First published in Relevant

Across the Sahel, the strip of arid land south of the Sahara, starvation threatens as many as 15 million people in West Africa. Famine lurks again in the Horn of Africa on the eastern side of the continent where last summer tens of thousands of people died after two years of drought left families with nothing. Reports of women abandoning their children along the side of the road to refugee camps illustrate just how terrible famine is.

Experts can list a number of reasons why Africa is plagued by chronic food shortages. Changing weather patterns have made drought a more common occurrence. Political turmoil exacerbates efforts to feed the hungry, as when the militant group al Shabaab prevented aid from reaching the worst of last year’s famine zone in Somalia. Population growth and soil depletion have reduced food production while increasing the number of hungry people. Lack of functioning markets for food commodities and inadequate transportation infrastructure often mean that famine exists in one part of a country while a food surplus in another region causes prices to fall so low farmers can’t recoup their costs.

But the most basic reason why famine haunts Africa is that the continent’s farmers can’t grow enough food using their common, but vastly outdated methods of farming. Roger Thurow, a former Wall Street Journal reporter based in Africa, has reported on famine in Ethiopia and chronicled the causes of hunger across the continent. His second book, The Last Hunger Season: A Year in an Arican Farm Community on the Brink of Change, illustrates how farmers in Kenya are leading the way out of Africa’s food shortages.

The title of the book refers to the annual wanjala or hunger season, when last year’s crop is eaten but the coming harvest is not yet reaped. Thurow follows a group of farmers as they enter the wanjala, which in the year he visits is the most severe in living memory. In January and February of 2011, while Somalia heads toward famine, families in western Kenya are running out of their food stocks with the harvest still months away.

The price of food, particularly the staple crop of maize, or corn, is shockingly high following its post harvest low. One of the forces working against the farmers is that the price of food is high when they need to buy it in the market yet low when the markets are flooded by post harvest plenty.

Yet farmers have plenty of other expenses. School fees are costly, even in public schools where the education is terrible. Malaria rages during the wanjala when the rains are welcome to water the crops but also provide breeding grounds for mosquitoes. Treatment is pricey and will often force farmers to skips meals—against the advice of doctors—to afford it. Children suffer the most. “When you, as a parent,” one farmer tells Thurow about her obviously malnourished boy, “see your child not eating enough to be satisfied, you are hurt, but you are not in a position to control the situation.

Farmers don’t have savings accounts; instead they store wealth in the form of animals, like cows and chickens. But animals get sick, eaten by predators, or stolen.

What is abundantly clear in The Last Hunger Season, is that Africa’s small farmers are incredibly industrious, savvy, and future oriented. They must be if they are to avoid starvation. But they also realize that their biggest hope for ending their poverty is their children’s education. Families whose children graduate from high school enjoy steady incomes because a diploma is the ticket for a job. Public schools are awful, so parents are willing to spend huge portions of their income on private school fees. Even during the wanjala, one mother Leonida sold her food in order to keep her son Gideon in school. It’s a common sacrifice.

Hardship and sacrifice is a way of life, but so is a rich and beautiful dependence on God. Thurow doesn’t spend time on the farmers’ faith, but he does show them in church and at prayer as a constant way of life. God is faithful despite the wanjala, and God is bounteous in His blessings at harvest.

Perhaps due to their faith, Thurow’s farmers are incredibly hopeful. They have been introduced to more advanced methods of farming—one that has been standard in the U.S. for a century. They have joined the One Acre Fund, an agricultural development non-profit focused on providing the tools and the training to make Africa’s smallholder farmers productive and able to feed not only themselves, but their country, ending the wanjala for good.

One Acre provides seed, which is bred for their climate, soil and altitude. One Acre representatives also train farmers in more advanced agricultural methods. It’s almost shocking for the reader to learn these farmers typically scatter their seed as Jesus described in His parables. Instead they’re taught to plant in straight rows, to weed and to correctly use fertilizer so each maize plant can use all the nutrition in the soil around it without competition.

