A Picture Today, Revealing Tragically Displaced Moral Priorities of Many American People of Faith

Pictures today. Though I plan to do another posting featuring pictures, I cannot post the picture above alongside the other ones I intend to post. It would be . . . wrong . . . to imply that the heart-breaking story this picture tells stands alongside the chatter of almost any other story.

While many of us in the U.S. have been riveted of late by the bizarre show staged for our amusement in Kentucky — while I myself have been riveted by this show — the story above was unfolding. One of the things I hear it saying to me is how tragically misplaced the moral priorities of many American people of faith are.

How tragically misplaced my own moral priorities are . . . .

This picture and the story it seeks to tell us implicate us. They do so in a very uncomfortable way that makes us — that makes me — want to turn our eyes away. To seek another kind of spectacle . . . .

The little Syrian boy in the photo above, who drowned as his family sought refuge from the turmoil in his nation, is Aylan Kurdi. Today, Nicolaus Mills asks us whether this photo can change history in the way that the photo of Kim Phuc in 1972 seems to have done. 

As Mills concludes, it remains to be seen what the effect of the photo of Aylan Kurdi (which was taken by photographer Nilüfer Demir of the Turkish Doğan News Agency) will be.

Everything depends on us.

(For thoughtful, informed commentary on what is now happening in Germany, in particular, as the Syrian crisis sends waves of immigrants westward, see Alan McCornick's Hepzibah blog — especially here, here, and here.)