Israel
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.
I saw a lot of things in Palestine that made me think about my gun. I had purchased it some years ago, when I realized what little democracy we had left in the United States was deteriorating. When you live in a country where an individual has the right to bear arms as a stopgap against tyranny, and then you suddenly realize you are witnessing tyranny’s rise, you arm up.
Joe Kent, the former head of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned on March 17 in an act of protest over the war in Iran. Kent self-identifies as a proponent of the America First ideology. He claimed in a letter posted on X that Israel deceived President Donald Trump into believing that war with Iran was necessary. Trump has said the war in Iran was his choice alone.
Before praising Kent’s actions, it should be noted that his resignation reveals a stark divide within the Republican Party, which has pitted America First advocates against those who believe the U.S. should offer uncompromising support to Israel. Kent’s resignation highlights fault lines that threaten to fracture the Republican Party and the evangelical voting bloc.
As Christians across the globe remember Jesus’ journey through Holy Week, Israel is taking the unprecedented steps of restricting access to holy sites in Jerusalem.
Israel is blocking access to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, as well as the Western Wall, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque complex indefinitely after the outset of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, impacting typical observance of the Christian Holy Week, Ramadan, and Passover and restricting travel into East Jerusalem.
For Palestinian Christians, it would mark the first time that access to the church—which is known as the site of Jesus’ crucifixion, burial, and resurrection—is blocked over Easter. Historically, thousands of Christians around Jerusalem have traveled to the city and church as part of their Easter celebration.
As we journey through Holy Week, I’m meditating less on Jesus on the cross—I see that every day—and am instead meditating on Jesus razing hell.
Israel’s displacement and killing of Palestinians continues; the U.S. continues to escalate the war with Iran; and immigrants are still being hunted down by cowards in masks. Every day we see Christ crucified. What does the hope offered by Jesus, that these forces of evil can be stopped, look like? What are the lessons for us on the road from the crucifixion to the resurrection?
Disintegrating refugee tents, babies freezing to death, and extreme malnutrition are samples of the horrid conditions aid workers with the American Friends Service Committee have been witnessing in Gaza as they and other organizations provide the bulk of health and human services in the decimated region. But soon even those services could be gone. Under new registration requirements from the Israeli government, 37 aid organizations are set to be expelled from the region in March.
“It’s a red flag. It’s a shining light that says things are going to get worse,” Kerri Kennedy, AFSC international associate general secretary, told Sojourners. Kennedy oversees the 100-year-old nonprofit’s work in Gaza. AFSC and dozens of other aid groups have protested the new registration requirements and warned that their expulsion is a harbinger of things to come. “I can’t imagine the horrors and the lives that will be lost,” she said.
Our shared planet is crumbling under the weight of human greed and exploitation; our neighbors are being snatched up and disappeared from our communities; and money for jobs and education is being used to fund wars and genocide. And I’m expected to believe that God is good?
With a fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in place, it is tempting for many in the West to ignore the broader issues that Palestinians still face: Namely, increased settler violence and the state of Israel annexing more Palestinian land. I went to Palestine in August, while the war that was not a war still raged, and I saw firsthand the dire reality of Palestinians in the West Bank.
Joyous Palestinians rushed to embrace prisoners freed under a U.S.-brokered ceasefire agreement as they arrived by bus to the occupied West Bank and Gaza on Monday.
The prisoners were released after the Hamas militant group freed the last 20 living hostages taken during the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks that precipitated the war in Gaza.
Under the deal, Israel is set to release 250 Palestinians convicted of murder and other serious crimes as well as 1,700 Palestinians detained in Gaza since the war began, 22 Palestinian minors, and the bodies of 360 militants.
Several thousand people gathered inside and around the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, awaiting the arrival of freed prisoners, with some waving Palestinian flags and others holding pictures of their relatives.
Fighting back tears, one woman who asked to be identified as Um Ahmed said she said that despite her joy at the release, she still had “mixed feelings” about the day.
For as long as Lecrae has been a public figure, he has been a lightning rod for white evangelical racism.
A spearhead for the movement that turned Christian hip-hop from a misfit genre to a powerhouse industry, Lecrae has consistently endured racism thinly veiled as theological critique. While he was earning deep respect from hip-hop luminaries—Sway In the Morning and Kendrick Lamar, for example—he was fighting a Christian industry that only begrudgingly came to accept that CHH was here to stay.
Early on, critics claimed “Christian” and “hip-hop” were contradictory terms, and Christian rappers like Lecrae were putting godly messages second to godless culture. Then, as the U.S. began another reckoning with racist police violence, Lecrae was accused of division, partisanship, and putting “political issues” like racism before “biblical issues” like abortion. When he attempted dialogue, white pastors told him to his face that chattel slavery was a “white blessing.”
