Polite Persecution

Sat, 01 Apr 2017 00:00:00 -0400

No American has suffered the fate of Helen Berhane, the Eritrean gospel singer whose evangelizing earned her two years in a shipping container in the middle of a hot desert. But in the last decades American Christians, like Christians across the West, have faced a rising trend of what Pope Francis has termed “polite persecution.” As the pope explains, “if you don’t like this, you will be punished: you’ll lose your job and many things or you’ll be set aside.” At the hands of bureaucrats, bosses, and judges, Christian merchants, universities, schools, hospitals, charities, campus fellowships, students, public officials, employees, and citizens have been fired, fined, shut down, threatened with a loss of accreditation, and evicted for living out traditional convictions about marriage and sexuality.

Continue Reading »

Peace After Genocide

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Every country that in recent years has moved toward democracy and peace first suffered large-scale assaults on human dignity from dictatorship or civil war: genocide, massacres, torture, rape, maiming, abduction of children, illegal detention, the destruction of homes and livelihoods. Countries like South Africa, Rwanda, East Germany, Timor-Leste, El Salvador, Chile, Serbia, Argentina, and Albania all faced the questions: What is the meaning of justice when it has been so despoiled? Can past evil on this scale ever be overcome? Can it be transformed or redeemed? Should the guilty be punished, and if so, how severely? Can the tyrants and their victims be reconciled? Should they be? What difference, if any, does God make to the answers to be given?

Continue Reading »

First Things RSS Feed - Daniel Philpott

​Polite Persecution

Peace After Genocide

Polite Persecution