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What has happened to my country?

   Lately I feel like a stranger in the United States.

I am a remnant of what has been called "the greatest generation," but it's not the thinning ranks of my generation that has me feeling lost and confused. It's the debate about torture that has been swirling around me for months. I never imagined such a debate in my country.

A single statement from the executive branch that torture is forbidden everyplace, all the time, by every agency and under all circumstances, would stop all such talk immediately. There might be an element of danger in that stance, but virtue knows any sacrifice is worth a better future. We need to end the torture debate so the world will know that my country would never become as the enemy.

My father fought in World War I in Europe. He was a quiet man who never talked about his service in France, but my mother's photo of him in his uniform is etched in the minds of his children.

When World War II broke out, we were five boys and a little sister. The three oldest enlisted within days of the declaration of war. As number four, I enlisted as soon as my 18th birthday rolled around. Three of us went into the Army Air Force for pilot training; one joined the 5th Armored Division.

My youngest brother, Dudley, graduated from high school a couple of years later. Dad and Mom did not stand in the way of his enlisting, although they could have gotten a deferment for him to help on the farm. Dud didn't want cold, mud and tents, so he joined the Navy.          

When his orders came to report for duty, what was left of the family climbed into the car and took him to the train station -- his grandfather, a great aunt, his little sister and parents. They all returned to our home to stay overnight. Dad went immediately to the end of the backyard and dug up the basketball standard that had stood for many years over a dusty plot where running feet had trampled out every living thing. It was too painful to see it standing there, silent and unused. After supper and evening visiting, Mom and Dad turned their bed over to company. They took the boys' room; Mom crawled into Dud's lower bunk, and Dad climbed into the top one. Finally, in the dark, alone, Mom was able to shed the tears that she had held back all day. Dad heard her crying and climbed down. They slept wrapped in each other's arms in Dud's empty, single bed. Mom wrote later, "When the morning came, our courage returned."

No2Torture

Editor's Note: Presbyterian Church U.S.A. Moderator Rick Ufford-Chase and Ed Brogan, Director of the Presbyterian Council for Chaplains and Military Personnel, are planning a meeting in Miami, Fla., January 6 - 7, 2006 on the issue of the use of torture by the United States.

We are inviting concerned people of faith to gather in Miami for a time of spiritual renewal in an age of violence, a public witness and worship on the beach that will call on our leaders to live up to the most noble of our country's ideals, and a strategy session about how we might encourage a grass-roots movement of Presbyterians to stand unequivocally against the use of torture by our government and to name the ideals that might lead us to authentic security.

 We are asking Presbyterians to pray, study and take action to assure that there will be no unjust and abusive treatment of detainees by the United States and its allies. This statement is an extension of a quickly growing grassroots effort to educate people about the use of torture and the urgent need to call for an immediate end of these practices, wherever they occur.

There is now clear and compelling evidence that the U.S. government has routinely turned to torture as an appropriate tool in the "War on Terror." As I have traveled this year, I have asked Presbyterians to think carefully about the growing level of violence (torture, militarized borders, security checkpoints, and the War against Iraq) that our government has employed on our behalf in its earnest quest for security in a time of violence. I have insisted, and continue to insist, that this is a deeply theological challenge. As Christians, we know that genuine security is found only in Jesus Christ, whom we discover as we read and re-read Scripture while we seek to live Christ's example in the world around us.

Why the torture abuse scandal matters

Of all the scandals that beset us as Americans, there is one that history is likely to judge most harshly, namely, the official authorization of torture abuse by the current Bush administration. As the Abu Ghraib photos have shown with unforgettable horror, serious violations of international law have followed in its train.

Let us be clear that torture is not just one issue among others. It is a profound assault on the dignity of the human person as created by God. It is therefore inherently evil. It violates a person's body, and terrorizes his mind, in order to destroy his will. The strongest of presumptions stands against it -- not only legally and morally, but also, from a religious point of view, spiritually. At the same time, authorizing torture poses a direct threat to constitutional government. As Columbia law professor Jeremy Waldron has urged, the issue of torture is "archetypal." It goes to the very heart of our civilization. Whether torture is permitted or prohibited is a question that separates tyranny and barbarism from the rule of law.

Good King Wenceslas, Look Out!

Richard II, son of Edward the Black Prince, was king of England from 1377 to 1399.  According to his biographer, Anthony Steel (his note 23), Richard was the inventor of the pocket handkerchief, which is a very absorbing subject.  I admit that a pocket handkerchief can get snotty, but only if you get too nosy.  During Richard's reign, the power behind the throne was John of Ghent whose name was corrupted to Gaunt.

Flora and Fawning

Being myself a progressive liberal, I turned immediately to the Revised Standard Version of the Bible as soon as it became available in 1946.  Hide-bound conservatives in those days called it the Reversed Virgin because the translation of Isaiah 7:14 ("Behold, a young woman shall conceive") differed from the hallowed orthodoxy of the King James Version.

Boxers or Briefs: A Choice at Bottom

Some people think the Boxer Rebellion describes the refusal of young males to wear a certain style of undergarment.  Actually, it was an event which took place at the beginning of the twentieth century in China.  Old movie fans or fans of old movies might enjoy Charleton Heston and Ava Gardner in "55 Days at Peking".

Great Expectorations: Ode to the Spittoon

Men, I am proud to say, are by nature and nurture gross and disgusting creatures. I did my very best to pass on this crude heritage to our three boys. However, my success was not equal to my desire. I assume their occasional fastidiousness may be traced to their mother's "sugar and spice" influence.

Teat for Tat

Anointing events as the will of God is a devotional, if not exactly theological, temptation.  Christians accept God's providence in both prosperity and adversity, a sentiment famously expressed in the Heidelberg Catechism, which I think represents the irenic and ecumenical Lutheranism of Philip Melanchthon within the burning heart of Calvinism.  As a passionate advocate for The Book of Confessions,

High Jumping Naked is not recommended

Soon after we moved to Pittsburgh I located a Presbyterian physician and went to his office for a medical check up.  I filled out a form in the waiting room and was ushered into an examination room and told to take off my clothes.  Sitting on the table in my goose bumps, I was just about to get the doctrine of the Trinity figured out when a gorgeous young female nurse opened the door and walked in.

What the Celtic cross tells us about peace, unity, and purity

The Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity and Purity revived our interest in Presbyterian history in the United States since 1729, but stopped short of formative roots in the old world. Recently my wife and I joined a presbytery- sponsored tour to visit some sources of our Reformed faith in Scotland and Ireland. We found significant historic challenges to the peace, unity and purity of the church, and also surprising foundations for hope.

"Purity" was a driving force in the turbulent events of the Scottish Reformation. Purity was the match used by John Knox and his colleagues to ignite the flames of church (and national) reform in Scotland--purity in the Word of God, in the sacrament, in the clergy, and in the leaders of the land. In his passion for religious purity, Knox sparked an emotional explosion among Scottish people early in St. Andrews in 1547, and again in Perth, Edinburgh, and beyond beginning in 1559. In these violent birth-years of the Presbyterian Church, purity-minded mobs attacked the churches and monastic houses to strip them bare of their images of "idolatry," typically burning the churches to the ground, and often inflicting bodily harm or death to Catholics who resisted.

Museums and monuments to formative religious struggle marked our Presbyterian heritage across the lowlands and up into the Scottish hills, written in blood by passionate Presbyterians in the never-to-be-forgotten massacres like Glencoe and Culloden.