Many faith leaders were dismayed when the government announced last January that federal immigration agencies can make arrests in churches, schools, and hospitals, ending the protection of people in sensitive spaces.
The faith leaders, who hail from across the country and represent a range of religious traditions, deployed to neighborhoods with significant immigrant populations, where DHS agents have been most active.
At least one other religious leader, Muslim hospital chaplain Ayman Soliman, had been detained earlier by ICE as part of President Donald Trump’s ongoing mass deportation effort.
Johnson initially claimed he was not aware of the instances, despite having been directly asked about one of the incidents in a press conference earlier this month.
Empathy is usually regarded as a virtue, a key to human decency and kindness. And yet, with increasing momentum, voices on the Christian right are preaching that it has become a vice.
A small but influential group of evangelicals argues that enforcing the law is as important as mercy, and has come to see Christian charities as the enemy.
Few people have thought as much about faith and politics as Danforth, who served as Missouri’s attorney general, special counsel for the DOJ, special envoy to Sudan, and ambassador to the UN for George W. Bush.
This issue of A Public Witness looks at numerous sermons by Episcopal and other mainline preachers across the country as they reflected on Luke 4, Bishop Budde, and showing mercy.
Amid the vitriol against Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde from Trump and other Republicans this week, a few proposals stick out since they attempt to empower the federal government to decide which religious beliefs should be allowed or not.
This issue of A Public Witness explores Bishop Mariann Budde’s viral call for Trump to show mercy, the attacks on her and the Episcopal Church that followed, and the Washington National Cathedral’s history of advancing Christian Nationalism.