Quick Read: Social. Justice. News.

Joshua Hersh reports on Huffington Post that the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing yesterday on the use of drones in targeted killings. There was bipartisan unhappiness over the lack of transparency from the administration, yet the committee voted down a bill that would have required more information.

“The House Judiciary Committee hearing was held on Thursday to discuss a resolution put forward by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) that would order the White House to turn over to Congress all documents related to the government's targeted killing program.

“The measure was dismissed as overly broad and aggressive, but legislators took the opportunity to vent their frustrations about the limited amount of information the administration has shared with the public and Congress about the use of drones.”

Qanta Ahmed, Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellow in Science and Religion and Associate Professor of Medicine, State University of New York, writes in Haaretz about a recent trip to Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province. She finds that hatred of the US and strengthening of the Taliban are directly linked to continuing drone attacks.

“While the drive to codify U.S. drone policy is finally gaining momentum, it may be a case of too little, too late. As long as drones remain airborne, neo-orthodox Islamist terrorists and non-violent - but extremist - anti-American ideologues gain political capital, hoarding it as fast as America loses it. As long as we allow our administration to deploy drones without accountability, Pakistani anti-Americanism is validated, the Taliban is actually strengthened, while we as Americans remain confined in an ugly reality - defined not by who we are, but by whom, how and how often, we kill.”

Bishop Walter Sullivan, former head of the Catholic diocese of Richmond, Virginia, has died at the age of 84.

In the movement against nuclear weapons in the 1980s and 90s, I met and worked with a number of Catholic bishops. The then-named National Conference of Catholic Bishops had issued a pastoral letter in 1983 opposing nuclear weapons, The Challenge of Peace, which became a model for other denominations. The bishop I knew best was Bishop Sullivan, who served as bishop-president of Pax Christi, the Catholic peace organization, for more than 10 years. He was also committed to people in poverty, and was a featured speaker at the first conference of Call to Renewal in September 1995. It is prophetic voices such as his that we badly need today. I was blessed to have known him.      

The National Catholic Reporter has an obituary worth reading:

“One of the celebrated "Jadot bishops," meaning progressive American prelates appointed under Pope Paul VI during the 1970s, Walter Sullivan led the Richmond, Va., diocese for almost 30 years, and from that perch became one of the country's premier "peace bishops," denouncing armed conflict from Vietnam and the Cold War all the way up to Iraq.

"He just could not reconcile war and Christianity," said Phyllis Theroux, a Virginia-based author whose biography of Sullivan, The Good Bishop, is scheduled to appear from Orbis Books in May.

"He once said that as far as I'm concerned, you can take the whole 'just war' tradition and stick it in a drawer and lock it up," she said, adding that Sullivan believed the idea of a just war had been "abused" by both clergy and politicians.

“Bishop Walter Sullivan died Tuesday as a result of an inoperable liver cancer after he returned to his Richmond home from a local hospital. He was 84.”

The religious implications of climate change are becoming evermore clear, as the topic makes its way into mainstream America. 

The Huffington Post reports:

Indeed, what role do religion and theology play in the accelerating conversation about climate change? This has been a banner year for extreme weather events -- from severe drought in the American Midwest to the wildfire siege in Colorado to the "Frankenstorm" of Hurricane Sandy fueled by a warming Atlantic Ocean -- which have helped the reality of climate change to register on the consciousness of most people.

Read more here.