The Supreme Court seems likely to overrule a law banning conversion therapy for minors, horrifying queer faith leaders and their allies after years of fighting to protect queer children.
Colorado’s minor conversion therapy law prohibits state-licensed mental health workers from seeking to change a minor's sexual orientation or gender identity, including attempts to reduce or eliminate same-sex attraction or change “behaviors or gender expressions.” Violations are punishable by a fine of up to $5,000. The petitioner Kaley Chiles is a Christian counselor who argues that the law violates her First Amendment right to free speech by censoring what can be discussed with consent in therapy sessions.
Chris Damian, a gay Catholic lawyer, told Sojourners that the case hinges on whether talk therapy is considered a form of speech or whether it’s considered conduct.
“Obviously this case is about conversion therapy,” Damian said. “But it’s also about much more. It’s about whether and how state legislatures can hold mental health professionals accountable for their practice.”
Are billionaires the reason we can’t have nice things? It’s tempting to think so.
Consider Elon Musk, having been messily ejected from President Donald Trump’s orbit after his DOGE project ended in failure, with little to show for it other than an appalling and growing body count. Or Jeff Bezos, whose reported interference with The Washington Post has helped reduce the one-time standard bearer of ferocious journalism to a husk of its former glory.
As President Donald Trump ordered federal troops into Chicago to assist with deportation efforts, immigrants and their advocates found an ally in Pope Leo XIV. A native of the city, the new pope urged U.S. bishops to confront the government’s escalating targeting of migrants.
After a private audience with Catholic leaders from El Paso, Texas, at the Vatican, on Oct. 8, Leo said he would like the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to issue a formal statement. His appeal followed recent comments questioning the consistency of some American Catholics’ moral stances: “Someone who says that ‘I’m against abortion, but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States,’ I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”
Alongside Bishop of El Paso Mark J. Seitz, Hope Border Institute, a grassroots organization rooted in Catholic social teaching, presented the pope with a stack of letters from immigrant community members. The letters expressed both the worries and hopes of migrants in today’s political climate and were received with emotion, said Astrid Liden, Hope’s communications officer.
Joyous Palestinians rushed to embrace prisoners freed under a U.S.-brokered ceasefire agreement as they arrived by bus to the occupied West Bank and Gaza on Monday.
The prisoners were released after the Hamas militant group freed the last 20 living hostages taken during the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks that precipitated the war in Gaza.
Under the deal, Israel is set to release 250 Palestinians convicted of murder and other serious crimes as well as 1,700 Palestinians detained in Gaza since the war began, 22 Palestinian minors, and the bodies of 360 militants.
Several thousand people gathered inside and around the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, awaiting the arrival of freed prisoners, with some waving Palestinian flags and others holding pictures of their relatives.
Fighting back tears, one woman who asked to be identified as Um Ahmed said she said that despite her joy at the release, she still had “mixed feelings” about the day.
As we enter the second week of the government shutdown, paychecks are on hold, flights are being delayed, and the political blame game is in full swing. One way or another, it will end when legislators do what they failed to do in the first place: Pass a spending bill.
Until that happens, I find it’s easy to get lost in the political soup of it all. A nonstop churn of pundits bid for the best take on what the shutdown means, which party will be held responsible, and whether a new spending bill even matters if Congress won’t do its job and enforce. Politicians point fingers, the president posts a racist deepfake, and Washington, D.C.’s bars roll out themed “unhappy hour” menus with discounts for furloughed workers. A round of “Continuing Rye-solutions,” anyone?
For as long as Lecrae has been a public figure, he has been a lightning rod for white evangelical racism.
A spearhead for the movement that turned Christian hip-hop from a misfit genre to a powerhouse industry, Lecrae has consistently endured racism thinly veiled as theological critique. While he was earning deep respect from hip-hop luminaries—Sway In the Morning and Kendrick Lamar, for example—he was fighting a Christian industry that only begrudgingly came to accept that CHH was here to stay.
Early on, critics claimed “Christian” and “hip-hop” were contradictory terms, and Christian rappers like Lecrae were putting godly messages second to godless culture. Then, as the U.S. began another reckoning with racist police violence, Lecrae was accused of division, partisanship, and putting “political issues” like racism before “biblical issues” like abortion. When he attempted dialogue, white pastors told him to his face that chattel slavery was a “white blessing.”
Pope Leo told U.S. bishops visiting him at the Vatican on Wednesday that they should firmly address how immigrants are being treated by President Donald Trump's hardline policies, attendees said, in the latest push by the pontiff on the issue.
Leo, the first U.S. pope, was handed dozens of letters from immigrants describing their fears of deportation under the Trump administration's policies during the meeting, which included bishops and social workers from the U.S.-Mexico border.
This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here.
I’m not on TikTok, so I’d never heard of 22-year-old content creator, Taylor Cassidy. Cassidy rose to prominence after she started creating engaging and easily digestible videos about Black history. During my interview with Cassidy, she told me her goal is to make sure her audience feels uplifted and excited about learning.
“You know what freedom is? No fear,” says Benicio Del Toro’s Sensei Sergio in One Battle After Another, inspiring Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson to face an authoritarian manhunt right on his family’s tail. While both Bob and Sergio are, in certain senses, doomsday preppers, they react quite differently to an impending threat. And how we react when we feel under threat makes a big difference, both to our own wellbeing and to the movements we care about.
In the film, Bob is an in-hiding former member of the far-left revolutionary group called the French 75. For the last 16 years, while raising his daughter Willa in the sanctuary city of Baktan Cross, he’s lived with an intense paranoia about her safety and the potential of his old life coming back to haunt them both.