On Tuesday, President Donald Trump climbed onto the roof of the White House briefing room, saying he was there “taking a little walk,” and surveying the “ballroom on the other side.”
Last week, the White House announced plans for a $200 million ballroom, with hopes for the golden, gilded East Wing to be completed by 2029.
Surprisingly, the Bible has a lot to say about rooftops. In the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, rooftops are a key part of stories where powerful rulers stand and hatch plans to exploit the vulnerable, where God intervenes to encourage inclusive polity, and even in the tempting of Jesus. At other times, the Bible instructs people on how to build their rooftop decks, and roofs are used to ask Jesus to care for others. Rooftop stories show God cares about good infrastructure, accessibility, and safe communities.
Despite what you may have heard about a “muted” response to President Donald Trump’s second term, the size and scope of protests in 2025 have far surpassed what we saw in 2017.
According to data compiled by Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth and researchers at the Crowd Counting Consortium, the vast majority of these protests have been nonviolent; in April and May — which included large nationwide protests like Hands Off!, No Kings, and May Day — 99.5% of the protests featured “no injuries, arrests or property damage.”
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.
Like most superhero stories, The Fantastic Four: First Steps is about the end of the world. Early in the film, the ethereal Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) arrives to warn the titular heroes that Galactus (Ralph Ineson), the cosmic being who feeds on planets, will come to eat the Earth. Like all good heroes, the Fantastic Four take action, journeying deep into space to confront Galactus on his spaceship.
Rather than spend time on the usual origin story, First Steps director Matt Shakman and his team of writers throw the viewers directly into the action. Via a television special celebrating the team’s four-year anniversary, we’re introduced to the Fantastic Four and the retro-futuristic 1960s alternate reality where they live.
Given Christianity’s sordid history when it comes to antisemitism, we have a responsibility to reaffirm our commitment to combating antisemitism. But we must be vigilant to resist the lie that this commitment requires our silence on Palestine or Palestinian human rights. As journalist Peter Beinart told Sojourners in April, there is a “sense of guilt and anxiety that exists about Christian antisemitism,” and it “is leveraged sometimes by pro-Israel leaders … It’s much easier to level accusations of antisemitism than to actually have an honest conversation about how you justify a system that the country’s own human rights organizations are calling apartheid.”
The way to address antisemitic violence is not, as our current and previous administrations have suggested, by silencing Palestinians or those advocating for a free Palestine.
IN THE MIDDLE East, water is more than a resource. Water is a source of power, and in many cases, a weapon of war. The Gaza Strip is the most urgent and devastating example.
The survival of Ahmad (whose last name we have withheld for security reasons), like hundreds of thousands of others in Gaza, depends on gaining access to basic humanitarian resources, especially water.
“Sometimes a water truck comes to our area, so we fill some gallons. When it doesn’t, we’re forced to drink regular water,” Ahmad told us and our colleagues at Churches for Middle East Peace over WhatsApp in July. The “regular water” he refers to is untreated groundwater pulled from local wells, risky to consume even before the most recent war. “My body didn’t take it. I got very sick,” he told us. “But we had no other option.”
The Fantastic Four: First Steps starts out with a trade proposal of the highest stakes. Galactus, the world-eating villain of Marvel’s latest reboot, will spare the Earth from his insatiable hunger in exchange for one child.
The child on the cosmic bargaining table is Franklin, son of Reed Richards, aka “Mister Fantastic” (a subdued Pedro Pascal) and Sue Storm, aka “The Invisible Woman” (Vanessa Kirby, who really gets to shine as the Fantastic Four’s leader).
I was researching an article I was writing for Sojourners recently when I noticed something odd: The AI Overview answer that was being generated kept shifting, even though my search query did not.
For those not familiar with Google’s relatively new AI Overview technology, AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of Google search results pages for certain queries. According to Google, AI Overviews use generative AI to provide quick, easy-to-read answers to Google searches by compiling information from multiple sources, including web pages, news articles, and Google’s Knowledge Graph.
Brad Onishi is the co-host of a podcast titled Straight White American Jesus. With co-host Daniel Miller, Onishi examines and deconstructs evangelical politics, theology, and culture. Onishi, who has a doctorate in religious studies, told me that when they began the podcast in 2018, he wasn’t sure if anyone would listen. But now, almost 900 episodes later, they’ve “commented on every angle and every aspect of Christian nationalism, the Trump presidencies, the Biden presidency, and everything in between: from gender to race, sexuality, church politics, and so on.”
The verse that radicalized me will be a familiar one to Sojourners readers. It can be found in Matthew 25: “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’”
“Radicalization” is a popular topic. When I say I have been radicalized, I don’t mean that I’ve been shaped by a rigid set of beliefs that draws hard lines between who’s in and who’s out. I mean that I’ve been transformed by the teachings of Jesus, which challenge me to practice a radical form of love for others.