An Old Idea Is New Again in Europe: Spiritual Formation

How do you transform European hearts? 

It’s one thing to tell people about Jesus. It’s another to get them to change the way they live and help them develop the kind of daily practices that, as the late American philosopher Dallas Willard once wrote, “actually lead to the transformation of life.”

That thought drove Michael Stewart Robb, a Munich-based American theologian who wrote a book on Willard, to found the Sanctus Institute in 2017. He wanted something—an infrastructure, an organization—to teach Christians to foster the day-to-day disciplines and practices that shape people spiritually. Today the institute brings together ministers and ministries with an interest in spiritual formation from across the continent. 

Evangelicals in other parts of Europe have started exploring and rediscovering ways of connecting with God too. From Methodist band meetings in Bulgaria to urban monks in Paris and Berlin and spiritual retreats in Portugal, missionaries, pastors, and everyday Christians are looking for ways to not only pursue converts but also help people conform to the image of Christ. 

According to Willard, who died in 2013, American evangelicals started feeling a pressing need to emphasize discipleship after World War II. Many ministers and Christian leaders felt the Sunday sermon alone, or even the Sunday sermon plus a midweek Bible study, didn’t provide people enough sustenance to really live like Christians. Churches had put too much emphasis on head knowledge and belief, not enough on formation.

Today, ideas about the importance of discipleship are widespread in the United States, Robb said. Americans can easily find books—including titles by Willard and a range of writers including Richard Foster, Henri Nouwen, Richard Rohr, Elizabeth Oldfield, Ruth Haley Barton, Barbara Peacock, Diane Leclerc, James Wilhoit, John Mark Comer, and many others—as well as retreats and seminars on the topic. Many seminaries teach spiritual direction and offer specialization in spiritual formation. 

“You can’t run a seminary in North America unless you say you do spiritual formation. It’s part of the package,” Robb said. “In Europe, you don’t really see that.”

That Europe May Know

The goal is audacious. But as far as James Davis, founder of the Global Church Network, is concerned, Christians need deadlines. Otherwise, they will never do what they need to do to fulfill the Great Commission.

His group gathered in Zurich, Switzerland, last September with 400 ministry leaders from across Europe who committed to raising up and equipping more than 100,000 new pastors in the next decade. The network plans to establish 39 hubs in Europe, with a goal of 442 more in the years to come, for training church planters, evangelists, and pastors to proclaim the gospel.

“A vision becomes a goal when it has a deadline,” Davis said at the event.

“So many Christian leaders today doubt their beliefs and believe their doubts. It is time for us to doubt our doubts and believe our beliefs. We will claim, climb, and conquer our Mount Everest, the Great Commission.”

Davis has a number of very motivated partners in this project, including the Assemblies of God, the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), and the International Pentecostal Holiness Church. The network also counts The Wesleyan Church, the Church of the Nazarene, the Foursquare Church, the Church of God in Christ, and OMF International (formerly Overseas Missionary Fellowship) as members of a broader coalition working to complete the Great Commission in the near future. If it turns out their European goal is a bit beyond reach, they will still undoubtedly do a lot between now and their deadline.

And the Global Church Network is not alone. In Germany, the Bund Freikirchlicher Pfingstgemeinden (Association of Free Church Pentecostals) has announced plans to plant 500 new churches by 2033. The group, celebrating its 150th anniversary in 2024, told CT it is currently planting new congregations at a rate of about seven per year. Raising up new pastors is key to its growth strategy. 

And the Bund Evangelisch-Freikirchlicher Gemeinden in Deutschland (Association of Free Evangelical Churches in Germany) has planted 200 churches in the past decade. It has grown to about 500 congregations with 42,000 members. The Free Evangelicals also have plans to launch 70 new churches by 2030, at a rate of 15 per year, and then start another 200 by 2040. 

“Goal setting is a bit of a thing in Europe,” said Stefan Paas, the J. H. Bavinck Chair for Missiology and Intercultural Theology at the Free University of Amsterdam and the author of Church Planting in the Secular West.

He’s not convinced it’s a good thing for Christian missions, though. In fact, he doesn’t think ambition, verve, and goal setting actually work.

Paas’s research shows that supply-side approaches—the idea that if you plant it, they will come—seem promising and often demonstrate early success, but the results mostly evaporate. While it is widely believed that planting new churches causes growth, he said, that’s not what the evidence shows.

“Yes, newer churches tend to draw in more people and more converts, but they also lose more,” Paas told CT. “There’s a backdoor dynamic where people come into newer churches but then leave.”

He examined the Free Evangelicals’ membership statistics from 2003 to 2017 and found that church plants often correlated with quick growth but then slow decline. 

“It’s one thing to draw people, and another thing to keep them,” he said. 

At the border, a shelter for -- and by -- women

Anyone crossing the U.S.-Mexico border faces a journey fraught with violence and danger.

But for women and children, that journey is even more treacherous. Not only are many fleeing violence at home — including gender-based violence — they also experience higher rates of violence en route. Torture, mutilation, sexual violence, femicide,disappearances, and additional health complications are common occurrences for female migrants making their way north.

That danger is amplified for the thousands of girls living in makeshift camps and tent cities along the U.S.-Mexico border without protection or accompanying support. According to the Washington, D.C.-based Kids In Need of Defense, “[u]naccompanied children are especially vulnerable to sexual violence, human trafficking, and exploitation by cartels and other criminal groups.”

Over the last few years, a group of Muslim women has stepped in to meet their needs in unique ways. Albergue Assabil (“the Shelter of the Path”), the first Muslim shelter along the U.S.-Mexico border, has been in operation since June 2022 under the leadership of Sonia Tinoco García, founder and president of the Latina Muslim Foundation. According to staff, the shelter served nearly 3,000 migrants in its first two years of operation. Many of those migrants have been women, attracted to the shelter because of its separate men’s and women’s facilities and the fact that Albergue Assabil is a female-led shelter.

And it’s not only Muslim women finding sanctuary under the shade of the shelter’s blue dome; there have also been other female immigrants looking to García and her team for assistance as they make the perilous journey north.

A critical look at Luther Country

It’s pretty boujee, but I have two stained glass windows in my office.

I know, I know.

