https://sojo.net/feeds/articles Sojourners Magazine Articles en https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2026/new-and-noteworthy-young-king-biblical-interpretation-and-more Safe Havens For undocumented migrants facing deportation, church can be more than a place of worship—it can become a home. Thu, 23 Jul 2026 15:27:40 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2026/new-and-noteworthy-young-king-biblical-interpretation-and-more https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2026/humor/just-what-we-need-reassuring-uncertainty-about-aliens SO MANY TROUBLING things are happening these days that it’s hard to get out of bed, especially for yet another breakfast of homemade yogurt and granola with toasted sourdough bread, also homemade. Living in a fast-food desert, with at least three organic food stores within a mile of our home, it’s not easy to find the sublime comfort that junk food provides to an anxious spirit in challenging times. And with so many farm-to-table friends looking on, it’s hard to keep up appearances and maintain that brave free-range face. Thu, 16 Jul 2026 15:43:30 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2026/humor/just-what-we-need-reassuring-uncertainty-about-aliens https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2026/god-holding I DON’T KNOW about you, but I’m having a tough time. I look around and so much is broken that I don’t know how to fix. To make matters worse, your personal life never gives you a break just because the world is falling apart, which hardly seems fair. It’s always something, and it’s just too much for one person to hold. We are not the first to feel this way. I found inspiration in the characters from our lectionary texts this month. They faced great challenges, too, and surely felt the same despair and fear we do. They navigated uncertainty, conflict, and circumstances beyond their control. And yet, it turns out God didn’t need them to be perfectly faithful or unshakingly stable. When Peter gets scared and starts to sink, Jesus pulls him back up. When Moses’ life is threatened at birth, five women participate in his rescue (and it takes all of them). Peter questions Jesus to his face because he does not understand. Jesus corrects him without kicking him off the team. The heroes of these stories and of our faith are brave and also human—just like us. God is not upset about our human limitations. God sticks it out with us. Maybe faith isn’t about holding everything together. Maybe it’s about trusting that we are being held, even when we’re not sure we can hold on. Thu, 16 Jul 2026 15:13:04 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2026/god-holding https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2026/abiding Every first contains within the seed of its last. This is part of living. Before you arrived, you appeared to me in a dream. Wed, 15 Jul 2026 14:02:59 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2026/abiding https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2026/children-strife-theology-not-fantasy ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY’S Children of Time series begins with a premise so simple it sounds like a B-movie: What if we landed on a planet full of talking spiders? From that jumping-off point, he builds a story spanning star systems and thousands of years with remarkable insight and humanity. Four books in, with Children of Strife ’s 2026 arrival, he is still asking the question driving the whole series—Who is my neighbor?—and still finding ways to make the answer genuinely uncertain. Wed, 15 Jul 2026 13:31:17 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2026/children-strife-theology-not-fantasy https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2026/we-need-more-poetry-public-life FOR MY GRANDFATHER’S first death anniversary, my mother wanted me to design a thank-you card for those who supported our family throughout the year. The card featured a poem I wrote recounting one of my treasured memories with him: feeding his chickens as a rooster crowed in the wee hours of the morning. Upon reading it, one of my uncles smiled and asked, “Did you include this because your Lolo was a poet?” I didn’t. The 8,441 miles between Dallas, Texas, and Daanbantayan, Cebu, Philippines, left me bereft of the more intimate details of my grandfather’s life, including that we shared an affinity for the written word. This unexpected link soothed my suffocating sadness at our now permanent separation, thanks to a medium that is often at the crossroads of mending what is broken. Wed, 15 Jul 2026 13:18:45 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2026/we-need-more-poetry-public-life https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2026/what-clarice-lispector-taught-me-about-freedom AUGUST IS THE month of spider webs. Where I live in Chicago, they erupt and crackle from corners and streetlamps and porches, birthing and killing multitudes. It’s