Colin Martinez Longmore is an opinion writer for the 2026 Sojourners Journalism Cohort.
He is a community organizer with LA Voice, working with churches and faith leaders in the San Gabriel Valley to build collective power. He is also a Latinx Fellow in the master of divinity program at Duke Divinity School.
Previously, he worked in faith-based advocacy with NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice in Washington, D.C., advancing national policy campaigns for the common good alongside Catholic sisters. He also spent nearly a decade in parish ministry in the Diocese of Orange, leading bilingual youth faith formation programs. His writing and work focus on the gray areas of faith and public life. He is based in Southern California.
Posts By This Author
The Devil Is Real. He Lives in Betting Apps
I’ve heard the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness described as a warning against testing God. Maybe. But lately I’ve been thinking that the story is about testing your luck.
Here’s how the scene might look in 2026: The devil isn’t a shadowy figure on a mountaintop. He’s a sleek betting app. A notification lights up the screen: Turn this stone into bread. Massive payout. No one will know. Another notification appears: Jump from the temple. Stick the landing. Viral moment. Your followers will explode. Then there is the final notification, the final temptation: Bow to me just once. Lifetime guarantee. Unlimited upside. In the story, Jesus swipes away the temptation for the massive payout. But today, with the rise of predictive markets and sports gambling, it’s getting hard for us to do the same. It’s harder to resist this modern temptation because, for a lot of people, it now takes something big just to get by.
Some ICE Agents Want Out. Christians Can Help Them
Across the country, thousands of men and women wake before dawn, put on a neck gaiter, sunglasses, and a baseball cap, and drive to work to separate families. They do this in the name of “law and order,” a phrase that sounds sturdy enough to be moral, and vague enough to hide what it requires. Under the current administration, that looks like intensified immigration crackdowns and scapegoating immigrants as the source of the country’s problems. It’s part of a long American tradition of fusing public safety rhetoric with racist and xenophobic policies. “Law and order” has always depended on certain people carrying out actions the rest of the public prefers to ignore.
ICE Violence Thrives on Forgetting. Faith Compels Us to Remember
In Minneapolis, the places where Renee Nicole Macklin Good and Alex Pretti were killed by federal immigration agents have become sacred ground. People have returned to those sites with candles, signs, prayers, and grief. As far as community members are concerned, these memorials serve to remember those killed and what they stood for.