North America will consume, waste and pollute in his or her lifetime as much as 50 children in developing countries. This good-sized tendril of the root causes of hunger starts in our own backyard.

We Lutherans love to cooperate in starting and supporting water projects in other countries. We rejoice that in Chiapas, Mexico, our support is helping an indigenous community irrigate its fields. Meanwhile, speaking of consuming 50 times more than everybody else, at home we treat our water with little respect. We run our faucets while we brush our teeth, take 10-minute showers, and insist on bright green lawns no matter what the climate. It took three liters of water to make our 1-liter plastic water bottle? 70.5 pounds of water to manufacture (in Asia, probably) a 2-gram, 32-megabyte memory chip and its plastic package? Not our problem!

It’s odd to me that our passion for water in Chiapas doesn’t inspire us to connect the dots between green lawns and the fact that, for example, the United States consumes 95 percent of the Colorado River’s water.  The paltry 1.5 million acre feet of Colorado water we give to Mexico is about what farmers in Sonora used in 1922. They can’t farm; the indigenous living along the Sea of Cortez, where the Colorado once emptied, can’t fish. And how are the farmers down the road from that thirsty computer microchip plant faring? All we know is that we can get a computer for a song at Best Buy, and when it wears out, we can recycle it. We don’t want to know streams, groundwater, and children will be poisoned when an offshore e-waste recycler sends it back to Guiyu, China—increasing the very poverty, hunger and environmental degradation we claim to oppose.

My little blog posts fall under the World Hunger program objective, “to encourage members of this church to practice responsible stewardship of their lives and their financial resources toward the prevention and alleviation of hunger.” To me, responsible stewardship means making sure our left hand knows how the plastic water bottle it plunks  down at the cash register aggravates a situation the World Hunger dollars in our right hand hope to alleviate.

As consumers we are discouraged from connecting the dots between our stuff and its consequences. As Christians, we’re obliged to. Convenience and personal comfort at the expense of others are not gospel values. The opposite is true: the gospel exhorts us always to act with our brothers and sisters in mind.

See? My blogs are not stuff and nonsense, but stuff and challenge. Thank you, Hunger Rumblings. I’m grateful for this space and everyone blogging along with it.

Anne Basye, Sustaining Simplicity

This is the ninth in a series of posts highlighting hunger-related activities that happened at ELCA Outdoor Ministry locations over the summer with the help of Education/Advocacy grants from ELCA World Hunger. The following is from Carol Joy Holling  Camp in Ashland, Nebraska. It was written the last week of July.

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We are in the final week of camp here at Carol Joy Holling and the garden supported by an ELCA World Hunger Education/Advocacy grant is flourishing! Campers and staff have picked tomatoes, radishes, lettuce, zucchini, and a variety of squash. All the food continues to go to Table Grace Ministries in Omaha; an organization that teaches low income and single parent families how to cook and shop wisely.

The Hunger Garden is located at a central place on site that campers pass everyday to and from their activities. It’s an exciting place where everyone feels that they are doing something beyond our camp. The greatest experience is that many of our campers come without ever digging in the dirt or seeing where vegetables come from. This is a new experience!

Wednesdays’ focus is “Created for Community” and the Hunger Garden certainly brings the theme alive. Campers learn that “community” is much greater that just the camp – it extends out to many – many who we may never meet.

After the campers and staff leave for the summer the garden will continue to give. Members of American Lutheran Church in Ashland will come out on a regular basis to make sure nothing goes to waste. This is a great partnership with the local congregation.

Pastor Brad
Director/Programs, NLOM

This is the eighth in a series of posts highlighting hunger-related activities that happened over the summer at ELCA Outdoor Ministry locations with the help of Education/Advocacy grants from ELCA World Hunger. The following is from Agape Kure Beach in Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina.

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Worms. Food Waste. Campers.  You might be thinking, “Wow, what a mess!” or maybe even “Ewww, gross!”   It may be a little messy, but at Camp Agape we have been teaching campers about how to reduce our carbon footprints and world hunger by combining worms and food waste!  For the last two years, Camp Agape has been vermiposting (composting with worms).  Volunteers built vermiposting pits outside our dining hall and extra worms (red wigglers) were bought to start the process.  

After each meal campers separate their waste into two tubs: worm-friendly and trash.  Examples of waste that worms can eat include: fruit or vegetable scraps, coffee grounds, newspaper, and other organic waste.  Our campers and guests catch on very quickly not only to what foods can be composted but just how much food waste they create.  Campers also take part in maintaining the vermiposting bins: adding food waste,  shredding extra newspaper to cover the composting materials, and using water from our rain barrels to make sure there is plenty of moisture in the bins.  The more aware campers are of their waste, the more likely they are to think twice when piling up their plates with unnecessary, large serving sizes! 

