Anna Piela, a visiting scholar in religious studies and gender at Northwestern University, is the author of Wearing the Niqab: Muslim Women in the UK and the US. She is also the senior writer at American Baptist Home Mission Societies and co-associate regional minister for white and multicultural churches at the American Baptist Churches of Metro Chicago. Anna is working with senior minister of Lake Street Church of Evanston on a book project currently titled “Towards an Anti-Islamophobic Church: Preaching, Teaching, and Worshiping against Islamophobia.”
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How Faith Leaders Are Urging Congress to Remember Wadee Alfayoumi
Mahmoud Yousef, second from left, comforts Odai Alfayoumi after the burial of Alfayoumi's son, Wadee Alfayoumi, at Parkholm Cemetery in La Grange Park, Illinois, on Oct. 16, 2023. Credit: TNS/ABACA via Reuters Connect
On Oct. 14, 6-year-old Wadee Alfayoumi was stabbed to death in a Chicago suburb. Joseph Czuba, the 71-year-old man who stabbed Alfayoumi is a longtime member of a church and, according to the Will County sheriff’s office, was motivated by anti-Muslim sentiments and Israel’s war against Hamas. According to Joseph’s wife, Mary Czuba (who has filed for divorce), Czuba had been radicalized by conservative talk radio.
I live in a Chicago suburb and am the associate regional minister of American Baptist Churches Metro Chicago. When I heard Alfayoumi had been killed, I was horrified; as a mother, a Christian, a faith leader, and most of all a human, I took the news extremely hard.
6 Ways Christians Can Fight Islamophobia This Advent
A mourner holds a candle at an Oct. 17 vigil service for Wadea Al-Fayoume, 6, a Muslim boy who according to police was stabbed to death in Plainsfield, Ill., in an attack that targeted him and his mother for their religion and as a response to the war between Israel and Hamas. REUTERS/Jim Vondruska
For many Christians in the West, Advent is a time of preparation infused with prayer, anticipation, and reflection. This year, Advent is painfully marked by more than 18,000 Palestinian deaths — including more than 7,000 children — as a result of Israel’s brutal military retaliation for the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. But the violence stretches beyond the borders of Gaza and the West Bank.