Pastors Aren’t Politicians

I only talk politics when it helps me attend to deeper concerns among those I serve.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Wikimedia Commons

People want to talk to me about politics.

These conversations often come out of nowhere—or at least feel like they do. I’m a pastor at a church in the downtown neighborhood of a midsize city, and there are reliably people living on the sidewalk on my way to work. Some are asleep, others peddling, still others in line for a meal. My collar marks me as a member of the clergy, so when they approach me, it’s usually for prayer or practical help.

That’s what I was expecting when a man called me over last fall, soon after Donald Trump had been reelected. “It’s really good versus evil,” he told me, a smile on his face, “and after years of God’s punishment under Joe Biden, we finally have a godly president again.”

I was surprised but went with it. “Do you think this will make your life better?” I asked.

“Yeah!” he said. “Trump’s all about freedom and standing up for Christians. We’ll stop being persecuted.”

That wasn’t the only unexpected plunge into political talk I took in that season. In many conversations, more well-to-do folks expressed to me their dread and anxiety over a new Trump administration. They saw his reelection as an existential threat, and perhaps they guessed that as a Canadian living in Texas, I’d be likely to agree.

They’re right that there’s a lot happening with this administration that worries me. And I certainly don’t deny the real-life import of tariffs, religious liberty law, border enforcement, or any other policy concern.

But I’ve also come to see that when a conversation turns so suddenly and unexpectedly to politics, it’s often about some underlying fear, something far removed from the people and policies in Washington. We project our griefs and frustrations onto political figures and events as a way to talk about our worries without really talking about them.

In a later conversation with the man near my church, he told me someone had stolen from his encampment. He had so little to begin with and now had even less, and he particularly felt the injustice of it because, he told me, he’d never stolen anything. He felt sad, angry, almost persecuted.

And in those middle-class conversations, if I listen long enough, we’ll sometimes make it beyond politics to something else, like teenage or adult children who have left the church, or a frustration with ugly comments overheard from a neighbor, or ways their churches have changed or declined.

There are more pressing matters below the surface, but it can feel as if politics is the only conversation we’re allowed to have. Politics is everywhere all the time, and watching the news, reading the news, scrolling through the news—all of it—is a constant drip of anxiety, uncertainty, dread. How do we get past this permissible but miserable conversation to our real troubles?

I’ve decided to put my head in the sand. I’m choosing to be willfully ignorant. When someone talks to me about politics, I don’t have much to contribute, and this tends to move the conversation along to where it ought to go anyway. My hope (and, so far, my experience) is that is averting my sight from the spectacle of political life can open my ears to the hidden concerns of my friends and neighbors.

I recognize I have the luxury to do this. I am a normie. I don’t have a career in politics. I am not working on legislation. As a Canadian, I can’t even vote in federal US elections. My job is not on the line as the president makes sweeping policy changes. I am not afraid for myself or my family. I lead a little life.

Yet honestly, what good would my attention do? Given the complexity of American life and government, given the sheer vastness of this country, very few people have the ability or resources to make a big difference. For me to hang on every word of the president and his team and his rivals is futile, a waste of mental energy. The possibility that some new legislation or executive order could drastically change my life or the lives of my parishioners is real, but my focused attention has no power to attenuate misfortune that might befall us.

I am not a fundamentalist about this. I still live in the world. I notice headlines. I hear—roughly—what’s going on.

But I have responsibilities in the real world, in my home and my church. I have a wife and children who need me. We’ve planted a garden. I cook meals and clean up and put my children to bed. I have books to read. I meet with my friends and parishioners to drink coffee and talk. I have lost nothing but anxiety by letting go of the constant pull of political life. It’s no longer dragging me along.

What’s more, my vocation as a priest is not to tell people what I think about politics. They don’t care. It doesn’t help them. What do I know anyway?

Pastors are sometimes advised to “preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other,” a quote (probably spuriously) attributed to the theologian Karl Barth. I think this is bad advice. For most Christians in America most of the time, what’s happening in Washington, DC, is not terribly relevant to the daily challenges of living in faith, hope, and love. For most of us, far from the halls of power, politics is but a specter that haunts real life.

But the Bible is real life. The local church is real life. The people with whom I speak and visit and pray, they are real life.

That tangible connection determines when I do have to pay attention to politics: when it begins to harm people under my care. And then my role is to help them as best I can. Sure, this involves telling the truth. But more often it involves listening, praying, and helping in practical ways.

Since I stopped paying attention to politics, people still want to talk to me about it. But the conversations go differently now. As Justin Vernon croons in Bon Iver’s new album SABLE, fABLE, “I see things behind things behind things.” I am learning how fears of mortality, worries about the future, and grief over loss can present themselves as political outrage or enthusiasm.

I know that I risk being wrong about everything. But who doesn’t? I ask myself whether this approach is pastoral wisdom or dangerous acquiescence. But I can tell you that it’s bearing good fruit. I have work to do here in this city with the people I know and care about. This is what should be taking my attention, energy, and time.

When the Russian author and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was being carted from one gulag to another, he would catch snatches of freedom. In a train station once, he heard people complaining about their jobs, their neighbors, their petty concerns, and all the while swaths of the population were dying or trying not to die in prison.

He could see there was no way to convey to the free how good their lives were. He didn’t want to cajole or criticize them for not attending to the grave misfortune around them. Nor did he want them to focus less on what was immediately in front of them. Rather, he wished they would be even more intensely focused on life itself and the relationships that sustain it.

“What about the main thing in life, all its riddles?” he asked. And his answer:

Do not pursue what is illusory—property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life—don’t be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn’t last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing.

Whatever happens in this presidential term or any term to come, I will still have a family to care for and a church to serve. Even these things are ephemeral. But they are the responsibilities God has given to me. I’m putting on blinders about everything else so I can better see the people in front of me.

Cole Hartin is an Anglican priest serving in Tyler, Texas, and a fellow at the Center for Pastor Theologians.

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Theology

To Know Christ, Use Your Sense of Smell

Bohye Kim

Mary pouring nard on Jesus’ feet isn’t only about extravagant worship.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek

Even half asleep at night, I knew when we had reached my grandparents’ house in a rural village in Pyeongtaek, South Korea. I didn’t need to see the gate or hear their voices. The smell of the house, ripe with the memories of summers spent with my grandparents, already told me.

The wardrobe in their bedroom, just past the kitchen and always a little dark, exhaled the scent of warm wood and old drawers, marked by a serene hush. Outside, the wind blew the smell of rice fields—damp, grassy, and faintly sour in the summer heat—through the windows and into the warm, clay-packed floors.

Similar to how I immediately associate these scents with my grandparents’ home, one passage in the Bible illustrates how scent is central to knowing Christ. In John 12, Mary bends low, breaks open a jar, and pours. She does not call Jesus “Lord” or “Rabbi,” and she offers no explanation for her actions. The apostle John simply writes this line: “And the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume” (v. 3).

Christians today may read this line without recognizing its importance. But when John says that the fragrance filled the house, the detail ought to linger in our imaginations.

Why does this moment feel so vivid, so emotionally charged, even 2,000 years later? John is making a claim: Jesus has just been recognized for who he is, and that recognition has transformed the space. The scent signifies Jesus’ divine presence in a way that is physical, olfactory, and unmistakable.

Here, the scent testifies to who Christ is, like the incense-filled tabernacle that illustrated God’s presence in the Old Testament. To know Christ—to encounter him and be utterly transformed by his presence—does not merely involve intellectual assent. It involves allowing every sphere of our lives to be permeated by Christ and living in a way that spreads “the aroma of the knowledge of him everywhere” (2 Cor. 2:14).

Unlike other moments in Jesus’ ministry, this scene unfolds without divine voices or miraculous signs. No one trembles, no cloud descends, no dove appears. There is no sound from heaven, no confession from Peter, no healing to report.

There is, instead, the smell of an overwhelmingly rich fragrance.

In this passage, knowing Jesus comes not by way of word but by way of smell. Fragrance, rather than doctrinal revelation, becomes the medium of recognition.

Nard was not the kind of scent that floated lightly in the air, like lavender or citrus. It was heavier: A mix of sweet earth, warm wood, and the sharpness of spice, reminiscent of ginger or galangal.

The Roman writer Pliny the Elder described nard as sweet and musty, like damp wood after rain. Dioscorides, a Greek physician, said the best kind of nard has a smell that clings to you, stays in your skin, and lingers long after the jar is empty.

But not all nard was this lovely. Some types, especially the ones that grew in the wet lowlands near the Ganges River, had a sour, almost rotten smell, Dioscorides observed. Traders knew to avoid batches mixed with weeds, which smelled like goats.

The best kind, the one Mary likely used, came from high mountain slopes, where the plant grew slow and strong, its roots soaking in sun and thin air.

John saying that “the house was filled” (eplērōthē in Greek) with the smell of nard echoes the language the Septuagint uses to describe the times God’s glory filled the tabernacle and temple (Ex. 40:34; 1 Kings 8:10–11). The scent filling the house may echo the glory that fills God’s house at its consecration, American theologian Craig Keener suggests.