Last weekend, I visited my home state of Illinois to attend the Church at the Crossroads conference, which was held at Parkview Community Church in Glen Ellyn. Conference organizers estimated that 580 attended in person and 300 more joined virtually. The conference was convened to encourage American evangelicals to listen to Palestinian Christians and to confront and correct those who use scripture to “justify war, occupation, or silence” in the face of the escalating violence in Israel and Palestine.
Practically speaking, though, what was the point of this shindig?
In 2002, director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland released a post-apocalyptic horror movie that would redefine the zombie genre forever. 28 Days Later was not only ambitious for its experimental cinematography and reliance on relatively obscure actors, but also because of its critical commentary on violence and militarism. Boyle and Garland have partnered up again for the newest installment in the 28 Days Later film series, with the release 28 Years Later (now playing in theaters).
There’s nothing wrong with a gross and scary zombie movie that just stops there, but the 28 Days Later film series offers more than jump scares and blood-barfing, fast-moving zombies, which are called “infected” in the films.
We also need to be clear: Iran did not possess a nuclear weapon. Iran was enriching uranium needed for such a weapon and had recently increased its production, but intelligence assessments concluded they had not made a final decision to produce a bomb. In fact, the assessment said Iran would be more likely to produce a weapon if the U.S. attacked its uranium supply.
Francis called the church hours after the war in Gaza began in October 2023, Antone said, the start of what the Vatican News Service would describe as a nightly routine throughout the war. He would make sure to speak not only to the priest but to everyone else in the room, Antone said.
Since arriving to the White House, the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, has been on a destructive whirlwind through the federal government. At the behest of President Trump, the South African billionaire and chief of the Department of Government Efficiency has led an effort to illegally gut numerous federal agencies, fire tens of thousands of federal workers, and perpetrate fraud while claiming to root it out.
Regarding the seemingly intentional turmoil of Musk’s actions, Trump bragged at the Conservative Political Action Conference that his administration had “effectively ended the left-wing scam known as USAID. The agency’s name has been removed from its former building, and that space will now house agents from Customs and Border Patrol.” Taken alone, these actions have the makings of an oligarchic heist or a coup that cripples the government’s capacity to provide and protect public goods.
But within a wider aperture of the administration’s priorities — ripping apart families, hoping to establish concentration camps, offering refugee status to white Afrikaners, attacking trans people, and engaging in a “war on woke” across institutions — a coherence comes into focus amid the chaos. These are men who destroy to build a racial hierarchy in service of their own wealth and profit. Or as political commentator Elie Mystal of The Nation has framed it, they are bringing a “a neo-apartheid economic agenda to the US government.”
Amid the fragile ceasefire, the exchange of hostages, and the temporary pause in Israel’s genocidal onslaught against Gazans, nearly six hundred Christians huddle together in one of Gaza’s battered churches, their prayers rising above the rubble as a defiant testament to their faith and resilience. Among them, Gazan Christian George Antone boldly declares, “For us, as Christians, we are not leaving Gaza. We will remain in Gaza and help people in Gaza reconstruct their houses, rebuild the streets. Yes, we will stay in Gaza. We are not leaving.”
Antone’s words stand in stark contrast to the explosive press conference at the White House on Feb. 4, when President Donald Trump brazenly suggested that the United States should “effectively own” Gaza, proposing to turn it into a real estate venture while displacing Palestinians from their homeland and relocating them to neighboring countries.
When I visited Rev. Munther Isaac in Bethlehem, the West Bank, in October, he mentioned that he was previously opposed to liberation theologian James H. Cone. Isaac was trained in theologically conservative teachings, growing up in a conservative church and then leaving Palestine to attend a conservative seminary in the U.S.
An Israeli government minister criticized Pope Francis on Friday for suggesting the international community should study whether Israel’s military offensive in Gaza constitutes a genocide of the Palestinian people.
An evangelical Christian, Huckabee has been a vocal supporter of Israel throughout his political career and a longtime defender of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. A former Republican presidential hopeful, Huckabee hosted a weekly Fox News TV show for six years ending in 2015.
Ruth Padilla DeBorst told her audience: “There is no room for indifference toward all who are suffering the scourge of war and violence the world round, the uprooted and beleaguered people of Gaza, the hostages held by both Israel and Hamas and their families, the threatened Palestinians in their own territories, all who are mourning the loss of loved ones.”
Less than 48 hours later, the director of the Fourth Lausanne Congress emailed all attendees, issuing a lengthy apology for Padilla DeBorst’s speech.