But one of them is pretty much tailor made for a religion nerd like me. It’s a bright and beautiful, stained-glass representation of the Wartburg Castle.

Perched at a height of some 400m above delightful countryside and rich central German forest, south of the city of Eisenach in Thuringia, the Wartburg is “a magnet for memory, tradition, and pilgrimage,” a “monument to the cultural history of Germany, Europe, and beyond.” Christians the world over also know the castle as where Martin Luther made his momentous translation of the Bible over the course of eleven weeks in the winter of 1520-21.

Since moving to Eisenach, I’ve watched out my windows — the non-stained ones — as busloads of tourists from places like South Korea, the U.S., and Brazil arrive on the square outside my apartment, where a prominent statue of Luther awaits them. They are here, in Luther Country, to walk in the Reformer’s footsteps and learn from his life in towns like Wittenberg and locales like the Wartburg.

A lot of these tours lavish praise on Luther, lauding the 16th-century rebel monk and cantankerous theologian for birthing the Reformation, and shaping Germany and the wider world’s theological, linguistic, historical, psychological and political self-image in the process.

And rightly so. Luther’s legacy is long and important to understand. But I can’t help but wonder what these tours would look like if they were a bit more critical of the man and his consequence. What, I often muse, would a more critical Luther tour look like?

Who said anything about an apple tree?

As the annual Reformation Day approaches (October 31) and I get ready to host a group of college students in Eisenach here to learn about Luther and his impact, I’ve been thinking about how our vision of Luther can be skewed by the superficial stereotypes that are typically trotted out for people on the usual tours.

It’s not that I blame the tourists, travelers, and pilgrims themselves. It’s hard to see past the Luther-inspired gin, “Here I Stand” socks, and cute Playmobil toys to disrupt the narrative around the Reformator.

The well-known statue of Martin Luther in Lutherstadt-Wittenberg, in central Germany. Some commentators suggest it shows — with the word “END” written so prominently under the words “Old Testament” — a questionable view of the Bible “in a political and social context in which anti-Jewish views are again on the rise.” (PHOTO: Ken Chitwood)

But the resources are there, if we care to see them, to startle and awaken our appreciation for who Luther was in critical fashion – to move beyond the myths we know we are making to (re)evaluate Luther and the ways in which we’ve made him into a caricature for our own purposes.

We all make claims about ourselves and others, doing so from within practical, historical, and social contexts. Stories around Luther are no different. When we talk about Luther, it is less about the man, his thought, and his supposed authority over theology and history itself. Instead, it is much more about the ongoing process by which we humans ascribe certain things to people like him: certain acts, certain status, certain deference.

Many of the stories and claims about Luther have calcified over time, produced and reproduced in books and movies, within theological writings and on tours in central Germany.

The good news is, they have also been contested, undermined, and — in some instances — replaced.

Some of these have been relatively simple things, like the fact that Luther was no simple monk, but a trained philosopher and theologian. Or, that he never nailed ninety-five theses to a church door in Wittenberg or said, “Here I stand!” or anything about planting an apple tree. These are, as Dutch church historian Herman Selderhuis wrote, fine sentiments and sayings, but just not true or attributable to Luther himself.

Luther: Wart(burg)s and all

There are also darker and more difficult subjects in need of revisiting in our retellings of Luther’s life — issues that bear relevance to contemporary conversations around race and class, diversity and difference.

As PRI reported, appreciating who Luther was also means coming to terms with how he “wrote and preached some vicious things about Jews.” In his infamous 1543 diatribe “Against the Jews and Their Lies," Luther called for the burning of Jewish synagogues, the confiscation of Jewish prayer books and Talmudic writings, and their expulsion from cities. It is possible that these directives were immediately applied, as evidence suggests that Jews were expelled from the town of his birth, Eisleben, after he preached a sermon on the “obdurate Jews” just three days before his death at age 62.

Luther’s death mask in Halle, Germany (PHOTO: Ken Chitwood)

Dr. Christopher Probst, author of Demonizing the Jews: Luther and the Protestant Church in Nazi Germany, said that while Luther’s “sociopolitical suggestions were largely ignored by political leaders of his day,” during the Third Reich “a large number of Protestant pastors, bishops, and theologians of varying theological persuasions utilized Luther’s writings about Jews and Judaism with great effectiveness to reinforce the antisemitism already present in substantial degrees.”

Probst said that one theologian in particular, Jena theologian Wolf Meyer-Erlach, “explicitly regarded National Socialism as the ‘fulfillment’ of Luther’s designs against Jewry.”

Today, far-right parties continue to use Luther’s image and ascribed sayings to prop up their own political positions.

Beyond his tirades against Jewish people and their sordid use in German history, we might also take a critical look at the class dynamics at work in Luther’s life. Historically, his family were peasant farmers. However, his father Hans met success as a miner, ore smelter and mine owner allowing the Luthers to move to the town of Mansfeld and send Martin to law school before his dramatic turn to the study of theology. How might that have shaped the young Luther and later, his response to the Peasants War in 1524-25? How might it influence our understanding of who he was and what he wrote?

There are also critical gems to be found in his writings on Islam and Muslims, his encounters with Ethiopian clergyman Abba Mika’el or the shifting gender dynamics at work in his relationship with Katharina von Bora, a former nun who married Luther in 1525.

Reimagining Luther Country

Thankfully, I am far from the first person to point these things out. Museum exhibits, books, and documentaries have covered these topics in detail, doing a much more thorough job than I have above.

The problem is that gleanings from these resources can struggle to trickle down to the common tour or typical Luther pilgrimage. Or, they’re ignored in favor of just-so stories.

In Learning from the Germans, Susan Neiman wrote about the power of a country coming to terms with its past. In her exploration of how Germans faced their historical crimes, Neiman urges readers to consider recognizing the darker aspects of historical narratives and personages, so that we can bring those learnings to bear on contemporary cultural and political debates.

We might consider doing the same as we take a tour of Luther Country — whether in person or from afar. By injecting a bit of restlessness into our explorations, stirring constantly to break up the stereotypes, being critical and curious and exploring outside the safe confines of the familiar, we might discover more than we bargained for. But that, I suggest, would be a very good thing.

