That feels a little strange to write. There is, I suppose, a version of 69 where I settle into an easy chair, reminisce about the good old days, and slowly hand the work over to others.

But that is not where I find myself.

In some ways, I feel more alive, focused, and ready than I have in years. I have lost 40 pounds. I feel lighter on my feet. I am carrying hard-won lessons, wounds, relationships, networks, theological convictions, and a clearer sense of calling than I had when I was younger.

I am not pretending to be 39. And I am not pretending to have this all mapped out.

But I do not feel done.

What I feel, more than anything, is a convergence. Threads I have been pulling on for decades seem to be meeting in this season — and I want to steward that faithfully.

I am writing a book this year called Finding Peace in the Rubble.

The title matters to me.

Not Making Peace in the Rubble. Finding Peace.

I am not the guru. I am not the one arriving with ten easy steps, a master plan, or a polished theory of change. I am a pilgrim with a camera, a notebook, a few scars, and a growing suspicion that the people closest to the rubble may know more about peace than the rest of us.

Most of that listening, for more than twenty years now, has happened in Palestine — in homes in Bethlehem and Hebron, with pastors and activists and families living under occupation, with Christians and Muslims who keep choosing peace in conditions designed to crush it.

That is why I keep going.

That is why I keep listening.

That is why I keep trying to tell these stories.

And I will say this as clearly as I can: I want my life and work to be part of ending the occupation and helping our Palestinian friends find peace with justice.

I know that is a bold thing to say. I also know I do not carry that work alone. None of us does. It is sustained by friends, partners, and people who have chosen to walk this road with me. But things are changing, and they are not changing quickly enough for the people we know and love who are trying to survive under the weight of military occupation, displacement, economic pressure, and daily uncertainty.

This is both crucial and urgent.

Support My Next Phase of Peacemaking

So here is what this next year looks like.

And here, plainly, is where you can step into it with me.

The book is currently before two publishers. One is considering it as the inaugural book in a new series focused on themes and regions very close to the work I have been doing. The other is something of a gold-standard publisher for me — a press whose books I have purchased, read, marked up, and learned from for years. We will see which door opens first.

I am also continuing to raise support for my third documentary film, Letters from Palestine: What We Need to Hear Now.

Our planned Palestine-Israel pilgrimage has been postponed, but we are already looking toward possible fall dates. That postponement was disappointing — we had a strong group, deep relationships, and a real desire to stand again with our friends and partners in the land. But the work has not stopped. If anything, the urgency feels even clearer.

Cari and I are taking a much-needed semi-vacation through Portugal, Andalucía, and Barcelona before the summer’s deeper work begins. We need rest. We need beauty. We need wandering streets, shared meals, and time to breathe.

But even there, the themes continue.

Barcelona is where I lived years ago, and where much of my peacebuilding journey began among immigrant communities. Andalucía carries the memory of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian coexistence — and of conflict, conquest, expulsion, and the launching of the European colonial project into the Americas. In Seville, I hope to reflect on figures like Bartolomé de las Casas, the Dominican friar who became one of the early Spanish critics of the brutality of colonization.

Even at the beginning of empire, there were people saying no.

There were monks, theologians, and dissidents who saw the machinery of conquest and challenged it. That matters to me. Because one of the great temptations of our own time is to imagine that oppression is always obvious in retrospect but somehow confusing in the present.

It was not confusing to the people being crushed.

And it was not confusing to the people who chose to listen to them.

From there, I will be listening and learning in Ireland and South Africa — two places where communities have struggled against colonialism, sectarian division, apartheid conditions, and theologies that too often blessed or ignored oppression.

What I am doing is not strictly academic. It is in context. It is immersive. It is the kind of learning that only happens on the street — in living rooms and church basements and meeting halls, alongside people whose theology and politics have been shaped by struggle.

I am not going to collect ideas or case studies. I am going to listen to insiders, victims, activists, theologians, Indigenous thinkers, and peacebuilders who know, in context, what it means to resist dehumanization without surrendering their humanity.

Ireland. South Africa. Palestine.

These are not identical histories, and I do not want to flatten them into one another. But they do speak to one another. Each one raises hard questions about land, memory, theology, empire, resistance, and the role of the church — sometimes courageous, sometimes silent, and sometimes tragically aligned with the powers that crush the vulnerable.

Part of why I continue this work is because I believe listening still matters. Witness still matters. Stories still matter. Relationships still matter. Films, books, pilgrimages, sermons, conversations, and small circles of courage still matter.

And part of why I am asking — directly, plainly, as a friend — is that none of this happens without people who choose to walk it with me.

People who pray. People who give. People who show up. People who pass a story or a film along to one more friend.

This is the kind of ministry that runs on relationships, not machinery. We travel light, in more ways than one. We do not have a large institutional system behind us, but we do have deep experience, trusted partners, strong networks, and the capacity to move quickly when doors open. That is a feature, not a bug — but it does mean the work depends on you.

Support My Next Phase of Ministry

Your support is what makes the next film, the next trip, the next book, the next pilgrimage, and the next room full of people learning to listen actually possible. It funds production. It funds travel. It funds the slow, relational, patient work of accompanying people whose stories most of the world is not hearing.

So for my birthday month, I am inviting you to walk with me.

Would you consider a one-time birthday gift of $69, $690, or another amount?

Or — even better — would you become a monthly supporter at $25, $50, $69, $100, or whatever amount fits your life?

Your support goes directly to production costs for Letters from Palestine, travel for filming and formation, future trips to the Middle East, public education, writing, and the broader work of peacebuilding through Peace Catalyst International.

I have lots of dreams and plans still.

Maybe another ten years.

Maybe more.

I do not know exactly what the road ahead holds. But I know I want to spend it listening to those most impacted, telling the truth as clearly as I can, and helping more people find peace in the rubble.

Thank you for walking with me.

Not as gurus.

As pilgrims.

And maybe, by grace, as peacemakers.

P.S. If you would like a clearer picture of what life looks like right now in Palestine, I have a recent three-page report from Father Fadi Diab, an Anglican priest in Ramallah, on the current situation in the West Bank and the broader Palestinian community. It is sobering, honest, and important. Reply if you would like a copy, and I will send it to you.

A personal note: I haven't stopped taking pictures through the hard seasons of the last fifteen years — through the end of my first marriage, through the work in Palestine, through deaths and disappointments. Often I just grabbed the camera, hiked, came home, and dropped the images on Flickr or Facebook. Random. Unstructured. Holy, in its way. Or at least some form of enjoying beauty and trying to nurture wonder in spite of the mess in the world and in my own life. I want to keep doing that here too — sharing what I see, with a little more space around it. So: an image, and the story behind it.

Behind the Image
This image was made on the trail toward Dege Peak, a high point above the Sunrise area of Mount Rainier National Park, sitting just over 7,000 feet. Several years ago, a friend and I left the Seattle area around midnight, reached the Sunrise parking lot a little after 2 a.m., loaded our backpacks, camera gear, tripods, headlamps, and a small camp stove for early morning coffee, and started hiking in the dark.

Night hiking has become one of my favorite ways to meet the mountains. There are fewer people, more quiet, and a kind of attentiveness that comes when your world is reduced to footsteps, breath, and the small circle of light from a headlamp. Sometimes, in the darkness, you can see the headlamps of climbers far away on Rainier as they begin their ascent.

Somewhere between 4 and 5 a.m., we found our spot, completely alone in the high country. Before sunrise, we watched the occasional car creeping up the road toward the ranger station and visitor center, headlights and red taillights tracing ribbons of light through the dark.

Then the first orange glow touched the summit — just a small sliver at first — and slowly moved down the slopes of the mountain. Tahoma, known and loved by Native peoples long before my Scandinavian ancestors arrived, seemed to wake before the rest of the world.

Waiting. Watching. Breathing. Enjoying the quiet. It was magical.

The mountain has been here much longer than my photographs of it. I hope this one carries something of the quiet I felt that morning. If you find it helpful, send me a note here in the conversation below. If you know someone who might need it, share it with them.

I started trying to write this more than a week ago.

It was supposed to be the follow-up I promised in Part I: a reflection on the documentary Gaza, and why it knocked me on my ass.

Instead, I kept opening the laptop and closing it again.

A sentence would form, then sink. A paragraph would start to breathe, then collapse under the weight of another report, another image, another headline, another country on the edge of another war.

And meanwhile, our Palestine-Israel pilgrimage team was trying to find an alternative date to lead nearly 30 people to the region—to see what is happening, and to listen as heartbreaking, resilient peacebuilders share their stories. Our trip has been postponed. We were supposed to be packing today and leaving for the region this Friday.

It is Tuesday now.

After several failed attempts to get this post out, I think I can safely call it a verifiable fact: I am still crawling through molasses.

Not stuck exactly. Not silent exactly. Not finished. Just slow.

And then someone asks, “How are you doing?”

There it is.

The little doorway.

Most days I know how to step around it. I know the socially acceptable answers.

“Hanging in there.” “Doing okay.” “Busy, but good.” “You know how it is.”

All those little verbal handrails we grab when we do not want to fall down in public.

But the other night, Cari and I were at a beautiful, heart-warming, hope-filled event hosted by The Ayla Project, hearing updates on several families who have been successfully extracted from Gaza and are now receiving medical and psychological care in new host countries. The Ayla Project assists women, children, and families—many with critical medical needs—with stabilization, evacuation, relocation, and sustainable resettlement.¹

At one point someone asked me how I was doing.

I could feel the usual answers lining up in my mouth. Then I looked at the person asking. I knew them. I trusted them. I knew they could probably hold something heavy. I also suspected they were carrying some version of the same weight.

So I told the truth.

“I’m depressed. I have been for more than a month.”

And even as I said it, I knew that was probably the tidy version. The version you can say in a room full of people without becoming the human rain cloud hovering over the snack table.

Because that is part of it too.

How do you tell the truth without becoming Debbie Downer in every circle, every dinner, every church hallway, every “how are you doing?”

How do you answer honestly when the honest answer is: I do not know how to talk about the scale of suffering anymore without saying too much. Or nothing at all.

And yes, I want to move on too.

I want a normal week. I want to think about Mother’s Day and my mother who is no longer with us but seems to weigh in on so many questions and conversations I continue to have with her. I want to answer emails. I want to enjoy what’s popping up in our garden. Can’t I just bloom for a minute and show my smiley face to the world like the clematis opening up in our front yard?

I want the stalemate with Iran to stop. I want the prospect of another widening war to disappear from the corner of my nervous system. I want military powers to stop killing people and then calling the killing “strategy,” “deterrence,” “security,” or “stability.” And as certain leaders in the Christian world baptize these incredibly horrible incursions into a place they know so little about, killing people they give a shit about, I ask the question as a Christian, “who are my people?” Surely, not these!

But that is what scares me.

Because moving on is part of what the machinery of violence depends on. Not always our approval. Often just our fatigue.

Our attention wanders. Our nervous systems protect themselves. Our inboxes fill up. The workweek begins. The next holiday comes. The news cycle turns the page. The baseball season is in full swing.

And somewhere, beneath all of that, people with power count on the rest of us becoming too tired to keep looking.

Stagnation

The Saturday before last, Father Fadi Diab—an Anglican priest in Ramallah and one of the clearest Palestinian Christian voices I know—began a talk our local activist group hosted with a word that has stayed lodged in me:²

Stagnation.

That was the word.

Not peace. Not resolution. Not repair. Not even aftermath.

Stagnation.

Father Fadi said that what is most frustrating for Palestinians right now is “the stagnation of the current situation.” Nothing is happening that points to hope for them and a resolution to the existential crisis they continue to live on a daily basis. Two and a half years after October 7, Palestinians are still living in the same machinery of pressure, fear, deprivation, and abandonment. In Gaza, even when there is “less violence,” he said, “it continues to be violent.” People continue to suffer shortages of food, water, and sanitation. People continue to live with fear, anxiety, oppression, and hunger. And now, he said, what was once not acceptable has become normalized.

That is the sentence I needed.

Not because it explains everything. Because it names the thing that is happening in plain sight.

The world is adjusting.

The world is learning how to live with what it has allowed.

The violence does not disappear. It gets absorbed. It becomes part of the daily weather report. It becomes the thing happening “over there.” It becomes one more update from Gaza, one more checkpoint in the West Bank, one more village in southern Lebanon, one more warning about Iran.

And the victims become abstractions.

They are “Palestinians.”

Not children. Not mothers. Not fathers. Not Christians. Not Muslims. Not students. Not farmers. Not patients. Not priests. Not poets. Not people with gardens and jokes and bills and cousins and wedding photos.

Just Palestinians.

And in the moral imagination of too many people, especially too many Christians formed by fear, October 7 becomes the all-purpose permission slip.

They are Palestinians. They are terrorists. They are human shields. They voted for this. They brought this on themselves. They hate their neighbors in Israel more than they love their children.

Once that story takes hold, almost anything can be done to them.

The West Bank as a Giant Prison

Father Fadi did not talk about stagnation as a feeling. He talked about it as a structure.

He described the West Bank as a giant prison.

Every city and village can now be locked behind a metal gate. The only thing a soldier has to do is close the entrance, and an entire town is trapped inside. He talked about villages turned into ghettos, locked behind gates and checkpoints and roadblocks. He had been in Aboud the day before, meeting with a community struggling to keep its land after settlers pushed them off it. He described one settler, his wife, and two daughters placing a caravan (like a mobile trailer) and occupying the west side of the village, telling Palestinian families they could no longer enter their own land.

OCHA now documents 925 movement obstacles across the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem—the highest number recorded in twenty years. These include checkpoints, road gates, earthmounds, roadblocks, trenches, and other barriers that restrict the movement of 3.4 million Palestinians.³

Not one wall, but a thousand little interruptions to ordinary life.

A geography of humiliation.

A map that says: your time is not yours, your road is not yours, your village is not yours, your future is not yours.

Open-air prison.

That is what Father Fadi told us.

Not as metaphor only.

As morning routine. As school run. As ambulance delay. As the sick person waiting at a checkpoint trying to get to the ER. As the farmer watching his own land become unreachable. As the mother wondering whether her child will make it home.

And the strategy, as Father Fadi named it, is not hidden. Area C is 60 to 65 percent of the West Bank. When rural life becomes unworkable—when people cannot get to jobs, schools, clinics, or their land—families move into the cities. The villages empty. The cities become larger ghettos. The land becomes easier to annex.

This is not stagnation as in nothing is moving.

It is stagnation as in nothing is being stopped.

From Liberation to Survival

This may have been the most devastating part of Father Fadi’s talk.

He said Palestinian dreams have changed.

From liberation and self-determination to the arduous efforts just to reach a workplace. From equality as a human being to desperate searching for a simple job. From freedom to feeding children. From political imagination to monthly survival.

“What people care about today,” he said, “is employment—the ability to keep your work, the ability to keep feeding your children.” When the pressure becomes intense enough, people will accept whatever crumbs are offered simply for safety, security, and food. Survival becomes the number one goal for every Palestinian family: How can I stay alive for tomorrow? How can I continue to bring food and buy medication for the next month?

I have heard versions of this from Palestinian friends for years.

But hearing Father Fadi say it so plainly lodged somewhere in me.

A people should not have to shrink their dreams down to survival.

And yet that is what occupation does. That is what siege does. That is what abandonment does. That is what happens when the world decides that some people’s lives are perpetually negotiable.

