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By Kathryn Post
(RNS) — ‘The biggest lesson I had to learn is that God’s lack of an answer to my prayers to change me was an answer, because there was…
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Netflix Exposes Massive Dysfunction in ‘The Family’
By Rob Schenck
In the five episodes of the Netflix documentary mini-series, The Family, based on a book of the same title by investigative reporter Jeff Sharlet, we learn a lot about a…
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Using Stories to Bridge the Empathy Gap
When it comes to challenges such as the crisis at the southern border, restrictions on voting rights and problematic policing, our culture has an empathy gap. While these issues register…
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We Are Too Old Not to Get Arrested for Children at the Border
Via RNS — One of the most important tasks of any community’s elders is to protect children — all children. One obligation of rabbis is to love Torah, live Torah…
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Ted Cruz Takes Alyssa Milano to Bible Study — with an NRA Edition of the Bible
Via RNS — It takes some serious theological gymnastics to twist the Bible to defend guns. Ted Cruz was the largest recipient of National Rifle Association funds in the Senate…
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Why Christians Leaving Churches Today May Be Christianity’s Best Hope for Tomorrow
By Peter Oliver
One of the reasons many people leave churches may be that too many churches place too much emphasis on the importance of human rules and traditions, and not enough emphasis…
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Chasing Resurrection: How Conservation Is Gospel Work
We need varying strategies for convincing Christians to invest in environmental conservation. Some read Genesis 1 with an extended interpretation of what “dominion” should really mean. Others appeal to personal…
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Stressed-Out Anglican Priests Turn to Trade Unions for Support
Via RNS — The archbishop of Canterbury, head of the Church of England and the wider Anglican Communion, was an oil executive who helped run a major corporation before he…
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#GoldsboroRevival: Challenging the Distorted Moral Narrative of the Religious Right
By RLC Editor
We’re thrilled to announce that we’re partnering with Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II and Repairers of the Breach to co-host a two-night Red Letter Revival on October 1st and…
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Dear Gov. Lee: Pray with These Brothers in Christ on Death Row
By Kevin Riggs
Recently Gov. Bill Lee was challenged by a reporter to personally witness Tennessee’s next execution. Gov. Lee said while he had thought about doing so, he has never felt compelled…
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ICE Raids in Mississippi: White Crosses, Brown Babies, and Black Jesus
Last weekend I sat with a group of traumatized children in a small, rural sanctuary and listened to their stories. Their lives had been ripped apart by the ICE raids.…
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A Survivors’ Guide on How to Navigate Sexual Abuse in the Headlines
Hey, other survivors, I see you. You are not alone. People supporting survivors, I see you too. Thanks for standing with us when we can feel so alone. On days when…
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Why Trump — and Some of His Followers — Believe He Is the Chosen One
Via RNS — This week, President Trump took on two new titles, one bestowed upon him, and the other self-proclaimed. First, in a series of tweets, the president quoted Wayne Allyn Root,…
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Sister Helen Prejean on New Book, Getting Rid of Death Penalty, and Getting Jesus ‘Right’
Via RNS — Sister Helen Prejean wants to get religion “right.” But too often, she said, people use religion, including Christianity, for the wrong reasons. That includes Scripture used by…
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Red Letter Ethics: Putting First Things First
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is written by the editor of Christian Ethics Today, which strives to express, teach, and encourage disciples to look to the red letters of the Bible…
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Abandoning Faith to Find It
By Jim Zartman
We are starting to see a pattern, and we need to respond differently. Hillsong worship leader and song writer Marty Sampson recently posted on Instagram about losing his faith: Time…
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Taking Love Out of the Statue of Liberty
I am not one who believes there is such a thing as a “Christian nation” or who imagines that the United States counts as one. Nevertheless, there are aspects of…
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Lip Service is Not Enough: Trump Should Repent and Resign
Every pastor knows the difference between the grace of the Gospel — salvation through faith in Christ and repentance for our sins — and what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace,”…
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Thy Will Be Done
By Morf Morford
“You’ve got to think of people first,” he said in defense of yet another blatant assault on the environment in the name of creature comforts. I was stunned to hear…
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How to Practice Radical Generosity
By Julie Long
In one scene in the Richard Bach novel Illusions: Adventures of the Reluctant Messiah, the main character cracks open The Messiah’s Handbook, a book that opens to whatever the reader…
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Pastoral Letter on the El Paso Shootings
“If you really change your ways and your actions and deal with each other justly, if you do not oppress the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow and do not…
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The Grace of Red State Christians
As I came to the end of writing Red State Christians, I kept remembering something an editor of a Christian magazine had written to me, after reading a story I’d…
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Hurricane Maria’s Victims Have Been Mocked All Along
We had to fly my aunt to Buffalo, New York, to undergo emergency surgery. Which shouldn’t be newsworthy but it very much is because she is diabetic and was unable…
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When There Are No Words Left
By Molly Smerko
On Saturday night, I went to bed with the knowledge of two things: another mass shooting just occurred in the United States, and I still needed to write the prayers…
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The First Letters in Red
Matt 4:1-11 and Luke 4:1-13 Ever wonder “what are the first letters in red”? “What was Jesus’ first teachings or sayings”? “Who was his first audience”? What did he say?…
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Gilroy, El Paso, Dayton, and the Normalization of Violence
By Thomas Reese
Via RNS — As a bad Catholic, I need to make a confession. I no longer pay attention to mass shootings. If I see a headline in the newspaper or…
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What Did Church Teach White Students Posing with Guns in Front of Emmett Till Marker?
