I saw this photo while flipping through the Times this morning, and at first I thought it might be a new installation by the artist Richard Serra. Instead, it is an image, beautiful yet terrible, of a recently completed section of the fence the United States is building across dunes along the border with Mexican border. The shot was connected with a story about the U.S.’s troubled relations with its southern neighbor.Border fence.jpg

David Gibson is director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University and an occasional contributor to Commonweal.

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