While John does not explicitly draw on these Old Testament temple narratives, the shared vocabulary in these passages highlights how a space can be wholly permeated by something that illustrates divine presence.

Jewish historian Josephus vividly captures a similar scene at Solomon’s temple dedication, describing incense saturating the air and signaling God’s presence:

Burning an immense quantity of incense … the very air [itself everywhere] round about was so full of these odours, that it met … persons at a great distance; and was an indication of God’s presence: and … of his habitation with them in this newly built and consecrated place, for they did not grow weary either of singing hymns, or of dancing, until they came to the temple.

In John 12, scent quietly affirms an indisputable truth: Something sacred now fills this space.

So when John writes that Lazarus’s house was filled with fragrance, he may be doing more than describing its atmosphere. Here, we witness how Christ can be recognized—and glorified—through scent. The smell of nard would not just linger in the air but impress itself on those present, becoming part of how they remembered this seminal moment—and Jesus.

Not everyone receives the fragrance the same way. One person speaks up, not to name the scent but to question its worth. Judas responds not to the act itself but to the excess of the aroma. He turns to cost. He detects waste.

Judas objects: “Why wasn’t this perfume sold and the money given to the poor? It was worth a year’s wages” (John 12:5). The gospel clarifies that Judas spoke not out of care but out of greed (v. 6). His inability to perceive the meaning of Mary’s act reveals the blindness that often accompanies a utilitarian view of gestures of recognition.

In the cultural imagination of the first century, Mary marks Jesus with a fragrance that signifies both burial and honor. Her act resonates with John’s narrative: Death awaits Jesus, and the scent already affirms his worth.

As Susan Ashbrook Harvey, a professor of history and religion at Brown University, writes in Scenting Salvation, “To smell that odor was to gain the knowledge it contained.” In the ancient Mediterranean world, scent was more than sensation. Fragrance could reveal something of a person’s very nature.

Early Christians came to see smell not just as atmosphere but as a way of knowing, Harvey writes. To encounter a fragrance was, in some cases, to encounter presence. And that presence reveals something about oneself in return.

Today, we tend to trust what we can explain: what is clear, logical, and stated. We seek doctrine we can categorize and truths we can name. But the living Christ is not a concept to master. He is a person to know and to follow.

The Book of John does not tell us what Mary knew about Jesus, only what she did in his presence. Perhaps that is the point this passage wants to highlight: We say we know who Jesus is, but if that knowing never bears fruit in us—no change, no humility, no costly love—was it truly knowledge at all?

Like the early church, we can harness our sense of smell as a way of knowing Christ intimately. That does not mean that we break open a bottle of our most expensive perfume at church or concoct a special Lord’s Day fragrance for the sanctuary. Rather, we deepen our knowledge of Christ through becoming people who exude his aroma (2 Cor. 2:15).

Those who love Jesus do not always need to use words. His presence lingers in them, a fragrance that emerges not through ritual smoke but through lives thoroughly shaped by the enduring imprint of knowing Jesus.

Such an aroma is not loud, but it is unmistakable. It smells of mercy, not moral superiority; of humility, not self-righteousness; of love that acts, not merely a voice that speaks. In a world wary of religious pretense, the aroma of Christ is not an argument but a witness, quiet evidence that grace has passed this way.

Faithful witness may not always come in sermons or syllogisms. Sometimes, it comes through a life that quietly bears the fragrance of having known Jesus—like the scent that filled a house and said what no one else could. Like the aroma of Christ: quiet and persistent, a grace that speaks before language and stays after everything else fades.

We get whiffs of the aroma of Christ when we “hold our convictions with confidence and compassion while avoiding the trap of treating every disagreement like a battle to win” in conversations with other believers online, writes Chris Butler from the Center for Christianity & Public Life for CT. Or when we stop asking, “What can I get out of this faith?” and begin to wonder, “What story have I been invited into?” The gospel, after all, is centered on God in Jesus Christ, not on ourselves and what we can gain from God, theologian Andrew Torrance writes for CT.

The aroma of Christ is not something we manufacture. It rises when we forget to be impressive, when we stop trying to win at faith and simply return, again and again, to the Person whom the story is about.

Even now, the smell of my grandparents’ house in South Korea returns to me with startling clarity. The comforting scent of warm wood, sunlit rice fields, and clay floors gently told me what no words ever did: You are safe. You are home.

In some small and sacred way, that is what the fragrance of Christ does still, in John 12 and in these ordinary days. It tells us that he is with us always, to the very end of the age (Matt 28:20).

Bohye Kim teaches biblical studies as an adjunct professor at Paul Quinn College and is a researcher at the H. Milton Haggard Center for New Testament Textual Studies.

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News

As Drugs Slam Nigeria, Christians Push Back

Emmanuel Nwachukwu

How one ex-addict created a haven.

A man smokes marijuana in Nigeria.

Pius Utomi Ekpei / Getty

Behind a dense bush near Biraidu Community Secondary School in Abocho, Nigeria, students smoked marijuana. One was Samson Ocholi. He was 19.

Ocholi grew up in a devout Christian home, learning Bible stories in Sunday school and serving in The Boys’ Brigade. High school changed everything. At 14, he fell in with friends who introduced him to cigarettes, then marijuana. “Then other things started creeping in,” Ocholi said. “Alcohol, tramadol, codeine, and Rohypnol. Each drug was opening a gate to another.”

Ocholi’s case is not unusual. A National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) survey revealed that 14 million Nigerians—from 15 to 64 years old—abuse drugs. According to a 2024 study, almost 14 percent of high school students in Lagos State have experimented with drugs, and half of those are current users. Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu called the situation a “malignant cancer” and said, “It is disheartening to witness the spread of drug abuse among our youth, with its grip extending even to our innocent children.”

Nigeria’s NDLEA Act enforces “laws against the cultivation, processing, sale, trafficking and use of hard drugs.” Individuals convicted of using and trafficking these drugs face a sentence of anywhere from seven years to life in prison. But the NDLEA faces an uphill task, given the plentiful supply of drugs.

In 2023 the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes reported seizing 57 tons of cocaine on the way to West Africa from 2019 to 2022. The report named West African countries—Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Nigeria, and Senegal—and Central Africa as emerging cocaine-trafficking hubs, with global cocaine production increasing by 35 percent from 2021 to 2022.

One drug common among young people is cheap, synthetic marijuana termed Colorado, locally called colos and sold in nightclubs, on street corners, and at pharmacies. Dealers face little interference from law enforcement.

A 2018 investigation exposed a syndicate fueling Nigeria with codeine, another drug commonly used—at the time, 3 million bottles were consumed daily in the north alone. The investigation showed corrupt pharmacists and distributors illegally selling codeine cough syrup—an addictive opioid—in open markets, bypassing regulations. The health ministry then banned the production and import of codeine-containing cough syrup.

In February 2025, theBBC Africa Eye’s documentary revealed that Aveo Pharmaceuticals, an Indian company, was illegally exporting unlicensed opioids like tapentadol to Nigeria, Ghana, and Côte d’Ivoire. The undercover investigation captured an Aveo director admitting the drug was harmful but saying business was his priority. India’s Food and Drug Administration has since raided the company’s Mumbai warehouse and seized its stock.

“Everybody has a part to play in fighting most of these nefarious individuals that exploit vulnerable young ones,” said Kenneth Anetor, cofounder of A New Thing Worldwide. For ten years, Anetor’s antidrug nonprofit based in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, has advocated improved government policies. He also counsels high school students against drug abuse. He acknowledges the societal damage of drug abuse, including the breakdown of families and marriages, but sees drug abuse as a public health challenge, not a moral issue.

For Samson Ocholi it is both. Ocholi entered a university in 2005 while using drugs: “I was no longer serious with my life. I tried several times to quit, but all of that was not working. I was losing my mind.”

A single summer night in 2016 altered Ocholi’s life. A drug dealer’s harsh words frustrated him. “He called me a fool, and that struck me,” Ocholi recalled. That night he cried out: “Oh my God, please, I think I’m tired, because this is not really satisfying. The more I want it, the more I get disgraced.”

Now 42-year-old Ocholi seeks to bring the gospel to those abusing drugs in Nigeria. Through Right Mind Homes, launched in 2021, he is building a community in Abuja for those seeking a drug-free life. His ministry is “for people willing to change,” he told CT. “They are tired, just as I was tired. I was looking for something to rescue me. I was looking for God to rescue me. That’s the kind of people I want to work with.”

At Right Mind Homes, currently housing six men aged 23 to 45, Ocholi seeks to transform their lives by anchoring them in biblical principles. Their days begin with morning devotions, fostering spiritual growth. Badminton, chess, Scrabble, and other activities promote mental and physical well-being.

Ocholi pours his heart into the Bible-based initiative, but it’s no easy road. Convincing a sceptical public is also tough—many see addiction as just a brain disease. But Ocholi believes it’s deeper, like idolatry—worshiping something destructive: “It hurts you and your family, but you don’t care.”

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Books

Review

Who Is the Real Hero of ‘Paradise Lost?’

