Heath Carter
This morning at 7:30am the Reverend Corey Brooks will depart Bedford, PA, and will walk some 32 miles to Boswell, PA, where he hopes to be by dinnertime. For the Chicago pastor, it's the latest leg of a planned walk across America, a journey that began in New York City and will end in Los Angeles. Brooks' aim is two-fold: to call attention to the alarming levels of violence in Chicago and to raise money for a community center in his south side neighborhood (for more on those plans and/or to follow his journey, check out the site for
Project HOOD). His transcontinental ambitions have
garnered the attention of major news outlets such as Good Morning America, making his one of the more celebrated religious responses to rising gun violence in the Windy City.
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| The Reverend Corey Brooks on his walk across America |
There has been all-too-much to respond to in Chicago of late. Two sentences in
yesterday's Daily Mail (UK) put a fine point on the matter: "Over the course of the war since 2001, around 2,000 US troops have died in Afghanistan compared to the 5,000 gunfire victims in the Illinois city. Since the start of the year, 144 US soldiers have been killed on duty in Afghanistan, while at least 240 people have been shot dead in Chicago." The point here is not to diminish casualties abroad, of course, but rather to underscore the ongoing war in urban streets: nearly 900 Chicagoans wounded by gun violence so far this year;
the casualty numbers for the last three weekends, starting with the most recent, are 42, 54, and 32. Such figures do not begin to tell the story of hundreds of (disproportionately) young lives - including, for example, that of 6-year-old Aliyah Shell (pictured below) - cut short.
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| 6-year-old Aliyah Shell was shot on her front porch in the Little Village neighborhood in March 2012 |
The Rev. Brooks is one of many within Chicago's religious communities who have responded in force to the violence.
St. Sabina, a vibrant African-American parish in the south side's Englewood neighborhood, sponsored
a march last week during which its well-known pastor, the Rev. Michael Pfleger, declared,
"It is time for the righteous to stand up." The church has moreover called for persons of faith to fast and pray every Wednesday throughout the summer for an end to the shootings. At another
large interfaith march back in early April space was created for the parents of victims to share stories and memories of their slain children. The group that organized that event continues to
create opportunities for local residents to get involved in the struggle against violence.
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| A photo from the April march against violence in Chicago |
But any account of the religious response to rising gun violence must also consider the spontaneous prayer services and make-shift memorials that have materialized in neighborhoods across the city. When a 13-year-old boy was gunned down on his front porch a couple of months ago, some six blocks from our home on the southwest side, my family attended one of these services. I passed by that same house on a walk through the neighborhood last week: the icons and candles were still there.
In the years to come, historians of religion and violence will have a complicated tale to tell about early-twenty-first-century Chicago. In the meantime, I count myself amongst the many ordinary folks who long for peace.
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