Tyler Huckabee is the managing editor of sojo.net. He is originally from the Great Plains but now lives in Nashville with his wife.
Tyler has come a long way from writing Narnia fanfic in the third grade. Much of his writing has centered on the intersection of faith, justice, and pop culture, which he has written about for the Washington Post, The Week, Religion News Service, and Sojourners. He is also interested in David Lynch, Bruce Springsteen, Lana Del Rey, Kendrick Lamar, Nick Cave, and Marvel Comics, but he mostly writes about those things on his own time.
Tyler lived in Chicago for several years, working in low-income communities with people who taught him where to look for Jesus on earth. Now he uses writing and editing to pass those lessons along.
When he's not writing, he's watching old movies or trying to get his dogs to sit still.
Speaking Topics
- Writing About Pop Culture from a Faith Context
- Deconstruction and What Comes Next
- Moving Beyond Toxic Masculinity
- Writing About Faith and Justice in the Social Media Age
- Discernment in an Age of Misinformation
Speaking Format
- Virtual and in-person
- Writing workshops
Languages
- English
Posts By This Author
‘Brand New Day’ Makes Peace with the Powers of Surveillance
Midway through Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Peter Parker (Tom Holland) needs to track down the escaped villain Scorpion, so he tells his NYPD contact, Detective Jean DeWolff (Liza Colón-Zayas), that he’s going to hack every security camera in New York City to find his face.
Reckoning With the Youth Groups That Raised Us
We were meant to live for so much more. But we lost ourselves.
“DO YOU WANT to go on a walk?”
I was 16, on a youth group trip near Los Angeles. The specifics of why our Lincoln, Neb., youth group went to a Christian camp halfway across the country have blurred over the intervening years. But I remember when a girl about my age asked if we could go on a walk. I didn’t know her well, but she clearly had something she needed to get off her chest and must have figured my ears were as good as anyone’s.
We walked a trail on the outskirts of the camp, cheap buildings sprinkled across the desert, pockmarked with firepits, a basketball court, and a swimming pool with a handwritten “T-shirts must be worn at all times” sign duct-taped near the entrance. As we walked, she unloaded her raw feelings about youth group: In brief, where exactly did all these hypocrites get off?
We were already old enough to have seen plenty of youth ministers fall prey to scandal. And as for the youth group kids, were we really any better off than our non-youth group peers? Didn’t we have the same social hierarchies, and all the bullies, outcasts, and smutty gossip that comes along with them? The girl was having a crisis of faith, but it wasn’t about whether she believed Christianity was true; she doubted if anyone else really believed it. Gesturing dramatically to the entirety of our ramshackle camp she cried, “What’s the point of any of this?”
Forgiving Graham Platner Isn’t Our Business
My wife is a novelist, and she’ll tell you that the best surprise ending should feel initially shocking but inevitable in hindsight. That’s an apt descriptor of this horrible Graham Platner arc.
Proverbs Gave Me a Better Way to See Trump's Iran Deal
Sometimes the book of Proverbs can seem a little simplistic, its cause-and-effect declarations sounding nice but not very realistic. Proverbs 10:28 teaches us that “the prospect of the righteous is joy, but the hopes of the wicked come to nothing.” As Jake tells Brett at the end of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
‘The Sheep Detectives’ Is ‘Babe’ Meets ‘Knives Out’ Meets Jesus
“Do you know what humans call stupid people who can't think for themselves?” one sheep pointedly asks another in director Kyle Balda’s The Sheep Detectives.
The other sheep, a bit dim, responds: “Ducks?”
A murder mystery that casts a flock of talking sheep in the Hercule Poirot role sounds like a mildly diverting kids’ cartoon from one of Disney’s less inspired eras. And yet, my interest was piqued when I saw the script came from Craig Mazin, who’s been delivering television wonders like Chernobyl and The Last of Us. Working off Leonie Swann’s hit novel, Mazin turns this cutesy premise into a profoundly moving meditation on memory, belonging, and mortality. Throw in a game voice cast and a juicy puzzle and you’ve got Babe meets Knives Out, with all the wit, charm, and twists those comparisons invite. It’s a real contender for 2026’s biggest surprise.
A Christian ‘Conversion Therapy Dropout’ on the Supreme Court’s Decision
On March 31, the Supreme Court sided with a Christian therapist in Colorado and tossed out the state’s ban on conversion therapy for minors. The therapist, Kaley Chiles, challenged the state’s ban on the grounds that it violated her First Amendment rights. The Court agreed with Chiles by an 8-to-1 vote.
Gavin Newsom Wants to Overcome Evil With Evil
I want to talk about a Christian response to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s campaign, and to do that, we need to start with Batman.
John Perkins’ Legacy of Reconciliation in 10 Quotes
John Perkins, a pioneering Civil Rights activist and Baptist leader who devoted his life to racial reconciliation and justice, died on Friday. He was 95.
Kings Start Wars. Christians Stop Them
After I saw that President Donald Trump had ordered attacks on Iran, I thought about the passage in 1 Samuel in which the Israelite elders get fed up with being run by a series of judges and ask for a king. The prophet Samuel, after praying over the matter, urges them to rethink the request, reciting a laundry list of all the things a king will do to the people.
The Cowardice at the Heart of the Trump Administration
Last week, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt threw a performative tantrum when asked about the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who shot and killed Renee Nicole Macklin Good in Minneapolis. During a lengthy and frankly exhausting tirade in which she berated The Hill reporter Niall Stanage as “a leftwing hack,” Leavitt unloaded with some rhetoric about the crimes of undocumented immigrants.
