Transubstantiate

For his entry into Jerusalem, Jesus picked a symbol of lowliness rather than military might.

Christian churches throughout the world will begin our holiest week of the year on what is popularly known as Palm Sunday. It commemorates one of the few events in the life of Jesus recorded in all four gospel stories: his entry into Jerusalem, followed by a raucous and warm welcome and a lot of waving branches. (Only John 12:13 mentions they were palms.) In Israel today, churches still reenact the journey from the Mount of Olives to Jerusalem—the route supposedly taken by Jesus all those centuries ago.

As a kid, even in the nonliturgical world of the Black Baptist tradition, I recall receiving my palm branch and dutifully marching into the sanctuary with a palm in one hand and my unintelligible King James Bible in the other. This year on Palm Sunday, I will be the adult trying to make sure my children don’t use the palms as weapons to tickle and annoy their siblings.

As I study this story in Scripture, I’m struck by the fact that the primary symbol for this day—a palm—was not chosen by Jesus.

John writes, “They took palm branches and went out to meet him” (John 12:13). Why did the crowd choose palm branches? It could simply have been that palms were nearby. But history tells us there might have been a deeper reason: Those plants were symbolically linked to military victories and Messiahship.

A generation before Jesus, when Simon Maccabee drove Israel’s enemies out Jerusalem, people celebrated by waving palm branches:

On the twenty-third day of the second month, in the one hundred seventy-first year, the Jews entered it with praise and palm branches, and with harps and cymbals and stringed instruments, and with hymns and songs, because a great enemy had been crushed and removed …

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Alumnus Dondi E. Costin steps in to lead years after Jerry Falwell Jr.’s scandal.

Two and a half years after Jerry Falwell Jr. stepped down in scandal, Liberty University named its new president on Friday: Dondi E. Costin, the outgoing president at Charleston Southern University and a retired US Air Force major general and chaplain who earned a pair of master’s degrees from Liberty.

Costin’s appointment represents the first time the school hasn’t had someone named Jerry at the helm, as he succeeds interim president and longtime board chair Jerry Prevo and the two Jerry Falwells before him. Liberty’s founding family is still represented in leadership; pastor Jonathan Falwell—son of the late Jerry Falwell Sr. and brother to Jerry Falwell Jr.—has been appointed chancellor.

Costin, an Air Force Academy graduate who concluded a 32-year military career as chief of chaplains at the Pentagon, spent the past five years leading Charleston Southern, a Christian college of around 3,500 students in South Carolina.

“There are fewer differences than one might imagine between the processes and procedure of the military and higher education,” Costin told CT’s Creative Studio in 2019. “If you can survive and thrive in a complex bureaucracy like the Pentagon, then you can do it in a complex bureaucracy like higher education.”

At the Lynchburg, Virginia, campus, some high-profile challenges linger. Last year, Department of Education officials launched an investigation into the school’s handling of sexual assault claims, following a lawsuit from Jane Doe survivors and a campus movement calling for an audit of the school’s Title IX office. Former president Jerry Falwell Jr. continues to challenge the terms of his departure, suing earlier this month over …

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In Lent, we realign our identity in Christ and recover our sense of being loved into existence by our Creator.

As a Singaporean, I grew up immersed in a national culture defined by stress.

These instincts were arguably more learned than anything else—my Malaysian father and South Korean mother moved to the country from the United States in the 1990s. So much of how I grew up was shaped by the intensity of Singapore’s academic culture, shuttling between exam-heavy course loads, afterschool tutoring, and reams of practice papers to complete.

Different phases of my life would come to mirror this rhythm: spending hectic days in high school between writing long essays and serving in church, balancing responsibilities during military service while leading a small group and trying to keep up with reading, managing the busyness of my undergraduate life and subsequent tenure as a graduate student, and, even now, trying to uphold different commitments to ministry, creative writing, editing, friends, and family amid a full-time job.

The last time I felt thoroughly burnt out was about five years ago, as an undergraduate in England. Between reading and writing essays for class, keeping active in Christian fellowships, participating in theater productions, and rowing by dawn, I found myself gradually compromising my sleep schedule. Seven hours a night got slashed to six or even four and a half. I’m not entirely sure what drove me back then. Perhaps it was a feeling of duty and responsibility I felt I owed the people I had made promises to or a desire to not let any part of my university life slip by. Lurking beneath all this, perhaps, was an impulse toward optimization.

Optimization can be described in two ways, opines writer Jia Tolentino. First, it is a means of achieving profitability by “satisfy[ing] …

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Shootings have become normal to the American public. But as Christians, we know better.

Over the past few days, my city, Nashville, has been grieving and suffering after a terroristic murderer attacked a Christian school and slaughtered six people—including three children.

