I arrange my Mondays around a certain ritual, a yoga class taught by my gifted teacher, Mireille (Mimi) Mears. She’s from Belgium. From Charleroi, to be exact. It's about 30 miles away from Brussels. Her nephew lives a few minutes away from the attack site with his wife and three children under the age of 6. Mimi always closes our class with a ritual, this prayer/meditation/homily (with her beautiful Belgian accent) and yesterday was no exception.
The actions of the shooters like those in San Bernardino, Paris, and very probably Brussels are difficult for most people to understand. But the work of scholars specializing in extremism can help us begin to unravel how people become radicalized to embrace political violence.
Security experts Alex Wilner and Claire-Jehanne Dubouloz define radicalization as a process during which an individual or group adopts increasingly extreme political, social, or religious ideals and aspirations. The process involves rejecting or undermining the status quo or contemporary ideas and expressions of freedom of choice.
Newly radicalized people don’t just agree with the mission and the message of the group they are joining — they embrace the idea of using violence to induce change.
Rarely is racism confessed so baldly.
John Ehrlichman, domestic policy chief for Richard Nixon, admitted in 1994 that the "war on drugs" was a way to "criminalize" the ant-war left and black people, and "disrupt those communities," according to a recent article from Harper's Magazine.
Ehrlichman was known as a close adviser to Nixon, and served 18 months in prison for his role in the Watergate scandal.
"Instead of preaching, perhaps what is more appropriate is, in fact, confession of how hard it is to actually love our enemies,” says Pastor Jarrod McKenna.
Though this video reflection for Common Grace’s Love Thy Neighbour campaign was filmed a few weeks ago, its pre-scheduled release today goes right to the heart of enemy love and offers a Christian response to terrorism in the days after shocking attacks in Brussels, Istanbul, and elsewhere.
“This teaching is the most often quoted teaching of the early church, because it is the teaching that sums up the cross the easiest,” he says.
Though God originally intended that humankind experience goodness and abundance, forces that seek to counter the divine will of God continue to struggle. The divine will of God is for God’s children to prosper, live in peace, unity, and attain equity of God’s resources. God in infinite wisdom established a plan for reconciliation to the disruption in social order before the foundation of the earth.
In this way, God took a stand for what mattered: against the evil that coopted the human experience by way of sin; for God children’s to all have equal access to the graces and life available that came through acceptance, profession of faith, and obedience.
It is no secret that in today’s culture, there is an outcry that resembles the prophetic witness of taking a stand for what matters.
Nearly everyone I know believes that one or more of the presidential candidates is an exceptionally bad leader, and this leaves us to grapple with why so many of our fellow Americans support them. Personally, I reject public stupidity as an explanation for anything. Our people deserve a more generous attempt to understand them. So let us look deeper.
Zootopia is the story of a large, metropolitan city where everyone lives in peace and harmony. Tolerance and diversity are hallmarks of this great city. Hope abounds in this land of talking animals because it’s a place where, “You can be anything!” Zootopia is peaceful because after thousands of years of evolution, carnivores no longer eat other animals. Everyone lives in peace. The prophet Isaiah’s vision that “The wolf will live with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the goat” seems to be fulfilled in Disney’s latest movie.
One of the most anticipated cases of this Supreme Court season revolves around nuns and birth control.
Zubik v. Burwell, which comes before the justices Wednesday, addresses one of the most contentious parts of the Affordable Care Act: the requirement that employers offer certain types of birth control to their employees — the so-called contraceptive mandate.
I drove by a church last week, a few days before Palm Sunday, and read their sign: CHRIST HAS RISEN!
Um, no. No he hasn’t. In the Christian calendar he hasn’t even died yet. But this is an all-too-common phenomenon in Christian Churches.
Why?
Pastor Ray says that the Good Samaritan story leads Christians to ask, Where is the church in the healing of these wounds?
“The healing of our wounds becomes the healing of your wounds as well,” he says.