Blackened trusses stand against the sky above the walls of an old church that burned. I often pass the corner where the church has sat
HARRISONBURG, Va. — When a person you know well makes a regrettable choice, how do you reconcile what you know about that person with his or her actions? And how do you share what you know about this person without seeming to excuse the action? These questions confronted Luke Hartman, vice president of enrollment at Eastern Mennonite University, when he saw on national news the video of resource officer Ben Fields flipping over a black student’s desk and tossing her across the classroom in a South Carolina high school.
Consecutive issues of MWR carried opinion pieces speaking negatively of the nonviolent movement to oppose Israeli military occupation of Palestinian territory. “Resolution on Mideast Harms Efforts for Peace for All Faiths” (Oct. 26) equates last summer’s Mennonite Church USA resolution on Israel-Palestine with the BDS (boycott, divest, sanction) movement and calls it “counterproductive” to the cause of peace. The piece never uses the word “occupation.” In “Pray for Peace of Jerusalem” (Nov. 9), J. Nelson Kraybill encourages us to be “agents of healing” rather than participants in “coercive boycotts.”
