The young Afghan shopkeeper knows the high price of living in the line of fire.

Which means Nakibullah, who gives only his first name, also knows the precious value of peace, now that decades of war in Afghanistan have given way to victory for the Taliban.

For years, his family’s roadside kiosk straddled one front line in Wardak province, one of Afghanistan’s most hotly contested areas, southwest of Kabul.

Now, surrounded on a late-winter day by the shop’s boxes of vegetables, nuts, and dried mulberries, his shawl wrapped tightly against the chill, Nakibullah points south down the rutted, dusty road to the remains of a military base less than 100 yards away.

It was from there that American troops, and later, Afghan security forces, fought to stamp out Taliban insurgents. For miles around, mud and wattle villages, their high-walled compounds wrecked by explosions and scarred by bullet holes, are testament to years of intense fighting.

Civilians routinely got caught in crossfire, and Nakibullah – at 22 years old, his beard still growing – describes how, two or three times a day, “we closed up and ran, when fighting was getting near.”

He then points to the ground near his feet.

“My father was shot dead right here,” he says matter-of-factly, about the bullet from a government sniper fired five years ago. “They were always shooting innocent people. I don’t know the reason.”

Such trauma for Nakibullah’s family has made them – and all residents of these districts, whether they stayed or fled – connoisseurs of the new age of nonwar that Afghanistan finds itself in.

Although the chaos of the rushed American exodus last August brought an ignoble end to the United States’ longest-ever war after 20 years, for Afghans emerging from four decades of near-constant conflict, the Taliban takeover has brought an unaccustomed peace.

Problems still abound for Afghanistan’s latest rulers: from haphazard and opaque leadership styles, and attempts to impose hard-line directives on issues such as women’s rights and education, to Western sanctions and an acute lack of funds and food.

But for many Afghans, like those in once-embattled Wardak province, the absence of war is more important than who is in charge.

“War destroyed our homes, our villages, and our youth,” says Rukamdin, a white-haired elder with a beige shawl who also gave only his first name, in Salar Bazaar, a village and cluster of roadside shops 60 miles southwest of Kabul.

And now that war is over? “God is great,” he says.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

An Afghan builder looks at a wall scarred by battles in the Mali-Khil settlement in Afghanistan's Wardak province, which witnessed frequent fighting during the Taliban insurgency, Jan. 14, 2022.

Better sleep, better business

Rukamdin recalls fighting Soviet troops in the 1980s, and points to where his cousin’s house nearby was destroyed much more recently by an American airstrike. He says he knows the family, that “they are not Taliban,” and that all survived because of an underground bunker built during the Soviet occupation.

“Now we are very happy. We get better sleep at night,” says Rukamdin. “Before we were waiting for airstrikes. Now this is a good moment.”

“Business is much better now,” says shopkeeper Nakibullah, despite his being forced to close his kiosk for three months as the Taliban advanced last year.

That is welcome news along this two-lane “highway,” which bends its way from the capital, Kabul, southwest through Wardak province toward Kandahar. It became one of the most contested and dangerous stretches of road in the country, where residents say war raged “every day.”

Craters scar the asphalt where Taliban jihadis planted improvised explosive devices to target U.S. and Afghan military convoys. Locals still recoil – and their voices sometimes gain a higher pitch, with fearful recollection – as they pass sections of road with thickets of trees on both sides: positions popular with the Taliban because they could attack, then safely hide from drones.

Former Afghan army and police posts are abandoned, their positions on commanding heights now looted by the Taliban. Bulletproof glass at lookouts is often shattered by multiple impacts.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

A water pump is riven with bullet holes from battles in the Mali-Khil settlement in Afghanistan's Wardak province, Jan. 14, 2022.

Jokes at a Taliban checkpoint

The violence here carried on to the last days of conflict.

Taliban memorial flags today mark the spot on the road where an American drone strike last August killed some 15 Taliban insurgents who had blocked the retreat of Afghan police and soldiers trying to escape Wardak to the capital.

Today peace prevails, in the form of children sledding down hillsides or playing cricket in open fields. At one Taliban checkpoint, a uniformed soldier asks why a car from Kabul is going to a former battlefield.

“To visit, to have a picnic,” replies the driver, half-joking.

The Talib leans into the car for a look, and chuckles with everyone else.

