November 14, 2006

The tomb of Archbishop Oscar Romero is all but hidden in the basement of the national cathedral in San Salvador. Though the memorial was recently beautified to mark the 25th anniversary of the 1980 assassination, no signs point to its location. Of course, San Salvador is not known for being tourist friendly; it has few signs pointing to anything. But as my students and I stood before the tomb, we could not help wondering if Romero, whom many Christians across the world regard as a saint, is an embarrassment to the government and perhaps to the church.

Many Christians’ image of a labor leader is of a Jimmy Hoffa–like cigar-chomping political boss—a figure as morally suspect as the industry captains labor tangles with. I tended to have this image in mind too until I met some pastor-organizers and found them to be not only zealous for social justice, which I expected, but people who love the church and seek its good—like many of the workers they aim to organize. They might even be called evangelical for their idealism and their willingness to be fools for Christ.

Mauricio Avilez isn’t sleeping well. He’s jumpy. It’s hard for him to concentrate on his studies. He’s learned surreptitiously that the paramilitary groups in his country, Colombia, want him dead. So he worries about unfamiliar cars on his street and motorcycles that cruise too close to the curb or near the window of a taxi he is riding in.

When asked about the Bible course at the local public high school, a West Texas minister told the Abilene Reporter News, “My hope is the end result is they read their Bible and start asking questions elsewhere and they become Christians. That’s the hope of the community, too.”

In her 2004 book The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation (Westview), Barbara R. Rossing challenged notions about the rapture and the end-times destruction of the earth that are popular in evangelical Christian circles and are elaborated in the Left Behind series of novels. She has since had a number of opportunities to engage in public discussions on end-times theology and the interpretation of Revelation. A professor of New Testament at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, Rossing did her Ph.D. work on Revelation and ecology.