Politics & Society
Creativity as alchemy for the world
A collection of lectures-turned-essays urges us to imagine a world beyond empire.
The whole, contradictory truth
Martin Luther King Jr. worked to expose the distance between what the United States professed and what it practiced.
Whose antiquity?
Curtis Dozier argues that White nationalists often don’t even have to distort Greco-Roman history in order to misuse it.
What the border wall does
I went to Tijuana with a group of US Christians to confront the theology embodied by a steel barrier three stories tall.
Citizenship by fiat
Political belonging isn’t naturally grounded in land, ancestry, or anything else. It is based on decisions that governments make and continually revise.
Douglas Wilson’s theology of victim blaming
The Christian nationalist pastor proposes that women are responsible for preventing men from committing sexual violence—by being subservient to them.
A feast day for the whole church
“The Feast of Creation in Christ names our need to celebrate God’s saving work in creation,” says liturgical theologian Kimberly Belcher, “and to do so together.”
Reforming higher ed by punishing students
Federal policy changes have made student loans harder to obtain—and much harder to pay back.
The faith of an empire
Religious leaders supplied the motives for American expansionism—along with the means and the opportunity.
Protesting into the void
Dissent is becoming a criminal act in America. As Christians, how will we respond?
The future of dying?
Physician-assisted suicide is morally complex. For Christians, it requires wrestling theologically with concepts like suffering, autonomy, and dignity.
The social failure behind assisted suicide
Why are people in pain? Why are their illnesses incurable? Neither advocates nor opponents of PAS tend to ask these questions.
Afro-pessimism and Christian hope
Reading Saidiya Hartman alongside Vincent Lloyd has helped me get through the night.
Putting a price on Indigenous lives
William Kiser’s sweeping history tracks three centuries of bounty hunters paid to kill and mutilate Native Americans.
Can this far-right Christian militia de-radicalize?
The Bratstvo Battalion was once known for its antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric. Now it’s fighting alongside diverse Ukrainians to save the country from Russia.
Strangers no more
The compassion of Iraqi and Syrian migrants I’ve met has transformed me—and challenged my vocabulary.
Escape to Mars?
The ultrarich are planning their exit from a dying planet. Christian apocalyptic theology has a different ending in mind.
Daniel Berrigan and the religion of war
The radical Catholic peace activist believed war is a religion that only a rival liturgy can resist.
An agnostic who out-Christianed the Christians
The 19th-century orator Robert Ingersoll denied God. But his answer to the question of human purpose strikes me as a pretty good one.