a month of green exploding and beginning to rot, a month of lingering heat and thunderstorms and frayed nerves and migraines, a stickiness that won’t go away. I’m uncomfortably alive. Wed, 15 Jul 2026 13:07:33 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2026/what-clarice-lispector-taught-me-about-freedom https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2026/love-remains-shows-directors-gods-eye-view ALFRED HITCHCOCK ONCE said, “In feature films the director is God; in documentary films, God is the director.” That’s true in a more theologically complex way than the director of Psycho and Vertigo meant. In a literal sense, a director controls a movie’s tone, guides actors’ performances, and chooses which shots make it into the final cut. In doing so, the finished product’s audience understands the story, characters, and themes through the director’s perspective. We see their creations as they see them, the same way God understands us entirely, beyond our actions and curated exteriors. Wed, 15 Jul 2026 11:50:31 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2026/love-remains-shows-directors-gods-eye-view https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2026/can-we-reform-our-souls-going-analog ACROSS SOCIAL MEDIA you’ll find sped-up videos of people sitting and doing nothing. They settle in alone, with no phones, and simply sit with their thoughts. The figures in these videos are trying to retrain their attention spans. After years of mindlessly scrolling through social media, they now film themselves, clasping their hands, tapping their thumbs, closing their eyes. In The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource, author and political commentator Chris Hayes argues that technology firms are deliberately chipping away at our ability to focus. He details how our attention spans and value systems have been reoriented and commodified for financial gain. Attention “is the foundation for nearly all we do,” he writes, “from the relationships we build to the way we act as workers, consumers, and citizens.” Our attention is precious and we need to protect it, to draw it close. As inherently curious individuals, the deep dive of doom-scrolling harms us. It cuts to the deepest part of us, the inquisitive part, which can’t contend with the infinite content overload of social media. Wed, 15 Jul 2026 11:33:26 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2026/can-we-reform-our-souls-going-analog https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2026/preparing-our-spirits-midterm-elections IN SOME WAYS, this November will be an ordinary national election in the United States. As is true in every “even” year, all 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives are up for reelection. In the U.S. Senate, 35 seats are up for reelection. In 2024, it was 34 seats; in 2022, it was 35. Incumbents tend to have an advantage in elections. All very normal. Wed, 15 Jul 2026 10:22:47 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2026/preparing-our-spirits-midterm-elections https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2026/we-almost-foolishly-dismantled-our-ocean-sensor-network I HAVE BEEN involved in many a church planning process over the years—I’m old enough to remember, say, Vision 2000, and Vision 2010, and Vision 2020 (extra points for that name). Doubtless now there are congregations across America involved in a “Vision 2030” process, and doubtless the first PowerPoint slide for their first meeting has words from Proverbs 29:18: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” Wed, 15 Jul 2026 10:15:22 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2026/we-almost-foolishly-dismantled-our-ocean-sensor-network https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2026/can-we-disarm-ai WHEN POPE LEO XIV published “Magnifica Humanitas” in May, what struck me most was a verb. The Pope reaches twice for the same words—“to disarm”—as he reflects on artificial intelligence and the civilization we are building. As someone who spent more than a decade working on nuclear disarmament, including helping to build the campaign that produced the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, that verb landed differently for me than it might for most readers. This spring, I signed the “Pro-Human AI Declaration,” a document that calls for centering human dignity and equity at the heart of AI governance. Having worked inside the nuclear disarmament framework, I want to offer an honest accounting: what it can teach us, where the analogy breaks down, and why people of faith may be essential to making any of this operational. Wed, 15 Jul 2026 09:49:11 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2026/can-we-disarm-ai https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2026/holy-disruption-fossil-fuel-crisis IN APRIL, REPRESENTATIVES from 57 nations met in Santa Marta, Colombia, shattering bureaucratic climate change gridlock to