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Faith leaders working toward peace in Israel and Palestine have met the ongoing ceasefire with wary hope—grateful for a step toward peace, but anxious about long-term justice.
“Our organizational position and a part of the sentiment I’m experiencing is a cautious hope,” said Rev. Mae Elise Cannon, Executive Director of Churches for Middle East Peace. “We’re not using optimism, we’re using hope.”
On Oct. 8, Israel and Hamas agreed to commence the first stage of a 20-point peace plan drawn up by President Donald Trump with the assistance of Middle East allies. The Trump-led plan marks the third cessation in fighting between Israel and Hamas since October 2023, after Hamas’s terrorist attacks on Israel, which killed 1,200 people, and Israel’s following offensive on Gaza which has killed more than 67,000. Israel’s military violence and blockading of aid and food have led to a humanitarian crisis that the UN and other groups have called a genocide.
The Supreme Court seems likely to overrule a law banning conversion therapy for minors, horrifying queer faith leaders and their allies after years of fighting to protect queer children.
Colorado’s minor conversion therapy law prohibits state-licensed mental health workers from seeking to change a minor's sexual orientation or gender identity, including attempts to reduce or eliminate same-sex attraction or change “behaviors or gender expressions.” Violations are punishable by a fine of up to $5,000. The petitioner Kaley Chiles is a Christian counselor who argues that the law violates her First Amendment right to free speech by censoring what can be discussed with consent in therapy sessions.
Chris Damian, a gay Catholic lawyer, told Sojourners that the case hinges on whether talk therapy is considered a form of speech or whether it’s considered conduct.
“Obviously this case is about conversion therapy,” Damian said. “But it’s also about much more. It’s about whether and how state legislatures can hold mental health professionals accountable for their practice.”
As President Donald Trump ordered federal troops into Chicago to assist with deportation efforts, immigrants and their advocates found an ally in Pope Leo XIV. A native of the city, the new pope urged U.S. bishops to confront the government’s escalating targeting of migrants.
After a private audience with Catholic leaders from El Paso, Texas, at the Vatican, on Oct. 8, Leo said he would like the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to issue a formal statement. His appeal followed recent comments questioning the consistency of some American Catholics’ moral stances: “Someone who says that ‘I’m against abortion, but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States,’ I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”
Alongside Bishop of El Paso Mark J. Seitz, Hope Border Institute, a grassroots organization rooted in Catholic social teaching, presented the pope with a stack of letters from immigrant community members. The letters expressed both the worries and hopes of migrants in today’s political climate and were received with emotion, said Astrid Liden, Hope’s communications officer.
Joyous Palestinians rushed to embrace prisoners freed under a U.S.-brokered ceasefire agreement as they arrived by bus to the occupied West Bank and Gaza on Monday.
The prisoners were released after the Hamas militant group freed the last 20 living hostages taken during the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks that precipitated the war in Gaza.
Under the deal, Israel is set to release 250 Palestinians convicted of murder and other serious crimes as well as 1,700 Palestinians detained in Gaza since the war began, 22 Palestinian minors, and the bodies of 360 militants.
Several thousand people gathered inside and around the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, awaiting the arrival of freed prisoners, with some waving Palestinian flags and others holding pictures of their relatives.
Fighting back tears, one woman who asked to be identified as Um Ahmed said she said that despite her joy at the release, she still had “mixed feelings” about the day.
Pope Leo told U.S. bishops visiting him at the Vatican on Wednesday that they should firmly address how immigrants are being treated by President Donald Trump's hardline policies, attendees said, in the latest push by the pontiff on the issue.
Leo, the first U.S. pope, was handed dozens of letters from immigrants describing their fears of deportation under the Trump administration's policies during the meeting, which included bishops and social workers from the U.S.-Mexico border.
For as long as Lecrae has been a public figure, he has been a lightning rod for white evangelical racism.
A spearhead for the movement that turned Christian hip-hop from a misfit genre to a powerhouse industry, Lecrae has consistently endured racism thinly veiled as theological critique. While he was earning deep respect from hip-hop luminaries—Sway In the Morning and Kendrick Lamar, for example—he was fighting a Christian industry that only begrudgingly came to accept that CHH was here to stay.
Early on, critics claimed “Christian” and “hip-hop” were contradictory terms, and Christian rappers like Lecrae were putting godly messages second to godless culture. Then, as the U.S. began another reckoning with racist police violence, Lecrae was accused of division, partisanship, and putting “political issues” like racism before “biblical issues” like abortion. When he attempted dialogue, white pastors told him to his face that chattel slavery was a “white blessing.”
Hamas said on Friday it would agree to some aspects of U.S. President Donald Trump's plan to end the Gaza war, including releasing hostages and handing over administration of the enclave, but that it would seek negotiations over many of its other terms.
In a copy of the statement seen by Reuters, Hamas issued its response to Trump's 20-point plan after the U.S. president gave the Palestinian militant group until Sunday to accept or reject the proposal. Trump has not said whether the terms would be subject to negotiation, as Hamas is seeking.
The Church of England named Sarah Mullally on Friday as the next Archbishop of Canterbury, the first woman to hold the 1,400-year-old office, prompting criticism from conservative Anglicans mainly based in Africa who oppose women bishops.
Mullally will also become the ceremonial head of 85 million Anglicans worldwide and, like her predecessors, faces a tough challenge in bridging the divide between conservatives - especially in Africa, where homosexuality is outlawed in some countries - and generally more liberal Christians in the West.
