A personal testimony of God and politics in the Holy Land. Mitri Raheb is a Palestinian Arab Lutheran Christian pastor who ministers in his hometown of Bethlehem. For many American Christians this combination of identities is incomprehensible. They assume that Palestinian Arabs are Muslims, not Christians, much less Lutherans. Raheb writes as a cultural mediator to the Western Christian world and as a local theologian for the Palestinian community. He grapples with how Palestinian Christians can develop a local theology that can be both truthful and helpful in mediating the conflicts between Israel and Palestine and among Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Both are conflicts in which religion, politics, and collective identity intertwine.