By Jemar Tisby
The investigative news agency ProPublica last week released a photo showing three white students from the University of Mississippi posing with guns in front of a bullet-riddled marker dedicated to Emmett Till. White…
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Uncivil War: Gilroy, Guns, & White Anger
What is there left to say after two children and a young man the age of my youngest child are murdered? Their killer, at a Garlic Festival in Gilroy, Calif.,…
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America Doesn’t Need More Death
We should all be deeply troubled by this week’s announcement by Attorney General William Barr that the federal government plans to resume executions. Not only did he announce his intention,…
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Who Will America Be?
My organization, Repairers of the Breach, joined major denominational and faith leaders recently to launch Moral Monday at the Borderlands. The purpose of the event was to highlight the crisis…
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A Revolution of Love with RLC UK
Last month, the Red Letter Christians movement went international. It was ambitious to pull off 27 events in 10 days in half a dozen cities across the UK. But we…
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Why I’m No Longer Listening to Complementarians
I recently heard about a campaign organized by many Christians to get the Amazon Prime Show, “Good Omens,” taken off the platform. Jokes on them for not doing their research…
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It’s Time to Revive Religious Civil Disobedience
By John Gehring
Via RNS — The Catholic nuns who occupied a revered place of awe and fear in my childhood psyche never talked about the the holy tradition of civil disobedience. But…
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Belief Is Easy
By Chris Ebling
As we move further into the 21st century, I am confronted more and more by Christians demanding that I believe a certain way. They say, “If you believe in the…
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How Being Unaffected Is a Sign of Privilege
I once worked for an organization whose executive roundtable was comprised of all older, white men. At some point in time, these people had to be hired. A position would…
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What It Feels Like to Be Told ‘Go Back Where You Came From’
Via RNS — Over the past few days, the president of the United States has publicly announced his racism through a series of tweets targeting four women of color who…
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Facing the Church’s Complicity in Racism
How many prophets will it take to repent of the United States’ original sin? For white Christians in the U.S. to acknowledge and turn away from our complicity in racism,…
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Why One Cannot Follow Jesus and Support Trump
Throughout the Gospel narratives, the Jesus we most often encounter is one of kind and encouraging words delivered with a divinely-inspired and gentle grace, purposeful poise, radical hospitality, and an…
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Churches Don’t Need Unflappable CEOs. They Need Non-Anxious Parents.
