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Watching and listening to Eitan Haber, I felt the past and the present collapsing into each other. We were reliving the drama of Cain and Abel. Yigal Amir had murdered Yitshak Rabin, his brother in the faith, and Rabin’s blood was crying out to us from the text of Shir L’Shalom. One drama was interpreting the other. Rabin’s blood was crying out for peace and reconciliation, and I began wondering what the blood of Abel might have been crying. What…

We do have a gun violence problem in this country. In my view, both action and prayer can be appropriate ways to respond. But prayer alone, without active response has literally never worked to bring healing and wholeness to systemic issues in the United States. Ever.

As a psychologist, I also know it is never too late to change and create new habits! Oh, to experience the mystery of God’s word as I did as a child—what a pleasure that would be—as would sharing that with the youth of today.

There are difficult days ahead for Ukrainians, and the West must not back off from full support of their struggle against the Russians. As Pete Wehner has noted, in this terrible human drama, we are witnessing “ordinary people – including the young and the elderly – acting in extraordinary ways to defend the country they love, against overwhelming odds.” There are lessons here for us.

In this Age of Autocracy, we who follow the Gospel need to refute nonsense like this whenever we hear it.  An authoritarian leader who has subjected universities, news media, courts and regional governments to political control, while stirring up xenophobic nationalist fervor, is hardly a model Christian ruler.  With friends like Orbán in Hungary – and Putin in Russia, and Duda in Poland, and, yes, Trump in the US – the church needs no enemies.