Rachel, weeping

Important enough to quote in its entirety, from National Review:

Iraq’s Holy Innocents [John F. Cullinan]

Spare a thought — and perhaps also a prayer — for Iraq’s beleaguered Christians, who yesterday observed the somber Feast of the Holy Innocents. Perhaps nowhere else does this particular occasion cut closer to the bone: In Iraq, Christians mourn their friends, the most recent martyrs for the faith, on the same day that Christians around the world are called to remember the Church’s very first martyrs, the infants slaughtered en masse in Bethlehem on Herod’s orders after the birth of Jesus.

Today is also an appropriate time for all Americans, believer and unbelievers alike, to consider their moral responsibilities toward an invisible minority caught up in a forgotten war. After all, one of the unintended — and unacknowledged — consequences of Iraq’s liberation in 2003 was the swift and ongoing demise of Iraq’s ancient Christian communities. While this tragedy was unforeseen, it was by no means unforeseeable, if only U.S. policymakers had paid due attention to Iraq’s complex religious landscape and recent history. Worse yet, U.S. officials have deliberately refused to take any steps to safeguard Iraq’s persecuted Christians — or even to acknowledge their plight — for fear of being seen as aiding unpopular and unfashionable religious minorities.

This policy of malign neglect helps explain why so few Americans are even aware that Iraq still remains a rich ethnic and religious mosaic beyond the simple tripartite division of all Iraqis into three warring tribes: Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds. Fewer still are aware that Christianity in Mesopotamia dates from the mid-first century, when local tradition holds that the Apostle Thomas (the same doubting Thomas who appears in John’s Gospel) founded what became the Church of the East, the only enduring Christian community formed outside the borders of the Roman empire during apostolic times. Thomas’s mission predates the arrival of Islam by six centuries and serves as a needed reminder that early Christianity was an essentially Eastern phenomenon.

Today, the vast majority of Iraqi Christians share common roots in the Church of the East, which split into two branches in the 16th century, one Roman Catholic (Chaldean) and the other essentially Orthodox (Assyrian). Both churches worship partly in Arabic and partly in Aramaic, the same language that Jesus spoke. Smaller Christian denominations include Syriac Christians (mainly Roman Catholic, but also Orthodox), Latin Rite Roman Catholics and other historic Middle Eastern churches (mainly Orthodox and Armenian), and some Protestants (mostly Anglicans) and Evangelicals.

It was not so long ago that Iraqi Christians belonging to all these churches played a unique and vital role in the common life of modern Iraq. Their contributions, both institutional and individual, once formed an irreplaceable part of the fabric of Iraqi life. And their contributions in turn played a wholly disproportionate role in relation to their actual numbers in an overwhelmingly Muslim society.

On the one hand, there was a web of church institutions — schools, hospitals, clinics, and orphanages — that served all Iraqis regardless of faith. Of these, none was more prominent than Baghdad College, a remarkable Jesuit preparatory school for boys that turned out a disproportionate share of Iraq’s political and cultural elite between 1931 and 1968. As with most other church schools, fully half the student body were Muslim. Even today, 40 years after the American priests and seminarians were expelled and all private schools nationalized in the wake of the Six-Day War, Baghdad College’s legacy endures. In the December 2005 parliamentary elections, three of the four leading candidates for prime minister (all Muslims, of course) were former students. So too are many other distinguished Iraqis, such as Kanan Makiya, whose 1989 classic Republic of Fear shattered the wall of silence around the Baathist dictatorship. Yet this one school’s splendid example is by no means a strictly Iraqi or purely historical phenomenon, as Christian schools continue to educate an outsized share of local Muslim elites in places as diverse as Egypt (Gamal Mubarak) or Pakistan (the late Benazir Bhutto).

On the other hand, there was and remains individual Christian witness to values that are in notably short supply in Iraq nowadays, especially respect for one’s neighbor regardless of faith and willingness to resolve disputes without recourse to violence. These particular values are ones their Muslim neighbors most often acknowledge and admire, as I learned while living and working as a Catholic seminarian in Jordan a decade ago. And they are precisely the same ideals Pope Benedict XVI cited in his annual Christmas message on Saturday:

How can we forget the troubled situation in Iraq and the little flock of Christians which lives in the region? At times it is subject to violence and injustice, but it remains determined to make its own contribution to the building of a society opposed to the logic of conflict and the rejection of one's neighbor.

Yet these same values have made Iraqi Christians easy targets for Sunni and Shiite extremists and common criminals in the utter collapse of law and order that followed the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. Unlike their Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish neighbors, Iraqi Christians have no private militias, no powerful foreign patrons — and no fighting ideology like the political Islam of the Muslim Brotherhood or its Shiite counterparts. They are thus the only group in Iraq without blood on their hands, holy innocents caught up in an unholy war.