By telling different stories about Luther — and by demanding that we be told about them — I believe we might better know ourselves. How might we relate to a Luther who is not only the champion of the Reformation, but a disagreeable man made into a hero for political and theological purposes? How might that Luther speak to our times and the matters of faith and politics, society and common life, today?

As we come up on Reformation Day — and I welcome that group of students to my hometown and all its Luther-themed fanfare — I hope we might lean into such conversations and recognize how a critical take on Luther might prove a pressing priority for our time.

BBC Radio 4 Interview

From the BBC:

This week's Sunday explores the latest on the conflict in the Middle East, and its repercussions in the UK for Jewish and Muslim communities. The archbishops of Canterbury and Jerusalem unite in a call for peace. As the Metropolitan Police reports a spike in anti-semitic hate incidents, a Jewish woman from London tells the programme how her Muslim friends escorted her to synagogue in an act of solidarity. And we examine the significance of the site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem with Ken Chitwood, a site layered in history and meaning for Muslims and Jews alike.

The Library of Forgotten Wonders

In a small, eastern German city, a treasure trove of Arabic, Turkish, and Persian manuscripts invites visitors to explore the longstanding and ongoing connections between Europe and the Middle East.

You could walk by every day and not know it was there.

That is, if you could ignore a sprawling, white-walled palace perched high upon a hill, overlooking the town of Gotha’s bucolic environs in central Germany.

Known as Friedenstein Palace, it is one of the best-preserved examples of early Baroque European architecture. Established in the mid 17th-century by Duke Ernst I (1601-1675) of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, the building survived World War II and the Cold War, but the signs of its age are showing. With orange stains dripping from its windows, rotting support beams in its vaulted roofs, scaffolding clinging to columns in the courtyard, and the detritus of renovation strewn about its gardens, Friedenstein might look like a palace long past its former glory. But inside are resplendent rooms reflective of the riches of a dukedom at the height of its power and, in the east wing, a world-famous collection of Middle Eastern manuscripts and artifacts.

PHOTO courtesy AramcoWorld/Fabian Brennecke.

Altogether, the Gotha Research Library holds about 1 million objects, including nearly 362,000 books, manuscripts, and print materials. Among them are 800 years of Islamicate scholarship, comprised of 3,500 manuscripts in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian. This “Oriental Collection” — featuring reams of legal, literary, grammatical, philosophical, geographic, theological, and other texts — sits side-by-side on the floor-to-ceiling shelves with paragons from the history of Europe, including a UNESCO World Heritage first print copy of the German Protestant Reformer Martin Luther’s "On the Freedom of a Christian,” published in 1520.

Each book and every manuscript has a story: from a famous hadith collection possibly pulled out from under a murdered mufti’s corpse during the siege of Buda in 1684 to an account of the life and exploits of Alexander the Great in Turkish, featuring a richly colored depiction of the Greek king’s mythical “flying machine” — a set of gryphons chained to a throne with rods of meat above. As they traveled, these texts survived numerous, disruptive epochs in European and Middle Eastern history — including two world wars, the French campaign in Egypt and Syria, and the decline of the Ottoman Empire.

Today, scholars across the globe travel to Gotha to explore its almost encyclopedic collection of treasured documents.

The library’s history tells a tale of scientific adventure and of a contemporary renaissance in the study of Middle Eastern manuscripts. More than that, it reveals how such a significant treasury made it to a somewhat forgotten, small city in the former East German Republic.

*Corrections: the lead image on the website is of the Herzogliches Museum of Gotha, not the Palace with the library. Also, Kathrin Paasch did not become director until after the tenure of its previous director, Rupert Schaab, ended in 2005.

From Mecca to Mount Kailash: The Enduring Power of Pilgrimage in the Modern World

As the summer travel season starts and the annual Hajj — the Islamic pilgrimage to holy sites in Saudi Arabia required of all Muslims who are able — is expected to begin on June 26, it seems a good time to reconsider the concept of “spiritual travel” or, more specifically, pilgrimage.

Pilgrimage is generally defined as a journey with a religious purpose, often taken to a place of spiritual significance involving certain rituals or paths.

More broadly, pilgrimage can be any journey and its associated activities, undertaken by people to and from one or more places made meaningful by the pilgrims themselves.

Though long associated with European Christianity in Western academia, or perhaps with significant sacred shrines like Mecca or Mount Kailash in Tibet, pilgrimage can also include trips to seemingly mundane places or movement to and from otherwise unexceptional locations.

Furthermore, pilgrimage is not restricted to institutional religions. Some pagans and others with a focus on old traditions (i.e., Reconstructionists or "Recons") travel to lands where they believe original gods were from or to ancient sites of significance. For example, a Greek Recon may go to Greece; Celtic practitioners to standing stones in the United Kingdom; heathens to Iceland; African traditionalists to significant sites in South Africa or Uganda.

Visits to nonreligious sites have also become increasingly popular as a form of pilgrimage in recent years. Large numbers of people find meaning in traveling to memorials of suffering, pain and bloodshed like the 9/11 Memorial in New York City or the “Killing Fields” of Cambodia. There are also pilgrimages to places linked to such pop culture icons as Elvis Presley, Susan B. Anthony, Steve Prefontaine or Taylor Swift.

With all these varying expressions, pilgrimage — like other religious rituals and phenomena — is what we make it. Less than looking for the transcendent meaning or chasing after miracles, the student of religion should pay attention to the human elements of spiritual travel: Things like tourism and economics, politics and place.

The importance of place, people and politics.

Journeys to holy sites and major religious celebrations can be shot through with multiple meanings, personal motivations, and traveling trajectories.

Take, for example, the pilgrimage experience of those who make the expedition to Tepeyac hill in modern-day Mexico City. There, each December, pilgrims from all over the world gather to celebrate the annual feast of the Virgen de Guadalupe, joining a centuries-old Catholic tradition of celebrating what is known as “the miracle on Tepeyac Hill.”

According to celebrants, it was at that spot that May, the mother of Jesus, appeared to a Nahua villager named Juan Diego. The cloak she gifted him included an image of herself as a radiating, brown-skinned goddess robed in stars. Despite its linkages with Spanish colonialism and forced conversion, the image and festival have enduring cultural importance in Mexico. After 500 years of devotion, the annual celebrations are some of the most robust in all of Catholicism.

