Author Archive
Chris Heuertz
A Post-bin Laden Reflection on Violence
Friday, May 6th, 2011
[Editor's Note: This post originally appeared on the Q Ideas Blog and has been re-posted with their permission]
In the spring of 1999, during NATO’s bombing of Serbia, I was in the “Tent City” in Tirana, Albania. Floods of Kosovar refugees were pouring into the camps, telling horrific stories of rape and ethnic cleansing. Something needed to be done. The Serbs had to be stopped. But as fighter jets roared above and thundering Apache helicopters flew overhead, I experienced tremendous inner conflict. Could I support violence to stop violence?
The truth is, I prefer non-violence. That’s exactly what I mean. I cannot with integrity say I’m committed to non-violence because most of the champions who’ve made this commitment don’t seem to agree on a clear definition of what they mean by “violence.” And, if the use of force to protect a vulnerable child or my wife is “violence,” then I may not be able to fully commit to non-violence in every situation.
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The Callousing of Morality
Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011
A few years ago, a series of commercials for a shampoo product saturated television programming. Each ad portrayed a woman experiencing sexual ecstasy as she washed her hair in the shower. Quite the product—or, at least, quite a promise.
The disconnect between our ordinary experience of hair washing and the implicit claims of the commercial is partly what made some of us laugh at the ad. When we remember that particular advertisement, or the dozens of others that are like it, we laugh or sometimes smirk. Perhaps we are also mildly shocked by the crassness, the explicit sexuality, but we don’t often name the misunderstanding of sex it represents or the flippancy of our own responses. If we think about it at all, the ad is utterly ridiculous, but it is not harmless.
Around the same time that those commercials were running, a board member of Word Made Flesh traveled to Sri Lanka. She collaborated with a friend there in assisting the government as they shut down thirty children’s homes. Most of them were homes for young boys.
