From: Dr. James Zogby, "Bush's Tortured Legacy," truthout, 7 April 2009
Two major stories, prominently featured in The Washington Post and The New York Times last Sunday, dealt with the Bush administration's use of torture. When combined, they raised several important issues.
The front-page banner headline in The Washington Post read "Detainee's Harsh Treatment Foiled No Plots," with the subhead continuing "Waterboarding, Rough Treatment of Abu Zubaidah Produced False Leads, Officials Say."...While, early on, President Bush heralded the capture of Abu Zubaidah (calling him "a senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden"), the story notes how, within weeks of his imprisonment, analysts concluded that he was not an official member of al-Qaeda, serving more as a "travel agent" for recruits seeking to join the war in Afghanistan.
Nevertheless, the Post reports that, facing intense pressure from the White House, interrogators were pushed to use torture techniques in an effort to extract information from their prisoner. In the end, they found that the "fruit" of this torture was either
2009 Readings in Christian Social Thought Discussion Series, Week 6
Reading: N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope, Chapters 10-11.
Why is it, I have sometimes wondered, that, as Adventists understand it, the unrighteous must be roused from their graves at the end of the millennium, only to meet an already-decided fate of execution? Wouldn't it be punishment enough to leave them in non-existence? I don't yet have an explanation that neatly conforms to the narrow confines of my understanding, though the Gospel of John makes clear that it has something to do with the righteous judgment to be meted out by the Son of Man (5:24-30).
It is to such punitive aspects of the "last things" that N.T. Wright turns in this week's reading (Chapter 11), following a chapter on the redemption of our bodies (10). There is much fodder here for a good old-fashioned doctrinal discussion over such matters as purgatory (denied), intercession of saints (denied), the intermediate state ("sleep" regarded as a conscious state of blissful rest -- the "paradise" of Luke 23, and "dwelling place" of John 14), hell as a place of unceasing fiery torment (denied), and eternal punishment (affirmed with a novel, admittedly speculative theory about sub-human existence "beyond hope and pity").
However, it is once again in the central theme of final judgment that underlies all of these matters that Wright's work holds it greatest significance as a text informing Christian social thought. In it, I propose, we find one remedy for the "lifeboat" eschatology that has helped debilitate Adventist action for peace and justice in the present evil age....
In "Perilous Presence: Christians in Uganda" (Christian Century, 10 February 2009), Jason Byassee cites first-hand observations from Todd Whitmore, a Christian ethicist at the University of Notre Dame, regarding peacemaking efforts in northern Uganda in the midst of a vicious civil war that has relentlessly continued for twenty-two years:
"Christian ethicists in North America talk a lot about war, but most have never seen one. And they talk a lot about social location, but they do so from the library." Whitmore was influenced by what he learned at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, and it inspired him to live in the IDP (internally displaced people) camps in the north of Uganda, where he learned the Acholi language, gathered people's stories and, as he put it, "saw what real Christianity looks like." "The church never left northern Uganda" even when Ugandans of means and NGOs did. Seventy-eight Catholic catechists have lost their lives in the 22 years of fighting.
Whitmore found the most practically helpful people in the IDP camps to be the most apocalyptically oriented. "I call them reasonable apocalypticists," he said, and wondered if their outlook would shift with the coming of peace. In a war zone, they believe, no human effort could be relied upon for help - only God could intervene. In the U.S. people who talk that way are often accused of being mentally unstable. But in the IDP camps, "They were among the most rational. They'd ask, 'How do we cooperate with the NGOs?' Or 'We want to help with orphans.'" The Bible was written to people in crisis with promises of an intervening God; perhaps it is best read there.
Photo above from: exposugandasgenocide.blogspot.com
Recent Comments