The impact is dramatic. One Acre grows quickly in part because farmers so easily see the benefit. Where one farmer harvests two bags of maize, another harvests 20. By the time the maize is in storage, it is clear their first season with One Acre farming will no longer be a subsistence activity but a profitable business. Able to feed a family for a year on an acre of land, the farmers quickly see more potential. “One Acre has given me the spirit to find money in the soil,” one farmer says. They all have big plans for the rest of the growing season as well as next year’s crop. Hardship remains, but death and hunger need no longer stalk these farmers.

The Last Hunger Season is a beautiful story, and readers will find themselves pulling for these farmers to make it. It’s troubling that these basic farming techniques, available to farm families a century ago in the U.S., are still inaccessible to most of Africa’s farmers. Thurow only hints that this story of Africa’s untapped farmers as the key to the continent’s development is beginning to be recognized by governments, non-profits and corporations.

Thurow makes it clear this is the solution for Africa’s repeated food crises. There are challenges—training a whole continent of farmers, adequate storage for grains, better seeds, and transportation to bigger markets—but they are all surmountable with the will and resources. These farmers have experienced their last hunger season. There is no reason why the rest of the world’s one billion hungry people can’t do the same.

Rob Moll is an editor at large for Christianity Today magazine and author of the forthcoming book, What Your Body Knows About God (IVP). Follow Rob @MollRob

First published in Christianity Today

onservatives have a lot of science in their favor these days. Bookshelves are bowed down with the studies of social science researchers, development psychologists, and neuroscientists that largely confirm the instincts of social conservatives. This research has so thoroughly overturned the tables that a liberal think tank fellow (the Brookings Institute’s Isabel Sawhill) recently praised Dan Quayle’s condemnation of Murphy Brown becoming a single parent on the 1992 sitcom.

The latest of these books is Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon). While many books implicitly affirm general evangelical views of morality, social relationships, and how healthy societies should be constructed, Haidt, a moral psychologist at the University of Virginia, explicitly compares liberal and conservative views of morality. Conservatives, he says, have a moral outlook that more fully accords with human nature.

Haidt splits his book into three parts. The first is an explanation of human moral tendencies. The big idea here is that our moral instincts come before our rationalization of them. Morality is based on “automatic processes” that guide our gut reactions to behaviors. Morality is innate, as Haidt says, “organized in advance of experience.”

Part two discusses the palate of human moral instincts. Here, Haidt begins to address the differences between conservative and liberal morality. Westerners, mostly liberal ones, have studied morality by examining the views of Western Educated Industrial Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) individuals. Yet the moral tastes of these research subjects are extremely limited.

Through his research outside of WEIRD cultures, Haidt came up with a moral matrix that generally fits societies around the world. This matrix includes six core values: Care, Liberty, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity. This matrix exists in all cultures—except the WEIRD ones.

Haidt chronicles how he learned to appreciate this broader moral palate while conducting interviews in a town in India. After three months, Haidt writes, “I could see beauty in a moral code that emphasized self-control, resistance to temptation, cultivation of one’s higher, nobler self, and negation of the self’s desires.” While these virtues sometimes conflicted with Haidt’s own emphasis on personal autonomy, he recognized that they served other moral goods and that it was Haidt who was deficient.

This explained why Haidt had previously discovered that liberals were unable to condemn morally repugnant behavior. Westerners, except social conservatives, exclusively valued Care as a moral category. As a result, they were unable to label behavior such as incest, cannibalism, or sex with a corpse as immoral. While these things might elicit disgust, unless they caused harm to a person, liberal interview subjects failed to find any grounds on which to condemn them. (It is easy to see that once activists are able to overcome the “ick factor” of a taboo—a stigma once attached to homosexual behavior—Western cultural values have no further ground to oppose it.)

Most cultures, on the other hand, including those sustained by American conservatives, have the full range of moral tastes. They value care for people and oppose oppressive behavior that limits individual liberty, just as liberals do. But they also value authority that gives a society structure. They invest ideas, images, and religion with sanctity. They prize loyalty to one’s country and family, and they hold these values equally and in tension with each other. When asked why incest is wrong, they answer, “Because it is.” When pressed, they answer, “Because it violates the dignity of the human body.”