But each year, it is not only Catholic devotees who make the pilgrimage to the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City. So do some of the city’s Sufis. According to religion scholar Lucía Cirianni Salazar, members of the Nur Ashki Jerrahi tariqa in Mexico City join millions of others to commemorate the Virgin’s apparition. Justifying their presence from a universalist perspective, the leader of the group — Shaykha Amina — told Salazar that the location represents one of the most powerful places for connection to the “one God.”

This example reminds us that far from removing people from the world, pilgrimage is all about places in the world. Less about the world beyond, pilgrimage is often very much about places we inhabit and fill with meaning.

This means that although often associated with the extraordinary and faraway, pilgrimage sites can be local and surprisingly unremarkable. What matters is context and the meaning people give such locales.

Pilgrims frequently journey with the expectation of miracles or receiving spiritual blessings from contact with significant religious figures, symbols and artifacts (e.g., relics or icons). Or they expect the travel itself will provide some transcendent benefit. Even so, pilgrims' progress and practices are intimately tied up with the worldly dynamics of tourism, local economies and the embodied experience of bumping up against fellow pilgrims with blood, sweat and tears along the way.

Pilgrimage also has powerful political overtones. For example, the disputed site of Marian pilgrimage in Medjugorje, Bosnia and Herzegovina, is suffused with symbols of Croat nationalism, featuring prayer beads in national colors and Mary set against the backdrop of a Croatian national flag on everything from pillows to pillboxes. Still, despite its contentious place in the civil war of the 1990s and ongoing tensions in the Balkans, Medjugorje has become a huge draw for pilgrims drawn to its calls for peace and the renewal of faith along with prophecies of divine intervention.

Other pilgrimages such as the Hajj become playgrounds for political football, with nation-states and power brokers fighting over everything from logistics and management to the miracles and blessing associated with sacred sites.

The politics of pilgrimage are also at play around physical boundaries and borders that some spiritual travelers must contend with. Beyond visas and travel quotas, pilgrims must navigate the vicissitudes of state power and the various impediments that are put in place to deter, capture, or otherwise manage and control traveling bodies.

Those journeying to and from pilgrimage sites are often on the margins of official religious communities. Instead, their motivations for movement are linked to personal spiritual trajectories, frequently with little or nothing to do with institutionalized religion.

The physicality of pilgrimage must also be taken into consideration. To return to Tepeyac, Elaine Peña talks about Marian pilgrims’ “devotional labor.” Peña writes of “the moments of pain and discomfort” for pilgrims making their way to offer devotos to the Virgin of Guadalupe every December — “walking on blistering feet, proceeding on injured knees and cramped legs, with growling stomach and salty saliva, with too much light and too little sleep.”

Enjoy the journey.

As I write this blog, I am already starting to plan for my own travels this summer, including a visit to the largest mosque in the United Kingdom and some off-the-beaten-track churches in Berlin, Germany. While not explicitly pilgrimages, these trips will be filled with divine intimations.

This means I will be looking out for some of the very things mentioned above: The importance of place, the role of politics and economics and the position and plurality of bodies that inhabit a space or move around, through and within it.

Perhaps you too are getting ready for a trip. Maybe, you are embarking on a pilgrimage of your own this summer. As you do so, try to not only savor the spiritual importance of such travel, but the very human aspects of how these journeys are made holy in the midst of the mundane.

FURTHER READING:

•Read “A pilgrim’s progress: Resources for reporting on religious journeys,” from ReligionLink.

•Explore the Routledge Studies in Pilgrimage, Religious Travel and Tourism book series.

•Read Powers of Pilgrimage: Religion in a World of Movement, by Simon Coleman (2022).

•Explore the Oxford Bibliography on Pilgrimage for numerous resources, studies and possible sources.

What One Man Learned About Religion Visiting Every Country In The World

May it be Your will, Lord, our God and the God of our ancestors, that You lead us toward peace, guide our footsteps toward peace, and make us reach our desired destination for life, gladness, and peace. … May You send blessing in our handiwork, and grant us grace, kindness, and mercy in Your eyes and in the eyes of all who see us.

The Traveler’s Prayer — also known as the Wayfarer’s Prayer, or Tefilat Haderech in Hebrew — is an invocation said at the onset of a journey. Customary to recite when one embarks on a long trip, the prayer is a request for safety and protection but also that the traveler would be a blessing to those they meet in the course of their voyage.

Daniel Herszberg, a 30-year-old doctoral student from Australia, said the prayer is a common one among Jewish travelers, and the “beautiful text” traveled with him as he visited all 197 countries around the globe over the last 10 years.

As he finished his feat after setting foot in Tonga in March 2023, Herszberg became the 145th most travelled person in the world. Along the way, he also amassed 79,000 Instagram followers at @dhersz. He also became an unofficial student of humanity, treasuring the opportunity to learn more about the world’s religions and connect with Jewish communities scattered across the globe.

From Addis Ababa to Tehran, Herszberg visited synagogues, schools, cemeteries and Sabbath services in hospitable homes. In Suriname and Poland, in Pakistan and Sudan, Barbados and Brazil, Herszberg not only discovered cherished archives and legacies but connected with locals who shared their stories — both lived and long forgotten. In some instances, he was the first person to have visited Jewish heritage sites in decades.

It’s a responsibility the 30-year-old global citizen is quite philosophical about, whether in terms of what it means for the diaspora as a whole or who he is as a modern Jewish traveler.

“No matter how far you travel,” Herszberg said, “you always return to where you began — home.”

Barely Anyone Reads the Bible in Germany. So Why Are Luther Bibles Selling So Well?

From “better an end with horror than a horror without end” to expressions like bloodhound, baptism of fire, and heart’s content, the German language is peppered with idioms from a source that’s more than 500 years old: the Luther Bible.

A translation by the Protestant reformer Martin Luther, the Bible continues to be a touchpoint for German culture, politics, and language. And in 2022 — over 500 years after its initial publication — it was a bestseller yet again.

According to the German Bible Society (Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft) in Stuttgart, they circulated 130,000 copies of the Luther Bible in 2022, accounting for almost half of their total distributions that year.

“After five centuries, it remains the most popular Bible translation in Germany,” said the German Bible Society’s General Secretary Christian Roesel (Rösel), “it is and will remain a classic.”

