Christians and Christianity

Subterms

    Latest story

    200 Shares99 Views

    Jesus Has ‘More to Say Than Any Human Language Can Carry’: A Q&A With Rowan Williams

    by

    Rowan Williams is among the most important religious thinkers in the world. A theologian, poet, playwright and literary critic, he served as the archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012. I spoke to Dr. Williams about his journey of faith and doubt, why God allows the innocent to suffer and how to interpret the Bible (and how not to). He talked about the New Atheists and the influence on his theology of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, what makes Jesus such a compelling figure and what it means to pastor people through grief. Dr. Williams also talked about how, for him, the Christian faith is “the perspective that enriches.” Our conversation, which has been lightly edited, is the third in a series of interviews I am doing that explores the world of faith.1. Dostoyevsky Led the WayPeter Wehner: Let me start out by asking you to describe your journey of faith. As a young adult, what was the pull toward Christianity for you? Was it primarily intellectual or aesthetic or an appeal to the imagination or some combination of those? Did you experience what C.S. Lewis called “Sehnsucht,” an intense longing and divine spark for something that’s unattainable in this material world?Rowan Williams: I’d grown up in a Christian environment but not a very intense one. It was really when I was a teenager that it began to speak to me, and it did so largely, to pick up your categories, at the imaginative level. It felt like a larger world to inhabit and at a time when I was discovering more and more about the literary world, about philosophical questioning, about the historical roots of our culture.All of that seemed to me, as a student, enriching and exciting. But it was also brought alive — and here was my good fortune — through particular people who were very important to me at the time, especially my parish priest, who was a huge influence — encouraging, supportive, giving me the message all the time that there’s room for all that in the life of faith.When I started as a university student — coming into contact with an awareness of human need and human suffering that I hadn’t quite registered before, meeting homeless people when I was a student in Cambridge, the sense that you needed to have quite a capacious picture of human nature in order to see the dignity and the need — that reinforced my feeling that the faith I’d grown into was something which actually allowed you to engage at depth with people.Wehner: Is the draw of faith for you now essentially what it was when you were younger?Williams: It’s probably pretty much what I grew up in, in many ways, which is not to say it’s not changed or developed. It’s certainly been battered and tested in various ways. But when I go back to what I was learning at that time, it’s still that same sense that this is the perspective that enriches. This is the perspective that enlarges.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 75 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      The Many Meanings of ‘True’ Religion

      by

      More from our inbox:Stop the ElderspeakReligious believers have a renewed power in Washington. Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Religion’s Role, Revisited,” by Lauren Jackson (Sunday Styles, April 20):About a third of the way into this essay, I realized that the author was on the wrong track. Religion is not about the individual but about the community.The Torah begins not with the creation of an individual but of an ecosystem within which individuals can thrive. And all major religions, in both scripture and practice, emphasize the importance of a common community.Because the author focuses so intently on our national illness of narcissism, she misses the simple answer to her question: Religion is to be found in the people next door, the ones in need down the block and across the sea, the ones who need just laws and an end to violence. To be authentic, religion needs to be not about “me” but “us”; it needs to make us better neighbors, better lawmakers, better lovers and better at self-reflection.Alexander M. JacobsMilwaukeeTo the Editor:I’ve long noted the unsettling contradiction between people who extol the community they find in their religious lives and their need to judge and stereotype those outside their community.Lauren Jackson first lost me at “elite liberals,” a reductive term that dismisses humanity’s rich and complex experiences, beliefs, family influences, education and ethical framework. Further, as someone who has lived in or adjacent to large cities my entire life, I’m deeply skeptical of her claim that “many said they left religion because they moved to places like major cities, where people were more hostile to it.” This makes me wonder about the demographics of her self-selected survey respondents.I, along with my family and friends, have always been able to access and participate in warm faith communities. The “hostility” I can think of has been in cases where Americans’ professed religious beliefs have impinged on other Americans’ rights, beliefs and welfare.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Syria’s Easter Celebrations Pass Peacefully, in Early Test of New Government

      by

      At one of the most famous Christian churches in Damascus, the Melkite Greek Catholic cathedral known as Al Zeitoun, the bishop spent part of Sunday’s Easter sermon comparing Jesus’s Resurrection to that of Syria.The metaphor was an obvious one. Less than five months have passed since Syrian rebels overthrew President Bashar al-Assad, putting a sudden end to the Assad family’s brutal half-century reign. The new Syria, liberated Syria, is still rising to its feet.But what that new nation will come to look like is an open question. While many Sunni Muslim Syrians have embraced the country’s new leaders, who espouse a conservative version of Islam, religious minorities who felt protected or empowered during Mr. al-Assad’s rule greeted the takeover with anxiety.Worshipers at the Orthodox Armenian Church in Damascus.Young people who attend Al Zeitoun church in the city streets on Saturday night.Easter, for Syria’s historically persecuted Christians, was therefore something of a test. How would the new government led by President Ahmed al-Shara, a former Al Qaeda member who says he has moderated and who has promised inclusivity and tolerance, handle one of Christianity’s most important holidays? Would it pass as peacefully as it had under Mr. al-Assad, who courted minority support with his secular outlook?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 50 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      America Wants a God

