Commentary
Photo by Sally Hayden / SOPA Images Limited / Alamy
IN MAY 1933, Nazi-influenced student groups publicly burned more than 25,000 books by Jewish authors and those deemed liberal or leftist in 34 university towns across Germany. Newspapers supported it as “action against the un-German spirit,” and Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, said to a crowd of 40,000 that “the era of extreme Jewish intellectualism is now at an end. ... The future German man will not just be a man of books, but a man of character.”
This antisemitic act of censorship and intolerance is memorialized at the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum in Jerusalem, where a display about book burnings sets the tone for the rest of the museum. Before you enter the display on the rise of Nazism, you must first consider the gravity of book burnings. A prophetic quote from 19th century German poet Heinrich Heine concludes the display: “Where books are burned, human beings are destined to be burned too.”
Across the city, in East Jerusalem, is the Palestinian-run Educational Bookshop. It consists of an English store, which doubles as a coffee shop, workspace, and community hub, and an Arabic store across the road. This family-owned business, which opened in 1984, sells all sorts of titles related to Palestine. There are Palestinian books on cooking, art, and history; there are novels, textbooks, and children’s books. The Educational Bookshop carries titles that are hard to find within Israel, and on a Sunday afternoon in February, this popular bookstore was raided by undercover Israeli police for the first time.
“They came into the shop with a search warrant,” Ahmad Muna, assistant manager of the shop, told me. “They demanded a search that happened over the course of two hours. The officers were aggressive, brutal, were not polite.” According to Muna, the officers didn’t speak Arabic or English; at first they used Google Translate to figure out book titles.
“At some point they had enough of Google Translate,” Muna said, “It was getting too tedious. So, they started to judge the books by their covers, by the design, by the picture on the cover, any book that had the flag of Palestine, any book that had a picture of a prisoner, of a boy being arrested, a picture of the wall, a picture of a Palestinian flag, it was confiscated.”
Police took away about 300 books in trash bags. Muna and his uncle were arrested and detained for two nights. After release, both were put under house arrest for five days and banned from entering their shop for more than two weeks.
retrorocket / iStock
I WAS STANDING at a bus stop in northern Virginia this spring with another dad putting his kids on the bus. He is a federal employee coping with the sudden precarity of the career he pursued to support his family. President Donald Trump’s executive order in February that directed federal agencies to submit plans for “large-scale reductions in force” may leave this dad out of work.
President Trump’s deployment of billionaire Elon Musk to dismantle the federal government fulfills a long-held dream for some. Since the mid-1980s, certain far-right Republicans have wanted to enact political strategist Grover Norquist’s mantra: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”
Well, “government” is “people.” Real people. There are 2.4 million federal employees, not including the military or the postal service. Under the Trump administration, they wake up each day not knowing whether the world’s richest man and the world’s most powerful man will decide that they no longer have a job.
Federal workers are only one sector in Trump’s bull’s eye. This administration is attempting to erase the existence of transgender and other gender-diverse people: A day one executive order proclaims that “it is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable.” Trump has banned trans people from women’s sports and the military and now is attempting to eliminate gender-affirming medical care for people under 19. Immigrants are also facing a terrifying crackdown. Immigration enforcement officials arrested more people in the first 22 days of February this year than in any month for the past seven years, according to The Guardian. Green-card holders have been deported for their political activities. Immigrants accused of gang membership were flown to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador in open defiance of court orders.
Sipa USA / Alamy
AT TIMES, WHITE HOUSE press secretary Karoline Leavitt proudly wears a gold cross when meeting with the press pool. Many assume she emerges from the heart of right-wing American evangelicalism. But they would be wrong. Leavitt emerges from the heart of right-wing American Catholicism. While we have been focused on the fusion of evangelical Christianity and Far Right nationalism, we’ve missed how Christian nationalism has risen in Catholic and Orthodox traditions. Are former evangelicals — or “exvangelicals” — who resist Christian nationalism also contributing to its smokescreen?
“Christian nationalism” is an idea from academia that has become a bit overused. Fortunately, sociologists Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry provide a narrower, more workable definition. Christian nationalism, they write, is an “ideology that idealizes and advocates a fusion of Christianity and American civic life.”
