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There's still no video available of the interview, but some photos have been posted on the site of the Philippine channel that ran it.

Civilization has its side effects
Critics have long accused Wycliffe Bible Translators and SIL International of damaging indigenous cultures even as they create written forms for native languages. They have also been (falsely) accused of being a cover for the CIA and American oil operations in Latin America. (The most strident criticisms can be found in out-of-print books such as David Stoll's Fishers of Men or Founders of Empire: The Wycliffe Bible Translators in Latin America and Gerald Colby and Charlotte Dennett's Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil.) Their main purpose is to translate God's Word into the "heart language" of the people.

This week The New York Times Magazine joined earlier critics as Ron Suskind chronicled Wycliffe-induced cultural changes among the Ibitan people on tiny Babuyan Claro, separated from the Philippine mainland by 100 miles of choppy sea. Suskind writes with a much lighter touch than some earlier Wycliffe critics. But he resorts to the Rousseauian myth of the bon sauvage.

The Ibatan passed the decades in a kind of serenity. Though they did dispense with a few unlucky visitors, they were otherwise peaceful. They wore clothes of pounded bark and found herbal remedies in python gallbladders. Their world evolved with a gentle, premodern rhythm—until the day, in 1977, when a 29-year-old missionary named Rundell Maree slipped off a boat into the water, carrying his shortwave radio overhead …

Of course, everything is downhill from there. Rundell Maree brought them a clean water system (which destroyed the communal interchanges at the island's springs), he brought them their own history in writing (which destroyed their peaceful sense of timelessness and turned some of them into driven achievers), and he brought them the material things of civilization (which created a division between the haves and have-nots). Oh yes, he brought them the Bible, too. Suskind barely mentions the main reason for Wycliffe's work.

Suskind pads his prose with references to Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Alexis de Toqueville. With jaundiced eye, he interprets the creation of wealth into the makings of class struggle. Curiously, he never produces any evidence of actual class struggle beyond garden-variety covetousness.

• ACLU sues Nebraska school district over graduation prayer | Board member led students in Lord's Prayer (Associated Press)
• Some fear Bush's call to faith will blur church, state lines | Civil libertarians generally give Bush high marks, but say the president's emphasis on religion is encouraging other public officials to go much further (Chicago Tribune)

• My view of Islam | I do not believe Muslims are evil people because of their faith. I personally have many Muslim friends. But I decry the evil that has been done in the name of Islam, or any other faith - including Christianity. (Franklin Graham, The Wall Street Journal—requires subscription)
• A call to convert Muslims divides Christian groups | At first, the Ramadan observance was meant as a gesture of solidarity (The Philadelphia Inquirer)
• Gaza Muslims dig up their Christian roots | Palestinian archaeologists have unearthed an undamaged fifth-century mosaic in the Gaza Strip at a site believed to be the location of the oldest monastery in the Middle East (The Daily Telegraph)

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December (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45