      by

      Today, we’re introducing “Believing,” a yearlong exploration from The Times on how we experience religion and spirituality now.Americans believe.Most people are wary of the government, the future and even each other, but they still believe in astonishing possibilities. Almost all Americans — 92 percent of adults — say they have a spiritual belief, in a god, human souls or spirits, an afterlife or something “beyond the natural world,” as we reported earlier this year.The country seems to be acknowledging this widespread spiritual hunger. America’s secularization is on pause, people have stopped leaving churches, and religion is taking a more prominent role in public life — in the White House, Silicon Valley, Hollywood and even at Harvard. It’s a major, generational shift. But what does this actually look like in people’s lives?I have spent the past year reporting “Believing,” a new project for The Times. This project is personal to me. I was raised a devout Mormon in Arkansas. I’ve left the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and I understand how wrestling with belief can define a life. I hoped to capture what that journey looked like for others, too — both inside and outside of religion. I interviewed hundreds of people, visited dozens of houses of worship and asked Times readers for their stories. More than 4,000 responded.In my reporting, I found that there are many reasons for this shift in American life. Researchers say the pandemic and the country’s limited social safety nets have inclined people to stick with (or even turn to) religion for support. But there is another reason, too: Many Americans are dissatisfied with the alternatives to religion. They feel an existential malaise, and they’re looking for help. People want stronger communities, more meaningful rituals and spaces to express their spirituality. They’re also longing to have richer, more nuanced conversations about belief.Unsatisfying alternativesIris LegendreOver the past few decades, around 40 million Americans left churches, and the number of people who say they have no religion grew to about 30 percent of the country.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      A Resurrection Faith Needs a Resurrection Church

      by

      Have you ever seen a person come back to life?I don’t mean literally. The Easter miracle of nearly 2,000 years ago is not so easily replicated. We don’t have the power to physically raise the dead. Instead, we Christians have faith that death is nothing more than a temporary separation from the people we love. The pain we feel at a funeral is a pain of absence, not the pain of permanent loss.No, I’m talking about something else — the resurrection and redemption when we see a person who is lost to darkness return to the light. It’s the dazzling smile when a young woman gets her one-year coin at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, or it’s in the tears of joy when an estranged husband and wife finally embrace again after repentance and forgiveness.Or it’s in a moment like I experienced in a small church in Kentucky. One Sunday evening, our pastor was preaching about the prodigal son, Jesus’ parable about a young, ungrateful man who left his home, squandered his fortune and returned home completely broken, expecting to face anger and retribution — only to be greeted by a father who ran to him, embraced him and declared, “My son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.”The pastor concluded his sermon with an altar call. “Some of you here are dead — you’re lost in a life you don’t want — but you can live again.”It was a simple call, one that pastors have made countless times in countless churches. Often they’re ignored. The congregation sings its final song and files out. But this time someone answered.From the back of the church, a young man choked out a single word: “Pastor?”It sounded like a question, as if he was asking for permission to come forward. When we looked back to see who’d spoken, I heard a gasp. The young man was a deacon’s son who had abandoned his faith long ago. He’d become angry and violent. He bullied kids in the church’s youth group. It was shocking that he’d even shown up at church.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 50 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      One Nation, Under God

      by

      Americans have stopped leaving Christianity. And the country is overwhelmingly spiritual, a new report found.As religion in America declined, experts administered last rites.Churches were approaching “their twilight hour” as attendance fell, The Brookings Institution wrote in 2011. In his 2023 book, “Losing Our Religion,” the evangelical preacher Russell Moore asked: “Can American Christianity survive?”The answer appears to be yes. People have stopped leaving churches en masse, according to a new study released this morning by Pew Research. America’s secularization is on pause for now, likely because of the pandemic and the country’s sustained spirituality. Most Americans — 92 percent of adults — say they hold one or more spiritual beliefs that Pew asked about:Share of U.S. adults who believe … More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      America Loses Its Soul When It Rejects People Fleeing Danger

