Letters: Mocking Bush is my patriotic duty – Salon
July 14, 2007 at 8:05 am | In Humor, Politics, Spirit | 1 Comment
Golden Boy, I understand your point
But you don’t seem to want to accept that there a Christian fundamentalists who will never stop also. What makes a Christian fundamentalist any better? Do you think that being Mulim means you deserve to have a bomb dropped on your house when you did nothing to the Christian dropping the bomb? Hating Muslims is the reason you accept the invasion of Iraq, because there has never been any real justification for it. You know they had no weapons. You know they weren’t part of 9/11. You know they weren’t a threat to us. AND you know the real terrorist, Bin Laden got away. Your hate of Muslims has blinded you into beleiving that America is completely justified in killing anyone they want and invading anyone they want. That’s evil, and above all, stupid, because we are the ones who will have to pay for it for generations to come.
Injustice Anywhere . . .
July 14, 2007 at 7:17 am | In Domestic Violence, Feminism, Law | Leave a Comment
*A client’s domestic violence assault charge was dismissed. I think the prosecutor finally bought my argument that she was the actual victim in the case when she listened to the 911 tape I subpoenaed where the caller describes the state’s “victim” as “choking her, banging her head against her car, and throwing her on the ground like a rag doll . . . he only stopped when I banged on my window at him . . . I thought he was going to kill her.” It should be noted that the fine police officers who arrested my client interviewed this caller at the scene, who told them the same thing she said on the tape, but failed to include any of this information in their police report. They did, however, refer to her as “anonymous,” even though she clearly gives her name and phone number on the 911 tape, and actually characterized her as corroborating the “victim’s” account, which was that my client hit and scratched at his face, and he pushed her down to stop her assault. The police report literally said, “The anonymous neighbor corroborated the part where he pushed her down.” So, they ommitted the exculpatory information from their report, falsely called the exculpatory witness “anonymous” forcing my investigator to track down who she was, and completely mischaracterized her account as “corroborating” the alleged victim’s account, at least in part. Nice work, Dano.
Injustice Anywhere . . .: Which Case is the Most Depressing?
July 14, 2007 at 7:02 am | In Domestic Violence, Feminism, Law, Politics | Leave a Comment
One thing that has helped me is a diagram with two circles, the smaller one inside the other.
Someone drew this for me once and said, “See, that small circle? That is your circle of influence.”
Then, he pointed to the larger circle encompassing it and said, “See the larger circle? That is your circle of concern.”
Because I, like you, have a circle of concern that is far larger than my circle of influence.
Then, he told me the secret,”If you are faithful within your circle of influence, you can create a ripple effect that can reach outward to touch your circle of concern.”
Source: Injustice Anywhere . . .: Which Case is the Most Depressing?
Dahr Jamail | Iraq on My Mind
July 13, 2007 at 6:58 pm | In Feminism, Law, Politics, Spirit | 1 Comment
Iraq on My Mind
By Dahr Jamail
TomDispatch.comThursday 12 July 2007
Thousands of stories to tell – and no one to listen.“In violence we forget who we are”
– Mary McCarthy, novelist and critic1. Statistically Speaking
Having spent a fair amount of time in occupied Iraq, I now find living in the United States nothing short of a schizophrenic experience. Life in Iraq was traumatizing. It was impossible to be there and not be affected by apocalyptic levels of violence and suffering, unimaginable in this country.
But here’s the weird thing: One long, comfortable plane ride later and you’re in Disneyland, or so it feels on returning to the United States. Sometimes it seems as if I’m in a bubble here that’s only moments away from popping. I find myself perpetually amazed at the heights of consumerism and the vigorous pursuit of creature comforts that are the essence of everyday life in this country – and once defined my own life as well.
Here, for most Americans, you can choose to ignore what our government is doing in Iraq. It’s as simple as choosing to go to a website other than this one.
The longer the occupation of Iraq continues, the more conscious I grow of the disparity, the utter disjuncture, between our two worlds.