In one “Mad Max”-like scene, Taliban gunmen who are packed into a captured green Afghan police pickup with a motorcycle thrown in the back quaff energy drinks and laugh, as they barrel forward at high speed.

“It’s a happy situation when we stand here, and are not afraid of being shot from this side or that,” says Rukamdin, at the Salar Bazaar.

Yet peace alone is not enough, he says, with Taliban rule displacing that of former President Ashraf Ghani, whose U.S.-backed government was underpinned by billions of dollars in Western aid that has now dried up.

“Of course, we have a lot of expectations of this Taliban government and the international community,” says Rukamdin. “We need food. ... I have high expectations that the situation should be better.”

A few hundred yards north, up the road from the Salar Bazaar, the low-slung settlement of Mali-Khil nestles beside a stream and is surrounded by fields. It is all but destroyed and nearly empty.

Fighting in recent years was so intense here, as Afghan government forces blasted houses where Taliban insurgents took cover, that bullets carved their way through the metal pump handle at a well.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Afghan elder Haji Hamdullah in his sitting room, rebuilt after the Taliban used it as a defensive position, in the Mali-Khil settlement in Afghanistan's Wardak province, Jan. 14, 2022. Mr. Hamdullah, who was once held captive and beaten by the Taliban, says, “We just want peace. It doesn’t matter who is in charge.”

“It doesn’t matter who is in charge”

That intensity found its way into the compound of Haji Hamdullah, a resident for 30 years, who recounts how the Taliban hid and set up defensive positions in his meeting room. That was three years ago, when the Taliban broke holes in the walls to create passages. The carpet was burned, and the roof.

“The Taliban came into this room and fired on the National Army. This room was destroyed,” says Mr. Hamdullah, his face deeply creviced by 70 years of farming hardship.

Sitting on cushions and carpets in the recently restored space, he recalls how he was injured in that firefight. His knee was broken and he was shot in the back by a government bullet, he says – and also hit by a piece of shrapnel – while he tried to run away.

He had reason to be angry with the Taliban, too, Mr. Hamdullah says. He had complained to the insurgents who confiscated his house about being rude to his daughter-in-law, and warned that any fighting would cause his cow to produce less milk.

“They captured me, because I complained,” he says. “They held me for one month, and beat me and used electrical shocks.”

But today? Those visceral memories seem to have faded, as Mr. Hamdullah appreciates the absence of war, and the start of rebuilding 150 wrecked houses.

“Now we’re better, because there is no military base” to either draw Taliban fire or fire back on the Taliban, he says.

“We are not related to the previous government, or the Taliban,” says Mr. Hamdullah. “We just want peace. It doesn’t matter who is in charge.”

Mónica Guzmán is the author of "I Never Thought of It That Way: How To Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times."

Mónica Guzmán’s political beliefs were vastly different from those of her parents, fueling a family-sized version of the rancorous national divide. Rather than turn away, though, she dug deeper and retained their close-knit connection.

The longtime journalist and two-time Pulitzer Prize juror works for Braver Angels, a national nonprofit devoted to political depolarization and developing strategies for bringing people together.

Inspirations for her work include authors like Valerie Kaur and Amanda Ripley, she says, but a key influence was also her high school ethics teacher, who helped her understand that “every truth that really matters is an open question.” 

She spoke with the Monitor recently about her new book, “I Never Thought of It That Way: How To Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times.”

How did you come to this book and this work?

There were a couple of threads. One of them was my work as a journalist, having so many conversations that were about understanding people rather than judging them or arguing with them. Another one was because I’m a liberal Latina who is the daughter of conservative Mexican immigrants who voted for [Donald] Trump, and after 2016 that became really interesting – both in our household and out in the world! And the third thread was my own experimentation in bridge building, not just in journalism, but also in community work. There was an event in 2017, where I led about 20 Seattleites to a rural county in Oregon that had [voted] opposite us in the 2016 election. That event – getting curious with the people who had opposing views – was life-changing and the beginning of an obsession around bridging the political divide.

Why do you focus on listening and understanding instead of changing people’s minds?

I believe that the most important thing we can do for our democracy is to talk with people who disagree with us, rather than about them. Talking about people but never with them, in a climate of fear and distrust, further separates us from each other. To me, that is the deeper threat to democracy.

How can we get better at seeing each other?