Gaza Is Not “Post-War”

And Gaza itself is not “post-war.”

Gaza is being carved into zones, lines, danger areas, military corridors, and shifting maps that ordinary people cannot safely read. Reuters reported in late April that recent Israeli-issued maps place nearly two-thirds of Gaza under effective Israeli control.⁴

The Washington Post has documented how Israeli enforcement of the so-called Yellow Line has killed hundreds of Palestinians since the October ceasefire — civilians shot near their homes, on their roads, on their way to work.⁵ Among them was Basma Aram Banat, a 27-year-old mother from Beit Lahia. In February, she was on her way to her job at an educational center, her children with her, when Israeli vehicles opened fire near Beit Lahia Square. Her brother said her children ran screaming, “Our mother has been martyred.” Her husband, Mousa Warsh Agha, holding their infant Ibrahim, asked a reporter, “What do I tell them when they ask every day, ‘Where is our mother?’”

That is the kind of sentence that stops me.

Not because I do not know how to analyze it.

Because I do.

That is the problem.

I know how to analyze occupation, militarized borders, Christian Zionism, Islamophobia, Western complicity, media framing, and the moral collapse of religious language in the service of state violence. I’ve been in this space for nearly 20 years. It’s getting worse, and our friends in Palestine are exhausted. Disillusioned. Trying to survive. Giving up on the kinds of dreams we give ourselves permission to dream.

But sometimes analysis feels obscene beside a two-year-old calling for his mother.

The Review I Still Cannot Write

So this is not the film review I promised.

Maybe I will write that someday. But not today.

Not because the film is unimportant. Quite the opposite.

The 2019 documentary Gaza, directed by Garry Keane and Andrew McConnell, premiered at Sundance and portrays the everyday lives of Gazans under siege.⁶

That is what knocked me on my ass.

It showed Gaza before. Before the current destruction. Before the rubble became almost total. Before so many people and places in the film were likely killed, displaced, shattered, or forever changed.

It showed people, streets, buildings, rooms, fishermen, children, kitchens, music, shoreline, arguments, dreams.

It showed a place still intact enough to be filmed as a living human world.

And now I find myself asking: what date do we use as the reference point?

Before October 7? Before the ground invasion? Before Rafah? Before the “safe zones” became killing zones? Before schools became shelters, then targets, then rubble? Before hospitals were emptied, raided, bombed, rendered nonfunctional, or turned into places where doctors had to practice medicine without the basic tools of medicine?

How do you review a film about Gaza when the place it filmed has been so systematically destroyed?

According to an April 2026 OCHA humanitarian update, over 370,000 housing units and nearly all schools in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged. More than half of hospitals are nonfunctional. Gaza’s economy has contracted by 84 percent. A UN/EU/World Bank assessment estimates $35.2 billion in physical infrastructure damage, $22.7 billion in economic and social losses, and $71.4 billion in recovery and reconstruction needs over the next decade. Human development in Gaza, the report says, has been pushed back by 77 years.⁷

So I am not ready to write a film review.

Because I am still trying to figure out how to talk about the scale of largely unimpeded destruction we have allowed since then.

Not “we” in some vague human sense.

We, as in those of us whose government arms this. We, as in those of us whose churches often bless or excuse this. We, as in those of us who have been taught to call Palestinian life complicated and Palestinian death unfortunate. We, as in those of us who keep finding ways to move on.

That is part of why I am still crawling through molasses.

The film showed Gaza as a place.

The world has treated Gaza as a problem.

And now we are left trying to find words for what happens when a place is destroyed while the problem remains unsolved.

And the same pattern is unfolding now in southern Lebanon—villages attacked, homes demolished, neighborhoods flattened so that people have nothing to return to. Father Fadi connected it to Gaza and to 1948: destroy what people would return to, and return itself becomes impossible. A military phrase laid over a human world. The people who lived there told not to come back.

The Thing We Do Not Want to Know

Part of what makes this so heavy is not only that terrible things are happening.

It is that we know enough.

We know enough to know that we are implicated. And that is what we do not want.

We do not want to be la mala de la película—the bad one in the movie. The villain. The one who seemed decent enough, harmless enough, respectable enough, until the camera widened and we saw the system they were helping to preserve.

Most of us do not wake up wanting to be cruel.

We want to be kind people with manageable lives. We want to love our families, answer our emails, go to church, make dinner, post a photo, watch a show, sleep at night.

We do not want to look too long at the fact that our government funds this. That our churches often bless this. That our silence helps normalize this. That our inherited fears about Muslims and Arabs have made Palestinian suffering feel distant, suspicious, explainable, or deserved.

We want to move on.

Not always because we are malicious. Sometimes because we are tired. Sometimes because we are overwhelmed. Sometimes because we feel helpless. Sometimes because our nervous systems are not built to carry live-streamed atrocity for months and years.

But there is another reason too.

We want to move on because staying would require us to change.

It would require us to ask why Palestinian suffering has been so easy for Western Christians to minimize. It would require us to ask why we have been more afraid of being accused of taking a side than of failing to love our neighbors. It would require us to ask what kind of discipleship formed people who can read the Sermon on the Mount and still defend the destruction of a people.

I am tired of asking those questions.

But I am more afraid of what happens if we stop.

Where Christ Is

The celebration event hosted by our friends at The Ayla Project last week helped.

Not because it fixed anything. It did not.

But Cari and I cried several times as we listened to stories of children receiving care, families being accompanied, and people doing the slow, practical, stubborn work of saving lives.

We heard about children with critical medical needs being treated. We heard about families carried through impossible bureaucratic and geographical barriers. We heard about people refusing to accept that Gaza’s children are disposable.

And I thought about the strange and holy image of Pope Francis’s popemobile being turned into a mobile health clinic for children in Gaza through Caritas Jerusalem. Vatican News called it his “final gift to Gaza.”⁸

A symbol of religious visibility repurposed for wounded children.

A vehicle once used to carry a pope through crowds now being prepared to carry care toward children who have been abandoned by the world.

A popemobile turned into a pediatric clinic.

It has not yet become what it is meant to become, because even mercy has to pass through bureaucratic and political checkpoints.

This is the part where my Protestant self starts wondering whether the Catholics are trying to win me over.

That feels like a parable. Maybe even a sacrament.

Not enough, of course. Never enough.

But still something.

A refusal.

A small act of defiance against the idea that death gets the final word.

And Father Fadi, after naming all of that suffering, did not end in despair.

He talked about Easter. He talked about Palestinian Christians coming to church, attending Holy Week, carrying the Holy Fire through the streets, scouts marching and playing music, communities still bearing witness to the love of God in the land of Jesus.

“This is not a dying community,” he said. “This is a living community.” Though frustrated, crushed, and exploited, they continue to carry the light of Christ to their larger society. Father Fadi called that grace a miracle. He called it Pentecost—the power of the Spirit giving people courage to keep going despite all that has happened.

That may be the only way I know how to end this.

Not with optimism. Not with a clean bow. Not with the kind of hope that asks us to skip over the tomb.

But with the stubborn witness of people who keep carrying light.

So yes, I am still crawling through molasses.

But maybe that is not the same as doing nothing.

Maybe this is what faithfulness feels like some weeks: not triumph, not clarity, not the clean moral energy of a well-crafted essay.

Maybe some weeks faithfulness is just refusing to close the laptop before telling the truth.

Maybe it is refusing to let the word “stagnation” become normal.

Maybe it is naming the prison even when the prison has gates and roads and maps and bureaucratic language.

Maybe it is saying the mother’s name.

Maybe it is remembering that Gaza was never only rubble. Lebanon is not only a buffer zone. The West Bank is not only an occupation map. Iran is not only a strategic problem.

These are human worlds.

Homes. Children. Churches. Mosques. Olive trees. Grandmothers. Wedding dresses. School books. Photographs. Bread. Graves. Songs. Keys.

And if our theology cannot see that, then our theology has become one more wall—and perhaps the millstone tied around the neck of our own Christianity.

So when someone asks me how I am doing, I may still reach first for the easy answer.

But the truer answer is this:

I am grieving. I am angry. I am tired. I am implicated. I am still trying to listen. I am still trying to see. I am still trying not to become numb.

And somehow, by the mercy of God, I am still moving.

Slowly.

Through molasses.

Endnotes / Source Notes

Footnotes

1. The Ayla Project describes its work as assisting in the stabilization, evacuation, and relocation of women, children, and families, many with critical medical needs, while also addressing family needs for sustainable resettlement. See: https://theaylaproject.org/about/ ↩

2. Father Fadi Diab is the Rector of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Ramallah and St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Birzeit. He is a Palestinian Anglican priest, theologian, writer, advocate for justice and peace, co-author of the Kairos Palestine document, and board member of Kairos Palestine. Bio: https://episcopalparishes.org/portfolio/2025-keynote-bios/ ↩

3. OCHA’s April 2026 West Bank movement and access fact sheet documents 925 movement obstacles across the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, restricting the movement of 3.4 million Palestinians. See: https://www.ochaopt.org/content/movement-and-access-west-bank-april-2026 ↩

4. Reuters reported on April 29, 2026, that newly issued Israeli maps placed nearly two-thirds of Gaza under Israeli control. Reuters wire reprint via Al-Monitor: https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2026/04/israeli-maps-outline-expanded-zone-military-control-gaza ↩

5. The Washington Post has reported on the deadly enforcement of Gaza’s “Yellow Line” since the October 2025 ceasefire: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/01/03/israel-yellow-line-gaza-ceasefire/. The specific account of Basma Aram Banat’s killing in Beit Lahia on February 22, 2026, including the quotes from her brother and husband Mousa Warsh Agha, was reported by Anadolu Agency: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israeli-bullets-continue-to-claim-palestinian-lives-at-gaza-yellow-line-/3840848 ↩

6. Gaza is a 2019 documentary directed by Garry Keane and Andrew McConnell; it premiered at Sundance and portrays everyday life in Gaza. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_(film) ↩

7. OCHA’s April 23, 2026 humanitarian situation report includes the Gaza destruction and recovery figures summarized here, including housing, schools, hospitals, economic contraction, and recovery needs. See: https://www.ochaopt.org/content/humanitarian-situation-report-23-april-2026 ↩

8. Vatican News reported that Pope Francis requested that his popemobile be turned into a mobile health clinic for children in Gaza, calling it his “final gift to Gaza.” See: https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2025-05/the-popemobile-of-peace-pope-francis-final-gift-to-gaza.html ↩

The Image: April 2026

Looking straight up inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. In the center of the frame sits a small, ornate stone chapel — the structure that traditionally marks the tomb of Jesus. Above it, a great dome lifts away into the air, and at the very top a round opening lets in a single column of daylight. Golden rays fan out from that opening like a sunburst pressed into the ceiling. Columns, arches, and carved stone frame the scene from every side. Candles flicker at the edges. The whole room feels heavy with centuries — and yet somehow still open at the top, still breathing, still letting the light in.

A quick, honest note before we go further. Cari and I do this writing alongside our actual peacebuilding work with Peace Catalyst International. If something here resonates and you want to partner with that work directly, the most meaningful way is through our ministry page at peacecatalyst.org/larsens. We’re not trying to fundraise our way into existence — we’re trying to build a movement of people committed to working for peace, not just thinking or talking about it. If you’d rather simply support the writing, a free or paid Substack subscription helps too. Either way, the most valuable thing you can do is pass this along to someone who needs it.

The Making

I took this photo inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, standing near the center of the round room beneath the great dome and pointing my camera straight up. For those who haven’t been, the small stone chapel you see in the middle of the frame is what houses the tomb itself — the place of burial, and, for those of us shaped by the resurrection story, the place where death did not get the last word. (Guidebooks call this inner shrine the “Edicule,” but you don’t need the word to feel what it is.)

I have been inside this church many times. It is never simple. Every visit is a crowd of languages, incense, footsteps, and centuries colliding in one room. You can feel the weight of it. You can also feel the strange, stubborn tenderness of it — the way people from every corner of the world come here to touch stone, to light a candle, to whisper something they’ve carried for miles.

For this image, I wanted to escape the crush of the crowd at ground level and look up. The tomb itself is sacred, but it’s also constantly surrounded. The dome, on the other hand, is quieter. It’s where the building stops trying to explain itself and simply opens.

I crouched low with a wide lens, placed the little chapel into the lower third of the frame, and let the curving walls and arches above it sweep the eye upward toward the round opening at the top. The exposure was a balancing act — the room is dim, the opening is burned bright by the sky, and the dome’s details fall somewhere in between. I set the camera to read the middle tones of the stone, braced myself against a column to steady the shot, and trusted that the light coming down through the opening would hold the frame together.

Photo Instruction (Today’s Tip): Look up in sacred spaces.

Most people, when they enter a cathedral, mosque, temple, or historic sanctuary, instinctively photograph whatever is at eye level — the altar, the icon, the tomb, the door. Those images have their place. But the real architecture of a sacred space is almost always in the ceiling. Builders and artisans across centuries have poured their best work into the part of the room most people never notice, because they were trying to point the eye — and the heart — upward.

Three practical notes when you try this:

First, steady yourself. Indoor light is dim, so your camera will take the picture more slowly, and any little shake will blur it. Lean against a column, brace your elbows on a pew, or set the camera on a ledge and use a short timer. No flash — it flattens the light the building has worked centuries to shape.

Second, find the center and aim for it. Domes almost always have a single high point — a round window, a skylight, a painted medallion, a hanging lamp. Let whatever sits at the very top of the ceiling become the still point of your photograph, the place the eye comes to rest.

Third, include a hint of the ground. A bit of the altar, the tomb, the pews, or a candle in the bottom of the frame tells the viewer where they are standing while they look up. Without that anchor, a photograph of a ceiling can feel abstract. With it, the image becomes a small story: I stood here, and this is what was above me.

The Meaning

Easter has already come and gone this year, and I am still sitting with it.

It was a tense Holy Week in Jerusalem. Access to the Old City and to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher itself was restricted by Israeli authorities under the familiar banner of “security.” Pilgrims and local Christians alike were turned away, rerouted, made to wait at checkpoints, or locked out entirely. The reasons offered were the reasons that are always offered. But anyone who has watched this pattern for long enough knows that “security” is often the language power uses when what it actually means is control — who gets in, who is kept out, who is seen as a threat simply for trying to worship in their own city.

I don’t want to turn this month’s post into a diatribe. There are places and moments for that, and I have written plenty of them. But I want to sit with something more layered this time, because the Easter story itself will not let me stay in outrage alone.

Consider the irony. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is built around a tomb that could not hold its occupant. The central claim of the place is that a stone was rolled away, a seal was broken, and a body that powerful men had tried very hard to make disappear turned up alive anyway. The whole point of this building is that you cannot control resurrection.

And yet here we are, two thousand years later, with soldiers at the gates of that same building deciding who gets to come in and worship the God who walked out of a tomb.

The dissonance is almost too on the nose.

I think about that as I look at this image. The small chapel sits in the center — a stone shell around a stone slab, a tomb inside a tomb inside a church. Human hands have layered shrine upon shrine for centuries, trying to protect, honor, and, yes, sometimes control the meaning of this place. The various Christian traditions that share this building famously do not always get along; they have squabbled over every inch of floor and every minute of liturgy for so long that the key to the front door is held by two Muslim families as a kind of neutral arrangement.

