spend a week in deep conversation, shared worship and focused learning with a vibrant community of ministry practitioners, theologians, and lay Christians. The Institute will focus on the theme “The Ministry of Reconciliation in a Divided World” and will be held from May 31 – June 5, 2010 on the campus of Duke Divinity School.

Today is World Water Day! “Water is essential for life. Yet many millions of people around the world face water shortages and a daily struggle to secure safe water for their basic needs. Millions of children continue to die every…

The Swedes are labeling some food items with the amount (estimated) of greenhouse-gas emissions the production of the food puts into the atmosphere!If this experiment is effective, they estimate the country’s emissions could be reduced by 20-50 percent. One Swedish burger chain, Max, offers beef alternatives and signed on enthusiastically to the new recommendations. It became the first restaurant chain to publish carbon footprints of menu items to encourage people to eat less beef.

“It’s very simple. The system that we have in place is totally upside down and backwards. We know how to feed the world. We know what the developing world needs to do, and yet we keep hearing more and more…

Bill Gates thinks he’s got a brilliant idea: fighting malnutrition abroad by fortifying food. The scheme, backed with $50 million from the Gates Foundation, in part encourages Proctor & Gamble, Philip Morris’ Kraft, and other companies to develop vitamin and iron-fortified processed foods. It then facilitates their entry into Third World markets. Gates seems to believe we don’t have time to address the complex social and political roots of malnutrition. But in opting for this single-focus, top-down, technical intervention, Gates can end up hurting the very people he wants to help.

Faced with the international “technical” conference of the FAO in Guadalajara, “Agricultural Biotechnologies in Developing Countries,” which is little more than just the promotion of GM crops – today we inaugurated the “First public hearing to prepare the presentation of the GM Maize case before international courts,” organized by La Via Campesina North America Region, Red en Defensa del Maíz (Network in Defense of Maize, Mexico), and Asamblea Nacional de Afectados Ambientales (Assembly of People Displaced by Environmental Impacts, Mexico), with the participation of 276 people, mostly members and leaders of peasant, family farm , and indigenous peoples’ organizations from 19 Mexican states, the USA, and Canada.

“Picture this: a tree full of a dozen chickens and roosters in branches laden with oranges against a brilliant star lit sky. This tree stood in the barnyard of a farm where a group of five women from the Presbyterian Church (USA) and Equal Exchange delegation spent two nights this past January. It was one of our first sights at Luis and Elsa Castillo’s farm in Boaco, Nicaragua; and for me it’s an image that captures the beauty and tranquility that we found there.” Read Susan Sklar’s reflections from this trip to Nicaragua that Melanie Hardison, of PHP’s Enough for Everyone, helped lead.

An Agrarian Road Trip to the U.S. Social Forum June 13–26, 2010 Experience the good food revolution on this road trip from the vibrant small farms of Kentucky to the bustling Eastern Market of Detroit. Visit church and community initiatives…

The recession has hit the poorest people in our community the hardest. More and more families are resorting to selling their food stamps to pay rent and buy basic necessities. Listen to the story of Eva, a mother of two,…

Despite the reference to eggs, this has nothing to do with food. No eggs, but yes, hot. Some fellow human beings have achieved and measured a quark-gluon plasma at 4-trillion degrees Celsius. In case you can’t fathom that, imagine 250,000 times hotter than the center of the sun. Protons and elections would simply melt. If that isn’t wild enough to fry your brain, what gets me is the speeds they get these gold nuclei circling around their handy Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider on Long Island. They collide these invisible-to-the-eye gold specks after accelerating their speed to 99.995 percent the speed of light. You can do the math, right. One lap of this underground track is 2.4 miles. The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second, I think. So in one second, this gold speck goes around that track 77,500 times. In ONE SECOND. If we can do stuff like that, we should be able to figure out how to end hunger. Do you think we can?