Last year, I wrote about how practically every Christian neighborhood, parish, or family was repeatedly forced to pay protection money (jizya) to avoid exile, murder, or forced conversion to Islam. These evils were universally justified by their perpetrators on the basis of the same Koranic verses dealing with subject peoples, but they were seldom if ever publicly denounced as a perversion of Muslim faith by Iraq’s influential Muslim clergy.

This year, Iraq’s dwindling Christian communities are still being targeted on the basis of their faith. That is especially the case in Mosul, long the most lawless and violent place in Iraq. By an unhappy coincidence, Mosul is also located in the ancestral heartland of Iraqi Christianity, and is thus the last refuge (short of exile) for Christians fleeing targeted violence in Baghdad, Basra, and other places.

Mosul is therefore a target-rich environment. In December alone, at least seven churches, convents, and schools have been bombed, claiming dozens of lives, including the latest holy innocent, an eight-day-old baby girl. Iraq’s central government deserves credit for dispatching some 3,000 additional police after a similar spate of bombings and attacks in October, but their presence has brought little improvement as Christians continue to flee Mosul for overcrowded and underdeveloped villages such as Qaraqosh in the adjacent Nineveh plain. Meanwhile, the situation around Kirkuk, also in northern Iraq, remains nearly as dire for Christians caught up in the Arab-Kurdish struggle for control of the area’s oil fields.

While the Iraqi government has belatedly taken some modest steps to ease the suffering of Iraqi Christians, the U.S. government’s consistent policy of studied and shameful indifference forms rare common ground between the Bush and Obama administrations. It is an indelible stain on American honor that two administrations did nothing to assist, much less protect, a beleaguered religious minority. Such was not the case in the Balkans a decade ago, when the Clinton administration came to the aid of embattled Muslim minorities in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo with decisive military force in similar circumstances. In Iraq, however, America’s unmet moral obligations were and are the direct consequence of the security vacuum arising from the American-led destruction of Saddam’s Republic of Fear.

When pressed by religious-freedom advocates, Bush-administration officials invariably ducked responsibility by claiming that overall security improvements, beginning with the 2007 surge, would trickle down to Iraq’s most vulnerable and helpless minorities. The Obama administration takes the same hands-off approach in October’s annual State Department report on religious freedom: “The ‘surge’ by the Multinational Forces in Iraq, in coordination with Iraqi Security Force operations, reduced the overall level of violence in the country; however, significant effects were slow to trickle down to the country’s minority communities.” But the real reason for inaction, as several senior Bush-administration officials admitted to me off the record, was that being seen to help Christians was simply too controversial at home and in the Muslim world. It was a matter of scarce political capital better spent elsewhere, I was told.

A couple of weeks ago, a Chaldean-American friend of mine raised the issue of American responsibility for the plight of his brothers and sisters at a public forum convened by a mid-level State Department official. According to the Detroit Free Press, this official “said he couldn’t comment on whether Iraqi Christians were hurt by the U.S.-led war.” “I can’t answer that,” he said. “Let’s leave that to the historians.”

On the same day that my friend was try to get a straight answer from the State Department, more than 120 Christian leaders met in Baghdad to issue yet another urgent plea for targeted security assistance and development aid. Similar pleas for equally modest measures have long fallen on deaf ears, not least in Kurdish-controlled areas, where the treatment of Christians seeking refuges leaves a lot to be desired.

Meanwhile, the plight of Iraq’s surviving Christians worsens. In churches around the world today, Christians will hear the passage from Matthew’s Gospel (2:13-18) that recounts the slaughter of the holy innocents and ends with these words of the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah:

A voice was heard in Ramah,
sobbing and loudly lamenting:
it was Rachel weeping for her children,
refusing to be comforted because they were no more

The time is fast approaching when Iraqi Christians are no more.

Merry Christmas!

Santa came! We got lots of neat things and are going to start our Christmas lunch pretty soon--Dziadzi sausage, YUM.

Eldest Daughter even came up with a stocking for me--one of her socks, clipped to her wall shelving. I got a phaser!!!

A very merry Christmas to all, both near and far away. We love you tons and tons.

Happy birthday to me!

I am in the City Too Very Far Away to spend Christmas with Eldest Daughter. Today we went to a needlework shop where I spent too much money, then out for turkey dinner. En route to the restaurant we passed Santa. He drives a blue Neon.

When we got back, we decorated her tree.


Something scary is under there, though...

