Opinion

Emma Cieslik 5-28-2025

Pope Leo XIV walks and shakes hands at the end of a special audience with thousands of journalists and media workers in the Paul VI Hall in Vatican City. The audience with journalists has become a tradition for newly elected popes. Credit: IPA/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect.

Over a grainy international phone call, I could hear people singing at St. Peter’s Square as I spoke with BBC journalist Mark Lowen about Pope Francis. It was April 21, and I, along with two other queer Catholic advocates, Max Kuzma and Simon Fung, were reflecting on what Francis had meant for each of us and our hopes for the future of the Catholic Church.

A view of an agenda with the words "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" printed on it, on May 21, the day of a House Rules Committee's hearing on U.S. President Donald Trump's plan for extensive tax cuts. REUTERS/Nathan Howard/File Photo

This bill, which passed the Republican-controlled House of Representatives on a party-line vote, serves as a thermometer — and the reading we’re getting back is telling us that the United States of America is suffering from a dangerous fever.

Oisín Rowe 5-22-2025

PA via Reuters A rainbow flag, a symbol of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBT) pride and LGBT social movements, flies at St John the Baptist church in Felixstowe, Suffolk, after the use of prayers of blessing for same-sex couples in Church of England services were approved by the House of Bishops. Picture date: Sunday December 17, 2023.

On April 16, 2025, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom passed a ruling that the legal definition of a woman excludes transgender women in some cases. This came after the campaign group For Women Scotland fought to oppose sex-based protections for anyone not assigned female at birth. The group’s agenda had focused on the Scottish government’s interpretation of The Equality Act of 2010, which provides protections against discrimination. This ruling does not prevent trans people’s protection from discrimination as trans people, but it does reinforce the idea of a strict binary for gender.

Lamma Mansour 5-21-2025

Artist Emmalene Blake puts the finishing touches to a mural of Hind Rajab, the 6-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed in Gaza, along with several family members and paramedics, outside Dalymount Park in Dublin, ahead of the friendly match against the Palestine women's national team and Bohemians Women. Credit: PA Images via Reuters Connect

I went on a trip to the American South with the Telos Group, a nonprofit dedicated to equipping people to advocate for peace and reconciliation amid conflict. The purpose of the delegation was to help Palestinians learn about the histories and current realities of the Black and Indigenous struggle for justice in the United States.

U.S. President Donald Trump attends the National Prayer Breakfast event in Washington, U.S., February 2, 2017. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

One of the more alarming aspects of the Trump administration is the way it seeks to instrumentalize Christianity — both as a weapon against its political opponents and to reward its political supporters.

Fares Abraham 5-13-2025

Pro-Palestine protesters rally and march to commemorate the 77th anniversary of Nakba Day on Saturday, May 10, 2025 in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. The Nakba, meaning 'catastrophe' in Arabic, is marked every year by Palestinians on May 15 to remember the expulsion of hundreds of thousands from their homes and land in 1948 after the founding of Israel. Credit: Michael Nigro/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect.

On May 15, Palestinians around the world will mark Nakba Day to remember the catastrophic events of Palestinian mass displacement. In years past, this day has largely flown under the radar. But this year feels different. After the atrocities committed by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, and in the wake of the state of Israel’s mass killing of Palestinian men, women, and children along with the staggering destruction of Gaza, the world can no longer look away. The question now is whether it will summon the courage to act.

Josiah R. Daniels 5-09-2025

Graphic by Ryan McQuade/Sojourners

Since graduating, I’ve largely tried to ignore all things related to Cornerstone. Whenever I would hear news about the school — whether it involved limiting intellectual freedom, disassembling the humanities department, or dismissing employees deemed to be insufficiently conservative or supportive of the president — it only served to confirm my ignorance-is-bliss approach. For a long time, whenever I was confronted with the fact that Cornerstone had only become more restrictive since I graduated, what came to mind was the first half of a quote from the writer James Baldwin: “Not everything that is faced can be changed …”

Ian Lasch 5-02-2025

Robert F. Kennedy JR, President-Elect Donald Trump’s nominee to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, is seen in the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington DC, as he meets with Senators on Tuesday, December 17, 2024. (Photo by Aaron Schwartz/Sipa USA)

On Wednesday of Holy Week, while most Christians were preparing to proclaim the Resurrection of Christ, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made a proclamation of a different kind: “Autism destroys families.” He went on to say that autistic children “will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date, many of them will never use a toilet unassisted … ”

These remarks framing autism as an epidemic or tragedy were not simply a one-off. They are both part of and an escalation in the broader Trump administration position that accessibility — the “A” in DEIA — is a problem to be eliminated, a mindset that results in policies that are at least unfriendly, if not actively hostile, to disabled people like me.

