Prepare hearts for Easter this Lenten season with Heifer International's Fill the Ark program. This meaningful family devotional fosters gratitude through a four-week giving calendar, helping families reflect on their blessings and extend generosity.
At the first of what will be many funerals that appear in The Monkey, a young priest struggles to find the right words. After offering some half-hearted bromides about how everything happens for a reason, the priest can no longer pretend that there’s some divine plan behind the death that brought them together — an accident involving a hibachi chef’s knife getting too close to a diner.
“It is what it is,” the priest (Nicco Del Rio) finally declares, with the most conviction he can muster. “The words of the Lord.”
Before he was hospitalized for double pneumonia, Pope Francis was battling firm resistance from some of his own cardinals about how to plug a widening gap in the Vatican’s finances.
On Feb. 13, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to unfreeze the billions of dollars in life-sustaining foreign aid suspended by executive order in January. The order, which cited “enormous harm” to global networks of relief agencies and the populations they serve, was met with relief by Christian anti-poverty and anti-hunger ministries. But even amid relief, the chaos of the last month has been relentless, say direct aid providers like World Vision and advocates like Bread for the World.
In late January, the Pew Research Center released a study of religious nationalism worldwide, including in the U.S. The results? Only 6% of Americans fit Pew’s definition of “Christian nationalist.” That's a smaller number that several previous estimates, but sociologists and researchers suggest it may just provide a shade of nuance to the way we think about religious nationalism in America.
As a theologian, ethicist, professor, priest, and author, Gary Dorrien has helped shape and excavate the overlap between social justice and faith for nearly 50 years. He has written definitively as a historian and prophetically as an activist, all while teaching generations as a professor of religion. Now, he explains why it was time to tell his own story.
In the halls of empire, men sit at gleaming tables untouched by war, they speak of peace as though it is theirs to grant. But they have never gathered their children into one room to sleep at night so that if death comes, it takes them together. They have never watched the sky split open with fire, felt the air convulse after the blast, felt the wind howl past — hot, violent, and thick with the dust and scent of obliteration. And yet, they sign their names to ceasefires, shake hands, and expect the world to applaud. They do not blush as they bankroll the demolition of homes, the bombing of hospitals, and the erasure of entire families .
During the first week of February, U.S. President Donald Trump hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whois the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. This meeting took place as the fragile ceasefire agreement between the Israeli occupying forces and the Palestinian militant group, Hamas, hung in the balance. Trump, never one to concern himself with the nuances of international law (or any law, really), originally floated the idea of the U.S. “owning Gaza” on Feb. 4 and then has since doubled down on this colonial fantasy, one so crude and reckless that his own administration scrambled to downplay it.
Even while wrestling with lament, I’ve wanted to move toward contributing to addressing injustice to counter the pervasive injustice that occupies so much of our news. But I’ve just not known how. I’ve felt that nothing in my sphere of direct influence is grand enough to move any kind of needle.
But being a faithful follower of Christ is, in fact, less about giving a virtuoso solo performance and more often playing a small part in a great work we cannot fully comprehend.
The U.S. has always considered itself as this New Jerusalem — a land specially blessed by God — but also one that is only available to those specially chosen. And from the establishment of the United States as a nation, as Lin discusses, this drive to only welcome certain individuals has been heavily focused on questions of race and national origin. The notion that the U.S. is a nation that welcomes immigrants is a myth that contradicts historical record. Instead, our “[i]mmigration and naturalization laws serve ultimately to create the ideal population as conceived by those who set policy and legislate,” Lin writes.
An executive order from the White House took aim at recent policies in South Africa designed to heal old wounds left over from apartheid. Now, a group of white South African religious leaders are pushing back on President Donald Trump's claims.