by Lisa Etter Carlson
If I were to fly across the span of time and look down upon the world of the Christian, I would find the landscape to be different in many places, the clothing to be foreign, the languages to be vast, and at points I would find no one living on the very land which I now call my home. If I were to fly across the span of time I would get a birds-eye view of the school of thought that brought about the symposium, and see Joan of Arc riding off to battle and Betsy Ross sewing the first American flag, but, across all this vastness and all this time, there is one thing I would find that remains the same. I may find wars, places dry with famine, I may see cities known for gambling and prostitution and others, places of slavery and segregation, I may even (and God help me) see such monstrosities as Auschwitz. If I were to look down on the lives of Jesus, Paul, Constantine, Teresa of Avila, Francis of Assisi, John Calvin, Blaise Pascal, Dietrich Bonheoffer, Romero, Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King Jr I would find, in all these places and all times, the Christian to be living in a time and place where the majority of people in the world are living in poverty. Continued… Assuming the Destiny of The Poor: a post-colonial view to trauma and healing