News

The early version of Christian nationalism turned the fear of communism into an excuse to embrace prejudice and forfeit American democracy. While Rev. Gerald L.K. Smith’s name is mostly forgotten, his ideas — and the strategies he used to promote them — still haunt America today.

This issue of A Public Witness will coach you up about a recent controversy regarding women in ministry at Saddleback Church and then consider how moments like that are connected to the same way of reading the Bible that got the whistle blown at Texas Tech's Mark Adams.

In "The Desert of Compassion: Devotions for the Lenten Journey" author Rachel M. Srubas draws on the images of the desert, which she knows so well as a pastor in southern Arizona, to provide the reader/spiritual seeker with a rich devotional book.

The Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty is acquiring the Center for Faith, Justice, and Reconciliation in a move its leaders say will help them broaden efforts to support a more universal range of religious freedoms in the country.

Currently governed by India, the union territory of Ladakh in the larger Kashmir region has been a major point of dispute among India, Pakistan, and China since 1947.

Helping ease medical debt, especially for people of color, is an increasingly popular social justice project among liberal Christian, Jewish, and Muslim congregations. Over the past few years some 800 U.S. congregations have partnered with RIP Medical Debt to do so.

Barbara Mahany's "The Book of Nature: The Astonishing Beauty of God’s First Sacred Text" serves to remind us that before there was scripture, there was nature. It was nature that spoke to humanity about the presence of God the creator.

This issue of A Public Witness looks at the reinvigorated crusade by politicians across the country to push official, government prayer in schools. And then this class session ends with an explanation of why a common remark about gun violence in schools is dead wrong.

More than 200 interfaith leaders have requested that President Joe Biden establish a commission to study reparations for African Americans by signing an executive order by the newly recognized federal holiday Juneteenth.

Jeremy Fuzy reviews "Second Thoughts about the Second Coming: Understanding the End Times, Our Future, and Christian Hope" by Ronald J. Allen and Robert D. Cornwall. This book explores the apocalypse from a mainline Protestant perspective.