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The Discerner

Culture and politics, read for meaning. No rage. No mush.

The parable Jesus told for days like this

The parable Jesus told for days like this

I read the story twice, hoping I had misread it the first time. Amber Nadeem is thirteen. She is a Christian girl from the Faisalabad area of Pakistan. Last year, according to her family and their advocates, a Muslim man named Mohsin Liaqat took her, and what followed was the

What Would Your File Say

What Would Your File Say

Of everything the police carried out of those homes in Yueyang, it is not the Bibles I keep thinking about. It is the files. On July 11, authorities in Yueyang, a city in China's Hunan province, raided a network of house churches. ChinaAid, which broke the story, reports

Christ the Answer, Permit Pending

Christ the Answer, Permit Pending

The church is called Christ the Answer. I keep turning the name over, because for nine years the church called Christ the Answer has been waiting for one. Nine years of signatures, identity cards, village office stamps, and recommendation letters. Nine years of doing everything asked of them, and then

The Man Who Won't Rest

The Man Who Won't Rest

I have been thinking all week about a man who spent 266 days in detention and says that freedom felt disorienting. Pastor Jin Mingri, who goes by Ezra, founded Zion Church in Beijing in 2007. When the government shut its buildings in 2018, the church did not die; it scattered

Permission to Stand

Permission to Stand

I read Pastor Ezra Jin's op-ed on my phone, in line for coffee, between a weather alert and a text I was avoiding. It took me four minutes. It took him 266 days. Jin spent those days in a Chinese prison cell with the other leaders of

Scrolling Past the Martyrs

Scrolling Past the Martyrs

My thumb has habits my heart never approved. Somewhere in an ordinary evening scroll, between a slow cooker recipe and an argument about a movie I will never watch, my feed has shown me a church being raided on the other side of the world. Three items, three identical rectangles.

Seven Years of Sundays

Seven Years of Sundays

It does not take much to keep me home from church. Rain has done it. A cough, a late Saturday, a stretch of sermons I privately graded and found wanting. I say that plainly because of what happened on June 14 in a hotel ballroom in Jiangyou City, China. At