Guest Post

(RNS) A well-intentioned argument is developing among some Westerners, urging the evacuation of Christians from the Middle East. These Westerners reason that because no one will defend the Middle Eastern Christians, they should be resettled elsewhere. Such an approach is naive at best, and complicit at worst, accomplishing the religious cleansing desired by ISIS.

Our arrest happened much faster than we anticipated. As we unfurled our banner based on the “unjust scales” of Amos 8, the police moved in. We had gathered at a magnificent skyscraper in Chicago’s financial district for a meeting with Ken Griffin, Illinois’s richest citizen and top financial contributor to Governor Bruce Rauner.

Just before the papal encyclical on the environment was released, the hype in environmental circles matched that for Taylor Swift’s latest music video. (To be clear: “Bad Blood” deserves the hype.) Who will Laudato Si’ affect the most? What will its rationale be? What sort of reception will it get? Most importantly: will it matter? With international climate talks again looming and considerable activist pressure on President Obama, the pope’s timing couldn’t be better. While some may dismiss his office as more pomp than power, Francis has been throwing his weight around where he can—and for good. 

In years and decades to come, we’ll remember the last two weeks. The Emanuel A.M.E. massacre, the sudden shift away from the Confederate flag, the Supreme Court’s reaffirmation of the Affordable Care Act and its extension of same-sex marriage to every state. Last Friday there was an awesome funeral service for Clementa Pinckney, the pastor of Emanuel and one of the victims in the shooting. And all of it while once again black churches have been burning, some under suspicious circumstances. For all of America’s secularization, actual and expected, each event was resonant with religious significations—and each prompted a wave of public theology.

In the wake of Friday’s landmark 5-4 Supreme Court decision finding a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, two divergent streams of American cultural and religious life are as far apart as ever.

The Confederate battle flag will not fly much longer on the grounds of the South Carolina state Capitol, where it has flown since it was dislodged from the Capitol itself 15 years ago. The state’s political establishment wants it gone, and doubtless it soon will be. What is to be hoped is that its removal signals the end of the mythical republic for which it stands.

Sometimes it’s the child’s job to let go of old memories in order to make room for the new. Our task is to hold the old ones and to remind her that she was young once.

As long as people have been praying, they have also been asking for prayer from one another. In the Bible, the New Testament is full of requests from Paul and others to pray for them; contemporary places of worship often offer time in their services to pray for the specific needs of their parishioners. A new app called Instapray makes sense as a digital heir to that tradition.

Some of us clergy couples struggle with jealousy. Some of us don’t. And sometimes we’re split on the matter. It took my partner seven and a half years before she felt the envy. Then (finally!) the other month the Rev. Jamie looked me in the eye and said (for the first time), “I am so jealous of you. If one more person says they’re going to give you a stole, I’m going to scream.” 

The Century invites readers to submit first-person narratives (under 1,000 words) on the topics lies and road.

God is flying to tell me something. On a recent Saturday I worked beyond the point of exhaustion. Not to. Beyond. Never mind exactly on what. I like to think it was for a good cause, though that is debatable and not the point here. The point is: I so believed outcome x needed to happen that I was willing to do violence to myself to make it happen.

Last week the Nebraska legislature abolished the state’s death penalty, overcoming the governor’s veto to do it. First Things editor Matthew Schmitz, writing in National Review, adds a salutary note of caution to the celebration that followed: viewing abolition as moral progress allows us to “overlook the countless cruelties of our criminal-justice system as we congratulate ourselves on the elimination of a relatively rare punishment.”

Two years ago I was in El Salvador and asked a fellow Jesuit priest if he thought that Archbishop Oscar Romero—famously slain while celebrating Mass in 1980—would ever be beatified. The Salvadoran Jesuit’s answer: only when all of the people who loved Romero and all of the people who hated him were dead.

I often think I hear colleagues asking, “How could we attract nuns to our church?” Actually they’re talking about “the nones,” of course. One of the clearest findings of the Pew Forum’s new religious landscape study is that fewer and fewer people have any religious affiliation at all. Catholics and mainline Protestants show the biggest drop.  I feel pretty conflicted about all of this.

Can poetry be an antidote to poison? Can it provide an alternative to the jihad of Pamela Geller?

The current issue of the Century features a remembrance by my mother of my grandfather’s terrifying war experience and its unfolding consequences. Tomorrow the world marks the 70th anniversary of V-E Day, when the world-shaping trauma of the war halted in Europe. My grandfather’s story is only a tiny fragment of the war, his decades of agony only a ripple in its billowing aftershocks. But it is the kind of story that is easily lost as the war recedes from living memory.

In the past week, Kelly Brown Douglas, a black Episcopal priest and religion professor at Baltimore’s Goucher College, joined students as they watched, analyzed and agonized about their city erupting in protest after the death of yet another black man, Freddie Gray, in police custody. On Friday, the Baltimore state’s attorney criminally charged six officers involved in Gray’s death and declared his arrest was illegal.

For more than a week I’ve been reciting Habakkuk in my mind.

Even though I preached at my father’s funeral, I remembered how meaningful it was for me to sit in the front row between my brother and mother, to sing and pray with them. I wanted to do that again. The next day I changed my mind.