Feature

It was the last concert of the season. From my seat I could see the hands of the young Israeli pianist as she played Edvard Grieg’s piano concerto. The guest conductor was a Norwegian (like Grieg himself). The rest of the orchestra included Asians, African Americans and Anglos. Ah, I thought, music does bring people together!Then I was struck by another thought: my own field, theology, tends to drive people apart. In fact, it’s mostly intended to divide people. What is wrong with this picture? What is wrong is that in the apparently innocent effort to arrive at truth, theology inculcates pride, the very vice that Christians claim is the consummate sin.

Every week day, as I walk my son to school through Central Park, I pass a man in a yellow coat. His face, burnished by the sun, is the same smooth-and-taut coppery brown. Next to him sit a large rolling suitcase and assorted smaller bags. A bright yellow cloth neatly covers his belongings and is anchored in place by two apples, each nestled in a paper coffee cup. The yellow cloth and the yellow coat—along with other items, including a plastic yellow banana and a cardboard yellow taxicab—are the reason I took to calling him The Man Who Likes Yellow.

Not long ago donkey-drawn plows turned the soil over in fields of sorghum and peanuts near Bela village. But today the village is deserted. In 2003, Arab militias killed 37 people and drove the survivors away. Now there is only silence—the sound of genocide in slow motion. The grass and weeds growing up amidst skeletons of burned huts are proof that the world hasn’t cared enough to stop the violence and bring the people of Bela home.

The collapse of immigration reform legislation is best understood not as a failure of short-term political leadership, but rather as an inevitable long-term consequence of NAFTA. NAFTA’s architects believed that as goods and services began to flow in unprecedented volume throughout the world’s largest free market, low-wage labor would remain largely fixed.Unfortunately, the unleashed forces of the free market uprooted longstanding social and economic arrangements in Mexico and caused the already meager economic opportunities, especially in the rural parts of the country, to evaporate. Millions of Mexican people—the bearers of cheap labor—were compelled to seek out their most rational reallocation.

Pastor Maria Edmonds is doing gang ministry in the mountains of North Carolina. As she puts it, "They’re not accepted anywhere else. So I figure Jesus would have me spend time with them.”Millions of dollars are spent each year at the federal level to combat gang activity and reduce gang-related violence in our big cities. And, as Edmonds has discovered, gangs are also a feature of life in many small towns.

In 1998, the SBC missions board distributed over 45,000 evangelistic kits titled “The Mormon Puzzle: Understanding and Witnessing to Latter-day Saints.” The kit included a video that depicted a typical Mormon family enjoying the weekly LDS ritual of “family home evening.” The commentator noted that the Mormon family “could be the family across the street—wonderful, law-abiding people who adore their children, instilling values we all love and cherish.” But, the commentator continued, this family would be “lost for eternity.” The message was that though Mormons may look clean and righteous on the outside, on the inside they are in the grip of dark forces.