“We had a prayer meeting [Monday] morning with dozens and dozens of people from all different traditions, from bishops to people sitting in the pews,” Cannon told Sojourners. “We’ll have another prayer gathering on Wednesday morning. We’re grieving, we’re lamenting, and we’re also working really hard.”
“They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain...” —Isaiah 11:9
Pope Francis called for an end to attacks and violence in Israel and Gaza on Sunday, saying terrorism and war would not solve any problems, but only bring further suffering and death to innocent people.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the birth of hip-hop. From the rubble of gentrification and political abandonment in New York’s South Bronx, overlooked Black and brown kids used turntables and records to create new words and beats, movement and art. They built community and kinship, created meaning and culture, and developed self-worth in a world that hated them. “We were creating something that took up our time and made us feel good and brought us together,” Easy A.D., a member of Cold Crush Brothers, told oral historian Jonathan Abrams. “You have to imagine walking out your house every day and seeing abandoned cars burnt up, empty buildings, and you’re going to elementary school.”
At the first 2024 Republican presidential primary debate on Aug. 23, presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy called for a return to involuntary institutionalization of “violent, psychiatrically deranged people” as a solution for our country’s gun violence epidemic.
His voice joins that of former Vice President Mike Pence who made a similar call at an NRA convention in April. Democrats are also pushing for the involuntary institutionalization of people: Last November, Democratic New York City Mayor Eric Adams laid out a plan for involuntary hospitalization as a solution for addressing homelessness, and Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom recently amended his proposed $6 billion mental health bond language that would have prohibited involuntary psychiatric institutionalization. Pence, Adams, and Newsom identify as Christian.
The word “monster” originates with the Latin words for “omen” or “warning.” The best monster stories teach us about ourselves — about the evil that lurks in our own spirits. That’s something horror stories and the Enneagram have in common.
Pope Francis on Wednesday appealed to climate change deniers and foot-dragging politicians to have a change of heart, saying they cannot gloss over its human causes or deride scientific facts while the planet “may be nearing the breaking point.”
In launching The Reconstruct, Sojourners’ newest newsletter, we hope to continue what we have been doing, but with more regularity: Offering thoughtful, constructive conversations with folks who are changing the world and reforming our faith.
Ashon T. Crawley, author, artist, and professor of religious studies and African American and African studies at the University of Virginia, constructed a memorial for Black church choir directors who died during the U.S. HIV/AIDS crisis. The exhibit, “HOMEGOING,” told the story of the musicians who, as he puts it, “died within a kind of epistemological moment,” where to be a musician in the Black church was to be understood as gay, to be gay was to be understood as HIV-positive, and vice versa.
As a Jewish atheist, I’m not invested in arguments about which version of Christianity is truer. However, I am skeptical when I hear Christians respond to Christian nationalism by distinguishing it from “true,” “Christlike,” “pure,” or “orthodox” Christianity. If Christianity is only true Christianity when it is good or kind, then no “true” Christian ever does anything bad. That makes it easy to dismiss Inquisitors and slaveholders alike in the past, and it makes it easy to dismiss structural power to do harm that you may have as a Christian now as well.