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Speaking of things sacred...

The Union Church is an institution that lives more than anywhere else in the memories of Zonians, but mostly they are elsewhere and meanwhile that multidenominational Protestant congregation maintains churches in Balboa and Gamboa and has gone off in different directions more consonant with the post-Canal Zone realities of our times. The man shown above is Reverend Luis Veagra, who nowadays presides over the Balboa Union Church and gave the English-langauge meditation at the annual ecumenical Easter Sunrise Service at the Afro-Antillean Museum of Panama. The meditation displayed a deep knowledge of history and human nature in addition to theology, and implicitly touched upon the Union Church's philosophy that Christians should be united about the principal tenets of the faith and free to disagree about the minor points of doctrine.

By contrast to Veagra's more cerebral meditation, the Spanish-language meditation, delivered in spellbinding fashion by Reverend Alejandro Douglas of the Mision Cristiana de Panama, was an appeal to accept Jesus Christ as a personal savior and thus be able to surmount daunting obstacles and obtain everlasting life despite the natural fact of death.

The lack of Catholic clergy at this year's service made it slightly less representative of Panama's West Indian community, which has always had a substantial Catholic minority, but nevertheless Veagra and Douglas well represented two of the main currents in the Christianity of our times, in complementary rather than competitive fashion.

Production of this issue of The Panama News coincided with Holy Week, and also with preparations for my April 10 grilling by prosecutors in the case that erstwhile "Patriot" militia radio shill Mark Boswell, who's now an offshore hustler who is doing business through a number of Internet sites and who njow goes by the "Patriot" militia alias of Rex Freeman, has brought against me. I stand by my story.

(See also this bogus  "partnership" claim and this thing about the context from which Mr. "Freeman" came to Panama --- after a few years of hustling in Costa Rica.)

Anyway, let's get away from the profane and back to the sacred.

People in different cultures often have a much different view of what's "sacred" and what constitutes "religion." Especially in the Orient, there are people who don't embrace the idea that there's only one "true religion" and that any mixing of beliefs is a terrible sin punishable by eternity in Hell or at least a long time pushing a boulder up a hill in Purgatory. And so there was nothing at all that seemed incongruous the other day at the Chinese cemetery, where sincere Christians and those with other religious views performed Confucian rites at the graves of their ancestors.

The Chinese community also recently inaugurated a new addition to their cultural center, in ceremonies that included dragon dancing and the presentation of a new book about Chinese-Panamanian history.

One other story that includes an aspect of religion is the growing protest movement against the capture of dolphins in Panamanian waters. The proponents seek to portray their critics as these fanatical animal rights activists in the tradition of PETA's public image, but at the heart of the movement we have Panama's home-grown animal welfare groups, the mainstream of which flows directly from the Catholic Church. (Now if the dolphin capture proponents want to couch such an appeal in Panamanian traditions instead of engaging in what looks very much like imported US-style attack campaign politics, they might want to in very low-key fashion work the crowds at the nation's cockfight pits. A free round of seco and a plea that the same folks who would shut them down would also close the rooster rings would be the classic pitch to the other side of the gender gap on the dolphin issue.)

Because there were three weeks between the last issue and this one, we have a bit more content, including larger opinion sections in both our English and Spanish sections. For a number of reasons The Panama News does not often follow other bilingual publications' practice of publishing the same stories in both languages. One of those reasons is that a lot of the English-speaking community here, and many of our readers abroad, read both languages. The two sections are not mirror images, and if you can read both The Panama News is a much more comprehensive publication, sometimes taking on the same topic from two different angles --- like we treat the subject of torture in the English opinions and the Spanish news. A lot of arguments and declarations within the context of Panamanian politics get played out more in the Spanish sections than in English.

Enjoy.

Eric Jackson

the editor