The United States must recognize the harmful effects of its current and historic foreign policy in the Middle East, and begin working toward a better future.
We cannot bomb our way to peace. What is imperative is that we don’t lose sight of the civilians and families whose homes and communities in Syria and Iraq bear the brunt of these never-ending proxy wars fought between the US, Iran, Russia, Turkey, and others.
As professors—one a politically-engaged theologian and the other a theologically-engaged political scientist—we admit that this situation leaves us concerned and scratching our heads. In our current American context, we wonder: what does it mean to live an authentic life of faith?
Friday, the U.N. treaty declared that the manufacture, possession, use or threat to use nuclear weapons is illegal under international law, 75 years after their development and first use.
Our country is aching to see the strength it takes to accept responsibility for more than our own individual acts. To be wrong, and admit it. To be the first to apologize. To accept the hard truth that we’ve sown bitterness and are reaping violence. Violence doesn’t start in our fists, it is born in our hearts.
It is to this group of social outcasts that God chooses to make an announcement of astonishingly good news—good news in which God declares a true peace that subverts the ways of the Empire.
Perhaps this contrast—the real, difficult version of something held up against the cheap and easy imitation—will help us navigate the disaster of American disunity.
I am concerned that, for all our brave talk of the Gospel, there is a part of us that is still tempted to find our own way toward the knowledge of good and evil, knowing better than God what is good for us (see Genesis 3). That there is a prideful instinct within us that assumes that we can, perhaps even have, designed the political system and philosophy that will lead us into the promised land of peace, prosperity, justice, and rest.
Some individuals who have fled countries internally disrupted by bloody violence have warned that what they see taking place in the U.S. is troublingly similar to what they saw happening in their own countries. Warning lights are flashing