In January 2004, I traveled through villages and cities south of Baghdad investigating the Bechtel Corporation’s performance in fulfilling contractual obligations to restore the water supply in the region. In one village outside of Najaf, I looked on in disbelief as women and children collected water from the bottom of a dirt hole. I was told that, during the daily two-hour period when the power supply was on, a broken pipe at the bottom of the hole brought in “water.” This was, in fact, the primary water source for the whole village. Eight village children, I learned, had died trying to cross a nearby highway to obtain potable water from a local factory.
In Iraq things have grown exponentially worse since then. Recently, the World Health Organization announced that 70% of Iraqis do not have access to clean water and 80% “lack effective sanitation.”
In the United States I step away from my desk, walk into the kitchen, turn on the tap, and watch as clear, cool water fills my glass. I drink it without once thinking about whether it contains a waterborne disease or will cause kidney stones, diarrhea, cholera, or nausea. But there’s no way I can stop myself from thinking about what was – and probably still is – in that literal water hole near Najaf.
I open my pantry and then my refrigerator to make my lunch. I have enough food to last a family several days, and then I remember that there is a 21% rate of chronic malnutrition among children in Iraq, and that, according to UNICEF, about one in 10 Iraqi children under five years of age is underweight.
I have a checking account with money in it; 54% of Iraqis now live on less than $1 a day.
I can travel safely on my bicycle whenever I choose – to the grocery store or a nearby city center. Many Iraqis can travel nowhere without fear of harm. Iraq now ranks as the planet’s second most unstable country, according to the 2007 Failed States Index.
These are now my two worlds, my two simultaneous realities. They inhabit the same space inside my head in desperately uncomfortable fashion. Sometimes, I almost settle back into this bubble world of ours, but then another email arrives – either directly from friends and contacts in Iraq or forwarded by friends who have spent time in Iraq – and I remember that I’m an incurably schizophrenic journalist living on some kind of borrowed time in both America and Iraq all at once.
2. Emailing
Here is a fairly typical example of the sorts of anguished letters that suddenly appear in my in-box. (With the exception of the odd comma, I’ve left the examples that follow just as they arrived. They reflect the stressful conditions under which they were written.) This one was sent to my friend Gerri Haynes from an Iraqi friend of hers:
Dear Gerri:No words can describe the real terror of what’s happening and being committed against the population in Baghdad and other cities: the poor people with no money to leave the country, the disabled old men and women, the wives and children of tens of thousands of detainees who can’t leave when their dad is getting tortured in the Democratic Prisons, senior years students who have been caught in a situation that forces them to take their finals to finish their degrees, parents of missing young men who got out and never came back, waiting patiently for someone to knock the door and say, “I am back.” There are thousands and thousands of sad stories that need to be told but nobody is there to listen.
I called my cousin in the al-Adhamiya neighborhood of Baghdad to check if they are still alive. She is in her sixties and her husband is about seventy. She burst into tears, begging me to pray to God to take their lives away soon so they don’t have to go through all this agony. She told me that, with no electricity, it is impossible to go to sleep when it is 40 degrees Celsius unless they get really tired after midnight. Her husband leaves the doors open because they are afraid that the American and Iraqi troops will bomb the doors if they don’t respond from first door knock during searching raids. Leaving the doors open is another terror story after the attack of the troops’ vicious dogs on a ten-month old baby, tearing him apart and eating him in the same neighborhood just a few days ago. The troops let the dogs attack civilians. The dogs bite them and terrify the kids with their angry red eyes in the middle of the night. So, as you can see my dear Gerri, we don’t have only one Abu Ghraib with torturing dogs, we have thousands of Abu Ghraibs all over Baghdad and other Iraqi cities.
I was speechless. I couldn’t say anything to comfort her. I felt ashamed to be alive and well. I thought I should be with them, supporting them, and give them some strength even if it costs me my life. I begged her to leave Baghdad. She told me that she can’t because of her pregnant daughter and her grandkids. They are all with them in the house without their dad. I am hearing the same story and worse every single day. We keep asking ourselves what did we do to the Americans to deserve all this cruelness, killing, and brutishness? How can the troops do this to poor, hopeless civilians? And why?
Can anybody answer my cousin why she and her poor family are going through this?? Can you Gerri? Because I sure can’t.
