“When you commit crimes against another you are not only hurting them, you are also damaging your own soul” (Wendell Berry, The Need to be Whole). Two years ago I wrote a series of posts titled: The Status Quo ain’t the Status Quo. (links for each post can be found below). In those posts, I argued that as long as things remain as they were, which at the time included a lack of war and intermittent violence at best, Israel... Read more
The West Bank is under siege by Israel With all the attention on the war on Gaza, extremists within the Israeli government have seized the opportunity to intensify the oppression of the Palestinians in the West Bank. And things are beyond “out of control.” In fact, I fear that it will soon be too late if we do not speak up now. Now, you might say that this is an overreaction. But I dare say that the events of the... Read more
If the Israeli-Palestinian conflict does not find a swift resolution, it may never be resolved. By this, I mean that whatever resolution that eventually comes may well entail the erasure of either the Israelis or the Palestinians, or conceivably both. And it could well mean the destruction of the U.S. as well. NB: After I finished writing this post, I received an update on conditions in the West Bank from Mercy Aiken, a colleague at NEME. We decided that we... Read more
War is a business. And the Military-Industrial-Complex (MIC) profits from it. A lot. As I have noted in previous posts, my expertise is in the book of Revelation. For the past 25 years, I have been contemplating the nature of the Beast in Revelation 13 and what it means for us today. This has especially been a pressing concern for the past several years. The problem is that the more I consider this, the more deeply I am disturbed. War... Read more
This title derives from a recent blog by Craig Murray, “We Are the Bad Guys.” Craig is not a nobody. He is a former UK ambassador. He begins his post by noting, “In Murder in Samarkand I describe how as a British Ambassador, when I discovered the full extent of our complicity in torture in the War on Terror, I thought it must be a rogue operation and all I had to do was make ministers and senior officials aware and they... Read more
The war in Ukraine is going so well. After two years of fighting off the mighty Russian army, the Ukrainians have entered and seized control of Russian territory! Well, that’s what the US Government, the Western media, and the military-industrial complex want us to believe. We must remember that when it comes to war, those in power and those who benefit from war want us to believe that it is going well so that we will support their intent on... Read more
Lest there be any question: torture is immoral. As Christians, we should fundamentally oppose torture because it is dehumanizing and thereby undermines the divine image inherent within humanity. It dehumanizes both the victim and the perpetrator. If we were to address Russia’s use of torture, I am confident that we would unquestionably condemn their actions and demand the international courts investigate. Russia’s poisoning of Alexi Navalny, formerly Russia’s most famous dissident and Putin’s most ardent rival, who was exiled to... Read more
The question is simple: Should we allow our democratic process to be determined by money? Last month, I wrote about the hijacking of American democracy. One primary means this hijacking occurs is with money. Whether it be corporate dollars or powerful lobbies (often, these two go together), the power of money to influence elections is quite evident. In that post, I noted that AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) is one of the most powerful lobbies in American politics. In... Read more
It is fundamental to the Christian worldview that all persons are made in the image of God and are beings of inherent value. Tragically, many Christians seem to conclude that if a person does not act or believe as they do, which is assumed is in accord with some divine will, they somehow lose that inherent value. This is nothing short of shameful. I am convinced that the “Image of God” includes the task, or the mission, of imitation. We... Read more
What if we could sit back and cry “foul” to all the things that we believe to be wrong, yet do so in such a way that we don’t actually have to do anything? Win-win! It is easy to sit back and complain about all the problems in the world. It is something else to get up and do something about them. Everything would be better if everyone else would get their acts together and be like me! But what... Read more
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