A Bible study
Feature
Lois Ann Lorentzen 3-01-2003
Walking around my hometown of San Francisco, I am always struck by a remarkable cultural vibrancy that translates into religious dynamism.
Elizabeth Palmberg 3-01-2003
Philip Berrigan, 79, the first American Catholic priest jailed for political dissent, according to one biographer, died on December 6, 2002, in Baltimore, Maryland.
Chuck Collins, William H. Gates Sr 1-01-2003
William Gates Sr.—whose son is Microsoft founder Bill Gates—joins with co-author Chuck Collins to argue that the wealthiest among us have an obligation to pay their fair share.
Rose Marie Berger 1-01-2003
Around the world publicly owned, government-run water utilities are being sold off to for-profit companies.
Emily C. Dossett 11-01-2002
Churches are helping many with mental illness find medical, psychological, and spiritual aid.
Dale W. Brown 9-01-2002
For Louisiana writer Ernest Gaines, home is the place where you're torn between the difficulty of leaving and the terror of staying.
Bethany Spicher Schonberg 9-01-2002
Imagine a packed elementary school auditorium and only an hour between hundreds of kids and summer vacation. "Peace" isn't the word that comes to mind.
Franklin D. Raines 9-01-2002
Recently a newspaper in Washington, D.C., carried a four-part series titled "Black Money."
Ryan Rodrick Beiler 9-01-2002
Many Christians who support Israel out of a fundamentalist Zionism forget that they have Palestinian brothers and sisters in Christ who suffer under the occupation. Collective punishments through fences, walls, checkpoints, and curfews fail to distinguish between the violent and the nonviolent. Israeli soldiers often do no better, as civilian casualties mount in their war on terror.
"We are all traumatized," said Elias Mishrawi, a Christian Palestinian businessman and political activist from Beit Sahour. "We no more know what is normal life.... Not only do I not see a light at the end of the tunnel. I don't see a tunnel."
While such despair is prevalent among Palestinians, following are the stories of three Palestinian Christians living and working in hope of peace while confronting the violence of occupation.
On April 4, 2002, Rev. Mitri Raheb was detained by Israeli soldiers as they ransacked the compound of Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem, smashing windows, computers, and artwork. That attack, and the curfews that followed, have set back, but not squelched, a vision rooted in nonviolence and "contextual theology."
After a seminary education in Germany gave him answers to questions his people weren't asking, Raheb asked himself: What is good news for people who hear bad news every day?
Walter Brueggemann 7-01-2002
Former Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill, an embarrassment to the Bush administration, was among the first to comment publicly on the Enron debacle in 2002, with a sound bite that is likely to endure as a signature statement of the market ideology of the Bush years:
"Companies come and go; it is part of the genius of capitalism."
The comment was a powerful disclosure of the governing ideology of our society. We may observe of that sound bite:
1) O'Neill spoke without any hint of irony. He seemed genuinely to believe his own mantra.
2) At the same time, however, we had to credit O'Neill, a consummate insider, with an immense cover-up in his utterance. He innocently suggested that capitalism is an unfettered system that operates unencumbered, all by itself. O'Neill, however, did not live in a bubble of isolation. He undoubtedly knew of the multiple covert manipulations by the key market players in their influence upon government, whereby the cards are stacked for the big ones and against the little ones.
3) One is struck in his sound bite by a remarkable lack of empathy for those who genuinely lose and suffer when "companies go," for the "going" is not simply a statistical fluctuation, but a huge displacement that includes loss of job and savings, and often thereby loss of home. O'Neill's dismissive slogan continued:
"Part of the genius of capitalism is people get to make good decisions or bad decisions, and they get to pay the consequences or to enjoy the fruits of their decisions."
The Editors 7-01-2002
How will the global community develop sustainable social structures for an aging population?