Holy Week
Holy Week pain, Easter hope in Ukraine
By Thomas Reese — April 5, 2022
(RNS) — A visit to a Ukrainian church as Christ is being crucified again in Ukraine.
Franklin Graham writes to Putin, Zelenskyy to ask for a cease-fire during Holy Week
By Yonat Shimron — March 31, 2022
(RNS) — Samaritan’s Purse, Graham’s humanitarian relief organization, is pushing farther east and plans to open a second emergency field hospital in Ukraine by this weekend.
At second Easter under pandemic rules, Christians glimpse church’s future
By Adelle M. Banks, Emily McFarlan Miller, Alejandra Molina, Bob Smietana, and Yonat Shimron — April 2, 2021
(RNS) — The pandemic has 'redefined for me what church is going to be like and what the definition of membership is,' said one pastor in North Carolina.
Christians mark Good Friday amid lingering virus woes
By Joseph Krauss — April 2, 2021
JERUSALEM (AP) — "Things are open, but cautiously and gradually," said Wadie Abunassar, an adviser to church leaders in the Holy Land.
Why parts of Good Friday worship have been controversial
By Joanne M. Pierce — March 31, 2021
(The Conversation) — Prayers for Jews and veneration of the cross are often misunderstood as anti-Semitic or racist.
Despair and hope in Holy Week
By Thomas Reese — March 31, 2021
(RNS) — Our world, like Holy Week, is full of bad news. We need to remember to also look for goodness.
Is faith as we know it enough to get us through a pandemic?
By Anthea Butler — April 10, 2020
(RNS) — It turns out that a virus we cannot see is a more formidable threat to religious faith than secularism, government or unbelief.
As a pandemic peaks at Christianity’s Easter climax, churches adapt online
By Alejandra Molina and Emily McFarlan Miller — April 9, 2020
(RNS) — Social distancing measures have caused radical dislocations for a holiday that is at once one of the most mystical and most hands-on in world religion.
After a Holy Week disrupted by death, an honest Easter
By Laura Everett — April 9, 2020
(RNS) — We are heading into an Easter that stares straight into the eyes of death and empire and still declares love stronger than the grave.
Why Holy Week is made for this pandemic
By Thomas Reese — April 9, 2020
(RNS) — The suffering servants that the prophet Isaiah speaks of are the doctors, nurses and caretakers who are risking their lives, getting sick and dying after ministering to those who are sick.
In a virtual Easter season, matter still matters for Catholics
By Timothy OMalley — April 9, 2020
(RNS) — Most Catholics understand why we’ll have to stream our Easter celebrations this year, but digital connection is not the coin of the realm in our worship.
Palm Sunday: The most anti-Semitic time of the Christian calendar
By Jason Byassee — April 3, 2020
(RNS) — Christians can explain away Holy Week Gospel readings as internecine rivalry between Jewish sects. But we still have to answer for the shadow of anti-Semitism, which became a monster.
In Mexico, Holy Week penitents continue bloody 16th-century traditions of absolution
By Irving Cabrera Torres — April 22, 2019
TAXCO, Mexico (RNS) — The celebration of Holy Week in this colonial town southwest of Mexico City is one of the most dramatic and shocking in the country.
In new film, Mary Magdalene is rechristened a revolutionary, healer and baptizer
By Cathleen Falsani — April 19, 2019
(RNS) — In the new film 'Mary Magdalene,' the title character is many things but not the one role in which she has been historically (mis)cast: the so-called 'fallen woman.'
#MeToo, ‘Mary Magdalene’ focus on women’s stories in Bible as Easter nears
By Emily McFarlan Miller — April 18, 2019
(RNS) — It seems like the women of Scripture are having a moment leading up to Easter (April 21), celebrated by many Christians as the day they believe Jesus rose from the dead.
