I’ve not felt much like blogging today…..went to church and videotaped our daughter Kelli in a Christimas play. But spent the rest of the time staring and thinking about things like what Juan Cole talks about below, and wondering how in the world the Church got to this point. Well, I sort of know….it happens when the Church wants to be “acceptable” and then when the Church ceases to be the Church so that people have to flock to such phenomenon as some nationalistic crusade, and so atrocities like this, far from us, are quite “acceptable”.
Advent is not off to a great start. Still looking for some miraculous ray of hope. It seems that this Christmas, it will remain very much an eschatological hope.
The use of air power in Iraq has been among the more troubling policies in the post-Saddam period. It appears to be the case, from the Lancet survey, that between 40,000 and 100,000 excess deaths have occurred among Iraqi civlians since the war began, and 85 percent of those deaths were because of US aerial bombardment (these statistics were gathered excluding Fallujah, lest it skew the national averages). That is between 34,000 and 85,000 Iraqis killed by US bombing, most of them civilians. Jeffrey Sachs and Tom Engelhardt are among the few American observers who even seem to be noticing the phenomenon.