A Violent Tale of Two Cities

October 10, 2023 by Miguel De La Torre

The day after I flew out of Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, Hamas fired more than 2,000 missiles into Israel from the Gaza strip. Israel responded unmercifully. Hundreds are dead, thousands wounded. These numbers are expected to rise as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu…

Domestic Tranquility for Whom?

September 27, 2023 by Miguel De La Torre

These 19 words enshrined at the start of the preamble to the U.S. Constitution provide a vision for a republic yet established. They offered a new way of self-governance which entrusted people (defined as landholding white men)—not some deity—with sustaining a civil peace absent of…

Forced Sterilization in America Is Not a Thing of the Past

September 6, 2023 by Miguel De La Torre

Genocide (genos-race/nation + cide-killing) is a nomenclature coined by Raphael Lemkin, a jurist who served as an advisor to the U.S. Department of War during the Second World War. The term helped describe the six million Jews murdered and the near extinction of the Roma people…

God Is Good

August 23, 2023 by Miguel De La Torre

“God is good!” Can a brother get an Amen? Not so fast. Maybe God is good because we only read those biblical passages which present us with a benevolent deity. But for those of us who have carefully read the entire text, a disturbing depiction…

New Florida Teachings Standard is a Racist Revision of History

August 9, 2023 by Miguel De La Torre

The standards in Florida for teaching middle schoolers about African American history require that they learn “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefits.” High schoolers are to be taught about the “violence perpetrated against and by African Americans” during the…

How Freedom Has Been Redefined to Deny Human Rights

July 26, 2023 by Miguel De La Torre

“Freee-domm!!!” At the top of his lungs, the so-called “QAnon Shaman” – also known as Jacob Chansley – walked the hall of Congress and breached the Senate chamber with his fellow “patriots” during the January 6 insurrection crying for freedom. In the name of this…

Are We Living in the “Neo-Dark Ages”?

July 6, 2023 by Miguel De La Torre

Historians are adept at naming spans of time. We have the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Atomic Age, for example. I wonder how future generations will make sense of these times in which we live, in which many barely subsist. No doubt…

Why It’s Time to Shake the Dust From Our Feet and Move On

June 23, 2023 by Miguel De La Torre

The Southern Baptist Convention met in New Orleans last week and declared women lacked the necessary chromosome to pastor a church. Bless their hearts. Some male allies rushed to post pithy memes expressing allyship to demonstrate their wokeness. Others sought to raise the consciousness of…

A Troubling Past and An Equally Troubling Present

June 1, 2023 by Miguel De La Torre

A meme started to appear on my social media toward the end of April. It simply read, “May she rot in Hell.” It took me a few minutes to realize it was referring to Carolyn Bryant, the grocery store proprietor who falsely accused a 14-year-old…

Is Jesus Ambiguous on Violence?

May 3, 2023 by Miguel De La Torre

Apologists seeking to save God from God are quick to remind us that the God of the Hebrew Bible was a God of justice in order to explain the violence found there. They contrast these texts with the God of the Christian Testament – seen…