In the past 50 years, this ideology has increasingly emerged as a visible force in American life, as the Religious Right walked onto the political scene and into the center of the Republican Party. For all that time, the image in the popular mind of the Christian nationalist has been stereotypically the (often Southern, but not always) white evangelical denizen of megachurches replete with rock bands and biblical literalism.
Colorado was one of the epicenters of that subculture, in part due to James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, based in Colorado Springs. I grew up in that region when the subculture was reaching its zenith in the 1990s, and it was clear that our evangelical neighbors did not think of my family’s Greek Orthodox faith as “Christian.” As a marginal minority in a context where evangelical Christians dominated the state’s cultural and political life, this experience prompted my interest in the history of religion; specifically, in how people construct idiosyncratic versions of history and identity for political ends. Over the years, I’ve watched the Religious Right morph into something new and virulent. Many of those raised in its most extreme cultures have migrated out of nondenominational evangelicalism to Orthodox Christianity or Catholicism. Others left Christianity altogether, joining the unaffiliated or “nones.” Many of the millennial (born between 1981 and 1996) and Generation Z (1997 to 2012) children of American evangelicalism became disaffected with their upbringing and the limited worldview it offered.
Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
THE WORD “SERMON,” like “lecture,” is an ambiguous one: both a genre of speech and a shorthand for our worst ways of speaking to one another. Outside of a religious context (and to be honest, sometimes even inside one), who wants to be preached at?
Those connotations of arrogance and superiority likely come from authentic experience. But they also miss something important about the sermon as a genre: its foundation in humility, in the practices of reading, reflecting on, and speaking on someone else’s text.
In his 1990 farewell sermon as pastor of Concord Baptist Church in New York, Gardner C. Taylor, one of the great preachers of the civil rights era, asked for forgiveness “if I ever tried to make the Word of God mean what I wanted it to mean.” Sermons (in Christian tradition, as well as in my Jewish tradition) are public acts of commentary. And, as Taylor reminds us, serious commentary is a morally consequential act, because it requires putting one’s own priorities and intentions second to those of the text, an act which is always, at least a little, selfless. At the heart of a sermon is the tension between what the text seems to say and what the preacher wants to say with the text.
When I read or listen to a sermon — even one as politically memorable as Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde’s sermon at the national prayer service following President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2025 — I try to keep that basic question in mind: What text is she preaching on?
stuartmiles99 / iStock
IT SHOULD HAVE surprised no one when Donald Trump, who boasted to a New York City crowd, “On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history to get the criminals out,” began carrying out his promise on Inauguration Day. Immigrants have been the target of Trump’s most aggressive rhetoric since he entered politics a decade ago, and he loves hyperbole. Trump is making the removal of migrants a centerpiece of his new administration by declaring a state of emergency on the U.S.-Mexico border, mobilizing National Guard units, and sending troops to do his bidding. The warlike imagery and language he uses are hard to hold alongside the Christian belief that we are all created in God’s image.
With approximately 11 million undocumented residents in the United States, there is legitimate reason to fear what Trump is enacting in his second administration. I say this as someone who witnessed what a Trump-appointed federal prosecutor called “the largest single-state immigrant enforcement operation in our nation’s history” during Trump’s previous administration. It occurred in 2019, in Mississippi, where I live. I know that whatever else happened that day, children were left without parents, families were cut off from loved ones, and communities were filled with a sense of confusion and terror. But I also know from that experience that, even in the worst moments, there were people and places where hope and comfort resided, too.
On day one, Trump began translating his campaign rhetoric to actual deportation methods. The point is sometimes made that Trump’s first administration deported fewer people than Biden’s or either of Obama’s administrations. While that may be accurate, context is everything. For example, deporting someone who just crossed the border illegally is very different from deporting someone who has lived in the U.S. for 20 years. While the numbers of people matter for each impacted individual and family, it also matters how people are targeted and why inciting terror is the tool of choice. Tom Homan, who Trump has chosen to oversee the nation’s borders, has said we should expect “shock and awe” from the current administration’s deportation efforts. That comment, coupled with Homan’s promise to conduct more workplace raids, suggests how deportations will be handled. That language calls to mind the workplace raids that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials conducted in Mississippi in 2019.
smartboy10 / iStock
ON MARCH 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic of covid-19. The virus causing covid had already been circulating for at least four months. People were dying from some kind of strange pneumonia. In the five years since, our world has changed. As of December 2024, there were more than 7 million covid deaths worldwide (the actual number is likely three times that high) and 1.2 million were in the United States. The coronavirus has left an indelible mark on relationships, social institutions, and politics.
