Jim Forest

Terrence Malick’s new film, A Hidden Life, is closely based on the life of Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian farmer who was beheaded in Berlin in 1943 for refusing to make an oath of allegiance to Hitler or serve in the armies of the Third Reich. For Jägerstätter, his conscience became his cross.

The Just War theory emerged in Western Christianity and never became rooted in Eastern Christianity. Instead, in the East, there is a relatively undeveloped theology that war is sometimes forced on a nation under attack, but is only justified to the extent that the nation is defending itself from invasion.

For the past fifty years I’ve been living with a remarkable photograph. I’m looking at it now. It was taken on July 16, 1969, by an astronaut who was gazing at his home planet through a thick glass window. I wonder if he didn’t feel like a new Bartimaeus, a man born blind whose eyes[…..]

Metropolitan Filaret of Minsk’s death on January 12, 2021, released a flood of memories.I first met Filaret in April 1984. I was one of several people from the West invited to participate in a discussion of “Violence, Nonviolence, and Liberation” he hosted at the Moscow Patriarchate’s Office of External Affairs.