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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am not the first one to say this, and it is less prophetic than just observably true: Donald Trump is consistently putting his calculus of how he can win reelection over any commitment to protect the nation’s public health.
John Lewis was a friend and mentor. As I, Jim, said when he died last Friday, John Lewis showed us the way again and again; his truth will keep marching on. I was moved to share a tweet from my son Luke, which said, “I’m honored to have ever been in the room with this man. Let’s fill these empty statue pedestals with patriots like #repjohnlewis.” Under his tweet was a picture of John Lewis holding Luke as a baby — he’s the only politician I ever let hold my child.
What’s been the message of Confederate monuments and flags? It depends on who you are.
Sandi Villarreal, the executive editor of Sojourners, a Christian social justice magazine, said that her husband, Michael Middaugh, a pastor of a Lutheran church in Silver Spring, Md., is doing the same amount, if not more, of the caretaking for their three children, ages 6, 4, and almost 1, because his schedule is more flexible than hers — for now.
The mask is off. For decades, white political leaders in the U.S. have masked their racism, subtly stoking white voters’ racial fears, grievances and even hatred of those whose skin color makes them matter less to white America. But throughout his presidency, Donald Trump has steadily moved from covertly racist rhetoric and policies to ones that are overtly so. And standing in front of Mount Rushmore on July 3, Donald Trump abandoned any remaining shred of pretense (he doesn’t like masks anyway) and delivered a speech that offered a classic defense of white nationalism in America’s past and for America’s future.