Matthew Mullins

Alan Jacobs clarifies centuries of debate over John Milton’s epic retelling of the Fall.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

Christian life is rooted in a story with a specific plot. It begins with God’s creation of the world, builds with humanity’s fall from grace, climaxes in God’s redemption of the world through Christ, and resolves with the establishment of God’s eternal kingdom.

The stickiest of these plot points is the fall from grace: Why would a good God allow sin to enter the world? Why wouldn’t a powerful God stop Adam and Eve from eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil? Why would an omniscient God create the tree in the first place? These are all variations on a question most people have asked at some point: If God is good, then why is there such evil in the world?

The English poet John Milton grappled with this question in his famous epic, Paradise Lost, first published in 1667. And Alan Jacobs grapples with the meaning and legacy of Milton’s landmark poem in his latest book, Paradise Lost: A Biography.

Jacobs, now based at Baylor University after teaching for decades at Wheaton College, is among the most important Christian scholars at work today. He has written extensively on C. S. Lewis and the poet W. H. Auden, and his essays on issues as varied as technology, theology, and the art of reading provide a consistent model of academically informed but broadly accessible prose. Those traits are on impressive display as Jacobs guides readers through Milton’s masterwork.

For many contemporary readers, diving into a complex work like Paradise Lost can seem like a forbidding prospect. Even a few lines in, both the language and the form itself can feel intimidating. In fact, the very idea of reading a 17th-century poem seems daunting. Thankfully, faithful Christian scholars like Jacobs can help us close the gap between old writings and our modern world.

In his 2020 book Breaking Bread with the Dead, Jacobs argues there is great value in reading books from outside our own era. It is inevitable, he contends, that people become prisoners of their moment, nearly incapable of imagining alternative ways of thinking and acting. One solution to this problem is exposing ourselves to writers and thinkers whose older customs, rituals, and cultural assumptions gave them different perspectives on the questions we share in common.

Jacobs’s “biography” of Paradise Lost puts that philosophy into practice. It might seem strange to write about a book or poem in the same manner as one would chronicle an individual human life. But if we conceive of books like Paradise Lost as works of art that outlive their authors, then it makes sense to think of them as having lives of their own.

In the first two chapters, Jacobs briefly describes the life and times of Milton and provides an overview of his most famous poem. The final four chapters tell the story of the poem’s reception, covering everything from initial reactions to its influence on contemporary fiction, films, and even video games. The result is an accessible and insightful guide that ultimately tells us as much about how the world has changed over the last 400 years as it does about the 400-year-old poem itself.

In his own time and in the years soon after his death, Milton was known mainly as a political radical, but within a century he was rivaling—and by some measures eclipsing—Shakespeare as England’s bard. Jacobs notes that Milton was memorialized in Westminster Abbey alongside two other English literary greats, Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser, “three years before Shakespeare was thus acknowledged.” This drastic change in reputation, from troublemaker to versifier, can be ascribed almost entirely to Paradise Lost, Milton’s epic rendition of Satan’s revolt and its aftershocks in the Garden of Eden, where he successfully tempted our first parents to rebel against God as well.

Jacobs helps readers understand why it’s important that Milton chose to retell the story of Genesis 3 as an epic: “Any epic poem tells only a part, if the crucial part, of a larger story.” The Greek poet Homer, for instance, doesn’t tell the entire story of the Trojan War in the Iliad but only the final year of the decade-long saga. His audience would know the rest of the story and enjoy the deep dive into the nuances of one of its greatest chapters. Likewise, when you pick up Paradise Lost and read of humanity’s fall from grace, you’re reading an important part of a larger story—a detailed exploration of the characters and events that unleashed sin into the world and forever changed our relationship with our Creator.

Another central feature of the epic genre is that it typically focuses on a hero. Readers who know anything about Milton’s retelling of the Fall may also recall the judgment of the poet William Blake, who infamously argued that Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Following Blake, many poets and scholars have interpreted Satan as the hero of Paradise Lost. This view is now commonplace.

But if Satan is the hero of the Fall, the whole Christian story must be rewritten. By emphasizing Milton’s choice of epic as a genre and thus insisting that the poem be read in light of the larger Christian narrative, Jacobs challenges this prevailing view and restores the poem’s theological and devotional significance for 21st-century readers.

One way Jacobs arrives at a more compelling interpretation of Paradise Lost is by weaving the story of Milton’s transformation from political radical to poetic sage throughout his biography. Milton achieved the reputation of political firebrand by defending the 1649 execution of Charles I, who aroused the ire of England’s Parliament by asserting a divine right to rule. Milton became an apologist for regicide because of his passionate commitment to the principle of liberty, whether artistic, personal, political, or religious.

Milton’s central preoccupation, Jacobs tells us, was the legitimacy of the ruler. He believed the king who infringes on the God-given liberty of his subjects is an illegitimate king. Unfortunately for Milton, the English monarchy was eventually restored, little more than a decade after Charles was put to death. As a result, Milton lived the rest of his life as a political outcast, even imprisoned for a time.

When we read Paradise Lost—and especially the central conflict between God and Satan—in light of Milton’s life, interpreting Satan as the hero can make sense on the surface. One might say that Milton, a vocal opponent of authoritarian overreach, rejected the legitimacy of Charles I much as Satan rejected God’s right to rule. We might even identify with Satan when we consider the problem of evil raised above: If God could have prevented sin from entering the world, does he really deserve to sit on the throne of heaven with earth as his footstool?

Guiding us through centuries of interpretation, Jacobs helps us read Paradise Lost as Milton clearly intended. As one chapter in a longer story, humanity’s fall from grace is not evidence of God’s illegitimacy as king. Rather, it is a powerful justification of God’s love for his creation. It sets the stage for the next chapter: God’s redemption of the world through Christ. Make no mistake, Jacobs insists, the hero of the Christian narrative is Christ, the Son and the incarnation of the rightful king.

This central argument gets lost in many later interpretations of the poem, like those that mistake Satan as its hero—or others that picture Adam or Eve as the true protagonists. Some, like the literary critic William Empson, even bestow this status on Milton himself. (As Jacobs sums up this line of thought: Milton is “less wicked than the religion he professes,” but he “strives, with astonishing intelligence and artistic power, to make that religion seem less wicked than it is.”) Jacobs does an excellent job explaining these multifaceted, often contradictory readings of Paradise Lost while keeping the poem’s central argument in view.

I commend Paradise Lost to readers, along with Jacobs’s biography of this great work of poetic theology. While I’m at it, I encourage Christians to read Jacobs’s other books—in particular, his unofficial trilogy on reading, thinking, and learning, comprised of Breaking Bread with the Dead and two earlier volumes: The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction and How to Think. Together, they demonstrate how deep commitments to Christian Scripture and tradition can help us wrestle with voices from the past, as well as the voices that dominate our own contentious age.

Matthew Mullins is associate professor of English at Oklahoma Baptist University. He is the author of Enjoying the Bible: Literary Approaches to Loving the Scriptures.

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News

Israeli Strike on Gaza Church Leaves Three Dead

Jill Nelson

“Everyone I talk to in Gaza from the Christian community asked me to find a way for them to get out.”

Christian Palestinian mourners attend the funeral ceremony of victims killed in an Israeli strike that hit the Holy Family Church in Gaza.

Omar Al-Qattaa / Getty

Hundreds of people were sheltering in the Gaza Strip’s only Catholic church last week when an Israeli strike on the complex killed 3 people and injured 12. Among the injured was the parish priest.

The Holy Family Catholic Church in Gaza City is one of three operational churches in the coastal enclave and currently shelters about 600 people. More than 21 months of war have crippled the region and led to mass starvation, according to aid groups, as Israel continues its operation to dismantle Hamas’s grip on Gaza.

Two patriarchs from Jerusalem, representing both Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches, made a rare visit to Gaza on Friday to express a “shared pastoral solicitude of the Churches of the Holy Land.” They are also organizing convoys of hundreds of tons of food and medical supplies, which have not yet been delivered to the compound.

Fabrid Jubran, a spokesman for the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, told Christianity Today that one of the injured from the church attack is in critical condition but that the church’s priest is doing fine. Among those who died were a man in a wheelchair and an elderly woman who was a retired teacher, according to Khalil Sayegh, a Palestinian Christian and political analyst who lived in Gaza until 2009.

The attack brings the number of war-related deaths among Christians in Gaza to at least 33, Sayegh said. The Christian population has roughly halved since the beginning of the war, dropping to between 600 and 700 people. “Everyone is scared,” he said.

Israel claims the incident at the church was a mistake. A government-issued statement said, “Israel deeply regrets that a stray ammunition hit Gaza’s Holy Family Church. Every innocent life lost is a tragedy. We share the grief of the families and the faithful.”

US president Donald Trump has pushed for a 60-day cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. On Monday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump was “caught off guard” by the strike on the Gaza church and “wants the killing to end, to negotiate a ceasefire in this region, and he wants to see all of the hostages released from Gaza.”

The attack on the church came as US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, an evangelical Christian and longtime supporter of Israel, was in the country addressing his concerns about the government’s treatment of Christians. In a string of rare rebukes, Huckabee sent an angry letter to the Israeli government last week about its refusal to grant entry visas to American evangelical organizations, including the Baptist Convention of Israel, Christian Missionary Alliance, and Assemblies of God, and threatened to reciprocate by refusing visas to Israeli citizens. On Tuesday, he announced on X that the issue had been resolved after meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s interior minister.

