Hopewit

I'm not sure what artist and friend Jill Mitchell titled this work, but I call it, "I could be fifteen and walking down that road, dreaming!" Check out her amazing art at https://www.facebook.com/jillmitchelloriginalart Are you bothered by the seemingly insurmountable problem of achieving an Israeli/Palestinian peace? I know I am. For followers of Christ, both the source and the solution are head-scratchers. Our religion can be justifiably called a Jewish sect in that our very faith grows out of the revelation of—and the record of—interaction between Jewry and YHWH, the record of those revelations and events being vital parts of our Christian scriptures. In other words, we are unable to see the State of Israel, its establishment and survival as objectively as we can, for instance, the annexation of Crimea by Russia. The website of a Zionist organization called The Refiner’s Fire has posted 10 Old Testament prophecies fulfilled in the existence of modern-day ...

Paul’s letter to the church in Rome has the flavour of being directed to a particular issue in a particular group of people who apparently haven’t grasped an essential, pivotal point in his teaching ministry. Summed up, as he does in the last verse, the chapter reinforces quite dramatically that “ the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 6:23, NRSV) The forcefulness of his message to church-people suggests that having been baptized into the faith, Christians in Rome were continuing to live in the lifestyle of their culture, including aspects Paul clearly considers “sinful.” What exactly Paul considers “sinful” he delineates at other places in his letters (see Galatians 5:19, for instance) but I have no doubt that whether it has to do with sexual promiscuity, activities in the bath houses, questions of slave ownership and their treatment, economic practices for those in trade, the readers of Paul’s letter probably...

Batoche A man walks into a mosque during Friday prayers with an automatic weapon and clips of ammunition and commences emptying his weapon over and over into the crowd. He manages only about 100 dead and wounded but according to his manifesto, his deed falls well short of his intentions. Claiming, apparently, that his act was retaliation for acts of violence by Muslims in Europe, one may be left to wonder if the perpetrator saw himself as the Christian god’s avenger, or if he possibly fell into a recurring pattern so often connected to violence particularly by lone individuals, namely the feeling of worthlessness, of rejection sublimated in a fixation on a perceived enemy and the most “noticeable” act of violence against that enemy. The Holocaust should have taught us to watch for the signs that fixated hatreds can become epidemic in a population where unfairness and injustice are allowed to flourish. So far, the overwhelming rhetoric surrounding the New Zealand m...

San Antonio, Tlayacapan Catholic church, Jalisco, Mexico (Near Ajijic, Chapala) We were talking trends this morning , in technology, primarily, where the telephone quickly becomes the cell phone and . . . who-knows-what in the future. Where the calculator seems a breakthrough after the abacus and counting fingers but is made redundant in a fraction of a lifetime by the computer, which in turn grows in capability through rapidly-passing generations, etc., etc. I thought of family farms giving way to corporate farming to who-knows-how food will be synthesized in an imaginary future. We talked about Sophia, the robot who has so many human-like abilities that she’s been granted citizenship! And of course, crypto-currency, artificial intelligence, 5G communication capability and threats and . . . on and on until the fear of being submersed by developments we barely understand made us want to crawl under the bed with our thumbs in our mouths, cuddled under a blankey. We talk about ...

Church of Our Lady of Guadaloupe, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico Suppose you were Mexican , and suppose the history of your religion went back to the sixteenth century when Spanish plunderers and missionaries together subdued your ancestors with the sword and the Bible, converting them to a Christianity resembling as closely as possible the church culture of Spain. And suppose you were making a scanty living selling trinkets and souvenirs, T-shirts and serapes in a tiny stall among hundreds of tiny stalls offering the same fare to tourists. Suppose further that as you walked by the Church of Our Lady of Guadaloupe on Calle Hidalgo some ancient force draws you inside while on your way to the Malecon to open your booth. Inside is what has amazed you a thousand times. The high, vaulted space of it, the soaring white columns gold-leafed on their caps, the two statues of Jesus, one in a one-hand-raised, “blessing the people” pose and the other in a posture of abject defeat, a crown o...