In "A Reckoning: The Price Tag for America's Wars," recently published by Commonweal magazine, Ronald Osborn asseses the economic, human, and moral costs of the Iraq War on the seventh year anniversary of the invasion. The extensive body of evidence he presents is crucial foundation for the commentary on the meaning of it all, excerpted here from the latter part of the article:
...There is every reason to fear the United States has sown seeds of hatred, suffering, waste, and insecurity that will someday return to us in forms of violence we can barely imagine. It may be, as René Girard has recently declared in conversations with Benoît Chantre (published under the title Battling to the End), that we are living in the midst of an apocalypse already set in motion. The horrific violence of
Michael Peabody's succinct and insightful history of conscientious objection to military combat is the cover feature for the July-August issue of Liberty magazine. He provides this analysis of how modern democracies motivate people to fight:
Motivating people who enjoy freedom to join a larger fight is more difficult than simply forcing them to do so at the tip of a sword. The loyalty of subjects has been replaced by patriotism and nationalism, and there is an expectation that citizens will take up the fight against the Other.
There is a formula for this rhetoric. The Other has made plans to harm our interests and will carry them out unless these plans are stopped
The world's most powerful nations are failing to implement adequate control over the transport of weapons around the world leading to serious human rights violations, according to arecent Amnesty International report. Excerpts:
[The report] highlights how transport companies registered in China, France, the Russian Federation, the UK, and the USA – the five permanent members of the UN Security Council - are able to move conventional weapons and munitions to countries where they could be used to commit rights violations and war crimes....
...Revelation is overwhelmingly concerned with the truth of God. So we should not construe the notion of different imaginative ways of perceiving the world in the vulgarly postmodern way that reduces all significant truth to matters of personal preference and ends in nihilism. Revelation gives us no warrant for mistaking images for truth itself, but it seeks images that conform to truth. It reminds us that the church's witness to the world is authentic only as primarily a witness to truth - to the one true God and the truth of his righteousness and grace. In western societies today this witness to truth does not confront a totalitarian ideology which claims sole truth and seeks to suppress the Gospel. Instead it faces a relativistic despair of the possibility of truth and, even more, a consumerist neglect of the relevance of truth. The church's witness will be of value only if it knows truth worth dying for.
Micah 2010 is a special campaign of Micah Challenge to focus on our promise to the poor, ten years after nations around the world, in the UN Millennium Development Goals committed to halve global poverty by 2015. The Seventh-day Adventist Church has pledged its support for the goals, which, in addition to poverty reduction, include improving maternal health and fighting HIV/AIDS and malaria (see "Church Cooperation With WHO to Impact Community Health," Adventist Review General Conference Bulletin for July 1, 2010, p. 4)
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