In recent weeks I had been attempting to get in touch with one of my friends, a journalist in Baghdad. I’ll call him Aziz for his safety. Beginning to worry when I didn’t receive his usual prompt response, I sent him a second email and this is what finally came back:
Dear old friend Dahr,I am so sorry for my late reply. It is because my area of Baghdad was closed for six days and also because I lost my cousin. He was killed by a militia. They tortured and mutilated his body. I will try to send you his picture later.
Just remember me, friend, because I feel so tired these days and I live with this mess now.
With all my respect,
Aziz
Conveying my sadness, I asked him if there was anything I could possibly do to ease his suffering. As a reporter in that besieged country, he is constantly exhausted and overworked. I hesitantly suggested that perhaps he should take a little time to rest. He promptly replied:
Dahr, my old friend,I really appreciate your condolence message. Your words affected me very much and I feel that all my friends are around me in this hard time. I live with this mess and I do need some rest time as you advise before getting back to work again. BUT, really, I have to continue working because there are just very few journalists in Iraq now, and especially in my area. I have to cover more and more everyday.
Anyway friend, everything will be ok for me. And I wish we can make some change in our world towards peace.
With my respect to you friend, Aziz
I have also been corresponding with “H,” who lives in the volatile Diyala province and has been a dear friend since my first trip to Iraq. He would visit me in Baghdad, bringing with him delicious home-cooked meals from his wife, insisting always that I be the one to eat the first morsel.
A deeply religious man, his unfailing greeting, accompanied by a big hug, would always be: “You are my brother.”
He was concerned about the perception that there were vast differences between Islam and Christianity. “Islam and Christianity are not so different,” he would say, “In fact they have many more similarities than differences.” He would often discuss this with U.S. soldiers in his city.
Yet he was no admirer of imperialism. Last summer in Syria, he and I visited the sprawling Roman ruins of Palmyra. One evening, as we stood together overlooking the vast landscape of crumbling columns and sun-bleached walls in the setting sun, he turned to me and said, “Mr. Dahr, please do not be offended by what I want to say, but it makes me happy to see these ruins and remember that empires always fall because empires are never good for most people.”
After several weeks when I received no reply to repeated emails, I wrote to “M,” a mutual friend, and received the following response:
Habibi [My dear friend],It has been very long since I have written to you. I’m sorry. I was terribly busy. I have some very bad news. [H] was kidnapped by the members of al-Qaeda in Diyala 25 days ago and there is no news about him up to this moment. It’s a horrible situation. One cannot feel safe in this country.
When I pressed him for more information, he wrote me the details:
[H] was kidnapped as he was trying to get home. He was coming to Baquba to visit his parents, as he does every day. His oldest daughter who was with him told him that a car carrying several men was following them from the beginning of the street leading to his parents’ home. So, when he stopped to get his car in the garage, they got out of their car covering their faces and asked him to come with them for questioning. People in Diyala definitely know that such a thing means either killing or arresting for few days. You may ask why I’m sure it is al-Qaeda. That is because no other group, including the U.S. military, dominates the whole city like they do.We are the people of the city and we know the truth. They overwhelmingly dominate the streets and are even stronger than the government. So, there is no doubt about whether this was al-Qaeda or another group. You may ask how people stay away from these very bad people. People never go in places like the central market of Baquba. For this reason, all, and I mean all, the shops are closed; some people have left Diyala, some have been killed, while most are kept in their homes.
If someone wants to go the market, this means a bad adventure. He may be at last found in the morgue. Al-Qaeda fought every group that are called resistance who work against coalition [U.S.] forces or the government (policemen or Iraqi National Guards). Nowadays, there is fighting between al-Qaeda and other [Iraqi resistance] groups like Qataib who are known here as the honest resistance in the streets. By the way, I forgot, when al-Qaeda kidnaps someone, they also take his car in order that the car shall be used by them. So, they took his car, along with him. In case he is released, he comes without his car. I will tell you more later on.
