Tag Archives: violence

Turns out Faisal Shahzad, the would-be bomber of Times Square, was inspired by the teachings of a radical imam, Anwar al-Awlaki, who had also communicated with suspected Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Hasan before he killed 13 people. For me, the most the chilling passage in the WSJ article linked above is this: “Officials said Mr. Shahzad told his interrogators that he read Mr. Awlaki’s English-language writings calling for holy war against Western targets and was moved to action, at least in part, by the cleric’s exhortations.”

Upon reading this, my mind was immediately turned back to an article I researched and wrote on Sept. 11, 2003, about the “other 9/11” in American history–the fateful Sept. 11th on which the preaching of a well-known American religious leader bore similarly violent fruit, resulting in the massacre of 120 American citizens:

Christian History Corner: Learning From the Other 9/11

“Words kill. So teachers, watch what you say”
Chris Armstrong

“It’s getting uncommonly easy to kill people in large numbers,” wrote the Christian scholar, novelist, and lay theologian Dorothy L. Sayers in her novel Gaudy Night. “And the first thing a principle does—if it really is a principle—is to kill somebody.”

I write this as midnight approaches and the calendar flips to the new Day of Infamy. I am thinking, as are many others, of where I was and what I felt on September 11, 2001, when I first heard that airplanes had struck the World Trade Center’s towers.

I was in the basement of the Duke Divinity School’s library, attending to my duties as copy editor of Church History, the journal of the American Society for Church History. Adam Zele, the book review editor, hung up the telephone, his face pale. Continue reading →