American society needs to stop telling people to “go home” to a place and a culture they may not even be from (or which may not even be home at all anymore)

In 2014, I attended an interfaith and intercultural networking meeting held at St. Thomas Chaldean Catholic Church in West Bloomfield Township, and got to learn some basics about what makes Chaldeans distinctive from other Middle-Eastern groups. Such distinctions are very important, especially now when many people think it’s easier to assume all people from a particular geographic region are the same (and equally as foreign and therefore threatening)—regardless of the fact they represent not just different ethnicities, but different religions.

Here, of course, I’m referring to the misconception that all Middle-Eastern people are Arabic, and all of them are Muslim. Father Andrew Seba, one of the priests at St. Thomas, explained to us that Chaldeans not only are a different ethnic group than Arabs, they are Catholic.

Chaldeans did not originate as Arabs or Persians—they are Semitic. Prophet Abraham, the forefather that Jews, Christians, and Muslims all trace back to, was from “Ur of the Chaldees—Chaldees means he was Chaldean,” as Father Seba pointed out. When the Chaldean nation of Mesopotamia was conquered by Islam several hundred years ago, it became the Arab nation now known as Iraq. Another interesting fact is that Chaldean is a sister language of both Aramaic and Hebrew. While these different types of people are related, they are not the same.

Chaldeans in Iraq currently face the same kind of tyranny, marginalization, and violence from the larger community that Jews experienced all over the world prior to the founding of Israel. I also couldn’t help but see the similarities between how Chaldeans are treated in Iraq and how Bahá’ís are being treated in Iran.

Chaldean Catholicism differs in some ways from, and has other religious influences than, Roman Catholicism. The differences in practice arose because, while Roman Catholicism was developing under the Roman Empire, the Chaldeans were the only Christian denomination in the Persian Empire. The two faith groups maintained ties, and Chaldeans do answer to the Roman Catholic pope, but in a sort of roundabout way, through their own dioceses and a religious leader called the Patriarch, whom Father Seba described as a sort of “sub-pope” (or pope with a lowercase p).

The members of St. Thomas parish have adopted some aspects of mainstream Catholicism that weren’t traditionally part of their faith, such as praying the rosary. To people who say “That’s not our prayer,” Father Seba says, “It is now.” As he showed us St. Thomas’s sanctuary, in which several hundred people worship every week, Father Seba described an upcoming prayer service in which it is St. Thomas’s custom to say prayers in several different languages, not just Chaldean and English.

Chaldeans are in asylum all over the United States and Europe, with the largest concentration outside of Iraq being right here in Michigan—with a population of close to 200,000. The draw to this area was originally the automotive industry; Chaldeans have since branched out into other business, and a gradually increasing percentage of their young people are graduating from college and getting into various professions.

Something I found particularly interesting was that many Chaldean refugees, Father Seba explained, actually had no interest in leaving their homeland—they did so because they had to, and are waiting to see if the situation for their people improves enough for them to return home.

Understanding this about immigrants and refugees can go a long way toward helping us develop compassion for them, rather than see them as an imposition or a threat to our ways of life. Many of them truly have no other choice—They came here to survive destruction in their homeland, only to be treated like invaders and discriminated against when they try to re-settle.

The heartbreaking truth is, a lot of immigrants and refugees would go home if they had a home they could survive going back to. Regardless of the hardships they take on by coming to the U.S., where they are unwanted by a large percentage of the population, considering their alternatives, I think they made the best choice they could for themselves and their families, and they deserve credit for that.

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Image: “Sanctuary Window” (at the Detroit Baha'i Center) by Karla Joy Huber, 2007; Prismacolor marker, Sharpie marker, white colored pencil, silver Sharpie

We all need some help with cultural competency these days, so here you go...

In one of my older blog posts, I came across an intercultural and interreligious resource that is now more timely than ever. The cultural competency guides, produced by Joe Grimm and the Michigan State University School of Journalism, are a series of informative books that each answer 100 common questions about a particular ethnic, cultural, or religious group.

The guides are each about 60 to 100 pages. Most Read the Spirit books are short, averaging between 80 and 200 pages. One benefit of this is it enables Read the Spirit writers and their publishing teams to get books out in a short time, and more of them—the cultural guides are each produced in a single semester by MSU School of Journalism students as their semester-long project assigned by their instructor Grimm. 

This quick response is very valuable in an era where people get inundated with new information and cultural changes at such a rapid rate that they need rapid-response educational commentary from credible sources to help them determine what these media and changes mean to them culturally, spiritually, socially, and morally.

There are four ethics Grimm’s students adhere to when writing and producing the guides, he said. The first is respect, for both the subject matter and the needs of readers seeking to understand how to live in a community with cultural groups different from their own.

The second ethic is accuracy: The student writers conduct interviews, refer to census records, published studies, and polls, and have their work vetted for accuracy by credible sources from the cultures they write about to assure their guides are accurate, concise, and practical.

The third ethic is authority, which is fulfilled by the vetting process each guide goes through, in the form of evaluation by experts from the culture or religion the guide is about.

The fourth ethic is accessibility: “Thanks to the digital stylings of [Read the Spirit co-founder] John Hile,” Grimm said, “these guides are made to come out simultaneously on paperback, on Nooks, Kindles, for iPads and as e-books.”