While the Luther Bible may remain a definitive example of German literature and hold a special place in its national psyche, ordinary Germans often know its catch phrases better than its contents. According to a 2017 opinion poll conducted by Insa-Consulare (Erfurt) and the German Christian magazine “Idea,” only four percent of German adults read the Bible every day. 70 percent say they have never read it once.

That begs the question, at a time when Bible sales are generally falling — related to a decline in Christianity’s share of the overall German population — why do so many Germans keep buying it?

BorderLine Impossible

As Hamza starts tellling his story, tears roll slowly down his cheeks.

Sitting on the back of a white pick-up truck with other Ghanaians, Hamza and his fellow countrymen are within eyesight of the rusted steel bollard fencing that demarcates the dividing line between San Ysidro, California and Tijuana, Mexico.

On the other side of la linea, Hamza hopes to claim asylum in the United States.

It’s been a long, laborious journey to get this far. Hamza left Ghana for Brazil the day after his only daughter was born, which also happened to be Eid al-Fitr. That was May 2, 2022. It took Hamza another three, arduous months to make his way by foot, truck, train, and bus across the Amazon and then through Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Guatemala to Mexico. Along the way, Hamza said he saw dead bodies hidden in the bush, witnessed multiple assaults, and suffered the pangs of frequent hunger without adequate access to halal food. He spent another one and a half months in Mexico, bouncing from shelter to shelter, struggling to maintain a halāl diet and keep to his daily cycle of prayers.

Then he heard about Albergue Assabil (“the Shelter of the Path”), a sanctuary in Tijuana for Muslim migrants run by the Latina Muslim Foundation (LMF) of San Diego, California.   

Sitting outside the shelter, tantalizingly close to his goal, he is filled with hope and fear, expectation and exhaustion. “Next week, insha’Allah, I will be in the U.S.,” he said.

Hamza is far from alone.

Described as a “waiting room” for “thousands of migrants who try to reach the border between Mexico and the US every month” and a principal landing point for deportees, Tijuana has taken center stage in the ever-unfolding drama of migrants’ journeys to the U.S.

Among them are Muslims like Hamza, from places like Chechnya and Afghanistan, Syria and Ghana. According to Eduardo Campos Lima, writing for Arab News, “thousands of people from Southeast Asia, Middle East and Africa try to reach the US-Mexico border every month.” Although there are no firm statistics about these “Muslim migrant flows,” organizations in the region report that more-and-more are making their way north from Brazil to the U.S./Mexico border.

For Muslim migrants, the “normal” stresses of labor precarity, family separation and potential imprisonment, deportation, or death are compounded by additional complications. Arriving in Tijuana, Muslim migrants face added challenges of finding shelter where they can consume halāl food, access facilities for prayer, and procure information about asylum in a language they can easily comprehend. If they are able to cross over, a triple bind of Islamophobia, anti-migrant sentiment, and a host of American fears about crime, disease, and a loss of cultural privilege await.

To provide a humane, and helpful, place for Muslim migrants to land in Tijuana Sonia Tinoco García and LMF constructed a purpose-built Muslim shelter. Opening in the border city’s Zona Norte neighborhood in March 2022, the shelter features separate men’s and women’s facilities, a prayer and wudu area, halāl food, Quran classes, and legal services to assist migrants. In the first year of operation, they served over 1,000 asylum seekers, deportees, and others seeking shelter.

The Religion + Culture 2022 Reading Rundown

I’ve said it before and I will say it again: I have a ridiculous job.

I get to read books, talk to authors and creatives, and write about it all so that others can listen and learn, rage and wonder, contemplate and cause trouble.

I read things I love. Things that interest me. Things that matter. Things that I would read and write about for free (shhh, don’t tell my publishers).

Really, it’s a ridiculous vocation. A calling that I am immensely humbled to have.

One of my favorite things to do at the end of the year is look back on all the things I read, the ideas I encountered, and reflect on the people I interviewed or interacted with along the way.

This year, I read a total of 25,353 pages, including numerous news pieces, 63 journal articles, a behemoth of blogs, countless chapters, and 84 different books (including 19 works of fiction).

The following are some of the books that moved me, made me smile, or that I think matter in a world swimming with competing and contrasting ideas, viewpoints, and perspectives. They are, you could say, my Top 25 Books of 2022.

Perhaps you’ll find something that piques your interest in the list as well.

A lot of the books below featured in my research and writing over the year, but others just caught my attention (and more importantly, held it). Among them are my usual themes and interests: religion, borderlands, interreligious encounters, Berlin and Germany, spirituality, James Bond, Islam and Christian-Muslim relations, and travel (this year, to places like Italy and Scotland, Morocco and Mexico).

And so, here are my Top 25 Books of 2022, in the order I finished them throughout the year. Many of the hyperlinks connect you to reviews or other relevant works. Others take you directly to the publishers’ webpage, where available (be sure to support your local bookstore!):

• My Broken Language: A Memoir, by Quiara Alegría Hudes

• A Traveler in Italy, by H.V. Morton

• The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution, by Lindsay Chervinsky

• Journeys toward Gender Equality in Islam, by Ziba Mir-Hosseini.

• Ministers of a New Medium: Broadcasting Theology in the Radio Ministries of Fulton J. Sheen and Walter A. Maier, by Kirk D. Farney

• Berlin Global, from the Humboldt Forum.

• Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and their History, by Simon Winder.