“I bet you never even read about Laken Riley or Jocelyn Nungaray or all of the innocent Americans who were killed at the hand of illegal aliens in this country,” she said. “And the brave men and women of ICE are doing everything in their power to remove those heinous individuals and make our communities safer.”
‘Abolish ICE’ Is the Cry of the Prophets
The book of Amos tells us of a priest named Amaziah, who is depicted as something of a rival prophet to Amos himself. The book itself is full of Amos’ harsh words against Israel’s exploitation of the poor and greedy indulgence of the rich, as well as prophetic calls to repentance before God’s judgment falls on the whole nation.
Knives Out’s Rian Johnson Says He Will Always Be a Youth Group Kid
One of the stranger moviegoing experiences of my life was walking out from The Last Jedi and feeling sure I’d experienced a masterpiece. I’m not the most devoted Star Wars fan, but I thought I’d seen something special. I still do. So, you can imagine my surprise when the rest of the world was, shall we say, a little divided on The Last Jedi.
I’m not here to relitigate that whole exhausting conversation now. But while watching that movie, I felt a connection to the filmmaker, Rian Johnson. Something in the way he navigated the power of belief, the handing down of received wisdom, and the challenges of carving new paths in old traditions spoke to me. I was not surprised to later learn that Johnson had been raised in the church, and I was delighted when he decided to take that as both the theme and setting of the third Knives Out film, his wildly popular murder mystery franchise starring Daniel Craig’s Foghorn Leghorn-throated detective Benoit Blanc.
Charlie Brown and Sufjan Know the ‘Good Grief’ of Christmas
Sufjan Stevens’ Songs for Christmas boxset includes a memoir essay about how the smell of a burning spatula sent him tumbling into old Christmas memories and, eventually, something like a spiritual revelation—“a tragic-comic-sentimental shock that was simultaneously mundane and supernatural.”
In the vision Stevens describes, the smell of melting plastic becomes a portal to the whole universe, past and present, and “at the very center of the universe I saw the Christ Child … This was the mysterious Incarnation of God. It feels about right that Stevens would treat Christmas like both a theological mystery and a craft-store accident.
Sojourners’ Top Movies of 2025
For five years now, Sojourners has created a list of our favorite films of the year. And because we’re Sojourners and not Vulture or IndieWire, our list follows a different set of priorities. We only focus on films that are concerned with spirituality or justice (or when we’re really lucky, both).
This year, more than any of the other four years we’ve done this round-up, I was struck by the sheer number of films grappling with faith and justice.
Finding the Apostle Paul in the Epstein Files
As the Apostle Paul warns us in 1 Timothy 6:9: “But those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction.” And if you want proof of Paul’s words, look no further than the release of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails.
The Moral Lesson Buried in Last Week’s ‘Blue Wave’
Following a stronger-than-expected showing from Democratic candidates in last week’s elections, there's been a lot of media discourse about what the party can learn from these wins. Much of the focus has been on Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory in New York City.
Bruce Springsteen Understands Depression. His Biopic Doesn't
Here’s a story that never grows tired of the telling: Bruce Springsteen, on the cusp of greatness following a string of instant classic albums that turned a scrawny New Jersey hippie into a bona fide rock star, pivoted to a spare, gothic folk album. Nebraska mystified and frustrated executives, who couldn’t understand why the Boss would zag into such commercially unviable territory with a fuzzy, warbly collection of bedroom demos about losers and outlaws on the fringes of society, but it made sense to Springsteen. To hear him tell the tale, it was the only thing his personal demons would allow him to release at the time, and he didn’t feel comfortable releasing Born in the U.S.A.— the album that would solidify his legacy—until he’d exorcised Nebraska.
Writer and director Scott Cooper brings this story to the screen in thew new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, working off Warren Zanes’ book about Nebraska. Jeremy Allen White is tasked with playing Springsteen, and he does a nice job of it. In a scene near the end, White’s Springsteen finally sits down with a therapist and tries to open up, but only sobs can come out. It’s powerful. White long ago mastered portraying this sort of incoherent anguish on The Bear, and he’s extremely effective as a man struggling with emotions he can’t articulate. It’s too bad the movie doesn’t deserve his performance. The script is riddled with musical biopic cliches and, more damning, a poor grasp of what depression is.
A Christian Plan to Help Billionaires
Are billionaires the reason we can’t have nice things? It’s tempting to think so.
Consider Elon Musk, having been messily ejected from President Donald Trump’s orbit after his DOGE project ended in failure, with little to show for it other than an appalling and growing body count. Or Jeff Bezos, whose reported interference with The Washington Post has helped reduce the one-time standard bearer of ferocious journalism to a husk of its former glory.
Jimmy Kimmel in the Lion's Den
“On Sunday, Erika Kirk forgave the man who shot her husband,” Jimmy Kimmel told his live studio audience on Tuesday night, his first show back after a six-day suspension following his musings on Charlie Kirk’s assassination. “She forgave him.”
“That is an example we should follow,” Kimmel continued, his voice cracking with emotion. “If you believe in the teachings of Jesus, as I do, there it was. That’s it. A selfless act of grace, forgiveness from a grieving widow that touched me deeply. And if there’s anything we can take from this tragedy, I hope it’s that.”
God’s Not All Powerful. And Here’s Why That’s Good
When Robert Redford was 18 years old, his mother died—suddenly and young—following complications from delivering twin girls who did not live long. This harrowing loss left young Redford disillusioned with God. “I’d had religion pushed on me since I was a kid,” he would tell Michael Feeney Callan, his biographer. “But after Mom died, I felt betrayed by God.”