The focus is on distribution, not just selling. As Grimm pointed out, there’s no point writing a great guide if your distribution pool is too narrow to make much of a difference in society’s education. Since funding is critical for this, “if you can line up sponsors for a guide early, you’re guaranteed some kind of success,” he said. Grimm approached credit unions and cultural organizations, for example, to sponsor a few hundred copies of a guide each. Grimm also stated that audio editions of the guides are in the works.

The cultural competency series, which started in 2013, currently includes seven books, starting with 100 Questions & Answers about Indian Americans. The other books in the series cover Muslim Americans, Arab Americans, East Asian Cultures, and Hispanics & Latinos as immigrant groups. Even though Native Americans aren’t an immigrant group, they are as misunderstood as immigrant groups, so the team covered them too with 100 Questions & Answers About 50 Nations.

In 2014, one of Grimm’s colleagues persuaded him to produce a guide that was the reverse of the previous six. Whereas the audience for those is Americans who want to learn about people (particularly immigrants) from other cultures and religions in America, 100 Questions and Answers about Americans is written for immigrants to learn about us. Answered questions include what Americans mean when they say “How’s it going?,” how much do Americans study, how do you make American friends if you don’t know sports or popular culture, what is included in a date, and so on.

Deciding to branch out even further with their cultural competency series, in 2015 the MSU team tackled the task of creating a guide with answers to common questions about military veterans.

The cultural competency series books are available for purchase in paperback and digital formats on Amazon.com, and through ReadTheSpirit.com. Bulk and custom editions are available by contacting Joe Grimm.

In my next few posts, I’m embarking on a cultural literacy series of my own, so stay tuned for other highlights from my interfaith and intercultural encounters over the years, in the context of using what we can learn from such encounters to help combat the currently growing culture of misunderstandings and discrimination.


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Illustration by Karla Joy Huber, 2004; marker, colored pencil, watercolor, metallic gel pen, flower petal

Replacing the word “fault” with the word “responsibility”: Breaking out of shame-based models in the journey to wellness

Our spirituality is as much about relating with ourselves as it is about relating with our spiritual foundation. If we follow a spiritual practice that denigrates our physical experience—that sees our bodies as dirty or sinful, of much lesser value than our spirits, and our bodily wants and needs to be despised or conquered—what does that say about how we view ourselves? Are such beliefs conducive to developing compassion for our physical selves, toward making healing choices that enhance the vitality and longevity of our bodies, toward empowering our physical selves to be the best vehicles they can be for our spiritual endeavors?

In my experience, they are not.

Beyond denigrating our physical experience, such beliefs also rob us of compassion and respect for the physical experience and the bodies of other people, and make us more inclined to be judgmental and dismissive of people when they become ill, addicted, or display some other physical weakness that conventional thinking says they should use “willpower” to overcome.

We have inherited too much cultural and religious conditioning that sees misfortune in our health as punishment—reducing the idea of karma to a cold, two-dimensional mathematical model of “Because you did this, you get this,” and if the result is negative, you must be a bad person or a person to be scorned for making bad decisions.

For people who aren’t inclined to be so harsh, the most common alternative I’ve heard is the victimization approach: “It’s not your fault,” a clichéd idea that we mistake for compassion. This approach is not true compassion because it is just the opposite extreme of the above. The perpetrator / victim paradigm is no more value-adding than the reward / punishment paradigm when it comes to overcoming our most personal wellness challenges.

Our society is notorious for its extremes: If we don’t like one idea, we tend to swing all the way to an opposite extreme that is just as limiting. If it’s not all our own doing, then it must not be our doing at all and we are victims of genetics or culture or abuse.

So, what does the middle ground between these two extremes look like?

To get to that middle ground, I first propose that we throw out the word “fault.” That word is useless here. I’m big into recasting these days, meaning examining existing, flawed belief systems and tweaking them in some way (such as by replacing a major word), to come up with a more empowering and practical alternative that I can use without feeling like I have to climb into a box or fight with myself in order to apply it to my life.

Thus, I propose we replace the word FAULT with the word RESPONSIBILITY.

“It’s my fault that I’m sick.”
“It’s my responsibility that I’m sick.”

Hear how different the second sentence sounds? How the word “responsibility” here implies there is something we can—and should—do about the problem, without implying that we are bad people or are getting punishment we deserve?

Illness gives us the responsibility to learn how to become healthy, to learn how to make positive choices in our lives that we can feel good about. Using the word “fault,” I can’t even write a sentence that sounds empowered or self-compassionate in any way to express the same idea about health. Seeing something as our responsibility to change is more conducive to seeing it as an opportunity to create value, whereas seeing some result as our “fault,” or punishment, is conducive to feeling shame.

Instead of shaming myself for physically not taking good enough care of myself this year, or absolving myself of my role in my illness by blaming it on stress and grief, I’m forging a path into the middle ground between these two by taking responsibility, and sharing what I’m learning along the way with you so that you can do some recasting of your own.

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Image: “Elemental Healer: Water,” by Karla Joy Huber, 2008; Prismacolor marker, Sharpie Marker, highlighter



~ Post revised December 12, 2018