As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, the national mood is a complex mix of anticipation and deep concern. Following a year defined by immigration crises, threats to voting rights, and the drumbeats of war, how should people of faith navigate this milestone? We gathered diverse voices into a special issue of the magazine, to provide a prophetic Christian perspective on where the U.S. has been — and what it means to follow Jesus when our nation struggles to achieve “liberty and justice for all.”
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Grab a copy of the "America Isn't Exceptional" magazine at the link in our bio; it comes with this poster designed by @dear_stephan . Tape it to your wall, send it to a friend, mail it to someone you think needs to see it.
“The undulance.
The brilliance.
The glow. I wanted
you to know I knew:
Dust. Breath. Both of them shone.”
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Find this poem and more at sojo.net (link in bio)
Quotes from Marian Wright Edelman, Keith Haring, and Dr. Haunani-Kay Trask.
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If you want to stay spiritually rooted in the fight for justice, sign up for #VerseAndVoice, our free newsletter featuring a daily Bible reading, quote, and prayer. Visit sojo.net/daily-wisdom (link in bio). Support our work as journalism is threatened in the U.S. and beyond its borders: follow us, like and share our content, and do the same with other outlets you love.
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#InspirationalQuotes #QuoteOfTheDay #QuotesToLiveBy #MondayMotivation #inspo #inspiration #faith #justice
@barnettjenna fills us in on this week’s latest stories from Sojourners, including one that invites us to be people at the table (that is, when it doesn’t need to be flipped). Read all of these and more at sojo.net!
No spoilers, but you can’t miss these stories! Pick up the May issue of Sojourners magazine, which includes the lessons learned while accompanying a loved one with dementia, flying across the country to visit an incarcerated friend, and a book review examining the plight of a time-traveling trad wife.
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Read these pieces and more at sojo.net/magazine (link in bio)
As anti-government protests in 2025 erupted in Indonesia, Nepal, the Philippines, Morocco, Madagascar, France, and the U.S., observers and journalists noticed demonstrators flying an unusual flag. The “Jolly Roger”—a white skull and crossbones on a black field—wearing a distinctive yellow hat was instantly recognizable to fans of Japanese anime culture. This flag belongs to the fictional Straw Hat Pirates from ‘One Piece,’ a Japanese manga by Eiichiro Oda. This particular shonen (“youth”) graphic novel series has become a global symbol of revolution, resistance, and hope against government oppression and corruption among young protesters.
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First published in 1997, ‘One Piece,’ with more than 500 million copies sold, is the most popular manga in the world. It has spun off more than 1,100 animated episodes and a live-action Netflix adaptation and continues—three decades on—to run in ‘Shonen Jump,’ Japan’s influential weekly manga anthology.
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In many ways, the Celestial Dragons, a self-proclaimed divine aristocracy who exploit and enslave others, resemble our global one percent: They have shaped the world’s laws and economic order to benefit themselves even when they don’t formally govern.
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If the Celestial Dragons reflect the world’s oligarchs, dictators, and technocrats like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, Luffy is more of a Jesus figure. He declares an alternative authority and kingdom by exuberantly proclaiming, “I’m going to be the King of the Pirates!” He rejects the imperial logic that denounces pirates, and sets out to sea as a teenager, assembling a boisterous crew of nakama—friends bound by deep loyalty and companionship. Through his chaotic adventures, Luffy frees slaves, dismantles racial hierarchies, inspires the downtrodden, and leads rebellions against the Marines and the World Government. And for followers of Jesus, the echoes of the gospel are hard to miss.
Quotes from Hafsat Abiola, Marjane Satrapi, and Everett Hoagland.
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If you want to stay spiritually rooted in the fight for justice, sign up for #VerseAndVoice, our free newsletter featuring a daily Bible reading, quote, and prayer. Visit sojo.net/daily-wisdom (link in bio). Support our work as journalism is threatened in the U.S. and beyond its borders: follow us, like and share our content, and do the same with other outlets you love.
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#InspirationalQuotes #QuoteOfTheDay #QuotesToLiveBy #MondayMotivation #inspo #inspiration #faith #justice
On the seventh anniversary of @rachelheldevans ’ death, we’re spending time with this excerpt from ‘Braving the Truth,’ a new collection of blog posts by the late writer. The collection includes reflections on Evans’ writings by a range of Christian authors.
