Jane Fonda born-again
Jane Fonda has become a born-again Christian and is attending services and Bible studies at a black Baptist church in Atlanta. According to a story in The Washington Times [1/14/00], friends of Fonda have said that her conversion contributed to her separation from her husband, Ted Turner, but that the couple hope to work out a reconciliation. According to the story, Turner "has been an outspoken critic of Christianity, calling it a 'religion for losers.' ... Mr. Turner has told friends that he had accepted Christ as a young man at a Billy Graham crusade, but lost his faith after the death of his sister." The Times quoted Gerald Durley, pastor of Providence Missionary Baptist Church in Atlanta, as saying that he was "extremely impressed with the genuineness and sincerity in [Fonda's] search for spirituality and wholeness." The story cites a number of people as instrumental in Fonda's conversion, including Ginny Millner, wife of Georgia Republican leader Guy Millner, and Nancy McGuirk, whose husband is an executive in Turner Broadcasting Co. Fonda's chauffeur also played a role, according toTed Baehr, chairman of the Christian Film and Television Commission in Los Angeles. The Times story reports: "The key figure in Miss Fonda's search ... may have been her chauffeur, who shared his faith with her, Mr. Baehr said. When her husband became upset when she began attending Atlanta's fashionable Peachtree Presbyterian Church, Miss Fonda 'asked her chauffeur where she should go.' The chauffeur invited her to attend his church, the predominantly black Providence Missionary Church.
"She accepted the invitation, and became a regular parishioner there, though she apparently has not joined the church. Miss Fonda, who founded the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention, helped Providence Church establish its Fathers Resource Center, which educates young men about the emotional and social responsibilities of fatherhood.
"She has not publicly talked about her political views, or whether she has changed any of them, but she is said to have declined to participate in a meditation ceremony at an environmental conference not long ago with an admonition that 'it would be better to pray to Jesus Christ.'" The Washington Times writer states that "spiritual growth may be difficult for Miss Fonda because of her Hollywood background. The Academy Award-winning actress, who was called 'Hanoi Jane' after her 1971 trip to North Vietnam, where she was photographed posing on an anti-aircraft battery, 'has been in a cultural universe that is utterly hostile to Christianity,'" according to Robert Knight of the Family Research Council, a conservative advocacy organization.

Car-sharing
"For the past nine years, Bremen, Germany, has been encouraging its 550,000 inhabitants to abandon car ownership through a car-sharing scheme that allows them to rent a vehicle quickly and at low cost," Timeline reports (11-12/99). "The cars can be rented at 37 locations around the city for a short shopping trip or a weekend excursion. For about $40, a Bremen resident buys a smart card that allows a driver to make reservations and to gain access to the vehicles, with a choice of 10 models from subcompacts to vans. The cars recognize the smart card through a transponder field on the windshield that opens the doors; upon return, a swipe of the card across the windshield locks the doors and transmits trip information for billing. Rates are cheaper than rental agencies' because the city picks up costs such as wear and tear, taxes, insurance, gasoline and cleaning."

Staying put, moving on
Every place needs both people who are committed to it as their home and people who move in and out, Scott Russell Sanders, author of Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World, said in an interview with The Sun (2/00). "I think it's essential that there be many people who are deeply committed to their places," Sanders said. "If every community, watershed, and bioregion had a core of people who'd made that commitment, then other people could move around. In fact, places also need people who are moving around, people who bring in new ideas from outside and break the ethnic or religious or economic pattern. The problem is that our entire culture encourages us to move rather than to stay. All the voices we hear are saying, 'Change, move, seek novelty.' If I lived in a culture where everybody stayed put, I would probably have written a book called Moving On, because for wholeness, you need both: people with a commitment to a place, and people who bring new ideas from elsewhere."

Resistance to change
"All attempts at change mobilize resistance," Walter Wink writes in Fellowship (1-2/200). "The power of What-Is attempts to squelch That-Which-Attempts-To-Be. Perhaps What-Is succeeds, but in the very act of repression, draws attention to and gives credibility to the emergent new. Psychotherapists are trained to recognize massive resistance as a hopeful sign; it means that the resistance may be on the verge of capitulating altogether. Institutions function the same way.
"'When the Church is about to accept a mutation in doctrinal explanation or disciplinary direction, the whole edifice of tradition refuses to acknowledge the possibility of change.' Precisely at that point, argues Francis X. Murphy, the turnabout has begun. Resistance to Jesus led to the cross; it did not succeed in stopping the New Reality that he brought."

Democractic capitalism?
"There is something particularly evil about U.S. elites' use of the term 'democratic' in connection with an increasingly universalized and worldwide capitalism," Paul Street writes in Z. "Few if any aspects of contemporary capitalism are less democratic than precisely its tendency towards globalization. ... Capital seeks through globalization to evade, subvert, and preclude popular and governmental regulation and to roll back labor power.
"According to a recent study by the New Economy Information Service (NEIS) -- a labor-connected think tank that gauges the impact of globalization -- American corporate capital particularly likes to float into global territories controlled by dictatorships. By cross-checking U.S. government and World Bank statistics on world trade and investments with Freedom House's comparative ranking of world nation states as 'free,' 'partly free' and 'not free,' the NEIS recently discovered that 72 percent of U.S. manufacturing investment in 'developing' (Third World) countries goes to 'unfree' nations. At the same time, U.S. imports from 'unfree' states have risen from less than half to nearly two-thirds of U.S. imports from the 'developing' world since the end of the Cold War, even while the number of Third World nations meriting Freedom House's criteria for 'free' status has also grown. It should be remembered, of course, that much of what passes for import trade with the 'developing' world is in fact the shifting of product assets from Third World to U.S. branches of American-based multinational corporations."