Sojourners

In 1 Kings 19, God appears to the prophet Elijah. At this point in the biblical story, Elijah is the last remaining prophet who follows God, and many in the nation of Israel have stopped listening. There are several people who would like to kill Elijah, and he’s desperate. If anyone could hope in a divine power to defeat his enemies, it’s Elijah. “Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces,” the Bible says.

Despite preparing for the possibility, advocates still felt the grim reality set in when the Supreme Court decided to allow the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status for immigrants whose home countries were previously deemed too dangerous to force their return. Christopher Kerr, executive director of the Ignatian Solidarity Network, said in a statement that the ruling “strips vital humanitarian protections from our migrant neighbors and leaves families in a dangerous place.

The Vatican said on Thursday that priests and lay Catholics who are part of a breakaway right-wing Catholic group that ordained bishops without Pope Leo's approval were in schism with the wider Church and now excommunicated. In a strong decree, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, the top watchdog authority for the 1.4-billion-member Church, also warned Catholics globally that the Swiss-based Society of St. Pius X now celebrated the sacraments illicitly.

After much fanfare, America’s 250th birthday is finally upon us. Here in Washington, D.C., the White House-sponsored Freedom 250 celebrations don’t seem to be going too well, from the algae-filled debacle in the reflecting pool to the sparse crowds at the Great American State Fair on the National Mall. Elsewhere around the city, the president has refused to sign a bipartisan housing bill in order to blackmail Congress into passing measures that would disenfranchise millions of eligible voters.

At the start of this year, Ruth-Ann Briscoe filled her calendar with different churches to try each Sunday, determined to find a community to call home. Belonging to Generation Z, Briscoe’s story is one anecdote in the flood of media and ecclesial narratives about young people and religious revival. While religious service attendance has been on the decline globally for the last 15 years, multiple studies in recent years have sought to quantify those anecdotes.

Sometimes I have to remind myself that I believe in the supernatural. I mean God, not ghosts. One reason I love horror is because the genre insists that for all of the world’s attempts to explain everything that happens to us, there are still some mysteries. Vampires, zombies, and their blood-chilling ilk remind me there are some questions only God knows the answers to. Part of faith is learning to live with mystery and accepting the supernatural as part of our lived reality.

As Cuba continues to face severe blackouts, economic crisis, and political pressure, Christians on the island and their allies in the U.S. are working to save lives and advocate for Cuban freedom. In recent months, the nation of Cuba has been experiencing blackouts so severe that journalists at the New York Times have mapped the effects in satellite photos taken from space.

This piece contains spoilers for Leviticus. In 2026's Leviticus, a boy called Naim becomes convinced by religious believers that it is good to be alone. It’s not an unreasonable conviction; indeed, Naim believes being alone may be the only way to truly avoid the demonic entity that has plagued him since a forced attempt at conversion therapy by his church. But as we begin to see throughout the film, being alone might prove fatal.

The Supreme Court backed on Monday state laws that allow mail-in ballots received after Election Day to be counted, rejecting a Republican-led challenge to a five-day grace period in Mississippi and dealing a setback to President Donald Trump. The justices in a 5-4 ruling overturned a lower court’s decision that had deemed Mississippi’s law inconsistent with U.S. statutes that set the timing of federal elections—for the presidency, Senate, and House of Representatives.

Texas elementary and middle school students will likely see redesigned social studies and reading lessons that minimize racial, geographic and cultural diversity while emphasizing the Bible — but changes for high schoolers have suddenly hit a pause. The Republican-led State Board of Education decided Thursday evening to allow final votes on a rewrite of Texas’ K-8 social studies lessons and a mandatory reading list for all public schools that includes Christian stories.