I would want to remind him that the faith tradition he has participated in all along was born out of the testimony of a Savior who dared to look Rome and Satan in their faces and to refuse their bargain for such a violent and intellectually lazy expression of power and plead with him to do likewise.

It’s not too late to admit you were wrong. It’s not too late to repent. And it’s not too late to speak and act against injustice, to walk away from these instruments of death and to look instead for the tools that cultivate life.

I wondered what I would say to him. A part of me would be indignant and furious at him, I think. But the more honest part of me would lean close and say this:

I also thought about a version of myself in some other timeline that never let go of nationalism—a version of me who might have wanted to cozy up to such powers, to find meaning in it, to infuse it with some carefully selected bible verses, maybe even to join institutions that enforce it.

Signposts, too, of the resilience our wee country showed in the face of fracture, and of countless acts of love and hope in the face of long seasons in which bitterness had become normal that eventually brought better days.

Reminders of what happens when empires use violence to impose their will, and how ordinary people on both sides end up carrying the scars.

plastic poppies and lillies faded in the sun at our many memorials to those that were lost and more implicitly to those that were forced to grieve them.

the biting feeling of my skin in those cold Midwestern winters and the uncritical patriotism I once felt for my country and its government, alongside memories of Northern Ireland—walking through the Bogside and the Shankill Road, seeing murals of the dead,

And now, in many ways, also as someone who is a nearly naturalized Northern Irish person. Today, reading about the execution of Alex Pretti by federal agents, all of those lenses seemed to collide. I found myself holding together strangely dissonant memories:

Some of these lenses are obvious: I am a Midwestern American. An immigrant. Someone who once believed deeply in Christian nationalism, repented of it, and eventually found a home in the Mennonite tradition of Christianity. A theologian concerned with the topic of reconciliation.

All of it builds into a sort of general feeling of frantic chaos that seems to spill over into everyone's attitude

People talking loudly, the loud beeping of machinery, Hoovers and other motors running, a manager of a bar yelling at his staff for some backend problem, dogs barking, everything overpriced, the main thoroughfares too close to seating, a wash of bright florescent lighting everywhere

In and of itself I'm not that mad, but it underlines how skeptical I am about the articles for subjects I didn't write the wikipedia article on.

I knew it was plagiarism because I drafted the section of the wikipedia article they plagiarized. I wrote it and sourced it from very obscure Irish football websites as an elaborate form of procrastination.

And the thing is, they wrote it up it really well, and a normal reader would have assumed they did original research.

"Hey girl, I heard you like a bit of danger. I've been a Christian pacifist since the latter years of the Bush administration."

That those who have been repelled by the false, lying Christianity of Trump might come home. That those suckered by the false promise of Christian empire might wake up, unshackle themselves, and choose the God of Erica’s speech while rejecting the contemptible religion of Donald’s.