In response to the crisis of mass deportation, faith leaders and clergy are taking a moral stand. Whether it’s clergy protesting in Minnesota or faith-based mutual aid networks dedicated to assisting immigrant communities, people of faith are fighting against injustice. What comes next? What demands can Christian leaders make to shape our collective response beyond immediate protest and protection?
A framework for real justice going forward has three parts: Abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement and related agencies; welcoming immigrants through immigration law that includes rather than excludes; and participating in truth and reconciliation work, which may take various forms—including national or local truth commissions.
The film Midwinter Break opens with an intimate flashback to the Troubles of Ireland: A very pregnant Stella is shot by an Irish Republican Army sniper; the milk bottle she just purchased shatters to the ground, her own blood pooling alongside the spilt milk. The trauma is vivid, but its extent is not yet known.
The novel on which the film is based, also named Midwinter Break, begins far more quietly. Rather than announcing its central wound at once, it allows the trauma to surface gradually, disclosed in fragments as the chapters unfold.
A set of Catholic investors said on Monday private-prison operator GEO Group has rejected a shareholder vote designed to shed light on alleged human rights violations in its operation of ICE detention facilities as part of U.S. President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
The government contractor has become one of the biggest benefactors in Trump’s expansion of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, including operating a fast-growing detention center in Southern California. Complaints of poor treatment, including dismal sleeping conditions and a lack of fresh air at facilities run by GEO and others, have sparked protests against the administration as it ramps up detentions and pushes for mass deportations.
A group of social activist investors led by Jesuit priests said GEO rejected a proposed shareholder vote to review its human-rights conduct, ended talks on facility visits and reduced its reporting on human rights.
As the U.S. embarks on a massive expansion of the country’s immigrant detention capacity, a coalition of organizations opposing abortion are calling on President Donald Trump to stop detaining pregnant, postpartum, and nursing immigrant women.
Rehumanize International, which opposes abortion, the death penalty, war, and other forms of “aggressive violence,” spearheaded an open letter to Trump, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement acting Director Todd Lyons. Dozens of signatories—including representatives of Secular Pro-Life, Live Action, Anglicans for Life, and some state-level affiliates of the National Right to Life Committee—urged the Trump administration to immediately resume enforcing federal policy against holding pregnant and postpartum women in ICE detention.
Millions of American Christians attend church on Ash Wednesday, and the gesture of marking our foreheads with ashes is formally known as the imposition of ashes. An imposition is a burden or demand. Those ashes are meant not only to be a reminder of our own mortality but also of what faith demands of us in Lent. Among those things is repentance.
A federal district judge ruled that government authorities must allow clergy to minister to Broadview Processing Center detainees on Ash Wednesday this Feb. 18. The order, if followed, fulfills a year of organizing by Chicago area clergy to minister to detainees of Immigration and Customs Enforcement within the oft-protested facility.
The government and its officials substantially burdened the exercise of religion by the clergy group who brought the lawsuit and made no argument that the burden was “in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest, and that it is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest,” according to the injunction, written by Judge Robert W. Gettleman.
It’s 2026, the world is on fire, and against all odds, the Muppets are back on television.
In the first week of February, Disney released a special episode of The Muppet Show, serving as a backdoor pilot to a potential revival, with Sabrina Carpenter as a special guest and the Muppets back to their old antics. It’s been 45 years since The Muppet Show was officially on television, but despite all the time that has passed, something about it feels just as resonant today as it did decades ago. And part of that resonance, I think, comes from the Muppets’ affectionate relationship with chaos.
Charismatic Civil Rights leader Jesse Jackson, an eloquent Baptist minister raised in the segregated South who became a close associate of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and twice ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, has died at age 84, his family said in a statement on Tuesday.
“Our father was a servant leader - not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world,” the Jackson family said.
Jackson, an inspirational orator and long-time Chicagoan, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2017.
As founder and president of the AND Campaign, Justin Giboney has championed an approach to politics that seeks to overcome, in his words, Left-Right culture wars.
He has galvanized Christians, especially evangelicals, around a platform that aims to maintain a commitment to traditionally conservative Christian morality while championing traditionally progressive views on race and economics. His organization’s name and its ampersand logo represent an unwillingness to cede either value in service of a political party.
An attorney and political strategist, Giboney explains in his new book, Don’t Let Nobody Turn You Around: How the Black Church’s Public Witness Leads Us Out of the Culture War, the ways his upbringing and study of the Civil Rights Movement informs his work. In particular, Giboney criticizes Christians on the Right for allowing conservative politics to shape their views on race, immigration, and economics; he criticizes the Left for allowing progressive politics to shape their views of sex and abortion. At one point, the AND Campaign’s tagline was “Social Justice (&) Biblical Values.” In recent years, it has shifted to “Social Justice (&) Moral Order.”
Ash and dust. Sorrow and repentance. An invitation to remember our baptism and dwell on our own mortality. The blunt grimness of Lent can be intimidating.
But the solemn, 40-day period of preparation for Easter that begins on Ash Wednesday was never meant to be undertaken solo. “We may—we will—find that we can’t do it alone,” writes Julie Polter. “We need help. We need community. We need a God who is reaching toward us and isn’t afraid of meeting us at the point of our worst sin, a God who knows death intimately, and pulls us toward life.”
The resources in the list below—books, free downloads, email series, audio formats, and other media—aim to accompany us as we accept Lent’s invitation to self-examination, renewal, and yes, good old-fashioned repentance.