Ken Chitwood 6-03-2024

Latinos do not always support candidates with progressive immigration policies — including policies that expand legal pathways to citizenship, enforce fewer penalties for those who immigrate without documentation, or end sanctions that devastate economies and fuel immigration. Experts and members of the community say Latinos of faith, with or without an immigration background, can feel torn between theologies that emphasize respect for the rule of law, a cultural emphasis on the family, allegiances to denominations that encourage support for conservative candidates, and their own personal trajectories.

Lexi Schnaser 6-03-2024

Queer people of faith have always existed. We are here, existing now, and we will continue to exist well into the future.

I felt a sense of somber relief when I learned former President Donald J. Trump had been found guilty of 34 felony charges. Somber: It’s a sad moment when a former president is convicted of falsifying business records to cover up an alleged sexual encounter that could have hurt his presidential campaign in 2016 — a verdict that will inflame the deep divisions in our nation. Relief: This is a victory for the United States’ constitutional commitment that no one, not even a former president, is above the law.

Anna Piela 5-30-2024

On Oct. 14, 6-year-old Wadee Alfayoumi was stabbed to death in a Chicago suburb. Joseph Czuba, the 71-year-old man who stabbed Alfayoumi is a longtime member of a church and, according to the Will County sheriff’s office, was motivated by anti-Muslim sentiments and Israel’s war against Hamas. According to Joseph’s wife, Mary Czuba (who has filed for divorce), Czuba had been radicalized by conservative talk radio.

I live in a Chicago suburb and am the associate regional minister of American Baptist Churches Metro Chicago. When I heard Alfayoumi had been killed, I was horrified; as a mother, a Christian, a faith leader, and most of all a human, I took the news extremely hard.

JR. Forasteros 5-29-2024

Fury Road drew on Exodus imagery in Furiosa’s flight from the Citadel, leading her people to a promised land. No surprise, then, that the earlier beats of Moses’ story have striking parallels to Furiosa’s backstory.

From his booth in the exhibit hall of the Texas GOP’s 2024 convention, Steve Hotze saw an army of God assembled before him. For four decades, Hotze, an indicted election fraud conspiracy theorist, has helmed hardline anti-abortion movements and virulently homophobic campaigns against LGBTQ+ rights, comparing gay people to Nazis and helping popularize the “groomer” slur that paints them as pedophiles. Once on the fringes, Hotze said Saturday that he was pleased by the party’s growing embrace of his calls for spiritual warfare with “demonic, Satanic forces” on the left.

Josiah R. Daniels 5-28-2024

In this week’s conversation with writer and novelist Alessandra Harris, we spoke about her love of writing and when she first realized she wanted to be a writer. She was in fourth grade and the story she had written about a genie was chosen by her teacher to receive a prize. When you’re a kid, there’s just something extremely compelling about the fantasy of encountering a genie who will grant you wishes galore. Of course, as a kid, our wishes are rather innocent and self-centered: “I wish I could meet Michael Jordan,” “I wish the Chicago Bulls could win one more championship,” and, last but not least, “I wish for more wishes.” As you grow up, you realize genies aren’t real but that doesn’t prevent you from imagining what you’d wish for if you had three, two, or even a single wish. And as we age, our wishes tend to transform into a single hope for something innocent and unselfish.

Ken Chitwood 5-28-2024

“Immigration, whether you live in the south of the state or the far north, is a part of life here,” said Adam Burke, a Lutheran pastor in the Arizona city of Prescott, which is between Phoenix and the northern city of Flagstaff. “Whether you see it or not,” he said, “it impacts Arizonans every day.”

That is why in poll after poll in early 2024 — like those conducted by Noble Predictive Insights, Morning Consult, and the UK-based Redfield and Wilton Strategies — immigration is, along with reproductive rights and the economy, a top issue among Arizona voters.

Pope Francis, widely quoted as having used a highly derogatory word to describe the LGBTQ+ community, did not intend to use homophobic language and apologizes to anyone offended by it, the Vatican said on Tuesday.

Class of 2024, you are indeed overcomers, but you’re also no strangers to grief, doubt, and other emotions we don’t often acknowledge in commencement addresses. As you accept your well-deserved diploma, I don’t need to tell you that you’re graduating in an unsettling time: uncertainty around the most consequential election of your (and my) lifetime, uncertainty around the future of our planet amid an accelerating climate crisis, and uncertainty as to the outcome of horrific and intractable wars in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, and so many other places. You may be uncertain about your job prospects, whether Social Security will remain solvent by the time of your retirement, or whether you will ever be able to afford a home in this overheated housing market. If you’re a Christian, you may feel uncertain about how you can stay in a faith that has so often been distorted from the gospel.