general
In The New York Times story about the administration's secret
authorization of torture, one sentence is particularly chilling: "With
virtually no experience in interrogations, the CIA had constructed
its program in a few harried months by consulting Egyptian and Saudi
intelligence officials and copying Soviet [...]
I remember about eight years ago when then presidential candidate George W. Bush repeatedly claimed that he would restore honor to the presidency, soiled as it had been by our previous president's infamous affair. I remember hoping he would succeed. But a new kind of shame has come to the office and to our nation as reports surface about our government's secret authorization of torture. We all share [...]
The last time I saw Rami, we were at the beach near Gaza City. A group of us were in the water and I was trying to force Rami underwater. Rami was a big man, weighing at least twice what I do. Needless to say, I did not manage to get him to budge. When he in turn came after me, all I could do to protect myself from suffocating under him was flee. Eventually I was able to sneak up on him under water, [...]
With all the fuss around Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's recent visit to New York, you'd think that he had political power, command of the military, or at least strong popular support in his homeland. Actually, he has none of the above, as Stephen Zunes argues in a recent Foreign Policy in Focus article:
International solidarity and support for the Burmese democracy movement is growing, as evidenced in the imposition of new economic sanctions against the military regime. The European Union and the U.S. government have announced additional measures to isolate the dictators. The democracy movement has supported the imposition of these international sanctions as an effective means of pressuring the Burmese government, as
The news this afternoon from Myanmar/Burma is not good. A recent AP story said that
Soldiers clubbed and dragged away activists while firing tear gas and warning shots to break up demonstrations Friday before they could grow, and the government cut Internet access, raising fears that a deadly crackdown was set to intensify.
The government said 10 people have been killed since the violence began earlier this week, but British Prime [...]
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.
- Romans 15:13-13
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To everyone who took action and emailed the Bureau of Prisons, thank you! On Sept. 14, Sojourners helped break the story that the federal government had created a list of acceptable religious books and purged all other books from the religious libraries. Often these stories fade away and are quickly [...]
How do we live out God's call to prophetic witness in an apathetic and disempowered society? How can we learn from others who have remained faithful to Jesus' radical call in the midst of failure?
These don't sound like the questions you'd expect to be hearing from a van full of exhausted young adults on a 12-hour drive back from Washington, D.C.
But last March, that's exactly what happened to a group of us from Living Water Community and Reba Place Church in Chicago on our way [...]
I recently posted about the purging of religious books from prison libraries across the country. Since that post and a follow-up action alert, there has been a groundswell of outrage from across the religious and political spectrum against the government's attempt to purge religious libraries. Thank you to everyone who took action. The response has been so overwhelming that
I got a LOT of responses to my post at the end of last week, in which I said the war in Iraq presents the American churches with an issue of Christian identity. Nobody really denied the fact that the worldwide body of Christ is overwhelmingly against the war and the whole thrust of American foreign policy in the post-9/11 era. And that fact remains true even for evangelical Christians around the [...]
From my blogs this week, readers can rightly conclude that I believe Gen. Petraeus' claims of modest security gains in certain sectors of Iraq do not justify extending the U.S occupation, especially when four years of occupation of Iraq have not produced the political reconciliation that would be necessary for real security and stability. The fragile security improvements are not sustainable without a [...]
From my blogs this week, readers can rightly conclude that I believe Gen. Petraeus' claims of modest security gains in certain sectors of Iraq do not justify extending the U.S occupation, especially when four years of occupation of Iraq have not produced the political reconciliation that would be necessary for real security and stability. The fragile security improvements are not sustainable without a [...]
From my blogs this week, readers can rightly conclude that I believe Gen. Petraeus' claims of modest security gains in certain sectors of Iraq do not justify extending the U.S occupation, especially when four years of occupation of Iraq have not produced the political reconciliation that would be necessary for real security and stability. The fragile security improvements are not sustainable without a [...]
From my blogs this week, readers can rightly conclude that I believe Gen. Petraeus' claims of modest security gains in certain sectors of Iraq do not justify extending the U.S occupation, especially when four years of occupation of Iraq have not produced the political reconciliation that would be necessary for real security and stability. The fragile security improvements are not sustainable without a [...]
Recent discussion on Jews and Israel reminds me of a joke we used to hear as youngsters. The joke begins with a person, who, looking for direction in life, decides to go to the Bible. Opening the New Testament and randomly searching for a verse, he gets the verse of Judas, where, after his treason, it says he went and hanged [...]
It was a big day for a general on Capitol Hill yesterday, as Gen. David Petraeus made his long-awaited "progress report" to a joint House committee. But one congressman remembered the last time a general's testimony drew such public attention. It was on April 1967 that Gen. William Westmoreland made his speech to Congress about how much progress we were making in Vietnam. Later, in November 1967, the [...]
On Thursday, Sept. 6, 2007, six of us were found guilty in federal court in Albuquerque, New Mexico, by a federal judge for trying to visit the office of our senator. We will be sentenced in a few weeks.
It all started one year ago on Sept. 26, 2006. That day nine of us entered the Federal Building in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and tried to take the elevator to the third floor to the office of Sen. [...]
The words of Jesus are unambiguous when it comes to expressing how we
are to love each other--we are to love others as we love ourselves. In
fact, the paradigmatic, the normative test case for Christian love is love
of enemy. In the Sermon on the Mount, for example, Jesus tells us that we
are to love our enemies and to do good to them. Surely we can agree that it
is exceptionally difficult to see how one can genuinely love the other who
is enemy to us at the same time that one is engaged in [...]
In an attempt to scare off support for a military exit from Iraq, President Bush in a recent speech made the false claim that U.S. disengagement from Vietnam caused the killing fields in Cambodia. The price of American withdrawal, [...]