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?
Earlier this week, the Evangelical Press Association voted to change its name, dropping “evangelical” to become the “Christian Communicators Network.” The move follows a 2020 name change from Evangelicals for Social Action, founded by Ron Sider, to Christians for Social Action.
Both groups cited the current American political climate as baggage that had attached to the term in ways that made “evangelical” no longer useful. And public polling finds that evangelicals are the religious group viewed most unfavorably by Americans. It can seem like no one wants evangelicals to be “evangelicals.” Bonnie Kristian, author of In Defense of Evangelicalism: A Response to Its Cultured Despisers, hopes to intercede. Kristian, having written for and served as an editor at Christianity Today, has had a close look at evangelicals and their critics.
In her book, Kristian reads and responds to the work of several journalists and scholars whose work can be critical of evangelicals—Tim Alberta, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jemar Tisby, Anthea Butler, Samuel L. Perry, and others. A tightly argued book, she contends that evangelicalism is not worthy of the ire it receives from culture nor is it as harmful (to individuals, communities, or democracy) as scholars say.
Kristian believes these scholars mistake the margins of evangelicalism for the center. At the center, she says, are regular Christians who seek to love God and neighbor and want to live their convictions alongside those neighbors.
Pope Leo XIV was diagnosed with a common form of lung cancer after doctors removed a lower lobe of his right lung in surgery on Tuesday, the Vatican said in a medical bulletin.
The 71-year-old pontiff has lung adenocarcinoma, with tissue tests conducted during the operation confirming what doctors had suspected from preparatory examinations, the bulletin said.
The pope was admitted to Rome’s Gemelli hospital on Tuesday for surgery to remove a growth on his lung that doctors found in a recent health checkup.
Narnia fans can rest easy. That was my thought upon leaving a sneak peek at Greta Gerwig’s upcoming Narnia adaptation.
Catholics serving in the U.S. Army should not participate in the firing squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan that the Pentagon is planning to livestream in December, a prominent U.S. archbishop said on Monday.
In an unusually strongly worded statement, Archbishop Timothy Broglio, who oversees the spiritual care of Catholic members of the U.S. armed forces, raised a series of objections to the unprecedented plan to broadcast the execution of Hasan, who killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, in a 2009 shooting spree.
Broglio said he presided at the funeral of one of Hasan’s victims and lamented the shooting. But the Ohio-born archbishop asked whether the U.S. wanted to “imitate the terrorists of this world and make a public spectacle of barbarically killing our adversaries.”
The daily wisdom our algorithms invite Christians to practice on the Internet: Always judge a book by its cover. Be the first to cast stones. Condemn things we haven’t seen and know little about.
At the beginning of the second Trump administration, a homemade yard sign appeared in my neighborhood. It quoted the German Protestant pastor Martin Niemöller’s “First They Came” poem. Promoting both empathy and political action, Niemöller’s poem has become rightly omnipresent as Trumpism and its Christofascist base are arguably the most successful fascist movement since Nazi Germany. Lesser known than the poem is Niemöller’s journey into the antifascist spirit that inspired it.
Niemöller’s gradual turn against Hitler began only after the church’s autonomy was threatened in the Nazis’ attempt to establish the Reich Church. Before 1934, he voted for the Nazis numerous times, led a Freikorps unit during the Weimar Republic, joyfully greeted Hitler’s rise, and even sent his autobiography to Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels with a personal note that it was written in the “spirit of the Third Reich.” In his role in the Confessing Church, he was againstHitler, but kept the ultranationalism and antisemitism that led him to support the Nazis in the first place. His imprisonment wasn’t enough to shake off his fascist proclivities—he still volunteered for the war effort from Sachsenhausen concentration camp. It took the defeat of Germany and a direct confrontation with his own complicity after the war, for him to reject fascism.
When I published a spiritual memoir based on the teachings of a 16th-century saint named Teresa of Avila, my 13-year-old daughter suggested my next writing project should be something “more people would want to read.”