Pope Leo on Tuesday appeared to offer his strongest criticism yet of President Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policies, questioning whether they were in line with the Catholic Church’s pro-life teachings.
“Someone who says I am against abortion, but I am in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States, I don’t know if that’s pro-life,” the pontiff told journalists outside his residence in Castel Gandolfo.
Angela Thompson soaked in the garden tub of her new apartment in Columbia, South Carolina. With a freshly cut bob and a lease penned in her name, she reflected on the 30-year marriage she had just left behind. “I put down a deposit, I got the utilities and I furnished the [apartment] off Facebook Marketplace,” she told Uncloseted Media and The 19th.
At just 17 years old, Thompson married a youth pastor six years her senior due to pressure from a non-denominational evangelical church she described as “close to a cult.”
“The message from my church was: ‘You find a man, you marry a man, you have his babies, you stay married forever, whether you're happy or not,’” she says. “Look around and pick a man,” they would tell her.
In response to ongoing federal threats from President Donald Trump, Chicago faith leaders organized a surge of solidarity to protect the most vulnerable. Alongside a deep pride for their city, some of the organized actions share a critical motif: joy.
Community leaders in Chicago were already alert to the threat that Trump posed to immigrant communities in Chicago when the president began hinting at sending the National Guard into the city to support Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and cut the crime rate of what he falsely claimed to be the most dangerous city in the world. For some of the faith leaders, it was important that they protest not just the dangerous influx of troops, but also the false narrative surrounding their city.
“We’re called to be constantly rejoicing,” Rev. Juan Pablo Herrera told Sojourners. “It’s a spiritual strength that we can have in times of negativity coming against us, that we can choose to live with joy as a way of defying the forces of principality.”
Faith leaders are speaking out against Arkansas’ efforts to expand its options for carrying out the death penalty, calling for the state to address the root causes of violence rather than doubling down on punishment.
“Some will say, if you really do the research, you’ll find a more humane way for us to kill each other. I say, if you really do the research, you’ll find the laws that won’t put us in that position to begin with,” said Rev. Paul Beedle of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Little Rock.
Beedle joined more than 40 faith leaders signing onto a letter urging Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders to refrain from authorizing nitrogen gas as an execution method. Seven leaders gathered and spoke at the state’s capitol in Little Rock on Aug. 21, then delivered the letter to the governor’s office themselves.
A teenager who died of leukemia in 2006 became the first Catholic saint of the millennial generation on Sunday, in a Vatican ceremony led by Pope Leo XIV and attended by an estimated 70,000 young worshippers from dozens of countries.
Carlo Acutis, a British-born Italian boy who died aged 15, learned computer code to build websites to spread his faith. His story has drawn wide attention from Catholic youth, and he is now at the same level as Mother Teresa and Francis of Assisi.
Leo, the first U.S. pontiff, canonized Acutis on Sunday along with Pier Giorgio Frassati, a young Italian man who was known for helping those in need and died of polio in the 1920s.
Faith in Public Life, a nonprofit that organizes clergy and faith leaders toward progressive causes, laid off 90% of its staff, CEO Jeanné Lewis confirmed to Sojourners.
Lewis said the decision, which reduced FPL’s staff from 19 to just two on Aug. 1, was both strategic and financial, in response to changes from institutional philanthropy and grant-makers. FPL and its sister organization, Faith in Public Life Action—which Lewis also heads—will scale back programming as a result of the shift.
Two children were killed and 17 other people were injured on Wednesday after a gunman opened fire on schoolchildren who were attending Mass at a Minneapolis Catholic school, authorities said.
The assailant, wielding a rifle, a shotgun and a pistol, fired dozens of rounds through the church windows, officials said. The shooter then took his own life, they said.
“In my ideal society, we would vote as households,” a pastor tells CNN. “And I would ordinarily be the one that would cast the vote, but I would cast the vote having discussed it with my household.”
Another agrees, saying he’d back an end to a woman’s right to vote: “I would support that, and I’d support it on the basis that the atomization that comes with our current system is not good for humans.”
The discussion of 19th Amendment rights was part of a news segment focused on Doug Wilson — a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist pastor based in Idaho — that was reposted to X by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The secretary is among Wilson’s supporters, and his involvement with Wilson’s denomination highlights how a fringe conservative evangelical Christian belief system that questions women’s right to vote is gaining more traction in the Republican Party.
For the first time in more than 10 years, Detroit will choose a new mayor without an incumbent on the ballot. Among the candidates are a City Council president, a nonprofit leader, a former police chief, and a reverend.
The Rev. Solomon Kinloch gained early traction as a spiritual leader and community-first candidate. Recent polling shows Kinloch in tight competition for second or third place as Detroit heads into a tightly contested primary on Aug. 5.
Kinloch currently leads Triumph Church, a large, multisite congregation with seven campuses and 40,000 members across the region. He has led Triumph Church since 1998 and has stated he intends to retain his pastoral duties if elected. His long tenure pastoring a large church body is part of Kinloch's appeal to be a credible candidate for public office. But that same tenure raises questions among some potential constituents about his willingness to defend the rights of LGBTQ+ Detroiters.
The Supreme Court dealt a blow on Friday to the power of federal judges by restricting their ability to grant broad legal relief in cases as the justices acted in a legal fight over President Donald Trump's bid to limit birthright citizenship, ordering lower courts that blocked the policy to reconsider the scope of their orders.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday backed a bid by an arm of a Catholic diocese in Wisconsin for a religious exemption from the state's unemployment insurance tax in the latest ruling in which the justices took an expansive view of religious rights.