forge a “coalition of the willing“ for a just transition beyond the use of fossil fuels. Together, they moved past the question of if we should abandon fossil fuels; the gathering in Santa Marta focused entirely on how. Global climate leadership is being rewritten, forged through a rare convergence of political courage and multifaith prophetic witness. Wed, 15 Jul 2026 09:34:19 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2026/holy-disruption-fossil-fuel-crisis https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2026/god-numbers-our-hairs-now-dhs-trying-do-same IN MATTHEW 10, Jesus tells his disciples not to fear their persecutors, for “nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered.” He then assures them that “even the hairs of your head are all counted” by God (verses. 26-30). Some human entities seem to aspire to this level of knowledge. Congress approved a multibillion-dollar increase to the Department of Homeland Security’s budget last year, and DHS has been rapidly expanding their surveillance technology. This includes location trackers, license plate readers, facial recognition technology, and iris scanners. Mon, 13 Jul 2026 14:42:59 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2026/god-numbers-our-hairs-now-dhs-trying-do-same https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2026/editors-hallelujahs-and-howls-are-birthed-together THE LATE CONTEMPLATIVE Christian theologian and professor Barbara Holmes wrote about “crisis contemplation” for upside-down eras. Mon, 13 Jul 2026 14:34:19 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2026/editors-hallelujahs-and-howls-are-birthed-together https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2026/making-immigration-illegal-ignored-real-issues LAURA WAS AN Ecuadoran painter who sold her colorful pastoral scenes to tourists on the streets of Quito. Then the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and the tourists stopped coming. Her livelihood gone, Laura hired smugglers to help her join family in the United States. She arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2021, shortly after the border wall had been raised in places from 12 to 30 feet, through the efforts of the Trump administration. The smugglers leaned a ladder against the high wall for Laura to climb. Once she reached the top, they took the ladder away. She fell into the U.S., fracturing her spine, pelvis, and both legs. She had arrived, but at terrible cost. I wrote about Laura [a pseudonym] in Strangers in the Province of Joy, my recent book on migration across the southern border. Her story illustrates a larger point: We cannot solely enforce our way to a functioning immigration system. The $147 million price tag to raise the border wall caused a sharp increase in migrant injuries and deaths, but it did not significantly deter border crossings. And the southern border wall is just one manifestation of decades of increasingly more restrictive policies that have cost billions, killed thousands—and largely failed to curb unauthorized migration. Mon, 13 Jul 2026 13:44:29 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2026/making-immigration-illegal-ignored-real-issues https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2026/anti-capitalist-take-parable-talents THE CONCEPT OF talent as innate skill comes from an interpretation of one of Jesus’ parables (Matthew 25:14–30). In the parable, a man entrusted his slaves to grow his wealth by investing his money for him. A talent was a unit of currency and roughly represented 20 years of wages for an average worker. The story goes: The rich man gave one slave five talents, another two talents, and another one talent. When he returned, the first slave had doubled his investment to 10 talents. The master said, “Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things; I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.” The second slave also doubled his investment and received the same reward. The third slave returned the one talent he was given. “Master,” he explained, “I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow and gathering where you did not scatter, so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here, you have what is yours.” Mon, 13 Jul 2026 13:16:53 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2026/anti-capitalist-take-parable-talents https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2026/culture/story-bible-inviting-kids-scriptures-complexity I don’t want to exaggerate, but my family are sort of kids’ Bible specialists. We’ve been through a fair many, both for independent reading for our 8-year-old daughter and for the family reading time we share every night. That’s why I greeted The Just Love Story Bible (Beaming Books) by Jacqui Lewis and Shannon Daley-Harris, with illustrations by Cheryl “Ras” Thuesday, with excitement—it offered just the sort of justice-centered telling of scripture that my wife and I are trying to expose