Islam was the most difficult to research and to find information because they have less customs and holidays. The four rule demonstrations of Ibadah with Tawheed shapes five mainstays of Islam on which Islam settles upon. That evening we drove to Broad Street Ministry, a large Presbyterian church in downtown Philadelphia that serves four hundred and fifty people lunch each day and houses hundreds more each night. Claiborne moved to Kensington in 1998 and started the Simple Way, a Christian community-service organization that runs a food bank, which distributes four tons of food each week. The next morning, before leaving on their trip, Claiborne and Martin kneeled on the sidewalk in Kensington next to their mobile forge, among a pile of guns that they’d collected from neighbors or found in abandoned homes. The afternoon before Claiborne left for the trip, I visited him at the pale yellow row house in Kensington where he lives. Claiborne and Martin were now loading it under her watchful eye, shuttling backpacks and boxes from the house out to the porch. The mattock that Martin was making was going to be a gift for Rainey, which she would use in the small garden behind her house.

She hadn’t been through formal counselling; she didn’t trust paid professionals to empathize with what she’d gone through, and preferred speaking with small church groups, in cities or small towns affected by gun violence. When she travelled the country, she was surprised at how backward some of the Midwestern towns seemed. After the shooting, Olshefsky kept filming, and made the incident the focus of the project; the film, “Quest,” premièred at Sundance in 2017. Since then, Rainey has travelled around the country, talking to people about guns. “Six or seven times, I’ve come home to find people dying on our doorstep,” Katie Jo told me. “But then we found out they aren’t putting fentanyl in the heroin so it’s not as strong, and people aren’t buying as much.” In the past few weeks, new dealers had come into the neighborhood to hand out free samples across the street from the Simple Way.

He quoted a passage from the Gospel of John when a skeptical man asks one of Jesus’ disciples, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth? “Can I get a ‘Lord have mercy’? “Lord have mercy!” the crowd replied. I also have a memory to go with this scripture. The squadron was temporarily suspended from combat and might have been dissolved completely were it not for Davis, who pleaded their case. But this is the dismal case of every soul in this congregation that has not been born again, however moral and strict, sober and religious, they may otherwise be. Some calculators may also provide additional features like customization options, detailed breakdowns of zakatable assets, and recommendations for charitable organizations to donate your zakat. They have bumper stickers that read, “Jesus would still be alive if he’d had an AR-15.” In fact, gun violence disproportionately affects people of color, and white Americans are largely insulated from its day-to-day toll, though this may be changing as school shootings affect suburban communities. According to a Pew study, fifty-seven per cent of white evangelical gun owners cite “protection” as the main reason that they carry firearms; they envision themselves defending their families against criminals, who are often rendered as black or brown inner-city men.

Once, while leading a discussion among his progressive friends about spiritual warfare, he brought a gun to use as a visual aid, which caused alarm. Indeed, religion can be seen as something of a paradox, as it simultaneously contains both humanity’s most sublime moral and spiritual teachings, as well as grim remnants of intolerance and patriarchy that foster hatred and horror. Just because a country has a free press doesn’t mean media outlets there can publish whatever they wish. Notice that a key phrase in the dictionary definition of love is the phrase “based on.” This phrase implies that we love conditionally; in other words, we love someone because they fulfill a condition that we require before we can love them. At one point, Claiborne disappeared into the basement to fetch some wooden signs that he had made by cutting up old gun advertisements and fashioning them into inspirational words, like “Hope,” “Faith,” and “Love.” He returned with a large stack, and Katie Jo glanced at him with the patience of one accustomed to trying to speak in practical terms to a self-styled visionary. Outside his home is a large mural-a Banksy replica-of two children standing atop a mountain of defunct weapons.