Post by angli_fan on Dec 23, 2006 15:12:09 GMT -5
[from the Times (UK)]
by Rowan Williams
These [Arab Christian] communities will survive only if fellow Christians in the West decide to pay a bit of attention. This doesn’t mean using clumsy political or military pressure to “protect” them, in ways that only reinforce the idea that they’re Western allies and so must be unreliable. That’s happened too often in the past. It means being willing to protest when they are ill-treated; to make contact with them, to set up links between local churches here and in the Middle East; to remember when we visit the region that they exist and need friends. It’s not that these Christians are being persecuted by Muslim governments on the whole. It’s a matter of rising tides of extremism, which governments are as keen to check as anyone.
Speaking up for and befriending the ancient Christian communities of the Middle East is good for them and for Muslims too; it’s a reminder of the healthier and saner relationship between the faiths that existed in many parts of the Middle East for long tracts of its complicated history.
www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,6-2516379,00.html(copy/paste)
by Rowan Williams
These [Arab Christian] communities will survive only if fellow Christians in the West decide to pay a bit of attention. This doesn’t mean using clumsy political or military pressure to “protect” them, in ways that only reinforce the idea that they’re Western allies and so must be unreliable. That’s happened too often in the past. It means being willing to protest when they are ill-treated; to make contact with them, to set up links between local churches here and in the Middle East; to remember when we visit the region that they exist and need friends. It’s not that these Christians are being persecuted by Muslim governments on the whole. It’s a matter of rising tides of extremism, which governments are as keen to check as anyone.
Speaking up for and befriending the ancient Christian communities of the Middle East is good for them and for Muslims too; it’s a reminder of the healthier and saner relationship between the faiths that existed in many parts of the Middle East for long tracts of its complicated history.
www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,6-2516379,00.html(copy/paste)