Human Trustees

The painting of St. Francis embracing Egypt’s Sultan Malik al-Kamil is on the first page of my website. It graces my Twitter handle. After nine years, I finally get to explain it, and this with the help of acclaimed 2009 book by journalist and professor of journalism Paul Moses, The Saint and the Sultan: The Crusades, Islam, and Francis of…

This comes on the heels of a substantive critique of America’s Christian nationalist movement. Now I offer one possible Christian response to it, one that I believe is particularly potent and relevant. One of the most influential Old Testament scholars and theologians of our time, Walter Brueggemann (b. 1933) has written nearly fifty books, hundreds of articles, and participated in…

At the turn of the new millennium, David Kuo was rapidly climbing the ladder of influence in the Republican party. He had come ten years before at age 24 to work for the most powerful pro-life organization, the National Right to Life Committee. Yet when he graduated from college, this could not have been farther from his mind. David’s father…

I hope this infamous image will go down in history as a cautionary tale: President Trump’s photo-op brandishing a Bible in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church near the White House, minutes after the police and national guard teargassed the demonstrators that had stood in his path, including at least one Episcopal priest and a seminarian in the church courtyard.…