KtBlog
Poems for the Cruelest Month
All of the intensity and unpredictability of this season, the surges of hope and terror, the stirring of memory and desire—word images, symbols, and sounds arranged in rhythm, engaged in elegy and mystery may be our best bet for helping us hold it all.
Aleppo Is Us
With the recent “What is Aleppo?” gaffe by Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson, the news cycle has long moved on from the child whose image quickly became an icon of that city’s daily disaster. I first saw Omran Daqneesh on the front page of the New York Times, sitting bolt upright in an ambulance. I…
The Most Dangerous Game
David Holthouse, in Alternet, reports on the twice yearly Machine Gun Shoot in West Point, Kentucky, where he found lots of Nazi t-shirts and books and anti-Muslim paraphernalia for sale, along with, of course, deadly weapons. This “family-friendly” event is said to have a “split personality”: The rent-a-machine-gun portion of the event is family-oriented. Fathers pay…
Cautious Optimism in Cairo
My cousins in Cairo don’t watch Al Jezeera or the Egyptian-government channels. They think Qataris don’t like Egypt, and Al Jezeera is making the situation look worse than it is. And they know not to trust the state-run channels. So they watch O-TV, Orascom Television, a satellite network whose founder Naguib Sawiris says, “It will…
The Kabul Scarf
It’s New Year’s Eve, and last night my colleague at Waging Nonviolence, Eric Stoner, returned safely from Afghanistan. He was there as a journalist and activist with an envoy of peacemakers, meeting networks of Afghans and internationals who are working to end the endless war, to which so many young people in that country have…
Reverend Phelps, Your Cause Is Just!
Occasionally KtB just can’t resist sharing its space with some of the wild letter-writers we hear from on a regular basis. They, after all, are part of the cacophony choir, to the exposition of which the site is so fervently devoted. Take, as a saner preface to this, Josh Garrett-Davis’ recent piece here on Fred…
Independence Day, almost
This one day during basic training when we did a night live fire exercise crawling under exploding things made me kind of done with fireworks. I was low-crawling through the sand with tracer bullets flying overhead (“Don’t stand up, or you might get killed,” they told us, though I figured the bullets were probably higher…
Flag Day: Keshena, WI
Not two weeks ago in Kyle, SD, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, a woman caught me looking at an image of a red, white, and blue tipi drawn onto a sheet of old camp meeting ledger. In front of the tipi stood a feathered and braided brave wearing a union jack cloak with tails striped…
The Crusades: Actually Not So Bad?
The sociologist of religion Rodney Stark is back (just in time for Medieval Week) with yet another in his always-controversial oeuvre, this time with a book about the very thing we all thought we could love to hate about Christian history: the Crusades. Our friends over at Patheos recently put up an interview with Stark…
A Good Opening
From the pamphlet Sharing the Good News in Wartime The Biblical verses on some of our gunsights have caused some controversy. When asked, why not use it as an opening to share the Gospel? Here’s an example. Subject: Is that one of those Jesus rifles? Soldier: Why yes, it is. Put your hands on your…
The Songs of War
In the first years of the Iraq War, what distinguished Maj. Gen. David Petraeus’s success in the north from his fellow commanders’ difficulty in the south was his correct assessment of the “center of gravity.” The term, coined by Clausewitz, refers to the enemy’s source of strength. Petraeus understood that insurgents depend heavily on civilians—for…