One thing I think is really powerful is to ask “how,” not “why.” How did people come to believe what they believe? When you ask how, you’re more likely to be in a place where judgment doesn’t play a role, and you can walk alongside someone’s story. And then maybe you’ll see things that you wouldn’t have anticipated.

Shouldn’t we try to change people’s minds if their beliefs are based on disinformation?

That, to me, is by far one of the biggest challenges that we face today. I was the vice chair of the Society of Professional Journalists’ ethics committee for a couple years and take very seriously the [journalistic] tenet to minimize harm, and misinformation is harmful. But there are a lot of very questionable beliefs that millions of people believe. While I personally have very little doubt about the reality that I live in, there’s a lot that I don’t understand. And what I don’t feel I understand is other people’s perspectives. So if I am in a conversation with somebody who starts to say things that for me are just categorically untrue, I lift off of that conversation into another one. I don’t tell them they’re wrong. I don’t argue those facts. To me, getting into the information back-and-forth is almost never productive when someone holds those beliefs very deeply, especially if there’s no relationship or no trust built. So instead, I make it a different conversation. What about their path is different from mine? What about their path is something that I can totally relate to? What I find is that I can almost always relate to something.

Do these conversations have to be in person? 

They don’t have to be in person, but only in person can people bring their full tool set. The tool set is not just words. We tend to think that our words are our meaning. But we’ve [also] got our voice, our tone, gestures. You can see sometimes goodwill in someone’s face, and it wouldn’t come across in an email. And goodwill matters a lot. Humor matters a lot, right?

Is social media ever helpful instead of harmful for this understanding?

Social media is extraordinarily helpful, because it puts us in easy contact with people who are not like us – but we have to choose it, because the default pattern on social media is to help us find people who are exactly like us.

Do you need a thick skin for this work?

I think more than a thick skin – it’s just patience, and the faith to know that what is most important is to maintain our links and relationships to people who hold different beliefs. It is really hard to wake up tomorrow and be a Zen master of curiosity everywhere you go. Fortunately, that’s not what is required of anyone. What is going to make a huge difference in people’s lives and in our whole society is for people to just take one more step. Whatever your circle is, just go to that edge, and ask one more question. It’s going to be us taking these steps, and they’re going to feel small and ordinary, but they are anything but. It’s going to change the world.

The last time Jack Hanson took an airplane, he was a junior at the University of Vermont. To return from a semester abroad in Copenhagen, he flew from Denmark, stopped in Iceland, and landed in New York. 

But the next term, one of his professors asked students to calculate their individual energy usage. And when Mr. Hanson did the math, he realized that just one leg of that international flight accounted for more energy, and more greenhouse gas emissions, than all the other things he had done that year combined – the driving and heating and lighting and eating and everything else.

He was taken aback.

“I just couldn’t justify it,” he says. “It really is an extreme. It’s an extreme amount of energy, an extreme amount of pollution.”

So Mr. Hanson decided to stop flying. That was in 2015. Since then, he has traveled by train and bike and car, and has even written a song about the trials of getting home to Chicago on an overnight bus. But he has not been on an airplane.   

And he has never found travel more joyful, he says.

He knows that some find this hard to believe – including many friends and family members. They look at a two-day overland trip from Burlington, Vermont, to Chicago, compare it to 2 1/2 hours in the air, and decide Mr. Hanson’s approach is ludicrous. 

But with more people recognizing the climate impact of the aviation industry, and more people interested in lowering their own carbon footprint, a new ethos of “slow,” climate-friendly travel is taking hold. And those at the forefront of this movement – travelers like Mr. Hanson who have pledged to go “flight free” for a year or more – claim that their new approach from getting here to there is surprisingly fun.

“The motivation initially is the emissions, but once you try it, you think, ‘Why have I been torturing myself?’ says Anna Hughes, the head of Flight Free UK, a group based in the United Kingdom that has collected some 10,000 pledges from people to eschew flying. “Flights are too fast, and kind of fake. You’re air dropped from one place to another.”

AP/File

Greta Thunberg stands on the Malizia II boat off Plymouth, England, Aug. 14, 2019. The teenage climate change activist who has inspired student protests around the world took this high-tech but low-comfort sailboat from Plymouth to New York to avoid going by plane to a conference.

Go more slowly, she says, and travel begins to return to what it once was: a slow metamorphosis of one place to another, a sense of space, an unwinding of time.

