World Trade Center, 2011

Various thoughts that have resonated with me over the past few days:

Patrick Smith on security theater:

The tragic irony being that the success of the 2001 conspiracy had nothing to do with airport security in the first place. This was a failure of intelligence at the FBI and CIA levels, not at the concourse checkpoint. As I’ve pointed out many times in the past, the hijackers were not exploiting a weakness in airport security, but rather a weakness in our mind-set — our presumptions, based on years of precedent, as to what a hijacking was, and how it would unfold. What weapons the men used was irrelevant. Ballpoint pens would have sufficed, for the strategy relied not on hardware, but on the element of surprise. So long as the hijackers didn’t chicken out, their plan was all but guaranteed to succeed.

I will otherwise spare my regular readers any further rehashing as to what, since then, has made our airport security apparatus so farcical and ineffective. The topic has granted more than ample coverage in this column over the past eight years. For those of you who are unfamiliar, the points are neatly summarized here. [Read full post]

James Wall on the manipulation of the day’s meaning:

Murderous crime scenes in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, became spiritual staging grounds for an international war against what Time’s Tony Karon describes as “a tiny network of transnational extremists, founded on the remnants of the Arab volunteers who’d fought in the U.S.-backed Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union.”

It did not need to come to this. [Read full post]

A call to action for young people from Be2021 and Americans for Informed Democracy:

Ten years later, we remain stunned by losses that we incurred on that day and in the years to follow; we have lost service men and women and civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, personal freedoms in the name of national security, and tolerance for those of the Islamic faith. We remember these losses on the 10th anniversary. However, September 11th should not be solely about remembrance, it needs to be about looking forward. Young people are inheriting a world that has been created as a result of September 11th. It is therefore the responsibility of youth to ensure that the world becomes the one we need it to be. In the next decade, young people will remember, but we will no longer remain stunned. [Read full post]

And finally, a reflection from Paige Eaves and Progressive Christians Uniting:

I wish we could call this 10th anniversary year a sort of Jubilee Year, like the tradition cited in Leviticus, which calls for everyone to say “I’m sorry” and be universally pardoned. The prisoners would be freed, and all debts forgiven, mostly because we need God’s mercy and a new start more than anything else. In Leviticus, Jubilee is supposed to be every

… Read the rest

We have just witnessed a McCarthy-like persecution, and Glenn Beck says that he’s not finished yet—there are other “radicals” in the White House and he’s going to go after them too.

So we need to speak up. We need to speak up with voices of reason grounded in hope. We need to name wrongdoing when we see it, and speak truth in the face of lies. We’ve seen lies grab the headlines: about the President’s birthplace, about death panels and socialized medicine, about the President’s ‘hidden agenda’ encouraging schoolchildren to study hard. Enough is enough. It’s time to name the fear that underlies the politics of hatred.

It’s time to speak clearly, in our churches, in our schools, at our kitchen tables, and at our Labor Day cook-outs—it’s time to name the lies as lies, and to counter fear with steady, strong, quiet, persistent truth.

The politics of hatred need to stop.  Politicians need to stop the propagation of lies that will undermine a just and peaceful future.  Racially tinged anger and outbursts are a harmful distraction from green jobs, healthcare reform, and other policies that will substantively improve millions of lives.

I am currently attending the 76th General Convention of the Episcopal Church as a member of the Episcopal Peace Fellowship’s Young Adult Presence.  You can read about the advocacy work that the seven other young adults and I are doing here.

Swarthmore Scriptural Reasoning Group (Courtesy of Stuart Watson, Swarthmore College)

The Scriptural Reasoning group I participated in last semester was featured in the Swarthmore College Bulletin.  Scriptural Reasoning, text studies and dialogues with Christians, Jews, and Muslims, has been a great opportunity for me.  In contrast to the living room dialogues I did in high school (which were also great), it seeks to engage the differences in interpretations between the three faiths.  Learning about how the other Abrahamic faiths view figures such as Jonah and Noah is really illuminating.  I’m looking forward to our first session of this semester, for which the Christian text is the Sermon on the Mount, this Sunday.

Photo by Florence Peters, Episcopal News Service

New York’s Episcopal Cathedral had its rededication service yesterday [Articles from the New York Times and Episcopal Life Online].  The Cathedral of St. John the Divine is a quick walk from Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and has quite the fascinating architectural history.  I visited it a few weeks ago, and despite the large partitions in place for the construction work, it was an impressive space.