Between Empire and Kingdom Come

by | Oct 13, 2013 | sermon 2013

In the first pages of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, the reader confronts a Columbus quite different from the one we learned in school. Soon after his ship arrived, Columbus wrote of the Arawak Indians who swam out to meet it: “They are well-built . . . and so naïve and free with their possessions. They never say No. . . They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane… They would make fine servants… With fifty men, we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want . . .”