In 2025, we are still dealing with the shock and trauma of who and what we lost. Our sublimated grief, confusion, and anger too often manifest as personal denial, social apathy, or political individualism. All while the virus persists among us. For proper healing and to navigate this “new normal,” we must first square the last five years.
From the jump, the U.S. failed to provide an adequate pandemic response. President Donald Trump, in his first term, was handed an unexpected event — but not an unprecedented one. Preparations for a mass public health event were available, but by politicizing public health his administration left the country vulnerable. In 2018, Trump’s national security adviser oversaw the disbanding of the global health security team. Trump’s adversarial stance toward China, including increased tariffs, negatively impacted the supply of personal protective equipment (PPE) available in the U.S. In those first key months, the administration chose propaganda, not science, to fight the pandemic. In May 2020, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the World Health Organization (as he did again in January this year), which was coordinating a global response.
CSA-Printstock / iStock
I WANT TO let you in on a joke. But, for many of us, this joke might not be funny for a very long time. Let’s begin by addressing the elephant in the room. The election results drastically exacerbated tensions that Americans have been struggling with for the last decade. As I write, holiday plans are being made and canceled based on who voted for whom. This tension is not going away soon. However, changes of political regimes and the Christmas story give us insight into where we are as followers of Jesus today.
As a pastor and a comedian, I try to bring God’s levity to bear on tragedy to recenter a Christian perspective. At its root, the word levity means “lightness,” like the word “levitate.” While God’s levity may not be conventionally funny in the moment, it employs the elements of comedy that, by design, lighten the burdens of our human experience.
Pandagolik / iStock
FOR THE FIRST time, Americans have elected a wannabe dictator as president. Donald Trump is committed to and now capable of ending democracy as we know it. Trump is the one the “new authoritarians” have been waiting for. What now?
First, as of January 2025, the United States is on track to become an electoral autocracy. Electoral autocracies have multiparty systems and independent institutions that over time lose sufficient power to hold the executive branch accountable for its corruption or restrict its lawlessness. The Republican trifecta in November was not the presidency, Senate, and House. It was the White House, Congress, and Supreme Court. This win enables what political scientists call “state capture” by anti-democratic forces.
Whatever else we do, we must reorient our political map.
Eleven pastors with Mountain Gateway ministry in Nicaragua, arrested there in 2023 on false charges of money laundering, were released in September 2024. / Mountain Gateway Ministries / ADF International
ON SEPT. 5, the U.S. Department of State announced that it had secured the release of 135 political prisoners in Nicaragua. Among those released were 11 pastors of the Mountain Gateway ministry and a number of Catholic laypeople. These victims of the Ortega-Murillo regime’s sweeping persecution of religion will join hundreds of now stateless priests, women religious, bishops, and other believers exiled to Guatemala, Costa Rica, the United States, and even Vatican City.
Despite this negotiated release, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom still lists 36 Nicaraguans imprisoned because of their faith. That number does not include the thousands of Nicaraguans who have fled because of their beliefs or the more than 1,600 religious organizations and facilities that have been closed by the regime. Dozens of priests and ministers have been arrested. Religious charities, schools, universities, radio stations, churches, and clinics have been shuttered. Religious orders have been banned. Traditional religious processions for Holy Week have been outlawed. Secret police systematically monitor religious services. Even Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity were escorted from the country by armed police.
President Daniel Ortega’s authoritarian-trending-toward-totalitarian regime is powerfully repressing the Catholic faith and is rapidly expanding its persecution to Protestant and Indigenous faith communities. However, it was not always so.
Raneen Sawafta / Reuters
I KNOW YOU. I met you in the dense canopies in the war in El Salvador. It was there that I first heard the single, high-pitched crack of the sniper bullet. Distinct. Ominous. A sound that spreads terror. I saw you at work in Basra in Iraq and of course Gaza, where on a fall afternoon at the Netzarim Junction, you shot dead a young man a few feet away from me. We carried his limp body up the road. I lived with you in Sarajevo during the war. You were only a few hundred yards away, perched in high rises that looked down on the city. I witnessed your daily carnage.
