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Blog Posts

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 ...

Hole in the Wall

For perspective, I turned to a friend of mine, Ken Kemp, for an eyewitness account of one temporary settlement near San Diego. As politicians debate the issues, we dare not forget the human factor, and the good people who step up when government fails. The following is an edited portion of Ken’s blog post. Last Sunday, a few of us drove from suburban Los Angeles into the desert along the Wall, an array of thirty-foot-tall rusting steel pillars crowned with ...

Waiting for the Light

“Christmas Eve in prison is so terrible because a wave of sentimentality passes through the gloomy building. Everyone thinks of his own loved ones, for whom he is longing; everyone suffers because he doesn’t know how they will be celebrating the festival of divine and human love. Recollections of childhood come surging back, almost overwhelming some, especially those who are condemned to death, and who cannot help looking back at their past lives. It is no accident that in prison ...