Hoosiers protest against federal cuts by Trump and Musk for national ‘Hands off Day’ marches at the Indiana Statehouse on April, 5, 2025, in Indianapolis. USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect

There’s been plenty of coverage of what Trump and his administration have done in their first 100 days. In the conservative media ecosystem, this coverage appears as disinformation-riddled praise for how Trump has restored America’s greatness and created renewed prosperity. In mainstream media outlets, this coverage is often focused on cataloguing the harms of policies that often felt chaotic or cruel. And while I’m grateful for those who ensure the public has an accurate understanding of the impact of Trump’s decisions, there’s another set of stories beneath those headlines that rarely get as much attention: how people have consistently been taking courageous action to counter these harms.

Dean Dettloff 4-28-2025

A woman lifts the image of Pope Francis. Numerous Catholic congregations gathered in Buenos Aires' Cathedral Square to bid farewell to Pope Francis with a mass. Archbishop Jorge Ignacio García Cuerva led the celebration in front of the crowd. Afterwards, the groups made a symbolic procession around the square, led by an image of Pope Francis.

Pope Francis will be remembered as a champion for the vulnerable. The outpouring of praise from global leaders shows a near universal appreciation for his voice for justice.

Former President Joe Biden marked Francis’ death in a statement, saying the pope “commanded us to fight for peace and protect our planet from a climate crisis. He advocated for the voiceless and powerless.” President Donald Trump ordered flags to be flown at half-staff in the pope’s honor. Several other leaders in the U.S. and around the world also took time to honor Francis.

But you can’t have a voice for justice without boldly denouncing injustice, and Francis was brave enough to do so. Recalling Francis’ simplicity and humility, we must avoid the risk of erasing his courage and audacity, letting the powerful — all too keen to praise a pope whose advice they routinely ignored — off the hook in the process.

Kwaneta Harris 4-23-2025

Amanda Johnson, 31, (L) holds hands with her son Mack Darbey, 10, of Sacramento at California Institute for Women state prison in Chino, California May 5, 2012. An annual Mother's Day event, Get On The Bus, brings children in California to visit their mothers in prison. Sixty percent of parents in state prison report being held over 100 miles (161 km) from their children. Picture taken May 5, 2012 REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

At Lane Murray, where I’m incarcerated, a bureaucratic rule creates a peculiar dilemma for someone like me who finds truth and solace in both Christianity and Buddhism. The prison system demands I choose just one, but my soul refuses to be so neatly categorized. We’re also only allowed to change our religious affiliation once every six months. As if divine inspiration could ever follow an administrative calendar.

Chris Crawford 4-22-2025

Pope Francis waves as he arrives to lead the general audience in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican August 26, 2015. REUTERS/Max Rossi

The pope’s final months have felt to me like the times when my grandparents were at the end of their lives. We waited for updates from the doctors. We waited with dread for the phone call — or in this case, breaking news emails and social media posts — to bring the final news. There were moments of hope, including Pope Francis emerging from the hospital and appearing in St. Peter’s Square. But we knew that at some point, we’d be facing the loss of someone we loved.

Kaya Oakes 4-21-2025

Pope Francis leads his Wednesday general audience in Saint Peter’s Square at the Vatican November 19, 2014. REUTERS/Tony Gentile

Francis’ attempts at reforming the church often clashed with Catholicism’s growing right wing and failed to stop the flood of Catholics abandoning the church. It takes time to turn a 2,000-year-old church around, and ultimately, Francis’ papacy would be a complicated one, marred by the damage done in the church’s past, even as he tried to guide it forward into an unclear and troubling future. But like his namesake saint, he always put being a pastor first.

Jim McDermott 4-21-2025

Pope Francis looks on at the end of his pastoral visit at the parish church “Santa Maria dell’Orazione” at Setteville di Guidonia neighbourhood of Rome, March 16, 2014. REUTERS/Stefano Rellandini

When Pope Francis’ condition first began to worsen in February, I found myself suddenly feeling the kind of vertiginous paradigm shift usually reserved for the loss of close family or friends, that sense of a curtain being torn aside and a truth being revealed. The detail that really broke me was the news that as he had gotten sicker, Francis continued to text and call the people of Holy Family Parish in Gaza. It was so far beyond what anyone would expect of a critically ill 88-year-old man. And yet it crystallized for me what has been so personally important about Pope Francis: his dedication to welcoming those on the margins.

