Since 2022, the Portuguese have increasingly expressed pessimism about their future. They worry about their financial responsibilities and fear their income might not be enough to cover basic expenses. The radical change in the political status quo in Portugal’s recent elections is proof of the current mental state of the country.
![[Interview] Missions in the digital age: cyber missionaries, attachment theology and why AI does not bring life](/media/cache/thumbnail/0/04/444sp_320w_210h_1x_1y.jpg)
The political positioning of new regimes is matching an ideology that has been forming for some time—Dark Enlightenment. We are watching a new world order emerge that will cause great suffering. As the performance of Bach's St Matthew's Passion unfolded, it resonated deeply with the times we find ourselves in.
Thomas Schirrmacher has worked with Pope Francis in a variety of official roles, both for the World Evangelical Alliance and the International Society for Human Rights. He accompanied the pope on three state visits and also visited him privately at Santa Marta on numerous occasions, often around the pontiff’s birthday. These are his reflections.
Among many other things, Easter is an opportunity to reflect on Jesus' relationship to political power. Modern readers of the Gospels and Epistles too easily miss the political significance of Jesus' death and resurrection. Far from leaning into and leveraging political and imperial power, Jesus and his followers are called to righteously and justly subvert it for God's glory alone.
Eastern Europe has a rich tradition of celebrating the Easter season and passing meaningful Christian customs on to successive generations. Christians in non-Christian contexts and those in newer Westernized nations can learn much from older expressions of Christian faith and hope in the death and resurrection of Jesus.
On March 4, 2024, a joint session of France’s parliament voted 780-72 to revise France’s constitution to include a “guaranteed freedom” for abortion. This happened after a majority of the French senate voted last Wednesday to accept the wording of the amendment of article 34 of the constitution. Now France has become the first country to enshrine abortion in their constitution.
On February 5, 2024, Catholic former Dutch prime minister Dries van Agt passed away “hand in hand” with his wife Eugenie van Agt-Krekelberg when they both undertook “duo euthanasia.” Van Agt and his wife both had “delicate health conditions.” They had been married for 70 years and were 93 years old. According to the Guardian, their deaths are part of a growing duo euthanasia trend in the Netherlands.
“We are facing three major crises today,” he said. But the crises he was referring to were not the outward contributors to orphanhood and vulnerability among children, such as war, drug abuse, climate change or pandemics – all very relevant and important to understand in the context of a global event that seeks to address them.
In the summer of 2022, members of the National Council of French Evangelicals (CNEF) launched a website (Stop-Abus.fr) where victims and witnesses of sexual abuse can report abuse and find more information on sexual abuse with links and sources curated by CNEF. The site also provides resources on how to manage sexual abuse and misconduct within Evangelical churches and organizations.
German parliamentarians seek to ban Christians and other right-to-life advocates from standing near abortion clinics under a draft law proceeding through the Bundestag.
Two years after Russia invaded Ukraine, families in the country are desperate and looking to the Church for support, putting clergy under huge pressure.
The Sahel continued as the region where most terrorist violence occurred in 2024, with Burkina Faso again the country with the most killings while Niger shot from 10th to fifth worst in the world, according to the 2025 Global Terrorism Index (GTI).