      by

      I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be “civilized.” It’s not caring for one’s own; animals do that. It’s not making music and art; cave men drew and sang. It is, I believe, to live with a moral standard that takes into account our fellow man, and to ask: What do we owe one another, and what do we owe strangers?For me, to be civilized boils down to being willing to work against our own lesser interests in order to alleviate greater suffering, no matter the sufferer’s identity or relationship to us. It is a high standard, but it is not heroism, which is putting one’s own life in real danger for another.After World War II, a large group of lawmakers decided to codify this principle of humanitarian duty into international law. Nonrefoulement (from the French “fouler,” meaning “to trample”) is the idea that vulnerable people, once arrived on safe shores, should never be sent back into danger. Put simply, it is the premise that the least we can do is not knowingly send someone out to die. It is this idea that was challenged by the first Trump administration, with its “Remain in Mexico” policy, which denied responsibility for asylum seekers. Now, in his second term, President Trump has not only reinstated that harmful policy but also suspended thousands of existing asylum cases, and canceled appointments and even flights for refugees already cleared to enter the United States. All of this goes against a contract this country signed 58 years ago.One hundred and forty-five countries signed the United Nations 1951 Refugee Convention (the United States signed on to the bulk of the convention’s requirements in 1967, including those on refoulement), which states: “No contracting state shall expel or return (‘refouler’) a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.”The language in the treaty was designed to be all-encompassing, and to acknowledge that there will always be refugees fleeing persecution. The vaguest protected category, “particular social group,” was added by a Swedish delegate who worried that some people who deserve shelter would not fit into the existing categories. How could anyone when this language was drafted, just six years after the horrors of the Holocaust, foretell whom the next atrocity would target? “Particular social group,” then, was written as a catchall, to make sure everyone who needed refuge would be covered by the legal language.In 1988, my family fled Iran and landed in the United Arab Emirates. After nearly a year, we were recognized as refugees by the U.N.’s High Commissioner on Refugees and sent to a camp in Italy. There we sat for another six months or so, waiting and submitting to “credible fear” interviews, wherein asylum seekers must prove to an immigration office that the danger back home is real, not imagined. My mother explained to the officers that her Christian conversion was apostasy according to Islamic law, and that before we escaped, she had been imprisoned, interrogated and told she’d be executed. As we told our story, I sensed that our interlocutors’ aim was to save us, not to send us away. Later, too, I saw American neighbors and friends embracing this moral duty, a responsibility and an instinct to protect lives more vulnerable than their own.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Trump Pauses Online Tirade to Preach Unity

      by

      Of all the many forms Donald J. Trump can take, maybe the most perplexing one is Pious Trump.It is a shape he shifted into shortly after 8 o’clock on Thursday morning to deliver a sermon of sorts on Capitol Hill for the annual National Prayer Breakfast. In the grand amphitheater of National Statuary Hall, members of Congress sat before him. There were leaders of the Republican Party, never so in thrall to him as they are now. There were Democrats, never so lost and powerless in their struggle against him as they are now.“Look at each other,” he urged. He said they were a “great group of people” and beseeched them to come together. “We have to make life better for everyone,” he said.President Trump, appealing to the better angels?Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle filled Statuary Hall on Thursday morning.Eric Lee/The New York TimesThis was somewhat amazing, since the various other forms of Mr. Trump happened to be running around with flamethrowers earlier that morning, torching the federal bureaucracy, the global order, the media, the opposition party in the room and even the messaging coming out of his own White House.Just before his arrival at the Capitol to preach unity, he had gone on a fiery posting spree. He demanded that CBS lose its broadcasting license. He trumpeted a baseless conspiracy theory that Democrats had “STOLLEN” billions of dollars from the U.S. Agency for International Development to pay off media outlets for slanted coverage. “DEMOCRATS CAN’T HIDE FROM THIS ONE,” he wrote. “TOO BIG, TOO DIRTY!” In another post a few minutes before that one, he elaborated upon his desire to grab the Gaza Strip, an idea that drew bipartisan condemnation and shocked even his own staff, who tried to clean it up yesterday, evidently to no avail. He described Senator Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, pejoratively as a Palestinian.This was all difficult to square with the version of Mr. Trump who arrived at the Capitol a little over an hour later and had only warm words to say about Mr. Schumer. “Chuck, thank you very much,” Mr. Trump said as he read out a list of names of lawmakers he believed were present, “thank you.” (In fact, Mr. Schumer had skipped the ceremony to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares109 Views

      in Elections

      An Excruciating Wait for Abundant Life Christian School Families After Shooting

      by

      Inside Abundant Life Christian School, a chilling message came over the intercom late Monday morning: “Lockdown. This is not a drill.”Teachers herded students out of view, a sixth-grader recalled. Then there was banging, and screaming. “Everybody started freaking out,” said the student, Breken Ives.The sirens came minutes later.“Police car after police car,” said John Diaz de Leon, a retiree in his 60s who lives near the school in Madison, Wis., and who soon headed outside to see what was bringing so many squad cars to usually quiet Buckeye Road.It would be hours before anyone knew any of the details that the police disclosed in a series of news conferences — including that the shooter was a student at the small private school, and that a teacher and a fellow student had been killed and six others injured.Mr. Diaz de Leon had tuned into a police scanner and heard the words “triage” and “D.O.A.” — dead on arrival. Outside the school, he watched as two police officers with long guns drawn approached the school building, leading a police dog. Soon, groups of students began running out, some coatless and holding hands.All around Madison, parents began to rush toward the school. One father, Mike Brube, was blocks away at work, he said, when he saw the police cruisers screaming by, sirens blaring.He drove straight to the school where his seventh-grader, Angel, had been enrolled throughout childhood. “The school is Christian, and it’s like a family place,” Mr. Brube said.Viktoriya Gonzales was among the parents who waited anxiously near the school for hours to be reunited with their children. Some of the students were held back to talk with police officers as the authorities began to investigate.Ms. Gonzales had heard from other students that her son, 12, was safe but “severely traumatized, because he was right by the shooter.”“That’s all I know,” she said. More