By Eric Minton
When I was an impressionable college student exploring “the ministry,” a well-intentioned someone gave me Good to Great by Jim Collins in hopes of helping me increase “my reach” as…
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Nuns & Nones Helps Millennials Find Surprise Soulmates in Catholic Sisters
Via RNS — The Dominican sisters sat in silence, eyes closed, palms upturned, couches and chairs pushed together into a circle in the room at the Dominican Center at Marywood…
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“Which Church Is True?” Isn’t the Right Question Anymore
By Jana Riess
Via RNS — I’m going to the Hill Cumorah pageant this weekend for the first time. The cast-of-hundreds pageant is going away after next summer, the victim of a 2018…
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Awaiting Trial for Breaking into a Nuclear Base, 7 Catholic Activists Are Unrepentant
Via RNS — In April of last year, on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., a group of seven aging Catholic activists assembled…
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The Jesus Truth + The Jesus Way
Modern American evangelicals have made salvation something altogether different than discipleship. This was true of the kind of evangelicalism that nurtured my faith in my teens and twenties. Billy Graham–style…
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Results Not Typical
Have you ever watched a TV commercial or read a print advertisement that made something look deceivingly easy? I’m thinking about those weight loss companies that put out their most…
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The ‘Imaginary God’ of Rev. Robert Jeffress
Who is God? Any human answers fall far short. God is beyond our comprehension and formulation. Anything we say of God is little more than stuttering and mumbling. But that…
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Onward Christian Soldiers
By Chris Ebling
Attending church services around the 4th of July always makes me uneasy. As I walked up the steps to the sanctuary at my church this year, I knew what to expect.…
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Hispanic Evangelical Group Offers to House Migrant Children in Churches
Via RNS — The head of the largest Hispanic evangelical Christian network in the United States announced it will offer to work with the Trump administration to provide resources and shelter to…
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Let’s Talk About Reparations
We aren’t the first civilization to debate reparations. In an excerpt from an ancient Jewish scroll known as “The Scroll of Fasting,” Egyptians lodged a complaint about how the Jewish…
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Seeing Jesus in the Migrants at the Border
By Alan Cross
Via RNS — The devastating picture of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his 23-month-old daughter, Valeria, lying face down in the muddy waters of the Rio Grande jolted the nation awake…
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Thou Shalt Not Compare Historical Horrors?
Via RNS — Yesterday (June 24), the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum condemned the comparison of concentration camps to illegal immigrant detention centers. Here is the statement: The United States Holocaust Memorial…
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What Will It Take to Study War No More?
By Art Laffin
Each Monday morning, members and friends of the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker (DDCW) hold a peace vigil outside the Pentagon’s southeast entrance where hundreds of civilians and military personnel stream…
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What Should Churches Do with Questioners?
By Jen Zamzow
I know what it is like to question. After growing up in the evangelical church, I did a Ph.D. in philosophy in a department that was almost all atheists. I…
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Faith Gone Wrong
Addiction is a kind of faith gone wrong. Across the country and the world, we see its effects at work. Drug overdoses in the United States have doubled every nine…
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How Wellness Culture Is About More Than Beauty
Via RNS — Last week, novelist Jessica Knoll wrote a scorching op-ed in the New York Times devoted to taking down the wellness industry. Reflecting on a lifetime of “counting macros, replacing…
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Boisterous Faith Leaders and a Silent Pete Buttigieg Rally Against Trump at White House
By Jack Jenkins
Via RNS — A diverse band of faith leaders and at least one presidential candidate descended on a park outside the White House on Wednesday (June 12), gathering to decry what…
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As Opioid Epidemic Spreads, a NC Church Opens Its Doors to a Syringe Exchange
Via RNS — The Rev. Sarah Howell-Miller, a United Methodist minister, once opposed needle exchange programs for opioid addicts — a stance shared by legislators in some three dozen states. The…
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Bible-Waving in the Face of Injustice
By Alex Awad
It is deplorable and somewhat surprising to watch Danny Danon, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, wave a Bible at a session of the Security Council to defend his country’s…
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Taking Biblical Economic Justice Seriously
By Don Golden
CNN recently reported that Donald Trump made $434 million in 2018. How is that so many working-class evangelicals are so willing to look past income inequality? Are evangelicals only Bible…
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The America Where I Want to Live
The air dripped this week in the Midwest. Finally summer, the first week of June, and I remembered how heavy it becomes an hour before a storm, the sky growing…
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#MoralWitnessWednesday: A Call to Prayer and Prophetic Action
This past Sunday (June 2nd), Franklin Graham and fellow Christian nationalists organized a “special day of prayer” for the president. Though Trump spent the morning on his golf course in…
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While It Was Still Dark: A Requiem for Rachel Held Evans
EDITOR’S NOTE: After a brief illness, beloved Christian author and theologian Rachel Held Evans passed away on May 4, 2019, at the age of 37. In the midst of deep…
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On Trump, Forgiveness, and Theocracy
By Bill Cayley
There are (sadly) so many ways in which the current leadership of our country falls far, far short of exemplifying Christian leadership and Christian character — no matter what some…
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Can the Religious Right and Left Be More Than a Rubber Stamp for Their Parties’ Policies?