our daughter to. Thu, 25 Jun 2026 09:13:22 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2026/culture/story-bible-inviting-kids-scriptures-complexity https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2026/new-and-noteworthy-friendlier-churches-democracy-and-more Clarity Amid the Noise The Straight White American Jesus podcast believes “democracy depends on religious literacy.” Hosts Bradley Onishi and Daniel Miller, both former evangelical pastors, offer weekly Sunday interviews and refreshing insights on current events. Axis Mundi Thu, 25 Jun 2026 08:46:45 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2026/new-and-noteworthy-friendlier-churches-democracy-and-more https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2026/culture/sisters-epistolary SHANDA MCMANUS HAD just finished her first semester of medical school when she found out her little brother, Monir Hall, had been struck down in a drive-by shooting. As she was becoming a doctor, Hall—an army veteran and father of two, just shy of his 21st birthday—was selling crack in their Philadelphia neighborhood. In a cold hospital room where Hall lay brain-dead, McManus pressed her hand to her brother’s chest and thought she felt faint beats of his heart. In her debut memoir Brother Epistles, McManus recounts the night when she walked out of that room. She “had the sense of facing two doors, one marked DIE and the other LIVE.” She “stepped, unfeeling, through the second.” Tue, 23 Jun 2026 17:33:03 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2026/culture/sisters-epistolary https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2026/culture/mon-rov-offers-folk-hymns-displaced “REMEMBER, LIFE DOES not have to end with suffering,” writes Janjay Lowe in an Instagram caption promoting his latest album Bloodline. Performing under the moniker Mon Rovîa, the Chattanooga-based folk singer’s debut is a chillingly tender body of work. Tapping into the storytelling of his lineage through the sounds of his adoptive home, every strum, chord progression, and harmony is a cultural exchange. Tue, 23 Jun 2026 17:06:12 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2026/culture/mon-rov-offers-folk-hymns-displaced https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2026/culture/blue-heron-infuses-memory-grace I didn’t expect to cry watching hash browns burn in a cast-iron pan, but that’s the shattering power of director Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron, a semi-autobiographical drama that ruminates on the power and limits of our memories. Tue, 23 Jun 2026 13:08:22 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2026/culture/blue-heron-infuses-memory-grace https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2026/practice-micro-joy A FRIEND RECENTLY shared with me her practice of micro joy—pausing to appreciate the small things—and I can’t stop thinking about that word “micro.” When things are so very wrong on a macro level, it can be easy to neglect altogether the seemingly small stuff. But what if the small stuff is actually the big stuff? Maybe connecting with my daughter by getting down on her level is resistance. Taking time to admire the sunset is prayer. Inviting my neighbor over for coffee is the work. I don’t suggest burying our heads in the sand about the big injustices to focus only on the here and now. I simply mean that the daily little practices and gestures contribute to a healthier soil in which liberation can sprout. These small acts prepare the ground—and that work matters. Not all kingdom work is big or flashy or causes a system overhaul. But the little choices have ripple effects and something as tiny as a mustard seed can grow a tree. A little bit of grace, a little bit of courage, a little bit of hope, a little bit of prayer, a little bit of love can go a long way toward reorganizing the system so that everyone’s potential gets planted in equal soil. Mary Oliver’s words keep playing on repeat in my head, “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass.” Tue, 23 Jun 2026 12:39:04 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2026/practice-micro-joy https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2026/culture/why-are-so-many-drawn-authoritarianism THE QUESTION IS no longer whether we live in a time of democracy’s collapse in the U.S. The question is how we got here. Historian Ibram X. Kendi might have uncovered that history. Tue, 23 Jun 2026 11:42:41 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2026/culture/why-are-so-many-drawn-authoritarianism https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2026/song-sorrow I’ve been contemplating going off-grid— writing a new Scripture of fire and flood, the next Revelation. Tue, 23 Jun 2026 11:00:58 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2026/song-sorrow https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2026/humor/career-planning-rocks MY DAUGHTER LEAVES for college in a few weeks, and