The task of offering an analysis of the movie Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin has been complicated for me because the promotion for the movie shows Dietrich Bonhoeffer with a gun in his hand. My attempts to recover from this misleading…
A response to Mark Wingfield: Moltmann offers a third way
A couple of weeks ago, Mark Wingfield wrote to challenge his readers in his article, “The Strict Father Model is Killing Us.” After describing the differences between the Strict Father and the Nurturant Parent worldview models, which attempts to explain…
Louisiana Jews form alliance to oppose gassing as means of execution
Louisiana’s Jewish community has formed an alliance committed to protesting and ultimately repealing a new state law allowing the use of gas as an execution method. The Jews Against Gassing Coalition was formed after the March 5 passage of House…
The Holocaust Musaffecteum: Humbling irritations amidst genuine horror past and present
My family and I had been standing in line for nearly half an hour at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. Despite all that time and with prior experience at another high-security location, I still wasn’t ready…
The night I stopped believing in substitutionary blood atonement
Almost two decades ago, during a combined Holy Thursday/Good Friday worship service, I told a true story from the Holocaust. The story involved a Polish army sergeant named Franciszek Gajowniczek and a Franciscan priest named Maximilian Kolbe. The Saint of…
This week is the 80th anniversary of the day my great-grandparents died
The reality is that my great-grandparents didn’t just die, they were murdered. They were two of 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis and their willing accomplices throughout Europe. And it wasn’t just the two of them, but their children…
The original sin of the church
Last week we observed Shoah, or Holocaust, Remembrance Day. It is well, then, to consider the original sin of the church. If America’s original sin is slavery, the original sin of the church is anti-Judaism and antisemitism. Before the New…
‘Yes, they are children of Nazis, but we are Christians, and we will stand with those who suffer’
When the Nazis invaded Holland in 1940, Gerrit tenZythoff was 17 years old and leading the sort of life that was common for teenage boys even then — a life filled with schoolwork and sports and good friends. And then…
The Maus saga: A case study of our present crises
In Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History, the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel, writer and illustrator Art Spiegelman inquires of his Polish Jewish father: “When did you first hear about Auschwitz?” His father, a Holocaust survivor, replies: “Right…