But above all of that — above the chapel, above the shrines, above the arguments, above the soldiers, above the politics of who gets in and who gets turned away — the dome opens to the sky. The light still falls.

That is the part I keep coming back to.

Peacebuilding, for me, has to hold both things at once. It has to name clearly what is happening — the closures, the cruelty, the way “security” becomes a cover for domination. It has to refuse to let those things become normal. At the same time, it cannot let despair have the last word, because despair is itself a kind of capitulation to the powers that want us exhausted and numb.

The empty tomb is not a sentimental comfort. It is a claim that the worst things done by the most powerful people can still be undone. It is a refusal to accept that might makes right. It is a stubborn trust that light keeps falling through the opening, even when the gates are closed.

This month’s image reminds me that the sky above the tomb cannot be sealed shut.

It reminds me that the dome is still open.

It reminds me that whatever the powerful do with their checkpoints and their “security” and their guns, they have not yet figured out how to keep the light out.

Peace work, in a year like this one, is partly about keeping that opening visible. Pointing to it. Photographing it. Naming it. Walking toward it. Refusing to forget it is there.

A Practice

Try this once this week:

The Open Dome Practice (about 7 minutes):

Find a place where you can look up — a tall room, a stairwell, a window with sky above it, a tree canopy, or even this photograph itself. If you can, do this outside, at dusk or just after sunrise, when the light is changing.

Sit or stand for a moment and feel the weight of whatever you have been carrying this week. The news. The losses. The things that feel out of your hands. Don’t rush past them. Let them be present.

Now, slowly, lift your gaze. Look up until the ceiling, the branches, or the sky fills your field of vision. Breathe in for a count of four. Hold for a count of four. Breathe out for a count of six.

As you breathe, ask yourself:

What in me is sealed shut this week?

Where is the light still trying to get in?

Then write one sentence, in whatever notebook or note you keep:

“The dome is still open where...”

Complete the sentence with whatever rises — a person, a place, a memory, a piece of music, a small act of goodness you witnessed, a truth you cannot unlearn.

For me this week, the dome is still open in the pilgrims who walked up to closed gates and prayed anyway. In the neighbors in Jerusalem — Christian, Muslim, Jewish — who refuse to let the worst versions of their governments define them. In the stubborn rhythm of Holy Week liturgy that continues whether or not the powerful permit it. In every person, here and there, who keeps choosing to see the humanity of the other.

The stone does not get to win. Not ultimately. Not in the long arc. The light keeps falling through the opening at the top.

And our work, in the meantime, is to keep looking up — and to keep walking toward the door.

Calendar & Index — 2026

• January: Mt. Shuksan — Steadfastness / stillness within motion

• February: The Bench in the In-Between — permission to pause / holding two seasons at once

• March: Remembering the Path — memory as resistance to despair

• April (you are on this one here): The Light Still Falls — resurrection, control, and the open dome

  
  (And month by month, we keep learning to see)

  

What follows is personal, unfiltered, and heavy. It is not a policy brief. It does not offer the kind of balance that too often functions as erasure. It is the honest account of someone who has been to these places, knows these people by name, and is still trying to get up off the floor. If you are looking for comfortable, this is not it. If you are looking for true — read on.

This is Part 1 of 2. Part 2 is a review of the 2019 documentary Gaza — one of the most important films you can watch right now. But I needed to write this first.

Sometimes life knocks you on your ass.

I’m not being dramatic. I mean it in the most ordinary, embodied, sitting-on-the-floor sense. You look around and make a quick assessment: Do I have the capacity to get back up? Do I even want to? Maybe you’re not looking for a solution. Maybe you’re just looking for a handrail. Something to grab while you crawl back to standing.

That’s where I am.

Watching the documentary Gaza last night was walking back into some of the darkest moments of the last several years. The wind knocked out of me — emotionally, spiritually. And even though this is ultimately a matter of the heart — I am not Palestinian, I do not live in Gaza or Lebanon — there is a physical manifestation in my own body that I cannot ignore. It shows up in drooped shoulders. Heavy limbs. An emotional inertia that makes getting out of bed feel like an act of will. Shave. Walk to the car. Go shopping. I can’t smile. Laughter seems like it was frozen out of my emotional bandwidth way too long ago.

On Easter Sunday, Cari and I served communion at our church. It was genuinely beautiful — watching the span of different faces, different pigmentation, different stories file past us as we looked each person in the eye and said: This is my body and blood, shed for you. There was something holy in that.

And yet Easter was painful this year. For those old enough to remember, ABC’s Wide World of Sports opened every week with “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” — two things that don’t belong in the same sentence, except in the strange theater of American sports culture where we’ve learned to hold them together without feeling the weight of either. That’s what Easter felt like this year. Resurrection and genocide in the same breath. “He is risen,” and “how are you” in the same sentence. Joy and devastation forced into the same emotional space with no separation. And unlike a sporting event, nobody gets to turn the channel.

What has helped me — and I mean this with real theological weight, not a tidy bow — was not Easter Sunday itself but the Sunday after. Our preacher, Brandi Miller, gave us the road to Emmaus. Those two followers of Jesus walking away from Jerusalem in grief and confusion, talking with the risen Christ and not recognizing him. I have heard many sermons on that passage. I have preached a few myself. But this one gave us something I desperately needed: permission. Permission to feel the full weight of the unresolved. Permission to walk in grief before arriving at recognition. Permission to be exactly where we are without pretending we are somewhere else.

I want to be honest: that sermon gave me a handrail. It did not get me off the floor. I am still in this season. Still crawling. Still reaching. The coffee maker is about as far as I can manage some mornings. But the handrail is something. It is not nothing.

I want to try to tell you something about what it would mean to actually live inside this. Not metaphorically. Literally.

Imagine growing up in a strip of land 25 miles long and 7 miles wide. You live along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea — one of the most beautiful bodies of water on earth — and you cannot swim in it beyond a certain point without being shot at. You cannot fish beyond a certain distance without the navy turning you back. You have electricity for a few hours a day. The economy has been strangled. You have watched Israel “mow the grass”* every two years or so — bombing campaigns that kill your friends, flatten your neighborhoods, and then pause long enough for the world to move on before beginning again. And since 2023, the scale of the destruction has made Gaza into something harder to name — a laboratory of human suffering that is deliberately, systematically, overwhelmingly cruel. There are people in Gaza now who say they hope to die by a bomb rather than survive in the conditions being forced upon them.

I am not Palestinian. I know the difference. But I have been to these places. I have stood at that fence. I have looked into the eyes of people who live this every day. And I cannot un-know what I know.

* “Mowing the grass” is not my phrase. It is theirs. It is the language used by Israeli military and political strategists to describe periodic military operations in Gaza — the idea being that Palestinian resistance is like grass that grows back and must be cut down again regularly. Sit with that. A human population described as lawn maintenance. A people whose periodic killing has been so normalized that it has its own clinical agricultural metaphor. This is not the fringe talking. This is the language of policy. This is what dehumanization sounds like when it puts on a suit and goes to work.

And then there is my own government.

We watch our leaders invoke Christian language and imagery — with what appears to be genuine religious conviction — to frame what is happening as righteous, even holy. Our Secretary of War. And now this week, our President. Crusade language. Biblical overtones draped over missile strikes and blockades and the slow strangulation of a civilian population. It is breathtaking in the worst possible way.

But I want to say the silent part out loud, because this is where it gets closer to home for me. It is not only the wingnuts. It is not only the loud, flag-waving, end-times-obsessed slice of American Christianity that bears responsibility here. It is the quieter, more nuanced, more respectable Christians — many of them in my own tribe — who allow all of this to pass without comment, censure, or so much as a pause. People who know better. Who went to seminary. Who quote Bonhoeffer in one breath and fall silent about Gaza in the next. People whose careful neutrality and polite both-sidesism end up functioning as permission. As consent. As a kind of slow, dignified complicity.

Jesus said that salt which has lost its taste is good for nothing except to be thrown out and trampled. I don’t know how else to say it, friends. We have lost our taste. We have lost our nerve. And the world — and the people of Gaza, and Lebanon, and the West Bank — are paying the price for our silence.

And then Lebanon. Residential high-rises collapsing under the weight of missiles stamped Made in the USA. Another million people displaced. Civilians murdered in cold blood. And then Iran. And the world’s attention span twitching toward the next thing.

I am still on the floor.

I am not heroically on the floor. I am not nobly suffering. I am crawling — slowly, clumsily — back toward the easy chair, reaching for the remote.

And then Cari and I watched Gaza.

This film tells the story of before. Of 2018 and 2019. Of what was already happening before October 7th, before the genocide, before Lebanon, before all of it. And we were there. Close to the scene of what the world had already decided it could live with.

Part 2 of this 2-parter is my review of the film. My thoughts on the movie come next. When I get enough umph to get off the floor. But I needed you to be on the floor with me first before I could take you there.

Andy Larsen serves with Peace Catalyst International and teaches peacemaking at North Park Theological Seminary. He and his wife Cari co-lead their ministry work together. His documentary Letters from Palestine, and book, Finding Peace in the Rubble, is forthcoming.

We had a pilgrimage planned for May. Twenty-nine of us, ready to walk into the West Bank — not as tourists, not as observers, but as learners and witnesses, meeting the people whose names we’ve been praying for since last year. It was the kind of trip we had dreamed of and prayed for for months.

Today, we made the painful decision to postpone.

It didn’t come easily. After listening carefully to several trusted partners and a sober, candid conversation with our contacts on the ground, we knew. The current escalation made it unlikely the trip could become what we had hoped and prayed for it to be — and we were unwilling to move forward at the risk of jeopardizing the ongoing work of our peacebuilding partners, whose labor continues under extraordinarily difficult conditions. And we carry a real responsibility for the twenty-nine people who had entrusted us with their safety — in a region where conditions are not stabilizing. They are worsening.

So we are not going in May.

We are grieving this.

But we do not see this as a cancellation. We see it as a postponement — and we are already exploring alternative dates. Our solidarity with our friends and partners on the ground is not contingent on our ability to travel.

War is very good at interrupting the holy work of encounter, truth-telling, and human connection. It has had a lot of practice.

Which is why King’s words sting the way they do. Those of us who love peace have to be at least as organized, as persistent, as unwilling to quit, as those who prosecute war. That’s not a metaphor. That’s a description of the work.

Pilgrimage postponed. Peacemaking not canceled.

Quest Church, Seattle. Lincoln Park, Seattle. One week

(A note: I spell it “fotos” — a small nod to years spent in Mexico and Spain, where peacemaking first got under my skin.)

Last Sunday, after church, we screened With God on Our Side at Quest Church.* When it ended nobody left. We sat in a circle — many of them the age of my own children — and stayed for nearly three hours. Processing. Grieving. Asking hard questions about faith and violence and what it means to follow Jesus when bombs are falling on Iran.

What I kept thinking was: this is the church I believe in. Not the one that gives theological cover to empire. This one. Circles of people who refuse the world as it is.

Then I was going through old photos and found this — a winter evening at Lincoln Park, the sun burning through the clouds over Puget Sound. That’s what the sun looks like some days in Seattle. Still there. Insisting. I took it in a different heavy season, and it stopped me cold this week because of a verse from John’s gospel I’ve been carrying:

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. — John 1:5

Not “the darkness went away.” Not “everything got better.” Just — the light held. It has always held.

One thing: Find your circle this week. Show up. Stay longer than feels comfortable.

Friday Fotos is always free — forward it to someone who needs it today.

* With God on Our Side (2010), directed by Porter Speakman Jr., examines the theology of Christian Zionism — a movement, largely American evangelical in origin, that teaches unconditional support for Israeli government policies as a matter of biblical obligation. Dwarfing its Jewish counterpart in size and political influence, Christian Zionism has profoundly shaped U.S. policy in the region — often at tremendous cost to Palestinians, including Palestinian Christians. Watch it free on Tubi or YouTube.

(A note: I spell it “fotos” — a small nod to the years I spent in Mexico and Spain, where peacemaking first got under my skin.) Note: scroll down to see the photo.

I was walking with a lot on my mind when I almost stepped over these. Daffodils, pushing through the mulch right at the edge of the path. Behind them, barely in focus, someone running. Living their Friday. The lake catching the last of the light.

I’ve been thinking about Iran this week. About a pilgrimage that may or may not happen. About the gap between the world’s cruelty and the stubborn insistence of spring. And then this — a flower that didn’t ask permission, didn’t wait for the news to improve, didn’t need the world to be safe before it opened.

I don’t want to over-spiritualize a daffodil. But I do think beauty is a form of resistance. Not escape — resistance. It says: we are still here. Life is still pressing through.

One thing: Go outside today. Find one thing that’s still beautiful. Let it matter.

This post is always free — forward it to someone who needs beauty today.

“If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace.”
— Luke 19:42

This afternoon I found myself doing what too many of us do when the world feels like it is coming apart: scrolling.

I read the reporting on Iran again. Not just bombs falling, but ancient beauty and collective memory being torn apart. Golestan Palace in Tehran. The cultural treasures of Isfahan. Mosques, palaces, gardens — places that have stood through dynasties, invasions, revolutions, and war. Sites carrying the memory of a people are now shattered in the name of military necessity.

And then I saw the graph making the rounds: a majority of likely voters saying they believe Trump’s military action against Iran was motivated, at least in part, by the desire to distract from the Epstein scandal.

That matters.

It is one thing to watch your country go to war.
It is another to suspect that war itself is being used as spectacle, diversion, or political cover.

That lands somewhere deep in the soul.

It has already been a heavy week.

A little over a week ago, I attended my first iftar of Ramadan this season. Since then, I’ve shared more than one table with Muslim friends. One evening I was invited to speak in a mosque. My Imam friend wanted his community to hear from a Christian who could say clearly that not all Christians are swimming in the dark waters of Christian nationalism. Not all of us are cheering domination, conflating empire with faith, or calling cruelty righteousness.

That mattered to me.

It mattered because many in that room were from Iran or the broader Middle East. They know what it is to live under threat, to carry memory across borders, to be spoken about by powerful men who do not know their names. They also know what it is to wonder whether Christianity in America has anything left to say besides blessing bombs, borders, and brute force.

And now, only days later, I am watching my country help rain destruction down on Iran. Again. And again.

No matter how many briefings, talking points, or cable-news justifications are offered, this is what many in the world will see: barbarians with advanced weaponry, striking not only military targets but the memory of a people — and schools full of children whose parents expected them to come home alive. We are the ones shattering mirrored halls, breaking tiles laid by human hands centuries ago, burying little ones in the rubble of their schools and homework, and calling it strategy.

Because of us. While the public is being jerked around over the Epstein files, children are dying at their school desks. Don’t tell me we are a nation that truly cares about children.

I can feel that in my soul.

There is a moral injury in belonging to a nation that so often speaks the language of civilization while behaving with astonishing disregard for human life, memory, and beauty. I say that with grief. I say it as someone who has spent years trying to build relationships across religious and cultural lines. I say it as someone who sat in a mosque recently and felt, again, the quiet holiness of being welcomed by people our politics so often caricature or menace.

This afternoon, after too much news and too much heaviness, I did something small.

I put down the phone.
I drank a glass of water.
I went outside in the rain and took a photo of a flower.

A purple hyacinth, wet with raindrops, announcing it’s springtime.

When the headlines made me ashamed of my country, I went outside looking for something still alive.

