Two pictures rotating on my laptop’s screen-saver instantaneously rotate in my mind each time I hear a candidate or a preacher address the “value of human life.”

One picture is of my cousin’s family taken in Baghdad in 2004 in front…

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A couple of days before Christmas 1993, I was sitting in my parent’s living room watching a football game when I got a call from my uncle in Baghdad. After a very quick hello, he jumped right into asking if my father was home. I told him no, so he quickly gave me a flight number for a plane that was coming into Dallas the next day. After twice telling me that it was very important to be at the [...]

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The week before the invasion of Iraq, I was locked in an e-mail debate over the war with a friend of mine from my home church in Texas. I explained to him why I was opposed to the war. He responded by saying that while he understood my opposition to the war as an Iraqi, as a Christian I [...]

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A couple of weeks before the Thanksgiving holiday, I received a call from my cousin. Her father-in-law in Baghdad was dead. His death was not the result a car bomb or a kidnapping. No bullets or beheadings were involved. Instead, it was a kitchen fire. He was badly burnt up and down his [...]

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My parents had an agreement: If my father could name his children, then my mother could raise us in the church. So I was given a full Muslim name, but I was baptized as a Christian. Growing up I never really liked my name very much – Omar. For a little kid in Texas, a foreign [...]

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