Beyond Tut Tut: Thinking Through the New Zealand Massacre…
Friday March 15, 2019 was indeed, as Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described it, “one of New Zealand’s darkest days”, for on that day a gunman, (his name best left unspoken), killed 50 worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, and injured many others. It was an attack that represents so many things… for the families of victims, a long term journey with grief, sadness and probably rage – for many of them it will never ease; for New Zealand, the loss of innocence, for it has now not been spared the violence present in many parts of the world; for the world, a...
Read MoreGrand Bassam: On a Terrorist Attack…
I wonder what you felt when (and if) you read of the terrorist attack in the coastal town of Grand Bassam, Republic of the Ivory Coast, last week. Perhaps you shrugged your shoulders and asked in despair ‘What is the world coming to? So much violence.’ Or in your impatience to get to the sports page, perhaps you paid this bad news item no attention. For Audrey Francis, a student at Vose Seminary who served with her husband as a missionary in the Ivory Coast for 10 years, this was not a news item she could simply shrug off. She has walked on the beach where the attack took place...
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