Features
No longer welcome: Cracking down on immigrants
You and the alien shall be alike before the Lord. You and the alien who resides with you shall have the same law and the same ordinance.
(Num. 15:15b-16, NRSV)
Like many young Pakistanis, Khalid Faiz-Mohammad believed he could make a better life for himself in America. On his first attempt to get into the country, in 1988, he was caught, deported and barred from returning for one year.
Using Private Lynch: The making of a myth
Jessica Lynch resists America’s desire to call her a war hero. “They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff,” Lynch told Diane Sawyer during a television interview on Veteran’s Day. “It’s wrong.”
Cold-blooded
Relentlessly somber, with the eruptions of teen violence rendered in a hushed style, Gus Van Sant's Elephant—his response to the Columbine shootings—is an art-house version of an exploitation picture. It's very skillfully made, with warm cinematography by Harris Savides that provides a visual and tonal counterpoint to the affectless interactions of the adolescent characters, and with a restless camera that roams the halls of a monstrous glass-and-concrete high school.
Voices
Barbara Brown Taylor
Birth pangs: Sometimes you cannot give help
In the absence of a real, live spiritual director, I often turn to the Desert Fathers for wisdom about living a holy life on earth. My farm is no desert, but enough happens here for me to understand St. Anthony’s reply to the philosopher who asked him how he could be happy without books. “My book is the nature of created things,” Anthony said to him, “and any time I want to read the words of God, the book is before me.”