Wendell Berry, farmer, author, and activist died earlier this week. He was 92 years old.
Berry’s death was first reported by The New York Times and confirmed by a statement sent to Sojourners by The Berry Center where his daughter, Mary Berry, serves as executive director.
“The Berry Center and Berry family are heartbroken to announce the death of Wendell Erdman Berry, writer and farmer of Port Royal, Henry County, Kentucky. He passed suddenly and peacefully at home yesterday afternoon, August 31st,” the statement read. “His work continues, here and in every place where people aim to live according to nature’s measure, on and with and of their beloved home place.”
Churches are obsessed with doors. Churches bless these doors, paint them red, hold them open, photograph them, and put welcome signs on them. We tell the frightened person, the estranged child, the gay man, the addict, the doubter, the refugee, the person who has been made to feel impossible: Come in; there is a place for you here.
I believe in that sentence. But to the end of that greeting we should add: “and you can leave whenever you want.”
Try as my mother did to instill the chronology of the liturgical calendar in me, I’ve instead opted to track the passage of time by the movie release calendar. Right now, we’re in anything but Ordinary Time.
What thrills me about the fall and winter movie season is that, for the most part, the movies released in this window are the ones that will be in the conversation for the rest of the year (and even into the new year), whether it’s because they’re nominated for awards or just remain people’s personal favorites. It was around this time last year when I saw visions like Frankenstein, No Other Choice, Train Dreams, and Wake Up Dead Man. That’s not to say the movies of the summer and early months aren’t without substance or provocation (I still find myself thinking about scenes from 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, Leviticus, Disclosure Day, and, of course, The Odyssey). Maybe it’s something about the liturgical motions of the season itself, the way we move from bright days to crisp nights to winter chills, that makes the films that come out during this time weightier and cozier, a cinematic hearth that burns on the fuel of new releases.
For the first time, a delegation with the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center was denied entry to Israel earlier this month.
Sabeel, a registered nonprofit based in East Jerusalem, has nearly 40 years of history in the region. In the past three years, the group has welcomed more than 450 people in delegations and pilgrimages to the Holy Land. These trips are “learning experiences” for everyone involved, said Omar Haramy, director of Sabeel. They are inspired by the Bible’s repeated instructions to “come and see,” and “go and tell,” he said.
The delegation of 13 travelers, all American citizens, was coordinated by Rev. Ed Phillips and Rev. Sara Webb Phillips, married United Methodist ministers from Atlanta, Ga. On Aug. 13, the group was entering Israel—nine delegates had been admitted into the country when border agents suddenly ordered them to re-enter the processing area, then detained the whole group in a holding room in the terminal at Sheikh Hussein Bridge.
At 28, I resigned from my dream job, packed up my life and made the 24-hour drive from Gilbert, Ariz., to Nashville, Tenn. I had wanted to work for a big Catholic ministry since high school when I went to a youth conference and saw speakers giving passionate sermons about how God changed their lives and could change mine too.
A new lawsuit hopes to win religious accommodations for millions of American workers who wish to request fossil fuel-free retirement plans from their employers.
Andrew Hartley, a Christian and statistical scientist, is suing his employer Thermo Fisher, arguing that Thermo “unlawfully forced him to compromise his religious values in order to receive the full benefits of his employment.”
Brought by the environmental action group ClientEarth, the lawsuit claims that the Supreme Court’s Groff v. DeJoy ruling in 2023 means Thermo Fisher is violating Hartley’s religious liberty by not offering a retirement plan that doesn’t invest in fossil fuels.
A synthetic chorus has taken root across so much of the online world that it is getting difficult to tell the difference between human voices and manufactured ones. With the 2026 midterm elections approaching, the incentive to flood public spaces with manufactured consensus will only grow. In an age of astroturf-filled message boards, I would argue that the greater danger is the impulse to hunt for bots. Astroturfing is an activity performed by a person or a group in order to generate the surface texture of reasonable speech, but to do so in a way that overwhelms the ordinary human capacity to slow down and make appropriate judgments.
The result is a culture of interpretation that begins with triage, where we read less for meaning and more for signs of inauthenticity; where the first question is whether the voice in front of us is even a person. Hunting for bots trains us to view the world with an extra amount of suspicion; a suspicion that deepens our collective alienation. Jesus’ parable about the weeds among the wheat offers our culture an important lesson in how to press toward face-to-face interactions that will make neighborliness possible again.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has detained a “beloved” Springfield, Ohio, pastor Thursday morning, according to a local faith-based organization.
G92, which advocates for their immigrant neighbors, said in a news release that agents detained Gilbert Joubert Adrien at a South Limestone Street gas station Aug. 20.
I was born into a church in Chicago that was founded by fathers of the “racial reconciliation” movement in American Evangelicalism.
Led by those such as the late John Perkins, racial reconciliation aimed to encourage primarily Black and white interracial relationships meant to reconcile people to each other and to God, in a post-Civil Rights Movement (but still deeply segregated) U.S. I was taught to understand reconciliation as a ministry, as Paul advises in 2 Corinthians 5, where Jesus bestows the “ministry of reconciliation” onto the church.
As I grew up, I found the concept linguistically and historically fraught—misguided at best and destructive at worst. Reconciliation among contemporary racial groups implies a historical moment of racial harmony; the U.S. has none. Whatever Perkins and others envisioned for the movement, white evangelicals and others began to bypass the need for actual systemic change in favor of emphasizing spiritual harmony and claiming that the only way to true racial unity is through Christianity.
On Jan. 24, 2025, U.S. Border Patrol stopped Samuel Tunick at the Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta and demanded to search his phone. Tunick was part of the “Defend the Atlanta Forest” movement in Atlanta, opposed to the development of a police training center dubbed “Cop City.” He has been charged with a felony for giving a customs officer a duress passcode that deleted the contents of his phone when the officer entered it. Not only is the case chilling because of the aggressive nature of the prosecution, but also because the federal government wants to assume characteristics that are typically reserved for God.
The point of government surveillance is not merely to know everything, but to fundamentally change what we do.