by Dave Robinson
Beyond the million dollar homes in suburban San Diego, another reality exists. A harsh and lonely, tenuous and increasingly violent reality-the reality faced by undocumented workers. The Invisible Chapel is a new, 30-minute video by award winning filmmaker John Carlos Frey that takes viewers into the lives of a group of migrant workers and Catholic pastoral workers, who together created an authentic Church in a scrubby canyon just out of eyesight of their wealthy neighbors.
For nearly twenty years, their chapel remained invisible to these neighbors. Every Sunday, parish volunteers provided humanitarian assistance and held a church service for over one hundred impoverished agricultural, construction, and service industry workers from Mexico. When they finally were noticed, local neighbors, along with the San Diego Minutemen and a talk-radio show host clashed with the mostly undocumented immigrant congregation. The ensuing conflict forced the migrants and volunteers out of the sacred space they had occupied for nearly twenty years and ultimately caused...
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Also in this issue:
The ongoing war and occupation of Iraq is about oil and democracy, not religion
By Raed Jarrar and Joshua Holland
As Gen. Petraeus took the D.C. stage last September, he and the media only gave half of the story. Shockingly, the United States, Iran, and al Qaeda have the same goals in Iraq.
We've been buried under a crush of analysis about an Iraq that's being ravaged by a religious civil war - an incomprehensible war between "militants" of various stripes and "the Iraqi people". But Americans will be poorly served by the media's singular focus on Iraq's "sectarian violence". It obscures the fact that sectarian fighting is a symptom - a street-level manifestation - of a massive political conflict over what kind of country Iraq will be, who will rule it, and who will control its enormous...more
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