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The Last Supper - paperback
“With a reporter’s fair and dispassionate eye, Klaus Wivel has taken a necessary journey through Christianity’s ancient and vanishing homeland. He has returned with a clear-headed assessment of the threats facing not only Christians, but other embattled minorities in the larger Middle East, where the plural fabric is unraveling.”
—Eliza Griswold, author of The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam
Alarmed by scant attention paid to the hardships endured by the 7.5 million Christians in the Middle East, journalist Klaus Wivel traveled to Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, and the Palestinian territories on a quest to learn more about their fate. He found an oppressed minority, constantly under threat of death and humiliation, increasingly desperate in the face of rising Islamic extremism and without hope that their situation will improve, or that anyone will come to their aid. Wivel spoke with priests whose churches have been burned, citizens who feel like strangers in their own countries, and entire communities whose only hope for survival may be fleeing into exile. With the increase of religious violence in the past few years, this book is a prescient and unsettling account of a severely beleaguered religious group living, so it seems, on borrowed time. Wivel asks, Why have we not done more to protect these people?
“More than any other recent book, this work sets out with absolute clarity and sometimes uncomfortable honesty the intolerable reality of life for Christians in the Middle East today … a deeply intelligent picture of the situation, without cheap polemic or axe-grinding, this is a very important survey indeed.”
—Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge University
“Klaus Wivel’s report on the persecuted Christians of the Arab world is vivid, precise, morally astute, heartbreaking, and infuriating.”
—Paul Berman, author of Terror and Liberalism and The Flight of the Intellectuals
“A compelling story of the ethnic cleansing of Christian communities caught in the crossfire of the Middle East at war. A[n] … urgent and passionate epistle to the West to see an ongoing disaster.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A convincing and upsetting account of the systematic discrimination and persecution faced by Christians in the Middle East. We Jews have a special obligation to speak out and The Last Supper provides us with the information we need to take this challenge seriously.”
—Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun Magazine
“A sobering account with real life stories that detail the systemic targeting of ancient communities in the Middle East. By exposing such atrocities the hope is that people of all faiths can awaken and cleanse their societies of hate and intolerance.”
—Professor Alexander Dawoody, Marywood University, and president of the Association for Middle Eastern Public Policy and Administration
“This timely, unflinching and necessary book about the plight of Christians in the lands where Christianity first arose reminds us that we are all complicit, whether through indifference or ignorance. Klaus Wivel deprives us of any alibi for our silence.”
—Professor Valentina Izmirlieva, Columbia University, author of All the Names of the Lord: Lists, Mysticism, and Magic