Friday's News & Ideas - 4/5/2024

The church isn’t anti-fascist ... yet
Sojourners: After the Nazi electoral victory, there was a surge in church attendance (with one church district claiming an 1,800 percent increase in church membership). Many took this as a sign that a “spiritual awakening” was breaking out and church leaders declared it a joyous “ecclesiastical event” or “God’s hour.”

The peril radicalizing some evangelicals goes beyond Christian nationalism
Religion News Service: Christian supremacists are plotting the end of America as we know it.

Remembering Gerhard Lohfink, who wrote the best book on Jesus I’ve ever read*
America: Father Lohfink’s book, “Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was,” as many readers around the world know, is a model of clarity, scholarship, insight, belief and, best of all, surprises.

What comes after clergy self-care?*
The Christian Century: I didn’t need more candles or journaling. I needed solidarity with others, Benjamin J. Dueholm says.

For the Maya, solar eclipses were a sign of heavenly clashes − and their astronomers kept sophisticated records to predict them
The Conversation: Pre-modern societies watched the sky and created cosmographies, maps of the skies that provided information for calendars and agricultural cycles.

The Spark

Who needs a ripped basketball hero when we have DJ Burns?
The 6ft 9in, 280lbs NC State star doesn’t look like a typical athlete. But there’s no doubting his skill, or his dazzling charisma, The Guardian says.

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