Josiah R. Daniels 4-17-2025

Jennifer Vasquez Sura, wife of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, speaks during a press conference on the day of a hearing in the case related to Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran man who was deported without due process by the U.S. President Donald Trump administration to a prison in El Salvador, outside U.S. District Court in Greenbelt, Maryland, U.S., April 15, 2025. REUTERS/Leah Millis TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY

At some point this Easter Weekend, Christians will be reflecting on the final words that Jesus spoke from the cross, sometimes referred to as the seven last words of Jesus. 

When I was younger, I was convinced that System of a Down’s “Chop Suey!” was a Christian song because lead vocalist and lyricist Serj Tankian incorporated Jesus’ final declarations into the song. But dissimilar to the order that Christians have typically arranged Jesus’ final words, the song first quotes the cry of reunion and then climaxes with the cry of dereliction.

Considering that the Roman Empire believed Jesus was a terrorist and crucified him as one, emphasizing the cry of dereliction seems apt.

In observance of Holy Week, people walk along the Brooklyn Bridge as they attend an annual Good Friday procession emulating Christ's walk to Calvary on March 29, 2024. (Photo by Anthony Behar/Sipa USA)

Reading these passages today, Jesus’ trial is a striking example of the interplay between the political power brokers who condemn Jesus to death and the crowds who cried out to Jesus days earlier for deliverance. While Pilate is responsible, he uses the crowd’s actions as cover, absolving himself of responsibility for deciding Jesus’ fate. Reading this story amid the deeply concerning judicial drama playing out in real time between the Trump administration and courts, I’m reminded of the role we all can play when we collectively act — or fail to act — in support of justice.

Tyler Huckabee 4-16-2025


"Make empathy great again" Anti-Trump protest in Brussels, Belgium. Credit: Unsplash/Floris Van Cauwelaert.

“The problem with the meritocracy ... [is that it] leeches all the empathy out of your society.”

The right-wing political commentator Tucker Carlson said that back in 2017 and, by my lights, there’s a kernel of truth there. It almost echoes the early 20th-century sociologist Max Weber’s critique of the Protestant work ethic, how Americans are trained to see wealth as a just reward for living a good life and poverty as punishment for living a bad one; an economic spin on Calvinism. Even if you think Carlson is a reactionary grifter (which I do), I think he’s onto something here.

Ryan Duncan 4-16-2025

A person recently deported by the U.S. government to be imprisoned in the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) sits on the floor, as part of an agreement with the Salvadoran government, in Tecoluca, El Salvador, March 16, 2025. Credit: Reuters.

This past March, the Trump administration deported over 200 men to El Salvador to be held in the notorious maximum-security prison known as the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo.

White House spokespersons have repeatedly claimed that these men — most of whom are of Venezuelan background — are members of the Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua.

However, multiple outlets have reported that neither the U.S. government nor El Salvador have provided any evidence to support these accusations.

Nathanael Andrade 4-14-2025

‘Ecce Homo’ (Behold the Man), by 19th-century painter Antonio Ciseri, depicts Pontius Pilate presenting Jesus to a crowd in Jerusalem. Tungsten/Galleria d'Arte Moderna via Wikimedia Commons.

It’s a straightforward part of the Easter story: The Roman governor Pontius Pilate had Jesus of Nazareth killed by his soldiers. He imposed a sentence that Roman judges often inflicted on social subversives – crucifixion.

The New Testament Gospels say so. The Nicene Creed, one of Christianity’s key statements of faith, says Jesus “was crucified under Pontius Pilate.” The testimony of Paul, the first person whose preaching in the name of Jesus Christ is preserved in the New Testament, refers to the crucifixion.

But over the past 2,000 years, it was common for some Christians to deem Pilate almost blameless for Jesus’ death and treat Jews as responsible – a belief that has shaped the global history of antisemitism.

A man walks past dollars stickers on glass outside a foreign exchange house, after U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that he would temporarily lower new tariffs on many countries, in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico on April 9. REUTERS/Jose Luis Gonzalez

In these tumultuous moments, I’m tempted to worry about my own retirement savings — a threat that is especially acute for those nearing retirement. These are real fears. Yet, as Christians, we also must pay attention to those who will feel the most severe impacts of this economic malpractice. And the sad truth is that these reckless tariffs will be especially harmful for people who don’t even have a 401(k), let alone any way to seek redress for U.S. government policies likely to increase inflation and spark a recession.