The Mosaic covenant included a series of clear commandments to care for the widows, the orphans, and the stranger among them ... Now as then, there is a need to lift up the conditions of widows, orphans, and strangers:
Today they take the form of single woman, many of them livign in great poverty, who have been abandoned by husbands and boyfriends and are raiding children by themselves.
The world is literally awash with children who have been left orphaned by the unrelenting ravages of HIV/AIDS as well as by tribal warfare in Africa, ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that use the methods of terros (shock and awe) to combat acts of terrorism around the world.
The stranger is among us today, though here too the forms have shifted: Now the strangers are the migrant workers who pick our food, the illegal immigrants who clean our houses and hotels, and the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and inside of Abu Ghraib prison, who are under US control but not afforded the protections of the Us Constitution. Further, these prisoners are without the protection of the Geneva Convention nor recieve the common decency that any US citizen would expect and/or demand.
The stranger is also that person with an "Arab sounding name" or that Sikh from India who, because his religion requires him to wear a turban or some other kind of head wrap, is being caught up in the post September 11th 2001, frenzy created and sustained by a government that is always on the lookout for a "person of interest".
- From "Where have all the Prophets Gone?" by Rev. Marvin A McMickle
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