I read with interest your uncritical and admiring interview with Fr. Michael Prior [TW, 3-4/03]. I got his abhorrence of Zionism and Zionists, his avoidance of Middle East history, and his displeasure with the text of the Hebrew Bible, but I missed any suggested solutions. Does he favor pushing all Israeli Jews into the sea, or merely shipping them anywhere else in the next available container ships?

Steven A. Bookshester
Annapolis, Md.

I am chair of our Diocesan AIDS Task Force. We are having our annual Diocesan Convention at the end of the month. The DATF will have a table at the convention. I want to have copies of the Jan./Feb. 2003 issue for handouts.

This is a diocese that NEEDS to have The Witness coming to as many households as possible.

We have a resolution which is gaining strength, based on the UN rep’s comments to the House of Bishops last fall. A member of our AIDS Task Force asked his parish to sign on as a co-sponsor to it. The rector never allowed it to get to the table in a vestry meeting because Integrity had signed on to it. That should give you an illustration of the kind of uphill battle one has to deal with in most of the churches in this diocese. My church, the Cathedral of the Advent, has never signed on to any such AIDS-related resolution. God bless the witness of The Witness.

Frank Romanowicz
Birmingham, Ala.

In Jennifer Harvey’s interesting article, "Whites and reparations," [TW, 12/02], appears the idea that whites gained from slavery because, she writes, slavery provided whites with "the freedom to access a job as a paid laborer." In fact, quite the opposite was true. Slave labor effectively put the damper on free labor because it provided cheap labor to industrialists who therefore did not need to go in the free market to obtain labor. For example, the Tredegar Works, the large industrial complex in Richmond, Va., which was the largest such works in the South before the war, actually owned quite a number of slaves. According to Larry Daniel and Riley Gunter’s Confederate Cannon Foundries: "By November 1864, the free labor force had been cut by more than fifty percent, while the slave labor population had more than doubled. Ed Taylor, a slave belonging to [Tredegar owner Joseph] Anderson was highly skilled in hammering out the iron bands for Parrott and Brooke guns." Tredegar was typical in that most Southern manufacturing concerns used great amounts of slave labor to reduce labor costs. As well, public works projects were commonly performed by slave labor hired from local planters rather than by free white laborers competing in an open market.

What this meant was that effectively laboring class whites in the South until the end of the Civil War were all too often unable to compete for skilled jobs, thus forcing them to remain working poverty level farms unless they moved to free territories. At the same time, immigration of laborers from Europe, who largely sought factory and mill jobs, were at much lower rates in the south, where they would have had to compete with slave labor, than in the North where such jobs were readily available. For example, according to Dean Mahin’s The Blessed Place of Freedom, Europeans in Civil War America, "The vast majority of German immigrants – 1,229,144 persons – lived in the Northern states, with only 71,992 in future Confederate states."

The result was that chances for members of the poor white working class in the South to improve their status was greatly limited by the system of slavery which really benefited only a small exploiting class. As Southerner Hinton Rowan Helper wrote in his The Impending Crisis of the South in 1857, "illiterate poor whites [are] made poor and ignorant by the system of slavery."

Philip Katcher
Devon, Pa.

Today I received in the mail a photocopy of your "Editorial Notes" from the April 2002 issue of The Witness – "Women confronting violence." I am so pleased to read it. It is beautiful. I was completely unaware of the editorial and issue because I am no longer at my Milford address and have been unable to afford a subscription – both of those being the result of a divorce. (Healing and recovery has led to the truth-telling and "radical reformation" you mention in your editorial.)

And the odd thing about finding out about your column and the issue devoted to women and violence – besides that it is eight months after the fact – is that it came from my former therapist. I believe she may have begun a subscription to The Witness when I shared with her my initial letter to you. However it has happened, I am grateful to you and all at The Witness for breaking the silence, and I can’t wait to read the April, 2002 issue.

There has been a grace-filled ripple effect from your "Recovering from human evil" issue [12/99] and my response letter. Thank you for being faithful in ways I haven’t experienced anywhere else. You are truly witnessing, breaking the silence. And, as you wrote, it is "earth-shattering."

Mary Eldridge
Ann Arbor, Mich.

Our being "first in war and first in peace" does not include preemptive war, lest we be like Hitler’s Germany which launched a preemptive war against Russia, thus spreading World War II and labeling Hitler a war criminal. The World War II Japanese preemptive strike against Pearl Harbor "will live in infamy." Preemptive war smacks of "gangland ethics." Lest President Bush et al. end up in history classified with war criminals, the U.S. must seek peace guaranteed by the United Nations.

John Julian Hancock
Los Angeles, Calif.

It is with joy and respect that I renew my subscription to The Witness magazine and express my confidence that the Spirit is speaking to the churches in the forthright words and committed focus of the magazine on the dynamic action of faithful people to bring liberation and reconciliation to a world full of hostility, exploitation, divisiveness and imprisonment of all kinds. Keep it up!

Holly Antolini
Cushing, Maine

The email address for Roy Nielsen, who wrote the commentary on Sudan for the March/April issue of The Witness, was given incorrectly. Nielsen’s email address is: wr.nielsen@worldnet.att.net.

Also, our Jan./Feb. story on the restructuring of the national church’s ethnic ministry unit quoted a statement that "nobody applied for the director’s position." Ernesto Obregon alerted us that he had himself applied, so the information was mistaken.