Faith and Politics
To everyone who took action and emailed the Bureau of Prisons, thank you! On Sept. 14, Sojourners helped break the story that the federal government had created a list of acceptable religious books and purged all other books from the religious libraries. Often these stories fade away and are quickly [...]
How do we live out God's call to prophetic witness in an apathetic and disempowered society? How can we learn from others who have remained faithful to Jesus' radical call in the midst of failure?
These don't sound like the questions you'd expect to be hearing from a van full of exhausted young adults on a 12-hour drive back from Washington, D.C.
But last March, that's exactly what happened to a group of us from Living Water Community and Reba Place Church in Chicago on our way [...]
I recently posted about the purging of religious books from prison libraries across the country. Since that post and a follow-up action alert, there has been a groundswell of outrage from across the religious and political spectrum against the government's attempt to purge religious libraries. Thank you to everyone who took action. The response has been so overwhelming that
I got a LOT of responses to my post at the end of last week, in which I said the war in Iraq presents the American churches with an issue of Christian identity. Nobody really denied the fact that the worldwide body of Christ is overwhelmingly against the war and the whole thrust of American foreign policy in the post-9/11 era. And that fact remains true even for evangelical Christians around the [...]
From my blogs this week, readers can rightly conclude that I believe Gen. Petraeus' claims of modest security gains in certain sectors of Iraq do not justify extending the U.S occupation, especially when four years of occupation of Iraq have not produced the political reconciliation that would be necessary for real security and stability. The fragile security improvements are not sustainable without a [...]
From my blogs this week, readers can rightly conclude that I believe Gen. Petraeus' claims of modest security gains in certain sectors of Iraq do not justify extending the U.S occupation, especially when four years of occupation of Iraq have not produced the political reconciliation that would be necessary for real security and stability. The fragile security improvements are not sustainable without a [...]
From my blogs this week, readers can rightly conclude that I believe Gen. Petraeus' claims of modest security gains in certain sectors of Iraq do not justify extending the U.S occupation, especially when four years of occupation of Iraq have not produced the political reconciliation that would be necessary for real security and stability. The fragile security improvements are not sustainable without a [...]
From my blogs this week, readers can rightly conclude that I believe Gen. Petraeus' claims of modest security gains in certain sectors of Iraq do not justify extending the U.S occupation, especially when four years of occupation of Iraq have not produced the political reconciliation that would be necessary for real security and stability. The fragile security improvements are not sustainable without a [...]
Recent discussion on Jews and Israel reminds me of a joke we used to hear as youngsters. The joke begins with a person, who, looking for direction in life, decides to go to the Bible. Opening the New Testament and randomly searching for a verse, he gets the verse of Judas, where, after his treason, it says he went and hanged [...]
It was a big day for a general on Capitol Hill yesterday, as Gen. David Petraeus made his long-awaited "progress report" to a joint House committee. But one congressman remembered the last time a general's testimony drew such public attention. It was on April 1967 that Gen. William Westmoreland made his speech to Congress about how much progress we were making in Vietnam. Later, in November 1967, the [...]
On Thursday, Sept. 6, 2007, six of us were found guilty in federal court in Albuquerque, New Mexico, by a federal judge for trying to visit the office of our senator. We will be sentenced in a few weeks.
It all started one year ago on Sept. 26, 2006. That day nine of us entered the Federal Building in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and tried to take the elevator to the third floor to the office of Sen. [...]
The words of Jesus are unambiguous when it comes to expressing how we
are to love each other--we are to love others as we love ourselves. In
fact, the paradigmatic, the normative test case for Christian love is love
of enemy. In the Sermon on the Mount, for example, Jesus tells us that we
are to love our enemies and to do good to them. Surely we can agree that it
is exceptionally difficult to see how one can genuinely love the other who
is enemy to us at the same time that one is engaged in [...]
In an attempt to scare off support for a military exit from Iraq, President Bush in a recent speech made the false claim that U.S. disengagement from Vietnam caused the killing fields in Cambodia. The price of American withdrawal, [...]
Last week's announcement that the Bush administration is seeking to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a foreign terrorist organization is the latest drumbeat in an intensifying confrontation that could lead to war.
In an interview with The New York Times, former Iranian deputy [...]
An interview with Brian Steidle, a former American military observer in Darfur and the subject of the documentary film and book The Devil Came on Horseback.
Briefly explain why you were in Darfur.
I had been in Sudan for seven months prior going to Darfur. Even though I was in Sudan, I had very little idea what was going [...]
I first heard about the letter of the evangelical leaders through an e-mail from Professor Ron Sider, who used to teach at Messiah College, where I graduated. It was a gift from heaven after so many bad statements by evangelicals justifying killings, occupation, and the pillage of our land using [...]
I've gotta admit, it hasn't been easy being a Christian Arab-American, much less in the evangelical church. How many times can you explain that Jesus wasn't baptized in the Rio Grande, that there are tens of thousands of indigenous Palestinian Christians still living in the Holy Land, and that loving Jewish people and "blessing Israel" (as is oft cited from scripture) doesn't mean giving the modern (and mind you, secular) nation-state of Israel a carte blanche on foreign policy or grant it some [...]
Mitsuyoshi Toge, born in Hiroshima in 1917, was a Catholic and a poet. He was in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped on the city on August 6, 1945, when he was 24 years old. Toge died at the age of thirty-six. His first hand experience of the bomb, his passion for peace, and his realistic insight into the event made him a leading poet in Hiroshima. This poem is from Hiroshima-Nagasaki: A Pictorial Record of the Atomic Destruction (1978).
How could I ever forget [...]
For those who'll accuse me of Bush-bashing, the headline was Christianity Today's. Ted Olsen has an interesting round-up of conservative bloggers, mostly criticizing recent statements by Bush about his theology of foreign [...]
For those who'll accuse me of Bush-bashing, the headline was Christianity Today's. Ted Olsen has an interesting round-up of conservative bloggers, mostly criticizing recent statements by Bush about his theology of foreign [...]