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This issue of A Public Witness looks at the not-so-immaculate conception of Christ the King Sunday and the theological conflict today between different visions of Christ as King.

Leading Qur'anic scholar Gabriel Said Reynolds presents a revisionary account of how Islam emerged in dialogue with Christian traditions, challenging the dominant narrative that it came out of a predominantly pagan context.

After decades of fierce controversies over sexuality and theology, some leaders of a conservative coalition say it's time to make a final break from what has long been one of the world's largest Protestant church families.

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Videos

Church

The Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission has been criticized for failing to fall in line with the MAGA agenda.

The Rev. Yehiel Curry, bishop of the ELCA’s Metropolitan Chicago Synod since 2019, will serve a six-year term as presiding bishop of the 2.7 million-member denomination.

The mayor mentioned the decline in attendance and membership in local churches as one reason why he wanted the city to take over the Christ Church property, saying the Episcopal diocese has more church buildings than it needs.

Nation

Latino Christian leaders meeting in Southern California discussed how best to pastor congregations newly traumatized by the Trump mass deportation policy.

For the second time in six weeks, a pastor was struck in the head with a pepper round fired by a US immigration agent as faith leaders protested the arrival of more than 100 US Customs and Border Patrol agents.

More than 210 people, mostly Chicago-area Christian clergy, signed a letter titled “Jesus is Being Tear Gassed at Broadview.” The letter railed against ICE and agents “hunting and terrorizing of immigrant communities” in the city.

World

The 69-year-old Chicago-born missionary who spent his career ministering in Peru and belongs to the Augustinian religious order caught the world by surprise when he was elected to be the 267th pope.

While Trump attended Francis’s funeral, he and JD Vance have clashed with U.S. bishops in general and Francis in particular over the administration’s hard line stance on immigration and its efforts to deport migrants en masse.

Following the funeral, preparations began in earnest to launch the centuries-old process of electing a new pope, a conclave that will begin on May 7.

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

Unless the international community acts decisively and swiftly, Al-Taybeh risks being overrun by Israeli settlers, its lands confiscated, and its people forcibly displaced.

Contributing writer Rodney Kennedy argues that Trump has outdone every shyster who ever told a tall tale, every con artist, every swindler, every unscrupulous insurance salesman, and every crooked televangelist.

The co-founder of the Prayers for Peace Alliance makes the case that Johnnie Moore, the recently appointed chairman of the embattled Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, is getting away with using the Gospel to justify genocide.

E-Newsletter

This issue of A Public Witness looks at how one Calvinist voice with connections to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is publicly doing violence to Scripture to justify some disturbingly unChristlike behavior.

Mara Richards Bim, the new Justice and Advocacy Fellow at Royal Lane Baptist Church in Dallas, spoke about how to bridge what we talk about in church and political action.

The opening chapter to “The Bible According to Christian Nationalists,” which officially releases in eight weeks, is fortunately (and unfortunately) quite timely. We are sharing an excerpt from it here.

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Recent Episodes

Books

In “The Fearless Christian University,” sociologist and educator John Hawthorne laments the fact that fear has become a defining characteristic of many Christian schools today.

In “Pilgrim: A Theological Memoir,” Tony Campolo traces his evolution as a believer, scholar, and evangelical leader who continually sought to engage thoughtfully with the challenges of his time.

In “Knock at the Sky: Seeking God in Genesis After Losing Faith in the Bible,” Liz Charlotte Grant interprets the Bible’s inspired book of beginnings as a work of art.

Joe Blosser’s recent book is challenging because it takes seriously the idea that the only way to love God well is to love our neighbors more by re-evaluating how much we’ve fallen in love with ourselves.