there’s been an uptick in “for the rest of my life”-type conversations at our house. Since graduating from college, I have been a musician, a hotline operator, a collections specialist, an accountant, a project manager, a pastor, a consultant, and an executive in a faith-based social justice nonprofit. And I have a bachelor’s degree in geology. It rocks. My career path has been much more of a hiking trail with poor signage than a career ladder. Tue, 23 Jun 2026 10:35:31 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2026/humor/career-planning-rocks https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2026/what-claude-cant-generate SOMETIMES I HAVE what they call “lucid dreams.” I’m aware that what I’m experiencing is a product of my mind and not tethered to outside realities (like the law of gravity). I can wake myself up—with much effort—by yelling in my dream, which actually activates my real vocal cords (to my husband’s annoyance). As in the films The Matrix and Inception, the million-dollar question arises: How do we know what is real and what is all in our heads? With the skyrocketing use of generative AI in our everyday lives—from work reports to dinner-table Googling—the question takes on new layers. How can we tell when something is generated by Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s ChatGPT? What are the telltale signs of the “uncanny valley” experience? And—more importantly—is there something distinct and irreplaceable about our embodied reality that AI cannot simulate? Mon, 22 Jun 2026 17:47:50 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2026/what-claude-cant-generate https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2026/rejecting-arts-war DURING WORLD WAR II, my grandmother worked as a nurse and office clerk at Civilian Public Service Camp No. 7 in Magnolia, Ark., the only one of more than 150 CPS work camps across the United States that exclusively held religious conscientious objectors to war. Mon, 22 Jun 2026 16:18:34 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2026/rejecting-arts-war https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2026/pursuing-faithful-response-election-subversion THE FIRST TIME I voted, at age 18, I was both nervous and filled with a sense of sacred responsibility. As someone mesmerized by the Civil Rights Movement, I was painfully aware that my African American mother couldn’t vote in most of the South when she was 18 in 1959, due to pernicious barriers such as poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and the threat of violence. Mon, 22 Jun 2026 15:54:19 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2026/pursuing-faithful-response-election-subversion https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2026/editors-it-armageddon-yet THIS YEAR MIGHT BE among the hottest on Earth. Free and fair elections are being subverted in the U.S. According to Scot Nakagawa, Christian nationalism is like a bus ready to run down trans rights on the road to authoritarianism, and the U.S. military chaplaincy program has been co-opted by people preparing to usher in the apocalyptic end times through American troops. Just like kids on a long metaphorical road trip, some of us may be asking, “Is it Armageddon yet?” Or maybe we’re asking, along with poet Tyler Truman Julian, “When is the time to flee?” Mon, 22 Jun 2026 14:14:22 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2026/editors-it-armageddon-yet https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2026/theological-uncertainty-condition-abandonment-decision THE AUTHORITARIAN MOVEMENT reshaping American public life has a Christian vehicle—and it is the fastest-growing sect of Christianity in the country today. The New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), which seeks an explicitly Christian command of government, is no longer fringe. It’s running the show. The “Seven Mountains” dominionist theology instructs followers to place government, media, education, arts, business, family, and religious institutions all under Christian control. That’s happening. The Seven Mountains Mandate is a published road map for Christian authoritarian takeover. They are already “sending the bus” to capture the rights of transgender Americans. Attacks on progressive and mainline Christians are a later stop on the same route. Mon, 22 Jun 2026 13:30:16 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2026/theological-uncertainty-condition-abandonment-decision https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2026/what-works-address-homelessness THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION announced in March an agreement between the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Justice that would make it easier to place homeless veterans under conservatorship. This means that VA attorneys can now be appointed as special assistant U.S. attorneys who have the power to initiate guardianship for homeless veterans and increase