by | Oct 19, 2023 | Uncategorized
A historian of Gaza’s only Christian hospital, where scores died in an explosion this week, shares the story of the longstanding refuge.
Update (October 19, 2023): This story has been updated to include newly available information from a US intelligence assessment.
The Arabic word ahli can be translated into English in several ways: family, membership, and people. This family is not limited to nuclear family membership. It’s capacious, expanding to include a wide range of people who belong together.
This word, ahli, has appeared in news headlines across the world this week, following the explosion that killed scores seeking refuge at al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City.
Narratives about who was to blame proliferated before the fires at the hospital were even extinguished. Some claimed an Israeli air strike was resonsible. Others blamed a misfired rocket belonging to Palestine Islamic Jihad. A US intelligence assessment, viewed by outlets including CNN on Wednesday, judged “that Israel was not responsible for [the] explosion that killed hundreds of civilians,” estimated the death toll at the “low end of the 100-to-300 spectrum,” and reported “only light structural damage at the hospital.”
As a historian who has published on al-Ahli Hospital, let me extend an invitation to pause while media debate and intelligence fact-finding continue. Let’s pause to learn. To think. To pray.
Praying about the destruction at this hospital in Gaza needs to start, first and foremost, with knowledge of the people who were affected. Who were the people at the hospital? Why did al-Ahli Arab Hospital experience this tragedy? And how can we turn to God when nothing makes sense?
To more fully comprehend who sought refuge within the hospital, we must start with its history.
The idea of establishing a Christian hospital in Gaza began in 1878, …
Continue reading…
by | Oct 18, 2023 | Uncategorized
The fatal explosion hit a well-known facility run by Anglicans—and formerly by Southern Baptists—“in the middle of one of the world’s most troubled places.”
Scores of Palestinians were killed Tuesday in an explosion in the courtyard of Gaza’s only Christian hospital.
The Hamas-run Palestinian Health Ministry, which estimated a death toll of over 500, blamed the attack at al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City on Israel. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said the blast was a failed rocket launch from Islamic Jihad, a Hamas-aligned militant group. United States president Joe Biden, visiting Israel on Wednesday, referenced data from the Department of Defense backing Israel’s account. [Since this piece was originally published, the US government has published an unclassified intelligence assessment on the blast, placing the number of casualties between 100 to 300.]
Al-Ahli was founded by Anglican missionaries and has existed in the region since 1882. For some decades in the mid-20th century, it was operated by Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) missions. It currently sits under the Anglican Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem.
Known colloquially as Al-Ma’amadani (or “the Baptist” in Arabic), it is one of 22 hospitals in northern Gaza. After Israel’s evacuation orders in the area, hundreds of Palestinians had taken refuge there, with families sheltering in the courtyard where the explosion took place, according to news reports.
“We are here as an instrument in the hands of God to show the love of Jesus Christ for all people. We are proud that in all conflicts, this hospital was there to eliminate the suffering of the injured, the poor, and to help those in need of a compassionate heart,” said al-Ahli hospital director Suhaila Tarazi, in an earlier appeal to Christian supporters.
“This hospital will continue to be a place of reconciliation, of …
Continue reading…
by | Oct 18, 2023 | Uncategorized
Christians must care for both Israeli and Palestinian victims of war—and that means actively rejecting hatred of the Jewish people.
One day after Hamas’s Simchat Torah massacres in Israel, crowds gathered at a rally in Times Square promoted by the Democratic Socialists of America. “Our resistance stormed illegal settlements,” shouted one speaker, “and paraglided across colonial borders.” The crowd responded with rousing cheers.
It was an unapologetic celebration of the terrorists’ multi-front assault on Israeli cities, kibbutzim (progressive, communitarian farming villages), and an outdoor music festival. Hamas members have murdered more than 1,400 Israelis, raped, tortured, and injured thousands, and kidnapped around 200 more. Most of the victims were civilians, and many were children, the elderly, or infants. The vast majority were Jews.
