Conclave’s message goes beyond papal elections: Before I saw the film, I couldn’t have predicted just how shockingly relevant it would be to me and my experience as a trans person still doing my best to remain in relationship with the church.
Since graduating, I’ve largely tried to ignore all things related to Cornerstone. Whenever I would hear news about the school — whether it involved limiting intellectual freedom, disassembling the humanities department, or dismissing employees deemed to be insufficiently conservative or supportive of the president — it only served to confirm my ignorance-is-bliss approach. For a long time, whenever I was confronted with the fact that Cornerstone had only become more restrictive since I graduated, what came to mind was the first half of a quote from the writer James Baldwin: “Not everything that is faced can be changed …”
Until recently, the young women at the forefront of conservative politics were largely evangelical Protestants. They looked like the kind of young women you might see showing their OOTDs on RushTok, marrying a certain Southern-bred feminine aesthetic with a defense of President Donald Trump. These young women aren’t fading into the background during the start of the second Trump administration, but they now have company. Young Catholic women have emerged as instrumental messengers of the MAGA message.
Rev. Mark Francis, a friend of Prevost since the 1970s, told Reuters the cardinal was a firm supporter of his predecessor's papacy, and especially of the late pontiff's commitment to social justice issues.
"He was always friendly and warm and remained a voice of common sense and practical concerns for the Church's outreach to the poor," said Francis, who attended seminary with Prevost and later knew him when they both lived in Rome in the 2000s.
Cardinal Robert Prevost was elected in a surprise choice to be the new leader of the Catholic Church on Thursday, taking the name Leo XIV, becoming the first U.S. pontiff.
Christian nationalist ideology expanding to nonwhite and non-Christian populations is a particular area of interest for Eric L. McDaniel, who is a professor in the department of government at the University of Texas at Austin. In The Everyday Crusade: Christian Nationalism in American Politics, McDaniel and his co-authors, Irfan Nooruddin and Allyson F. Shortle, explore how religious nationalist ideology is gaining influence with the American public.
Money, ubiquity, and familiarity have blunted the radical force of Lucas’ original vision, so much so that it’s not unusual to see nostalgia-poisoned fans wistfully recalling his original trilogy as a time before “everything got so political.” But Cameron, always a fine student of sci-fi politics, notes that not only were Luke, Leia, and Han taking part in an explicitly political drama; they were fighting on the side most of the viewing public — at least in modern Western politics — would consider “the bad guys.”
During the first White House National Day of Prayer of his second term, President Donald J. Trump said he is making America “rich, healthy, and religious again.”
Trump’s approval ratings have dropped sharply since he returned to the White House and stand at 42% after his first 100 days in office, according to a poll by NPR. Still, Trump claimed that the spirit of the country shifted positively since Nov. 5, the day he was elected. Trump said his administration was “bringing religion back” to the United States of America.
On Wednesday of Holy Week, while most Christians were preparing to proclaim the Resurrection of Christ, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made a proclamation of a different kind: “Autism destroys families.” He went on to say that autistic children “will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date, many of them will never use a toilet unassisted … ”
These remarks framing autism as an epidemic or tragedy were not simply a one-off. They are both part of and an escalation in the broader Trump administration position that accessibility — the “A” in DEIA — is a problem to be eliminated, a mindset that results in policies that are at least unfriendly, if not actively hostile, to disabled people like me.
There’s been plenty of coverage of what Trump and his administration have done in their first 100 days. In the conservative media ecosystem, this coverage appears as disinformation-riddled praise for how Trump has restored America’s greatness and created renewed prosperity. In mainstream media outlets, this coverage is often focused on cataloguing the harms of policies that often felt chaotic or cruel. And while I’m grateful for those who ensure the public has an accurate understanding of the impact of Trump’s decisions, there’s another set of stories beneath those headlines that rarely get as much attention: how people have consistently been taking courageous action to counter these harms.