That did not change the headlines. It did not make the bombing less obscene. It did not restore damaged palaces or calm the fear of those waiting for the next strike. It did not answer the sickening question of whether war is being used to distract from scandal and corruption at home.

But it did remind me of something I needed to remember:

Not everything beautiful has been destroyed.

That is not denial. It is resistance.

Photography has taught me that attention is not passive. To look closely is to refuse the numbing machinery of spectacle. To frame one living thing carefully, truthfully, is to push back against the empire of noise. It is a way of saying that destruction is real, but it is not all that is real.

This week I have sat with Muslim friends during Ramadan. I have listened, spoken, eaten, and prayed in spaces where hospitality still has moral weight. I have been reminded that there are human bonds stronger than propaganda, deeper than nationalism, more sacred than the performances of media warmongers.

Because this is what war tries to erase: the face of the other, the memory of a people, the sanctity of beauty, the possibility of neighbor-love across lines of fear.

It is not only that bombs are falling on Iran. It is that the same world I glimpsed around an iftar table last week — a world of shared bread, human dignity, reverence, and welcome — is the world our leaders so casually endanger.

So tonight, I am holding two images together.

One is of shattered heritage, smoke rising near ancient places, and a superpower acting in ways that make us look less like guardians of peace than vandals of civilization.

The other is of a rain-soaked flower in my yard, still alive, still luminous, still receiving the day as gift.

I do not want to surrender to despair.
I also do not want to anesthetize myself with platitudes.

So this is where I land tonight:

lament honestly,
tell the truth plainly,
refuse the lies,
protect what is tender,
and keep paying attention to what is still alive.

A flower with raindrops on it will not stop a war.

But neither will giving my soul over to the scroll.

When the headlines made me ashamed of my country, I went outside looking for something still alive.

Sources:

Strikes on Iran Damage Cultural Heritage Sites, Infuriating Iranians

Revered cultural icons that have withstood the upheavals of history are being hit hard in the war being waged by Israel and the United States. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/11/world/middleeast/iran-heritage-sites-damaged.html

Zeteo

How the 'Fox News Cabinet' Helped Jumpstart Trump's Iran War

Good evening, and welcome to this week’s ‘Ragebait…

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Series anchored to my photo calendar, Finding Peace in the Rubble — a year of images, presence, and practice

The Image: March 2026

A narrow trail disappearing into wet green undergrowth near La Push, in Olympic National Park. Trees rise and twist overhead like old witnesses. The path is simple, almost modest — not dramatic, not grandiose — just there, asking to be walked. It feels like memory in landscape form: mossy, dim, beautiful, and somehow steadier than the mind that tries to hold it.

The Making

This was one of my favorite hikes, one of many my dad introduced me to over the years.

That matters to me more now than it did then.

When you’re younger, you don’t always realize that someone is giving you more than an outing. They’re giving you a way of seeing. A way of paying attention. A way of being in the world that doesn’t reduce everything to productivity, speed, or noise.

My dad gave me places like this.

He gave me trails. Trees. The hush of damp woods. The feeling that a path can hold you even when you don’t have language yet for what you’re carrying.

This image comes from one of those walks. Nothing flashy. No mountain summit. No heroic vista. Just the path, the green abundance, the misty air, and that sense that the forest knows how to slow a person down.

Photographically, I loved the way the trail itself became the anchor — a visual invitation into the frame. The steps pull the eye forward, while the tangle of branches above keeps the scene from becoming sentimental. It’s beautiful, yes, but it also has weight to it. The woods are alive, but not tame.

Photo Instruction (Today’s Tip):
Look for the path.

When you’re photographing a landscape, notice whether there is a natural line that leads the viewer inward — a trail, a creek, a fence line, a row of trees, shoreline, or bend in the road. Compositional “leading lines” give a photograph movement and invitation. They help the image feel inhabited rather than merely observed.

Here’s a little more.

Change your angle. Look up.

Too many photos are taken from straight-on, eye level, with the horizon parked right in the middle of the frame. Sometimes that works. But often it flattens the scene and misses what the place is actually trying to say.

In this image, part of the magic is upward. The trees are reaching. The branches stretch toward the light. The fog softens the distance and gives the whole scene a more mystical, layered feel. And the path still matters — it draws you in — but it becomes more powerful when it’s held inside a bigger story above it.

So next time you’re out walking with a camera or phone, resist the default angle. Tilt up a little. Or down. See what happens when you let the foreground lead, or let the canopy speak. A small shift in perspective can turn a basic snapshot into an image with depth, movement, and feeling.

The Meaning

Lately I’ve been feeling overwhelmed.

The world feels heavy with the decisions of cruel and powerful men. The devastation in the Middle East. The normalization of bombardment. The moral numbness that settles in when destruction becomes background noise. I find myself depressed by it, and I’m not even the one living under the missiles.

That’s part of what’s so hard.

To watch from a distance is not the same as living in the line of fire. Not remotely. But even from a distance, if we are paying attention at all, the soul knows something is wrong. Deeply wrong. And for those of us trying to remain human — trying to build peace, tell the truth, resist dehumanization — there are moments when the weight of it all makes it hard to rise and keep walking.

This trail became, for me, a kind of quiet counter-testimony.

It reminds me that before I had analysis, before I had public language, before I had all the reasons to be angry or heartbroken, I had paths like this. I had a father who led me into the woods. I had beauty. I had stillness. I had the slow formation of attention.

And maybe that is not an escape from the world’s pain. Maybe it is part of what equips us to face it without losing ourselves.

Memory can do that.

Not nostalgia as denial. Not a retreat into some imagined innocent past. But memory as recovery. Memory as a way back to what is deepest and truest in us. Memory as resistance to despair.

There’s a Van Morrison song from Hymns to the Silence that has been haunting me again lately — “Take Me Back.” Not because I want to flee the present, but because I understand the ache in it. The yearning for coherence. The longing to remember what steadied us before the world became so loud, cruel, and disorienting.

This trail doesn’t solve anything. It doesn’t end war. It doesn’t shield a child from bombs. It doesn’t bring tyrants to repentance.

But it does remind me that peacebuilding requires more than outrage. It requires roots. It requires practices of attention. It requires memory strong enough to keep us human when the world trains us toward fear, frenzy, or numbness.

In that sense, this path is not a retreat from reality.

It is a way of staying on the road.

A Practice

Try this once this week:

The Remembering Practice (5 minutes):

Put on Van Morrison’s “Take Me Back” from Hymns to the Silence.

Sit with this image — or with a photograph of your own that carries memory.

As the music plays, ask:

What place, person, song, or work of art has helped keep me human?

What do I need to remember so I do not surrender to despair?

Then write one sentence:

“Today, remembering is helping me…”

For me, music helps. Photography helps. Landscape work helps. Portraits help. Documentary work — what I sometimes think of as visual peacemaking — helps. Art does not remove the rubble. But it can keep us from becoming rubble inside.

And that matters too.

Calendar & Index — 2026

• January: Mt. Shuksan — Steadfastness / stillness within motion

• February: The Bench in the In-Between — permission to pause / holding two seasons at once

• March (you are on this one here) : Remembering the Path

(And month by month, we keep learning to see)

Host: Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac | Speakers: Daoud Kuttab and Dr. Salim Munayer

Prepared from an automated transcript and edited for readability, names, and obvious transcription errors.

Editorial note. This document preserves the substance and flow of the webinar while correcting obvious transcription errors, standardizing names and punctuation, and marking a few uncertain phrases with “[unclear]” where the source transcript could not be confidently reconstructed.

Why this conversation is personal for us

Editorial note. For Andyew and Cari, this conversation is personal. Munther Isaac and Salim Munayer are not distant commentators, but Palestinian Christian voices they have come to know and deeply respect. Their witness, leadership, and lived experience have helped shape the wider work of peacemaking, theological reflection, and solidarity that Andrew and Cari care about deeply. That personal connection is part of why this conversation matters so much.

Brief Bios

Dr. Salim Munayer. A Palestinian Christian theologian and one of the most respected voices in the field of reconciliation and peacebuilding. Born and raised in Lydda, he is the founder of Musalaha and has devoted much of his life to exploring the relationship between theology, justice, reconciliation, and nonviolence.

Daoud Kuttab. An award-winning Palestinian journalist and leading media voice in the Middle East. He previously served as the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University and has spent decades reporting on the political and human realities of the region.

Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac. A Palestinian pastor, theologian, and public witness currently based in Ramallah. He serves as Director of the Bethlehem Institute of Peace and Justice, a ministry of Bethlehem Bible College, and is widely known for helping the global church engage questions of justice, peacemaking, and theology in Palestine.

Transcript

Opening

Munther Isaac: So, friends, good afternoon or good evening, wherever you are watching us from.

Munther Isaac: My name is Munther Isaac. I’m a Palestinian pastor and theologian currently based in Ramallah, and I serve as Director of the Bethlehem Institute of Peace and Justice, a ministry of Bethlehem Bible College.

Munther Isaac: We are hosting this webinar because, at the Institute, we desire to engage the global church on issues of justice and peacemaking, and to walk alongside our siblings in rejecting theologies of violence. This is something that has been central to us at Bethlehem Bible College for years, and now, through the Bethlehem Institute of Peace and Justice, we want to continue embracing a Christ-centered, kingdom-oriented, and biblically rooted theology and practice.

Munther Isaac: This work is particularly important at this moment, as we witness politicians and state leaders weaponizing theology and invoking the name of Christ to win support for war and violence.

Munther Isaac: We invite you to join our ministry and support our work. If you value what we do and the impact it can have, please consider partnering with us.

Munther Isaac: Please note that we want this briefing to be interactive. If you have questions or comments, please put them in the chat as you watch us on YouTube. Our team will be collecting those questions and sending them to me so that I can ask our guests and try to respond to as many as we can.

Munther Isaac: We are coming together in a very difficult moment for our region. As you all see, another war has broken out — this time between Israel and Iran, with the United States directly involved. It is a conflict that has already expanded beyond these borders, drawing in multiple actors and raising fears of an even wider regional escalation.

Munther Isaac: In moments like this, we feel overwhelmed. We ask ourselves: What should we think? How should we respond? And for many of us who are people of faith, another question is equally important: How do we pray?

Munther Isaac: Before I hear from our speakers today, I want to begin with a brief reflection that frames our conversation.

Munther Isaac: First, I want to begin with a simple but often forgotten truth: in war, there are no real winners. Everyone loses, especially the innocent — children, families, civilians — who did not choose this war. We must emphasize that every life is precious. Every life is equal. Israeli, Iranian, Palestinian, Lebanese, Jew, Muslim, Christian — every life is precious. The moment we begin to rank the value of human life, we lose our moral compass.

Munther Isaac: Second, war carries a staggering cost — not only in lives, but in resources. Today’s wars cost tens and hundreds of billions of dollars, money that could have been used to build schools, hospitals, and opportunities for millions. In this sense, war steals the future.

Munther Isaac: And of course, for those of us who are Christians, we need to look at the ethics of Jesus. The teachings of Jesus are clear: Blessed are the peacemakers. Many Christians still detach the ethics of Jesus from their own ethics. But Jesus said, Blessed are the peacemakers — not the warmakers. Jesus rejected violence, even when facing violence himself. He refused the sword. He chose the cross. He challenges us to think deeply about how we respond to violence and how we speak about war.

Munther Isaac: Especially in our region, history reminds us that the crises we face today did not begin yesterday. Other wars have ripple effects that continue to shape everything happening today. Wars did not work then, and they are not working now.

Munther Isaac: For us as Palestinians, this reality is deeply personal. This is yet another war: 1948, the Nakba; 1967; the intifadas; and of course the trauma is being deepened once again, especially in Gaza, where people have endured repeated wars, immense destruction, unimaginable human suffering — and now, recently, genocide.

Munther Isaac: So this is not just a detached discussion for us. It is profoundly human, moral, and spiritual. It touches the conscience of our world.

Munther Isaac: How do we speak about war? How do we speak about justice? For us in Palestine, I say this humbly, but I think it is important: at the heart of so much of our region’s instability lies the unresolved Palestinian question. A just and lasting peace must include dignity, equality, and human rights for Palestinians.

Munther Isaac: Today, as we discuss what is happening, I am grateful to be joined by two respected voices — two voices I deeply and personally respect — who will help us reflect on what is happening and what it means for our region.

Munther Isaac: We are joined by Daoud Kuttab, speaking to us from Jordan. He is an award-winning Palestinian journalist and a leading voice in Middle Eastern media. He previously served as the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University and is the publisher of Milhilard.org, a news site focused on Christians in Jordan and Palestine. His most recent book, State of Palestine NOW, has been published in several languages and reflects his decades of experience reporting on the realities of our region.

Munther Isaac: Our second speaker is Dr. Salim Munayer, joining us from Jerusalem — a theologian and one of the most respected voices in the field of peacemaking and reconciliation. Born and raised in Lydda, he is the founder of Musalaha, a ministry dedicated to reconciliation. Over many years, he has devoted his life to exploring the relationship between theology, justice, and reconciliation in our context.

Munther Isaac: Let me begin by turning to Daoud. Many people around the world are following the headlines and the news updates, but we all know that the reality on the ground often looks very different — especially when seen from the perspective of the people of the region, and different from how the media covers it.

Munther Isaac: So help us understand what is really happening right now from where you stand, and how we should understand the current moment — not only in terms of the military developments we are hearing about, but also the broader regional dynamics. And maybe begin by telling us: how are you doing? What is happening in Jordan? How is this war impacting you and Jordanians in general?

Regional Situation and the Cost of War

Daoud Kuttab: Thank you. My wife and I were in Malta in the Mediterranean when the war began — literally just a few hours before our plane was supposed to return. It took us three more days and a lot more money to be able to come back. We are thankful to the Jordanian airline because they were able to fly us from Istanbul, down almost to Egypt, and then swing back to Amman to drop us off. So we were part of the tens of thousands of people whose plans were disrupted when this war began.

Daoud Kuttab: As to the situation on the ground, I can say what I know, but most of my information — other than what I directly experience where I live — comes from open sources. And we know that in times of war, truth is the first casualty.

Daoud Kuttab: Israel and the U.S. started the war, and one of the first things they did was what is called a decapitation strike — trying to cut off the heads of the Iranian government. They killed an 86-year-old religious and political supreme leader, who was not only important for Iran but is also a leader for the Shiite branch of Islam more broadly.

Daoud Kuttab: As I wrote recently in Al Jazeera, you can kill a lot of people, but sometimes whoever comes in their place might be the same as — or even worse than — the person you killed. Often, people in power are more willing to accept compromises, and those who come after them may not be.

Daoud Kuttab: We know that Ali Khamenei had issued a fatwa — a religious edict — against nuclear weapons. There were apparently talks progressing in Muscat and Geneva about reaching a new agreement, but those were disrupted by what I believe was an illegal and unprovoked war.

Daoud Kuttab: Most people around the world — certainly those who believe in a rights-based international order, and in the U.N. and the Security Council — understand that war should not be initiated without legal legitimacy, especially after World War II, when it was agreed that it is inadmissible to take land by force.

Daoud Kuttab: In terms of casualties, you may have heard that over a thousand Iranians have been killed, among them more than 150 girls in Iran. It’s not entirely clear exactly what happened, but some reports suggest that a girls’ sports school may have been near or housed some kind of military office. But that does not justify the killing of so many innocent people.