Huckabee also visited the West Bank city of Taybeh, where extremist Israeli settlers allegedly set fire to an archeological site next to an ancient church. He called the arson attack “an act of terror” that should result in “harsh consequences.” The ambassador also demanded an investigation into the death of a Palestinian American man whom extremist settlers allegedly beat to death earlier this month. Huckabee’s criticisms are atypical, as he supports Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

Times of Israel correspondent Lazar Berman believes the recent events in the West Bank and Gaza jeopardize Israel’s long-standing ties with evangelical Christians and could have been prevented.

“Netanyahu and his government are afraid to assert their authority, allowing extremists and those who have no understanding of the importance of Israel’s ties with Christians to set the agenda and inflict strategic damage on the Jewish state,” he wrote in an op-ed.

Meanwhile, the Gaza church strike was the fourth or fifth time the church complex has been hit, according to Sayegh, who stays in close contact with Christian friends and family in Gaza. His father died while taking refuge in the Holy Family Catholic Church in December 2023. He had a heart attack and was unable to seek medical attention because of Israeli tanks surrounding the church complex.

That same month, a mother and daughter bled to death after getting caught in sniper fire at the church. Israel denied intentionally targeting the women or the church but acknowledged exchanging fire with Hamas operatives in the area.

This week, Israeli troops launched a ground operation into an area in central Gaza they’ve previously avoided, calling for another round of civilian evacuations. Israel hopes to force Hamas into negotiations that will secure the release of the remaining 50 hostages, 20 of whom are believed to be alive.

Cease-fire talks have hit roadblocks due in part to Hamas’s demands that Israel withdraw from most of Gaza and hand over aid distribution to the United Nations and the Palestinian Red Crescent. Israel and the US claim Hamas steals aid to help fund its war aims.

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which took over Gaza’s aid program in late May, says it has distributed 90 million meals in less than two months, but Sayegh said the Christians he’s in touch with don’t visit the aid hubs because they are too dangerous. Hamas-controlled Gaza authorities claim hundreds of people have died trying to get food from the four GHF sites. Although the Israeli military admits to opening fire on people who come too close to the troops, it counters that those numbers are inflated.

“From my understanding, [the Christians] use the food that is stored at the church, or they buy from the market with very expensive prices,” Sayegh said. His sister lives in Gaza and struggles to find food for her two-year-old son.

Amid criticism of the Israeli-backed GHF, Huckabee posted on X that the UN deserves some blame for the growing starvation in Gaza as it has “massive amounts [of food] sitting on pallets rotting.”

Since last week’s strike, Christians sheltering in the church have felt that they have nowhere safe to flee. Due to the lack of food and the fear of increased attacks, Gaza’s Christian community could face another exodus.

“It’s a very harsh situation,” Sayegh said, “and one where literally everyone I talk to in Gaza from the Christian community asked me to find a way for them to get out.”

- More from Jill Nelson

News

With Fewer Places to Go, Afghans Find Refuge in Brazil

Erica Neves

Christian ministries partner with the government and the UN to lead the country’s resettlement efforts.

Afghan refugee family stays in a shelter in Praia Grande, Brazil.

Andre Penner / AP

Within days of the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban showed up at Sahar’s door.

A university student and new mom, she worked for an American ministry in the city of Herat. (CT is not using her full name for the security of her family and the ministry.) In August 2021, Taliban officials accused the 22-year-old of “corrupting women” and “straying from the Islamic faith.” They threatened to send her to prison.

Sahar knew she had to leave. She didn’t have a passport yet for her three-month-old son, and her husband— like Sahar, a convert to Christianity—had taken his mother to Pakistan for cancer treatment.

Sahar decided to cross the border illegally.

Later that month, she fled with her son and father-in-law. At the border town of Spin Boldak, they met thousands of fellow Afghans trying to escape in suffocating heat, women in their heavy, Taliban-sanctioned burqas. Sahar held her son tight as she tried to pass through the narrow border gate and crushing crowds. They ended up paying a local to drive them into Pakistan and take them the 600 miles to Islamabad.

The family reunited, but within months, Sahar’s mother-in-law died. They stayed for nearly two years, trying to rebuild their lives in a country that did not recognize them as refugees.

“We were always worried that we might be expelled at any moment,” said Sahar. “We didn’t know how we would survive if we had to return to Afghanistan.”

While Sahar prayed for safety, Christians thousands of miles away in Brazil were following the situation in Afghanistan and praying for a way to help.

A little over two years after fleeing the Taliban, Sahar’s family arrived in Curitiba, a city of 1.7 million in southern Brazil, where ministry volunteers met them at the airport. Sahar and her husband had considered the United States or Germany but went further south instead.

“We didn’t want to be judged because of our country’s past,” Sahar said. “Here in Brazil, people don’t care about that.”

During their first six months, the nonprofit Missão Mais provided everything: food, clothing, medicine, and assistance with legal documentation. The family lived at the ministry’s camp, which included 16 houses, all occupied by other Afghan families. And from the month they arrived, they had citizenship in their new country.

Since the Taliban takeover in August 2021, several Brazilian ministries stepped up to help Afghans, drawing from the generosity and welcome of local churches. With the US shutting down its refugee programs and the United Nations restricting resources for resettlement, these church-based networks serve as an even more crucial lifeline for refugees.

By the UN’s count, over half a million Afghans need resettlement this year, and the number of available spaces for refugees from all countries has dropped from 195,069 in 2024 to 31,281 in 2025.

Missão Mais is one of three organizations in Brazil currently authorized to vet Afghan refugees and help resettle new arrivals.

Another is Panahgah, which is named after the Dari word for “refuge” and began coordinating refugee sponsors among local churches in November 2021. Since then, the organization has worked with Christians in over 35 Brazilian cities to provide housing, food, legal assistance, and integration support for nearly 1,000 Afghan refugees.

Government officials have praised Panahgah’s community-sponsorship model for its success. Civil society organizations facilitate humanitarian visas and integration but do not receive government funding.

“It’s the community itself that takes responsibility for supporting and walking alongside the refugee families,” said Sindy Nobre, Panahgah’s legal adviser.

In addition to connecting refugees with church networks, the ministries offer Portuguese classes, migration guidance, and workshops about everyday life in Brazil, from the banking system to public health care.

Vila Minha Pátria, a nonprofit established by the Brazilian Baptist Convention’s National Mission Board in April 2022, serves as a primary reception center for arrivals as they prepare to relocate to other cities, where they will receive a year of support. The Vila initially received 54 refugees, but demand quickly grew as airport staff and others referred families who didn’t have a place to go.

“Today, in addition to Afghans, we’ve welcomed refugees from nine other nationalities,” said Jennifer Soares, who coordinates the Vila with the backing of church leaders who visit, donate, and host families.

Last year, though, Brazil suspended the humanitarian visas that allowed Afghan families like Sahar’s to arrive, and it reformulated the process so that Afghan refugees must go through approved organizations, rather than the embassies, to resettle in Brazil.

While the Vila has room for more, families remain trapped in Afghanistan with no safe way out. Relatives of resettled families often reach out to share their situations and ask for help.

“We receive daily messages from people hiding in their homes, afraid of being found by radical groups,” Soares said.

When Sahar moved to Brazil in 2023, the Christian ministry where she and her husband worked—which moved operations from Afghanistan to Pakistan—arranged her family’s travel documents. “All we had to do was an interview,” Sahar said.

Once her family reached Brazil, Missão Mais supported them through the process of obtaining ID cards and tax registration numbers with the Federal Police, granting them citizenship within a month of arriving. Their current ID cards are still provisional, but this month—a year and half later—they expect to receive permanent documentation.

After the US stopped accepting refugees under the Trump administration in January, many who had arrived in Brazil with hopes to move to America are instead crossing the border to French Guiana—a French territory in South America—in hopes of getting status in the European Union.

The drop in US foreign-aid funding has also forced the UN Refugee Agency to scale back operations in Brazil, suspending approximately 40 percent of planned programs, UN staff told CT.

While the agency continues to provide some assistance—relying on a mix of funding from other governments and private partnerships—it now prioritizes lifesaving activities and preventive measures to avoid a budget deficit should US support not resume.

Refugees arriving in Brazil receive less material aid and financial support, and fewer workers are around to help them settle quickly.

While churchgoers may care about refugees, many don’t know how to help them obtain legal documentation, housing, or jobs, according to Karen Ramos with the grassroots network Como Nascido Entre Nós (“As If They Were Born Among Us”).

There’s also a gap in theological understanding. “Without a solid biblical foundation,” she warns, the church’s commitment to welcoming and supporting refugees in meaningful and sustained ways can be fragile.” Beyond these limitations, there are cultural and social hurdles—including prejudice and resistance within some local communities.

After Sahar’s family stayed six months in Curitiba, Missão Mais connected them with a partner church in Ribeirão das Neves, Minas Gerais. The church provided housing, food, and a monthly stipend of 2,000 reais for one year (about $362). During that time, Sahar’s husband found work as a janitor washing buses. Later, he applied for a new role as a traffic controller and now works every other night.

