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Drawing on her vocational insights and personal experiences, Episcopal priest, historian, and spiritual director Rhonda Mawhood Lee offers a compassionate vision for understanding and responding faithfully to suicide.

‘Church-state separation ensures we are all free to live as ourselves and believe as we choose, as long as we don’t harm others,’ Rachel Laser of Americans United for Separation of Church and State countered.

This issue of A Public Witness considers some dangerous voices against climate action and then the Christians working to love their neighbors and the Creator by addressing our pressing environmental crisis.

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Church

This issue of A Public Witness covers a 1979 Sunday School lesson from President Jimmy Carter — with concerns eerily fitting for 2025 — taught at the First Baptist Church of the City of Washington, D.C.

A new White House initiative encouraging people to pray for America claims to have the backing of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. But a spokesperson for the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee told Word&Way that’s not accurate.

Churches across Chicago braced for Trump’s threat of a National Guard deployment and apocalyptic force, even as Chicago’s rates of violent crime have dropped substantially in recent years as part of a national trend.

Nation

A virtual media briefing titled ‘America at 250: Religion, Democracy, and the Promise of Pluralism’ covered solutions to the pressing issues of social isolation, political polarization, and bridging divides in the workplace and on college campuses.

The controversial ‘paleo-Confederate’ Christian Nationalist pastor stood at a podium on Tuesday as the guest preacher for the latest monthly Christian worship service held for leaders of the U.S. military.

‘I don’t think Jesse Jackson saw his political life as something different from his call from God as a preacher,’ said the Rev. Valerie Bridgeman.

World

Adding to the many voices in the U.S. and around the world criticizing President Trump’s proposal, the patriarchs and heads of the churches in Jerusalem issued a powerful joint statement on Friday.

In light of President Trump’s imperialistic rhetoric and the potential negative consequences for both nations, Rev. Jean-Daniel Ó Donncada, the national pastor for the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Canada, released an open letter.

“Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups,” Francis wrote in a letter to U.S. bishops.

Editorials

Editor Brian Kaylor reflects on how many White evangelicals moved in less than five years from condemning Donald Trump as a dangerous man to backing Trump’s assault on American democracy.

Editor Brian Kaylor reflects on Jesus’s parable in Luke 10 about being a good neighbor after learning of the death of a man in the roadway on Christmas Eve just blocks from his church.

Editor Brian Kaylor reflects on the Magi in the biblical story and how they inspired his imagination as a child and still today. They’re mysterious, magical, powerful, wise

Word&Way Voices

This action would ensure that no federal prisoner faces execution despite being intellectually disabled, mentally incompetent, or convicted in proceedings riddled with racial bias.

Exploring Advent in a time of dangerous pregnancies, Kristel Clayville reflects on spiritual needs related to the act of creating new life.

Reflecting on the dangerous pregnancies of Mary and Elizabeth, Traci Blackmon writes that God’s miracles required not just their wombs but their entire beings.

E-Newsletter

As Sen. Josh Hawley makes a push to require every federal building across the country to post “In God We Trust,” this issue of A Public Witness looks back at the real history of our national motto.

In life and in death, Charlie Kirk represented the worst of American politics. He stoked dangerous conspiracies, attempted to silence voices he disagreed with, and utilized violent rhetoric mixed with a godly veneer. Then, someone decided to respond with evil by picking up a gun to silence a life.

This issue of A Public Witness covers a 1979 Sunday School lesson from President Jimmy Carter — with concerns eerily fitting for 2025 — taught at the First Baptist Church of the City of Washington, D.C.

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Recent Episodes

Books

In “Defiant Hope, Active Love: What Young Adults Are Seeking in Places of Work, Faith, and Community,” scholars investigate how faith communities can be more hospitable to the next generation of Christians.

Matthew Taylor makes a compelling case that the New Apostolic Reformation, whose leaders and ideas have migrated from the fringes to the center of American evangelicalism, is a dangerous threat to democracy.

In “The Quest of the Historical Muhammad and Other Studies on Formative Islam,” scholar Stephen J. Shoemaker attempts to approach the figure of Muhammad in a manner comparable to efforts to recover the historical figure of Jesus.

In “One Lost Soul: Richard Nixon’s Search for Salvation,” Daniel Silliman cuts to the heart of Nixon’s tragedy: Nixon wanted to be loved by God but couldn’t figure out how.