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A year ago, I watched in horror as afternoon reports of a shooting at a college campus in Utah turned into confirmations that right-wing activist Charlie Kirk had been shot and killed. The ideas Kirk preached are antithetical to our mission here at Sojourners—which is why we dropped everything to immediately publish several pieces condemning his murder. One author sent me a draft at 1:20 a.m. “It doesn't matter what side of the ideological divide commits a politically motivated murder like that of Charlie Kirk's,” wrote Rob Schenck. “It is antithetical to everything Christian.” Twenty-five years ago, terrorists hijacked four airplanes in a coordinated attack that killed 2,977 people. News coverage played nonstop in the Sojourners office library next to a lit candle. Though it was just a few days before deadline, the editorial team scrapped the contents of the next issue and started over; the world had changed. I wasn’t on staff at the time, but when I read that issue now, I’m amazed at the moral clarity writers offered in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. “Our gravest temptation at this hour is to be grasped by the same evil that controlled the terrorists,” wrote Wesley Granberg-Michaelson. What do you remember about those terrible days? The way we remember events like 9/11 or Kirk’s murder can be revealing, writes Amar Peterman. There are many powerful people who don’t want us to remember—or at least, to remember accurately. And the results of that selective memory can be dangerous: “When we are taught to forget America’s disruptive military presence across the Middle East, 9/11 becomes a story of Islamic terror that both condones present Islamophobia and positions Islam as incompatible with ‘American values.’” Elsewhere this week: A herpetologist/theologian believes that if you can learn to love snakes (yes, literal snakes), you can overcome a lot of other prejudices. We review a book offering remedial evolution education for those of us who grew up thinking evolution was evil (where are my fellow Abeka book alumni?) and a satirical novel reimagining the Proverbs 31 woman as the pageant-going wife of a megachurch pastor. And British actor Andrew Garfield talked with Sojourners about the legend of Robin Hood and how early Renaissance Christianity had failed people.
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