Their son, now four, attends school in the afternoons while Sahar takes driving lessons. Once she has her license, she hopes to study sociology at a university.

Church members invite them to birthday parties and weddings, visit their home, and share meals. “We’ve introduced them to Afghan food—and they really liked it,” she said.“We were welcomed and embraced. Today, we hardly even remember we’re foreigners—we feel like we were born here.”

- More from Erica Neves

Ideas

Church in a Time of Brain Rot

Jeffrey Bilbro

Contributor

Technologies that promised mutual understanding have instead fomented confusion and fraud. Christians can model a better way.

Illustration by Lisk Feng

More of a good thing is not necessarily better. And what starts as a good thing may not stay that way.

This is a lesson we’ve had to learn and relearn in recent years while living through rapid shifts in digital communication technologies. It’s vertigo-inducing how a given tool or platform can have one effect in its infancy and an opposite one in its maturity.

But perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising: Scale and proportion matter. Our bodies need some salt, for example, but too much salt will make us ill. Communication technologies have a similar effect on the body politic. The same tool that at a low dose can contribute to mutual understanding and consensus can, when adopted on a wider scale, foment confusion and antipathy.

If we want to keep our feet under us amid these disorienting shifts, Christians must learn how to recognize this paradoxical reality and work together to keep such potent technologies in their place. Yet we’ll only be able to do so if our sense of community and belonging flow from the rhythms of our churchly life together. In other words, it’s our very commitment to living as members of Christ’s body that will enable us to serve a techno-addled society and call it to a better way of life.

Nicholas Carr articulates these dynamics well in his latest book, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart. It is a grave mistake, he warns, to assume “that the way a complex technological system works early in its development will be the way it works as it matures.” Yet because “the story we told ourselves about the net, from its earliest days, was a story of ‘democratization,’” many were slow to recognize how easily an abundance of information may foster enmity and mistrust.

Carr’s argument about the effects of too much content pouring through our screens corroborates the insights of the Catholic technology critic Ivan Illich, whom Carr—somewhat strangely—never mentions in Superbloom. In the 1970s, Illich proposed that the application of industrial-style technologies in any given field—education, medicine, transportation, communication, and so on—would be marked by two watersheds.

“At first,” Illich explained, “new knowledge is applied to the solution of a clearly stated problem, and scientific measuring sticks are applied to account for the new efficiency.” Such success generates great optimism, and these early improvements are used to justify “the exploitation of society as a whole in the service of” some too-simple metric, like content produced and disseminated. After this second watershed has been crossed, chasing further technological efficiencies fails to improve the situation and often causes new problems instead.

An example from an earlier era—the era which coined terms such as consensus, brain rot, and even, as Carr notes, social media—can help us to see this progression. The printing press played a key role in unifying the American colonists and orchestrating their rebellion against Britain. As the early American historian David Ramsay famously put it in 1789, “In establishing American independence, the pen and the press had merit equal to that of the sword.” Hence, a few years later, the Philadelphia Typographical Society could declare the press “the tombstone of ignorance and superstition.”

After such a positive experience with the hand-powered printing press, the industrialization of printing in the late 1820s and other new communication technologies, most notably the telegraph, were met with messianic fervor. The first message sent across the Atlantic Ocean in 1858 concluded with a nearly blasphemous connection between the advent of this technology and the advent of Christ: “‘Europe and America are united by telegraph. Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace, good will towards men.”

Such sentiments were common. An earlier essay in Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune is typical: “The Magnetic Telegraph, which is literally material thought, and flies as swift, absolutely annihilating space and running in advance of time, will be extended to all the great cities in the Union—so that a net-work of nerves of iron wire, strung with lightning, will ramify from the brain, New York, to the distant limbs and members—to the Atlantic seaboard towns, to Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Louisville, Nashville, St. Louis and New Orleans.”

The result, heralds of this new communication age were sure, would be the spread of truth and enlightenment. The Tribune story treated the telegraph as infallible, a tool to make journalistic “fraud and deception … next to impossible.”

Today it’s hard to believe that anyone seriously thought misinformation and fake news, much less sensational trivia, would be eliminated by the telegraph—but then, it was less than 15 years ago that Twitter was going to spread democracy throughout the Middle East. As I said, rapid technological shifts can induce vertigo.

One of the most notable consequences of the new connections the telegraph and industrial printing wrought is what we’ve come to call consensus: that experience of a common feeling throughout society. Consensus, in fact, is a fairly novel concept. The word first entered the English language in the mid-1800s, referring to a nation or other group of people sharing the same sensations and opinions at the same time.

As consensus develops—as people come to think and feel in unison with a speed and totality only possible through mass communication—the dangers of groupthink become pronounced. Political slogans, memes, and sentimental appeals pulse through these networks and our minds. And when there is an exception to that unity, some dissent that is disagreeable or even disgusting to the majority, the experience feels more intimate and hence more disconcerting.

The most obvious example of that disconcert from the 19th century is the question of slavery. When Northerners read proslavery essays or Southerners encountered abolitionist literature, their deeply divergent sentiments became unignorable. When, in the 1830s, Northern abolitionists blanketed the South with antislavery pamphlets, the result was not persuasion or mutual understanding but riots, bonfires, and calls to censor the mail. Proslavery sentiments only intensified.

Today, when our digital feeds provide constant reminders of what our fellow citizens and even fellow Christians think about immigration or vaccines or gender, the result is usually not deeper understanding but visceral antipathy. The networking technologies that make public consensus possible also make the dissent that persists more apparent and galling.

We tend to focus on the deleterious individual effects of digital communication technologies: Carr’s earlier book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains is a classic of this genre. And for individuals, it’s possible to make choices that counteract these effects. When Henry David Thoreau warned his readers that paying attention to sensational news would cause “brain-rot” (a term chosen as the Oxford Word of the Year in 2024), he could recommend changing their informational diet as a remedy.

It’s harder to address the political or cultural problems of an overconnected society, because these require collective action. I may be able to improve my own news habits, but I can’t choose to live in a world without TikTok.

So what is to be done about the studies Carr summarizes in Superbloom that show “false or otherwise misleading stories [are] 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than factual ones”? And that the most educated people, and the ones who follow the news most closely, also have the most distorted understanding of contemporary events? And that when most of us encounter “different points of view” online, we see these “not as opportunities to learn but as provocations to attack”?

As Carr concludes, “Flooding the public square with more information from more sources” does not “open people’s minds or engender more thoughtful discussions.” It doesn’t even “make people better informed.”

What makes the challenge of meaningful change even more difficult is that skepticism of our hyperconnected world is often corrupted or co-opted. Carr gives the particularly ironic example of Frank Walsh, who one night shot a bullet through his family’s TV—only to find himself an overnight news sensation. The next week, he won a new TV on a reality TV show.

We have become accustomed to the phenomenon of “politicians [who] go on social media to express their disdain for social media, [and] then eye the like count.” At the societal scale, is that really the best we can do?

Carr concludes Superbloom by proposing we look for ways to turn aside and form alternative communities on the edges of these digital networks. “Maybe salvation, if that’s not too strong a word, lies in personal, willful acts of excommunication,” he writes, in “the taking up of positions, first as individuals and then, perhaps, together, not outside of society but at society’s margin, not beyond the reach of the informational flow but beyond the reach of its liquefying force.”

He’s right, but it’s the togetherness aspect of this response that is particularly vital, for communication technologies by their very nature pose challenges that demand cooperative responses. What Carr does not say is that communities and even institutions already exist, all over our country, that are uniquely equipped to rise to this challenge: Christian families, schools, and churches.

We should be taking the lead in embodying alternative ways of communicating and feeling together. We need to practice developing a different kind of consensus, the consensus of members of the church conforming to the mind of Christ (Rom. 12:2; 1 Cor. 2:16), not members of an increasingly secularized society oriented around New York and Silicon Valley. This type of consensus is the stability we need to avoid fresh waves of vertigo as dramatic technological development, particularly around artificial intelligence, continues apace.

Communal action at the scale of a church or Christian institution can take many forms. We might begin with something like screen-free church services. Families and small groups can host discussions of books like Andy Crouch’s Tech-Wise Family and create their versions of the Postman Pledge. Students can start Luddite clubs. Christian schools can take a cue from the Bruderhof communities and workshops that subordinate technologies to shared commitments.

We can both observe and offer examples that testify to the possibility of distinctly Christian consensus even in this digitally networked age. It is still possible for Christians to think and feel according to our membership in an alternative community. It is still possible for our consistently shared life of Scripture, communion, and prayer to form in us a consensus tied not to some mass public but to the body of Christ.

Jeffrey Bilbro is associate professor of English at Grove City College and editor in chief at the Front Porch Republic. His most recent book is Words for Conviviality: Media Technologies and Practices of Hope.

- More from Jeffrey Bilbro

Theology

Does the Quran Support Religious Pluralism?

Jayson Casper

Islamic scholars from Tunisia and Egypt challenge the historical record.

Eric Lafforgue / Art in All of Us / Contributor / Getty

This is part three of a three-part series about a network of interfaith centers in the Muslim world. Click here to read parts one and two.

