“How Does It Feel

How Does It Feel

To Be On Your Own

With No Direction Home

A Complete Unknown

Like a Rolling Stone”

Bob Dylan

Mae La Refugee Camp

 For a long time I have had a desire to write something on the problem that undocumented immigrants face caught in limbo between a country they left and a new country they could never call their own. My work with the Karen People along the Thai – Burma border rekindled this desire. The Karen people in Myanmar had to flee their ancient homeland when the military turned viral and set out on an ethnic purge. A horrific slaughter ensued and a wholesale exodus followed. But just as I was about to commence working on a little book on the Karen plight, caught are they are to this day inside of Thai refugee camps, unable to return home or secure entitlement to build anew in Thailand, the great diaspora from Syria commenced. The heart wrenching scenes of their inability to live in their homeland or to find a new start in another land continue to fill the news. Focused on these problems, for a moment, I forgot that my own country was failing to deal responsibly with its own undocumented immigrants. Suddenly the idea of writing about the Karen plight seemed like a practicing alcoholic holding a seminar on how to get the victory over alcoholism. With this in mind I set out to address the immigrant situation in the USA. Many if not most of my thoughts can be applied with a little imagination to all setting where peoples are caught in limbo. Here follows a synopsis of the book I wrote.

The threat of terrorism in America is teaching us vigilance the hard way but it is also tempting us to become anxious. Anxiety induces stupidity and moral confusion. Political pundits and leaders on the right are exploiting this anxiety and calling for a very muscular, legalistic response to the presence of undocumented immigrants living in the USA. Their response is morally confused at best and at worst acutely harmful. Most Evangelicals and their preachers have been sucked into this moral confusion.

Using reason and the very Scriptures Evangelicals parade as the Word of God this book sets forth seven arguments that expose the attitudes and proposed resolutions of the Religious and Political Right as immoral and non-Christian. Only truth exposes error, and in this little book the truth is put on a lamp stand. The reader need not check his or her facility to think and reason in at the front desk and go upstairs to be preached at. “He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6)

The title of my book is The Strangers Within Your Gates: Overcoming the Moral Confusion in American Religion and Politics – Seven Arguments

Available as an e-book on Amazon or paperback at the The Book Patch