I soon slipped into the frantic routine all too familiar by now to countless Iraqis – scanning the horrible reports of daily violence in Iraq looking for the faintest clue to the whereabouts of my missing friend
3. Murderously Speaking
In McClatchy News’ July 5th roundup of daily violence for Diyala, I read:
“A source in the morgue of Baquba general hospital said that the morgue received today a head of a civilian that was thrown near the iron bridge in Baquba Al Jadida neighborhood today morning.A medical source in Al Miqdadiyah town northeast [of] Baquba city said that 2 bodies of civilians were moved to the hospital of Miqdadiyah. The source said that the first body was of a man who was killed in an IED explosion near his house in Al Mu’alimeen neighborhood in downtown Baquba city while the second body was of a man who was shot dead near his house in Al Ballor neighborhood in downtown Baquba city.”
The data for Baghdad that day read:
“24 anonymous bodies were found in Baghdad today. 16 bodies were found in Karkh, the western side of Baghdad in the following neighborhoods (7 bodies in Amil, 3 bodies in Doura, 2 bodies in Ghazaliyah, 1 body in Jihad, 1 body in Amiriyah, 1 body in Khadhraa and 1 body in Mahmoudiyah). 8 bodies were found in Rusafa, the eastern side of Baghdad in the following neighborhoods (6 bodies in Sadr city, 1 body in Husseiniyah and 1 body in Sleikh.)”What could I possibly hope to find in nameless reports like these, especially when I know that most of the Iraqi dead never make it anywhere near these reports. That is the way it has been throughout the occupation.
On July 8th, M sent me this email:
Habibi,Up to this moment, I heard that one of my neighbors saw [H's] photo in the morgue but I couldn’t make sure yet. Traditionally, when a body is dropped in a street and found by police, they take it to the morgue. The first thing done is to take a photo for the dead person in the computer to let the families know them. This procedure is followed because the number of bodies is tremendously big. For this people cannot see every body to check for their sons or relatives. For this, people see the photos before going to the refrigerator. I will go to the morgue tomorrow.
The next day he wrote yet again:
Habibi,Today I went to the morgue. I saw horrible things there. I didn’t see [H's] photo among them. Some figures cannot be easily recognized because of the blood or the face is terribly deformed. I saw also only heads; those who were slayed, it’s unbelievable. Tomorrow, we will have another visit to make sure again. In your country, when somebody wants to go to the morgue, he may naturally see two or, say, three or four bodies. For us, I saw hundreds today. Every month, the municipality buries those who are not recognized by their families because of the capacity of the morgue. Imagine!
In one of H’s last emails to me sent soon after his return home from Syria earlier this summer, he described driving out of Baquba one afternoon. Ominously, he wrote:
We left Baquba, which was sinking in a sea of utter chaos, worries, and instability. People there in that small town were scared of being kidnapped, killed, murdered or expelled. The entire security situation over there was deteriorating; getting to the worse.Now, that passage might be read as his epitaph.
4. Subjectively Speaking
The morning I receive the latest news from M, I crawl back into bed and lie staring at the ceiling, wondering what will become of H’s wife and young children, if he is truly dead. Barring a miracle, I assume that will turn out to be the case.
Later, I go for a walk. It’s California sunny and the air is pleasantly cool on my skin. I’m aware – as I often am – that I never even consider looking over my shoulder here. I’m also aware that those I pass on my walk don’t know that they aren’t even considering looking over their shoulders.
The American Heritage Dictionary’s second definition of schizophrenia is:
A situation or condition that results from the coexistence of disparate or antagonistic qualities, identities, or activities: the national schizophrenia that results from carrying out an unpopular war [italics theirs].That’s what I’m experiencing – a national schizophrenia that results from our government carrying out an unpopular war. It’s what I continue to experience with never lessening sharpness two years after my last trip to Iraq. The hardest thing, in the California sun with that cool breeze on my face, is to know that two realities in two grimly linked countries coexist, and most people in my own country are barely conscious of this.
In Iraq, of course, there is nothing disparate, no disjuncture, only a constant, relentless grinding and suffering, a pervasive condition of tragic hopelessness and despair with no end in sight.