In part three, Haidt explains why conservatives are right to equally value the whole palate of moral values. Humans are social creatures, and for societies to run effectively and harmoniously, all these moral categories need to be present. Religion, it turns out, is essential to group cooperation. For example, while most of the many communes that began in the nineteenth century failed, the religious ones had a much higher success rate after 20 years (39 percent) than the secular ones (6 percent).

A Coherent Moral Framework

But Haidt’s view of religion is incomplete. For him, it offers nothing more than an incentive for people to work together. In his view, doctrine is merely post hoc rationalization used to explain religious behavior. And, strangely, he doesn’t include religious ritual among those things capable of inspiring awe in humans, but instead nature, hallucinogenic drugs, and night club raves.

Still, Haidt is unequivocal that societies need all six moral senses. “We evolved to live, trade, and trust within shared moral matrices. When societies lose their grip on individuals, allowing all to do as they please, the result is often a decrease in happiness and an increase in suicide.” Haidt continues, “Societies that forgo … religion should reflect carefully on what will happen to them over several generations. We don’t really know, because the first atheistic societies have only emerged in Europe in the last few decades. They are the least efficient societies ever known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have few).” As the ultimate prize in Haidt’s evolutionary views, this is a bad thing.

Haidt’s main concern is to explain to liberals that the views of conservative moral thinkers (not Republicans) make a lot of sense. Liberals will continue to fail to attract voters until they expand their moral vision beyond concern for the care or harm of individuals and the free expression of their desires.

Liberals believe that conservatives vote against their own self-interest—represented by Democrats—because manipulative Republican politicians cynically appeal to their prejudices, their guns, and their God. Instead, Haidt explains to liberals, conservative thinkers have a coherent moral framework than accords with the latest social research in how society must be constructed for maximum human happiness.

Conservatives understand social and moral capital, and they see all the ways in which liberal pursuit of individual freedoms—enabled and upheld by the state—actually undermines healthy society. Observes Haidt:

Conservatives believe that people are inherently imperfect and are prone to act badly when all constraints and accountability are removed … Our reasoning is flawed and prone to overconfidence, so it’s dangerous to construct theories based on pure reason, unconstrained by intuition and historical experience … Institutions emerge gradually as social facts, which we then respect and even sacralize, but if we strip these institutions of authority and treat them as arbitrary contrivances that exist only for our benefit, we render them less effective. We then expose ourselves to increased anomie [breakdown in moral standards] and social disorder.

Haidt is no convert to conservatism. He hopes liberals will use his book to broaden their moral categories, appealing to more voters, and discover a formula for greater electoral success. But his respect for conservative views will be welcome to most conservative readers.

Christians won’t thoroughly agree with Haidt, but his work does suggest that there is a kind of foregone conclusion to the culture wars—one that is the opposite of what is now perceived to be historic inevitability. Happy, healthy, and effective societies require the morality of conservative communities. As the basis for such communities, the church is a refuge for those adrift in today’s moral and social disorder. As the project of unconstrained individualism fails, people and families and communities will find the church to be the ideal environment in which humans flourish.

Rob Moll, CT editor at large, is the author of The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come(InterVarsity) and a forthcoming book, What Your Body Knows About God.

First published in Patheos

I’m more than a little cynical about New Year’s resolutions. I’ve never made them before, having rarely seen others successfully fulfill theirs. After all, if we were able to keep even a third of our resolutions, the self-help shelves at Barnes & Noble would be bare. But this year my desire to change a few things got the better of me. I boldly made two New Year’s resolutions.

Over the past fifteen years, the pounds I gained my freshman year in college have only increased. They’ve hung on me long enough that I’m feeling the effects of that added weight. It’s not that I haven’t tried before to slim down. Pictures from my wedding and at my first child’s birth attest to my past successes, however short-lived. This year, despite a track record of failed attempts, once again, I promised myself, I’m going to lose some serious weight.

