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Blog Posts

From Tears to Laughter

Moltmann was planning on a career in quantum physics until Hitler’s war broke out. At age 16 his entire high school class was drafted to assist the anti-aircraft batteries defending Hamburg. What began as a schoolboy adventure turned into a horror show as waves of U.S. and British aircraft fire-bombed the city, killing almost 40,000 civilians. He saw his friends incinerated, and he only survived by clinging to a piece of wood in a lake surrounded by fire. Two questions ...

The Future of the Church

The statistics tell an alarming story. Mainline churches have shrunk dramatically. The number of Catholics who attend mass on a regular basis has declined by half. Southern Baptist membership has hit a 47-year low. The “Nones”–a group comprising atheists, agnostics, and those who describe their religion as “nothing in particular”–is now the largest cohort in the U.S. (28%). Unaffiliated adults outnumber Catholics (23%) or evangelical Protestants (24%). Observers propose possible reasons for the decline, which didn’t fully reverse after the disruptive ...

The Aroma of the New

Easter came early this year, sneaking into the calendar even ahead of April. To extend the season, and linger in its bright promise of resurrection, here is a guest blog post by the remarkable artist Makoto Fujimura, adapted from a commencement address he gave at Belhaven University in 2011. CNN selected it as one of the 16 greatest commencement speeches of all time.  … I recently had the delight to see a production of Our Town by Thornton Wilder at ...

A World Without Easter

In the summer of 2022 I visited the charming Alpine town of Oberammergau, Germany. I wandered its leafy streets lined with mural-painted houses, their balconies overflowing with flower boxes. After indulging in ice cream and shopping for the town’s famed woodcarvings, I settled in my theater seat for a five-and-a-half-hour performance of Jesus’ final week on earth. Since 1634, Oberammergau has put on a passion play involving almost all its residents, first staged in thanksgiving for the end of the ...

What Went Wrong in Russia?

In the fall of 1991, I received an invitation signed by the two most powerful men in Russia. Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin were asking a small delegation of American Christians to visit their country in order to “help restore morality to the Soviet Union.” The government would host us in a luxury hotel owned by the Central Committee of the Communist Party and would pay all other expenses. A few weeks later I boarded a plane for Moscow, unsure ...