“Why”, asked our Eastern brothers and sisters, “are the Western churches not doing more to prevent the ongoing persecution and killing of Christians even today in the Middle East?” It is a difficult question to answer. The plain fact is that we lack the international institutions necessary to secure and enforce world peace. The genocidal tendency lurks within the human spirit ”“ that fear of the other which, in its most malevolent form, treats the other not as a person but as an object that may be annihilated or ”˜cleansed’. The events in which I participated in Yerevan certainly caused me to grieve for the wrongs done to the Armenian people and to lament the slowness of the world in properly recognising these wrongs. But beyond that, I wondered what it would take for world leaders to develop the structures and institutions and the sheer political will to make sure that the wholesale persecution and killing of people because of their creed, race or ethnic background is properly punished and prevented.
Read it all
Bishop Robert Innes writes from Armenian remembrance event
“Why”, asked our Eastern brothers and sisters, “are the Western churches not doing more to prevent the ongoing persecution and killing of Christians even today in the Middle East?” It is a difficult question to answer. The plain fact is that we lack the international institutions necessary to secure and enforce world peace. The genocidal tendency lurks within the human spirit ”“ that fear of the other which, in its most malevolent form, treats the other not as a person but as an object that may be annihilated or ”˜cleansed’. The events in which I participated in Yerevan certainly caused me to grieve for the wrongs done to the Armenian people and to lament the slowness of the world in properly recognising these wrongs. But beyond that, I wondered what it would take for world leaders to develop the structures and institutions and the sheer political will to make sure that the wholesale persecution and killing of people because of their creed, race or ethnic background is properly punished and prevented.
Read it all