You targeted me, too. You struck down colleagues and friends. I was in your sights traveling from northern Albania into Kosovo. Three shots. That crisp crack, too familiar.
I know how you talk. The black humor. “Pint-sized terrorists” you say of the children you kill. You are proud of your skills. It gives you cachet. You cradle your weapon as if it is an extension of your body. You admire its despicable beauty. This is who you are. A killer.
Steve Schapiro / Corbis / Getty Images
THE LAST PICTURE in Richard Avedon and James Baldwin’s Nothing Personal, an exploration of American identity through the photographer’s eye and the essayist’s heart, holds a haunting some 60 years later. Two young boys look solemnly into Avedon’s lens. It is as if they stare into the soul of the watcher. It is as if in their innocence they wonder about the world in their silence. It is the children’s eyes that I can’t stop thinking about.
Their eyes are still our eyes, their gaze, still our gaze — weary, longing, determined, and despairing. Baldwin writes in the 1964 book, “Despair: perhaps it is this despair which we should attempt to examine if we hope to bring water to this desert.”
Baldwin and Avedon’s friendship and work together can be instructive for us because what we face as a nation is not much different from the Civil Rights years. We are presently dealing with a lack of trust; the forces of polarization are deepening within and without. There is, writes Baldwin, an “unspeakable loneliness” that we feel, wondering if anyone can feel what we feel and are angry about what we are angry about and are sad about what we are sad about. Then there is the kind of loneliness that takes root when “we live by lies.”
Potter and Potter Auctions / Gado / Getty Images
I PROUDLY SHARE the legacy of generations of people who fought to be respected as full citizens in America. I am the granddaughter of Mississippi sharecroppers. My parents picked cotton growing up, sometimes missing school to ensure the family could make ends meet. My parents left Mississippi in the late 1960s after college, having never voted. I know too well about voter suppression and the horrors of Jim Crow. The fundamental right to vote is close to my heart; it’s personal.
My generation was the first in my family born with full voting rights. I never thought the precious right to vote would be jeopardized in 2024. Yet, because the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, the right of full and safe access to the ballot box is again impeded. Voter suppression has again taken hold as a tactic for dismantling democracy. The ghost of Jim Crow keeps on haunting.
Lisa Vulovich / iStock
IF WE ARE to end Christian nationalism, we must first develop a better idea of the threat we are facing.
Christian nationalism in the United States is a political ideology and cultural framework that seeks to fuse American and Christian identities. It suggests that “real” Americans are Christians, and that “true” Christians hold a particular set of political beliefs. It seeks to create a society in which only this narrow subset of Americans is privileged by law and in societal practice.
Christian nationalism is a gross distortion of the Christian faith that I and so many others hold dear. It employs the language, symbols, and imagery of Christianity, and it might even appear to the casual observer to be authentic Christianity.
Olha Khorimarko / iStock
GOD SEIZED ISABELLA on Pentecost 1826. Isabella Baumfree, born in slaveholding New York, had secured her freedom. But, in despair for her children, she “looked back into Egypt.” On the verge of returning herself to slavery, God’s spirit overtook her in a mystical encounter that changed her life.
This thunderclap of God’s grandeur surpassed any notions of the divine she had previously acquired. This God, at once familiar and foreign, called Isabella to abandon the faith of her owners. But God also called her to transform the faith inherited from her mother, who taught that survival consisted of equal parts prayer and submission to enslavement. As Isabella recovered from this mystical encounter her only words were, “Oh, God, I did not know you were so big.”
Seventeen years later, Isabella had another mystical experience. After having been swindled out of her savings, she struggled to rebuild financial stability in New York City. She asked herself why, “for all her unwearied labors,” did she have nothing to show? Why did others, with much less work and anxiety, “hoard up treasures for themselves and children”? As she reflected on the economic hardship she witnessed, she realized, “the rich rob the poor and the poor rob one another.” With this insight, the political roots of her religious transformation took hold. From that time forward she claimed a new name: Sojourner Truth. And began her career as a traveling preacher and activist.
esfera / Shutterstock
POLITICAL SCIENTIST Thea Riofrancos has written extensively on the politics and economics of mining. “Extraction is a very old practice. We can say that it is as old as human history,” said Riofrancos in a Granta interview this year. With the rise of European empires in the 15th century, extraction led to conquest in search of valuable minerals. Conquest led to territorial occupation, consolidation of forced labor, and centralized foreign control over resources. And it is all still happening — now, on a planetary scale. This is why Pope Francis describes the Earth as the “new poor,” and thus as a locus of liberation.
