For Jews of Scottish Ancestry, An Official (And Kosher) Tartan

Today in Canada, and elsewhere in the world for all I know, we are observing National Tartan Day.   It seems a fitting occasion to pass on this story, via US National Public Radio, which certainly qualifies as one of the cheerier religious news items of the day.  In this link, NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with a Glasgow Rabbi, Mendel Jacobs, who has designed the fist official Jewish Scottish tartan.

Rabbi Mendel Jacobs with his tartan prayer shawl.

 

 

The interview references a Sikh tartan, which may be seen here.  There are also mysterious references to a Christian clergy tartan, but, being a bit of a liturgical purist, I don`t have the courage to really pursue that.

"I Made Horrible Mistakes": Regrets Of An American Torturer

 

Diagram of stress positions, from a US military handbook for interrogators.

 

A day after reading a very disheartening Religious News Service story about how nearly two-thirds of Americans support torture, I was given fresh hope when I listened to NPR's incomparable Terry Gross speaking with an American former interogator who worked in Iraq's infamous Abu Ghraib prison.

Eric Fair worked for a private contractor employed by the US military as an interrogator in Iraq.  A former soldier, his knowledge of Arabic qualified him for the work, though he admits there were times when he was reliant on translators to understand what the prisoners were saying.   He has just published Consequence: A Memoir, which has been well reviewed by the New York Times.

 

Eric Fair

 

In the interview, Fair sounds like a man who has been psychically and morally injured by torturing others, and he is very clear that how whatever  linguistically disguises we may give it, like enhanced interrogation, torture is torture.  While he is willing to give his fellow interrogators credit for sincerely believing that their work may have saved American lives, that motive for him, loking back, is not sufficiently exculpatory (setting aside the important point that torture does not work).  He writes:

I refuse to suggest that torture is successful on any level. And I'm not sure that it matters; it shouldn't matter to anyone in this country. I'm not sure why we've gotten to this point where we start to talk about the effectiveness of torture, as if that makes any difference whatsoever.

Torture is wrong. Americans, all Americans, should know better. That's what makes us attractive; what makes us attractive is the way we do things, it's the example that we set. What makes us attractive is not how tough we are or how good we are at extracting information, and anyone who thinks that way I think fails to understand what this country is about. So I've left that discussion about whether or not torture is effective or not behind. It simply doesn't matter.

At a time when a Reuters and Ipsos poll finds 63 per cent of Americans (and 82% of Republicans)  believing that toture is jsutified if it can "obtain information about terrorism activities", Fair's voice is honest and important.  I'll review his book here in the near future.

Anglicans: Catholic Or Evangelical?

A learned friend of mine would answer the question in the Post Header by saying Both, which is probably correct for some of us.

This post is just a stub and a plug for an excellent list of recent writing on Anglican ecclesiology and theology by the American writer, Christopher Benson.  Lots of items there to go on my reading list.

MP+