I also committed to memorize a long passage of Scripture this coming year. Discipline of my physical appetite, discipline of my spiritual appetite: In more ways than one, “He must increase, but I must decrease.”

With my vows made, I read a story in The New York Times about the near impossibility of permanent weight loss. According to the article, when people lose weight, hunger hormones kick into high gear and the body kicks into efficiency mode. The body burns fewer calories while clamoring for more. Not exactly the kind of encouragement I needed at this stage of the game.

Our bodies want us to put on weight, and when we see commercials, cookies, or smell the baking cinnamon rolls wafting through the mall, hormones and neurons kick into high gear, overriding our feeble self-control. “What we see here is a coordinated defense mechanism with multiple components all directed toward making us put on weight,” one of the researchers said.

Weight loss is just the latest in a flood of research in a range of areas that suggests that our bodies program our behavior. Through hormones, genes, or neural circuitry that make us hungry, lustful, or impetuous, our choices are not really volitionally our own. Our actions, scientists are learning, are to a large degree the product of our environment and our embodiment.

Specific instances of sex addiction, gambling, and shoplifting have all been tied directly to tumors, medication, or other influences of or on the body. For example, the brain chemical vasopressin has been found to help us fall in love. It allows our brains to change in ways that help us to bond with other people. When scientists increased the levels of vasopressin in animals, they begin bonding for life rather than mating willy-nilly. However, its absence has the opposite effect. Men whose genes prevent vasopressin from having a normal influence on the brain have been found to be more promiscuous.

“A slight change in the balance of brain chemistry can cause large changes in behavior,” writes neuroscientist David Eagleman. He sums up this research saying, “We are not the ones driving the boat of our behavior, at least not nearly as much as we believe.”

This research forces Christians to wonder to what degree we are indeed responsible for our actions when our very bodies, created by God, are causing us to sin. How can a just God hold us responsible for being what we couldn’t help being? Are we really at fault if a lack of vasopressin makes us a little more flirtatious with co-workers? Why bother to resolve to do better each year, to “gain victory” over sin, when our bodies seem hardwired to make the task almost impossible?

First, we must recognize that we vastly underappreciate sin and its pervasiveness in our lives. We talk of our “brokenness” or admit to “personal “struggles.” But this research shows that the damage is much, much deeper: it is indelibly written on our bodies, even our hormones and our genes. Our sinfulness has so deeply infected us that, like mutated cancer cells, even our body’s most basic parts often don’t work as they should. Nature and nurture conspire against us in ways we can never fully grasp. In the end, we only find refuge in the forgiveness of a gracious God.

Second, despite the tremendous obstacles, we can change. The ruts of sin do cut deep. Yet science also shows us that our brains are highly flexible. They can change, even drastically so at older ages. The scientists say our brains are plastic. An apt metaphor. With heat and pressure, time and effort, we can be formed into new, spiritually healthy people. Using spiritual disciplines like deep, concentrated prayer, such as in contemplation or lectio divina, we can change brain patterns and open up new possibilities.

Andrew Newberg is a neuroscientist and researcher of the effect of spirituality in the brain. He and colleagues write that through prayer “the brain becomes more sensitive to subtle realms of experience.” Meditation on God changes a person’s attitude and behavior in ways that other forms of concentration or awareness do not. According to Newberg, “religious and spiritual contemplation changes your brain in a profoundly different way because it strengthens a unique neural circuit that specifically enhances social awareness and empathy while subduing destructive feelings and emotions.”

Spiritual growth as well as personal change is possible with the aid of prayer. While God may change us through divine intervention, he has also uniquely enabled us to exercise our spiritual capacities in ways that make keeping one’s New Year’s resolutions possible.

As science discovers more about how our bodies influence our thoughts and actions, we are reminded in new and deeper ways of our need for physical and spiritual transformation. However our bodies may shape our sin, we trust in a God who has promised to provide all that we need as we seek to become people shaped more by Christ and less by our cravings.