House from the time of Jesus found in Nazareth

According to the Israel Antiquities Authority:

An archaeological excavation the Israel Antiquities Authority recently conducted has revealed new information about ancient Nazareth from the time of Jesus. Remains of a dwelling that date to the Early Roman period were discovered for the first time in an excavation, which was carried out prior to the construction of the "International Marian Center of Nazareth" by the the Association Mary of Nazareth, next to the Church of the Annunciation.

According to the New Testament, Mary, the mother of Jesus, lived in Nazareth together with her husband Joseph. It was there that she also received the revelation by the Angel Gabriel that she would conceive a child to be born the Son of God. The New Testament mentions that Jesus himself grew up in Nazareth.

In 1969 the Church of the Annunciation was erected in the spot that the Catholic faith identified with the house of Mary. It was built atop the remains of three earlier churches, the oldest of which is ascribed to the Byzantine period (the fourth century CE). In light of the plans to build there, the Israel Antiquities Authority recently undertook a small scale archaeological excavation close to the church, which resulted in the exposure of the structure.

According to Yardenna Alexandre, excavation director on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, "The discovery is of the utmost importance since it reveals for the very first time a house from the Jewish village of Nazareth and thereby sheds light on the way of life at the time of Jesus. The building that we found is small and modest and it is most likely typical of the dwellings in Nazareth in that period. From the few written sources that there are, we know that in the first century CE Nazareth was a small Jewish village, located inside a valley. Until now a number of tombs from the time of Jesus were found in Nazareth; however, no settlement remains have been discovered that are attributed to this period."

I went to Nazareth in 2008 with my mom and Youngest Daughter. We toured a site called "Nazareth Bible Village" that was a re-creation of a first century farm and town very much like what would have been in the area when Jesus lived there. Just for some perspective, here is a map of Nazareth showing the location of Nazareth Bible Village (large red oval on the left) and the excavation site, which is near the Church of the Annunciation (smaller red oval on the right). That amounts to about a 15 minute walk.


Makes me want to go back!

Snowflakes even at the doctor's

So I called my doctor's office on Monday to make an appointment. Here's the conversation that ensued:

Appointment lady: When would be a good time?
Prof: I live here in HomeCity but I work in UniTown. So I could come to an appointment either Monday mornings, Thursday afternoons, or all day on Friday.
Appointment lady: Hmm. Let me see....(sound of clicking keys)...Oh! How about 10 a.m. Wednesday the 6th?
Prof: No, that's a Wednesday and I will be in UniTown. Is there an opening Monday morning, Thursday afternoon, or Friday?
A.L.: Oh, okay. Let's see---ah, yes! I have an opening at noon on the 13th.
Prof: Ma'am, that's still a Wednesday.
A.L.: Oh, okay. How about Friday at 7 a.m.?
Prof: I'll take it! Now, can you re-order my prescription? I will run out of it by Thursday. Please send the script to the HomeCity Pharmacy on Main Street.
A.L.: Oh, not the Pharmacy in UniTown?
Prof: No, the one on Main Street in HomeCity.
A.L.: Okay, I have their fax number. No problem.
I hang up, happy to have that all taken care of.

Cue ominous music...

So I sent my spouse to the pharmacy Thursday to pick up the medicine. No medicine. Friday morning, I called the doctor's office again, and asked what happened with the prescription. The lady said they had inadvertently sent it to UniTown but would immediately fax the script to HomeCity Pharmacy.

This morning I went to HomeCity Pharmacy. Guess what?

Thankfully, the two pharmacies are owned by the same company. The nice pharmacist at HomeCity called UniTown and got the prescription faxed here, and I finally have my medication.

Time for a new doctor.

Sad news

One of Spouse's fraternity brothers from our undergrad years passed away at the end of November. We found out yesterday, via a hurriedly scrawled note on the back of another frat brother's Christmas card envelope. I went searching for DW's obituary online, and soon found it.

Since his sole remaining relative, a sister, lives down south there will be no funeral anywhere within driving distance. No formal way to say goodbye. So, we seem to be having an e-mail funeral as the news travels from friend to friend.

I am ambivalent about funerals. I think they end up being terribly expensive, as the families tend to choose options out of grief and not financial prudence. On the other hand, when Spouse's father died, it was a great comfort to the family to see the long line of cars escorting their dad to his final rest.

Spouse and I will not get the chance to escort D to his final resting place. We will not get the chance to formally say goodbye. So, I will do it here.

Godspeed, D. Thank you for the funny and fond memories we have of you. May you rest in peace in the arms of a loving God.

Ack! Training! and Home (or not) for the Holidays

For the past two days I've been in all-day training sessions run by federal and state agencies. OH MY LORD. Can these sessions run any slower? Can the material be any more boring and simple? Can we all survive without massive doses of caffeine to keep us awake?