involuntary hospitalization for those with mental illnesses. While people struggling with mental illness and addiction need more support, this is not the way to provide it. Mon, 22 Jun 2026 11:44:05 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2026/what-works-address-homelessness https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2026/how-christian-nationalists-took-control-us-military FORMER FOX NEWS host and current Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has some revealing tattoos. Across his right bicep is the phrase Deus Vult (“God wills it”), a rallying cry from the 11th century Crusades, and on his right pec is the Jerusalem Cross, which was carried by Christian crusaders on medieval campaigns to conquer the Muslim Ottoman Empire. Back when Hegseth was a TV commentator, he laid out his vision for a new wave of American holy wars, both foreign and domestic, in American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free. “Surrounded by the Left, with the odds stacked against us,” he wrote, “only a crusade will do.” Since becoming defense secretary in 2025, Hegseth has attempted to implement a Christian crusade mentality within the U.S. military. In the buildup to the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran in late February, Hegseth held a Christian worship service at the Pentagon. He prayed for God’s blessing on “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy,” and said, “Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation.” While President Trump warned Iran to “Open the F***in’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell,” Hegseth provided the religious apocalyptic validation for the violence—both positioning the U.S. war machine as being on the side of the angels: Deus vult. Mon, 22 Jun 2026 10:12:36 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2026/how-christian-nationalists-took-control-us-military https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2026/retired-not-done AS A FEDERAL WORKER, Peter Goering was never told he couldn’t participate in social activism, but the message was clear: “We didn’t have any explicit prohibitions from participating in civil disobedience actions,” Goering said. “But an arrest here or there may have caught up with me.” Things changed for Goering with his December 2023 retirement from the Food and Drug Administration, where he worked on medical product safety. Two weeks after he left his job, he was arrested in a civil disobedience action—his first ever—protesting Israel’s assault on Gaza. Since his retirement, Goering has played a leadership role in his local Mennonite Action chapter, helping to organize protests around Gaza, ICE abuses, and at D.C.’s Museum of the Bible. In February, Goering joined a delegation that planted olive trees in the Palestinian West Bank. Goering isn’t alone in his post-retirement activism. The wave of demonstrations against the authoritarian excesses of the second Trump regime has been marked by an abundance of gray hair. “In America, we associate activism with youth,” Deana Rohlinger, a sociologist at Florida State University, told Forbes magazine. “We often don’t see older Americans as engaged—but they are.” Wed, 17 Jun 2026 07:01:42 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2026/retired-not-done https://sojo.net/magazine/june-2026/questions-reflection-and-action 1. Theologian Lisa A. Dellinger of the Chickasaw Nation references a selective view of settler history that persists in the Oklahoma public schools she once attended. What were you taught about United States history? In what ways did your faith upbringing challenge or reinforce myths of U.S. exceptionalism? Tue, 26 May 2026 09:24:57 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/june-2026/questions-reflection-and-action https://sojo.net/magazine/june-2026/in-this-time-of-great-reflection “In This Time of Great Reflection” is a hymn that lifts up the theme of the Puritan John Winthrop’s 1630 sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity.” Winthrop talked about the Massachusetts Bay Colony as “a city on a hill,” referencing Jesus’ image from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:14. In his use of this phrase, Winthrop wasn’t giving a sermon about American exceptionalism, as some later historical figures have suggested. As historian Daniel T. Rodgers explains in As a City on a Hill: The Story of America’s Most Famous Lay Sermon, Winthrop was actually delivering a warning: The eyes of the world would be on Massachusetts Bay to see if the colony would morally succeed in being loving, just, humble, good, neighborly, and kind. This hymn is a prayer that, as we reflect on our nation’s 250th anniversary, we will strive to be a morally responsible and community-building people; that we will repent of our sins and become as loving and humble as God is calling us to be. Tue, 26 May 2026 08:50:29 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/june-2026/in-this-time-of-great-reflection