First published in Christianity Today

This Lent, fasting is for a cause. Chris Seay, for example, published A Place at the Table, a 40-day diet in solidarity with the poor. Blood:Water Mission is promoting its Forty Days of Water which began on Ash Wednesday.

I’ve eaten a solidarity diet, and—for someone like me who likes bread and red meat—it is a painful lesson on the suffering that roughly a billion people experience. But I’m afraid that by making the Lenten discipline of fasting about a cause, we are caving in to our cultural distaste for self-denial.

Modern Christians, along with our culture, dislike the idea of exerting control over our bodies, simply for denial’s sake. The popular book Eat, Pray, Love wouldn’t have sold so well if it had been titled Fast, Pray, Serve. As a result of our culture’s unease regarding abstaining from things our bodies desire, we must justify fasting by doing it for a good cause. But as we relearn to fast, we should remember that these disciplines are very much about us and our own personal faith, not only about solidarity with a cause.

Neuroscience sheds light on how fasting and other spiritual disciplines work by training our subconscious mental processes. We think of ourselves as entirely the activity of our conscious thoughts. In reality, our brain has thousands of sub-conscious processes going on all the time. These processes are often pushing and pulling different ideas, concerns, or cravings into our consciousness. What this means is your conscious self is far less in control over who you are and what you do than you realize.  ”We are not the ones driving the boat of our behavior,” says neuroscientist David Eagleman. “Who we are runs well below the surface of our conscious access.”

Fasting can train and shape these processes, giving us the ability to exert control over other desires. One study found that students who intentionally practiced good posture for two weeks showed significant improvement afterward on measures of self control. The ability to control our relationship to food is, of course, one of the most difficult of the disciplines. Self control is like a muscle; it can be exhausted by overuse, but it can also be strengthened with exercise.

Jesus expected that dietary restriction would be a part of our spiritual practice. “When you fast,” he said, not if. The traditional practice for Lent is to fast on Ash Wednesday and the following Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays throughout the next 40 days. Fasts, of course, don’t require abstinence from all food. A fast might mean a vegetarian diet, but it should require some extra level of dietary control.

Fasting and all other spiritual disciplines are not simply reminders of other more important things. We may use hunger like a string tied to our fingers, prompting us to pray or consider the plight of the poor. But more importantly, spiritual disciplines shape us in deep ways. Because our brains—at the very least—mediate, process, and experience our spiritual lives, the disciplines can train us to become more attuned to God himself. Fasting then teaches and enables us to live by deeper truths and in accord with a deeper reality than the basic cravings of our bodies.

For example, when our blood sugar runs low, chemical signals from the blood stream reach the brain, which sends out signals to eat. This can happen whether or not your stomach is empty. We obey those cravings and grab a snack—perhaps without ever consciously deciding to eat it.

Similar processes occur in social situations, when we interpret bodily cues to determine if a new acquaintance will become a friend; when we study and can’t figure out a problem until we’ve slept on it; or when a hunch leads us to a friend’s house even when we couldn’t remember the precise directions. The subconscious brain is at work, guiding our actions and our behavior.

This subconscious self is not wholly uncontrollable. It can be trained and shaped. Fasting and other spiritual disciplines train these processes, shape them, and thereby shape us into spiritual people. Fasting schools our subconscious. We exert our will over the cravings of our body so that we have a mental process in place that is strong enough to overrule other temptations we face. We slowly become people who are less driven by temporary cravings, whether for food or sex or personal fulfillment. While spiritual disciplines shape who we will be, they also reveal who we are. As we struggle and often fail—week after week—we discover our true selves. We learn about our weaknesses and can seek forgiveness.

If fasting for the poor raises awareness of their plight and spurs us to action alleviating their need, it is certainly a beneficial endeavor. But there is tremendous value in self-denial for its own sake. Or rather, a habit of denial strengthens our ability to take up the cross as even our very bodies are molded into the likeness of Christ.

Rob Moll is an editor at large for Christianity Today and author of What Your Body Knows about God, due out from InterVarsity Press.