• What We Owe the Future, by William MacAskill

• Theater Unser: Wie die Passionsspiele Oberammergau den Ort verändern und die Welt bewegen, by Anne Fritsch

• The Light We Give: How Sikh Wisdom Can Transform Your Life, by Simran Jeet Singh

• Fabian oder Der Gang vor die Hunde, by Erich Kästner

• Race and Rhyme: Rereading the New Testament, by Love Lazarus Sechrest

• Borders and Belonging, The Book of Ruth: A Story for Our Times, by Pádraig Ó Tuama, Glenn Jordan

• Religion in 50 Words: A Critical Vocabulary, by Aaron W. Hughes and Russel T. McCutcheon

• Casablanca: Colonial Myths and Architectural Adventures, by Jean-Louis Cohen and Monique Eleb

• Islamic Empires: The Cities that Shaped Civilization: From Mecca to Dubai, by Justin Marozzi

• Christianity’s American Fate: How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular, by David A. Hollinger

• An Odd Cross to Bear: A Biography of Ruth Bell Graham, by Anne Blue Wills

• Berlin Alexanderplatz, by Alfred Döblin

• Peaceful Families: American Muslim Efforts against Domestic Violence, by Juliane Hammer

• Manifold Destiny: Arabs at an American Crossroads of Exceptional Rule, by John Tofik Karam

• Black Oot Here: Black Lives in Scotland, by Francesca Sobande and layla-roxanne hill

• Undocumented Saints: The Politics of Migrating Devotions, by William A. Calvo-Quirós

• Trainspotting, by Irvine Welsh

• The 007 Diaries: Filming Live and Let Die, by Roger Moore

Let me know if you also read any of the books above, want to share your thoughts on titles you enjoyed in 2022, or if you have any book recommendations for 2023 (yes, please!).

Until then, Happy New Year friends. Here's to more good reads in the year to come.

The "Prince of Casablanca"

“A city,” wrote British town planner and polymath Patrick Geddes, “is more than a place in space. It’s a drama in time.”

Casablanca — celebrated by colonial architects as a laboratory for visual and architectural experimentation and long-romanticized by Hollywood — is a quintessential example of such urban spectacle.

Emerging as a modern metropolis in the 20th-century, “Casa” is a city of chaos and contradiction, the cherished and kitsch, the brutal and beautiful. At once unsettling and inviting, uncertain and yet enduring, the city’s future, past, and present collide in a merger of Moroccan artisanship with European modernism.

Striding through its streets with a palpable sense of familiarity and pride, you might come across young author and architect Alaa Halifi. He wrote the book, In Praise of Madness (مديح الجنون) , the only Moroccan work to receive the Al-Rafidain First Book Prize. Distinguished by the judges for its “deep dive into the worlds of Casablanca,” Halifi said he wrote the book to “reflect the complex reality of my city” and “shed light on the marginalized and chaotic part of the city’s underworld,” by putting on paper things that he and his generation see every day of their lives. The result is a book that fuses reality with fantasy, a vision for the city as it is, but also for what it could become.

Halifi brings this same energy to his architectural designs. He has designed award-winning mobile health clinics, transforming old city buses to be used during the COVID-19 pandemic and envisioned a network of green spaces in a city in desparate need of them. His hope is that his work can speak for a generation of Casawi — native Casablancans — who are too often left out of discussions of the city and its future.

“Without art or concrete forms of expression, we will be forgotten. Instagram posts and TikTok videos aren’t enough,” he said, “and so I write, design, and dream of a world that could be, in the midst of the one that is.”

On a Wing and a Prayer

Amid the hustle-and-bustle of checking in, making your way through the obstacle course that is security, and divining where your gate is, you might not have time to grab a bite to eat or sneak in a quick massage, let alone have time to settle yourself for prayer.

But, across the U.S. — and throughout the world — airport chapels, prayer rooms, and interfaith spaces offer travelers an opportunity to do just that: to meditate, catch a few moments of quiet contemplation, or perhaps beseech the travel gods for a bit of mercy when flights are canceled, or luggage lost.

According to sociologist Wendy Cadge,  airport chapels had their genesis in the daily devotional needs of Catholic staff working in the airline business. She wrote of how initially, airport chapels “were established by Catholic leaders in the 1950s and 1960s to make sure their parishioners could attend mass.” The very first was Our Lady of the Airways at Boston’s Logan airport, built in 1951. 

Today, major transit hubs across the world offer some sort of spiritual respite for the busy traveler.

Pew Research Center found  that more than half of the U.S.’s large hub airports (catering to 1% or more of annual air passengers) offer a chapel or interfaith prayer room of some sort. These include standouts like San Diego’s meditation room “The Spirit of Silence,”  Orlando’s former, centrally located prayer room,  San Juan, Puerto Rico’s decidedly Catholic chapel,  or John F. Kennedy Airport’s synagogue,  the only one of its kind in the Americas.

Internationally, you can find stunning examples like the Buddhist meditation space at Taiwan’s Taoyuan Airport,  Berlin’s Room of Stillness  and its formidable fire-brick interior façade, or the new Istanbul airport’s ecologically-certified Ali Kuşçu mosque,  which can fit up to 6,230 people for prayer.

Far from cheaply-packaged single-serving spirituality or simply a security threat,  airport chapels, prayer rooms, and interfaith spaces offer a chance to reflect on how we define religion, both at home and abroad. Their persistent popularity, and their place in our religious imagination, exhibit the pluralism, plasticity, and politics that typify global religion today.

Let there be nuclear light?

Christians wrestle with questions about radioactive accidents, technology, and replacing fossil fuels

By the end of 2022, Germany is set to decommission the last of its three nuclear reactors. But for local Christians, debates around nuclear energy will continue to have their own half-life. 

By December, Germany is pulling the plug on its last three nuclear power plants — Isar 2, Emsland, and Neckarwestheim II — as part of the country’s Atomausstieg, or “nuclear power phase out.”

Amidst the shutdown, evangelicals on both sides of the Atlantic are wrestling with the potential risks, rewards, and responsibilities of nuclear power. Discerning whether there is a Christian case for nuclear energy is not as simple as turning on the lights. At issue are questions about nuclear power’s potential to destroy life and poison the earth through toxic waste. 

Robert Kaita, 69, who worked for the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory for 40 years, said, “as human beings created in God’s image, we have tremendous power to create and destroy, to give life and to take it. 

“Nuclear energy isn’t inherently evil,” he said, “but we have to go beyond technical problems and consider the moral ramifications of what we are doing.” 

Indeed, as Germany shuts down its nuclear energy program, it is perhaps ironic that nuclear energy was invented in its capital, Berlin. In what is now the Hahn-Meitner building on the campus of Freie Universität Berlin (FU Berlin), chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Straßmann utilized Lise Meitner’s theories to discover nuclear fission on December 17, 1938. The splitting of nuclear atoms (fission) not only came to provide the basis for usable energy, but also the explosive force of the atomic bomb. 

