I’ve interviewed celebrities and entertainers before, and my main complaint is always this: They tend to dodge tough topics, which then results in pretty dull conversations.
So when I got on the phone with Christian hip-hop artist Dylan Phillips, whose stage name is nobigdyl., I thought getting him to say anything interesting would be about as hard as fishing for catfish.
But I didn't have to fish long before I realized that nobigdyl. was more than willing to tackle difficult subjects.
I first learned about Sojourners because I was looking for post-graduation fellowship opportunities in Washington, D.C.; at the time, I had no idea that a robust faith-based advocacy space like Sojourners existed, a place where people were living out their faith through the call to biblical justice. After I was accepted into the program but before move-in day, I met via Zoom with the five kind and impressive women who would make up the 41st cycle of the Sojourners Fellowship Program. We briefly discussed what our lives would entail throughout the fellowship and learned about the professional and spiritual development that the program would provide; I eagerly looked forward to my move.
Living in an intentional community is a core part of the fellowship experience and so our year in D.C. began with a week of long workshop days. We focused on activities such as learning our Myers-Briggs and Enneagram types, building up our conflict-resolution skills, and training in nonviolent communication to better equip our community full of people from different racial, cultural, and societal backgrounds to navigate any potential conflict we might encounter.
The manosphere and parallel trends like the tradwife (traditional wife) movement — led by influencers who idealize marriage, motherhood and domesticity — are impacting even socially conscious students who say it’s hard to avoid this content brimming with toxic messages about gender. Over a half-dozen students told The 19th that after the 2024 election, which saw the manosphere blamed for young men’s rightward shift, they noticed changes in their classmates’ behavior — an uptick in sexist remarks, a sense of entitlement to girls’ attention and schadenfreude that yet another woman lost the presidency.
Sojourners spoke with DeBlois about the film’s relevancy, the importance of wonder in the creative process, and filmmaking as an act of faith.
The Supreme Court dealt a blow on Friday to the power of federal judges by restricting their ability to grant broad legal relief in cases as the justices acted in a legal fight over President Donald Trump's bid to limit birthright citizenship, ordering lower courts that blocked the policy to reconsider the scope of their orders.
New York City Comptroller Brad Lander was arrested by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on June 17. At a lower Manhattan courtroom, Lander and his staff were attempting to escort a migrant after his court hearing. Seen repeatedly asking ICE agents to produce a judicial warrant, and asserting that they couldn’t arrest an American citizen, Lander was roughly detained and later released, the most recent in a string of Democratic politicians arrested by federal authorities.
Celine Song is just two films into her career, but she’s already established herself as a storyteller who infuses the tumult of modern love with ancient wisdom, and a kind of transcendence that breathes poetry into a disenchanted world.
We also need to be clear: Iran did not possess a nuclear weapon. Iran was enriching uranium needed for such a weapon and had recently increased its production, but intelligence assessments concluded they had not made a final decision to produce a bomb. In fact, the assessment said Iran would be more likely to produce a weapon if the U.S. attacked its uranium supply.
Corporations are jamming AI into every platform we use. Like it or not, it’s clearly here to stay. But we can fight back the mass possession of AI demons. By learning how AI works and why it has such a hold on us, we can start to see through its demonic facade. But that’s not enough by itself. To bust these ghosts for good, we need to think bigger and find collective ways — like trade unions — to take control of our work and thinking.