Get your facts straight

Put more politely, and more articulately, that is Dale Hanson Bourke's message to those who want to understand and have an influence in finding a peaceful solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

A passion for education, and a desire to further the cause of peace, is, in part, why Bourke wrote a book on a topic that arouses such heat, and often little light, on many sides.

Describing herself as a "liberal evangelical," Bourke, who has been deeply involved in international relief and justice work, says she grew up in a conservative Christian home. Thus she is well-acquainted with dispensationalism and various schools of Christian Zionism.

In this interview, Bourke addresses the ignorance and emotions that often bar the way to a constructive dialogue -- and suggests that perhaps American Christians need to put aside selective use of Scriptures and start to build relationships -- and listen carefully.

http://lancasteronline.com/article/local/858981_Column--Pro-Israel--pro-Palestine--pro-peace.html

Twitter rubbernecking: turning someone else's tragedy into your 140-character update

 Today I was working on a paper for my last course in the graduate program in counseling.

Remember the good old days (for some of us), when  online news, Facebook and other virtual opiates didn't pose a perpetual threat to productivity?

Those days are gone as though they had never existed.

Given that my self-control is feeble at the best of times when it comes to distractions, I soon found myself surfing Twitter, linking to articles, and thinking of clever ripostes to some of my followers tweets(most of which I was too sane or scared to post because really, they weren't all THAT smart).

A little after eleven, my Twitter feed lit up with bulletins: a building had fallen in Philadelphia.

There were injuries (as it turns out, there were also deaths).

Then the commentary began.

One update followed another. Some seemed rapt, even compelled, to bring us news of tragedy -- as some had done, one tweet following on another, during the Oklahoma earthquake the week prior.

Watching my followers, and those whom I follow (as I type, I am struck by the "Game of Thrones" quality of these descriptors), I started to feel queasy.

For minute, I imagined a town square, and villagers gathering to watch a public burning or a hanging.

Why were people tweeting about every tragic detail?

What was this voyeuristic impulse to watch, to communicate, to rubberneck in the virtual ruins of someone else's life?

One tweet -- that made sense to me.

Now everyone gets to be a reporter.

Buut on a more practical level, I wondered: didn't they have jobs?

Write a story? Teach third graders? Take their son to the doctor for his check up?  Change this sorry world for the better?

After a while, I turned away, feeling unsettled by the vigor with which some were chronicling the collapse and rescue efforts.

If the people were under the rubble were their brothers or daughters, would they want this much public attention to their personal grief and terror?

Perhaps I am overly pious. Perhaps some of these tweeters saw it as a public service to let the world know about this Philadelphia story.

Possibly this urge to share is a perfectly human impulse.

I'm still not entirely sure why.

After all, most of those who didn't have to know because they were related to the victims would learn soon enough.

It is never too early for joy -- and never too late for mourning.

The Philadelphia School Implosion: why suburbanites should give a hoot

To talk about the appalling conditions of the Philadelphia School System, I want to tell you about my son's school.

He attends a new high school in our district.  It was founded to help kids in the hard sciences (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math). More than that, it's the only S.T.E.M. school with the I.B. (International Baccalaureate)  program in the United States, he told me recently.

While there is grousing about the new school among teachers and some parents in the regular district high schools (very understandable), it's not like they are particularly deprived.  Our parents have to pay fees for some extracurricular activities now.

Tough.

That's because Governor Corbett and the legislature have tightened the belt on public education.

My point?

It's not our relatively affluent school district which has suffered.

Wanna know about suffering?

Check out Philadelphia.

Yesterday  the Philadelphia  School Reform Commission voted to eliminate 3,000 jobs (yup) and make an eight percent budget cut for the next school year.

No more guidance counselors.

No more sports teams.

No more art classes.

But why should we folk in suburbia care, you might ask?

After all, Philadelphia politics is a hot mess.  Corruption. Mismanagement.  Politics, yadda, yadda yadda.

It's not at all clear that Mayor Michael Nutter can get his "sin" taxes through a divided City Council.

Not to mention that the "small government " Republicans who run the State Legislature are awfully attached to telling Philadelphia what to do.

Then there is the resistance of the teacher's union to further sacrifices.

Business as usual, in other words.

Except for the kids.

It's the children who will have nowhere to go to blow off some steam, exercise their creativity, or get some help in escaping the chains of economic disadvantage.

If we care about other people's children, we should be outraged at what may happen in our local city.

Are we?

If we care about the future impact of these cuts on violence in Philadelphia, on our jails, on our educational institutions of higher learning, we should be dismayed.

If we care about the tapestry, increasingly frayed, that holds our social fabric together, we should speak out in solidarity with our neighbors.

If we care about ourselves, and want to be able to look ourselves in the mirror and sleep at night, we should cry out with disgust and exhort our state and city government to do better.

I happen to be a Christian -- as a believer, I subscribe to the words of the apostle Paul, who saw us as a Body, each dependent on each other.

But you know what? I'd believe that even if I wasn't a Christian.

Home school your kids if you want. Send them to private schools.  Sign  them up for Lower Merion or Downingtown or Radnor High, and count your blessings.

But don't think for a minute that what happens in Philly doesn't matter -- to your quality of life or your conscience or the future of this area. These could be your children.

These are are our children.

Christians can be faithful without being domineering

I didn't start the series on Israel wanting to write about Christian Zionism. In fact, when I heard John Hagee a few years ago being interviewed on Fresh Air, I got mad at Terry Gross for interviewing him (why does she always choose these fringe Christians, right or left?) Hagee is a lighting rod, and he says outrageous things.

But I don't this he is a "fringe Christian."  In fact, Hagee's theological perspective, refined and altered a bit for popular consumption, can be discovered lurking in many mainline and evangelical churches.

