内容摘要：“I literally told my agent, ‘I would rather the play just not get done if it can’t use that song,’” the playwright laughed. She wrote Lorde a letter, explaining what the song meant, and got her green light.

“I literally told my agent, ‘I would rather the play just not get done if it can’t use that song,’” the playwright laughed. She wrote Lorde a letter, explaining what the song meant, and got her green light.

In a special room about the size of a tatami mat is a scroll painting of a kimono-clad Asian woman. She looks like a Buddhist Bodhisattva holding a baby, but for the faithful, this is a concealed version of Mary and the baby Jesus. Another scroll shows a man wearing a kimono covered with camellias, an allusion to John the Baptist’s beheading and martyrdom.There are other objects of worship from the days when Japan’s Christians had to hide from vicious persecution, including a ceramic bottle of holy water from Nakaenoshima, an island where Hidden Christians were martyred in the 1620s.

Little about the icons in the tiny, easy-to-miss room can be linked directly to Christianity — and that’s the point.After emerging from cloistered isolation in 1865, following more than 200 years of violent harassment by Japan’s insular warlord rulers, many of the formerly underground Christians converted to mainstream Catholicism.Some, however, continued to practice not the

that 16th century foreign missionaries originally taught them, but the idiosyncratic, difficult to detect version they’d nurtured during centuries of clandestine cat-and-mouse with a brutal regime.On Ikitsuki and other remote sections of Nagasaki prefecture, Hidden Christians still pray to these disguised objects. They still chant in a Latin that hasn’t been widely used in centuries. And they still cherish a religion that directly links them to a time of samurai, shoguns and martyred missionaries and believers.

A scroll of the Virgin Mary and Jesus once secretly worshipped hangs at a home in Ikitsuki Island in Hirado, southern Japan, Sunday, April 27, 2025. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)

A scroll of the Virgin Mary and Jesus once secretly worshipped hangs at a home in Ikitsuki Island in Hirado, southern Japan, Sunday, April 27, 2025. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the unsealing of several court documents in the lawsuit over

deportation, rejecting the Trump administration’s arguments that it would risk national security.U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis in Maryland issued her order after media organizations, including The Associated Press, argued the public has a right to access court records under the First Amendment.

Filings unsealed so far offer little information that’s new or unknown publicly. Xinis described one document as “relatively boilerplate.” It was a request by the Trump administration to temporarily halt discovery, an early phase of a lawsuit where parties share evidence.“It does not disclose any potentially privileged or otherwise sensitive information for which a compelling government interest outweighs the right to access,” Xinis wrote.