Whenever a school shooting happens in America, our country is shocked and pays attention for a time. But within a matter of weeks, most people add these events to other names on a list of horrors—Columbine, Parkland, Sandy Hook, Uvalde, and so on. But as others can attest, it’s different when such a tragedy happens in your backyard.

Some of the boys and girls fleeing for their lives were children of dear friends, and almost everyone I know is connected—closely or loosely—with the victims. We all know the church, the school, our neighbors in the Green Hills neighborhood. Things will not be the same here for a very long time.

And yet Americans—especially Christians—should ask just how much we have adjusted ourselves to this kind of horror. How numb to it all have we become?

While I was still in the haze of this awful news, a friend who is an expert in domestic terrorism texted me to warn about people calling for the release of the murderer’s reported “manifesto.” My friend pointed to research showing that publishing these sorts of documents can fuel more incidents like it—as seen by the way that past mass murderers have cited those who came before. I trust this leader that such best practices are right.

Yet I wonder about all the “manifestoes” we have seen. I’m referring not to the deranged screeds of mass murderers but to the hate and rage that have become so commonplace in our society that we barely even notice them anymore. How long can we live like this and pretend …

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In the face of tragedy, Christ welcomes our confusion and anger.

Just a few days ago, parents were dropping their children off at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, anticipating a day of love, friendship, and learning for their sons and daughters. No one could fathom what would happen soon after, when a 28-year-old shooter entered the building and opened fire, resulting in the deaths of three nine-year-old kids, three adults on staff, and the assailant.

Part of a pastor’s calling is to enter into life’s disorienting, gut-punching, heart-ripping spaces and offer perspective on questions that cannot be answered. This is especially true in situations where the main question is “Why?”

Why would a good and loving God who is sovereign over every square inch of the universe, who knows the number of hairs on our heads, who said, “Let the little children come to me,” and who promised again and again to be our shield, our protector, and our defender allow for this senseless loss of life?

Why would the same God let faithful, loving, godly educators be gutted from their families and communities? Why would he allow young survivors to experience the trauma of hearing gunfire and then being rushed frantically to safety?

Why would he not foil and fail the shooter’s plans before a single shot was fired? Why would the One who holds even the hearts of kings in his hands not redirect the assailant’s heart as well? Why would God allow for one of his own image-bearers to go to such an inexplicable and horrific place and then follow through with those intentions?

We already know the answer to these questions, which is that we’ll never know the answer to these questions.

Nashville musician and producer Charles Ashworth, also …

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Victims include the head of school and the 9-year-old daughter of the church’s lead pastor.

Parents were invited into the chapel at The Covenant School in Nashville on Monday morning, like they are every school-day morning. They sang and prayed with the roughly 200 elementary students and 40 or 50 staff at the Presbyterian Church in America school and listened as pastor Matthew Sullivan “raises it to another level,” as one student put it, with his kid-friendly Bible lesson.

A few hours later, though, parents crowded into the sanctuary of Woodmont Baptist Church, two miles down the road, waiting to hear the worst. In the interval, the private Christian school became the site of the 130th mass shooting of 2023, leaving three children and three staff members dead.

“I know this is probably the worst day of everyone’s lives,” a police officer told the crowd. “I can’t tell you how sympathetic we are.”

The three students killed were each 9 years old. Police identified them as Evelyn Dieckhaus, William Kinney, and Hallie Scruggs, the daughter of Covenant Presbyterian Church senior pastor Chad Scruggs. The adult victims were head of school Katherine Koonce, 60; substitute teacher Cynthia Peak, 61; and custodian Mike Hill, 61.

Metro Nashville Police Department spokesman Don Aaron said that a 28-year-old former student shot out some glass doors and entered through the side of the building carrying two assault rifles and a handgun. Police were called at 10:13 a.m. They arrived less than 15 minutes later and followed the sounds of gunfire to the second floor of the private Christian elementary school. They shot and killed the suspect, whom they later identified as a transgender person.

Five of the victims were transported to Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital, about four miles …

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In an age of functional atheism, ‘tis the season for traditional fasting and prayer.

“I’m giving up God for Lent,” said the post on my social media feed.

I had to reread the line again while my brain did a bit of reorienting. Wasn’t the person who posted this a Christian?

For some believers, the argument goes like this: By intentionally “giving up” God for a season, we give ourselves the chance to put to death any inaccurate idols we may have unintentionally created out of him.

Engaging in this practice, they argue, allows us the chance to see what life would be like without God—and that, in turn, should make us want to draw closer to him. The principle goes that by choosing to lean away from God and depriving ourselves of his presence, we can learn His true value in our lives.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this practice is also promoted by atheist philosopher Peter Rollins, who is offering an online course called ‘Atheism For Lent’—aiming to critique theism and set aside “questions regarding life after death to explore the possibility of life before death.”