Last month, an obscure jihadist group claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing at the Mar Elias Greek Orthodox Church in Damascus, Syria, that killed 25 people. The attack came as a response, it stated, to the government requiring prior approval of Islamic preaching in the Christian neighborhood. Three months earlier, at the site of the future bombing, austere Salafi Muslims called on residents to convert to Islam, a practice known in Arabic as da’wa. Later, a car drove up and its occupants loudly repeated the call until local Muslims sent them away.

Salafis are known for growing long beards and wearing traditional robes in imitation of the prophet Muhammad. Salafi practice is not inherently violent, and reporting does not draw a clear connection between the incident at the church and the later suicide bombing. But many jihadists emerge from or are drawn to Salafi communities, as both aim to follow the Quran literally in complete devotion to Allah.

The jihadists even adopted a particular verse from the Quran as their slogan: “Fight the polytheists together as they fight together against you.” To them, belief in the Trinity is an offense against Allah’s oneness. In preventing Muslims from proper da’wa, then, both state and church in Syria became worthy of war.

Some experts say Salafis and jihadists represent a reaction—peaceful or otherwise—to reclaim a lost idealized era when Islam governed much of the world. Yet most Muslims are neither Salafis nor jihadists; many have accepted democracy and the nation-state system that formally adopts principles of minority rights and common citizenship.

Still, according to a 2013 survey of Muslims in 38 nations, the sense of Islamic superiority lingers. Like many evangelicals, the most devout Muslims view their faith as the only way to heaven and consider converting others to be a religious duty.

In the West, belief that someone is going to hell has little civic impact, as religious faith tends to be an individual decision. But in the Muslim world, this belief has subjected Christians to a long heritage of second-class citizenship. And the survey reveals that substantial minorities of the most devout want sharia made the law of the land, applied also to non-Muslims.

The modern principle of pluralism holds two ideas in tension: Believers should be free to spread their faith, while minority religions and their beliefs should be respected. As Syria shows, this can be complicated in the Middle East, where the understanding of Islam is a crucial factor for interfaith peace.

One Tunisian Muslim academic, Adnane Mokrani, makes a bold assertion: Islam, when properly understood, is an ally of religious pluralism. Though he concedes this is a minority viewpoint among Muslims, Mokrani, who serves on the Network of Centers for Christian-Muslim Relations advisory board, said that a new generation of theologians are reevaluating the Quran’s understanding of diversity.

The new network, profiled previously this series, doesn’t comment on political events or policies. It recognizes the witness of one’s faith as an essential part of both Christianity and Islam. But it believes that interfaith peace may require setting aside evangelism and da’wa in certain ways and places, though not as an activity of individual believers.

In this case, Mokrani believes the diversity of religions flows intentionally from the divine will, expressing his argument in a recent webinar. He cited this verse from the Quran as evidence: “If Allah had willed, He would have made you one community.” This idea is similar to that of the academic sage in the first article in this series, who lamented the state of conflict and rancor that ensues from religious difference. Yet the passage continues optimistically: Multiple religious communities exist so that they may “compete with one another in doing good.”

Classical Muslim theology, however, divides the world into the “House of Islam” and the “House of War,” as multiple verses in the Quran encourage Muslims to fight unbelievers. Historically, the House of War was the realm of opposing empires, with the Christian Byzantines the most stubborn in resistance.

This theology recognized that Jews and Christians in conquered lands now resided within the House of Islam. The Quran refers to Jews and Christians, along with Muslims, as “People of the Book,” in recognition of a shared scriptural heritage, Mokrani said. Classical Muslim scholars rejected much of the Bible’s content as distorted. Yet the Quran honors its conception of the Torah, given to Moses, and the Gospel, given to Jesus, as “containing guidance and light”—the same terms it uses of itself.

On the ground, this meant that Muslims would not forcibly convert Jews and Christians. Instead, the two religious groups could continue practicing their faiths in exchange for payment of a tax called jizya. Through this, these communities received status as dhimmis, safe from war and given freedom of worship—though not to evangelize. Treatment varied over time, but their second-class status reinforced the Islamic sense of religious superiority.

The historical development of Muslim society led to a gap between the original conciliatory vision of Muhammad and the later, more rigid attitude of scholars, maintains Mokrani, who is also professor of Islamic studies at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. Faced with a growing empire and Christian opposition in war and faith, Muslim scholars’ commentaries on the Quran polemically defined Islam as a religious community distinct from Jews and Christians rather than in continuity with them.

Their interpretive tool was the location of Muhammad’s prophecies.

In Mecca, the prophet preached on monotheism and morality, focusing on the Final Judgment. He spoke positively about Jews and Christians, calling his polytheistic tribesmen to repentance. Eventually, though, Muhammad fled north to nearby Medina, where the people accepted him as a political leader focused on governing. And here, his rupture with the Jews and armed skirmishes with Christians on the outskirts of the Byzantine Empire forced later scholars to interpret the differences between Mecca and Medina revelations.

From there, the principle of abrogation emerged, evident from passages eventually forbidding alcohol and shifting the direction of prayer from Jerusalem to Mecca. Since the Quran stated that Allah could “replace a verse with another,” scholars followed the pattern to prioritize latter revelation over earlier passages. And the commentaries they wrote increasingly limited the application of broadly worded verses.

An important example—crucial for religious pluralism—comes from a verse declaring, “Let there be no compulsion in religion.” Omaima Abou-Bakr, a professor at Cairo University in Egypt, examined centuries of commentaries for her chapter in Freedom of Expression in Islam: Challenging Apostasy and Blasphemy Laws. One early commentator qualified the plain meaning of “no compulsion” by linking it to another verse establishing the jizya tax. Later, another cited verses demonstrating the necessity of combat and related a traditional saying of Muhammad that praised the idea of captives of war entering paradise in chains—that is, accepting Islam after their military defeat.

Other early commentators linked instead to verses emphasizing, “Whoever wills let them believe [or] disbelieve.” But Abou-Bakr wrote that hundreds of years passed before another major commentary in the 19th century connected the “no compulsion” passage to tolerant verses about non-Muslims. By then, the world had changed, as European colonialism entered the House of Islam and shattered its civilizational sense of superiority. Muslims were now on the defensive, having to address accusations that their religion spread by the sword.

Mokrani highlighted other examples of tolerant verses. Not only does the Quran commend its conception of the Torah and the Gospel, but it also calls Jews and Christians to follow their own Scripture. If they do, Allah declared they will have “no fear” on the Day of Judgment, “nor will they grieve.”

“The only conversion required is to God,” Mokrani said.

This passage about the People of the Book also stresses the importance of the Quran to Jewish and Christian communities. But it comes, Mokrani emphasized, from the later Medina period of Muhammad’s ministry. So does the verse about the divine will for pluralism—that Allah could have formed “one community” if he had wanted to.

Mokrani’s argument that these passages are not abrogated runs into potential difficulty, however, considering what many scholars believe to be one of the final verses revealed in the Quran: “Certainly, Allah’s only Way [translated literally as “religion”] is Islam,” while a later verse in the passage says those who follow other ways “will be among the losers.” Still, rejection of this religion is met only with the promise of hellfire, and Muhammad is told “your duty is only to deliver the message.”

But Mokrani said the Quran’s emphasis on religious communities, not religions, yields a significant clue in how to understand what the “Islam” of this passage actually stands for.

The idea begins in recognizing that Arabic contains no system of uppercase and lowercase letters. Muslims have traditionally stated that the Quran can truly be understood only in its original language, compared to Christians who have eagerly translated the Bible. To that end, Muslims usually craft titles like The Meaning of the Glorious Quran, or something similar, when publishing translations of their holy text.

All translators must make choices. Mokrani highlighted the verse in which Jesus’ disciples confess their belief in Allah: “Bear witness that we have submitted.” This is the rendering at quran.com, and all quotations in this article are drawn from the popular internet site. In other translations, however, the disciples “testify that we are Muslims.”

To Christians, this is clearly an anachronism. Islam did not exist at the time of Jesus. Yet many Muslims maintain that Allah’s religion—as the verse above states—was always Islam. The Arabic word islam means “submission,” and this is what Allah requires. In the majority Muslim view, Jews were required to submit to the Torah and Christians to the Gospel, but now all people must submit to the Quran.

In English, “Islam” is capitalized as the name of a religion. This is a legitimate translation, as the Arabic islam is preceded by the definite article. But Mokrani said that the Quran never refers to Judaism, Christianity, or other faiths as religions; it therefore does not follow that “Islam” is a religion either. Instead, Allah addresses religious communities—Jews, Christians, and the people of Muhammad, muslimuun in Arabic, meaning “those who submit.” According to Mokrani’s exegesis, any within these communities who submit to Allah through their respective scriptures will be saved.

Does this pluralism only include the People of the Book? Not necessarily, he maintained. Another verse includes other regional religious communities present at the time of Muhammad’s preaching, and even polytheists, saying that “Allah will judge between them all on Judgment Day.” In this verse, Mokrani points out, salvation is promised to none, but neither is the possibility denied.