https://sojo.net/magazine/june-2026/humor/we-dont-look-day-over-240 Why so glum, America? It’s almost your birthday, and a big one, too! How often does a country turn 250 years old!? (Well, actually, just once. A bunch of other countries have done it already.) Fri, 22 May 2026 12:23:41 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/june-2026/humor/we-dont-look-day-over-240 https://sojo.net/magazine/june-2026/creator-healer-and-comforter From time eternal, we have felt you in the void. We have seen you in the stardust and in the lunar gleam that illuminated the void. We have seen you in molten rock and in the crystals and algae that became our rivers and our seas. Fri, 22 May 2026 12:13:49 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/june-2026/creator-healer-and-comforter https://sojo.net/magazine/june-2026/when-our-faith-forgets-people As Christian nationalism continues to plague the United States, I find myself asking the question: Who pays the price when faith separates itself from humanity? History is clear. It is the children. The mothers. The women. The foreigners. The outsiders. The marginalized. Who reaps the reward when we reconnect faith to the unlimited compassion of Jesus? All of us. All of us. All of us. Never in my lifetime has it felt as critical as it feels right now to make Christianity Christ-like again. Critical, as in people are dying. Critical, as in babies are starving. Critical, as in we are losing our very souls. Fri, 22 May 2026 09:12:03 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/june-2026/when-our-faith-forgets-people https://sojo.net/magazine/june-2026/when-bread-shared-cuando-el-pan-se-comparte The loaf is never owned, only passed from one set of hands to another. Thu, 21 May 2026 16:52:34 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/june-2026/when-bread-shared-cuando-el-pan-se-comparte https://sojo.net/magazine/june-2026/actually-we-need-more-flags-church A FEW YEARS ago, when I served as an elder at a largely Black Caribbean Seventh-day Adventist church, I grew tired of seeing the U.S. flag at the front of our sanctuary. So, one Saturday after service, I decided to move it to a back room. It only rarely returned. (Imitate at your own risk.) This was not unprecedented behavior for me. In 2004, as a new sixth-grade student at my local SDA school, I learned that my teacher, wanting to instill respect for the U.S. flag, would have our class hoist and lower the flag at the beginning and end of each school day. I, however, wanted it to be known that the flag was just a piece of cloth—one that absolutely was allowed to touch the ground. And then, with an overconfident 11-year-old’s flair, I would demonstrate. This earned my immigrant parents a phone call from a classmate’s concerned parent. I was correctly told to stop my shenanigans. Thu, 21 May 2026 16:29:33 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/june-2026/actually-we-need-more-flags-church https://sojo.net/magazine/june-2026/words-across-history-expose-americas-deepest-divide In All We Say, Ben Rhodes, a former speechwriter for President Barack Obama, examines 15 speeches that have defined and shaped the history of the United States. If you were to read the final two speeches back-to-back, Obama’s “race speech” and President Donald Trump’s second inaugural address, you’d likely experience an emotional whiplash. The first is delivered by an acclaimed modern orator, the second by someone who tends toward bombast and offensive tangents. Thu, 21 May 2026 16:15:04 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/june-2026/words-across-history-expose-americas-deepest-divide https://sojo.net/magazine/june-2026/deep-depression-philosopher-turned-mystics IN HIS BOOK Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark, author James K.A. Smith traces his own evolution through a personal “dark night of the soul.” Marooned by depression, Smith experiences a crisis of meaning, foreign terrain for him as a philosophy professor and preacher. In the context of what Smith calls our “knowledge economy,” the discipline of philosophy encourages academics to know, define, profess, defend, and win. Thu, 21 May 2026 14:58:50 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/june-2026/deep-depression-philosopher-turned-mystics https://sojo.net/magazine/june-2026/new-and-noteworthy-art-desert-theology-and-more Palestinian Insights From Bethlehem, Rev. Munther Isaac hosts the Christ at the Checkpoint podcast, talking with theologians, pastors, and leaders to share Palestinian Christian perspectives on Israel, Palestine, and what American Christians misunderstand about the ongoing conflict in the region. Across the Divide Thu, 21 May 2026 14:46:08 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/june-2026/new-and-noteworthy-art-desert-theology-and-more https://sojo.net/magazine/june-2026/what-can-film-made-during-bicentennial-teach-us-today “WE MUST BE doin’ somethin’ right to last 200 years,” proclaims the opening song of Robert Altman’s 1975 magnum opus Nashville. Over a dizzying five days, a cast of dozens of characters, all of whom feel true to life, stagger to put together a concert in support of a populist third-party presidential candidate. But the film’s plot is ultimately beside the point; what matters is the spirit Altman captures. Thu, 21 May 2026 14:34:00 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/june-2026/what-can-film-made-during-bicentennial-teach-us-today https://sojo.net/magazine/june-2026/letter-my-fellow-faith-activists DEAR FELLOW FAITH ACTIVIST, Over the years, I have seen how our country’s anniversary remains a source of pride for many, told as it is through the lens of cultural purity and exceptionalism. I regularly witness the country’s birthday celebration as if from a church overflow room, through a shiny screen—a flattened dream, as it were. Thu, 21 May 2026 13:52:34 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/june-2026/letter-my-fellow-faith-activists https://sojo.net/magazine/june-2026/one-burning-bush-used-be-enough IT’S AMAZING TO THINK there was a time when God could get one’s attention by setting a single bush on fire. Now, apparently, it takes the entire planet. In the last 18 months or so, there’s been a lot of talk framing climate change as a lesser issue, that instead we’re concentrating on “affordability,” and so on. If that’s been true, our intermission is coming to an end. Meteorologists are predicting that a new El Niño will form in the Pacific later this summer, and that there’s a good chance it could be a “super El Niño,” only the third such occurrence in the last 30 years. But even if it’s just a “normal” massive injection of heat into the atmosphere, it will mean enormous trouble. Wed, 20 May 2026 13:47:03 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/june-2026/one-burning-bush-used-be-enough https://sojo.net/magazine/june-2026/face-death-live-humanly IN 1973, in the context of the Vietnam War, Episcopal theologian and lawyer William Stringfellow (a Sojourners contributing editor until his death in 1985) published his classic work An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land. He wrote: “A nation ... may pursue such a course which so demeans human life and so profits death that it must be said ... that that nation ... is in truth governed by the power of death. ... The biblical story of such a realm is the saga of Babylon [in Revelation]. The extraordinary in-stance in the present time of the same situation is the United States of America.” Stringfellow’s analysis was profoundly biblical and remains the most trenchant theological analysis of American life, culture, and politics published in the last half century. As the United States marks 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, there’s value to engaging Stringfellow’s voice in our current national conversation. Wed, 20 May 2026 13:37:38 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/june-2026/face-death-live-humanly https://sojo.net/magazine/june-2026/my-family-fought-country-we-wont-celebrate-it AS A CHICKASAW child, I grew up in the shadow of Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma. I fell asleep to the drone of airplane engines and awoke to the sight of bombers, fighter jets, and AWACS (airborne warning and control system) planes in the sky above. I am well acquainted with how militarism permeates every aspect of the daily life of Americans. I recognize the stories used to promote this nation’s heroic “exceptionalism” on the world stage. This summer, as the United States marks 250 years of independence from British colonial oppression, our screens will fill with U.S. flags, fireworks, and military service members in full dress uniform. These images of patriotism, opportunities to consume rituals of collective belonging, and narratives of freedom and justice are presented as the aspirations of a Christian God and Christian country. Each soldier’s self-sacrifice for the nation is framed as Christ-like and their blood as poured out for our democratic salvation. Wed, 20 May 2026 13:23:03 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/june-2026/my-family-fought-country-we-wont-celebrate-it https://sojo.net/magazine/june-2026/what-can-we-give-us-its-250th-birthday How do we commemorate the 250th birthday of the United States while resisting the extremes of either hubris and triumphalism or apathy and self-loathing? This semiquincentennial year arrives amid great peril and polarization: Our democratic freedoms and our system of checks and balances are under severe threat, distrust of institutions is pervasive, and even the term “democracy” has become fraught and partisan. So, perhaps one of the best and most unifying ways we can mark this birthday is to make this a year of civic renewal. Mon, 18 May 2026 15:28:30 EDT Sojourners https://sojo.net/magazine/june-2026/what-can-we-give-us-its-250th-birthday