Turning faith into action for peace

The Palestinian community of al-Khalil (Hebron) experienced widespread civil disruption on 4 September when incumbent Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Hebron in a scheduled appearance at the Ibrahimi Mosque in the Old City. 

One week after the Global Climate Strike, a week after a million took to the streets in Canada with some 10-12,000 marching in the city of Winnipeg, I’m facilitating a panel conversation on intergenerational activism with four brilliant Indigenous teachers, pray-ers, and warriors.  They are diverse in age (ranging from 63 to 13), from different nations, and carrying various experiences—residential school survivor, community organizer, university prof, and middle school student. And yet all speak with passion for a responsibility to traditional lands and waters. And all speak with deep concern against Settler societies’ ravenous eco-culture of dispossession and placelessness.

Indigenous people and their allies commemorate “Orange Shirt Day” on 30 September, which marks the time of year when colonial authorities took Indigenous children in Canada from their homes and families and placed them in residential schools from the 1860s to the 1990s. 

Please pray for patience on the part of asylum seekers trying to enter the U.S.  They bear great anxieties for themselves and their families as they think about what they fled, and what they will do if they are denied entry.  Please pray for empathy and understanding on the part of customs officers at the border.  Help them to consider carefully the violence and living conditions these asylum seekers have left behind.