Honoring and Renewing Dr. King’s Other, More Challenging, Dream — 55 Years Later
Fifty-four years ago—on April 4, 1968—Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. Exactly one…
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Vincent Harding, 1931-2014 – An Appreciation
My heart skipped a beat when I spotted Vincent Harding’s obituary in the New York Times. I only…
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Why 9/11 Changed Everything Nothing
The cliché that 9/11 “changed everything” is nowhere less true than in the post-9/11 impulse to declare war immediately. War was a choice as well as an echo: a choice Americans made, and an echo of how Americans have made decisions in times of previous conflict.
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The Other, Forgotten Apocalypse of 2011
I think I can safely assume that for most Americans, Camping and his miscalculated (and then re-calculated) doomsday predictions are of more curiosity than true salvific concern. Camping has been buried by subsequent news cycles and is the latest member of a cadre of religious leaders whom the Apocalypse passed by. But while May’s Apocalypse seems to have skipped over most of the world, it did land squarely on a hilltop in north-western Vietnam. It would behoove us to take notice of the complex and unexpected ways in which this spring’s apocalypticism rippled across the world…
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Blood and Hammers: Elderly Anti-Nuclear Activists Sentenced to Jail
On November 2, 2009, five Catholic activists — one nun, two priests, and two laypeople, all age sixty or above — cut through a series of chain link and barbed wire fences surrounding Naval Base Kitsap in Bangor, Washington. The five unfurled a banner reading “Trident: Illegal + Immoral,” poured their own blood over the site, and beat on the ground and the fences with household hammers before being apprehended and arrested. The five, who call themselves the Disarm Now Plowshares, were found guilty in December on four felony counts: trespass, damage to federal property, injury to federal property, and conspiracy to damage federal property. A week and a half ago in Tacoma’s federal court they received prison sentences of six to fifteen months.
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Oppose Afghanistan But Not a Pacifist? Tough.
While Obama used his Nobel Peace Prize speech to legitimize Afghanistan using just war principles, soldiers are currently unable to invoke these principles in refusing to serve. When we punish soldiers who heed their moral compasses, we deny them religious freedom, and our democracy is threatened. It’s time to allow those who oppose the war on ethical grounds the option of ‘Selective Conscientious Objection.’
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By the Way: McNamara, Dead at 93, Lived Long and Rueful Life
What went through the mind of this haunted man with the “thousand-yard stare” in his later years as he shuffled back and forth to work just “a hand grenade’s throw” from the Vietnam War Memorial?
Read MoreThe Myth of “King David” Petraeus and Iraq
The words of our top general in Iraq—words I’ve described as myths—are those that the president says will determine his war policy.
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A Scholar Responds to John McCain: No God But Country
Did Lofton’s critique go far enough? Was it too measured and neutral? Scholar Mark Hulsether writes that “given the issues at stake in the current election and the huge gap in scholarly persuasiveness between some articulations of Christianity and others, this is a place where my own inclination would be to draw more critics out of the shadows and to give them space to twist their knives harder.”
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