As America prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary, our latest report, “Competing Visions of America at 250: Politics, Religion, and Identity,” surfaces a troubling signal for the future of our democracy — and it centers on the nation’s youngest citizens. Generation...
I never will forget the day I stood in the middle of the ICU waiting room at the local children’s hospital, embarrassed and a bit enraged. It was my last year of seminary, and I had spent the last four…
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. isn’t the only anti-vaxxer potentially headed to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services if President-elect Donald Trump gets his way. He could be bringing with him one of the most notorious anti-science doctors of…
Gladstone’s Library is a remarkable institution, a residential research library in Northern Wales that was founded by four-time British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone. Last month, I taught a course at the Library with Oxford University’s Professor of Black Theology…
The scene looked the same, just as it does every Sunday: We thanked God for the gifts of the table. Together, we sang “The Sanctus,” and then the celebrant spoke of Scripture — when, at the Passover meal, Jesus takes…
On Aug. 6, 1995, Michael McEachern and Katy Nesbit — two spirited, trusting young people — went to a Whataburger and never returned to the friends and family who loved them so much. They were murdered over the theft of…
One of President-elect Donald Trump’s most controversial cabinet nominees is a Southern Baptist. Matt Gaetz, who abruptly resigned his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives last week just days before a House Ethics Committee was to release its investigation…
In Oklahoma, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters is at it again. The man who has made controversial statements about Black history, who promotes a Christian nationalist agenda for curriculum and who demands teachers have Bibles in their classrooms…
With every announcement of a cabinet-level nomination that seems more shocking than the last, Americans who are not on the Trump train are struggling to understand how many of the president-elect’s actions will be agreeable to his base and whether…
Negative reactions to Donald Trump’s reelection to the presidency — the ones I have primarily heard or read — have been swift and serious. There have been many analyses of where Democrats went wrong in an election that offered such…
Beyond the campaigning that constantly exposed me to innumerable unsolicited ads in the mail and on television, what has bothered me most this election season is the bipartisan gullibility of Christians. We should, and many of us do, know better,…
I lay in bed, awakened from what otherwise would have been a restful night of sleep. The question that had plagued my conscience had now intruded upon my sleep: Why do so many conservative Christians so blindly follow Donald Trump?…
Less than an hour after Donald Trump was shot, one of my most liberal friends posted a meme making light of the situation. I phoned to confront the callousness. Things got heated. When I blurted, “Stop acting like a 2-year-old,”…
