Interview
Brad Onishi is the co-host of a podcast titled Straight White American Jesus. With co-host Daniel Miller, Onishi examines and deconstructs evangelical politics, theology, and culture. Onishi, who has a doctorate in religious studies, told me that when they began the podcast in 2018, he wasn’t sure if anyone would listen. But now, almost 900 episodes later, they’ve “commented on every angle and every aspect of Christian nationalism, the Trump presidencies, the Biden presidency, and everything in between: from gender to race, sexuality, church politics, and so on.”
You can add Nathan Evans Fox to the list of artists who are in the country music scene without entirely being of it. Or maybe it’s better to say Fox is operating in a purer, livelier stratosphere of country music that neither needs nor wants the approval of the Nashville ruling class. So far, he’s doing just fine. His “Hillbilly Hymn (Okra and Cigarettes)” made a viral splash; a rich tune in the tradition of old Appalachian spirituals that envisions a cop-free Heaven where “the rich get scared” and “the guns are all for shootin’ clays.”
Some may want me to stay quiet, but I want to be loud. I want to scream. I want to cry. I want to embrace the full spectrum of my humanity, the same way that author Austin Channing Brown has learned to embrace herself. In her upcoming book, Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-Possession, she details this journey.
Most would agree with the Nigerian-British singer-songwriter Sade that we don’t need any more war, but we are in desperate need of just a little peace. So, what do we do when it becomes clear that the people advocating for that peace are being thrown in prison or portrayed as “terrorists” who are interfering with the “peace process” in the Middle East due to their advocacy for Palestinian human rights?
Mohsen Mahdawi, who is a legal permanent resident in the U.S., was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on April 14 as he exited his citizenship interview at a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Vermont. President Donald Trump’s administration accused Mahdawi of potentially undermining the peace process in the Middle East. But despite this accusation, the government has not charged Mahdawi with a crime. Mahdawi was released from detention on April 30 after U.S. District Judge Geoffrey Crawford granted him bail, commenting that Mahdawi had “made substantial claims that his detention was in retaliation for his protected speech.”
I’ve interviewed celebrities and entertainers before, and my main complaint is always this: They tend to dodge tough topics, which then results in pretty dull conversations.
So when I got on the phone with Christian hip-hop artist Dylan Phillips, whose stage name is nobigdyl., I thought getting him to say anything interesting would be about as hard as fishing for catfish.
But I didn't have to fish long before I realized that nobigdyl. was more than willing to tackle difficult subjects.
Some of the discourse surrounding the LA protests reminds me of similar things I heard back in 2014, too. On the one hand, you have centrists and liberal pundits who are lecturing protesters about needing to remain nonviolent — which is quite easy to suggest from a work-from-home station largely insulated from the raids that working class Angelinos are enduring. On the other hand, there are the cynics — a group that, despite my best efforts, I sometimes find myself identifying with — and they are asking if protesting makes any difference at all
In her personal mission statement, Matthews says she strives “to amplify the voices of the unheard, to shed light on the unseen, and to be a steadfast reminder that hope, and love are the truest pathways to equity and justice." Influenced by Bernice Johnson Reagon, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke, Melissa Etheridge, Ani DiFranco, and, of course, Tracy Chapman, to whom she has often been compared, Matthews brings her whole self into her work.
In NPR’s Alternate Realities, Zack Mack, who is a podcast producer and storyteller, hosts a three-part series about his father falling down the conspiracy rabbit hole and the effect it has on his family. After challenging his dad about his conspiratorial thinking, his father responded by suggesting they make a bet: He would make 10 predictions that he believed would come to pass before the end of 2024, and for each one he got right, Mack would pay him $1,000. For each one he got incorrect, he would pay his son $1,000. Mack’s dad, who is a Christian, was certain that his predictions were ironclad.
After the COVID-19 pandemic, I started paying more attention to what I was wearing. It had been a year of sweatpants and T-shirts, and I was ready to switch things up to be presentable for the outside world. So, I started doing research on places that put time and effort into well-made pieces of clothing that look good, are built to last, and are ethically produced by people who care about their employees. And for menswear, you don’t have to do much of that kind of research before you start seeing the name 3sixteen everywhere.
R.O. Kwon, the bestselling novelist of The Incendiaries and Exhibit, does not believe in God. Even so, Kwon’s writing about God and faith feels more familiar to me than that of many who do believe.
As someone who very strongly believes in God, I find that kinship feels a little scary and a little dangerous. To avoid too much psychoanalyzing, it makes it feel like the waters between belief and unbelief are rather porous. This line of thought is tempting to run from, as all scary things are, but it’s here that I return to Kwon’s work.
Christian nationalist ideology expanding to nonwhite and non-Christian populations is a particular area of interest for Eric L. McDaniel, who is a professor in the department of government at the University of Texas at Austin. In The Everyday Crusade: Christian Nationalism in American Politics, McDaniel and his co-authors, Irfan Nooruddin and Allyson F. Shortle, explore how religious nationalist ideology is gaining influence with the American public.
Recently, I got to visit Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, a historic site where the National Park Service presents a lecture on the church’s history and impact in the city. A key figure in the presentation is Martin Luther King Sr., a Civil Rights leader even before his son became the better known MLK.
I loved the presentation, but something kept gnawing at me as I left. The park ranger who gave the presentation would often pause to interject on the greatness of Rev. King — praise he deserves — but at times he would slip into a sort of deification. King lost his namesake son and his wife to assassinations, and he managed to publicly proclaim love and forgiveness for their killers. The ranger seemed under the impression this came out of a superhuman reserve of grace that he and the rest of us could never achieve. While I understood the point, I wondered if Daddy King (as he was called) would have agreed.
Alissa Wilkinson, a movie critic at The New York Times and a Didion expert, is especially interested in how Hollywood continues to use such cliches when telling stories. Her newest book, We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion in the American Dream Machine, is an exploration of Didion’s writing in connection to the movie business and how her observations about Hollywood can help us interpret the current political landscape
Bishop Mariann Budde got a lot of attention at President Donald Trump's inauguration when she called on him to be merciful to those he had attacked during his campaign. Now, she reflects on her word choice, why she believes “mercy” was the right word, and the tension of leading a church through a political minefield.
Peter Beinart, author of Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, rejects the idea that the liberation of Palestine is an antimsemitic project. In fact, he argues that Zionism has become an idol for some Jewish leaders, and advocating for Palestinian people
The Constitution isn’t just a symbol, it’s the base document for our democratic republic. And Jamelle Bouie says that in a time of crisis, it's important to remember that in a democracy, we have ownership over its meaning.
The term “woke” has become something of an anathema in recent years. Those on the Right use “woke” to disparage anything they think of as social justice or political correctness. Those on the Left initially deployed the term to describe a person who was socially conscious, but after it became apparent that banks and corporations were adopting “woke” coded language, and that the semantics of “wokeism” were more performative than substantive, “woke” fell out of vogue.
The culture war and a moral panic around "wokeness" has many in Christian higher education living in fear. Now, one former educator is charting a new path.
Yanan Rahim Navarez Melo is a theologian getting his MDiv at Princeton Theological Serminary. He's also an artist pushing the boundaries of a burgeoning genre known as postclassical music. Here's how he sees these two areas of study overlapping.
As a theologian, ethicist, professor, priest, and author, Gary Dorrien has helped shape and excavate the overlap between social justice and faith for nearly 50 years. He has written definitively as a historian and prophetically as an activist, all while teaching generations as a professor of religion. Now, he explains why it was time to tell his own story.