From senior staff writer Emily Belz: Your friendly neighborhood reporters at CT really need Easter right now—some news of resurrection and a new world where death is defeated.

I look at our news section from the beginning of Lent to now, and it feels like Lent, a time of ashes before Jesus rose. Trade wars, actual wars, earthquakes, sexual abuse, deportation, the sudden cutting of lifesaving medicine to vulnerable patients—and perhaps a constitutional crisis. Jesus said in the Last Supper before he went to the cross, "Take heart! I have overcome the world" (John 16:33).

During Lent we’ve had some "overcoming" stories too: Japan’s Christians surviving. A Christian medical school continuing its mission of compassionate health care for over a century. Russian pastors risking their lives to oppose the war in Ukraine. Growing interest in discipleship in Europe. People all over the world singing together.

It’s true that the world is "full of peril," as J. R. R. Tolkien writes in The Lord of the Rings, "but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater."