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This issue of A Public Witness explores a monument that upsets the political and historical stories being told (or not told) and challenges the religious claims we often make.

The Trump administration often speaks of protecting Christians from discrimination worldwide. But that concern seems to vanish when Israel is involved — even with a Baptist pastor serving as the U.S. ambassador to Israel.

The shape-note tradition emerged from New England’s 18th-century singing school movement that aimed to improve Protestant church music and expanded into a social activity.

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Videos

Church

Vladimir Grygorenko is decorating the dome of a North Texas Christian Orthodox Church with an iconic representation of the ascension of Christ.

This issue of A Public Witness explores the “Let Freedom Ring!” initiative’s remembrance of the past, which also serves as a warning about contemporary tyrannical threats.

In recent decades, many mainline Protestants have moved away from the Calvinist theory of penal substitutionary atonement, which summons up the idea of an angry God who needs to be appeased.

Nation

‘Stir the conscience of our nation. Let justice rise up on these very steps, let truth trouble the chambers of the Capitol,’ Shane Claiborne said as he prayed.

President Donald Trump has appointed evangelical allies and a pair of high-profile Catholic clergy to join other faith leaders on a National Commission on Religious Liberty.

This issue of A Public Witness opens up the Aitken’s Bible to consider the tale of a flop and how Christian Nationalists misleadingly repackage it as ‘a Bible approved by Congress.’

World

He’s been widely quoted — and misquoted. People have claimed Bonhoeffer would support their side on issues ranging from the Vietnam War to post-9/11 militarism to same-sex marriage to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

Asked about Mike Huckabee potentially becoming the U.S. ambassador to Israel, the Rev. Munther Isaac called the prospect 'frightening,' adding, 'Huckabee presents himself, at least, as a man who does not live in reality.'

For the second straight year, Christmas celebrations will be somber and muted: no giant Christmas tree in Manger Square, no raucous scout marching bands, no public lights twinkling, and very few public decorations or displays.

Editorials

Editor-in-Chief Brian Kaylor reflects on comments made about school prayer as the U.S. Supreme Court agrees to hear a significant church-state case. Some conservative Christian groups are wrongly calling public prayer just a “private” act.

As a Jewish legal advocate and a Baptist minister, we support the arguments of Boston in this critical First Amendment case that Supreme Court justices will hear on Jan. 18. Read the Boston Globe op-ed by Rachel Laser (president/CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State) and Brian

In day 18 of our Unsettling Advent devotional series, Word&Way Editor-in-Chief Brian Kaylor reflects on the news of a camel escaping from a live nativity in Kansas.

Word&Way Voices

Reflecting on Advent in a time of rulers clinging to power, John Sianghio explores the key to understanding biblical leadership and leadership transition.

For this devotional entry, Karrie Gaspard-Hogewood considers how the pursuit of power is often accompanied by significant collateral damage — harm imposed on the most vulnerable communities among us.

Reflecting on Advent in a time of rulers clinging to power, Beau Underwood explores how the proclamation that ‘Jesus is Lord’ is still a radical statement today.

E-Newsletter

This issue of A Public Witness takes you inside a recent academic gathering to hear from some of the nation’s leading scholars as they offer ways to push back against a dangerous ideology.

Why does Charlie Kirk, the new face of Christian Nationalism, say the church is in ‘wartime’ when Trump is in the White House and his party controls D.C.?

In her new book, journalist and pastor Angela Denker ventures into contested spaces to help readers understand what is going on with the radicalization of American boyhood.

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Recent Episodes

Books

Jerome Copulsky’s “American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order” is a tour de force documenting the religious illiberalism that has challenged democratic values from the very beginning.

In “The Violent Take It By Force: The Christian Movement that is Threatening Our Democracy,” Matthew Taylor shows how some of the more extreme beliefs of American evangelicalism have begun to take hold in the mainstream.

In “The Moral Teachings of Jesus: Radical Instruction in the Will of God,” leading Christian ethicist David Gushee examines forty teachings of Jesus to clarify exactly what Jesus said about the moral life.

In “Another Gospel: Christian Nationalism and the Crisis of Evangelical Identity,” Joel Looper communicates an insider’s perspective on how a false gospel has colonized American evangelicalism.