March 29, 2026

Today the church is asking what it owes the world beyond its own walls — and the answers are pulling in different directions. First Things is covering Päivi Räsänen, the Finnish pastor who has now faced prosecution twice for stating what her tradition has always believed. The piece isn't really about Finnish law. It's about whether the church can still speak in public without the state deciding what speech is permissible. Relevant Magazine pushes back hard on Christian nationalism — not the caricature, but the real temptation to collapse kingdom and country into the same project. Both pieces are about political pressure on faith. They don't agree on where the threat comes from.

Christianity Today is tracking a coalition of religious leaders responding to rising antisemitism, and First Things ran a separate reflection on Jewish-Christian dialogue that resists easy sentimentality — it calls the theological distance between the two traditions a genuine scandal, not something ecumenical goodwill can paper over. That same refusal to look away threads through The Gospel Coalition's piece on Lamentations, which argues that the church keeps rushing past the rawest parts of Scripture on the way to resurrection. Earlier this week we were watching this same tension play out around suffering and whether the church believes God works through it. That question is still here. Lamentations doesn't resolve it. Neither does the silence that CT's books coverage says so many people bring to prayer. The church seems to be sitting, this week, with a lot it cannot fix.