———
Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist who has covered the Middle East for the last four years, eight months of which were spent in occupied Iraq. Jamail is currently writing for Inter Press Service, Al-Jazeera English, and is a regular contributor to Tomdispatch.com. Jamail’s forthcoming book, Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Independent Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books) will be released this October. His reports are regularly available on his website, Dahr Jamail’s MidEast Dispatches. (Thanks to Tom Engelhardt for the research done to provide the statistics used in this article.)
Source: Dahr Jamail | Iraq on My Mind
Charles Marsh | God and Country
July 8, 2007 at 1:29 pm | In Spirit | Leave a Comment
God and Country
By Charles Marsh
The Boston GlobeSunday 08 July 2007
What it means to be a Christian after George W. Bush.If God’s on our side, He’ll stop the next war.
- Bob Dylan
Early one Sunday morning in the spring of 2003, in the quiet hours before services would begin at the evangelical church where I worship in Charlottesville, Virginia, I opened files compiled by my research assistant and read the statements drafted by Christians around the world in opposition to the American invasion of Iraq.
The experience was profoundly moving and shaming: From Pentecostals in Brazil to the Christian Councils of Ghana, from the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East to the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, from Pope John Paul II to the The Waldensian Reformed Church of Italy and the Christian Conference of Asia, the voices of our brothers and sisters in the global ecumenical church spoke in unison.
Why did American evangelicals not pause for a moment in the rush to war to consider the near-unanimous disapproval of the global Christian community? The worldwide Christian opposition seems to me the most neglected story related to the religious debate about Iraq: Despite approval for the president’s decision to go to war by 87 percent of white evangelicals in April 2003, according to a Pew Charitable Trusts poll, almost every Christian leader in the world (and almost every nonevangelical leader in the United States) voiced opposition to the war.
In their enthusiastic support of the White House’s decision to invade Iraq, evangelicals in the United States practiced an ecumenical isolationism that mirrored the prevailing political trend. Rush Limbaugh may have pleased his “dittoheads” in mocking the dissenting pastors, archbishops, bishops, and church leaders who stuck their noses into our nation’s foreign policy, but the people in the United States who call themselves Christian must organize their priorities and values on a different standard than partisan loyalty.
These past six years have been transformative in the religious history of the United States. It is arguably the passing of the evangelical moment – if not the end of evangelicalism’s cultural and political relevance, then certainly the loss of its theological credibility. Conservative evangelical elites, in exchange for political access and power, have ransacked the faith and trivialized its convictions. It is as though these Christians consider themselves to be recipients of a special revelation, as if God has whispered eternal secrets in their ears and summoned them to world-historic leadership in the present and future.
One thing, however, is clear: Any hope for renewal depends on the willingness to reach out to our brothers and sisters abroad. We must reshape the way we live in the global Christian community and form a deeper link to the human family and to life. To do this, we must begin by learning to be quieter, and by reaffirming the simple fact that our faith transcends political loyalty or nationhood.
In a German concentration camp in 1944, the theologian, pastor, and Christian martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer pondered the future of the church in Germany as it lay in the ruins of its fatal allegiance to Hitler.
”The time of words is over,” he wrote. “Our being a Christian today will be limited to two things: prayer and righteous action.”
Bonhoeffer, who had actively opposed the Nazis since the passage of the Aryan Laws of 1933 and was executed in April 1945, believed that the church had so compromised its witness to Jesus Christ that it was now incapable of “taking the word of reconciliation and redemption to mankind and the world.” The misuse of the language of faith had humiliated the Word; any hope for renewal would need to begin with the humble recognition that God was most certainly tired of all our talk.
It is time to give Bonhoeffer’s meditations a new hearing. With many other Christians in the United States and many more abroad, I have watched with horror in recent years as the name of Jesus has been used to serve national ambitions and justify war. Forgetting the difference between discipleship and partisanship, and with complete indifference to the wisdom and insights of the Christian tradition, we have recast the faith according to our cultural preferences and baptized our prejudices, along with our will-to-power, in the shallow waters of civic piety.
By the time American troops began bombing Baghdad before sunrise on March 20, 2003, the collective effort of the evangelical elites had sanctified the president’s decision and encouraged the laity to believe that the war was God’s will for the nation. Evangelicals preached for the war, prayed for the war, sang for the war, and offered God’s blessings on the war.
