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.”
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.
This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here.
I’m not on TikTok, so I’d never heard of 22-year-old content creator, Taylor Cassidy. Cassidy rose to prominence after she started creating engaging and easily digestible videos about Black history. During my interview with Cassidy, she told me her goal is to make sure her audience feels uplifted and excited about learning.
“You know what freedom is? No fear,” says Benicio Del Toro’s Sensei Sergio in One Battle After Another, inspiring Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson to face an authoritarian manhunt right on his family’s tail. While both Bob and Sergio are, in certain senses, doomsday preppers, they react quite differently to an impending threat. And how we react when we feel under threat makes a big difference, both to our own wellbeing and to the movements we care about.
In the film, Bob is an in-hiding former member of the far-left revolutionary group called the French 75. For the last 16 years, while raising his daughter Willa in the sanctuary city of Baktan Cross, he’s lived with an intense paranoia about her safety and the potential of his old life coming back to haunt them both.
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.
I first learned about the theological concept of kairos while studying abroad in Cape Town, South Africa in 1996. South African faith leaders taught me that, as compared to chronos, or time as we know it and traditionally experience it, kairos moments are precipitated by times in which our current reality becomes so pernicious and fraudulent that God can create a moment of opportunity for propitious action and transformation.
As I think about the alarming things we’ve seen in the U.S. this year—eviscerated foreign aid, a gutted federal workforce, tax cuts for the 1% at the expense of Medicaid and food stamps, National Guard troops deployed against U.S. cities, indiscriminate immigration raids, an almost complete retreat on addressing our climate crisis, attacks on media outlets and free speech, and other tactics that mirror authoritarian regimes—I’m increasingly sensing that we are in the midst of a kairos moment. Further signs came to a head this past week with the horror of five mass shootings in one weekend, a costly government shutdown, and an alarming and bizarre summoning of 800 generals and admirals to the White House in which President Donald Trump pledged to dangerously misuse the military to come after the “enemy from within.”
I’ll be honest, I always thought the prophet Isaiah’s “woe to those who call evil good and good evil,” would play out a little more subtly in modern politics. Instead, last week gave us two explicitly straightforward examples of intentional, unjust redefinitions.
On Sept. 25, state Rep. John Gillette, a Republican from Kingman, Ariz., said earlier in the week that U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat from Washington state, should be “tried convicted and hanged.” After the Arizona Mirror reported on his comments, Gillette said he was simply referencing the “longstanding statutory penalty for treason.” But Jayapal, as the Mirror reported, was not calling for treason or a violent overthrow. Instead, she had been advocating for nonviolent resistance and protests. In a review of the entire session, the Mirror found there were “no calls to violence or advocating for overthrowing the government.”
You may have heard that, at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, Erika Kirk said that she forgave her husband’s assassin.
You may have also heard that only a few minutes later, President Donald Trump said that while Charlie Kirk “did not hate his opponents—he wanted the best for them,” he was different: “I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them!” This moment got a lot of attention, understandably so, but another moment stuck out to me even more. And even though we’re almost a week and a half removed from the memorial service, I think it’s still worth exploring today.
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.