Source: Christianity Today | Rebecca Randall

Speaking this week on behalf of an Oklahoma death row inmate who claims he did not commit the murder for which he’s served 20 years in prison, pastor T. D. Jakes said, “If Jesus acquitted the guilty, then surely he would advocate for the innocent.”

Source: Los Angeles Times | Jaweed Kaleem

Signers of letter, called “Say No To Christian Nationalism,” included Jerushah Duford, the granddaughter of the late Rev. Billy Graham, and the Rev. Jim Wallis, the founder of Sojourners, a prominent progressive Christian advocacy organization.

Source: Religion News Service | Adelle M. Banks

Sojourners founder Jim Wallis expressed his concern that “the risk of false testimony, the evidence of racism, and the finality of a death sentence” are reasons for a commutation for Jones, a Black man convicted in the death of a white man.

Source: HuffPost | Carol Kuruvilla

Rev. Adam Russell Taylor, president of the progressive faith organization Sojourners, told HuffPost that conspiracy groups like the Proud Boys are “antithetical to the Christian faith and values.”

Source: The Tablet | Liz Dodd

The Evangelical preacher who is a leading voice on the religious left says that the idol of white supremacy underpins conservative Catholicism in the United States as well as the conservative Protestant Churches.

Source: Religion News Service | Jack Jenkins

They were joined by the Rev. Eugene Cho, CEO of the Christian advocacy group Bread for the World; Lisa Sharon Harper, author, activist and founder and president of FreedomRoad.us; the Rev. Jim Wallis, founder of Christian advocacy group Sojourners; Shane Claiborne, founding member of The Simple Way; and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, an evangelical Christian author, minister and activist.

Source: The Hill | Eboo Patel

As our friend Rev. Jim Wallis, who also served with us on President Obama’s Faith Council, often said, there should indeed be a separation of church and state, but not a divide between government, diverse religious communities and issues of moral concern.

Source: Bloomberg | Francis Wilkinson

Sojourners, a pillar of the American religious left that was founded during the Vietnam War, is working on its own curriculum to address polarization in churches.

Source: Religion News Service | Yonat Shimron and Adelle M. Banks

The effort began when Mohamed Elsanousi, executive director of the Network for Religious and Traditional Peacemakers and former director of interfaith relations for the Islamic Society of North America, reached out to Sojourners founder Jim Wallis and other faith leaders who had organized a COVID-19-related National Day of Mourning and Lament on June 1.

Source: The Washington Post | Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Even today, there are influential evangelicals like the Rev. Jim Wallis who argue that true evangelicalism embraces a progressive social vision, not the “bigotry, xenophobia and misogyny” of the Trump era.

Source: Associated Press | Elana Schor

Jim Wallis, founder of the Christian social justice group Sojourners and a lead organizer of the event, said he hoped to see the faithful “move beyond the emotions of anger and fear” and toward the moral truth of communal reconciliation.

Source: Religion News Service | Jim Wallis

What has been happening since the outcome of the November presidential election has been historic: continuous acts of sedition aimed at overturning the results of an American election by the current president of the United States.

Source: The New York Times | Nicholas Kristof

Welcome to the latest in my occasional series of conversations about Christianity. Here’s my interview with the Rev. Jim Wallis, an evangelical Christian pastor, author and justice activist.

Source: Religion News Service | Jim Wallis

At a recent annual meeting, seminary presidents in the Southern Baptist Convention reasserted the SBC’s dismissal of critical race theory, which examines the issues of embedded racism across institutions and culture in American society.

Source: Religion News Service | Bob Smietana

The Rev. Adam Taylor has been named the new president of Sojourners, the national Christian social justice advocacy organization founded and led by the Rev. Jim Wallis since the 1970s.

Source: Associated Press | Elana Schor, Luis Andres Henao, and Jessie Wardarski

In nine of those battleground states, the Lawyers and Collars initiative – part of a partnership between multiple faith-based and civil rights groups – has signed up more than 100 religious leaders to serve as poll chaplains at more than 60 voting sites. The initiative also partners faith leaders and lawyers at polling places considered particularly vulnerable to disruption.“We’ve never done it at this level before,” said the Rev.

Source: Religion News Service | Jim Wallis

Last week, I sat on my couch watching a news report on long lines forming for early voting in Texas and Georgia — record turnouts despite cuts in the number of polling places and ballot drop boxes, ordered by those states’ white, Republican governors in an attempt to suppress the vote.

 

Source: The New York Times | Nicholas Kristof

There’s nothing inherently conservative about evangelical Christianity, for Black evangelicals mostly vote Democratic and there is a long tradition of liberal evangelicals from Martin Luther King Jr. to Jimmy Carter to the writer Jim Wallis. But in recent decades, white evangelicals have mostly voted Republican, and Duford and others engaged in the new outreach acknowledge that many find it somewhere between scary and unthinkable to break that tradition.

Source: The New York Times | Sandi Villarreal

Throughout the spring, I knew that I was deteriorating physically. The room would randomly spin around me, fatigue would set in and migraines would hit, distorting my vision and making it nearly impossible to look at a screen.

 

Source: Religion News Service | Jim Wallis

In nearly every presidential election cycle, a narrow set of so-called religious issues comes to the fore. In recent decades that set has been abortion, LGBTQ rights and religious liberty. Candidates fall on one side or the other, and predictable controversies erupt. It’s exhausting to see people of faith lumped into a media narrative that largely only follows white Christians.