“Once you’ve tasted this way of travel, you understand what it’s all about,” she says.

“The flip side is something positive”

But there is more underlying the satisfaction of land-based travel, psychologists say. A growing body of research increasingly ties environment- and climate-friendly behavior to a personal sense of well-being. In a recent Environmental Research Letters article, for instance, author Stephanie Johnson Zawadzki of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands explored the stereotype that environmental living is all about sacrifice. She found numerous studies showing that people not only felt better when they took easy “green” actions – choosing a paper bag at the grocery store, for instance, or buying a “sustainable” product – but also reported an improved sense of well-being when those actions required more give.

“Indeed, despite the possible inconvenience, cost, or discomfort which are sometimes associated with pro-environmental behaviors, people appear to consistently associate pro-environmental behaviors with positive feelings rather than negative ones,” she wrote.

Part of this, psychologists speculate, is that taking actions to counteract global warming helps counteract “climate distress,” an increasingly recognized psychological phenomenon.  

Climate distress, explains New York-based psychologist Wendy Greenspun, is “a range of emotional reactions from sadness to despair to grief to anger and rage, hope and shame and guilt.” And one of the key ways to build resilience to it, she says, is to behave like part of the solution, and to creatively connect with others doing the same.

“Guilt maybe leads us to recognize that we care and we want to repair,” she says. “Anger can often be the fuel for taking action rather than being helpless. Grief or feelings of loss can lead toward love. There’s something for me about negative or distressed emotions – the flip side is something positive.”

Traveling with joy – and justice – in mind

This was certainly true for Dan Castrigano.

A former teacher who now runs a climate organization from Burlington, Vermont, he says that he worried for years about flying. At first, he tried to lower his feelings of guilt by buying carbon offsets. (The offset system is basically an accounting mechanism where individuals or organizations pay to keep carbon out of the atmosphere one place to counteract their emissions somewhere else.) But he knew that many climate activists doubted the real value of offsets, and he didn’t feel much better. 

“There was this cognitive dissonance when I would fly,” he says. “I was teaching about climate to seventh and eighth graders, and I just kind of became embarrassed that I was flying to Europe for vacation.” 

Eventually, he decided to give up flying altogether. Now he helps run Flight Free USA, which connects people who have pledged to avoid planes for a month, a year, or indefinitely.  

“It’s extremely joyful not to fly,” he says. “It’s liberating.”

The aviation sector is responsible for around 2.5% of the world’s carbon emissions, according to researchers. There’s a greater total global warming impact when scientists consider the heating effect of planes’ contrails – those temporary, line-like clouds formed by an airplane’s exhaust stream.

In an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report released this month, scientists noted that although land-based vehicles still cause most transportation-related emissions, there are ways to stabilize or decrease those greenhouse gasses. Emissions from the aviation sector, on the other hand, are growing, and do not have an easy fix.

Part of this is because there is still no real alternative to jet fuel. While biofuels, electric planes, and green hydrogen engines are all the focus of research and speculation, the only way to lower the aviation industry’s climate impact at the moment is to either fly less or use offsets. 

Carolyn Kaster/AP/File

Contrails from airplanes crossing the sky are reflected in a building in Washington on Jan. 23, 2015. The aviation sector is responsible for around 2.5% of the world’s carbon emissions, according to researchers, but the impact on global warming increases when contrails are considered.

“There are just a lot of things we did on default”

And more people are concerned about this – even as the aviation industry grows. 

The concept of flygskam – a Swedish word usually translated as “flight shame” – is common in Europe; climate activist Greta Thunberg helped popularize the term when she traveled across the Atlantic in a racing yacht to avoid going by plane to a 2019 conference in New York. That same year, in a study commissioned by the World Economic Forum, one in seven global consumers said they would pick a form of transportation with a lower carbon footprint if they could, even if it were less convenient or more expensive. And a recent report from the consulting group McKinsey cited growing customer concerns about sustainability as one of the largest looming challenges to the aviation sector. 

Meanwhile, more organizations, newly accustomed to virtual meetings, are rethinking their business travel in order to reduce their carbon footprints, says Shengyin Xu, the global sustainability initiative lead for the World Resources Institute. 

“There are just a lot of things we did on default,” she says. “Historically, when we were invited to speak at a conference we would go and book a ticket.”

