My new story, on the re-opening of Wichita’s abortion clinic, is up at Religion Dispatches:
In mid-February, on the first day of lent, Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas, held a small, quiet service, with a female and male pastoral team preaching about a gentle God who is slow to anger and quick to forgive.
The church, a multi-colored brick building with stained glass windows that look like rolling waves, is flanked on one side by a domed Greek Orthodox church, and on the other by a field stretching out to a subdivision. Just inside its doors in 2009, 67-year-old Dr. George Tiller, one of the few late-term abortion providers in the United States and an usher at his longtime church, wasshot and killed by a man named Scott Roeder.
Four years later, the church doesn’t speak to the media about the murder. “They put that in the past,” an administrator told me, handing back my card. But they may be the only ones who can say that in Wichita, which for 20 years has been the epicenter of America’s fight over abortion.
This week, as Julie Burkhart, one of Dr. Tiller’s former colleagues, re-opens her mentor’s former clinic as the South Wind Women’s Center, that fight begins again.