Once they get into the habit of it, campers and guests find vermiposting easy to do, but often stop vermiposting when they leave simply because they don’t have vermiposting bins at home.  This summer with the help of the ELCA World Hunger Education/Advocacy grant we received, we were able to provide campers with the materials needed to take what they learned at camp about vermiposting home with them.  Campers in our SIT (Staff In Training) – Servant and Nature! Camp programs made their own vermiposting bins.  Camp Agape’s naturalist, Mir Youngquist-Thurow, led the sessions on how to create the bins, compost at home, and why composting can be so beneficial in our world.  We hope that campers will not only use their bins at home to continue vermiposting but also as a tool to teach their family, friends, and neighbors. 

Alissa Oleson
Program Director

Each year ELCA World Hunger provides funding through our Education/Advocacy grants to organizations working to educate Lutherans and others on the root causes of and solutions for world hunger, or organizations advocating on behalf of those who live in hunger and poverty. In 2010, ELCA World Hunger worked with ELCA Outdoor Ministries to provide Education/Advocacy grants to eleven Outdoor Ministry locations. The money is being used to help campers learn about world hunger, its causes, and solutions. Beginning with this post, on second and fourth Fridays we will highlight a few of the projects being conducted with these funds. Today’s post comes from Lutherhill Ministries in La Grange, Texas.

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Spiritually Fed

Greetings from Lutherhill Ministries in La Grange, Texas!    The weather is hot and humid here in our neck of the woods, and storm clouds seem to linger overhead daily.  While others grumble as they are called out of the pool – we are quietly elated as the fresh rain soaks our new garden!

As a grateful recipient of an ELCA World Hunger Education/Advocacy grant, we are excited to share our happenings with you! This summer, every Lutherhill camper participates in the Daily Bread Project. The Daily Bread Project includes a garden, compost pile, recycling program, hunger meal, Daily Bread worship and more.  We experience as a community the emptiness that comes with hunger and poverty. And as a community we experience the fullness that comes when we fulfill God’s call to do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with God. Here’s a taste…

Hunger Meal

As campers, staff and sponsors enter the dining hall for Wednesday lunch, each draw a colored marble. These marbles represent their lunch destiny, but more importantly they represent the distribution of food resources across the world.

The lunch-time experience helps youth explore hunger first hand – 65% eat rice on the floor, 20% eat rice and chicken on the floor, 10% eat pasta in chairs and 5% eat a three course meal at a table setting. As campers seated on the floor wait, kitchen staff graciously serve those at the head table. After this upper class is served, the others are haphazardly served their meager meals.

Reactions are intriguing. Some weeks campers are eager to share their food; other weeks campers turn inward, more concerned about eating their own lunch; other times campers linger on the verge of getting it, of pushing themselves beyond their comfort zone.

Food for Thought

The hunger meal becomes a topic for discussion throughout the day.  We walk together in frustration and disappointment and come out on the other side equipped and empowered. Simple lessons from the garden, compost, worship and more give us the tools to abate hunger locally and globally.  To date we’ve collected $560.92 in offerings for ELCA World Hunger and gathered 675 canned goods for local food banks in 9 communities.

Surrounded by abundance, love takes on a different shape than it does in the midst of poverty and hunger. The Daily Bread Project gives us the chance to explore Christ’s love in the middle of both!

For more information on The Daily Bread Project contact Geoff Roach, Daily Bread Coordinator at geoff@lutherhill.org.

I was recently listening to the soundtrack from Wicked, when a few lines from the song “Wonderful” struck me. The lines were these:

“A man’s called a traitor – or liberator
A rich man’s a thief – or philanthropist
Is one a crusader – or ruthless invader?
It’s all in which label
Is able to persist
There are precious few at ease
With moral ambiguities
So we act as though they don’t exist”

Working in the field of world hunger, it’s not unusual to have conversations with people who are reflexively negative about large corporations. From profit motives, to workers’ rights, to enviornmental exploitation, most of the world’s ills and many of the causes of hunger can be laid in the headquarters of corporations. And without question, some of the criticism is completely deserved and must be called out.

But for all the outrage that is justified, some of it is not. Some of the outrage is applied beyond what is deserved, and I don’t know that it’s helpful. Yes, companies do bad things. But they do good things, too. Standard Oil serves as an iconic historical example. On the one hand, it was a ruthless organization, using boldly smarmy tactics that are now illegal to drive competitors out of business and acquire their assets cheaply.  I don’t know how many people lost their jobs as a result, but I’m sure it’s a large number. On the other hand, they also hired a lot of people. And according to Wikipedia, they did some things that the general population found very helpful, like cutting the price of kerosene in half,  and developing many other useful products including tar, paint, and chewing gum. Then, too, Rockefeller used his (ill-got?) gains to do some extremely good things, like funding research that led to a vaccine for yellow fever and founding the University of Chicago. So what of Standard Oil? Good or evil? And what is gained or lost by declaring it one to the exclusion of the other?

There are, of course, many modern-day examples of corporations doing both good and bad things. Kind of like people. I don’t write this blog to defend the bad; only to acknowledge that corporations are complex and deserving of more careful consideration in our judgements. Ending hunger is a big, complex job. Personally, I think corporations have a role to play in it. Calling them out on the bad is necessary and important. But so is praising and encouraging the good, which requires acknowledging it – and often acknowledging moral ambiguities, too.

-Nancy Michaelis