The airline industry itself is well aware of these climate concerns. It has pledged to become “carbon neutral” by 2050, primarily by using carbon offsets. But climate activists are skeptical.

“There is no getting away from it,” says Ms. Hughes. “As an individual, there is nothing you can do in your life to raise your emissions as fast and as high as taking a flight. I could drive a car for an entire year and that would be the same as the flight from London to New York, per passenger. It’s insane how much fossil fuel it takes to get something so heavy up into the air and going so far.”

There is also a justice component, she and other activists say.

A growing body of research shows that the world’s richest countries and individuals emit a hugely disproportionate amount of the greenhouse gasses that warm the atmosphere. Research from Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute in 2020, for instance, found that the richest 10% of the world’s population were responsible for 52% of the globe’s cumulative greenhouse gas emissions; the richest 1% was responsible for 15%. 

This is mirrored in air travel.

Although it’s hard to get exact statistics, most research shows that around 80% of the world’s population will never travel on an airplane. In 2018, a study by Sweden’s Linnaeus University found that only 11% of the world’s population took a flight that year. Meanwhile, frequent fliers, who comprise 1% of the world’s population, generated half of the aviation industry’s carbon emissions.

This is why it feels so good to Mr. Hanson to stay on the ground.

“I want to live in a way where I know that, if everyone on earth was living like me, the world would be OK,” he says. “When it comes to individual lifestyle behaviors, that’s the baseline for me.”

Besides, if he was flying, he’d never have the story of when his girlfriend’s bike got a flat tire in rural Vermont, and how a stranger helped them and became a new friend. He wouldn’t have watched the sun rise over Indiana from a train’s sleeper car.

And he definitely wouldn’t have had those lyrics about the overnight bus to Chicago.

Editor’s note: The spelling of Jack Hanson’s surname has been corrected since the initial publication of the story.

AP/File

Apollo 8 astronauts prepare to leave on a moon orbit mission from Cape Kennedy, Florida, Dec. 21, 1968. The astronauts reading from Genesis in a Christmas Eve broadcast back to Earth is featured in a new Smithsonian exhibit, “Discovery and Revelation: Religion, Science, and Making Sense of Things.”

At the end of tumultuous 1968 – a year of political assassinations, war, riots, the crushing of the Prague Spring – the view from Earth was bleak. The world needed hope – and Apollo 8 astronauts orbiting the moon on Christmas Eve read the creation text from Genesis’ first chapter to a billion listeners.

The inspiration from the astronauts reading Old Testament Scripture on a scientifically engineered spacecraft comes through even decades later and on a crackly video loop in the new exhibit “Discovery and Revelation: Religion, Science, and Making Sense of Things” at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.

Such intersections of religion and science in American culture are part of the focus of the yearlong exhibit.   

Many people assume that there is a conflict between science and religion, says Peter Manseau, the exhibit curator. But he wants visitors to walk away realizing that the interaction is much broader than a story of conflict alone.

Jaclyn Nash/Courtesy of the National Museum of American History

The Apollo 8 flight manual, opened to the passage from the first chapter of Genesis that astronauts read during a broadcast, is on display as part of the exhibit “Discovery and Revelation.”

“The challenge was trying to expand the terms of engagement with which religion and science are usually discussed,” says Mr. Manseau.

To accomplish that, three prompting questions frame the exhibit: “What does it mean to be human?”  “What do we owe each other?” and “What is our place in the universe?”

Packed into the 1,200-square-foot space are artifacts to explore those inquiries. For example, the Apollo 8 flight manual, Charles Darwin’s 1860 book “On the Origin of Species” establishing his theory of evolution, and the message from the first public demonstration of the telegraph in the 1840s (“What hath God wrought?”) are all displayed.  

“It’s small enough for people to appreciate the theme,” says Lisa Deason, a member of the Guild of Professional Tour Guides of Washington, D.C., at an exhibition preview in March. “I think it will spur on some thinking.”

The exhibit proceeds both chronologically and thematically. Roughly chronological displays line the walls, starting with the 1700s and closing with the Apollo 8 message. In keeping with museum policy, all text is shown in both English and Spanish.       

“We’re trying to tell a story of American history that is as diverse as the American people,” says Mr. Manseau, noting the exhibit’s displays of many faiths.