Scholars consider this chapter of the Quran as partially from Mecca, partially from Medina. A later verse puts polytheists clearly in hell. Muslims generally follow the principle of abrogation, and jihadists in Syria not only expand the meaning of polytheism but also apply it violently.

But why, Mokrani asks, should Muslims prioritize the later particular verses of the Quran over the earlier universal verses? In his chapter of The Study Qurʾan, Walid Saleh wrote that much of what Muslims believe is more from the commentaries on the text and less from the text itself.

Sources referred to in this article are interpreting their faith in an era of widely esteemed religious diversity. Mokrani and Abou-Bakr admit theirs is a minority viewpoint—though their human task is the same as that of the commentators from an era of Muslim conquest.

“But now there are many voices,” Mokrani said, “taking the same direction of pluralism.”

- More from Jayson Casper

Church Life

Singing Hymns to Warn the Bears

Anna Broadway in Anchorage

On the outskirts of Anchorage, a Southern Baptist retired science education professor captures creation on her cameras.

Donna Gail Shaw uses a tree ladder to swap out memory cards from one of her trail cameras on the outskirts of Anchorage.

Photography by Anna Broadway

Donna Gail Shaw is up a tree, her holstered .44 revolver sometimes grazing the bark as she adjusts a game camera and describes the time she almost got between a bear and its cub.

“It was the biggest brown bear I’d ever seen in my life. And she kept coming toward me. And I thought, ‘This is not good,’ because I’m yelling and talking to her and she’s … coming toward me. She keeps looking this way. And I look that way too, and then I look at her and I thought, ‘I’ve got to get out of here.’”

For the better part of ten years, Shaw, a retired science-education professor, has made weekly hikes near her home to check each of the game cameras she maintains on the outskirts of Anchorage, Alaska. During summer, they number half a dozen or more.

As the lifelong Southern Baptist tells it, the hikes to and from her trail cameras—and the footage of wildlife she retrieves from the memory cards, then shares online with a growing audience—all sprang from simple curiosity. One day, on a hike, she met a man who maintained some game cameras that caught interesting footage of animals. When she got tired of pestering him to share his latest videos, she set up her own.

Several years later, Shaw’s work has acquired a following that’s gained increasing media coverage. But though some of the articles note her habit of singing hymns as a way to alert bears to her presence, the pieces are mostly framed as nature stories. They don’t consider the spiritual implications—how Shaw’s work obeys Jesus’ call to consider creation or how it might entail a practice akin to prayer.

Each game camera is slightly larger than a standard copy of the Book of Common Prayer—or a Lunchables snack kit. Depending on the location, Shaw might use moss or other greenery to camouflage them—more to hide the equipment from people than to hide it from animals.

Due to an unusually dry winter, we contended with few mosquitos the day Shaw took me out. Much of her route goes over winter mushing trails for dog-sled teams—trails which become a swamp of boot-sucking mud in summer.

Photography by Anna Broadway

Donna Gail Shaw hikes toward the Chugach Mountain Range near marshy ground that becomes dog mushing trails in winter.

This year, the swamp trail still had good visibility in early May, when Shaw set out to install more of her seasonal cameras. (She keeps only two, dubbed her “bunny cams,” up year-round. The name comes from the snowshoe hares whose pellets alerted her to the location’s filming potential.) Due to a few light snows in April, Shaw delayed our journey until the ground was fully thawed for Alaska’s short summer season. By the time she deemed the area ready to hike, the birch trees had sprouted a fresh coat of green, but little more than dead yellow grasses emerged from the mud, into which we sometimes sank ankle deep.

To check existing cameras and install new ones, Shaw wore a pair of gray Xtratuf shoes, the almost-knee-high boots many Alaskans favor. Later in the summer, Shaw said, the mosquitos get so thick she has to wear a head net. The swamp grasses grow high enough to conceal more wildlife—whether the spruce grouse she had us watch for in some sections or the bears for which she stayed constantly alert.

“Safe, to me, is when I can see around me and I can see in the creek and see if there’s a bear that’s going to kill me,” she explained. This rubric has determined the places where Shaw puts her cameras—particularly those that point at particular trees where bears love to rub.

Photography by Anna Broadway

Shaw points to strands of hair left on a bear rub tree.

When I suggested an opening prayer for our hike and interview, Shaw asked me to cover several specific things she usually asks God for before each of her treks. We should ask for safety, she said, for us and the animals alike. On her own, she also usually prays that if she should fall, God would bring her down gently and she would be able to get up again.

Shaw, 70, suits her prayers to action. In addition to a summertime array of two bear sprays and two air horns, she carries a sleek .44 revolver holstered near her substantial hip pack. She also tells a friend when she goes out, and has her track the journey via Apple’s Find My app.

As Shaw talked, a “girls in science” baseball cap shielded her face from the midafternoon sun. By the summer solstice in June, Anchorage gets almost round-the-clock daylight, but Shaw keeps a pretty consistent schedule and avoids going out too late in the afternoon or too early in the morning. No matter the sun’s position, bear activity near the creek where she trains some cameras becomes increasingly likely around 4 or 5 p.m. During the month of July, Shaw never hikes alone, because too many salmon are in the creek, prompting “high bear activity.” She said, “I’ve just learned from experience that I have too many bear encounters in July.” Bearing out her caution, a 67-year-old woman hiking alone was mauled by a bear earlier this week, in a “heavily wooded” area just a few miles from where Shaw keeps her cameras.

As a child in rural East Texas, Shaw grew up in a family that regularly hunted. But an early misadventure shooting a bird with a BB gun “broke my heart,” she said. “Now I like to hunt the cameras.”

Earlier on, Shaw checked the cameras as often as three times a week. “That slowed down after I had too many bear encounters.” Now she goes closer to once a week, often hiking Sundays after church. Perhaps that has something to do with the hymns. She landed on those after pondering how to make noise on her usually solitary hikes.

Photography by Anna Broadway

Bear skat on the ground near one of Shaw’s trail cameras.

Once she started, she said, “I enjoyed it so much that I would add a new hymn every year.” This year she’s learning “Because He Lives.”

“It was part of my upbringing … and I miss it,” Shaw said of the hymns. “I also like the message God gives me through the hymns, even though I might be singing the same hymns over and over. Maybe he speaks to me differently each time.” When Shaw runs out of verses, she prays out loud, including for some of the people in her hiking groups.

Before visiting the camera sites with her, I had wondered how Shaw’s video practice shapes how she relates with God. But she didn’t explicitly articulate those connections when I asked her about them. Some of the theologians I followed up with after our hike said she doesn’t need to.

“It’s part of our … Western Christianity to have to be able to put explanatory words” to what Shaw’s doing, said Danny Zacharias, an associate dean at Acadia Divinity College and adjunct professor for the North American Institute for Indigenous Theological Studies. The “natural integration of her life,” he observed, “sound[s] a lot like Indigenous ways of being and knowing.”

Randy Woodley, an emeritus professor at Portland Seminary and author of books including Becoming Rooted, agreed. “This is the most natural thing in the world for [Shaw] to be doing,” he said. “She’s … showing us the rivers and the salmon, the grasses and the wind. And this is the domain that we’re supposed to be taking care of.”

“When we say that, as Christians, God loves the world, we’re almost always thinking human beings,” Zacharias said. “Indigenous Christians, when we say, ‘God loves the world,’ we mean God literally loves the leaves and the trees and the weeds and the waters. And when we think of Jesus as being the Savior of the world, we think of that inclusive, all-encompassing way as well.”

Walking with Shaw, I was struck by how much of the earth remains uninhabited—a fact especially brought home by Alaska’s vast stretches of mountains and tundra. Thanks largely to fieldwork for my recent book, I’ve visited 50-some countries. But that focus on mostly urban centers leaves out how much of the earth is mainly traversed by air, sea, and land creatures like those Shaw trains her cameras on.

“The Bible gives us plenty of stories to show us that we not only can encounter God in creation; we encounter God through creation,” Zacharias said. He cited examples like the burning bush (Ex. 3), a rumbling mountain, wind, and “Jesus comparing himself to water.”

According to 1 Kings, attention to God’s work in creation strongly influenced none other than Solomon and his wisdom:

He spoke three thousand proverbs and his songs numbered a thousand and five. He spoke about plant life, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of walls. He also spoke about animals and birds, reptiles and fish. From all nations people came to listen to Solomon’s wisdom, sent by all the kings of the world, who had heard of his wisdom (4:32–34).

Perhaps the Bible includes Solomon’s proverbs but not his botanical or biological studies because we each need to consider creation anew, to study it for ourselves. “Wisdom, fear, awe, joy—all of these things we need in life—we learn those from creation,” Woodley said. “The wolves don’t kill more than what they need to eat. Bears don’t unless they’re rabid. … I’ve seen hawks in trees with songbirds because they’re not hungry; they’re fine.”

With her trail cameras, Shaw offers a glimpse of animal interactions—from the playfulness of young bears (caught on some of the cards we retrieved that day) to foxes making a meal of moose. “Life’s not all rainbows and butterflies, and nature’s not that, and those are some of the things we can learn,” Woodley said. But if, like Solomon, we would do better to emulate Shaw’s attention than to just watch her videos, Woodley and Zacharias offered some other ideas.

