Mainstream Muslims detest the infection of radicalization far more than do other people.
Columns
Lynne Hybels 6-03-2011
A club owner in Chicago can pick up the phone and "mail-order" three girls from Eastern Europe.
Jim Wallis 6-03-2011
Though the fast ended on Easter, it helped to spark a broad and united movement for a moral budget.
Jim Wallis 5-10-2011
The leadership of both our countries has preferred stability to democracy for a long time.
Eboo Patel 4-01-2011
The whole idea of democracy is that the setiments of our fellow citizens have power; we put ourselves in each other's hands.
Ed Spivey Jr. 4-01-2011
As the United States prepares for its inevitable takeover by special interests, Sojourners recently sat down with the godfather of them all, the National Rifle Association.
Bill McKibben 4-01-2011
The fossil fuel industry is the main impediment to real change. Why? Because they are making money. Exxon made more money in 2009 than any company in the history of money.
Joel C. Hunter 3-01-2011
Society's challenges won't be resolved just by being civil in our public discourse.
Bill McKibben 3-01-2011
We need to clear the polluted political air before we'll have a real chance to clear the actual atmosphere.
Ed Spivey Jr. 2-01-2011
As one would predict, many humor writers are taking cheap shots at the new pat-down rules at airports. But at Sojourners we're different.
Eboo Patel 2-01-2011
When Pastor Terry Jones threatened to burn Qurans at his church in Florida this fall, he hurt a lot of Muslims I know. He also hurt a lot of Christians.
Jim Wallis 2-01-2011
Time and again, we heard from President Obama on the campaign trail that Washington was broken and he was running for president to fix it.
Rose Marie Berger 2-01-2011
Last week the body of a young woman was found near my house. She was 17 years old. She'd been murdered. The garbage men reported finding her in a supercan in the alley.
Lynne Hybels 2-01-2011
Six Christian women from an evangelical church in Texas invited six Jewish women from a local synagogue and six Muslim women from a local mosque to form a cooking club.
Rose Marie Berger 1-01-2011
It's often good to have a donkey with you when you pray. They provide a natural antidote to excessive piety. Take my recent retreat day at the Jonah House Catholic Worker community in Baltimore. Since 1992, the members of Jonah House have served as caretakers for a 20-acre Catholic cemetery that had been abandoned since the 1980s. Bit by bit the community is reclaiming the graveyard from the underbrush and overgrowth. It’s bordered by the Emanuel Tire Co. reclamation plant, a Section-8 housing complex, and the Maryland National Guard.
On All Saints Day I visited Jonah House to quietly pray the litany of the saints while surrounded by that "great cloud of witnesses"—both living and dead. It was a stunning autumn morning. Sunlight filtered through the red oaks. However, while walking the quarter-mile track around the graves and headstones, I was unceremoniously shoved from behind—hard.
This was my introduction to Vinnie the 3-year-old donkey. Despite the name, Vinnie actually is female. (The president of the St. Peter's Cemetery Foundation demanded that the next animal adopted into the community be named after him. What can you do?) And she's very strong. After I completed a few more circuits of the prayer walk—with Vinnie doing heavy prodding and me jabbing back hard between "amens"—we reached a rapprochement. I walked with a handful of grass in my left hand and Vinnie sauntered easily beside me, nibbling as we went. I felt like St. Francis. A victorious achievement in sacred cross-species communion.
Jim Wallis 1-01-2011
In politics there is always a spiritual choice to be made—a choice between hope and fear. Leaders can build movements by appealing to a vision of what our country can be or by painting a picture of what to fear. Barack Obama won in November 2008, in the midst of a recession, bank failures, and two wars, by speaking to our values as a country and by riding a movement that had reason to hope and was ready to work for change.
But the new president soon lost the narrative, and the "movement" is now on the other side of the political aisle. Sadly, this fall the vast majority of the country voted against rather than for particular candidates or policies.
Scriptures say, "Without a vision the people perish." Soon after he was elected, the president let the vision perish, and the people soon followed. A campaign of "hope and change" and "yes we can" was replaced by the politics of diminished expectations and "they won’t let us." Without a deeper vision, a vacuum formed, and into it grew a different sort of movement. The "new populism" in America is now decidedly on the Tea Party Right.
Washington politics has been frozen solid, with little movement or motivation to solve the nation’s problems. We have seen the opposition party adopt a politics of sabotage more intense than any in years. On cable TV and talk radio, honest and robust political discourse has been replaced by an ideological food fight.
Bill McKibben 1-01-2011
Nonviolent civil disobedience has been a less effective tactic in this country in the past few decades for a variety of reasons, the most important of which is probably that our woes are more complicated than in an earlier age. If there’s an exception to this rule, it's the issue I've spent much of my life working on: climate change.
True, climate change is rooted in complex science, but at this point the mechanisms are pretty clear: Burn fossil fuel and wreck the planet. It carries a strong moral edge: The people who burn the least suffer the most. And there are a series of relatively obvious villains: oil and coal barons, who not only profit from the carbon but use their proceeds to foul the debate with endless propaganda.
Since campaigners have in many cases changed their own lives, and tried for two decades the obvious tactics, such as legislative advocacy, without result, maybe the time has come to heighten the stakes, with mass action at the most obvious sites, from coal-fired power plants to corporate headquarters and congressional offices. Indeed, brave people have already begun: More than 100 were arrested, for instance, in a recent D.C. protest about mountaintop removal coal mining.
But using this tactic effectively will require some other changes.