Religion Dispatches

Watching Pope Leo XIV announce and release the first encyclical letter of his papacy last week felt achingly surreal. In our age of rapid technology, livestreaming and immediate access build an aura displaced for the genre. Encyclical letters were once messier, embodied experiences: copied by hand or printed and circulated, re-circulated, discarded, or recycled to intended (and unintended) communities and ecologies. They now ascend to the cloud and disperse faster than ever to a global cloud of witnesses. As they do, encyclicals frequently set the public tone for a new pope. What difference they make, only time will tell; rarely does time shout that difference in a clear tone. We, anxious bearers of the news cycle, follow in the wake, paying attention or putting out of mind.

DOD celebrates America's 250th by kicking Congregationalists, Deists, and Unitarians off recognized religions list

The question is no longer purely hypothetical. The Supreme Court heard arguments this spring in Trump v. Barbara on whether the executive order ending birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants and people on temporary visas can take effect. A ruling is expected within weeks. The Court appeared skeptical at oral argument, although that is certainly not a guarantee. And the broader political project—the project of making citizenship a question rather than a fact—won’t be dispatched by a single ruling no matter how it lands.So the question is worth sitting with directly

Between one speaker’s defense of burning witches and another (visibly pregnant) speaker’s declaration that hell should be afraid because she’s “bringing forth a threat to his kingdom,” this past weekend’s Turning Point USA women’s summit produced some wild headlines. But the most atrocious moment may have been when a heckler shouted that Erika Kirk protects pedophiles, a pernicious conspiracy theory about Kirk’s connection to Jeffrey Epstein gaining traction on the Right and further weakening an already faltering organization. In fact, ever since the murder of Charlie Kirk last September there

Writer-activist-teacher Emmaia Gelman’s fascinating history of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a more than 100-year-old organization founded by German Jewish immigrants to the United States, situates the group squarely on the political Right.In The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State, Gelman not only recounts the group’s 1913 creation as an effort to quash the progressive impulses of labor organizers from Eastern Europe, but she also zeroes in on the ADL’s promotion of a law-and-order agenda that motivated their efforts to undermine movements against racism and colonialism and spy on

It’s really hard to sympathize with Senator Mike Lee, whose entire persona seems to have gravitated to online trolling of others from a most aggressively MAGA

It's a carefully chosen religious and political symbol designed to send a clear message.

It wouldn't just trample on America's sacred sites, it would reveal and amplify the painful legacies sites often paper over.

Like a number of other public figures in recent years who've embraced the Appeal to Heaven flag, the former Fox News pundit is moving ever farther to the Right.

The tragic irony is that far-right Christian critics of Israel are just swapping out one form of antisemitism for another.