By Jacob Lupfer
Via RNS — In the media and in our popular imagination, the religious right towers over our political landscape. So much so, in fact, that one could be forgiven for…
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Can We Remember Truthfully on Memorial Day?
Some conversations can haunt you long after they have taken place. I had one decades ago with a woman whose son was on the battlefield during World War II. Fortunately,…
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What Red Letter Christians Can Do When Political Talk Becomes Difficult
By Tony Campolo
Perhaps the most problematic result of the vitriol that has infected political discourse via the mass media is that people have tended to shy away from any discussion on political…
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Washing the Blood Off Our Hands
As Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee faced his first execution last week, he said that he was “upholding the sentence of the State of Tennessee and will not be intervening.” It sounds like an innocent…
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I Am Ashamed of the Anti-Abortion Gospel
By Don Golden
Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey recently signed America’s most draconian anti-abortion law. This latest in a series of red state efforts to overturn Roe v Wade makes abortion a Class A felony, threatening…
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A Prophet in Our Midst
I want to tell you a story about humility, and about purpose and prophecy, and about America. It begins in December 2014, though truthfully it started several months earlier, in…
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Could Draconian Abortion Bans Reverse Roe — and Unite Christians in Opposition?
Via RNS — Several states have passed restrictive abortion bills this legislative session, with Alabama earlier this week joining Georgia, Mississippi, Kentucky and Ohio in passing so-called “fetal heartbeat bills”…
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People of Faith Must Help Disrupt the School-to-Prison-Pipeline
By Emily Jones
When it comes to the school-to-prison pipeline, groups such as Advancement Project’s National Office, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Dignity in Schools campaign, Children’s Defense Fund, the Alliance for Education…
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For Houses of Worship, Interfaith Collaboration Is the Future of Security
By Aysha Khan
Via RNS — Last month, on the last day of Passover, a man armed with an AR-15-style rifle stormed into the Chabad of Poway synagogue in suburban San Diego and…
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Let Caster Semenya Be Who God Created Her to Be: Fast and Strong
Even now, more than 30 years later, I remember my shame. I was running a 10K co-ed road race, and found myself being funneled toward the men’s finish line as…
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Please Care
By Morf Morford
I don’t get to Seattle often, but when I do, I usually pass through a certain busy intersection. The past few times, months apart, I noticed an older Black man…
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Will Grace Prevail as Tennessee Execution Looms?
It’s the first time I’ve counted down the days to a friend’s execution. Unless there is a miracle from God or compassion from the state’s governor, Tennessee will kill Don Johnson…
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How Jean Vanier Broke My Heart and Saved My Life
Via RNS — Thirteen years ago this week, I met a man — a living saint, many insisted — who broke my heart and forever changed my life. Jean Vanier, the…
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Telling the Truth About Ourselves
One Coin Found was not written for me, but I needed to read it anyway. Although I also grew up in one of those relatively liberal Protestant denominations, spent some…
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Remembering A Woman of Valor: 4 Gifts Rachel Held Evans Gave Us
When the heartbreaking news came this weekend that Rachel Held Evans had passed away after enduring a medical coma for three weeks, it quickly became clear just how many people she had…
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Trumping the National Day of Prayer
I’m not a fan of the National Day of Prayer. Not that I oppose prayer, but the day is an occasion to put the nation in a sacred spotlight, linking…
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The Answer Isn’t Less Religion — It’s Better Religion
By Jon Huckins
The recent attack on the Jewish community here in our greater San Diego area has been deeply disorienting. Things always feel different when they get close. The Jewish community is…
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It Is Time to Publicly Protest Anti-Semitism
There is a very popular song that Jews sing at the Passover seder. It recounts the wonderful things that have happened in our history, all of them acts of God.…
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Cowboys and Indians: Dismantling the Western, Settler-Colonial Worldview (PART IV)
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article on “Shifting Worldviews and Indigenous Empowerment” is the last in a 4-part series to deconstruct the Western, settler-colonial worldview and to #ResurrectEloheh. Worldviews are not immutable,…
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To Sri Lankan Christians, and All Christian Friends: ‘May Christ Rise for You’