Christians often seem to either ignore the Hebrew Scriptures, or to treat them as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Christian Gospel.  It's understandable for historical reasons, but not particularly helpful for dialogue.

Haim Beliak, creator of the hilariously named "Jews on First" website, would like to see theology take a backseat to conversations about land-sharing between Jews and Palestinians. To do that, Americans need to own their part in supporting the Christian Zionist perspective here, and how it influences American government policy.

Can we leach religious rhetoric and assumptions out of peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians? Perhaps not. But at least we can be aware of our assumptions, and try to get out of the way.



http://lancasteronline.com/article/local/853687_Column--Beyond-Armageddon.html

The way the story gets told...

It still seems remarkable that she doesn't have to stumble out of bed and find matching a matching tunic and leggings every morning.

Today, there is no one to wake up.  No one grumbles, turns over a few times, and asks that his light be turned on, the better to oil his transition from sleepy son to yawning student.  

What was were high school administrators thinking, to ask high school students to wake up so early, she wonders.

Without a child at home today or a place to be on Friday, she falls asleep again as the sun shines through the flowered shades that cover the sliders to the deck.

As so often when she dreams around dawn, her dreams are vivid, more Salvador Dali than Claude Monet.

She is in what seems to be a large parking lot, watching a reporter re-image an ancient civilization that once resided there.

Why then does it look like the New Jersey shore?

Waking and slightly disoriented, she focuses her near-sighted gaze on the cat who slumbers on the edge of the bed.  

Her almost-constant companion in the night hours, as polite and well-behaved in the dark as he is not during the light, he is her signpost back to control and safety.

Not this morning.

Instead, as she reaches for her glasses (she often falls asleep on top of them). she is flooded with panic.

Beneath the panic is anxiety.

Beneath the anxiety, disbelief.

Where is acceptance? Acceptance floats like a cloud across the sky -- glimpsed, then gone wherever clouds go.

Yesterday she had experienced resignation.

Today, in the exuberance of sunlight and shadow on the lawn, it is absent. Perhaps it never existed.

Instead, there is this blind fear.

Underneath all of her worldliness, she has always assumed that there is a straightforwardness to love.

Particularly in the love of a parent for a child.

Before she knew anything about the dangers of the outside world, she knew this, learned it in her mother's lap, her father's eyes.

Her own child, she cannot reach.  There has, oh terrible truth, never been a time when she could say that she understood the daughter whose path to adolescence has been sprinkled with deception, insatiable desire for material goods, and a hidden life she cannot access.

While there was nothing perfect about her upbringing, the truth that remains after all the tragedy and debris is swept away is love.  

But it is this love that her daughter cannot accept, whether it be from her brother, who has grown to mistrust her, or even her father.. 

Tragedy -- ah, that is land the mother knows.

For years, after her brother's untimely death, she awaited the next phone call.

One day she watched her mother write messages on a pad as she awoke from a coma.

The next day the hospital curtains were drawn, and the staff said: "we tried to reach you."

But this living purgatory and terror -- how does she accustom herself to the implacable distance between parent and child?

The wall. 

The gulf.  

The horizon.

Beyond it, there looms, she fears...nothing.

Just the incredulous recognition that she, who is wired to love, who gives thanks every day for the uncomplicated affection in her cat's eyes, who weeps for squirrels smashed on the road -- she is still  banging on the door of her daughter's life.

Look at me in the eye. See me. Let me see you.

She is, simply, a mother who has never been let in. Parent of an absent child.

Never. Never. Never.

It's all about the text, says Lancaster Bible College professor

With modesty and erudition, Dr. Robert Spender of the Lancaster Bible College defends the historicity of ancient texts.

Gracious yet firm, Spender acknowledges how fast the world of Biblical criticism has changed over the past 100 years, but does not cede the game to colleagues on the left who chip away at the historical nature of the Hebrew Scriptures.

The dialogue will continue, undoubtedly -- one hopes that those immersed in study will continue to resist the temptation to caricature other impassioned scholars.

http://lancasteronline.com/article/local/848247_Column--Understanding-Israel-rooted-in-Scripture.html

Selective outrage can make asses of us all

Benghazi! Mark Sanford! Climate change! Abortion rights defense! Anti-abortion horrors!

My twitter feed sometimes seems clotted with the voices of the ticked off, the morally righteous, the snarky and the occasionally annoyed.

Truth be told, I join them now and then.  Gun control is a reliable hot button issue for me, and I can often be counted on to rise, like a fish to the hook, when somebody NRA-affiliated riffs on the armed revolution that's a comin.'

But sometimes...sometimes I wonder. Why don't I see conservatives posting about the collapse of the Bangladesh factory?  Are there liberals campaigning for better schools in urban areas? Aren't people appalled by the rise in female mortality in more than forty percent of American counties?

In other words -- why can't we agree on anything?

I know who is going to respond to MY tweets or FB status updates on controversial topics (though I try to keep them under control). It's either people who already agree with me (wink, wink, nod, nod, we're club members) or people who vehemently do not.

But what do we accomplish with our rantings?

Whose lives do we make better?

Or are we simply satisfying ourselves -- and that basement dweller in some city two thousand miles away?

Or maybe two basement-dwellers -- we must be pretty insecure, given the volume of self-complimentary retweets.

Information -- that's great.

Some well-sourced opinion -- I've been known to change my mind. That's why I try to read across political fault lines.

But for Pete's sake -- the next time you are about to nail some person you've never met with a well-aimed arrow bent to your own perspective, take a deep breath.

Before you jump the snark, ask yourself who this is going to help in the long run.

Then think about whose blood pressure you might also be raising, and what you are really accomplishing.

In the spirit of "doctor, heal yourself," I'm going to try to administer my own medicine.

If, given due provocation, I can remember my own counsel.