Visual-tactile substitution glasses can take the visual input from a camera and translate it into vibrations on a pad on the person’s back. After about a week, blind users of the device “become quite good at navigating a new environment.” They actually begin to perceive the pressure on their backs as sight: “The apparatus reminds us that we see not with our eyes but rather with our brains.”

In Eagleman’s telling, there is no conscious learning how visual-tactile substitution works. There is no memorizing certain patterns that equate to visual descriptions of the environment. Instead, the brain simply figures it out. In his book Strangers to Ourselves, Timothy Wilson writes that our brain processes as much as 11 million pieces of information per second, while only 40 bits enter consciousness.

If we think of ourselves only in terms of what enters our consciousness—even if that is the most important—then we fail to understand much of who we are. As the head of Baylor’s Laboratory for Perception and Action, Eagleman is at the forefront of efforts to revise our understanding of human nature. For the last 20 years, technological advances have allowed scientists to be able to watch the brain at work. We’ve seen that many of the functions we ascribe to our core selves are dependent upon brain functions. We’re realizing how dependent our sense of ourselves is on our biology and its interaction with the environment, and we’re seeing how enmeshed we are with our friends and family, parents and grandparents, as well as our culture and faith.

Read the rest (if you have a subscription) at Books and Culture. 

It used to be different. People washed the bodies of their dead loved ones. They journeyed with them from the home to the church to the grave. They buried bodies in certain ways and refused things like embalming because they believed a person’s body was really important. After death it would await the resurrection to be reformed and reconstituted as that person.

Christians did this because they knew that the body was created in the image of God. The body itself–not the soul or the idea of the person–was sacred. These bodies, these temples of the living God, are due honor and reverence.

I came away from writing The Art of Dying with the question: What would it mean today if we better understood our bodies to be created in the image of God, as sacred?

I started reading about spirituality and the body, and I discovered God has endowed our bodies–not just our minds or souls–with spiritual significance. Especially interesting to me was the neuroscience of spiritual experiences. I learned that our brains seem to be equipped to experience God. Through a specific brain system, we commune with God. When we have powerful moments of prayer or even mystical experiences, the sense of closeness with God or even unity with him, is the function of a brain system. That system seems designed to experience God. Neuroscientists don’t say it this way, but to me, God has designed us with the equipment needed to commune with him.

But there is more than simply a brain system for prayer. When we do practice deep prayer (mediation and contemplation in the Christian tradition) or have a profound spiritual experience, we are also stimulating areas of the brain involved with practicing empathy and compassion for others. We are more socially attuned, and we are more caring for the needs of others when we practice regular prayer, especially when that prayer leads us to deep experiences of the divine.

My research following The Art of Dying led me to a profound conclusion. We have been designed to experience God and to respond to that by loving other people. In other words, we were created to fulfill the two great commandments, to love God with our whole hearts and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

That is the subject of my new book, What Your Body Knows About God. How we have been physically designed to love God and serve others.

Please share your thoughts. What do you think about the body and spirituality?

Augustine of Hippo and his mother Saint Monica

My soul burns ardently to understand this most intricate enigma. O Lord my God, O good Father, I beseech thee through Christ, do not close off these things, both the familiar and the obscure, from my desire. Do not bar it from entering into them; but let their light dawn by thy enlightening mercy, O Lord. Of whom shall I inquire about these things? And to whom shall I confess my ignorance of them with greater profit than to thee, to whom these studies of mine (ardently longing to understand thy Scriptures) are not a bore? Give me what I love, for I do love it; and this thou hast given me. O Father, who truly knowest how to give good gifts to thy children, give this to me. Grant it, since I have undertaken to understand it, and hard labor is my lot until thou openest it. I beseech thee, through Christ and in his name, the Holy of Holies, let no man interrupt me. “For I have believed, and therefore do I speak.” This is my hope; for this I live: that I may contemplate the joys of my Lord. Behold, thou hast made my days grow old, and they pass away — and how I do not know.