Two of my closest friends are Episcopal priests. I know. This sounds like the beginning of a joke. “Two priests and a rabbi walk into a bar…” Except it is…
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Cowboys and Indians: Dismantling the Western, Settler-Colonial Worldview (PART III)
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article on “Embedded Fallacies in the Western Worldview” is the third in a 4-part series to deconstruct the Western, settler-colonial worldview and to #ResurrectEloheh. Dualism: Dualism is…
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Clay Jars: A Letter to My Sisters in Ministry
In these days after Easter, Jesus has risen, and I am thinking especially of my sister colleagues in ministry and in work of all sorts for the gospel across America…
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Cowboys and Indians: Dismantling the Western, Settler-Colonial Worldview (PART II)
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article on “Worldview Distinctions” is the second in a 4-part series to deconstruct the Western, settler-colonial worldview and to #ResurrectEloheh. There are glaring differences between the worldviews…
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Cowboys and Indians: Dismantling the Western, Settler-Colonial Worldview (PART I)
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article on “The American Way” is the first in a 4-part series to deconstruct the Western, settler-colonial worldview and to #ResurrectEloheh. The American, Western way of thinking…
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How Making Friends with Indigenous People Changed My Life
By Joshua Grace
I’m a Polish-American settler. I didn’t choose the conditions of my birth or my original family. However, I do choose to actively undermine the systems and lies beneath those conditions…
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Black Women Cracking ‘Stained-Glass Ceilings’ with Jesus’ 7 Last Words
Days before Good Friday, the Rev. Stacey Hamilton continued to contemplate what she would preach about some of the last words of Jesus: “Truly I tell you, today you will…
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Why We Want to Skip Holy Week
I have a suspicion about why so few of us go to church between Palm Sunday and Easter. It is not just that weeknight services are tricky in our schedules.…
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Unholy Week
Bright orange flames gave way to billowing clouds of sooty gray smoke, rising high in the sky and nearly covering the setting sun in gay Paris; the arrondissements and boulevards…
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Christian Nationalism: The Real American Idol
By Daniel Hawk
At 1:00 a.m. on May 1, 2011, twenty-three members of Navy Seal Team Six descended from two MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters into a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Their objective was…
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Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris Ravaged by Fire
Via RNS — A massive fire engulfed the 850-year-old Notre Dame Cathedral in the heart of Paris Monday evening (April 15), destroying the entire wooden frame of one of Christianity’s…
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The Religions in ‘Game of Thrones’
By Jana Riess
Warning: This post contains spoilers through the end of Season 7. Also, winter is coming. But you probably knew that. There’s a scene in Season 2 of Game of Thrones in which a…
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Rejoicing in the Midst of Sorrow
By Kate Bowler
If you attend a church that observes the liturgical calendar, this past weekend you may have noticed the sanctuary decorated with flowers, clergy clad in pink vestments, and the organist…
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Why White Guys Think They’re Suffering
By Sam Altis
When I think about the changing cultural and religious landscape, I often visualize a large theater where we collectively go for connection, entertainment, and a sense of purpose. On the…
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Lent Is A Season of Stubborn Hope
By Kate Bowler
Via RNS — We feel our smallness when we consider the universe, unutterably vast, dark and scattered. Whole swaths of space are empty, while elsewhere galaxies drift through the void…
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All Americans Owe It to Our Country to See What’s Happening at the Border
Just across the U.S. border in South Texas, a few steps into Mexico, a young couple from Nicaragua holds their 2-year-old son, who is, and will forever be, unable to…
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Incarnate Weirdness (Or How NOT to Give up Social Media)
By Eric Minton
So I (mostly) stopped using Facebook for Lent. After I made this decision, it took everything inside of me to not immediately post on Facebook about how I wasn’t using…
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JOB ANNOUNCEMENT: Executive Assistant to Shane Claiborne
By Don Golden
Executive Assistant to Shane Claiborne
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How Fan Fiction Gave Millennials Power over Their Spirituality
Masters voice I can heard (sic) loud and clear. I know when I do wrong, I know when he is pleased. The way I see things is that we tend…
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American Christianity vs. Faithful Christianity
By Chris Ebling
I was flipping through my Facebook feed the other day when I happened upon Mary Colbert, a self-proclaimed Christian activist speaking on Jim Bakker’s TV show. In the clip, she…