The logics of extraction and occupation are entwined. Driven by economics, both view certain human lives, and any part of nature, as marketable and disposable by the cheapest means of violence and destruction. These logics thrive on the constant retraumatizing of the environment and of Black and brown bodies, to keep them compliant and prevent them from consolidating power. These are presented as necessary sacrifices for civilization to “advance.” Colonial laws remain in many post-colonial nations, and elite communities in those countries continue to benefit from resource control, perpetuating the violence and oppression of the colonial project.
In the age of climate collapse, these sinful logics come back to haunt us. For example, as the geographer Kenston Perry has highlighted, the Caribbean region has faced enormous losses from climate-induced natural disasters. This is a result of colonial systems that prioritized extractive plantation agriculture instead of protective ecosystems and disregarded Indigenous practices and knowledge of the environment. The fate of the poor, the marginalized, and those on the wrong side of western colonialism is inextricably tied up with the fate of the planet.
The environmental crises in Congo from mining and in Gaza from war provide two examples of how extraction and occupation are twin sins.
CSA-Archive / iStock
AS THEY GEARED up to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the soon-to-be rioters carefully chose their clothes, their flags, and their symbols to convey the message they wanted to send. That message, surprisingly, had a lot to do with Jesus.
One popular flag read “Jesus 2020.” Preachers and worship leaders arrayed around the Capitol “pleaded the blood of Jesus” while their compatriots shed the blood of Capitol Police officers. Indeed, at times the Capitol riot resembled a modern-day crusade, mayhem and suffering inflicted on the innocent under the sign of the cross.
I have spent the past three years searching out the leaders and theologies that galvanized Christians to show up that day. What I’ve found are networks of hardline Christian nationalists who have cobbled together a theology of power, domination, and privileged access. I call them “Christian supremacists,” because they are making moves to restructure society to privilege and elevate Christians over everyone else.
I wish I could say that these leaders were fringy, or better yet, not really Christians, but, if anything, Christian supremacy is spreading like wildfire in the American church, especially as we careen toward another polarized election.
The early church faced a similar problem: A group of early Christians called the gnostics believed that God gave special revelation to certain individuals, the spiritual elites. The gnostics disdained the more bodily and human dimensions of the biblical Jesus in favor of an enlightened, victorious Christ.
Nazeeba Ibnat / iStock
I HAD A conversation recently about an essay I’d written on prison labor in the United States. My colleague was shocked. Well into the 21st century, she mused, isn’t that a phenomenon reserved for totalitarian regimes on the other side of the planet?
It’s a reasonable assumption. After all, it sounds an awful lot like slavery.
The U.S. never abolished enslavement; we only regulated it. In 1865, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution ended legalized chattel slavery and involuntary servitude, except “as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” This proviso, known as the “exceptions clause,” has served to obscure the continuation of an American slave system from the end of the Civil War to the present day.
Convict-leasing schemes were integral to rebuilding the South from the ashes of total war. Incarcerated labor fueled the postwar Industrial Revolution. And today, approximately 800,000 of the country’s nearly two million incarcerated people work for a pittance (on average, less than a dollar an hour) with varying degrees of willingness. If U.S. prisons and jails were to form that workforce into a conglomerate, they would be the nation’s third largest private employer, behind only Walmart and Amazon.
Will D. Campbell / Digital Collections at the University of Mississippi
IT FEELS AS though the United States could not become more polarized. Across our contemporary chasm, no matter what side people believe they occupy, the other always feels unreachable. That’s why this is a particularly apt time to ponder the late Rev. Will D. Campbell, who was born 100 years ago this July.
