Molly Marsh is managing editor at Partners In Health, an organization that works to provide health care to poor populations around the world.
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The View from Mars Hill
You might wonder how opera diva Kathleen Battle, the best-selling computer game MYST, and TV shopping networks all work into a conversation about Christianity.
Volumes of Inspiration
Spiritual Classics: Selected Readings for Individuals and Groups on the Twelve Spiritual Disciplines, edited by Richard Foster.
Breaking Down the Walls
A young Israeli soldier kicks a small rubber ball to two Palestinian boys in the West Bank city of Hebron, his machine gun slapping gently against his back as he moves. His fellow soldiers smoke and play cards nearby. Men in long flowing robes and white headscarves pass boys riding donkeys, tiny Palestinian shops loaded with film and souvenirs, and stores whose doorways are filled with bulging sacks of colored spices and grains.
Just beyond the soldiers sits an immense, foreboding building—one of its two entrances is guarded by Palestinian soldiers, the other by Israelis. It’s called the Mosque of Abraham or the Tomb of the Patriarchs, depending on who’s speaking, and inside are massive stones marking the supposed burial sites of Abraham and Sarah. Concrete walls enclose the tombstones. Muslims and Jews can view them through a set of iron bars, but only from separated parts of the building. The structure was bisected in 1994 after a Jewish settler, an American, entered the building and killed 49 Palestinians preparing to celebrate the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
The Israeli soldiers are also in Hebron, a Palestinian-controlled city of about 140,000, to guard Jewish settlers who live down the street in a compound distinctive for its brand-new buildings and the barbed wire that surrounds it. "Five hundred soldiers are here to guard 30 settler families," according to Bourke Kennedy, a member of the Christian Peacemaker Team in Hebron. The Jewish settlement is one of four in the Hebron district; roughly 6,000 Jewish settlers live in two settlements on the city’s outskirts. Because of their political and symbolic importance, settlements such as these have been targets—and impetus—for Hamas and other Palestinian groups who have resisted the Israeli occupation with violence.
Housing Summit at Pine Ridge
Housing and Urban Development officials and Native American tribal leaders are launching a project to build and renovate housing on tribal lands.
Briefly Noted
The AFL-CIO placed the Mt. Olive Pickle Company on its national boycott list in February.
Plant a Tree, Get a Beating
Wangari Maathai, above, coordinator of Kenya’s Greenbelt Movement, was attacked in January with several others as she attempted to plant trees in the Karura forest, near Nairobi.
Fund Raising for Cruise Missiles?
In the first such case in nine years, the Internal Revenue Service has taken longtime activist and war tax resister Ed Hedemann to court.
A 'Humanitarian Disaster'
Nobel Peace Prize Laureates Mairead Corrigan Maguire of Northern Ireland and Adolfo Perez Esquivel of Argentina traveled to Iraq in March on a Fellowship of Reconciliation delegation.
Less Sex and Violence Equals Greater Profits
Want to make profitable movies? Don’t make them R-rated.
Heavyweights Fight Third World Debt
Former boxing champion Muhammad Ali, the newly appointed "international ambassador" for Jubilee 2000, visited Britain in February to accept the Freddie Mercury Prize for the debt relief campaign.
Bourgeois: Bring Pinochet to Justice
Father Roy Bourgeois, founder of the School of the Americas Watch, testified last December at the extradition case for former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Thirty Percent of World Destroyed
In a new report from Cambridge University’s World Conservation Monitoring Center in Britain, scientists say that humans have destroyed more than 30 percent of the natural world since 1970
Sexual Promiscuity in Africa Called "Violence"
AIDS in Africa has reached epidemic proportions, and an American clergyman told a gathering in Zimbabwe this winter that he knows one of the main reasons why: male sexual permissiveness.
Landmine Treaty Takes Effect--Without U.S.
The 1997 Mine Ban Treaty will go into effect faster than any other major treaty, according to Jody Williams, ambassador of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.
U.N. Calls for Decade of Peace and Nonviolence
The United Nations General Assembly voted in November to proclaim the first decade of the 21st century "The Decade for a Culture of Peace and Nonviolence for the Children of the World (2001-2010)