In 1945, Jürgen Moltmann was taken to a Scottish prisoner-of-war camp. He and his countrymen were forced to grapple with their complicity in the Holocaust when photos from Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald were pinned up inside their huts. “Slowly and inexorably the truth seeped into our consciousness, and we saw ourselves through the eyes of the Nazi victims.”

It was here that Moltmann was given a Bible, which previously he had only ever considered a source of quaint but hardly transformative wisdom and tales. Initially, he didn’t know what to make of it. But when he came to the psalms of lament, something sparked. He returned to them over the next few nights before reading through the Gospel of Mark: “When I heard Jesus’ death cry, ‘My God, why have you forsaken me?’ I felt growing within me the conviction: this is someone who understands you completely, who is with you in your cry to God and has felt the same forsakenness you are living in now.” And with this, the hope for a new life and a new world began to kindle within.

Moltmann knew where to point those feeling abandoned by God, not least me, a student in a mental health crisis at the other end of the earth.>/p>