In her 2019 book, The Absent Hand:Reimagining our American Landscape, (our Heartlands favorite read last year), Suzannah Lessard described the place where we are just now as atopia, a realm in which place has lost its old meaning because the kind of things that used to define our world, primarily our work, shape our physical […]
A few years ago, as I was researching a book about Israel and Palestine, [A Space for Peace in the Holy Land: Listening to Modern Israel & Palestine], I visited a refugee camp in Nablus on the West Bank. Named Balata, it was home to about 25,000 people, all living cheek by jowl in one […]
When you go to the Holy Land and discuss the current realities of Israelis and Palestinians, you’ll often hear about two biblical characters—David and Goliath. Palestinians will point out how they have been consigned to two small patches of their former homeland—Gaza and the West Bank, how Israeli settlements and security encroach on these, and […]
It was 113 degrees when I was at Qumran a few weeks ago. Set up on a ridge near the Dead Sea, the site is unforgiving—no escape from the sun, salt flats and barren wilderness in every direction, a claustrophobic gift shop and lunch room packed with tourists who never seem to make it to […]
Flagpole in Sebastia Sebastia On the highest point in Sebastia, where a Roman Temple, the Northern Kingdom’s palace, and innumerable pagan holy sites once stood, there is a ramshackle wooden flagpole sporting a small Palestinian flag. Or at least there was last week when I visited. Locals report that the flagpole is the frequent target […]
I don’t talk much on this blog about Palestine and Israel, even though you’ll see a link here to my 2014 book, A Space for Peace in the Holy Land: Listening to Modern Israel and Palestine. That’s partly due to the fact that the commitment of this site is to understanding rural life and ministry, […]
On Easter Sunday…some thoughts from my first visit to Jerusalem in 2011… I would say that the world is a hopeless place…except it’s not. Somewhere around here – at the Garden Tomb, under a church – there’s an empty tomb to prove it. It’s what we have to offer this place – emptiness. Absence. If […]
Let’s get this out of the way first: If Dan Brown wrote a book about conflict resolution it would come out looking something like The Anatomy of Peace: Resolving the Heart of Conflict. If that sounds like an endorsement to you, you’ll love this book. If, like me, you threw The DaVinci Code across the […]
We’d all like a Holy Land made in our own image. I’ve just spent two weeks in Israel and Palestine and there are a few things I’d change. Yes, ending the occupation and a two-state solution are on the list. (More on that to come.) But, less grandly, how about the simplicity of a church […]
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