Daoud Kuttab: In Israel, too, a number of people have been killed. One Iranian missile hit a housing complex in the Gush Dan area, and a few others were killed. Some American soldiers were also killed. There is a lot of destruction happening.

Daoud Kuttab: The Israelis also began a second ground war in Lebanon. They have put troops on the ground in Lebanon, and they are currently trying to take over or bomb one of the most populated areas in the southern neighborhoods of Beirut, where many Shia live. They sent orders telling people to get out before they bombed. People panicked. We saw them leaving their homes with basically the clothes on their backs, getting into cars or moving on bicycles. It caused enormous human suffering, and many of them probably will not return to their homes.

Daoud Kuttab: Economically, one of the most important passageways for oil and gas from the Gulf has been effectively shut down. The Strait of Hormuz has been disrupted. The Qataris, who are among the biggest producers of gas, have basically turned off extraction out of fear of being bombed. The same happened in Saudi Arabia with Aramco. The entire Gulf region has been shaken.

Daoud Kuttab: Most of the time, American bases in those countries have been hit, but some civilian locations were also struck. There are disputes about whether those civilian sites contained U.S. military personnel or not, but civilians and civilian buildings were hit. That has caused enormous anger and damage. Flights have been stopped. Tens of thousands of flights have been disrupted.

Daoud Kuttab: We are now, I think, in the sixth day or so of this war. President Trump has not made clear exactly what the goals are. Three different goals have been articulated: first, to get rid of Iran’s nuclear program; second, to eliminate its missile capability; and third, regime change.

Daoud Kuttab: Today Trump said he would stop the war if the Iranians surrender. Anyone who knows Iran — and religious or ideological states more generally — knows that surrender is not really in their vocabulary.

Munther Isaac: Yes. And the question of the end result is definitely an important one that maybe we’ll get to at the end, because we still do not know: how does this end?

Living Under Constant Threat

Munther Isaac: Turning now to Salim — again, you are in Jerusalem. You hear the sirens all the time. I hope nothing interrupts this conversation so you don’t have to leave. I just want to ask you: how are you dealing with this spiritually and mentally, not just on the personal level, but also as a faith leader who has dedicated his life in Jerusalem to reconciliation and peace?

Salim Munayer: No doubt there is fatigue. Since 2019, we have gone from one trauma to another trauma — Gaza, attacks on Christians, restrictions on Christians. The situation is getting worse and worse. So yes, there is fatigue. A lot of people here are tired. A lot of people are fearful and anxious. That is a major challenge.

Salim Munayer: There is also a physical challenge. Just a few days ago, one missile landed about 300 meters from our apartment. So it is not just hearing it. It is a reality we have to deal with all the time.

Salim Munayer: How do we deal with it? For many years, as Palestinian Christians, we have practiced lament. We lament the situation, the loss of life. We lament the choices leaders are making. But we do not only lament — we also need to be present. And presence means being with people who are suffering, across the board, without distinction.

Salim Munayer: There is theological lamentation. There is the daily spiritual life you cultivate. But there is also the practical side: what do you do each day? Every day, we try to keep the routine of life, to do something meaningful, to achieve something, to reach out to others — to keep ourselves sane.

Salim Munayer: There are many practices we have learned through the years. Spiritually, there is the whole concept of sumud — steadfastness. And as Palestinian Christians, that means: we will continue to live. We will continue to raise children. We will continue to worship. We will continue to build our homes. We will continue to preserve our culture and our identity. Our sons and daughters will continue to get married. And today, I played with my grandchildren. This is our victory in the midst of this oppressive situation.

Munther Isaac: Thank you. I think it is important to highlight that, because even for us here in the West Bank, the war impacts us directly — closures, checkpoints, fear. We hear the bombs. We see everything. Some debris has even fallen here. And once again we are reminded of the trauma of war. But sumud — resilience — is such an important part of who we are.

War, Trauma, and Christian Ethics

Munther Isaac: Back to Daoud: some Christians think this is a good war. They are cheering it. All over social media and across the Middle East, people are showing images of evangelical pastors praising Trump, praying for the troops. We are hearing that this is a good war because it will get rid of an evil regime. Maybe it will bring freedom to Christians, or democracy to Iran. It’s a “good war.” How do we respond?

Daoud Kuttab: Jordan is deeply feeling the effects of this war. I interviewed an energy expert who said that Jordan may have no more than 30 days of supplies of gas and oil. Gas has become scarce, and the price of a gas bottle for cooking is already going up. Nobody knows whether it will still be available in a month or so.

Daoud Kuttab: We have sirens in Jordan as well. There are no shelters in Jordan. There are no shelters in the West Bank. Lebanese are literally sleeping on sidewalks today. Israelis have shelters. Most others in the region do not. Life is in total disarray. Tourism, which was only beginning to recover, has collapsed again.

Daoud Kuttab: I asked a theologian in my family this very question, and he said: “I am against any kind of war. Not just ‘unjust’ wars — I am against all wars.” Jesus Christ teaches that God created us all in the image of God. As Christians, we should never celebrate the taking of even a single life. That should be our attitude.

Daoud Kuttab: But yes, many Christians — especially many evangelicals — are caught in a situation where their faith is being distorted, where their following of Jesus is being manipulated by people who abuse the Bible and tell us they want to build the Third Temple.

Daoud Kuttab: The situation is dire. Christians are totally fed up with the way this war is being driven and justified using the Bible — the very Bible we believe in.

Daoud Kuttab: Thank God, some people are finally waking up and exposing Christian Zionism for what it is. Bethlehem Bible College has been doing this for years. Christ at the Checkpoint has been a leader in this effort.

Daoud Kuttab: Younger people are much more aware of what is happening. They are less willing to accept the justification of war, the genocide in Gaza, and the terrible situation in the West Bank. Churches have been attacked — in Gaza, in Jerusalem, and in Taybeh. Yet still, Christians come to the Holy Land and visit the Western Wall, but do not even visit the Church of the Holy Sepulchre or meet the local church.

Daoud Kuttab: As a Christian believer, I feel frustrated trying to explain our faith to people who assume that evangelicals as a whole are all pro-war. I have to say: no, these are people abusing our faith. But it is an uphill battle when the loudest megaphones belong to those doing the abusing.

Munther Isaac: Yes — by cheering these wars, people are not only making our lives difficult in general, but also making our lives difficult because we constantly have to defend our faith and say, “No, that does not represent us. That does not represent our faith.”

Can Violence Ever Bring Peace?

Munther Isaac: There is a theological issue here that needs deeper analysis: Can violence ever bring peace or stability? My instinct is that violence breeds violence. But why do we as Christians continue to resist letting our thinking be shaped by the ethics of Jesus, and instead use theories like just war theory, or cite Old Testament wars and say, “Sometimes war can be good”?

Salim Munayer: Violence breeds violence. It creates cycles in which more and more people are killed.

Salim Munayer: Jesus himself — and as Christians, we follow Jesus — refused the sword and chose the cross. Not because the cross is weakness, but because the sword brings more killing and prolongs the cycle of revenge and retaliation.

Salim Munayer: There are kings — as the prophet Samuel said, and as Romans 13 discusses — and their role is to administer order and justice. But kings are accountable to God. Their power is limited. In the end, God is the one who rules history.

Salim Munayer: But power corrupts, and kings begin to see themselves as ultimate authorities. In order to justify themselves and achieve their goals, they choose violence. And really, it does not work.

Salim Munayer: As followers of Jesus, our role is to be salt and light and to participate in what God is doing. Second Corinthians 5 says that through the death and resurrection of Jesus, God is reconciling the world to himself. There is a new creation, and we are called to participate with God in that act. Peace must become part of our active daily life.

Salim Munayer: If you look at our region, there have been peace agreements between Israel and Jordan, and Israel and Egypt, but there has not been reconciliation between the peoples. So even that “peace” still has a question mark over it.

Salim Munayer: Look at the last two decades in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, and Sudan. Violence has destroyed people’s hope, their aspirations for peace, for self-determination, for dignity, and for equality. That is something we must face.

Salim Munayer: The idea that one ethnic or religious group is uniquely authorized to carry out God’s justice in history is false and extremely dangerous. What we have right now is a state, through military power, claiming to advance the kingdom of God. Jesus rejected that.

Salim Munayer: Jesus repeatedly said the kingdom of God comes differently — like a mustard seed, quietly, in another way. That is why we are alert and worried.

Salim Munayer: The people of God are not meant to outsource the work of proclaiming the gospel to an army. The people of God are the ones called to love, compassion, and service.

Justice, Oppression, and Nonviolence

Munther Isaac: I recently received a thoughtful message from an Iranian pastor who appreciated the moral clarity with which many Christians condemn war and affirm the value of human life. But he also raised a difficult concern: what outsiders now call “war” did not begin with recent military escalation. For many Iranians, it began decades ago with systematic repression, imprisonment of dissidents, executions, violent crackdowns on protests, and severe restrictions of basic freedoms.

Munther Isaac: So how should Christians think about situations where people are living under long-term, systematic oppression? If we are called as Christians to pursue peace, how do we also take seriously the cry of people who feel that every peaceful path to justice has been closed to them?

Salim Munayer: If, through the power of violence, you become like the one who abuses you, then you have become like them. You want to get rid of the oppressor, but by using violence you risk becoming the oppressor.

Salim Munayer: The problem is not passivity. It is not one or the other. It is not simply doing nothing, and then only violence remains. Rather, we must practice nonviolent resistance all the way in order to deal with structures of injustice.

Salim Munayer: The message of Christ is not only about liberating the oppressed. It is also redemptive toward the oppressor. What is our theology of love, care, and hope — not only for us, but also for the enemy?

Salim Munayer: The question is not only, What is my message to the oppressed? but also, What is my message of hope, compassion, and repentance to the oppressor? Because the minute you liberate yourself from one oppressor and then become an oppressor yourself, history repeats itself.

Fear of Another Failed Intervention

Munther Isaac: Watching what is happening in Iran, many of us feel a kind of déjà vu. We feel like we have watched this movie before. Each time, military intervention or violent escalation is presented as a path toward stability, security, or even liberation. Yet in many cases, the result is prolonged instability. Is this a legitimate fear — that this war will actually make things worse?

Daoud Kuttab: I think your fear is legitimate. We are certainly not supporters of any regime that oppresses its own people. We should seek justice, freedom, and equality for our brothers and sisters in Iran. But at the same time, we have to understand that supporting violence by one country against another without international legitimacy is often done for other motives.

Daoud Kuttab: In my opinion, this war is being used to keep one person in power — the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who is facing serious charges and needs political survival. He has tried for years to get American presidents to agree to war with Iran, and finally he found one willing to do it.

Daoud Kuttab: So yes, I think your fear is legitimate. But we need to overcome fear with faith. We believe that God governs history, and that ultimately God will bring justice. We do not need Trump or Netanyahu to bring justice to our brothers and sisters in Iran. God will take care of that.

Munther Isaac: We have seen what Western — especially U.S. — intervention has done in our region. We would be fools to think we can keep doing the same thing and expect a different result.

Western Power and Orientalism

Salim Munayer: We should not forget that the present religious and political situation in Iran is itself, in part, the result of Western intervention in the past. What happened there historically matters.

Salim Munayer: We have to be careful not to adopt a racist or Orientalist approach to the Middle East — as though people in this region are always at war and need “the West” to come and fix them, to bring them peace. That approach is itself rooted in domination.

Salim Munayer: There is a hegemonic mindset here. Some Christians imagine that these powers are coming to liberate people, but as history shows, they often end up enslaving them.

Audience Questions

Munther Isaac: We’ve received many questions. One question is: How might this war with Iran relate to Israel’s efforts to displace Palestinians in the West Bank and intensify annexation?

Daoud Kuttab: It’s a very serious question. There is deep concern that creeping annexation will force more Palestinians to leave because they will feel they have no choice.

Daoud Kuttab: Palestinian Christians, over the years, have often left because they had more opportunities abroad through church networks and family ties. But certainly, annexation is a very serious issue. And with the world’s attention now on Iran, there is fear that Israel is moving ahead.

Munther Isaac: Another important question: What do you think about so many pastors gathering to pray over President Trump in the Oval Office?

Salim Munayer: We are commanded to pray for our leaders. But there is another Messiah. Our leaders are not our king. Jesus is our King.

Salim Munayer: Another aspect of Christian faith is the prophetic voice to power. My question to those pastors is: what prophetic word are they speaking to the powers in the White House? About mercy? About justice? About the kingdom of God? They should remember what the prophet Nathan said to David.

Munther Isaac: Another question: What about BDS? How do we hold our commitment to nonviolence and still pursue freedom for oppressed people? Does nonviolence work?

Daoud Kuttab: It works over time. I do not think anyone imagines that boycotting a few Israeli products will, overnight, change Israeli government policy. But it does work over time. We have to be patient, and we have to be willing to make sacrifices.

Daoud Kuttab: It takes much more courage to remain committed to nonviolence than to take up arms. Violence is easy in one sense: you can learn to shoot, you can be shot, and that’s it. But to remain steadfast, to go on hunger strikes, to accept suffering, even the possibility of being killed, and still refuse violence — that takes tremendous courage.

Daoud Kuttab: As Christians, we are commanded not to use violence. We are clearly called to seek justice through nonviolent ways of confronting oppressors — whether in Palestine, Gaza, Iran, or anywhere else.

Salim Munayer: And this is not only a matter of faith. There are political scientists — including Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan — whose research on grassroots nonviolent movements found that if you can mobilize about 3.5 percent of the population nonviolently, movements have historically had a strong record of success. The larger point is that disciplined, broad-based nonviolent struggle is often more effective than violent insurgency.

Munther Isaac: Speaking of Jesus’ commandments, one of them is not just nonviolence, but loving your enemies. So, Salim, how can I love my enemy when I see them committing genocide or carrying out oppression? What does that look like?

Salim Munayer: One of the key aspects of reconciliation is confrontation. A lot of people do not understand that.

Salim Munayer: Over 30-plus years, we have learned that reconciliation has two dimensions: one is the restoring of relationships, but the other is addressing the structures and systems of injustice. We need both.

Salim Munayer: One task is restoring the identity, dignity, and culture of the people who have experienced genocide. At the same time, the people who have committed these acts need to be confronted so that they can enter a process of repentance. If there is no healthy process of repentance and restoration, there will simply be another cycle of destruction and revenge.

Closing Reflections

Munther Isaac: That is our commitment at the Bethlehem Institute of Peace and Justice: to promote a Christ-centered, kingdom-oriented, and biblically rooted theology of peace and justice.

Munther Isaac: We are deeply committed to the teachings of Jesus, even when that means having difficult conversations about loving the enemy, about nonviolence, about war and peace, and about our conviction — based on the teachings of Jesus, the Word of God, and also our reading of history — that violence never brings good results.

Munther Isaac: We need to continue warning the church against adopting the ways of empire, the ways of power, and the illusion that through those means we can bring peace.

Munther Isaac: What message are you giving to the world? And what message are you telling your families and your people — those who live in this difficult region and feel troubled, traumatized, and perhaps despairing?

Daoud Kuttab: When we were talking about BDS, I was reminded of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. I always appreciated that truth came before peace. Truth and justice are essential.

Daoud Kuttab: As a journalist who seeks the truth, I believe we all need to search hard for the truth, and make sure that we know it. And the truth will set us free.

Salim Munayer: One of the most important things is not to be ruled by fear. We should not become so fearful of death and suffering that fear controls us.

