Mitchell Atencio

A group of students, faculty, staff, and alumni from Seattle Pacific University filed a lawsuit against the university’s board of trustees after over a year of protesting policies that do not allow full-time staff and faculty in same-sex relationships to be hired.

Kate McElwee, the executive director of the Women’s Ordination Conference and one of the women at the protest, spoke with Sojourners’ Mitchell Atencio about her hope for women’s ordination, Francis’ attitude toward reforms, and the symbolic nature of their activism.

Seattle Pacific University announced on July 28 that it is suing Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson, after the attorney general opened an investigation into whether SPU was violating the state’s anti-discrimination laws. SPU, which is affiliated with the Free Methodist Church, contends that Ferguson’s investigation is a violation of the school’s religious freedom.

Ronald J. Sider, founder of Christians for Social Action and a stalwart evangelical advocate for social justice, died of a cardiac arrest on July 27. He was 82 years old.

Over the last year, the majority of Seattle Pacific University’s community has been unwavering in its affirmation of LGBTQ equality on campus ... Nevertheless, on July 1, the evangelical university’s board of trustees affirmed — for a third time in about a year — that the school would not change its employee policy.

The Supreme Court overturned 49 years of federal abortion rights on Friday, in its decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Faith leaders and advocates told Sojourners they were not surprised by the court’s decision, which was nearly identical to the draft leaked in May. However, many leaders echoed Rev. Katey Zeh, CEO of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, who told Sojourners that “the emotional impact of a moment like this can’t be underestimated.”

NATALIE BERGMAN DID NOT anticipate a particular response from Christians to her first solo album, Mercy. Released in May 2021, it was a departure from Bergman’s work with her brother in the duo Wild Belle, offering a gentler sound and deep lyrics. Yet Mercy has been hailed as a masterpiece that explores gospel through the lens of grief. Christians, particularly millennials and Gen Zers who long ago grew sick of Air1 and K-LOVE, have celebrated the work.

But Bergman wasn’t thinking about listener reaction before releasing Mercy. She wrote, produced, and mixed the album entirely by herself to process the grief after her father and stepmother were killed by a drunk driver. She said she felt “protected” in its release.

“I knew—after I put the album out—that I was going to have some sort of feedback on [Mercy] from people that are believers ... but I went into this with no fear,” Bergman told Sojourners before her March performance at Songbyrd Music House in Washington, D.C. Citing right-wing trucker protests and other authoritarian manifestations of Christianity, Bergman said she realized later it was a “kind of courageous thing to [release] this body of work, because of the political climate and because of the history that religion has.”

Mercy and the follow-up EP, Keep Those Teardrops from Falling, are fundamentally gospel in every sense of the term.

In the summer of 2009, when I was 12 years old, a street racer crashed into my grandparents' minivan. The accident, by all means, should have killed my grandad, who was in a coma for several weeks after the crash. While undergoing emergency surgeries, he lost 98 units of blood in six hours — about the blood of 10 people. They were pumping blood into him as fast as it was coming out. Ever since that day, blood donation has held a place close to my heart.

On the evening of May 2, Politico reported on a leaked draft of a Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson which, if it became official, would overturn Roe v. Wade and end federal protections of abortion rights.