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COURTESY SUBJECT/ MEN’S HEALTH ILLUSTRATION
They committed to stay active despite the Russian invasion. And feel stronger for it.
MAR 25, 2022
AFTER RUSSIA INVADED UKRAINE on Feb. 24, life inside the eastern-European country transformed into a frantic combination of fleeing citizens and soldiers taking up arms. For days, Ukrainians holed up in shelters and underground metro stations as air-raid signals blared through the night.
But more than a month into war, regional Strava feeds have filled up again with cycling and running routes as outdoor athletes find ways to keep up their training amid days that feel otherwise anxious and surreal. “It’s my way to return to ordinary, normal life, and clear my brain,” says Maxim Lievliev, of Chernivtsi, a 37-year-old runner who was on a train from Kharkiv to Kyiv en route to getting his U.K. visa for the Cardiff Half Marathon when the war broke out and canceled his plans for the foreseeable future.
Men’s Health talked to four Ukrainian runners who’ve decided that it’s worth the risk to keep moving. For them, exercise isn’t a luxury but a physical and mental necessity, especially when so much else seems uncertain and out of control. New Ukraine laws prevent men between 18 and 60 from leaving the country, because they may be called to serve in the military, so all four men are stuck in limbo, unable to do much other than their jobs, shopping for necessities and, in some cases, volunteering to transport supplies and equipment.
All four runners work in tech, and for now, they are supporting their homeland by generating income. “That’s how we keep money going into our country, with salaries, taxes and so on,” says Alexey Zarubin, a Dnipro software engineer. Each is eager to talk about how and why they maintain their outdoor training regimens at this uniquely terrifying time. Here are their stories:
Cornelius Swart interviews Martin Doblmeier
Over the last 30 years, Martin Doblmeier has directed more than 25 documentary films on religion and spirituality. He won Emmys for two films, one on the Washington National Cathedral and another on Howard Thurman. In 2012 he received the Daniel J. Kane Religious Communications Award. His five-part series Prophetic Voices—films on Thurman, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Reinhold Niebuhr—is now available as a digital box set.
Why should people watch the Prophetic Voices series of documentaries?
Cornelius Swart
Cornelius Swart is a journalist and filmmaker who lives in New Jersey.
The subjects of these films are genuinely remarkable figures, whose lives and spiritual journeys intersected with some of the most dramatic moments in the 20th century. Their lives offer a window into how people of faith confronted the issues of their day and, in so doing, offer us inspiration as we confront our own struggles.
These people are from a very different time than our own. In the 1940s and ’50s, 76 percent of Americans attended religious services. Recently that number fell below 50 percent for the first time. How are these leaders relevant to us?
Too many of us find it easier to keep our heads down and avoid harsh realities. Rather than looking for the expedient, political solution, these people asked themselves: What is the moral response? What all five of these figures have in common is a refusal to be indifferent to the challenges around them. To a person, they armed themselves with their traditions, called upon God to reveal to them his will, and then went forth to do what they felt needed to be done.
Where do you think Dorothy Day, Howard Thurman, and the others would be in today’s political landscape?
Thurman, having been raised along the Atlantic coastline, would be a great public champion for the environment. He wrote beautifully and often about how we, as humanity, continue to “soil our own nest.” Day would be on the steps of the Capitol fighting for the growing number of poor in the richest country in the world. Abraham Joshua Heschel would be marching to support Black Lives Matter. He would be thrilled to see today’s pioneering interfaith work but heartbroken at the continued public display of hatred toward Jews. Reinhold Niebuhr would call for a pox on both houses of Congress for their selfish behavior that always comes at the expense of the American people. Dietrich Bonhoeffer would confront the apathy in our churches with sermons so powerful he would ignite a new spark.
I found that watching the Bonhoeffer film first and ending with Niebuhr brought things full circle, both chronologically and theologically. Do you recommend watching these films in a particular order?
