The Papers Project: Print! Copy! Distribute!!

“Jesus in the Rubble” flyers can be a way to confront the complicity of churches in the ongoing Gaza genocide.

I’m happy to share that I’m launching a new project. Honestly, it’s not really new in that I thought of it years ago. But now it’s real.

The Papers Project provides tools in the form of PDFs that can be downloaded, printed and copied to foster human-to-human communication.

Critical content that people can pass out. At places of worship. In front of the White House. At post offices. Courthouses. Historic sites. Anywhere.

Critical information that people of conscience can share in a timely manner with others, revitalizing the public square. Helping to make democracy real.

The first posting is this “Jesus in the Rubble” — click on the image to go to the page and see the downloadable PDFs:

This summer, Rev. Munther Isaac, of the Christmas Lutheran church in Bethlehem, gave an address at the Riverside Church in New York City, “Silence is Complicity,” challenging US churches.

Here, the Papers Project aims to provide tools to address the silence. We hope people will share these resources. If they belong to a church, have the church pass out these flyers as church bulletins this Christmas season. People can also use them as a resource to pass out at any church they want.

See:

“Christmas Message from Bethlehem”

Rev. MITRI RAHEB, [in Bethlehem] mraheb@daralkalima.edu.ps, @RahebM

Rev. Raheb is a prominent theologian and the founder and president of Dar al-Kalima University in Bethlehem. Artists from Dar al-Kalima, along with children with disabilities from Bethlehem, made the nativity scene currently at the Vatican. See report from the Christian Century: “From D.C. to the Vatican, baby Jesus is wearing a keffiyeh.”

Raheb served as the pastor of the Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem from 1987 until 2017. His books include I am a Palestinian Christian and Faith in the Face of Empire: The Bible through Palestinian Eyes.

He just wrote the piece “Christmas Message from Bethlehem — ‘Do not be afraid.’“

The current pastor of the Lutheran church, Munther Isaac, will speak at a livestream on Friday at 10 a.m. ET “Christ is Still in the Rubble.” He gave an address at the Riverside church earlier this year, “Silence is Complicity,” challenging U.S. churches.

Both pastors are quoted in a flyer / church bulletin from The Papers Project which “provides tools for conscientious communication.”

Raheb writes: “A few weeks ago, I was meeting with Christian leaders from the Middle East. Although each one of us came from a different context nevertheless it was clear that one single theme was common in all our deliberations: Fear. The Jewish settler attacks in the West Bank, the destruction that the Israeli airstrikes had left in Lebanon, and the regime change in Syria with an unknown future, are making Christians very fearful about their future. Fear seems to be the mark of our time.

“Yet, the fears of our Palestinian people in Gaza are beyond comprehension. Half of the population in Gaza are children. Most of these children have been through five wars in addition to the current ongoing genocide in only 16 years…

“We had a university campus in Gaza. It was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike during Holy week this year. We have 36 staff, all of them displaced. They refuse to surrender to fear. They are determined to do something against the fear, the trauma, the depression. They volunteer daily reaching out to the thousands of displaced children around them with art therapy programs so that the children can heal, at least partially.”

He writes of “liberation and freedom for a people under Roman occupation. Our people are asking for nothing more than freedom and liberation from occupation. As Christians we need to challenge the necro politics of our time, all politics that keep creating death worlds, and the military industries that keep benefiting from wars. It is not enough to call for a ceasefire. We need to be God’s instrument of liberation.”