The Time of Empty Churches

The book Time of the Empty Churches offers a comprehensive collection of sermons and reflections from the strange Easter of 2020. The individual Sunday stops, originally broadcast online from the empty Church of the Most Holy Saviour, reflect on the most important Christian holidays, also taking into account the time of the coronavirus pandemic. Against the backdrop of the current situation, Tomáš Halík also reminds us of the deeper wounds of this world—he highlights the crisis in the church and modern-day Pharisees, the problems of political populism and fundamentalism. Time of the Empty Churches is addressed to the general public—it shows that the time of the pandemic need not be seen as God's punishment, but rather as an open call for solidarity and for deep inner transformation: “I am convinced that God's challenge for this time is to strive for a globalisation of compassion and solidarity, to try to transform the unstoppable process of globalisation into a process of communication and empathy.”