As a native and resident of the Bay Area in California, none of this is shocking to me. But what’s intriguing to me after searching online is that so many Christians, and even some churches, are intentionally engaging in this practice as a form of spiritual formation.

My question is this: Aren’t most Christians already “giving up God” in their daily lives?

Many of us are living our day-to-day existence without reference to the Lord instead of involving him in the day-to-day choices and decisions we make. Some have called this “functional atheism,” which I find a fitting phrase. Parker Palmer defines this concept as “the unexamined …

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Meet an early evangelist, an education reformer, and a preacher who held Bible studies with the royal family.

Christianity arrived in Japan in 1549 through Jesuit missionaries and challenged the dominant Confucian view on the hierarchical position of women in society.

The Confucian instructional book Onna Daigaku (School of Women) instructed parents to raise their daughters to be submissive in order to marry into other families, where exercising too much independence would be impertinent. The most desirable qualities for women were obedience, chastity, compassion, and emotional balance. Wives were expected to revere their husbands as if they were deities and to never become jealous, as that would risk alienating their husbands.

The Christian faith that the Jesuits shared offered unprecedented opportunities for women to discover and embody new social roles and positions. The Protestants also represented this newfound reality as women comprised about two-thirds of the missionaries sent to Japan from 1859 to 1882, according to Japanese historian Rui Kohiyama.

“Christianity required women to make a personal decision about their religious choices and confess it publicly in a society where women’s opinions mattered little,” writes Haruko Nawata Ward, a church history professor at Columbia Theological Seminary, in her book Women Religious Leaders in Japan’s Christian Century, 1549–1650.

“It required them to maintain a stronger loyalty to Christ than to their feudal lords, fathers, elder brothers, husbands and sons. It empowered women to take vows of celibacy, or choose their marriage partners from among Kirishitan men.”

In the early 17th century, Christianity was banned. Believers were persecuted for just over two and a half centuries, with many practicing their faith in secret as Kakure Kirishitans, …

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That means dropping the façade and admitting their own struggles.

As Generation Z teens grow up, many are moving further away from Christian faith and challenging church leaders to adapt to new expectations from the youngest in their flocks.

Last month, Barna Research reported that young adults aged 18 to 22 are half as likely to identify as Christian and follow Jesus than teenagers aged 13 to 17. A slight majority of today’s young adults—52 percent—don’t identify as Christians.

The young people of Gen Z are diverse, educated, and social media savvy. When it comes to faith, they’re open to Jesus and his teachings but skeptical about institutions and leaders putting on a façade.

Kendall Johnson, 20, became a believer in college and established her faith through campus ministry, but it was the “real and raw” women of her local church in Raleigh, North Carolina, that helped her grow spiritually. Though older than she, they reached out to talk and share struggles from their own lives.

Their openness, Johnson said, “allows me to see how much faith and trust they have in Jesus. It showed me Christianity is relational with one another [and] relational with God.”

Young Christians like Johnson expect the same kind of transparency, honesty, and authenticity from their leaders.

“For some generations, the more mythical their spiritual leaders, the more they trusted them,” said Darrell Hall, author of Speaking Across Generations: Messages That Satisfy Boomers, Xers, Millennials, Gen Z, and Beyond. “Gen Zers want there to be no gap between Darrell and Dr. Hall. No gap in persona. No gap in who I am and who I present myself to be.”

To cultivate genuine relationships, Hall said leaders need be accessible to students, meeting …

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The former president’s potential arrest shows that character does matter.

This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

As I write this, I have no idea if or when we will see something no generation of Americans has ever witnessed: a mug shot of a former president of the United States. What I do know is that the entire country is waiting with a sense of unease about just that possibility and about what happens next.

Last weekend, former president Donald Trump posted on his social media platforms that he expected to be arrested this week, on charges by a New York grand jury of illegally reporting the hush money cover-up of an alleged affair with “porn star” Stormy Daniels.

Part of the confusion is that this potential indictment is almost universally considered the weakest of the (at least) four criminal investigations now ongoing regarding the former president.

The biggest difficulty related to this potential prosecution is the fact that we are dealing with probably the single most polarizing figure in American life in at least a century.

Not many families were divided into seething groups who refused to speak to one another over the relative merits of Hubert Humphrey or Bob Dole. I can’t imagine that very many pastors agonized over whether they would lose their pulpits over inadequate enthusiasm for Adlai Stevenson or Gerald Ford.

Imagine trying to find a jury of 12 people without already-fixed views on Donald Trump, even if the entire country were the pool for the search. That’s amplified for us as evangelical Christians because there’s an assumption in American life that “evangelical Christian” and “Donald Trump enthusiast” are synonyms.

Not all of us are, by any means. But it is fair to say that, in some ways, the …

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