The Times Square gathering was not an isolated case of pro-Hamas activism. Pro-Hamas demonstrations were held by the Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matter and Students for Justice in Palestine at California State University in Long Beach and the University of Louisville, each of which included images of paragliders in their promotional materials—a reference not to the Palestinian cause generally but to this specific Hamas attack on thousands of Israeli innocents.
The parent organization for those campus groups called the initial Hamas assault “a historic win for Palestinian resistance,” encouraging its members not merely to rally but to consider “armed confrontation with the oppressors.”
This war is still in its early days. It may be difficult to parse truth from lies and understand exactly why this kind of activism—which is misleadingly portrayed by its supporters as defense of the oppressed—is wrong. But we’ll have a clearer moral vision …
Continue reading…
by | Oct 18, 2023 | Uncategorized
New Pew survey of 7,000 adults explores the beliefs and practices of Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims and their affinity to Confucianism and Daoism.
Christians comprise the largest faith group (34%) among Asian Americans.
But since 2012, Christianity has declined by 8 percentage points. Meanwhile, the share of religiously unaffiliated people has increased from 26 to 32 percent over the same period.
This is according to a new Pew Research Center survey of religion among Asian American adults who self-identified as Asian, either alone or in combination with other races or ethnicities.
Pew conducted surveys between July 5, 2022, and January 27 this year and also held focus groups and one-on-one interviews with over 100 Asian Americans to uncover what religion means to them. Besides surveying Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, and Hindu Asian Americans, the research center also explored peoples’ affinity with Confucianism and Daoism.
Pew released its previous report on the state of Asian American religion in 2012. At the time, researchers found that Asian American evangelical Protestants, who surpassed white evangelicals in terms of weekly church attendance (76% versus 64%), were one of the most religious groups in the United States.
The latest Pew data is representative of ethnic Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese views on religion. People who were solely of Middle Eastern (e.g., Lebanese or Saudi) or Central Asian (e.g., Afghan or Uzbek) descent were excluded.
In many of these origin groups, well under half say that Christianity is their religion.
“At the pastoral level, these statistics match the countless stories of our immigrant churches struggling to remain healthy or viable,” said Gabriel J. Catanus, director of Fuller Seminary’s Filipino American Ministry Initiative. “Though we don’t know what …
Continue reading…
by | Oct 17, 2023 | Uncategorized
In her 69 years at Kapuna Hospital, Calvert delivered 10,000 babies, saved countless lives, trained healthcare workers, and loved the people.
I paused to soak in the scene before me. I had come to the remote Gulf Province of Papua New Guinea to write a book about the Calvert family, who, together with the local medical team, transformed medical care in the region.
Now, bathed in sunlight streaming through a window in her home, the elderly Lin Calvert sat bent over her Bible, grasping a magnifying glass. A doctor known as ‘Grandma,’ or Bubu Mei in the local Koaki dialect, the then-89-year-old didn’t notice me as she meticulously noted what God had taught her through the years.
I remembered this image when I learned that Bubu Mei died at age 98 on August 8, after serving nearly seven decades at Kapuna Hospital in Papua New Guinea. She and her husband Peter, along with their two young children, first arrived at the mission hospital in 1954. Their work enabled Kapuna to serve more than 45,000 tribal people making their home in the remote area accessible only by boat.
Calvert delivered generations of babies—an estimated 10,000 over her 60 years as a doctor at Kapuna—and saved countless lives through her aggressive treatment of tuberculosis (TB) and immunization against deadly diseases like measles and cholera. The Calverts also trained thousands of community health care workers in communities throughout the region, helped build the local church, and passed down their love for Kapuna and its patients to their children. Though Peter died in 1982, Calvert continued as head doctor until a fall forced her to retire at age 82.
“[Calvert] was adapted to living in the culture, knew how to communicate with local people in their language, and was committed to giving of herself for their benefit,” missionary doctor Neil Hopkins said at her …
Continue reading…
