The following is an excerpt from Shepherds for Sale.
When Maureen Maloney saw the tagline for the Evangelical Immigration Table, “Welcoming the Stranger,” she couldn’t help but feel a wave of bitterness. The same went when she saw Christian celebrities sending open letters to The Washington Post demanding that lawmakers admit more immigrants under programs that grant refugee status to many who are in no danger of persecution, war, or violence in their home countries. The group said they wanted to see more immigration because they “value the opportunity” to “live out the biblical commandments to love our neighbors and to practice hospitality.” She wondered why they didn’t have much interest in ministering to people like her. She wondered if they considered her their neighbor.
I spoke to Maloney three days after the twelfth anniversary of her son’s death.
When I asked her about Matthew, she still, at odd moments, inadvertently slipped into the present tense. “Matthew is one of those people who’s loved by everybody,” she told me. But in her next sentence, as she recounted what happened to him, her brain evidently clicked back into recognition that he was gone.
“He was voted most dependable in high school and graduated college three months before he was killed,” she remembered. “On the day that it happened, he was coming home in the early evening, like after dinnertime, and he was riding his motorcycle in a residential area. An illegal alien who had been drinking all day was driving
