Call to Conscience--Save Darfur

Robert Parham has a good column today at Ethics Daily entitled "Call to Conscience--Save Darfur." Here are a few highlights:

Belmont United Methodist Church in Nashville, Tenn., has a large, simple green sign with white letters facing a well-traveled street: "A Call to Your Conscience: SaveDarfur.org."

... Meeting in Accra, Ghana, with a large delegation of African participants, the Baptist World Alliance's general council adopted a resolution on Darfur.

Worldwide Baptists expressed concern in July about "the armed conflicts in Sudan, contrived famines, destruction of communities, lack of transparent truth and accountability and other human rights violations."

They called on global Baptists to develop partnerships with the Sudanese Baptists and requested that BWA leaders advocate for Darfur through letters to national and international leaders.

For a long time, younger Baptist bloggers have focused on Darfur, including Sam Davidson, Aaron Weaver, Brian Kaylor, Michael Westmoreland-White, Laura Seay, and John Henson.

Stopping the genocide in Darfur is a consensus moral concern within much of the Christian and Jewish communities of faith. But concern about Darfur hasn't translated into ending the genocide.

... Darfur needs continuous calls to conscience and concrete action. An estimated 200,000 people have been killed and some 2.5 million have fled their homes. The influx of refugees into neighboring Chad and the Central African Republic compounds the humanitarian crisis.

So, what can we do? We can certainly do more than we have. And now, with some hopeful signs about the situation related to Sudan, we need to make Darfur a greater priority.

Visit the Web site of a coalition of faith and human rights groups, Save Darfur, where more information and concrete action ideas are available.

Contact to your congressional representatives and senators during the August recess about the need for real U.S. leadership on Darfur, referencing Kristof's suggestions.

Ask your area religious institutions--universities, hospitals or foundations--if they are invested in genocide and if so, to divest from companies doing business with Sudan.

Keep Darfur a priority in houses of faith--it's evidence of our moral conscience.

This is a tragic situation that must be addressed. Parham offers some great tips on what each of us can do. We need to talk about it, raise awareness, and put pressure on people to finally take action.