I still remember where I was sitting. I was in church, and I heard the priest read the Gospel from Matthew 15. A woman is on her knees begging Jesus to heal her daughter, and Jesus tells her it isn't right to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs. To the dogs. I was young, and I got this hot, confused feeling in my chest, because it sounded like the opposite of everything I'd been told Jesus was. It sounded racist. It sounded cold. A desperate mother is falling apart over her sick kid and the Son of God calls her people dogs? I glanced around the church to see if anyone else had flinched. Nobody had. Part of why it hit so hard is that we drown in this stuff. Ethnic hatred, nationalism, the two so tangled up you can barely tell where one ends and the other starts. You watch it flare across the world, the Middle East and plenty of other places, neighbours who suddenly can't see each other as human because of blood or a border. And here was Jesus, appar...