The exhibit includes a portrait of Henrietta Lacks, a young African American mother who had cancerous cells that were used by medical researchers after her death in 1951 without her or her family’s permission. In the portrait, she stands, hands clasping a Bible, with the prompting question above her: “What do we owe each other?”

Mr. Manseau sees parallels between past and present, especially related to the pandemic that transpired as the collection was pulled together over the past three years. He points out the “Faith and Healing” display that shows pamphlets arguing for and against smallpox inoculations in 1721 and 1722. Conversations in Boston three centuries ago, he says, mirrored those that took place over the past few years.

Jaclyn Nash/Courtesy of the National Museum of American History

Fatimah Jackson, a biologist, and Albert Einstein, a theoretical physicist, are two of the eight people featured on panels in the “Discovery and Revelation” exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of American History in Washington. The exhibit runs through March 1, 2023.

“What we’ve seen is that the intersection of religion and science is still very present in our approach and our interpretation of what to do in the face of something like a pandemic,” says Mr. Manseau, author of a book about Thomas Jefferson’s Bible, where the third president excised Jesus’ healings and metaphysical statements. (That 1820 book by Jefferson interpreting the Bible, “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth,” is also on display.)

In the middle of the exhibit, between display cases that line the walls, are panels of eight people whose words are displayed next to other thematic questions such as: “Can religion be scientific?” The founder of this newspaper, Mary Baker Eddy, is included on the panel with that question, as is a partial quote from her book, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.”

Mr. Manseau, who co-wrote a new book with the same title as the exhibit, says he wants visitors to walk away asking new questions: “We’re not trying to solve this riddle or to answer this question definitively.”  

“Discovery and Revelation: Religion, Science, and Making Sense of Things” runs through March 1, 2023.

Reuters

Women sing at a church in Schleife, eastern Germany, on April 17.

In the midst of an intense national debate over how their country should help Ukraine, many German churches used their Easter services on Sunday to apply an Easter message about the war. For Christian theologian Georgios Vlantis in Bavaria, preaching reconciliation, peace, and love in the face of brutal Russian attacks on a weak neighbor was a near-impossible task.

“I hope that Easter and the behavior of Christians here will bring comfort and hope to Ukrainians,” he told the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. “It is precisely in this situation that the existential importance of the message of the resurrection becomes apparent.”

That message, Pastor Otto Gäng of the Fürstenfeldbruck parish told the same newspaper, is the “certainty and hope that death will not have the last word.”

For some churches in Duisburg, the debate over Germany’s policy stance toward Russia is secondary to individuals simply taking practical steps. They have turned down the heat in their buildings to reduce Germany’s payments for Russian fuels that help fund the war. Many churches have turned up their humanitarian efforts to welcome Ukrainian refugees, offering them homes and counseling.

Yet a striking number of Germans “are now asking us questions about the Christian message,” Elisabeth Hann von Weyhern, a church bishop in Nuremberg, told the local paper. Easter in 2022 is “not a harmless spring festival for cheerful times,” she said. “Never before” has the “meaning of Good Friday and Easter become so clear.”

The most vexing issue for Germans – one that divides churches – is whether Germany should send heavy weapons to Ukraine, such as battle tanks and combat helicopters.

Polls indicate Germans are about evenly divided on the question. In their Easter sermons, some preachers said that sending big guns would escalate the war. Others said aggression must be contained by force of arms. Still others claimed such decisions can only be known in retrospect.

As different as they were, the Easter sermons may nonetheless be helpful in resolving political tensions with the three-party governing coalition of Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Three days after the Russian invasion on Feb. 24, Mr. Scholz said the country is at a “turning point” in its long-held approach toward Russia, one that has relied on trade and Germany’s pacifism after World War II in hopes of creating a benign Kremlin.

So far, that turning point has led Mr. Scholz to cancel a gas pipeline from Russia, beef up spending on the German military, and send both money and nonoffensive weapons to Ukraine, such as surface-to-air missiles. Facing divisions in his coalition, however, he has not yet decided on sending bigger weapons.

In their Easter services, many churches equated Germany’s turning point to the resurrection of Jesus as a turning point in history. The overcoming of death in the resurrection, said Bishop Friedrich Kramer, was a “miracle of love” that revealed that “no violence in this world can separate us from this love.”

“Let’s rely on it,” he added, as it can change people and entire systems. Such messages in Sunday’s sermons are now part of Germany’s big debate on its role in a war determining Europe’s future.