I was visiting with a student in the cafeteria this week when some faculty friends joined us at the table. “Hey—did you hear about the joint statement the bishop of Rome and the patriarch of Moscow released last February when they met in Havana?” I hadn’t. Turns out our conference president Jay Gallimore had referenced the joint statement in an editorial in a recent Michigan Memo. And sure enough, when I later googled “pope” “patriarch” “Havana,” I found the concord.

In fact here is the paragraph (#24) in question:

The world’s heart has been broken over a video clip gone viral two weeks ago. Who can forget the picture of that five-year-old Syrian boy, pulled from the rubble of an Aleppo building, the victim of yet another lethal bomb in the war-torn city. Stunned and mute, the boy is seated on an orange jump seat in the back of an ambulance, the side of his head gashed by some projectile. While the video rolls, the young child stares back with blank expression, bewildered into silence. Not even a sob. Silence. What was he thinking in that moment of sheer terror?

The Roman Catholic turned Anglican Englishman lawyer turned diplomat, preacher and poet, John Donne (1572-1631), composed these lines (from his collection Devotions upon Emergent Occasions):

Has the blogosphere always been this awash in conspiracy theories? I was reading a European writer the other day who commented (and perhaps for good reason) that Americans as a people seem to have a predilection for conspiracy theories—those wild suppositions claiming sinister powers are manipulating current events, the populace, politics, the markets, medical science (you choose), all for a nefarious end. For example, one blogger suggested  one of the presidential candidates is suffering from a secret malady that will cut short their candidacy and offered a YouTube link as proof.

Remember being a child and sitting with your little friends in a long row, perched on chairs a bit too tall for all of you—remember what you did with your legs? Why of course—we sat there kicking and swinging our legs as if there were no tomorrow. G. K. Chesterton once commented about those indefatigable legs: “A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged”  (Orthodoxy 61).

The nation is still reeling from Sunday morning’s headline of the bloody massacre in an Orlando night club in the wee hours of a new week. But already the news media’s scrolling litany of superlatives—“the worst mass shooting in U.S. history” “the greatest mass murder in American history”—along with its non-stop coverage of this horrific tragedy have numbed the American psyche once again.

Months ago (it seems like years now, doesn’t it?) when Ben Carson announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for President, the North American Division of Seventh-day Adventists released the following statement: “While individual church members are free to support or oppose any candidate for office as they see fit, it is crucial that the Church as an institution remain neutral on all candidates for office. Care should be taken that the pulpit and all church property remain a neutral space when it comes to elections.

Now the country’s boisterously divided—not only between political parties and candidates this presidential election season—but water cooler conversations reveal a nation divided as well over the videotaped encounter of a 17-year-old male lowland gorilla and a three-year-old boy. By now you’ve heard the story retold a hundred times (make that 101 now). An unidentified boy with his mother and a group of children were visiting the Cincinnati Zoo last week, when the youngster pulled away from his mother, climbed into the gorilla enclosure, slipped on the edge and fell ten feet into the moat.

I'm sitting here in my 26th floor hotel room in Hong Kong—high rises towering into the sky all around me. I don't think I will ever forget the anguished, nearly despairing look on her face last Friday afternoon—a desperate face not even my iPhone camera could possibly have captured.