Limits of Prayer

Sometimes we face problems that don’t seem to have a Christian solution. Maybe there’s a way to pray about them anyway.

At the time of this writing, the Israel-Hamas War was still raging. While we hope for a resolution to that conflict, it won’t be because Christians imposed some sort of solution.

That’s a point writer Bonnie Kristian made in Christianity Today back in November 2023, in an article titled “Christians Can’t Fix the Israel-Hamas War.” Her article developed — from a Christian perspective — a point made by journalist and blogger Matthew Yglesias in his Slow Boring newsletter as part of a much fuller discussion of the Israel-Hamas conflict. He noted that for some kind of resolution to occur, both Israelis and Palestinians need to develop different, more reasonable preferences from the ones they have — which Yglesias freely acknowledged was not going to happen.

Responding to Yglesias’ point, Kristian wrote, “it gets at something that so much commentary on this subject seems to miss … which is that Israeli political leaders...