Diversity
I met Eliza Griswold in a Starbucks round the corner from her apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Thrumming with nervy energy, she comes off as smart, ambitious, charismatic, and intensely interested. Griswold has published one book of poetry, Wideawake Field (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Her poetry and award-winning journalism have been published in The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and Harper’s. Now in her mid-30s, Griswold grew up in various parts of Pennsylvania and moved to Chicago in 1987, when her father, Frank Griswold, an Episcopal priest, was consecrated as a bishop. (He would later serve as presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in North America from 1997 to 2006.)
Eliza Griswold’s first full-length prose work is The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). In it she recounts her journeys within Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. The text, although nicely larded with statistics and historical background, focuses particularly on her encounters with the men and women most vigorously engaged, on one side or the other, in the frequently violent clashes between Christians and Muslims in those countries. Where the book shines is in the way it allows you to take tea with a Jihadi leader and notice his odd habitual gestures, or the fact that he laughs less than the first time we met him. The big picture is illuminated through such exquisitely detailed miniatures.
I met Eliza Griswold in a Starbucks round the corner from her apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
When the forces of intolerance rear their ugly heads, the forces of inclusion go into action.
In 2004, I was the 40th Korean-American clergywomen to be ordained in the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. denomination. Forty seems like such a small number when you consider that in 2011, Korean-American Clergywomen (KACW) will be celebrating their 20th anniversary. However, many Korean-American women are still wandering the desert of the ordination process without a rock, well, pitcher, or even a drop of water in sight to quench their thirst to serve as God has called them. There have been times when we wished there was a Moses to break the rock or the obstacle so that freedom and the ability to serve as a minister of the word and sacrament would gush abundantly, but the reality is that many Korean-American women cannot find calls or find the support they need to find a call.
[Editors' Note: Former state trooper James Bonard Fowler plead guilty this week to a misdemeanor manslaughter charge in the 1965 shooting of Jimmie Lee Jackson in Alabama.
Ever since Peter and Paul had opposing views about ministry to the Gentiles, there have been divisions in the Christian church. But rarely in the course of church history have differences among Christians been so exploited and manipulated for political gain by those outside the church as is the case today.