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“Have I fallen into sin? Who will bring casseroles when I have a baby? What I feel these days is not guilt, but something far more nefarious: dull resignation. There are nearly two hundred churches near my small, Southern town, and hundreds more if we make the long drive to Chattanooga, so the fact that I can’t seem to make it through a single service without questioning the existence of God says a lot more about me than it does about church, now doesn’t it? Do I want a church that fits me, or a me that fits the church?”
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Read the full excerpt at sojo.net (link in bio)
In a time where "the stranger” is commonly labeled as a threat, there is also an alternate call to embrace them. @bartdehrman 's latest book “Love Thy Stranger” proposes that “the impulse to help strangers in need is embedded in our Western moral conscience because of the teachings of Jesus.” His argument as an agnostic New Testament scholar grounds the positive impacts of loving the stranger in Western culture with the historical Christian transgressions and shortcomings that undermined them.
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“The people who are in need are the ones you need to help. Not just your family, not just your friends. You need to help anyone in need. It doesn’t matter what their race is, their ethnicity, their nation, their religion. If they are in need, God’s will is that you help them. And that idea exploded into Christian discourse. I’m not a Christian. I’m not writing an apology for Christianity. But Christians invented public hospitals; they invented orphanages; they invented old people’s homes; they invented private charities dealing with hunger and homelessness; they invented governmental assistance to the poor. These are Christian inventions. That’s not just rhetoric. You can prove it historically. My book is trying to show that.”
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To see the rest of the interview, head to sojo.net (link in bio)
Last month, the Supreme Court sided with a Christian therapist in Colorado and tossed out the state’s ban on conversion therapy for minors. The therapist, Kaley Chiles, challenged the state’s ban on the grounds that it violated her First Amendment rights. The Court agreed with Chiles by an 8-to-1 vote.
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Conversion therapy is a practice that generally involves treatment intended to “cure” same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria. Every major medical study has determined that conversion therapy does not work and often leads to serious mental health problems for patients who are subjected to it. @timothy.s.rodriguez knows that from personal experience.
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Rodriguez is the author of ‘Conversion Therapy Dropout: A Queer Story of Faith and Belonging,’ which will be released on May 5. The memoir unpacks the eight years Rodriguez spent in conversion therapy, struggling to reconcile the tension between the version of Christianity he had been taught growing up and his sexual identity. For Rodriguez, the path to healing began when he accepted that there was no tension.
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Rodriguez told Sojourners the Supreme Court’s decision is deeply personal and painful, and he hopes that his story will both help LGBTQ+ Christians feel a little less alone and help convince non-affirming Christians to rethink their convictions.
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Read the full article at sojo.net (link in bio)
@georgiainhermind writes about “The Drama” and its refusal to oversimplify the complexities of human nature.
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“I have some respect for the way director Kristoffer Borgli catches his audience off guard; viewers enter the film expecting a satirical rom-com starring two of our hottest young actors and leave with sobering questions about the human condition. What is the worst thing you’ve ever done? Who is beyond the reach of forgiveness and grace? Is it possible to truly know a person? How can we remain in relationship in the face of our gravest sins? These questions cut straight to the core of who we are. The way the film confronts our cultural norms makes it feel not unlike one of the parables told by Jesus—complete with wedding imagery bathed in spiritual subtext. Weddings, after all, are a poetic picture of the unification of two disparate things—namely, unique human beings, who despite their nature must be different and yet also become one. Heaven and earth, the sacred and the profane, the lion and the lamb. The tale of God’s redemption of all things is a story of a cosmic wedding feast where the seemingly irreconcilable is brought together in unity and celebration and paradoxical grace.”
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“Grace, then, is not just an overly charitable explaining away of sin, an easy piece of context that softens the blow of our choices. Grace also isn’t a rigid insistence on individual blame coupled with an offer of forgiveness in spite of it. Instead, grace is often a humble acknowledgement of the painful mystery of the human experience. The ways we bear the inflicted scars of living in a broken world and the fact that we willingly participate in perpetuating that brokenness nonetheless. The acknowledgement that none of these things can be untangled from each other, and the recognition of that complexity. The belief that thorny people with repentant and humble and messy hearts are better than easy explanations and certain answers.”
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Read the full piece and more at sojo.net (link in bio)
