Berlin Like Jazz

It’s Saturday night and you’re looking for jazz in Germany’s capital. You could catch an after-midnight jam session at A-Trane in Charlottenburg, get cozy in the stylish, intimate ambience of the Zig Zag Club in Friedenau, or catch a solo saxophonist serenading the crowd at Berlin’s oldest jazz club, Quasimodo.

And there’s one more option: You could wait until morning and go to church in the Wedding district. 

One part church plant, one part jazz project, Kiez Church (Neighborhood Church) in the multiethnic district of Wedding is led by Ali and Rich Maegraith, Australian missionaries who say they want to bring the gospel to the cosmopolitan city’s art scene.

Berlin is a magnet for musicians—a place to connect and prove your chops. The German capital is a hub for many different European music scenes, from electronic dance to Afropop, classical to klezmer, and attracts creative people from all over.

The Maegraiths, who moved to Berlin in 2015, say that’s their in. The music provides them with evangelical opportunities. Rich, a professional jazz musician, and Ali, a vocalist and songwriter, moved to the city to serve with the European Christian Mission agency.

“We’ve met many people through jam sessions, performances or just busking on the streets,” Ali told CT. When they first arrived, Rich said he would go to jam sessions every night, all over the city. “In Berlin, the jazz scene is already a community, where people will play and hang out together until the early hours of the morning,” he said, “they even call it ‘jazz church.’”

Berlin’s nightlife is more readily associated with techno and punk, but it also has a long, historical relationship with jazz. The improvisational, syncopated music first came to the German capital at the end of World War I, when it was warmly received by the post-war population of the Weimar Republic.

When the American-born French singer and dancer Josephine Baker visited Berlin in 1925, she found the city dazzling with a vibrant jazz scene. Her performances were received with warm adulation. And popular acts like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington took the city by storm at a time when it was the third largest metropolitan area in the world by population.

Nazis put an end to jazz when they took control, but the music came back with the American victory in World War II. Soldiers stationed in the city brought the music of Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman and Miles Davis with them. This time, jazz stuck.

Today, Berlin is one of the best places in Europe to hear a live jazz show. And one of the places you can do that is at Kiez Church Wedding.

Best In-Depth Reporting on Religion

I am beyond grateful to announce that I was named the third place winner of the Best In-Depth Reporting on Religion award from the American Academy of Religion.

I love writing on religion, and going in depth on stories of relevance and import. To be recognized by the world’s largest association of academics who research or teach topics related to religion and to place behind wonderful religion writers like Peter Manseau and Dawn Araujo-Hawkins is an immense honor.

The judges had this to say about my work:

[Ken’s] reporting includes a delightful and eye-opening history of a Muslim acrobat in Liverpool, an insightful and timely article on how sports play a role in combatting ignorance and Islamophobia, and interesting reports on Jewish music and spiritual seeking in modern-day Germany.

Here below are the three stories I submitted, just in case you missed them last year.

Thanks in advance, for taking a (second) look.

The Liverpool Effect

A hidden grave, Moroccan acrobats, and combatting Islamophobia in Liverpool through sport.

Berlin: The not-so-secular city

Is Berlin the atheist capital of Europe? Maybe so…but maybe not.

Klezmer’s modern European revival

Yiddish Music Is Resurging In The Weimar Square Hitler Frequented

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.

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.

Finding spiritual solace in Berlin, the not-so-secular city

Both before and during the pandemic — and perhaps for years to come — religion remains a potent force in Germany’s not-so-secular city, Berlin.

When Harvard theologian Harvey Cox served as an ecumenical worker in Berlin in the 1960s, he watched the city and its people wrestle with their identity , surmising that they were taking steps toward a more secular future in the aftermath of conflict and chaos. 

It was in Berlin that the seeds of an idea — later called the “secularization thesis” — began to germinate in his mind. In his 1965 book, “The Secular City,” Cox proposed that as societies develop, the need for religion diminishes, and as a result, religion itself declines. 

And yet, as cosmopolitan as ever, Berliners — its people, not its pastries — still turn to a diverse array of religious sources to meet multiple needs: from social contact to providing a semblance of order in a tumultuous world.