There is no particular order you need to watch them in. Niebuhr is one of the more common threads. He was a professor at Union Theological Seminary when Bonhoeffer came to America, and they became close friends. Niebuhr was devastated when he heard of Bonhoeffer’s execution. When Thurman was at Howard University, he regularly invited Niebuhr to travel down and preach, so the two became close. Niebuhr had a historic friendship with Heschel—the two were famous for taking long walks on Riverside Drive in New York and discussing the most vexing issues of the day. And Susannah Heschel recalls coming home to find Day at the Heschel home being entertained by her parents.
One theme that plays out is the role and limits of nonviolence. These leaders reacted very differently to World War II. Bonhoeffer became a de facto assassin. Day opposed violence, even if it was directed at Hitler. Heschel, a Jew, concluded that God still loves humanity in a deeply personal way.
It has been one of the great, consistent mysteries surrounding the Bible that, through the centuries, gifted and sincere people can read the same texts and come away with very different conclusions. Early in his ministry, Niebuhr identified himself as a pacifist. That later changed, and he was one of those who rang the bell early as Nazi Germany was readying for war. Niebuhr understood that the only way the German war machine would be stopped was with military might.
Bonhoeffer longed to be a pacifist. He even planned at one point to travel to India to study nonviolence under Gandhi. But fate took him in another direction, and ultimately he supported the violent overthrow of the Nazis. Heschel openly admitted that given the opportunity to kill Hitler, he would do so. Having lost his mother and three sisters to the Nazi horror, who could blame him? Thurman held fast to a nonviolence position yet wrote pastoral letters supporting soldiers—especially Black soldiers—in the field. Of the five, Day was the outlier.
You’ve said that it’s your responsibility as a storyteller to learn from the lives you document. What do you take away from these conflicts?
That is the challenge of the filmmaker, isn’t it? To remain faithful to the story despite those times you feel at odds with your subject. In my mind, pacifism was impossible to justify in the face of the Nazi atrocities. Day campaigned for the right of women to vote and even risked her life in the campaign. But then, throughout her own life, she never voted. I think voting is a sacred privilege too many people fought for—and some are still being denied today—for us to ignore. But we turn to these figures today not because they had all the answers. Faith is not about answers. We turn to them because in the midst of the turbulence of the 20th century, they never let us forget the important questions.
Russian evangelicals urge Putin to stop the Ukrainian war
08-03-2022
Eastern Europe
CNE.news
Over 300 Russian evangelical pastors signed an open letter in which they condemned the war in Ukraine. They call for repentance and ask their leaders to “stop this senseless bloodshed”.
Despite the increasing censorship and risks of prison sentences, the Christians signed an open letter demanding that the hostility towards the neighbouring country ceases and that the bloodshed be stopped. The letter calls the Russian attack “full-scale hostile”. It stresses that Russia must repent “first before God, then before the Ukrainian people”. This reported Evangelical Focus.
According to the Christian French news website Evangeliques, the signatories cite several passages from the Bible, including Jeremiah 18, 7-8 and state: “The Holy Scriptures exhort us to withdraw “our hands from evil” and to seek “the ways of peace”. They warn that “he who sows evil will reap it”. According to them, the war destroys “not only Ukraine but also Russia – its people, its economy, its morality, its future”.
According to Christianity Today, the signatories are mainly Baptists and Pentecostal pastors as well as other Christian leaders from Moscow, Saint Petersburg and other cities across Russia. The text was made public on the website of a Protestant publishing house on March 2nd but has since then been removed.
According to the writers, it is important at the moment not to fall short of beautifying paraphrases of what is going on. “The time has come when each of us must call things by their proper names.”
Bonhoeffer
The letter comes after fierce criticism from Ukrainian evangelicals, who demanded condemnation and not just prayers for peace. “Your unions have congratulated Putin, giving thanks for the freedom of belief,” said Taras Dyatlik, the Overseas Council regional director for Eastern Europe and Central Asia. “The time has come to make use of that freedom.” This is reported by Christianity Today.
Dyatlik’s colleague, Valerii Antoniuk, went even further. “Where are your Bonhoeffer’s, where are your Barths?” the head of the All-Ukrainian Union of Churches of Evangelical Christians-Baptists asked on Facebook. “Your silence now is the blood and tears of Ukrainian children, mothers, and soldiers — that is on your hands.”
