Between Empire and Kingdom Come

In the first pages of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, the reader confronts a Columbus quite different from the one we learned in school. Soon after his ship arrived, Columbus wrote of the Arawak Indians who swam out to meet it: “They are well-built . . . and so naïve and free with their possessions. They never say No. . . They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane… They would make fine servants… With fifty men, we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want . . .”

A Window on the World House

Last Sunday, leaning in close to the prayer of Psalm 91, we felt after an answer to the question, how God protects, how God saves. Our thought hung close to the personal experience. We said little of our self in relation to any community, or to larger joined purposes in the world. Yet now,