Donald Trump
Image via RNS/Yonat Shimron
On the day after the election, Mervat Aqqad’s 7-year-old son woke up and asked who got elected president.
When Aqqad broke the news to Ibrahim, a second-grader at the Al-Iman School in Raleigh, his first question was, “Do we have to move now?”
Image via Philip Meyer/Shutterstock.com
“You are in a year of greatness. You are in a year of restoration,” White preached to a group of some 100 worshippers, almost all of them African-Americans. They had gathered in a large, windowless room at Faith Assembly Christian Center, a simple building in a predominantly black neighborhood of Durham.
Asked afterward about her ties with the president-elect, she declined to be interviewed “out of respect for the church.”
Image via RNS/Reuters/Ettore Ferrari/Pool
In an interview conducted on Nov. 7, on the eve of the election, and published Friday by an Italian daily, the Argentine pope declined to make any judgment about Trump.
“I do not judge people or politicians,” the pope told Eugenio Scalfari of La Repubblica when asked what he thought of Trump. “I only want to understand what suffering their behavior causes to the poor and the excluded.”
Image via RNS/Reuters/Mario Anzuoni
I am upset by the results of the election, and I am particularly saddened that 81 percent of white American evangelicals got into bed with a monster on Nov. 8. But I am also encouraged and have not lost hope.
Here’s why:
Around 11:15 p.m. Tuesday, my 15-year-old daughter, frustrated by all she was seeing on the television, stormed out of the room and announced: “Dad, I am going to bed. I am embarrassed for my country.”
Image via RNS/Reuters/Mike Segar
As it is, white evangelicals made up a little more than a quarter of those who turned out to cast their ballots. And by winning 81 percent of their vote, Trump was assured the presidency.
Now, evangelicals are expecting much in return from a president-elect who did not mention God in his victory speech, who was “strongly” in favor of abortion rights until he was against them, who has said he does not believe in repentance, who has made lewd comments admitting to sexual assault.
Trump's campaign sues over polling location that allegedly stayed open late for voters.
Image via katatonia82/Shutterstock.com
While Americans watch Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump fighting to the finish, in a noisy and polarized campaign, Germans are quietly debating their own presidential election in far different terms.
Among the names put forward as candidates are two leading Protestant bishops — one of them a woman — and even a respected Muslim writer.
Image via RNS/Reuters/Kevin Kolczynski
People need to believe in something, or someone, or Someone.
This human need to believe is a very powerful force. It can overcome a great deal of countervailing evidence. One place this is obvious is in politics.
Image via RNS/Election Day Communion 2016
The idea for an Election Day church service came to the pastor as he was pouring juice into little plastic cups.
Mark Schloneger was preparing for Communion that day in 2008, in the kitchen of Waynesboro Mennonite Church in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. The phone rang. It was a robocall from Sarah Palin, the GOP’s vice presidential nominee that year. She was imploring Christians to go to the polls, vote for her party, and take back the country.
Image courtesy Preemptive Love Coalition.
When Donald Trump looks at Mosul, a city suffocated by ISIS, he sees missed opportunity. On the campaign trail and in debates, he's expressed anger and dismay that military forces announced the operation to liberate Mosul months ahead of time. It should have been a sneak attack, he says over and over.
Image via Wikimedia Commons
In the summer of 430, the great Christian writer and bishop Augustine of Hippo lay dying as barbarians besieged his North African city – basically a mop-up operation in the slow-motion fall of the Roman Empire.
Today, in the fall of the year 2016, a lot of Christians can relate.
Halloween has passed and people are still scared out of their minds. The ghoulish costumes, haunted houses, and spirits, just don’t compare to the future of this country set to unfold over the next few days. Separatism, sexual assault, and scandal have set the stage. The anxiety of what is to come is chilling. I see it everywhere.
So I am writing this to you, the pastors and spiritual leaders of congregations of Christians all across America. I am asking about your pastoral and prophetic responsibilities as we approach this historic election with potential consequences that we have never seen before in our lifetimes.
While I was in Germany last week, watching the American election from afar, the Lutheran lectionary called for Micah 6:6-8 as text. That last verse plays a central role in America’s self-perception. It leads back to the year 1630, when a group of pious Calvinists sailed from England to North America. Boxed in between state church and English monarchy, they longed for more space to follow their religion. They wanted to build a society centered on the word of the God of the Bible. The Pilgrims decided to leave Europe and its institutions to become American immigrants. No walls could have stopped them.
Image via RNS/Reuters/Shannon Stapleton
They are many, shift between parties, and typically side with the candidate who ends up winning the White House.
That’s what makes Catholics the ultimate swing voters in the U.S. And this year they are going to throw their weight behind Democrat Hillary Clinton, a panel of political analysts said on Oct. 31.
Image via RNS/Reuters/Ronen Zvulun
Hoping for divine intervention – or Jewish votes – Donald Trump wrote a short prayer to be inserted in between the stones of the Western Wall.
Trump’s team photographed and sent a copy of the handwritten prayer to Ynet News and Yedioth Ahronoth, Israeli sister publications. The original was handed to David Faiman, a Trump advisor, who was heading to Israel, the news outlets reported.
May you remember that all politics and all platforms and all legalities and all borders and all leaders are temporary.
May you recall that political movements and boundaries and personalities and programs are here one day and gone the next. All of these are passing away.
Image via BlueDesign/Shutterstock.com
In 2013, Francis provoked an outcry from economic conservatives with the release of his apostolic exhortation, “Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel),” which was widely seen as his personal manifesto. In it, Francis said the world could no longer trust “the unseen forces and the invisible hand of the market,” and called for ecclesiastical renewal and compassion for the poor.
Cox, who taught at Harvard for 50 years, dedicated his latest book to the pope because they share a concern about what Francis called a “deified market” that’s creating “new idols.”
Image via RNS/Reuters/Jonathan Ernst
For some, the choice is not clear. Clinton-Kaine may be the more personally religious ticket, but Trump-Pence is more cozy with the religious right, aka the evil empire among atheists. Then there’s Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who has no chance of victory, but is the only candidate who reached out to nonbelievers and asked for their vote.
So what’s an atheist to do?
As a Christian who truly believes that abortion is a moral issue, I am deeply committed to dramatically reducing them. But criminalizing an often desperate choice is not the answer. We must also be deeply committed to the economic security, healthcare, and childcare choices that women need, which are critical to reducing abortion. I believe in the sacredness and dignity of life from womb to tomb. But a “consistent ethic of life” also ending poverty, human trafficking, the death penalty, ceaseless and senseless wars, and weapons of mass destruction.