This Ukrainian woman plays, “What a Wonderful World” as her fellow Ukrainians seek to escape at the Lviv train station. My interpretation is that she is offering hope to Ukraine as the world reacts and responds to the heart-wrenching situation in Ukraine.
Feb 27, 2022
Mike Coppinger ESPN
Vasiliy Lomachenko, ESPN’s No. 8 pound-for-pound boxer, has joined a territorial defense battalion in Ukraine as the country attempts to fend off an invasion from Russia.
The two-time Olympic gold medalist is shown armed and wearing military fatigues in an image posted to his Facebook page on Sunday.
The 34-year-old was in Greece when the invasion began, and his flight home to Ukraine on Friday was delayed due to air traffic being grounded. He flew into Bucharest and traveled through Romania on Saturday to reach his home outside of Odessa to be with his family.
Lomachenko (16-2, 11 KOs), a former three-division champion, is closing in on a June 5 fight in Australia against undisputed lightweight champion George Kambosos, a title bout that would be televised on June 4 in the United States on ESPN. Lomachenko agreed to his side of the deal earlier this month.
Since suffering a decision loss to Teofimo Lopez in October 2020, Lomachenko underwent surgery to repair a torn rotator cuff and reeled off two consecutive wins. Most recently, he defeated Richard Commey via decision in December.
Hall of Fame boxer Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, announced he was taking up arms to defend against the attack. His brother, fellow Hall of Famer and former heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko, enlisted in Ukraine’s reserve army earlier this month in anticipation of the invasion.
Truckers protesting against Covid health rules continued Wednesday to occupy the capital Ottawa, despite the government’s declaration of the Emergencies Act Ed JONES AFP
On February 15, Bloomberg ran a story about the “freedom convoy” that seemed to illustrate Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity.
Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran minister who was part of the German resistance to the Nazi Party and to Adolf Hitler’s rise. His book, The Cost of Discipleship, is a meditation on “The Sermon on the Mount” in which Bonhoeffer splits the Christian concept of grace in two.
On the one hand is “cheap grace,” which is “without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”
On the other hand, Bonhoeffer said, is “costly grace.” It “confronts us as a gracious call to follow Jesus, it comes as a word of forgiveness to the broken spirit and the contrite heart. It is costly because it compels a man to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him.”
Indeed, resisting fascism by submitting “to the yoke of Christ” and following him cost him dearly. At age 39, the Nazis hanged him.
His theory of stupidity is featured in a letter written to friends a few years earlier. The letter, which is now known as “After Ten Years,” argues that evil like the Nazis isn’t the worst thing. Stupidity is.
“One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force,” he wrote. “Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless.”
Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.
Bloomberg reporters Jen Skerritt and Robert Tuttle were covering protests of the Canadian government’s requirement that truck drivers delivering freight across the US-Canadian border must be vaccinated.
Protests in Alberta and Manitoba, dubbed the “freedom convoy,” took the form of blockades of bridges and trucking routes, at odds with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s declaration of emergency powers.
Skerritt and Tuttle interviewed one trucker. His name is Jake Klassen. His two campers and semi were in the blockade. He said Trudeau’s emergency powers were an attempt to “take everything from us.”
Then there is this part:
Klassen said he hasn’t been able to visit his nine-year-old daughter in months. She is receiving palliative care at St. Amant, a care residence in Winnipeg, but due to restrictions that require visitors to be fully vaccinated, Klassen and his wife can’t see her.
“Yes, that’s absolutely stunning and sad,” said Victoria Barnett
Barnett was director of programs on ethics, religion and the Holocaust at the National Holocaust Museum. She’s the author of many books on interfaith history. She edited a 2017 translation of “After Ten Years.” I asked if Jake Klassen exemplifies Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity.
Maybe, but as part of a bigger phenomenon. “After Ten Years” was his attempt to understand the first 10 years of National Socialism and what had happened to his compatriots, his church, his country.
He’s trying to figure out why most Germans caved to Nazi ideology and why they became integral to what happened. The historian Klemens von Klemperer (himself a refugee) called the Third Reich a “consensual dictatorship” — which is a pretty good description.
