9/11 returns a journalist to faith

At a recent borough book club meeting, where the Barbara Kingsolver novel  The Poisonwood Bible was being discussed, several members reported that they were lapsed members of their religions. Some were sad that their children had no religious community or education, but that ultimately they had become disillusioned with their respective formal religions, because they separated people and because of rules that didn’t seem humanistic.

Jim Purcell, who worked as a full-time journalist from 1994 to 2009, described himself as a lapsed Baptist before he completed one of his stories. Purcell has worked for a long list of newspapers but in his recently published new book, Faith Outside The City [Word Riot Press], he writes about how his assignment in the days after 9/11, covering the story at ground Zero, changed his lapsed status.

“I returned to my faith because of my work at 9/11,” Purcell said. “At that time in history, in the middle of horrific death, we put down our stuff and realized that we shared a common destiny as people.”

Although he might have returned to the religion of his birth, Purcell also is driven to change the walls that divide people and the status of women in most male-dominated religions.

“Faith Outside The City is a book that discusses salvation and Christianity in 21st century terms. It speaks frankly to sexuality, racism, homophobia, diversity, violence and love,” Purcell said. “The world we live in every day is one of divisions, where religion is often used as a barrier between people.”

It was the body bags that made Purcell realize that, in the end, any divisions put up by formal religion quickly fall apart.

“I saw four black body bags lying next to each other in a make shift morgue on the street,” says the author, who is now a American Baptist minister at the Stelton Baptist Church in Edison, under the direction of the Reverend Kathleen Tice. “Each one represented a person from a different walk of life, but it no longer mattered whether they were women or men, homosexual or an immigrant. Why do we have to create walls?”

Purcell is particularly interested in Liberation Theology and Womanist Theology as a way of reforming religion. He is a student at the New York Theological Seminary in Manhattan.

“Women are the most relentlessly oppressed group in history. Even if you are a white woman there is no parity,” Purcell said. “Even though the church has always depended on women to bring people into the pews, and without women the church does not exist, they have always been oppressed.”

One sign of the oppression in his own church, founded in 1689, is that only during the last ten years has a woman been given the chance to lead or be ordained.

Purcell also discusses in his book another moment in his journalism career that showed him the need for people to control others.

“In 1988, along the Mexican border in Brownsville, Texas, I reported on human traffickers who used woman as barter and people as mules to carry drugs and weapons into this county,” Purcell said. “It is not God who does these things, it is us and our need for power and control of situations and people.”

His book goes on to explain how Liberation Theology uses faith as an empowerment and escape from oppression, such as immigrants suffer in this country. One of his mentors is Cornel West, a philosophy and religion professor at Princeton University, who has spoken and written books on the subject.

“With my ministry and in my book, I want to challenge why the Christian religions believe that male domination is best or that we should exclude homosexuals,” Purcell said. “How can you say you follow Jesus Christ if you inspire hate against homosexuals or any other group?”