Salim Munayer: Suffering is part of spiritual character formation. It shapes our moral and ethical stance.

Salim Munayer: But in that context, we need reconciliation — not only sumud, not only resilience, but also reaching out to our neighbors.

Salim Munayer: And we need the imagination of hope. We must not lose that. We need what Walter Brueggemann called the prophetic imagination — the ability to imagine for our children and grandchildren that Israelis, Palestinians, Iranians, and Americans can live differently.

Salim Munayer: It has happened in the past. But we need to ask for the power of God to help us achieve that.

Munther Isaac: Truth that sets us free. Hope and imagination. Not losing our hope in the goodness and beauty of God to bring a better future.

Munther Isaac: Thank you both, and thank you to everyone who joined this conversation. Please continue to pray for our region, for the victims, for their loved ones, for protection for the innocent, and for God to give wisdom and conscience to leaders — to lead us to peace, to lead us into paths where we choose conversation and dialogue rather than destruction and war.

Munther Isaac: May we continue to pray and work together for a world free of violence, where the powerful do not enrich themselves by benefiting from the suffering of the poor. Thank you, and may God bless you.

Appendix: Erica Chenoweth, Maria J. Stephan, and the Case for Civil Resistance

Book note. Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict was first published by Columbia University Press in 2011, with the paperback edition appearing in 2012. The book is co-authored by Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan.

When Salim Munayer referenced Erica Chenoweth’s work, he was pointing to one of the most influential contemporary studies on the strategic power of nonviolent struggle: Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. Drawing on a comparative dataset of violent and nonviolent campaigns from 1900 to 2006, Chenoweth and Stephan argued that nonviolent resistance campaigns were more than twice as effective as violent ones in achieving their stated goals.

Their central claim is not merely moral, but strategic. Nonviolent movements often succeed because they can attract broader participation, generate tactical innovation, impose civic and economic disruption, and encourage defections from those who uphold the regime, including parts of the security forces. One of the book’s most important insights is the participation advantage of nonviolence: protests, strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience, and other forms of mass noncooperation lower the barriers to participation and allow ordinary people to join a movement in ways armed struggle often cannot.

This is the context for the often-cited “3.5 percent rule.” In later work, Chenoweth described this as an observational finding: historically, no government in the original dataset withstood a mass nonviolent challenge once roughly 3.5 percent of the population had mobilized at peak participation. But she has also warned against turning that number into a formula or guarantee. It is best understood as a descriptive rule of thumb rather than a magic threshold, and later work has identified important exceptions and cautions.

Even with those cautions, the larger finding still matters. Chenoweth’s work continues to suggest that disciplined, broad-based nonviolent resistance has generally outperformed violent struggle. At the same time, she also notes that nonviolent campaigns have faced new challenges in recent years as states have become more sophisticated in surveillance, repression, and disinformation. That does not make nonviolence irrelevant. It means that organization, training, strategic clarity, discipline, and resilience matter even more.

For Christians wrestling with occupation, repression, war, and the temptation to despair, this research is significant because it gives empirical support to a conviction many theologians and practitioners of peace have long held: nonviolence is not passive, naïve, or weak. It can be disciplined, costly, courageous, and strategically potent. In that sense, Chenoweth and Stephan’s work reinforces one of the central themes of this webinar: rejecting violence is not only a moral conviction rooted in the teachings of Jesus, but often the more effective path for building a just and lasting peace.

Selected references

Chenoweth, Erica, and Maria J. Stephan. Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.

Chenoweth, Erica. “Questions, Answers, and Some Cautionary Updates Regarding the 3.5% Rule.” Carr Center Discussion Paper Series, Harvard Kennedy School, April 2020.

We’ve crossed a line — and most of us don’t even feel it.

The U.S. and Israel have carried out massive strikes inside Iran. The Supreme Leader is dead. And I’m watching the reaction — some chest-thumping, some celebrating, some scrolling right past it — and I need to say something, because something is badly wrong with us. It’s not just the ones cheering that worry me. It’s the rest of us. The ones who aren’t cheering but aren’t saying anything either. The ones who’ve let this become normal. Our silence is deafening — maybe not to us, but to most of the world. We are the empire with no clothes, and we can’t even feel the wind. There’s no shame. No shock. No thought about arresting our fall into the consequences that a scorched-earth policy inevitably delivers.

And before someone says it — yes, I know. Dictators are real. Chemical weapons are real. Drug cartels are real. I’m not naïve about that. But here’s what we keep refusing to learn: what we’ve done in response — the bombs, the regime changes, the “pre-emptive” strikes — hasn’t eliminated any of it. It’s created the conditions for more of it. More instability. More power vacuums. More desperate people with nothing left to lose. We keep treating violence like a solution and then acting bewildered when it multiplies.

We’ve done this before. With the country just west of Iran.

A few summers ago I was in Iraq, walking through neighborhoods still scarred by what we unleashed. Dilapidated infrastructure, two decades later. And something I wasn’t prepared for: I don’t think I met a single man who had only one wife. Not because of some cultural stereotype or massive moral collapse around faithfulness in monogamy— but because a staggering percentage of Iraqi men are in the ground. The women who survived were widows. The children were orphans. And the men who remained were doing what they could to care for them. Don’t judge Iraq for that. They were picking up the pieces of what we left behind.

That’s what “shock and awe” looks like a generation later.

And we keep doing it. We backed the leveling of Gaza — entire neighborhoods, hospitals, universities turned to rubble — while telling ourselves it was someone else’s war. Just think about what might grow in the debris of leveled everything and 40,000 orphans. In January we bombed Caracas and snatched Venezuela’s president from his own country in the middle of the night. We toppled Gaddafi in Libya and left behind a failed state with open-air slave markets. We spent twenty years and trillions of dollars in Afghanistan, and the Taliban retook the country in weeks. Same playbook. Same promises. Same wreckage. Different people paying the price.

My own journey into this region — and now my full-time ministry among the peoples of this part of the world, on both sides of the Atlantic — grew out of the ashes of 9/11. I’ve been back again and again. Extended stays. Meals. Long conversations. Friendships. In Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon — and especially Palestine — I’ve met families who want what you want: a peaceful life, dignity, a future for their kids. The people we’re told to fear are often the people most exhausted by violence. Internally as well as the kind we deliver with our big bombs.

And let me tell you something: many of them are now my friends. My life is unfathomably richer because of them — more beautiful, more human, more alive. My dinner menu alone has been transformed by what my friends have set at the table when we visit. The “threat” we were warned about turned out to be hospitality I didn’t deserve, generosity that put me to shame, and friendships that have marked me forever.

I’m a Jesus follower — and the people my world taught me to fear as enemies are now my friends. I get it — I can see how many could mistake my friends for our country’s enemies, especially right after 9/11. But didn’t Jesus say something about that too? Love your enemies. And wouldn’t you know it — the move from enemies to friends is remarkably doable. Maybe nine times out of ten. Maybe ninety-nine out of a hundred. If you get to know them. Could Jesus have made it any clearer? Love your neighbor as yourself. Not “love your neighbor after you’ve verified they’re not a threat.” Not “love your neighbor unless your government tells you to fear them.” Just love them. As yourself. Full stop.

I wonder how many of Jesus’ followers had Samaritans at their b’nei mitzvah around 40 CE.

We throw around the word terrorist like a magic word — one that turns whole cultures into disposable targets and short-circuits moral imagination before it even begins. We don’t know them, so we fear them. We fear them, so we hate them. And then we wrap the killing in lofty language about democracy and human rights…even as those very values feel increasingly fragile in our own country.

And here’s what calling down fire eventually delivers: fire upon us. Maybe not today. Maybe not on us personally. But on our grandchildren, or someone else’s grandchildren, or somewhere further down the line — because violence begets violence. Always. You might get submission in the short run. But history is littered with the wreckage of empires that thought brutality would keep them safe. It didn’t. It’s how they were toppled. Military pre-emption — whatever it looks like on a briefing slide — does something corrosive to the soul of a nation: it destroys any credible moral claim we have left to speak as an arbiter of justice anywhere. It’s just not right to kill people. Can we get that into our thick skulls?

And then there’s Luke 9.1 This passage first stopped me in my tracks several years ago and features in many of my sermons and talks. When the disciples wanted to skip the hard part and go straight to calling down fire on the Samaritans, Jesus rebuked them and kept walking. I used to read that as their problem — a first-century temper tantrum. But it’s not just their problem. It’s a human problem. The impulse to reach for fire first — and to feel righteous while doing it — lives in us. It’s the spirit behind “shock and awe.” It’s the spirit behind every war we cheered from a distance. And for our sake — not just for theirs — we need to feel the weight of that rebuke today.

“It’s just good style to get to know people before you bomb them.”

Rick Steves once said: “It’s just good style to get to know people before you bomb them.” He meant it, and he backed it up by producing a PBS special designed to humanize Iranians rather than flatten them into an enemy-shaped stereotype. If you don’t understand Iran — or even if you think you do — watch it. Not to debate talking points, but to remember the basic truth that real people live there.

We can keep calling down fire. Or we can start carrying water.

PBS stream: https://www.pbs.org/video/iran-fxoqui/ Rick Steves page: https://www.ricksteves.com/watch-read-listen/video/tv-show/tv-specials/iran/iran-pledge-special

I’m on the road for a simple kind of pilgrimage—friendship, coastline, and the slow work of building a broader coalition for peacemaking.

First: a pause in McMinnville to visit an old friend and colleague, Nancy Jo Hoover. I first met Nancy Jo when we were missionaries in Mexico. Years later she collaborated with our team in the MENA region—and we’ve stayed good friends ever since. Her wisdom and deep experience across so many places yields valuable insight. Time with her always steadies me.

Then: Cannon Beach, where I’m meeting a pastor for lunch to talk about possible partnership in peacebuilding.

Why here? Why now?

This is the part that can sound strange to people: why talk about “peacebuilding” in a place as beautiful and ordinary as the Oregon Coast?

Because peacemaking isn’t only something we comment on “over there.” It’s a way of being we have to learn “right here.” And I don’t think it’s lost on anyone that “right here” has never felt more urgent. Our own country is as divided and polarized as most of us can remember—fractured along lines of politics, race, religion, and identity, with neighbors treating neighbors as enemies. The tools of dehumanization we lament abroad are alive and well in our own communities.

And if the church is going to have moral credibility in a fractured world, it can’t be content with peacetalking. It has to disciple people—train people—in the actual practices of peace.

A few years ago my friend Mitri Raheb gave me a phrase that keeps following me around: we’ve got way too many peacetalkers, and not enough peacemakers.

He’s right. And I’d go one step further: this is a discipleship issue.

What we’re actually training for

What we’re hoping to cultivate with churches is not a new set of talking points, but a set of skills—muscle memory—formed by practice:

• learning to cross divides without losing conviction

• resisting fear and caricature

• telling hard truths without weaponizing them

• showing up with neighbors who are targeted, overlooked, or treated as “other”

• building relationships sturdy enough to hold tension without breaking

These are the same human dynamics we encounter in Palestine–Israel, just closer to home. The location changes, but the training is transferable: learning to see people more clearly, to refuse dehumanization, and to choose neighbor-love with skin on.

(Also: somebody has to do the work of inviting churches into this. Apparently that somebody is me. I’d like to pretend I’m very brave, but I’m mostly just committed… and powered by coffee and a croissant at a café in Cannon Beach.)

The slower work

Tomorrow after lunch, I head into my quiet retreat. Not to escape the work, but to sustain it—because peacemaking that lasts has to be replenished from somewhere deeper than adrenaline.

Thomas Merton wrote: “We are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God.”

I believe that. And I believe the reverse is also true: that peace with God necessarily sends us toward our neighbors—especially the ones we’ve been taught to fear.

So I’m listening. What does peace look like in your community? What divides are you navigating? What training or tools would help you cross them? I’d love to hear your thoughts—hit reply, leave a comment, or just sit with the question for a while.

“Blessed are the peacemakers…”

The table in Jericho

The first stories came out around a table.

I was the only expat there—on purpose. I didn’t want to be surrounded by other outsiders trading commentary. I wanted to sit where I could listen, and let the center of gravity belong to the people who actually live this.

A young Palestinian father began describing what had happened to him at a military checkpoint on the way home. Detained for hours. Humiliated in front of his family. The kind of humiliation that isn’t only “inconvenient,” but designed to shrink a person’s dignity.

Halfway through, he broke.

Right there at the table.

And then I broke too—because something in me knew this wasn’t a “news item.” This was a human being, trying to stay human inside a system that keeps testing how much indignity a person can absorb.

That moment has never really left me.

And it became a kind of beginning—because ever since, I’ve kept noticing what happens after the witnessing.

The stare

I come home from Palestine carrying what I saw and heard—images I can’t shake, conversations that lodge in my chest, grief that comes out sideways when I try to speak.

I tell the truth as carefully as I know how—sometimes with tears I didn’t plan on shedding.

And then it happens.

That look.

Not anger. Not debate. Just a blank astonishment—like my words are arriving from a different universe.

How can that be true?
Are you telling me the whole truth?
If it is true… what am I supposed to do with it?

Over time, I learned to recognize the moment right before the fog machine turns on.

Even recently, a friend—someone I’ve known a long time—listened with genuine respect. I could tell he wanted to believe me. And at the same time, I could feel him reaching for the larger framework that keeps everything in its place.

He blurted out: “It’s complicated.”

I almost heard it coming before he said it—like a phrase already on the tongue, waiting for its cue.

And yes, of course it’s complicated. Human lives are complicated. Histories are complicated. Trauma is complicated.

But sometimes “it’s complicated” isn’t an honest admission.

Sometimes it’s a shield.

A way to keep reality at arm’s length.
A way to delay moral clarity.
A way to avoid the unbearable thought: If it’s really that bad… then we would have to change something.

That’s what I mean by framing. By obfuscating. Not always malicious—often polite. Often subconscious. But effective.

Because it takes lived testimony—someone’s actual experience—and relocates it into the realm of theoretical debate where nothing is required of us.

And then, like clockwork, the familiar lines arrive to hold the framework together.

“Well… you know… Yasser Arafat walked away from a pretty good deal. Remember?”

I’m not even trying to litigate that sentence here. I’m naming what it does.

It shifts the center of gravity away from what is happening now.
It turns present suffering into an old argument.
It subtly suggests: This is what they always do.
And it offers the listener a clean exit from the room—back into the comfort of “complicated.”

The gate around credibility

Here’s the harder truth: “it’s complicated” is not evenly distributed.

Some people are granted the dignity of being straightforward. Their words are received as baseline reality. Their fear is treated as rational. Their grief is treated as self-evident. Their explanations are treated as “context.”

But when Palestinians speak, their words often arrive with a warning label already attached: biased, unreliable, manipulated, angry, “inciting.”

And when a Western Christian like me centers what Palestinians say—when I repeat what they’ve told me in plain language—the suspicion often transfers: naive, one-sided, radicalized, “you don’t understand the whole picture.”

That’s when I realized I wasn’t just up against disagreement.

I was up against a gate.

Years ago I found a phrase that named the gate. Edward Said called it “Permission to Narrate.”¹ Not permission to have an opinion—permission to be treated as a credible human witness to your own life. Permission to say, “This is what is happening to us,” without having your testimony automatically downgraded to propaganda.

When a people are denied that permission, something subtle and devastating happens.