Sometime after Operation Iraqi Freedom began, I made a remarkable discovery. I had gone to one of my local Christian bookstores to find a Bible for my goddaughter. On a whim, I also decided to look for a Holy Spirit lapel pin, in the symbolic shape of a dove, the kind that had always been easy to find in the display case in the front. Many people in my church and in the places where I traveled had been wearing the American flag on their lapel for months now. It seemed like a pretty good time for Christians to put the Spirit back on.
But the doves were nowhere in sight. In the place near the front where I once would have found them, I was greeted instead by a full assortment of patriotic accessories – red-white-and-blue ties, bandanas, buttons, handkerchiefs, “I support our troops” ribbons, “God Bless America” gear, and an extraordinary cross and flag button with the two images interlocked. I felt slightly panicked by the new arrangement. I asked the clerk behind the counter where the doves had gone. The man’s response was jarring, although the remark might well be remembered as an apt theological summation of our present religious age. “They’re in the back with the other discounted items,” he said, nodding in that direction.
I have thought of this visit to the local Christian bookstore many times in the past several years. I remember the outrage I felt when I saw a photograph in Time magazine during the 2004 presidential election of Christian Coalition activists in Ohio. Two men, both white, and both identified as Coalition members, are holding two crosses aloft. The crosses upon closer inspection appear to be made of balloons twisted together. Across the beam-section of one of the crosses was the “Bush-Cheney” logo, and alongside the president’s name was the image of an American flag. In the second cross, the president’s name appeared in full at the places where Jesus’s hands were nailed.
Like Bonhoeffer, I fear that the gospel has been humiliated in our time. But if this has happened, it is not because the message – the good news that God loves us unconditionally in Jesus Christ, that we are freed and forgiven in God’s amazing grace – has changed. Nor is it due to the machinations of secularists, or because the post-Enlightenment world has dispensed with the hypothesis of God. The Christian faith has not only endured modernity and post-modernity, but flourished in its new settings.
The gospel has been humiliated because too many American Christians have decided that there are more important things to talk about. We would rather talk about our country, our values, our troops, and our way of life; and although we might think we are paying tribute to God when we speak of these other things, we are only flattering ourselves.
If only holiness were measured by the volume of our incessant chatter, we would be universally praised as the most holy nation on earth. But in our fretful, theatrical piety, we have come to mistake noisiness for holiness, and we have presumed to know, with a clarity and certitude that not even the angels dared claim, the divine will for the world. We have organized our needs with the confidence that God is on our side, now and always, whether we feed the poor or corral them into ghettos.
To a nation filled with intense religious fervor, the Hebrew prophet Amos said: You are not the holy people you imagine yourselves to be. Though the land is filled with festivals and assemblies, with songs and melodies, and with so much pious talk, these are not sounds and sights that are pleasing to the Lord. “Take away from me the noise of your congregations,” Amos says, “you who have turned justice into poison.”
Psalm 46 tells us, “Be still and know that I am God.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his classic work on Christian community, “Life Together,” spoke of a silence “before the Word.” He affirmed the wisdom of the Psalmist, and spoke of a listening silence that brings “clarification, purification, and concentration upon the essential thing.”
After all the talk and the noise, it is time for Christians in the United States to enter a season of quietness, being still, and learning to wait on God (perhaps for the first time).
Bonhoeffer wrote “Life Together” during the years he directed an illegal seminary in the North German village of Finkenwalde. The school’s mission was training pastors in the Confessing Church, a reform movement that opposed the nazified German Evangelical Church. Bonhoeffer had served in the Abwehr, the Nazi counterintelligence agency, as a double agent – helping Jewish families escape to Switzerland and organizing a coup attempt against the Nazi regime – and he participated in several assassination attempts on Hitler. For Bonhoeffer, being still in a time of enormous historical and ecclesial crisis was no invitation to idleness or indifference; rather, it was a call to discernment and responsible action.
