Dolores Huerta, who cofounded the United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez and fought legislators and powerful growers in the US to improve the lives of a previously powerless constituency, died on Wednesday at the age of 96, her family said in a statement.
Huerta was one of the foremost women in U.S. labor history, serving the UFW as chief negotiator, strike organizer, lobbyist ,and reformer during its heyday in the 1960s and ‘70s in California’s agriculture-rich Central Valley.
Thanks to the contracts the UFW negotiated, farmworkers won job security, healthcare, retirement plans, a credit union and job-specific benefits such as guaranteed rest periods, toilets in the fields, clean drinking water and protection from pesticides.
As a queer person raised in Catholic purity culture, I’ve found horror films to be a vital way to confront and heal from my religious trauma.
It’s tough to know what to do as a mainline Protestant pastor these days. Most of the news about churches has not been good. A recent article in The Hill by Rev. Jennifer Butler, Presbyterian minister and CEO of the nonprofit Faith in Democracy, made the case that mainline Protestants are the swing voters of the 2026 elections. It’s safe to say that mainline Protestants are at a crossroads, and how they handle this election will have ramifications for years to come.
Last week at a town hall event in Caro, Mich., a heckler lobbed Islamophobic accusations at Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. That’s unfortunately unsurprising this cycle, as Republicans, panicked by a growing Democratic wave, have doubled and tripled down on bigotry. But what made this incident go viral is the way in which El-Sayed calmly turned the accusations around and demonstrated the extent to which Republican hatred of Muslims is rooted in an exclusionary Christian nationalism.
This past weekend thousands of people marched to the polls in nearly 3,000 events for the No Kings: Vote Early mobilization. This was a historic surge in getting people and communities mobilized for early voting in neighborhoods across the country. Whenever possible, voting early and ensuring an overwhelming voter turnout is arguably one of the most powerful tools and best defenses we have against the abuse of power and authoritarian consolidation.
But early voting, let alone voting on election day, still requires persuading and, in many cases, empowering people to actually vote. Given the challenging reality that an estimated 87 million eligible voters didn’t exercise their vote in the 2024 election, I’ve been thinking a great deal about what role our Christian faith can and should play in dramatically increasing voter turnout.
In Acts 5, the gospel writer Luke recounts the story of Ananias and Sapphira: a husband and wife who made a show of graciously donating the entire sum of a sale to the early church and the poor among them, all while secretly conspiring to keep a portion for themselves. The apostle Peter, prophetically seeing through the couple’s deception with total clarity, tells them, “You have not lied just to human beings, but to God.” In mere moments, both suddenly fall dead.
American evangelicals have long made a bogeyman out of Marx and his many inheritors. In 1952, Billy Graham made “Americanism”—his counter to communism—a central message of his crusades. Of course, this opposition finds its context in both the Cold War and evangelicals’ existing alliance with free-market capitalism.
The latest installment of this criticism comes from former Moody Church pastor Erwin W. Lutzer and former Moody Bible Institute professor Gregg Quiggle: Marx and Moody, published by Moody Publishers in September. Marx and Moody is broken into two clear sections. The first is written by Lutzer, and it primarily deals with Marx. The second is written by Quiggle, and it engages the life and social activism of Moody.
From the outset, the authors make clear their position: This is not a neutral, objective, or academic comparative study of two figures who helped shape their respective disciplines. It is a plea for readers to choose light over darkness, good over evil, Moody over Marx.
In August, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement awarded a $16.7 million no-bid contract for 6,000 pairs of electric-shock gloves. The Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, abbreviated as G.L.O.V.E., can be activated by an officer against bare skin, delivering pulses of up to 380 volts—more than three times the voltage of a standard U.S. wall outlet. ICE says the gloves give officers another way to control people in close settings while supposedly avoiding more serious or lethal force. They’re manufactured by a company called Compliant Technologies, because subtlety is dead in our current political environment.
The gloves arrive at a strange moment in the Trump administration’s ongoing immigration crackdown. ICE arrests surged to nearly 51,000 in August. From June to August, ICE set arrest records. But deportations haven’t followed that trend. They’ve plateaued around 1,200 per day, roughly the same pace as May 2026, when ICE made about 32,000 arrests. There are many reasons for this gap: asylum claims, court proceedings, diplomatic issues with receiving countries. But the gap also makes the continued buildup of ICE’s arrest-and-detention machinery more revealing. If they are not getting better at the deportation part of their mass deportation campaign, what exactly is all this additional force accomplishing?
Sixty-three years after Black students propelled 16th Street Baptist Church to the heart of the Civil Rights Movement, the historic church is launching a center dedicated to educating the public on the fight for justice.
Directly adjacent to the church building, the new 16th Street Education and Visitor Center aims “to honor those who sacrificed, to teach the truths that shaped the fight for justice, and to inspire every visitor to carry that work forward.”
In 1963, more than a thousand Black students skipping school and wearing their Sunday-best poured out of the front doors of 16th Street Baptist Church and marched along the streets of downtown Birmingham, Ala. The “Children’s Crusade” was part of Martin Luther King Jr.’s and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s aggressive desegregation campaign in Birmingham. The images of children running and shielding one another from fire hoses and police dogs in Kelly Ingram Park, across from the church, horrified the nation and captivated activists.
Then, a few months later, the Ku Klux Klan bombed the basement of the church. The blast shook the entire building, blowing out most of its stained-glass windows and damaging structures along the street. Four of the five young girls closest to the blast were killed. Their deaths became national news, with people across the globe donating to help rebuild the church.
For two years, in the rectory where I live, my spouse and I hosted two parents seeking asylum along with their Canadian-born child. When she was a baby, not walking or talking, I used to sing lullabies to radicalize her—songs like the “Canticle of the Turning” (based on the Magnificat) and “Here I Am, Lord.” I would rock her to the beat of these justice-inspired songs, hoping that she would come to know that God is a God of justice.
But eventually, as anyone with a child in their life knows, you get bored of the traditional kid content, and so you begin searching for something unique. YouTube had just the thing I was looking for. The video I showed my 2-year-old housemate was from Rachel Griffin Accurso, who goes by the name Ms. Rachel. In this particular video, Ms. Rachel looks right into the camera and asks the toddler, “Can you say mama?” As I held this child, so innocent, so vulnerable, beside me as she engrossed herself in language and learning, I found myself thinking about the state of the world. How did we get to a point where—for years—we idly stood by and watched a genocide in Palestine livestreamed on our devices? How did we get to a point where anti-Black racism is making an unapologetic comeback? Why are we so hyper-focused on limiting the freedom of trans folks and immigrants when the actual source of our troubles is the Epstein class?