Forty-four bishops from the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America and its Canadian equivalent left for the Middle East today, including Bishop Gerald Mansholt of the church’s Central States Synod which includes Missouri.

On the synod’s website, Mansholt said the two-week trip is part of the ELCA’s “Churchwide Strategy for Engagement in Israel and Palestine,” adopted by the 2005 Churchwide Assembly.

According to John Brooks, director of the ELCA News Service, the trip was planned “long before the current Gaza conflict.”

Writing in a Dec. 31st pastoral letter, Bishop Mark Hanson, the ELCA’s presiding bishop, said the denomination “joins with all people calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and southern Israel,” and asked ELCA members “to join Middle East religious leaders who requested that Sunday, Jan. 4, be ‘a day for justice and peace in the land of peace,’” according to an ELCA press release.

In his own message, Mansholt wrote that there were three goals…

Photo Courtesy New York Times

A few days ago the New York Post ran a column  by Iranian-born journalist Amir Taheri highlighting comments made by the Rev. Jesse Jackson describing the radical change of influence Israel would have under a Barrack Obama presidency. Taheri writes,

The most important change [says Jackson] would occur in the Middle East, where “decades of putting Israel’s interests first” would end.

Jackson believes that, although “Zionists who have controlled American policy for decades” remain strong, they’ll lose a great deal of their clout when Barack Obama enters the White House.

“Obama is about change,” Jackson told me in a wide-ranging conversation. “And the change that Obama promises is not limited to what we do in America itself. It is a change of the way America looks at the world and its place in it.”

Soon after, Jackson released a statement suggesting that the New York Post column misrepresented his views on America’s partners…