Indeed, there are times when silence is an admonition fraught with danger. Martin Luther King Jr. warned of the “appalling silence of the good people” and those who turned their faces from suffering and oppression. But Dr. King also knew that careful and respectful speech was born of honest discernment of God’s moral demands for the present age – a discernment that begins in humility and quiet introspection.
I came of age in the American South in the 1960s, and the moral values shared by most families in the churches of my childhood were deeply interwoven with our culture’s hold on white supremacy. The vigilant and quite often neurotic defense we made of the Southern Way of Life blinded us not only to the sufferings of African-Americans – the victims of our collective self-righteousness – but also to our spiritual arrogance and group pride. We believed that our conception of Christianity and our cherished family values were the most wholesome and pure the world had ever known. Inside this serene delusion, we presumed ourselves to be paragons of virtue, although we rarely lifted a finger to help anyone but our own.
It was unsettling to learn, sometime in my adolescence, that the moral values I inherited as a white Southerner were not the marks of true Christian piety.
When Jesus spoke of the family, he had in mind the new community of God. “Who are my mother and my brothers?” he said one day upon hearing that his family was asking for him. “Here are my mother and my brothers!” Jesus said, pointing to the people gathered around him, who marveled at his words. “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” Jesus knew that loyalty to the Kingdom of Heaven would often require the renunciation of family traditions, habits, culture, and custom.
Today, in the national debate on faith and politics, there are signs of hope as an emerging generation of Christian leaders holds out the promise of a more comprehensively just and moral account of faith than the narrow agendas of the Christian right. In particular, the success of Sojourners magazine editor Jim Wallis’s 2005 book, “God’s Politics,” introduced many Americans to a vibrant culture of progressive Christianity ready to exert its growing influence over national politics and mobilize the churches around global poverty and AIDS relief.
And there are other encouraging signs: Criticisms of torture and detention practices of the US military by prominent Christian conservatives have been symbolically powerful moments. The emerging environmental consciousness among an increasing number of evangelical leaders and laity signals a more holistic social mission.
Even so, as welcome as these developments are, no explicitly partisan movement – left or right – to reclaim the soul of politics can reckon successfully with the grave effects of the Christian saturation of the American public square. Unless conditioned by clear and public confession of our support of the immoral and catastrophic war in Iraq, and our complicity in the humiliation of the Word, these efforts will lack coherence and a vital center.
Franklin Graham, the evangelist (and son of Billy Graham), boasted that the American invasion of Iraq opens up exciting new opportunities for missions to non-Christian Arabs. This is not what the Hebrew or Christian prophets meant by righteousness and discipleship. In fact, the grotesque notion that preemptive war and the destruction of innocent life pave the way for the preaching of the Christian message strikes me as a mockery and a betrayal.
But if Franklin Graham speaks truthfully of the Christian faith and its mission in the world – as many evangelicals seem to believe – then we should have none of it. Rather, we should join the ranks of righteous unbelievers and big-hearted humanists who rage against cruelty and oppression with the intensity of people who live fully in this world. I am certain that it would be better for Christians to stand in solidarity with compassionate atheists and agnostics, firmly resolved against injustice and cruelty, than to sing “Amazing Grace” with the heroic masses who cannot tell the difference between the cross and the flag.
Charles Marsh is professor of religion and director of the Project on Lived Theology at the University of Virginia. This essay is adapted from his new book, “Wayward Christian Soldiers: Freeing the Gospel from Political Captivity” (Oxford).
Source: Charles Marsh | God and Country
Michael Winship | Libby: One More Twist in the Yellowcake Road
July 6, 2007 at 6:47 pm | In Law, Politics | Leave a Comment
In his official statement, President Bush says he believes it’s Libby’s reputation that has been “forever damaged,” adding, “his wife and young children have also suffered immensely.”
Nearly 3,600 American men and women and an estimated more than 70,000 Iraqi civilians are dead in Iraq. Their families suffer immensely. Scooter Libby, aka Federal Inmate No. 28301-016, walks free.
Source: Michael Winship | Libby: One More Twist in the Yellowcake Road
Blog at WordPress.com. | Theme: Pool by Borja Fernandez.
Entries and comments feeds.