Go into that a bit more please. How was it consensual?
His main point is that stupidity is a moral failure, not an intellectual one. He’s reflecting on the process by which people willfully become part of a larger movement or political group, etc. As they become increasingly involved, two things tend to happen:
- They become isolated (or they isolate themselves) from those who disagree with them or challenge them (and I would say also from news sources that would challenge their worldview) and
- They get a lot of reinforcement. One of the things that happened in 1933 after Hitler came to power was that Nazi Party organizations were founded for every demographic group – teachers, housewives, kids, etc. Everyone suddenly had a badge, a uniform, meetings to go to, new friends to meet etc. — and that was a big factor in creating a new sense of a larger German community serving a “grander” purpose (in the Nazi mindset).
A big part of that, of course, was identifying enemies and those who needed to be excluded — Jewish citizens, political opponents, critical journalists, etc. But that early formation of consensus made life much harder, even by the end of 1933, for people who didn’t agree with it.
What you’re describing is collectivism, no?
The self-understanding of the German Volk was a collective concept personified by the “Fuhrer.” That’s a big part of authoritarian or fascist regimes. Authoritarian leaders can do things without parliamentary approval, because they represent the “true” will of “the people.”
But that also created a dynamic in Nazi Germany in which there was this mass adoration – almost a mass hysteria – for the person of Adolf Hitler. There are paintings portraying him as a messianic figure.
Bonhoeffer said there is no defense against stupidity. But if it’s a moral failing, wouldn’t a defense be private and public morality?
Ideally, yes.
Bonhoeffer’s essay is an exploration of why that didn’t happen. (Elsewhere, he explores the lack of civil courage) But Nazi Germany is a disturbing case study in the failure of leaders, institutions (such as the church), etc., to stand up in an effective way to National Socialism.
The best and bravest people were either arrested early on or got out. But he’s pondering (and I think this is autobiographical) the failure of good decent people critical of the regime to be more effective.
That didn’t happen. (Along the way, one must acknowledge that many of them became complicit). But by staying in and working from inside the regime, they also failed to offer a clearer example of resistance.
That’s why by 1942 Bonhoeffer believes (as he writes here) that “only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity.”
The trucker above says he’s seeking liberation, too. Liberation from responsibility. How would Bonhoeffer persuade a man that he has agency and can visit his dying daughter by making the right choice?
One thing DB ignores is the psychology of all this. (He describes stupidity as a sociological problem). In Nazi Germany, we’re also looking at the pressures and dynamics within a fascist police state.
In other circumstances, however (eg, the truckers’ protests), this gets back to the peer pressures within a group that’s getting its information only from certain sources, in which there is a lot of pressure to conform to the will of the group (and a reward for doing so).
I’ve studied this in terms of the psychology of group behavior in Nazi Germany, but the literature on personality cults, mob behavior, etc., shows that the longer and more deeply a person gets involved in something like this, the less individual agency they perceive they have.
For Bonhoeffer personally — he wrote as a theologian and person of deep faith — that faith has the capacity to make someone see more clearly. But “After Ten Years” is a rather bleak assessment.
I’m reminded of something Michael Josephson said in 1989:
Success can be defined so many different ways but right now it is defined in a kind of how high is your position, how many people work for you, how high is your salary. When you get into that kind of yuppie version of success, you’re going to sacrifice things along the way. There’s not enough commitment to the ground rules of civil virtue.
A society focused on “success” (greed, selfishness) is a society in which a man won’t do the right thing to see his dying daughter and as a consequence, will make sacrifices he can’t reverse along the way.
He’s making an important point about what we value publicly and how that affects the individual’s ethics and sense of responsibility.
I’ve been very disturbed by some of the very callous reactions during the pandemic – eg, the minimization of the deaths in nursing homes, the rush to get back to normal when thousands of people are still getting sick and dying (and when large sectors of the population — children under the age of 6 — can’t yet be vaccinated).
But as I saw somewhere, the scale of the callousness has been on display for some time now in how we’ve dealt with school shootings, the high level of violence in our society and the much higher levels of violence experienced by people of color and the poor.
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