Experience

After spending four years of college at an institution that teasingly encouraged me in my belief that life is a purely theoretical matter, I have been confronted at every turn since by the alternative dogma -- the cult of personal experience.

As soon as I came to divinity school, I was told that I actually would be learning nothing important in the classroom (a shame, since this was the only part I was looking forward to) -- and that the only real lessons would come from the aspects of ministerial training I most dreaded -- the ones that were "hands on." When I first started writing sermons, likewise, the first feedback I received was that they would be more interesting "if they came less from things you read and more from your life experience."

Purity

I will not be the first to point out the eery similarities between the militarization of the U.S. southern border and that of Israel's various boundaries -- notably Trump himself made a similar point, though he of course intended something very different by it. However, in a week that began with Israeli troops firing live rounds on demonstrators in Gaza and killing fourteen people (who were either wholly defenseless or armed at the very most with rocks and implements that posed no serious threat to the heavily equipped IDF) --and which concluded with Trump ordering the National Guard to patrol the nation's boundary with Mexico-- the parallels are particularly hard to miss.