A white Mississippian raised in a 1920s Jim Crow thicket, Campbell rejected that era’s rampant racism early on. When the civil rights movement began, he embraced its goals with open arms. Campbell’s no-frills reading of the Sermon on the Mount led him to the cause. When 16-year-old Ernest Green and eight other African American students entered Arkansas’ Central High School in 1957, Campbell walked beside them. When the Southern Christian Leadership Conference came together, Campbell was the only white man in attendance. When the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee formed in 1960, Campbell made the first cash donation. To the brave leadership from the Black community, he added his own. For everyone involved, it was an extremely dangerous endeavor.
Then, at the midway point in Campbell’s life, his ministry underwent a drastic change. He set a controversial new direction for himself, one that confused many of his supporters and angered others. He began a soul-saving outreach to the white racists of the local Ku Klux Klan.
Ofer Cassif, representing the Hadash-Ta'al party, speaks at the Israeli Knesset in Jerusalem in February 2024. / EPA-EFE / Abir Sultan
LIKE MANY ISRAELIS, Ofer Cassif, a member of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, knew people killed by Hamas militants on Oct. 7. “One of them was a very dear close friend of mine,” Cassif told Sojourners. “She actually texted me from the security room minutes before she was killed with her husband.” Many progressive, anti-occupation Israeli peace activists lived in the region where Hamas killed more than 700 civilians in one day. Cassif, whose grandparents came to Israel from Poland in 1934 as part of the Zionist movement, is a secular Israeli Marxist and a leading voice against the war in Gaza. During the first Palestinian Intifada in 1987, Cassif refused Israeli military service in the Occupied Territories and was incarcerated in military prison. In 2019, he was elected to Israel’s parliament as the only Jewish member of the Arab-majority Hadash-Ta’al party. In January, Cassif publicly supported South Africa’s petition to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to investigate Israel for violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention in its war on Gaza. In February, some parliament members tried — unsuccessfully — to impeach him. For this interview I spoke with Cassif in late March over WhatsApp. It was nearly midnight in Israel. He was still sipping his yerba mate through a metal straw.
Do you hold Hamas responsible for the Oct. 7 attack? Yes. Obviously, I hold Hamas responsible. That’s not to say that the government of [Benjamin] Netanyahu is not responsible in some respects, too. But definitely the guilt, the blame, is on those who killed, on those who raped, on those who tortured, and torched. And those are Hamas’ people.
Why do you support the petition before the ICJ to investigate Israel for genocide in Gaza? I do not trust the Israeli government or Hamas or any other government to investigate itself. The ICJ is the authoritative branch to investigate allegations of genocide. Israel recognized its authority in 1949, when Israel became one of the first states to ratify the convention. The bottom line is to support the ICJ in calling on Israel to stop the war — to save lives, as simple as that. The more than 30,000 deaths in Gaza, most of them women and children, the disease and starvation, this is totally the blame of the government of Israel. And it should be stopped. Stopping the assault on Gaza is the only way to save the Israeli hostages. There’s no military way to release the hostages, only a political one — which necessitates ceasefire.
In October 2014, 30 Pacific climate warriors from 12 Pacific island nations joined hundreds of Australians to block the world's largest coal port at Newcastle, Australia, in a protest against the fossil fuel industry. / Jeff Tan Photography
IN MARCH, CIVIL society groups across the Pacific — including churches — unveiled a landmark declaration to end fossil fuel expansion in the Pacific region. The Naiuli Declaration provides a moral rudder from Pacific communities to guide the international Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Pacific Islanders are championing the treaty as a legally binding mechanism to end new exploration and to support the rapid, equitable, and lasting phaseout of fossil fuels, core drivers of climate change and sea-level rise. To date, 12 nations have endorsed the treaty, including fossil fuel-producing countries Timor-Leste and Colombia. In the U.S., Maine, California, and Hawaii have also endorsed the treaty.
In envisioning our fossil free future, the Naiuli Declaration carries the twin aspects of vulnerability and resilience (the term Na i Uli draws from indigenous Fijian words for the steering oar in traditional double-hulled ocean canoes). There is the vulnerability of communities facing an existential crisis caused by climate change, putting at risk livelihoods, culture, our deep spiritual relationship with land and ocean, and the possibility for climate-induced displacement. The sense of exile evoked by this vulnerability resonates with the psalmist, who laments: “For there our captors asked of us songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’ How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” (Psalm 137:3-4).