Their grief has to audition for credibility.
Their suffering becomes an argument instead of a fact.
Their history becomes “disputed.”
Their dead get absorbed into abstraction—“clashes,” “cycles,” “both sides”—and the moral center never lands long enough to demand repair.

The fog machine

That’s why the fog machine works so well.

The explanations come fast:

It’s about Hamas.
It’s about Iran.
It’s about Hezbollah.
They don’t have leadership.
They’re corrupt.
They always walk away.
They only understand force.

Some of these claims contain fragments of truth. Some are half-truths that function like lies. Some are racist in both tone and outcome.

And in church spaces, some become “theology”—a set of contortions that treats one people’s domination as if it were God’s will.

But listen closely to what’s often happening underneath the chatter:

The goal is not always to refute Palestinian witness.
The goal is to relocate it—out of the realm of human testimony and into the realm of endless debate.

Out of this is happening and into well, remember that time…
Out of present-tense reality and into inherited scripts that keep responsibility at bay.
Out of the kind of truth that demands action and into the kind of “complexity” that demands only more commentary.

And there’s a reason that move feels so relieving to people like us.

If it’s really that bad—if people are truly living under a system that normalizes humiliation, restricts movement, and makes ordinary life contingent on permission—then it’s not just a sad situation “over there.”

It implicates here.
It implicates us.

In the United States, it means our tax dollars and politics are not neutral background noise. It means some of what we call “support” functions as underwriting a reality we would never want for ourselves. And that’s a moral and spiritual crisis, not just a foreign policy debate.

Jesus and the reliable narrators

This is where I feel the tension in Christian spaces most sharply.

Because the gate doesn’t always sound like cruelty. It often sounds like reasonableness. Or loyalty. Or biblical seriousness. Or concern for “balance.” It can even sound like compassion—as long as compassion never becomes clarity, and clarity never becomes accountability.

And I can’t reconcile that with Jesus.

Jesus doesn’t treat the vulnerable as unreliable narrators. He does the opposite. He listens. He draws near. He lets the wounded tell the truth about what happened to them—and he treats that truth as holy ground.

He refuses the logic that says, “We’ll believe you once you meet our standards of acceptability.”
He refuses the habit of protecting power by doubting the weak.
He refuses the version of “peace” that is really just quiet produced by control.

So here’s the dream I want to offer my readers:

A future where justice for Palestinians is held together with security for Israelis—not the security of domination, but the security that comes when dignity is not rationed and rights are not segregated. A future where Palestinians don’t have to be perfect victims to be believed, and where Israelis don’t have to live inside perpetual fear. A future where trauma is not weaponized to justify new trauma. A future where we stop treating one people’s freedom as optional.

And I want to say this gently but clearly: you don’t get there by denying narrative personhood to the people who are suffering most.

You don’t get there by demanding Palestinians be flawless narrators while granting everyone else the benefit of the doubt.

You don’t get there by calling domination “stability” and then baptizing it with religious language.

A practice for the reflex in us

I keep coming back to that table in Jericho—not because I’m trying to win an argument, but because I can still see that father’s face. I can still hear his voice cracking. I can still feel what it did to me to watch a human being describe humiliation as a normal feature of the commute home.

That’s not “a viewpoint.” That’s a witness.

So if you can feel the reflex rising in your chest—it’s complicated—I want to offer a different spiritual practice.

Before you reach for the fog machine, try this:

1. Let Palestinian witness be witness—first-person, not a debate prompt.

2. Notice what you instinctively demand of Palestinians (perfect leaders, perfect language, perfect strategy) that you don’t demand of anyone else.

3. Ask what “complexity” is doing in you—helping you understand, or helping you avoid?

4. Let clarity lead somewhere concrete: refuse dehumanizing talk, challenge inherited scripts, and press for policies that stop rewarding domination.

Because peace without narrative dignity is just quiet.

And quiet is not the same thing as justice.

Sit with this for a while:

The poor will inherit the earth.
Not because poverty is good,
but because God is committed to a world where the crushed are lifted up and the erased are remembered.

And then ask yourself—not as a debate prompt, but as a spiritual exam:

What’s the shortest path to making that a lived reality in the Holy Land?

Selah.

Footnote

¹ Edward W. Said, “Permission to Narrate,” Journal of Palestine Studies 13, no. 3 (Spring 1984): 27–48.

I didn’t want to go.

It was cold. My body wanted comfort. My mind wanted to bargain: surely staying home won’t change anything. Surely standing on a sidewalk won’t either.

That’s the quiet erosion that happens over time—the way discouragement tries to turn compassion into a private feeling instead of a public practice.

And then Ash Wednesday arrived, with its blunt honesty: Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

Not a threat. A truth. A leveling. An invitation to humility.

But today, those ashes felt like more than a reminder of mortality. They felt like a refusal to let other people become invisible—especially people whose suffering is so often talked about but not listened to.

Out on the street I met new folks. One person told me they’re agnostic—and then casually mentioned they show up twice a week for Palestine. Twice a week. And when they travel back to their home country, they speak in schools about what’s happening. No performance. No superiority. Just a steady decision to be present.

I also reconnected with friends from Christians for a Free Palestine and Mennonite Action. It mattered more than I expected. The world is loud right now—loud with spin, loud with cruelty, loud with “move on.” The simple fact of seeing familiar faces and meeting new ones felt like oxygen.

Then a pastor offered to impose ashes on my forehead. Not inside a sanctuary. Right there on the sidewalk.

Ash Wednesday has always carried lament and repentance. But on the street, the ashes also felt like a public confession: we don’t want to be complicit. We don’t want comfort to become our theology. We don’t want “neutrality” to become our spiritual discipline while other people pay the price.

And then came the small surprises: drivers honking—not in anger, but in support. Waves. Thumbs up. The quick eye contact that says, I see you.

It didn’t “solve” anything. But it did something real: it pushed back against the lie that no one cares, and against the loneliness that discouragement tries to manufacture.

So why do we do this?

Not because we believe a single afternoon will fix a system. We do it because public witness is part of staying human. Because showing up is how we keep our hearts from hardening. Because communities are built one conversation at a time. Because people under crushing power deserve to know they are not alone—and we need to be reminded that we are not alone too.

Why outside that company?

We were there in part because Chevron is deeply invested in Israel’s offshore gas sector and recently took a formal step to expand production at Leviathan—deepening a long-term stake in the region. Critics argue these projects strengthen economic and political structures that help sustain occupation and dispossession, which is why the Palestinian-led BDS movement has named Chevron as a boycott/pressure target.

I’m not naïve about what one protest can accomplish. But I’m also not willing to let “it’s complicated” become a blanket that smothers moral clarity. Sometimes the point is simply to tell the truth out loud—about power, about profit, about whose suffering gets treated as background noise.

And today I also found myself thinking about my Muslim friends as Ramadan approaches—friends who have invited me into spaces that matter: the mosque, the iftar table, the conversations where we stop performing and start being human. Their welcome has formed me more than they know.

So to my Muslim friends: Ramadan Mubarak. May the Holy One surround you with mercy, steady your hearts in prayer, and give you strength in fasting.

And I’m mindful, too, that this season doesn’t feel equally safe for everyone. There’s a particular vulnerability many Muslim friends carry right now—not only the generalized anxiety that comes with intensified immigration enforcement, but the way Islam itself can feel, in the eyes of our current government, like a faith to suspect… a faith to monitor… a faith to profile. When protections around houses of worship are rolled back and fear grows around enforcement in and near mosques, that fear isn’t imaginary—it’s foreseeable. And when reporting, lawsuits, and civil-rights advocates describe patterns of enforcement that lean on profiling, the weight lands unevenly—especially on those whose skin tone doesn’t look like mine.

I see that, and I’m not looking away.

Ash Wednesday says we are dust.

The street said something else too: dust can still tell the truth.

As we lean into this new year, part of my gratitude is this: this Friday we’ll gather on Zoom for the first time with twenty-eight souls who’ve decided to join this journey—toward peace, or at least toward a deeper understanding of what peace requires—in Palestine. That’s remarkable. And if I’m honest, it does more than encourage me. It steadies me. It makes me want to keep going—in a big way.

I’ve been writing thank-you notes.

It’s strange how gratitude can carry both warmth and weight at the same time—like holding a cup of something hot while your hands are still cold from the world. A simple sentence—thank you for standing with us—but it lands differently these days. Not because I’ve become more dramatic. Because the times have become more honest.

Tonight I’m not trying to produce anything impressive. I’m listening to Van Morrison’s Take Me Back and letting the lyrics do what good lyrics do: take a person by the hand and walk them back through memory—not to romanticize the past, but to remember what’s still true underneath all the noise.

So I walked the lake.

And yes—there was a bench.
If you read earlier this week’s February photo reflection, you already know I have a thing with benches. They’re permission: permission to stop, permission to breathe, permission to let the world be complicated without forcing it into a simple story. This one wasn’t exactly inviting my butt into visio divina (winter benches are basically a spiritual “Do Not Disturb” sign), but it still did what benches do: it reminded me that steadiness matters more than speed.

Bare branches scribbled across the last light like handwriting across the sky. The water held the fading color without asking anything from it. Runners passed—ordinary devotion, ordinary breath. The bench sat there like it always does: unbothered, not preaching, not hustling, just… available.

And I thought about how much of our work is like that bench.

Not a platform. Not a megaphone. Not an argument designed to win. Just a place where a person can sit long enough to tell the truth—without being rushed, corrected, or managed.

This past year has been heavy and clarifying. I’ve learned again that “peace” can be a word people use to avoid discomfort—like a polite curtain pulled over injustice. But the peace I’m after can’t be separated from justice. You can’t have one without the other. Not the real kind. Not the kind that lasts. Not the kind that restores anyone’s dignity.

Sometimes gratitude makes you want to talk about the highlights. Sometimes it makes you quiet because you don’t want to turn sacred things into content.

But tonight, in the simplest way I know how, I want to say this:

If you’ve supported us—prayed, given, shared, hosted conversations, asked better questions, stayed in relationship when it would’ve been easier to drift—thank you.

Thank you for choosing a version of faith (or humanity) that doesn’t look away.

Thank you for believing that solidarity is not ideology, but a form of love with skin on it: showing up, listening, learning names, honoring stories, refusing to let people become abstractions.

This work isn’t glamorous. Most of it happens in email threads, long walks, hard conversations, and those small moments when you decide not to dehumanize someone you’ve been trained to fear. It happens in the slow work of building trust—across religion, across politics, across walls, across grief.

Tonight I’m not trying to solve anything in a single post.

I’m just sitting with gratitude, and letting it tell the truth: that peace without justice is a fragile performance—and justice without peace can become hard and brittle. I keep praying for the kind of courage that doesn’t need to shout to be real. The kind of courage that can stay tender without becoming naïve.

The lake was almost dark when I turned back.

A few lights came on across the water. The sky kept its faint bruised color. And I felt that familiar mix again: grief and hope, fatigue and resolve—held together in one body.

Nothing profound tonight.

Well… maybe.

Series anchored to my photo calendar, Finding Peace in the Rubble — a year of images, presence, and practice

The Image: February 2026

A park bench under a canopy of copper leaves, with a first dusting of snow settling onto wood slats and ground. The lake sits quiet behind it. The whole scene feels like a pause: autumn refusing to fully release, winter arriving anyway — and the world holding both at once.

Let’s be clear: this bench is not inviting my butt into visio divina. This is winter’s version of a Do Not Disturb sign.

This is the kind of bench that says, “You can reflect here… but you’ll do it standing up and making good choices.”

The Making

This was one of those moments that doesn’t announce itself as “a photo opportunity.” It’s just a day, a walk, a familiar path, a place that sees me doing my circuit all year round — and then the weather turns the page while you’re still standing in the previous chapter.

Snow arrived like a hush. Not the dramatic kind that shuts down the city, but the thin, honest kind that lightly covers what was already there — fallen leaves, damp earth, the evidence of a season ending.

And there was the bench.

I’m drawn to benches because they’re permission. Permission to stop. Permission to be unproductive for a minute. Permission to look without turning everything into a task. This one held a little snow, a little leaf litter, and a quiet invitation that felt almost pastoral: Pause. Don’t fix anything. Just be here.

So I framed it low and close enough to feel the bench as a presence — not a prop — and wide enough to let the trees and lake become context. This isn’t a portrait of a person. It’s a portrait of a place that is ready to hold a person… even if today it’s mostly ready to hold snow.

Photo Instruction (Today’s Tip):

Look for the “anchor.”
When a scene feels emotionally ambiguous (or visually busy), find one strong subject that can hold the frame — a bench, a doorway, a lone tree, a streetlight — and build your composition around it. Anchors give the viewer a place to stand. If you’re working with a standard camera, play with the “f-stop” to create depth of field. It will help isolate the anchor and can be visually pleasing. On your phone you can do this with the portrait mode.

The Meaning

This photo is for anyone living in the in-between.

The in-between is where most of life actually happens:

• not quite grief, not quite relief

• not quite hope, not quite resignation

• not quite winter, not quite autumn

• not quite healed, not quite undone

We tend to treat transitional seasons like problems to solve. We want clarity. We want clean edges. We want a single mood we can name and manage.

But the world doesn’t work that way — and neither do we.

In fact, I was talking with my spiritual director just yesterday about this very thing — the in-between space in the Ignatian pathway. The space after the more hurried Advent season (and whatever our “best intentions” were for quiet time), but before Easter — and before whatever plans or commitments we’re imagining for the rest of 2026. It’s the season where you’re fighting inertia to make good on New Year’s resolutions… and also realizing that deep change doesn’t tend to cooperate with your calendar or well intended resolutions you make when the calendar flips to January 1.

In the Ignatian story, it’s also the slower time between the launching of Jesus into the world and the ending at the cross. It’s not dramatic epiphanies. No major breakthroughs. It’s the time of ordinary faithfulness — the long middle.

And so I’ve been settling back into the idea of the slow work of God — the kind of work you can’t always measure, but you can sometimes feel if you stop long enough.

This bench preaches that sermon without trying.

The snow doesn’t erase the leaves. It rests on them. Autumn is still there — but winter has arrived anyway. The bench doesn’t do anything. It waits. The lake doesn’t explain itself. It simply receives sky, weather, light — whatever comes.

And that’s the invitation: a peace that doesn’t depend on resolution.

Peace, in this sense, isn’t the absence of tension. It’s the presence of steadiness inside tension. It’s the ability to inhabit the moment without fleeing into numbness or frenzy. It’s the courage to let two things be true at once.

Jesus, too, seemed unhurried in key moments — resisting the crowd’s tempo, slipping away to pray, refusing to be rushed. There’s that language in the Gospel where he basically says, “Not yet.” (Which, honestly, feels like a spiritual direction phrase I need tattooed somewhere discreet.)

Some callings ripen. Some clarity comes only after steadiness, repetition, and quiet.

If January’s mountain (click to see what we covered last month) taught us steadfastness over time, February’s bench teaches something smaller and more immediate:

Peace is sometimes a place to pause when you’re not ready to leap into whatever is on the horizon. It’s okay to not jump. This isn’t procrastination dressed up as spirituality (we’ve all tried that). Sometimes it’s discernment — the slow work of letting conviction and clarity catch up to your good intentions, so that when you move, you move with your whole self.

Not rushed. Not dragged. Not performing. Just ready.

Even if, for now, you’re doing your reflecting standing up… because the bench is frozen and you are not a martyr.