Following World War II and the monumental, if monstrous, demonstration of fission’s power, Germany’s nuclear energy program kicked off in the 1950s. Its first power plants followed in the 1960s. Already, German anti-nuclear movements organized resistance to nuclear power’s proliferation. 

Local accidents and international disasters further propelled the anti-nuclear movement in the 1970s and 80s. Between 1975 and 1987 small scale incidents in Germany led to local contamination, radiation emission, and worrisome fires. Then, the Chernobyl accident occurred in 1986 and fears of nuclear fallout became mainstream.  

Located in what is now Ukraine, Chernobyl lies around 775 miles from Germany’s eastern border. When the reactor was destroyed, radioactive waste spewed across swathes of Europe, including Germany. It not only threatened lives, but water and food supplies. Wild mushroom samples in German forests still show signs of Chernobyl’s radioactive contamination signature to this day. 

For Markus Baum, 59, Chernobyl was a decisive crossroads. 

Mission Berlin: The Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-Day Saints And Its Nearly 170 Years In Germany’s Capital City

A tireless desire to share their message with the people of Berlin — and Germany as a whole — has helped the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ mission in Berlin persevere over the years, up to the present day. 

Despite criticism, shrinking numbers and the challenges of working in a diverse metropolitan area considered the atheist capital of Europe, numerous young church members fulfill their mission in Berlin and believe the city is rich with opportunity.

“Sure, we face difficulties, get tired or get nervous sometimes, but it’s all worth it to be able to represent Jesus Christ,” said Elder Wyatt Smith, 21, a missionary from Utah.

In the U.S., members of the faith have had a long on-again, off-again relationship with popular culture and the country’s religious mainstream. With the recent release of FX’s “Under the Banner of Heaven,” starring Andrew Garfield and based on the eponymous best-selling book by Jon Krakauer, Mormons — a colloquial term based on the church's sacred Book of Mormon — of various kinds have been thrust back into public conversation in a not-so-flattering light.

In Berlin, that relationship has perhaps been even more tenuous and tense. From resistance to their message and rejection by the Kingdom of Prussia in 1853 to their current mission to serve refugees fleeing the conflict in Ukraine, the church there has faced difficulties large and small.  

Across the years and various challenges, the church has persisted. Today, there are 39,456 church members across 149 congregations in Germany as a whole.

Young Latter-day Saints in Berlin have shaped their mission to the city, and in turn, the city has shaped the church and its efforts to reach one of the most secular urban communities in contemporary Europe.

Elder Joshua Obrist of Switzerland, 24, partners with Smith in Berlin’s Steglitz district to share the church’s message, “the restored gospel of Jesus Christ,” sometimes on the street to passers-by. 

On buses and trains, in front of cafés and kiosks, Obrist and Smith talk to anyone and everyone who has a moment to discuss questions about life, death and the ultimate meaning of the cosmos.

After five hours out on the streets, Obrist and Smith are on a bus headed back to the church’s ward — local congregation — in Berlin’s Dahlem neighborhood. But they are not yet done for the day. Starting around 6:30 a.m., a typical day in the life of church missionaries is relentless.

“We don’t really have time off,” Smith said. “We start early in the morning studying the Scriptures, catch up with contacts on Facebook, rehearse some conversations we might have that day, do our mission work and maybe have some evening meetings, but we aren’t done until around 9:00 p.m.

“And even though we have Mondays off,” he added, “we are still wearing our name tags if we go out.”

Asked if this schedule proved exhausting, Smith replied, “Not really. This is a calling for us, one we only get to know for a small window in our life.” 

Berlin's Transcultural Jam

“If Berlin and its music scene is something, it’s actually seeing people with their very diverse intersectional identities, and it’s celebrating that.”

— Jamila Al-Yousef

It’s a damp, cold October night in Berlin, but along Hauptstraße in the Friedenau district, inside the famed Zig Zag Jazz Club, the crowd waiting for Alaa Zouiten is lively, chattering and warm.

A fire-red glow reflects from the lights near the stage where the Morocco-born ‘ud player begins plucking a few of his instrument’s strings. Clinking glassware and the hum of conversation subsides into concentration.

“I love the transcultural approach in music, and that means there are no boundaries between music and cultures,” says Alaa Zouiten. Morocco-born and, since 2009, Berlin-based, the ‘ud virtuoso and music educator is among the more than 135,000 Arab-identifying residents of the city helping make Berlin one of the world’s hottest centers of creative arts. Zouiten cites the fusions in his own music as Moroccan, Amazigh, African, Jewish, North African and Andalusian. “Together it all sounds really organic,” he says, “In that moment, the listener says, ‘We’re all pretty close, and we have more similarities than differences.’”

Zouiten’s first song comes as a rapid-fire arrangement that at once showcases his virtuosity, flitting between styles he refers to as flamenco arabe and urban jazz. After that, his band joins him: a Spanish percussionist, a French bassist, a Canadian violinist and a pianist from Lebanon. Midway through their opener, Zouiten pauses to let his audience know it’s about to hear something new.

“We are trying a mix of different styles of music up here,” he says. “I hope it’s OK.” 

Cheers erupt. One woman near the front calls out, “It’s more than OK. It’s geil!”—a German slang compliment that falls between “cool” and “sick.” 

Reflecting on the audience’s enthusiasm, Zouiten elaborates as he strums and talks, strums and talks.

“I am neither a purist Arab ‘ud player, nor a jazz composer, nor a traditional flamenco artist,” he says, continuing to pad his thoughts with notes that will lead into the next song. “Just the fact that I’m from a country like Morocco, with its Arabic, Amazigh, Islamic, African, Jewish and Andalusian influences, makes the answer more difficult.” 

Like his band, his music and the city he now calls home, Zouiten is surrounded by a comingling of cultures and the resulting exchange of geographic collateral.

“While I was looking for a label for my music, some called my music Oriental Jazz. Others called it Arabic Andalusian fusion,” he says. “I was constantly dissatisfied with all these names, until finally I came to the right term. My music is about a plaisir transculturel, or transcultural enjoyment.” 

