Sojourners

I was born into a church in Chicago that was founded by fathers of the “racial reconciliation” movement in American Evangelicalism.

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.

After the Armed Forces of the Philippines shot and killed 19 people in Toboso, Negros Occidental, Philippines, Christian clergy have been active in efforts to seek truth and justice for the slain, including one they knew intimately as a colleague in social justice. Lyle Prijoles was a Filipino American activist who worked alongside many Christian clergy in the U.S. Bay Area.

In the fall of 2013, my family drove from the city of Boston to Greenville, S.C. We visited Charleston, S.C., where Confederate flags could still be seen at government buildings and all over Fort Sumter. As I walked through the city in the humid southern heat, I thought about the negative aspects of white culture in the South—racism, misogyny, and homophobia. I continued thinking about those things as we pulled into the school my parents chose for me: Bob Jones University.

One day, after washing the feet and hands of men and women with leprosy, Angela of Foligno, the 13th-century saint and mystic, ate a leperous sore. “We drank the very water with which we had washed him,” she writes. “And the drink was so sweet that, all the way home, we tasted its sweetness and it was as if we had received Holy Communion. As a small scale of the leper’s sores was stuck in my throat, I tried to swallow it.

The White Sox beating the Cincinnati Reds this week in Chicago? There isn’t a bigger sure thing in sports, right? Come on. Is the pope Catholic? More to the point, is the pope a White Sox fan from Chicago?

There's an early moment in the new Little House on the Prairie series that I keep thinking about. As the Ingalls family makes their way by covered wagon to the Kansas prairieland, they encounter a Black physician named Dr. George Tann. Tann (Jocko Sims) is a real historical doctor who helped the Ingalls family overcome malaria in the original book; here, he is the sole witness as the Ingalls family recklessly crosses a river and almost drowns in the process.

This piece was copublished with FāVS News, America’s only digital newsroom devoted exclusively to local religion journalism. Progressive religious leaders in Idaho are pushing back against a new state law that would force transgender people to use bathrooms aligned with their sex assigned at birth, a measure that is partially on hold following a preliminary injunction issued in June.

Several Catholic nursing homes in New York, including two in Westchester County, won’t have to comply with the state's newly-enacted Medical Aid in Dying Act while their lawsuit against it is underway. Just days before the MAID Act went into effect on Aug. 5, U.S. District Judge Anne Nardacci ruled the four orders of Catholic nuns and several Catholic healthcare ministries currently suing the state over the new law don’t have to follow it, at least for the time being.

Walking into the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Delaney Hall detention facility in New Jersey, Rev. Robin Tanner quickly noticed that the windows were blocked off. Tanner, a Unitarian Universalist minister in Summit, N.J., pointed out one issue for people inside: “For many people in their faith tradition, [prayer] is a daily act,” she said.