A Practice

Try this once this week — with this image, or with a view from your own life.

The Warm Drink Examen (3 minutes):

1. Make something warm (coffee, tea, whatever counts as mercy in your world).

2. Look at the image for 30 seconds. Don’t interpret — just notice lines, light, texture.

3. Ask: “Where am I rushing the slow work?”

4. Then ask: “Where is God quietly steady — even if I’m not?”

5. Write one sentence: “Today, peace looks like ______.”

This is contemplative seeing as a form of care: not forcing the world (or yourself) into a simple story, but letting complexity be held without shame.

Feel free to share your reflections and questions in the comments. We’ll return to this monthly theme each month through this year. Thanks for joining the journey.

📅 Calendar & Index — 2026

• January: Mt. Shuksan — Steadfastness / stillness within motion

• February (you are on this one here): The Bench in the In-Between — permission to pause / holding two seasons at once

• March… (you’re going to have to wait and see ;-)

(And month by month, we keep learning to see.)

Here’s what’s coming…

Or if you’d like to support our broader work in peacemaking go to the QR code.

A Word to Caregivers, Therapists, and Pastors

(Part 2: a deeper dive on John 1:5 and living in the split screen)

In times like these… there are some truths that bear repeating.

Yesterday I wrote about the collision John names in John 1:5—light shining in darkness that cannot handle it. Today I’m going deeper, because the darkness doesn’t only wound; it also fights to control reality—and we need language and practices to resist it.

If you are a caregiver—therapist, pastor, nurse, chaplain, teacher, organizer, parent—these days can feel like moral whiplash. You hold other people’s grief, anger, and fear. Then you go home and try to stay human. The public world keeps delivering more darkness, and the private world keeps asking you to be steady.

I want to offer one anchor—not as a platitude, but as a practice of sanity:

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” (John 1:5)

That line comes from the opening of the Gospel of John—one of the four “good news” accounts of Jesus in the New Testament. John isn’t offering a soothing slogan. He’s naming a collision. Jesus—his life, his message, his way of being human—enters a world already organized around domination, fear, scapegoating, and respectable lies. And the darkness can’t handle it.

Most of us hear the verse and imagine a simple contrast: light is bright, darkness is dim. But John’s language is sharper than that. The verb behind “did not overcome” (katelaben) can also mean “did not grasp” or “did not comprehend.” In other words, darkness doesn’t only fight the light—it also misreads it. It calls truth a threat. It calls accountability “chaos.” It calls mercy naïve. It calls people “illegal,” “enemy,” “disposable.” And then it spins stories to make brutality sound like necessity.

John 1:5 refuses sentimental hope. John does not say, “There is no darkness.” The Gospel is far too honest for that. The darkness is real enough to wound bodies, unravel communities, and crucify. But it is not final enough to extinguish the light.

Right now, Minneapolis is one of the places where that collision is happening in public.

The split screen

I didn’t know Alex Pretti, so I won’t turn him into a saint. But details reported about him stop me: he was a VA ICU nurse, and witness accounts say he was trying to help someone who had been shoved during the protest.

Then there’s the other side of the screen: official claims that he posed a lethal threat, and video evidence that major outlets say contradicts key parts of that narrative, showing him holding a phone during much of the encounter.

For caregivers, that “split screen” is not a side issue—it’s part of the trauma. We are asked to metabolize not only tragedy, but epistemic chaos: the fog that makes people doubt what they saw, doubt their conscience, and eventually doubt one another. John would call that darkness doing what darkness does.

And yet—what is also heartening are the stories emerging of people showing up for each other in spite of the darkness, and this is part of what carries me. The ugly, brutal killing grabs our attention and the “what the **** just happened” that we hear on the videos and feel in our minds grabs us by the throat. But the sustained and growing presence of people—and the swelling of protests across the country, in the bitter cold—are faithful deposits of the truth of the light shining in the darkness. Let’s not give in or give up to the darkness.

That, too, is John 1:5. Light is not merely “inspiring.” Light is revealing and gathering. It pulls people back toward one another. It keeps insisting that human dignity is real even when power tries to declare it optional.

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In times like these… there are some truths that bear repeating.

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” (John 1:5)

That line comes from the opening of the Gospel of John—one of the four “good news” accounts of Jesus in the New Testament. John isn’t offering a soothing slogan. He’s naming a collision. Jesus—his life, his message, his way of being human—enters a world already organized around domination, fear, scapegoating, and respectable lies. And the darkness can’t handle it.

Most of us hear the verse and imagine a simple contrast: light is bright, darkness is dim. But John’s language is sharper. The verb behind “did not overcome” can also mean “did not grasp,” “did not comprehend.” In other words, darkness doesn’t only fight the light—it also misreads it. It calls truth a threat. It calls accountability “chaos.” It calls mercy naïve. It calls people “illegal,” “enemy,” “disposable.” And then it spins stories to make brutality sound like necessity.

This is why John 1:5 refuses to let us settle for sentimental hope. John doesn’t say, “There is no darkness.” The Gospel is far too honest for that. The darkness is real enough to wound bodies, unravel communities, and crucify. But it is not final enough to extinguish the light.

And right now, Minneapolis feels like one of the places where that collision is happening in public.

The Optics

I didn’t know Alex Pretti, so I won’t turn him into a saint. But two details reported about him stop me cold: he intervened to protect a woman who was being targeted, and he was a VA ICU nurse—someone whose daily work was devoted to helping people at their point of need.

The Street-Level Truth

Then there’s the other side of the screen: federal agents, masked and roaming the streets like a band of teenage gangsters, picking fights because they know they’re insulated from any real adjudication—whether an assault they carry out is legal, or even reasonable. It’s all so warped.

Their accounts are disputed by video, agencies pressing “self-defense” narratives, and the familiar fog of spin that follows—trying to tell us what we didn’t see, or to redefine what we did. The stories spun make me gag—not because I’m shocked by propaganda, but because I’m tired of how easily darkness dresses itself up as righteousness.

“Their accounts are disputed by video—agencies pressing ‘self-defense’ narratives, and the familiar fog of spin that follows: trying to tell us what we didn’t see, or to redefine what we did.”

Who Gets Protected

The Gospel of John helps me name what’s happening without surrendering to it: darkness hates exposure. It prefers anonymity. It prefers fear. It prefers a public that is numb, exhausted, and easily herded by slogans. Light is not merely “inspiring.” Light is revealing. It shows us what we are becoming. It forces a choice: will we tell the truth, or will we participate in the lie that some lives are worth less?

And Minneapolis isn’t alone.

What’s Being Normalized

Look around: Gaza—a landscape of rubble, loss, cold, displacement, and an endless struggle over who gets to narrate what is happening. Ukraine—cities attacked in winter darkness, power cut, civilians paying the price while “peace talks” run in parallel like a cruel echo. Greenland—people pushed into the old logic of empire again, having to say out loud: we are not for sale. Venezuela—another pressure point where power, coercion, and destabilization don’t stay “over there,” but bleed into the moral atmosphere of the world we share.

Different contexts. Different histories. But the same ancient pattern: darkness doesn’t just harm people—it distorts reality to justify harming them. It trains us to accept what should never be normal. It tries to make us forget the face of the neighbor. It tells us some lives count more.

This is where John 1:5 becomes more than a verse we quote—it becomes a vocation.

The Invitation

To say “the light shines” is to refuse disengagement. It is to refuse the slow moral sedation that whispers, This is just how things are. It is to practice attention—especially to the people our systems train us not to see. It is to insist on names, on accountability, on basic human dignity that does not depend on usefulness, citizenship, or proximity to power.

And to say “the darkness did not overcome it” is not to promise quick outcomes. It is to plant a flag in the ground: violence does not get to define reality. Propaganda does not get to rewrite what love is. Fear does not get to dictate who is safe and who is expendable.

John’s original referent is Jesus himself: light entering the world in a human life, in public, and the darkness trying to seize it—silence it, criminalize it, crucify it, bury it. But the darkness could not finally contain him. That’s the Christian claim at the center of everything: the cross is not the end of the story. Resurrection is God’s refusal to let death and domination be the truest thing.

So tonight, I’m receiving a winter sunset at Green Lake as a small, stubborn act of resistance. Bare branches. Cold air. And still—light. Not a denial of darkness, but a refusal to hand it the microphone.

In times like these… there are truths that bear repeating:

The light still shines.

Darkness will resist, distort, and lash out.

But darkness does not get the last word.

And we do not get to look away.

A short closing prayer

God of light,
keep us from numbing out.
Give us courage to tell the truth,
to protect the vulnerable,
to refuse dehumanization,
and to practice the costly love of Jesus—
especially when the darkness cannot comprehend it.
Amen.

Renae Nicole Good.
Dr. King.
Nelson Mandela.
Palestine.

At first glance, these names can feel like separate streams—different contexts, different histories, different pain. And in a time like this, it can feel like too much for one soul to carry. I recognize the reflex in myself: I don’t want to hear one more terrible thing.

And yet I’m more convinced than ever that these stories converge at a single fault line. Seeing the connection doesn’t solve the overwhelm, but it can keep us from isolation—helping us become allies to one another even when we’re each living inside a different “central narrative crisis.”

If there’s a pattern I’m trying to name beneath it all, it’s this:

the way difference is turned into danger,
and how fear—especially racialized fear—is weaponized to justify exclusion, domination, and violence.

Last night Cari and I realized something that stopped us cold: today marks ten years to the day that I screened my first documentary, Blessed Are the Peacemakers, at Quest Church. It was my first real step into filmmaking—an attempt to bear witness with a camera and a microphone, not just a pulpit.

And then we laughed, because ten years ago Cari was there as my friend—simply present in the room, quietly supporting the work. Not my wife. Not yet my partner in this life we now share. We weren’t married then. That’s a story for another day.

Watching the movie again today, I felt my heart rise… and I also felt the honest sting of recognition.

In the opening narration, the film frames the story as an effort to “bridge the gaps,” specifically between Muslims and Christians. That framing made sense to me then. I was still coming out of a predominantly evangelical world shaped by post-9/11 assumptions—where religious difference was treated as the primary fault line, and Islam in particular was imagined as the looming threat.

But I can see it clearly now: that framing was incomplete.

Religion matters. Religious difference is real. It has been used—again and again—to justify fear, exclusion, and violence. But what I’ve come to see is that religion is rarely the root problem. More often, it becomes the language used by systems of supremacy to mark who belongs and who doesn’t, who is protected and who is expendable.

The deeper question beneath all of it is this:
Can we live with difference without turning it into domination?
Can we love our “other” as fully human—fully equal—fully bearing the image of God?

That question cuts across religion, race, immigration status, geography, culture, and politics. And it’s the question every generation is tested by.

Even in the film itself, the people I met in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Hebron—Palestinian and Israeli, Muslim and Christian and Jewish—kept pointing to a different reality than the one I thought I was going to document: humiliation at checkpoints “just to show you they are in control,” families separated by permits, a wall that doesn’t just keep people out but keeps people in, and the deep trauma that shapes everyone’s reflexes.

My “coming to Jesus” moment about the real conflict

Here’s the truth I’m naming today: the conflict I went looking for at the beginning—the one I thought I needed to “solve” or “bridge”—was framed wrong.

I started with the assumption that the main fault line was Islam versus Christianity, the familiar “clash of civilizations” storyline so many of us inhaled after 9/11. Mark Braverman, my Jewish friend and mentor in this space names it well in the movie. His comments start around 19 minutes into the movie attached below.

And then the land itself corrected me.

Not through theory, but through lived reality: bodies restricted, movement controlled, dignity negotiated at gates, daily life shaped by the calculus of power. The fault line wasn’t between religions. It was between justice and injustice, between freedom and control, between narratives that humanize and narratives that dehumanize—often with race and fear as the accelerants.

I’ll admit something else. Once you start with the wrong fault line, it becomes easy to keep feeding it.

In the film there’s an Israeli former IDF soldier—Daniel—who leans on a familiar narrative: Israel’s neighbors back then were essentially ISIS—”this isn’t like America,” and therefore any Israeli reaction is understandable. That storyline is powerful because it’s simple. It offers moral cover. It turns an occupied people into an existential threat. And once you believe you “live next to ISIS,” you can justify almost anything. The villain over the last 3 years has switched to Hamas and everything trying to move and live in Gaza.

But it isn’t true. And it isn’t the only story Israelis themselves tell.

Jewish voices in the film: refusing false symmetry

One of the graces of that early film is that Jewish voices speak with moral clarity. Some describe how fear has been cultivated and institutionalized. Some name the cost of refusing militarization. Some choose prison over participation. And several challenge the mythology that this is a “conflict” between equal sides who simply need to compromise.

That asymmetry matters.

As voices like Phyllis Bennis have long insisted, this is not a dispute between two parties with equal power and equal freedom. It is an occupying power and an occupied people. When we refuse to name that imbalance, “peace” becomes a demand placed on the oppressed rather than a responsibility placed on the powerful. Reconciliation gets hollowed out. Justice is deferred indefinitely.

Munther Isaac, MLK, and the refusal to lose our soul

One of the most important moments in the film comes when Munther Isaac—then a young professor at Bethlehem Bible College—speaks about his deep inspiration from Martin Luther King Jr. He names King’s insistence that love and light—not hatred—are what drive out darkness.

That connection matters to me today, because the MLK we often get in public memory is sanitized: safe, vague, committed to “unity” without disruption. But the King Munther was drawing from understood that peace without justice is not peace—it’s management.

Mandela: reconciliation is not meeting injustice halfway

And then there is Nelson Mandela, whose words keep echoing in my mind today:

“But we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

Mandela would not allow reconciliation to become a polite way of asking the oppressed to meet injustice halfway. He rejected any moral equivalence between justice and injustice. For him, peace only held when everyone could live with dignity and security, without discrimination.

Reconciliation, in his vision, was not a shortcut around freedom. It was the fruit of it.

Why Renae Nicole Good belongs in this story

This is why Renae Nicole Good belongs in this constellation of names.

She stood with immigrants—people routinely framed as threats, burdens, or problems to be removed. She crossed lines others were taught to fear. And what happened to her, alongside what we’re seeing now with ICE raids and aggressive enforcement, exposes the same fault line at work: the inability—or refusal—to see certain people as fully human.

Different context. Same test.

Renae’s life and death, King’s witness, Mandela’s clarity, Munther Isaac’s theology, the Jewish refuseniks and truth-tellers in my film, and the daily reality of Palestinians all converge on this question:

Can we live with difference without turning it into hierarchy, exclusion, or violence?

“Peacetalkers” and peacemakers

Mitri Raheb said in our interview (min. 35:50), “We’ve got many peacetalkers, but not enough peacemakers.” I hear that line differently now.

Peacetalking is safe when it costs nothing. Peacemaking requires us to locate the real fault line and take responsibility for what we see. It demands that we refuse comforting myths—even when they protect our own sense of innocence.

So today I’m naming the map I’m choosing to live by:

The struggle is not about erasing difference.
It’s about refusing to turn difference into domination.

If you’d like to watch Blessed Are the Peacemakers on this ten-year anniversary, I’m making it available today—not because it’s perfect, but because it marks a moment on the road. Click the red text and it will lead you to the full edition of the 43 minute movie. It’s a beginning. A witness. A reminder that the call to be peacemakers deepens as our eyes and hearts learn how to tell the truth.