I am not totally sure that it's possible to live through three days of this training. One more day to go. If you hear a big explosion somewhere in the vicinity of the frozen North, that would be my head.

So--Christmas. Sigh. This Christmas is the first time we will not all be together for the holiday (and my birthday). Eldest Daughter doesn't have any time off, as she just started her new job. Son doesn't have enough time off to justify traveling from way down South to the frozen North; he has to be back at work on December 26th. So, this is how we are handling the holiday: Youngest Daughter is flying down to spend her Christmas break with Son so he is not alone. I am traveling to the City Too Very Far Away to be with Eldest Daughter. Spouse is staying home to watch the cats, the house, and to generally keep from getting too far behind at work. Thank God for webcams, as that is how we will all "see" each other Christmas Day.

Am I okay with this? Well, it doesn't really matter, does it? There's no way to get us all under one roof, for this one day of the year. Airfares are horrible anyway. Last time Son came north for Christmas, it cost us nearly $500, mostly because he had to be back the 27th. At least we saw him at Thanksgiving, and we were all together then. We can deal with this.

On the job front, things are still chaotic at my work thanks to the increased requirements for externally funded research. At Spouse's work, the state budget crisis will mean he will most likely go down to four days a week for 8-10 weeks. We don't know when that will start, but isn't it wonderful to have that happen right at the holidays?

Progress is slow on the embroidered fan, although I have started the upper edge (the last embroidered part--then comes the silver!). When I get the padding in for the satin stitch I will take another photo of it. Silk is so slippery--I dropped my needle the other day, and none of us could find it. Dad got one of his magnets and swept it over the sofa, and we finally found the missing pointy sharpy thing this morning. Whew!

On the political front--I've sent a multitude of e-mails to my senators and representative asking them not to vote for Obamacare. Finally I am getting a response that acknowledges that I do not support the bill. Previous responses have thanked me for my support of the bill. Argh! Of course, I have Mr. Liberal as my senior senator, so I have no illusions that voicing my opinion will sway him at all. Still, I had to try.

Revealing Faith

Plimoth Plantation started a project three years ago to recreate a 17th century embroidered jacket. I've been following it for about a year, and today they revealed the completed jacket, which they have dubbed "Faith".

What a beauty! More photos here.

Another snowflake, already.

1. I post the syllabus for the online classes a week before the quarter starts (Online Learning makes us). It says in the syllabus that lectures are posted on Tuesdays, and that assignments are listed on the last page of the lecture. So, therefore, nothing will be available until the Tuesday of Week One. I have a general discussion area which also is open a week before classes start, for questions about the textbook, and other administrivia--including a place where I require students to post that they have read and understood the syllabus. On Monday of Week One, CluelessStudent asked where the assignment was for the first week. She said she has looked for it in the content area of the course management site, and in the syllabus. I refrained from remarking on her reading comprehension (as she has already posted that she has read and understood the syllabus) and pointed out that it was not yet Tuesday. I also was overly kind and told her there's no collected homework due this week.

2. Part of the requirement of this online course is that students must post a minimum number of times per week. I provide discussion questions for them in each lecture; they have to answer the question themselves, and then respond to their classmates' answers. CluelessStudent posted her response on Tuesday and it was just a tad off the mark. It's now Friday. I just looked at the report of who has accessed what, and found that CluelessStudent has neither read the lecture nor looked at the handouts that accompany the lecture.

What is up with this person? In her post she complains about being a single parent and having to juggle schedules, so she's not the typical undergrad snowflake, but apparently she's a snowflake nonetheless.

Weird, just weird. Yeah, I am REALLY looking forward to this term. Not.

Computer woes

Last week, while Youngest Daughter was using my laptop, the doggone thing shut down unexpectedly. Nothing would revive it, and of course it was the day before Thanksgiving so nothing could be done about it.

Monday I brought it in to work, and the Nice IT Guy picked it up in the afternoon. Next morning he e-mailed me and said that it seemed to have been in some sort of "super-hibernation" but it booted up on AC power. Then later in the afternoon he wrote and said it shut off on him too. So, now it has to go back to IBM and the motherboard needs replacing. It won't be back until next Thursday. Sigh.

So, I've been on my little mini-Dell that I got last summer. Just a couple of weeks ago I was thinking that I really don't use it much, and maybe I shouldn't have gotten it--but now I am so thankful I did! Nice IT Guy installed the software I need and hooked it up to our department printer, so it's meeting my needs just fine.

I've not done a lot on the fan since the new quarter started, but I should get somewhere this weekend with it. Weekdays are too busy, evenings I am too tired. I'd like to get it done before the New Year. We'll see.

We get a $750 bonus this month, in lieu of our annual raise. Looking forward to whatever the tax man doesn't take out of it!