Skeptical Faith

Google Image Outside Mexico itself, the United States is home to the largest Mexican community in the world. More than one in 10 Americans count Mexico as their country of origin or are of Mexican descent. Yet we have an equivocal relationship with Mexicans in our midst and with their home country. We’re OK with them fixing our roofs or washing our restaurant dishes but can’t seem to bring ourselves to see them as equals, or, for those of us who profess faith, as brothers and sisters. I recall that when I was growing up, many Mexicans declined to identify themselves as such, instead saying that they were “Spanish.” Faced with indifference or hostility, they had little sense of self-worth. That may have improved, but the attitude of many Americans appears to be changing at a snail’s pace. That’s one reason I was so moved by Pope Francis’ recent visit to Mexico. I know, I write a lot about the Pope, and I hope that non-Catholic readers of this blog will understand. Polls sho...

Google Image Master Sgt. Roddie Edmonds stared down the barrel of his Nazi captor’s pistol in a German prison camp 71 years ago and refused to say which of his fellow prisoners were Jewish.           "We are all Jews here,” Edmonds, the highest-ranking American noncommissioned officer at Ziegenhain stalag that day, told the officer. Instead, Edmonds ordered more than 1,000 of his fellow prisoners to stand together in front of their barracks. The Geneva Convention required prisoners to give only their name, rank and serial number, not their religion, Edmonds said, warning that if the German shot them all, he would be tried for war crimes. Edmonds’ words of solidarity spared the lives of as many as 200 Jews on that January day in 1945, according to the New York Times. President Obama recently recognized Edmonds posthumously as the first American service member to be named Righteous Among the Nations, an honor bestowed on non-Jews who risked their live...

Google Image My friend and former classmate, Ted Wolgamot, writes compelling blog posts that are weekly reflections on the Bible readings used at weekend Catholic masses. His posts are found at www.drtedsweb.com . “I was reading about a young woman, a white Canadian Catholic, who grew up attending daily Mass,” he wrote recently. The woman became disillusioned with Catholicism and converted to Islam. She had “abandoned religion altogether,” according to the story he read, “until she met some kindly Muslims who led her to a mosque where she felt close to God, as if for the first time in her life. She says she discovered that God was no longer in the church she grew up in, but was “everywhere: in nature, in art, and in the welcoming faces of other Muslims. “What I found remarkable,” wrote Ted, “is that, for whatever faults Catholicism has been guilty of through the years, it has … always been a church community that employed every possible physical sign to remind us of God’s pr...

Google Image Emily Triantaphyllis, a second daughter to my spouse and me since she became one of my daughter’s best childhood friends, has co-produced the award-winning documentary, Seeds of Time, which is available on Netflix. With beautiful photography and stimulating dialogue, it tells the story of world agriculture’s struggle to preserve seed diversity. Why should I care about seed diversity? Because it's critical to the sustainability of life as we know it. And combined with the problem of global warming, the lack of diversity could become perilous sooner rather than later. But this isn’t a film that adds to the long list of critical things to worry about. It lays out the problem but spends much of its time focusing on the work of Cary Fowler, an American agriculturalist who tells the film’s story and is among those desperately trying to amass a cache of the world’s seeds before they become extinct. Between Us and Starvation? “We tend to imagine apocalypse comin...