Salaam. Shalom. Shanti. Seek the shalom of Yerushalayim: and pray for the peace of Palestine. There are not enough words of peace in any language to bridge the lethal divides between human beings that were revealed again yesterday as Gazans continued to protest their confinement on what is essentially an intentionally starved under-resourced reservation while...... Read More

You will conceive—in your womb—and you will give birth to a son…  Did the Blessed Virgin say, “me too”? There is a moment in the Annunciation story when an ordinary girl on the cusp of womanhood is approached by a powerful male figure who tells her what is going to happen to her body, in its...... Read More

Today my friend and colleague took me on a tour of the wall around Bethlehem. The Israelis I spoke with on the interfaith listening trip said often only five percent of the wall—they prefer security fence or barrier—is a wall; the rest is a fence. In Bethlehem they say one hundred percent of the barrier...... Read More

Before folk start issuing calls for racial reconciliation… Again. No. Reconciliation is the culmination of a process that begins with conviction and leads to confession and contrition, public and private, followed by individual and communal repentance. Much like the stages of grief, these steps are not rigidly sequential, though some more easily presage others. Persons...... Read More

I got the number of a cab company and crossed smoothly in to Bethlehem. In all honesty the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) is more concerned with who comes out of the Palestinian Territories into to Israel than who goes in.  I arrived at the Diyar Consortium, a (Lutheran) church based organization that serves the people...... Read More

“Zionist” is regarded as a slur in many of the spaces in which I find myself. Settlers are regarded as (nearly) single-handedly destroying the peace process in those same spaces—inhabited by Jews as well as Muslins, Christians and non-religious folk. So it was a visceral shock to hear several of our speakers describe themselves as...... Read More

In between conversations and presentations I am going to the most sacred places in my faith, not as a scholar or priest, but as a pilgrim. My companions are my Anglican rosary gifted to me by a sister from my home church, the African Episcopal Church of Saint Thomas, and a silver medal with the...... Read More

The sheer scope of the evil manifested in the holocaust is nearly unimaginable. Today’s visit to Yad VaShem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem held the inhumanity of those who planned in meticulous detail to annihilate the Jews of Europe and began carrying out their unfathomable horror in the sharpest contrast with the fragile yet resilient...... Read More

I am on what I call a deep listening tour in Israel and Palestine with Interfaith Partners for Peace. They have selected threads to weave together in conversation, each of which is connected to other threads, tangled, torn, frayed, yet still revealing shadows and shapes larger and more complex than the frames we have. Today...... Read More

Have a seat at the table. Whose table is it? Who is issuing the invitation? Can we have a meaningful conversation when one presumes they own the table and the other disputes that claim?  It may be that no one can sit at that table. We may have to sit somewhere else to figure out...... Read More