Music has never been about just one thing, he says. Throughout the Middle East, North Africa and the Mediterranean, music has always been rich with both tradition and the eclecticism that comes with movements of peoples. In Morocco, for example, where French and Arabic are spoken both independently and fused into a dialect, there’s a complex soldering and even reconciling of identities that often presents in music. Moroccans, like people elsewhere, understand nuanced cultural representations, which in their region light up a spectrum of Arab, Italian, French, Amazigh and Andalusian influences that have all at different times borrowed from and given to other styles. 

Today, through artists like Zouiten, Arab music continues evolving through a nuanced cultural dialogue in one of its newest nerve centers: Berlin. Arab-influenced, Arab-produced, and performed by a mix of Arabs, Germans, and others who have come together in this global fulcrum of connections, people, tones, rhythms, ideas, and instruments from the Arab world are converging with others in Berlin, creating new combinations that not only resonate with the city itself, but radiate outward across Europe, the Middle East, and beyond.

Visiting Every. Church. In. Berlin.

When Berliners Piet and Ulrike Jonas travel abroad, they head into local churches to gawk at stained glass windows, ponder over ornate altar pieces, and discern the meaning of devotional art.

“It is a way for us to get to know the place,” said Piet, “to begin to understand its history and the people who lived there.”

With church visits featuring so prominently in their vacations, Piet and Ulrike wondered if they might start doing the same in their home city.

And so, one-by-one, they began to look in on Berlin’s churches. What started as a hobby quickly turned into a goal-oriented project: to visit every church in Berlin.

Alle Kirchen Berlins was born.

According to their website, their project is simple. “We want to see all the churches in Berlin from the inside,” they wrote. According to their count, that means visiting some 450 locations. As of January 2022, they were at number 381.

The project, however, is not explicitly religious in nature. Nor is it specifically historical, architectural, or social. Instead, Piet and Ulrike said it’s about getting to know Berlin.

Along the way, they are encountering the city’s diversity and development, it’s eclecticism and surprising spiritual effervescence.

“One would not think that Berlin is an especially religious city,” said Ulrike, “and yet we are finding out just how important religion has been and still is.

More than showcasing some of the most remarkable, interesting, or site-seeable places of worship, Alle Kirchen Berlins provides insight into how we understand and negotiate what counts as religion. Moreover, the project highlights how our encounter with religion is part of the way in which contemporary societies — and cities — organize and understand themselves.

Specifically, Piet and Ulrike’s project highlights how city dwellers determine what counts as sacred and secular, how immigration has long been a part of shaping urban religious expressions, and how the notion of religion and the notion of a city are entangled with one another, the one shaping the other and vice versa.

For Dr. Kezevino Aram, Joy Comes from Serving the Most Vulnerable

The township of Kovaipudur has a reputation.

Located in the foothills of the Sahyadri Mountain range and part of the city of Coimbatore, in Tamil Nadu, India, the township enjoys gentle mountain breezes and monsoon rains that create a generally serene setting of lush vegetation. Locals know Kovaipudur is cooler than the rest of the city.

But Kovaipudur is also known as the home of Shanti Ashram, an international centre for development, learning and collaboration founded by Dr. M. Aram and Mrs. Minoti Aram, who are Dr. Kezevino Aram´s parents,  in 1986 on the Gandhian principle of Sarvodaya (progress for all).

According to Shanti Ashram’s records, its community work impacts more than 250,000 people in Coimbatore and its environs. Dr. Kezevino Aram has been leading the Ashram as its President since 2014. Through her hands-on, collaborative approach, Aram has responded to numerous challenges and crises in her community— most recently the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hungarian Evangelicals Thank God for Viktor Orbán Victory

Szófia Boros voted for Victor Orbán. The young evangelical mother of two has her misgivings about the man who has been accused of undermining democracy—curtailing press freedom, undercutting the independent judiciary, and changing election rules to give an advantage to his political party, Fidesz.

But in the end, it was pretty simple to support him for reelection on April 3.

“Evangelical Christians support the majority of Orbán’s policies and positions, even if we don’t really admire the way he goes about his politics,” she said. “I voted for him because he is a conservative Christian standing up against a liberal Europe.”

Evangelicals aren’t a big or politically organized voting bloc in Hungary. Only a few evangelical groups are established enough to achieve recognition from the national government, including the Baptist Union, the Hungarian Methodist Church, the Hungarian Pentecostal Church, the Church of the Nazarene, and the charismatic Faith Church, whose pastor endorsedOrbán during a Sunday service.

About half the people in the country consider themselves Catholic, a quarter has no religious affiliation, and 16 percent—including Orbán—identify with the Reformed Church in Hungary, which is part of the mainline World Council of Churches and affiliated with the Presbyterian Church (USA).

Eighty percent of the country identifies as Christian, but only about 15 percent of Hungarians attend church on a weekly basis.

But a lot of Hungarians, it turns out, feel like Boros. They wanted a conservative Christian prime minister committed to defending what they see as a Christian culture and its Christian values.

Black Muslims' Enduring Legacy in the Americas

In St. Philip parish, on the easternmost tip of Barbados, there is a small, one-room, yellow and green “musalla.” With chipped, white wooden shutters, the prayer space looks like a mix between a chattel house and a beach kiosk, with accents of Islamic architectural flair.

Said to have been built by a local Black convert by the name of Shihabuddin at the front of his family residence, the room can fit six, maybe seven prayer rugs. Alongside four mosques, an academy, a research institute and a school, Shihabuddin’s musalla continues to act as a site of community connection for Muslims in the Caribbean island nation, despite Shihabuddin’s passing.

When one thinks of global Islam’s “representative sites,” as literary scholar Aliyah Khan calls them, images of grand mosques and significant shrines in Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Mali or Pakistan might immediately come to mind. And well they should. Yet, to overlook places such as Shihabuddin’s musalla — and other Islamic centers across the Caribbean, Latin America, the U.S. and Canada — as nodes in Islam’s worldwide networks would be to do a vast disservice to the numerous Muslims who call the hemisphere home.

In particular, it would be to sideline the significance of Black Muslims like Shihabuddin.

Beginning with the first Muslim to arrive with the Spanish in the 16th century, Black Muslims have been part of the American story, navigating enslavement, inequality and numerous other misrepresentations and marginalizations in the region for 500 years.

Today, their enduring legacy influences tens of thousands of Muslims across the region and around the globe.