When he lionizes child killers, is James M. Wall speaking for mainstream Christians

...Our interest in Wall was aroused when we saw a rambling article on his blog entitled “Ahlam and Nezar, A Palestinian Couple Released in The Prisoner Exchange”. In it, Wall makes the argument that Ahlam Tamimi, who proudly takes credit for a terrorist atrocity in 2001 which targeted Jewish school-children and extinguished the lives of 15 people including our daughter Malki, did what anyone would do if they saw themselves at war. What she did was merely logistic. It was therefore perfectly understandable. Murder? Hatred? Deeply visceral antisemitism? Terrorism? Not, it seems, in Wall's lexicon.

Frimet/Arnold Roth..
This Ongoing War..
18 July '13..

In the past year, we have three times devoted attention to a prominent theologian and commentator on American Christianity, James M. Wall, an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church. This is not because of a new found interest in the sorts of issues that keep him busy. Rather it is because he exemplifies, to us, a deeply disturbing trend in the world of ultra-liberal religious thought: the willingness to really, really, really understand and theologically empathize with the people who hate Jews and who do awful things to them. (We will illustrate below.)

Anyone not already familiar with what we said about this troubling individual earlier is invited to see

3-Jul-13: Stonewalling? The Christian Century and the thundering silence

5-May-13: Self-confessed jihadist murderer: "With my media card, I was able to enter back and forth, undetected..."

23-Aug-12: Theology and sociopaths

In the earliest of those posts, we noted that he was editor of a prominent American journal of thought and ideas called The Christian Century for the 27 years between 1972 and 1999. Wikipedia calls that "the flagship magazine of U.S. mainline Protestantism" [source]. On retiring, he remained there as a regular columnist until a few years ago. Though it appears he no longer contributes to its pages, his name remains on the masthead as Senior Contributing Editor.

And that's what has gotten the attention of some other good people, because it turns out that while he remains on the Christian Century masthead he has developed some collegial ties with some very hateful friends, blogging at a site where anti-Semitism is rampant (to quote the very well-written and readable source, theoptimisticconservative's Blog).

(Continue)

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