A quick disclaimer to start this post: I am a beginner in my effort to understand the Confessing Church in Hitler's Germany. I am simply writing as I am learning. I may occasionally get my facts wrong, or simplify a topic that really shouldn't be simplified. I need to say that aloud. And, at the […]

Nazism and Christianity had a fraught and tangled relationship in Hitler's Germany. Though we would be hard-pressed to call Hitler a Christian, he sprinkled his speeches with all kinds of references to both God and faith. He pressed for something his government called "Positive Christianity," which was grounded almost totally in Germany's National Socialism, and […]

I have been fascinated by the German "Confessing Church" (1934-1948) for years. The Confessing Church was the movement within German Protestantism during Hitler's reign that withstood intense pressure by the Nazi government to take over the German church in order to create a united national church obedient and submissive to pro-Nazi authority. The Confessing Church […]

It is amazing to me how Jesus is being used to justify the exact behaviors he preached so vociferously against. The one who declared that loving our neighbors as ourselves is God's very heartbeat is being used to justify hatred of the most vulnerable. The one who pushed the religious elite of his day to […]

If you are like me, you feel inundated with news about all the plans underway to alter the way our government - our democracy - works. What our funding priorities are, and are not. Who we care most about, and who we do not. Whose voices get heard and responded to, and whose do not. […]

As the new administration prepares to take power I wonder who you are watching out for. Have you thought about that? As I write these questions I think of what is often called "the quartet of the vulnerable" in the Bible. This is a phrase used by biblical scholars to describe a category of people […]