On Christmas Day, Radio New Zealand (RNZ), posted a beautiful article citing faith leaders around the Motu and their calls for a more peaceful future here in Aotearoa and abroad. It ended with a quote from Anglican Bishop of Christchurch, Peter Carrell. “In a Christmas message, Peter Carrell says the world is not at peace. He says he was struck by the name that was given to Jesus was the ‘Prince of Peace’ and yet in 2024 the world seemed consumed by war. And he urged Christians to pray for peace in Ukraine, the Middle East, Susan and elsewhere.”
The unfortunate typo remains on the RNZ article as of today, January 23, 2025. At first I had a laugh, and sent a screenshot around to my friends and even posted on my social media story praying for peace for all the Susans in my life. But then, in the print version of the article, which came out on Boxing Day, an editor must have flagged the typo but ended up revising it as follows: “He urged Christians to pray for peace in Ukraine, the Middle East and elsewhere.”
I don’t fault the editors — the copy editor deserves a Christmas holiday, to be sure. But the complete erasure of some conflicts over others is enough to give one pause.
My academic specialty is in digital media. And one of the unfortunate effects of my academic interests is a close attention to what is and what isn’t talked about online. Over the past few years, I’ve seen many friends posting impassioned pleas for our churches and our governments to intervene in the violence waged in Gaza, and before that, in Ukraine.
But what’s left out? I don’t say this as a gotcha or as a way to instil guilt or shame. In a way, it’s not entirely the individual’s fault if they don’t know between 60,000 to 100,000 indigenous West Papuans have been forcibly internally displaced. It’s not necessarily an individual shortcoming not to know that over 11.4 million people have been displaced by the current war in Sudan. To my knowledge, there has been no statement about the current war in Sudan by my church, the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, even though there are over 1,000,000 Anglicans there.
None of this is to say that proximity (geographical or denominational) or magnitude should be the deciding factor in who one cares for. It is to say that our media environment — in large part shaped by what we ourselves share on social medai — affects where we direct our attention, empathy, and prayer. And that matters.
This year, as we pray for peace, I hope that we continue to pray unceasingly. And as we pray, we pray without stopping to seek out all the stories and voices of those around the globe who are hurting. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells Zacchaeus that he came to “seek and to save the perishing.” To be like Jesus, it is not enough to pray for salvation for those we already know are hurt, lost, or dying. It is to actively seek out those who have been lost to the world’s attention.