During his master’s program, Woodley said he used to walk around a cemetery near Valley Forge in Pennsylvania to “see nature, smell the leaves after rain. … If you don’t have a yard to do that in, drive ten miles,” he said. “There’s a lot going on.” Zacharias suggested both “intellectual research” like learning where your water and food come from and choices about your living space. “Even in really urban spaces, we can intentionally be growers,” he said. “It’s good to have greenery around you, something that you need to have responsibility for and that you receive something back from.”

In these weeks after my hike with Shaw, I’ve been struck by how often my view of God’s character hinges on his recent responses (or perceived lack thereof) to my prayers or the human affairs that worry me. I’ve wondered: Is my pessimism because I don’t spend enough time in those woods? Is it because I don’t sufficiently study all the ways God continues to faithfully sustain the lives of billions of creatures he knows so well that he notes even each bird that dies?

Photography by Anna Broadway

A pair of bald eagles circles the skies above east Anchorage, near the route Shaw hikes to check her trail cameras.

Mortality came up frequently in my time with Shaw—whether the ever-present risk of a fatal bear encounter or the evidence of various tree and animal deaths. But even as Shaw faces some increased limits as she ages, she said the hikes continue to energize her. Recently, she’d been cleaning out a duplex she has decided to sell—a task that left her weary. “But when I finish there, I put on my hiking clothes and I come out here, and the exhaustion goes away,” she said.

Perhaps that rejuvenation owes itself to what one of the hymns she referenced that day describes.

And he walks with me,
And he talks with me,
And he tells me I am his own;
And the joy we share as we tarry there
None other has ever known.

Anna Broadway is the author of Solo Planet: How Singles Help the Church Recover Our Calling and Sexless in the City: A Memoir of Reluctant Chastity.

- More from Anna Broadway

Inkwell

Elizabeth Bruenig’s Advice for Young Christian Writers

Interview by Christopher Kuo

A chat with a Pulitzer Prize–nominated journalist.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons, Pexels

This piece was adapted from a newsletter series for Inkwell and written by former CT NextGen fellow Chris Kuo. Subscribe to the Inkwell Substack here.

Storytelling calls to me because I love the craft of writing and revising, the deliberate, recursive process of tinkering with words, sentences, and story structure. But I also love telling stories because of their ability to transform us—the best ones re-enchant what has grown familiar and introduce us to new, surprising ways of inhabiting the world, altering our thoughts and forming our loves.

Elizabeth Bruenig, a staff writer at The Atlantic, has mastered this type of storytelling. I’ve admired Bruenig’s work for a while now, ever since I heard her speak at an event during college. Over the years, I’ve grown to recognize her distinctive style, the way her opinion pieces blend on-the-ground reporting, rich sensory detail, and reflections on weighty political or philosophical topics.

By many measures, Bruenig has reached the pinnacle of American journalism. She is a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and has worked in several of the most prestigious newsrooms.

In a phone call with Inkwell, Bruenig reflected on how her faith influences her work, offered candid observations about newsroom culture, and gave some advice to young journalists. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

In your day-to-day work, do you consider yourself a Christian journalist? How do those identities intersect?

I consider myself a Christian and a journalist. The Christian prefix fits over everything I do. I’m a Christian mom, I’m a Christian wife and I’m a Christian journalist, a Christian writer. There’s a really long history of Christian writers. Starting in the early church, Augustine was a Christian writer, so I don’t think it’s hard at all to fit those identities together. The way it affects my work is in my choice of coverage, in my approach to interacting with people, and in my areas of interest. The death penalty is the most obvious because it’s a life issue. And that’s very important to me.

Some Christians who might consider journalism can be intimidated by the atmosphere they might perceive as hostile to faith in some of these elite newsrooms. Have you felt that way?

There are a lot of talented Christian journalists laboring away without making a big deal about it, which is something I didn’t recognize at first as a Christian myself who makes a big deal out of it, which is maybe not what I should be doing. But there are lots of people who are practicing their faith and doing their journalism work in these big institutions day in and day out.

But I don’t think people are mistaken when they detect a certain liberal bent in a lot of mainstream journalism, and I don’t think that’s necessarily the result of any wrongdoing. It’s just when you have people who have those politics, it affects their worldviews and their coverage. It happens to everyone.

There is some hostility. People obviously have a problem with some of the politics that seem to result from the Christian faith at times. There are people at work who won’t even speak to me, which is fine. I understand these are serious issues, and people have all kinds of different views on them that are very personal and closely held. I don’t want to force myself on anyone who doesn’t want to be my friend.

But I think the important thing is if you can go to work every day and do something that glorifies God, in some small way, even if it’s just having an interaction with a source where you’re empathetic and kind, or putting some stuff down on paper that really thinks through Christian virtues and Christian ideas like mercy and forgiveness. I think that’s all you really need.

My family is my rock, and the people who know me and are in my real daily life like me. So I can get by without being widely acclaimed or thought of as a cool journalist on the scene.

What is your relationship like with your editors?

I’ve always had a lot of editorial freedom, which is a gift and something that I appreciate quite a lot. I think generally the editors I’ve worked with have been fairly open-minded, and the country is 62 percent Christian, so there is a big audience out there for people who want to think through topics related to Christianity.

Do you ever think about an alternate career path?

I do think about going back and getting my PhD and finishing it, maybe once my kids are grown. They’re six and nine. I think if I go back and get my degree, it won’t be to have a career in academia. That was my dream for a long time. But you just have to listen to where life is leading you.

Is it important that there are journalists who are Christian in newsrooms like The New York Times or The Atlantic?

I do think it matters. In part, from a standpoint of a magazine trying to reach audiences, there are lots of people in the United States who take the principles of Christianity really seriously. And for people who don’t, Christianity still impacts their daily lives because Christian politics is a real active thing in the United States, as you pointed out.

Not every Christian journalist has to write about Christianity; that’s a weird quirk of my writing. But those ideas and those sensibilities matter. It helps that the journalist can understand where Christians and politics are coming from, and to distinguish the good from the bad in what they’re doing.

What advice would you give to young Christian journalists and writers?

I think the best way to develop your craft of writing is by reading. Every year, somebody puts out the 100 best American essays of the year, and I always buy them and read them because that’s how you learn: by seeing people demonstrate the craft. If you’re trying to do magazine journalism, read a lot of magazine journalism. If you’re trying to do straight news reporting, read a lot of straight news reporting.

Build relationships. Relationships are really key in this industry and probably every industry. If you’re concerned about newsrooms having certain antagonisms, I would just suggest building a lot of close relationships in your real daily life. Consider your profession as a public-facing thing that you do that’s important and meaningful, and it gives you an opportunity to worship God, but it can’t be your whole life.

You don’t go into your career and make it your whole life. I have relationships with lots of people in real life who don’t even know I’m a writer. It’s just not relevant to our conversations. My friends don’t read my writing. It’s just a separate part of my life. And that helps me stay a little sane. At the end of the day, you close your computer, and you have a household of people who love you, and that’s what really matters.

Check out more of Elizabeth’s work:

The Man I Saw Them Kill at The New York Times
Inside America’s Death Chambers at The Atlantic
I Became a Mother at 25, and I’m Not Sorry I Didn’t Wait at The New York Times

Behind the scenes with Bruenig

In her words, Bruenig’s foray into journalism happened largely by accident.

After graduating from Brandeis University in 2013 and earning an MPhil in Christian theology from Cambridge University, Bruenig began a doctoral program at Brown University in religion and philosophy, with the plan of becoming a Christian academic.

Around the same time, her husband Matt landed a job in DC. Tired of maintaining a long-distance relationship, Bruenig dropped out of her program and moved to be with her husband. To earn some income, she started writing for the magazine The New Republic, a move that quickly launched her career as a journalist.

In the decade since, Bruenig has established herself as a voice of moral clarity on a wide-ranging set of topics, from abortion and the death penalty to sexual abuse in the Catholic church and the politics of Bernie Sanders. Informed by her Catholicism and her political convictions—she is both pro-life and proudly socialist—her most distinctive work probes the many facets of human nature, wrestling with concepts of guilt and mercy, judgment and justice.

In the piece that made her a Pulitzer finalist for feature writing in 2019, she describes the ostracization of a teen sexual assault victim in Bruenig’s hometown in Texas. Over the course of 10,000 words, Bruenig grapples with what justice means for someone who has been lied to, mistreated, and discredited.

The art of storytelling, she concludes, can be an act of justice—an attempt, however halting, at seeking the truth and righting old wrongs: “This is my imperfect offering toward that end: a record of what happened, and the willingness to have been troubled by it all these years. It still troubles me now—it will always be unresolved—and I hope that it troubles you, because the moral conscience at ease accomplishes nothing.”

That sentiment is what animates Bruenig’s reporting: the wielding of words, details, and images to trouble her reader’s conscience, and her own, to shake us out of our ease and stir us to action.

Chris Kuo is a writer and reporter with bylines in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Fare Forward, and Christianity Today.

- More from Christopher Kuo

4/15 EVENT

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Check out more of Elizabeth’s work:

Behind the scenes with Bruenig

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