On Easter, the US service death toll in the Iraq War hit 4000. What responsibility does the church have to raise issues of war and peace, of torture and punishment, of politics and power? Was Jesus "political" or not? These issues also are swirling around questions of race and class especially brought up by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's preaching. Some assert that we should "leave politics out of the pulpit," while others believe we should "preach prophetically," and "speak truth to power," in our preaching. These issues are vitally important to engage at this point in our nation's history, and working through the conflicting thoughts about "Church" and "power" and "politics" are vitally important. What is the Church's role? Hmmmm..


From CNN....read the whole article HERE.

Grim milestone: 4,000 U.S. service employees dead in Iraq war

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Four U.S. soldiers died in a roadside bombing in Iraq on Sunday, military officials reported, bringing the American toll in the 5-year-old war to the grim milestone of 4,000 deaths. Eight of those killed were civilians working for the Pentagon.

Troops emerge from a bunker after receiving the "all clear" Sunday following a truck bombing in Mosul.

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The four were killed when their vehicle was hit by an improvised explosive device while patrolling a neighborhood in southern Baghdad, the U.S. military headquarters in Iraq reported Sunday night. A fifth soldier was wounded in the attack, which took place about 10 a.m. (3 a.m. ET).

The U.S. milestone comes just days after Americans marked the fifth anniversary of the start of the war.

Meanwhile, estimates of the Iraqi death toll range from about 80,000 to the hundreds of thousands, with another 2 million forced to leave the country and 2.5 million people displaced within Iraq, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

President Bush ordered U.S. troops into Iraq on March 19, 2003, after months of warnings that then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was concealing stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and efforts to build a nuclear bomb.

U.N. weapons inspectors found no sign of banned weapons before the invasion, and the CIA later concluded that Iraq had dismantled its weapons programs in the 1990s.

Hussein's government fell in early April 2003, and Iraq's new government executed him in December 2006.

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The news of the 4,000 mark came on the same day that Iraq's national security adviser urged Americans to be patient with the progress of the war, contending that it is "well worth fighting" because it has implications about "global terror."

Read the rest HERE.

Hidden Costs of War

This article in the New York Times is important, and also disturbing .. and points out just one of the most dramatic of the many hidden costs of (perpetual?) war:

Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles

By DEBORAH SONTAG and LIZETTE ALVAREZ

Published: January 13, 2008

Late one night in the summer of 2005, Matthew Sepi, a 20-year-old Iraq combat veteran, headed out to a 7-Eleven in the seedy Las Vegas neighborhood where he had settled after leaving the Army....

This particular 7-Eleven sits in the shadow of the Stratosphere casino-hotel in a section of town called the Naked City. By day, the area, littered with malt liquor cans, looks depressed but not menacing. By night, it becomes, in the words of a local homicide detective, “like Falluja.”

Mr. Sepi did not like to venture outside too late. But, plagued by nightmares about an Iraqi civilian killed by his unit, he often needed alcohol to fall asleep. And so it was that night, when, seized by a gut feeling of lurking danger, he slid a trench coat over his slight frame — and tucked an assault rifle inside it.

“Matthew knew he shouldn’t be taking his AK-47 to the 7-Eleven”....

Read it all HERE.