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65 <previous< Issue
066 Volume 13 No 4 Fall 2007 >next>
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Faith and Social
Justice By Jim Wallis, Some years ago on a trip to the U.K., I walked through the historic Holy Trinity Church on Clapham Common in South London. This Anglican parish was the home church to William Wilberforce, the abolitionist parliamentarian who wrote Britain’s anti-slave-trade legislation, Wilberforce and a group of Christian fellow parliamentarians and lay people known as “the Saints” were behind many social reforms that swept England in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The current vicar was very proud to show me around. On the wall were pictures of these typically English-looking gentlemen who helped to turn their country upside down.
Finally, the vicar pointed to an old,
well-worn table. “This is the table upon which William Wilberforce wrote
the antislavery act,” he said proudly. “We now use this table every Sunday
for communion.” I was struck—here, in dramatic liturgical symbol, the
secular and the sacred are brought together with powerful historical
force. How did we ever separate them? What became of religion that
believed its duty was to change its society on behalf of justice?
William Wilberforce and his group of
friends profoundly changed the political and social climate of their time.
Wilberforce was a convert of the religious revivals that transformed 18th-century
England. A Pious Proposal: The F Word vs. the J Word I’ve never read a word I didn’t like. Educated beyond my competence, I’ve amassed a huge vocabulary. I’ve taught myself to pronounce each and every word, including “pejorative” (there are at least three approved ways). I can enunciate each and every letter in succession to form the word “pejorative” as a whole; listening to recordings of British actors like Gielgud, Richardson, and Olivier decades ago taught me how, and in the process I eradicated my Bostonian accent.
The Day I
Knew We Had Lost the War The day I knew we had lost the war I was serving as a Navy Commander in Rota, Spain. Accounts of torture along with pictures from Abu Ghraib prison had been released for the entire world to see. Shocking photos were displayed on the Armed Forces Network broadcast of CNN. The details were printed in Stars and Stripes and The Early Bird. I was walking to my chapel office with a cup of café con leche warming my hand, when the impact of the breaking news hit me. I paused, looked into the Spanish sky, and muttered, “The war is lost.” There could be no
mistake. This was bad, really bad. The meaning of what had happened at that
prison was even more devastating than the mistreatment, which was all by itself
reprehensible enough. Soldiers from the United States of America had
purposefully engaged in activities designed to humiliate Muslim men.
Furthermore, they bragged about it. The photos revealed much more than a young
woman holding a naked Iraqi by a leash. Later it would be revealed that this was
not isolated acts by a few rogue soldiers, but a reflection of a policy change
that allowed and even encouraged mistreatment of prisoners.
And someone took photos. They announced our defeat. The war was over. We had
lost. On
Journalism and Democracy Throughout his career in print and broadcast journalism, Bill Moyers has blended a passionate interest in the workings of politics with a strong interest in religion. He is perhaps best known for the many interviews and reports he has produced and narrated for the Public Broadcasting System, including the “Faith and Reason” series in 2006. He has received over 30 Emmy awards for his documentary work and was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. You were part of the Johnson
administration during its escalation of the Vietnam War. What perspective does
that experience give you on the current administration and this war in Iraq?.
Updated Saturday, December 01, 2007 |
Remembering: Yad
Vashem and Ramallah By James Gaffne My first visit to Jerusalem was just after the 1967 war and my most recent one shortly before the 40th anniversary of that event was celebrated and lamented by the city’s Jews and Arabs respectively. During the latter visit, local news focused briefly on a group of German Catholic bishops who paid an invited visit to Yad Vashem, Israel’s principal monument to the Shoah (Holocaust) which I happened to visit just after them. Yad Vashem is an extraordinary place, which serves many functions related to remembering and understanding that historic atrocity. For the ordinary visitor, perhaps most moving is a remarkable exhibit that traces the history of anti-Semitism through the Common Era, the circumstances of Jews just before the rise of Nazism, the Holocaust itself as experienced in various parts of the world, and the subsequent hope represented by the State of Israel. The exhibit is eloquently housed in a kind of zigzag tunnel, whose tortuous shape evokes the recurring turbulence of Jewish history, before finally opening over green Judean hillsides onto Jerusalem visible in the distance.Continue The
Temple and Tatoos
My face cringes with disgust
involuntarily, as I walk past the tattoo parlor inviting teenage customers in
with a cheery neon open sign suspended in the window. I don’t even bother
looking into the crumbling walls of a building I am sure is full of pain and
dead skin, but instead I shift my attention onto the restaurant next door;
tattoos have never been appealing to me. Ethics in Ministry When as a teenager I first heard the term “ministerial ethics,” I wondered what in the world this could be about? Were some ministers unethical? Did they lie to their deacons? Did they steal from their churches? My image of the clergy was so innocent that I could not imagine immoral clergy. (This, by the way, says a lot for my childhood ministers.) So one day, as a young person aspiring to
ministry (we were called “preacher-boys” then), I happened on a book about
ministerial ethics in the Baptist Book Store. I scanned the table of contents
and discovered to my great relief, that the book was not about ministerial
ethics at all, but was rather about ministerial etiquette. It had to
do with things like not starting a church in another church’s back yard, how to
handle invitations to go back to previous pastorates for weddings and funerals,
the necessity of treating your predecessors with respect, and other such
regularly ignored niceties. By Britt Towery, Baptist Missionary (ret.) Brownwood, TX A few weeks ago televangelist John Hagee took a group to the nation’s capitol where he pushed his Christian Zionism agenda for Israel. His phrase “Christian Zionism” could not be more contradictory. It is an oxymoron and more cult than Christianity. Hagee topped off his lobbying blitz with the astounding demand that
America should invade Iran. He and other TV preachers see an invasion of
Israel by Russia and Iran. He gets that by reading between the lines in
Isaiah, Ezekiel and Daniel. He must be reading between the lines, as these
2500-year old words do not say anything about the 21st Century world. He
sees Iran president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as part of a conspiracy to wipe
out Israel and establish an Islamic world order.
Winning At Any Cost? A
few years back, I watched the Kansas State Wildcats play in the Big 12 football
playoff game. The Wildcats were ahead and could walk away with the victory by
sitting on the ball for the final few minutes. The All-American quarterback made
a fatal mistake and fumbled the ball to opponents who stole the victory. Instead
of playing for the national championship in Arizona with a pay off of $12
million, the team had to settle for a lesser bowl that paid $1 million. I
surmised that one fumble cost the school in cash, $11 million. This is a lot of
stress for a teenage student to handle. Remembering Doug Marlette (1949-2007) Since our beginning in 1995, Christian Ethics Today readers have enjoyed the cartoons of Doug Marlette. His untimely death evoked many tributes, from which we have gleaned the following excerpts that remind us of Marlette’s role as a prophet with a pen.
Christian Ethics and the
Movies Book Reviews
Poetry
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