Link Salad, the God and Mammon Edition
Some of what I've been reading
— Pope Leo has stirred awake a progressive Christianity. It can rise again - Bill McKibben, The Guardian, Apr. 26, 2026
“Even before the war, there were signs that these churches – while not exactly coming back, certainly not to the dominant role they once played – were reasserting themselves in remarkable ways. The first person to really stand up to Donald Trump in the days after his inauguration, as he launched his blitzkrieg of rightwing change, was the Episcopal bishop Mariann Budde, who at the official prayer service marking his ascension, told him: “In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy on the people in our country who are scared now,” specifically naming immigrant and gay communities. (Trump, of course, called her a “so-called bishop” and said the service at her cathedral had been “very boring”.) There were a great many different forces behind the magnificent display of non-violent resistance in Minneapolis this winter, but one of them was the Lutheran church, dominant in the region and with a long tradition of immigration advocacy. (Full disclosure, I’m on the advisory board of Global Refuge, known until last year as Lutheran Immigrant and Refugee Service). Renee Good, shot in January as she drove away from a protest, was a serious Presbyterian, who had taken mission trips as a child; at a vigil marking her death, the Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire called on his clergy to “get their affairs in order to make sure they have their wills written” so that they could, if necessary, stand between “the powers of this world and the most vulnerable”. After Good’s death, hundreds of clergy from across the country descended on Minneapolis as an act of witness; about 100 were arrested in a protest at the airport, appealing for an end to the flights disappearing immigrants from their families and communities.”
— A Year of Magical Thinking - Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Boston Review, Spring 2026
“On Saturday night, a lone gunman attacked the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, sending off the predictable wave of condemnations of political violence by U.S. public officials, from federal legislators to state officials. As Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin put it, “Political violence has no place in America.” But there seems to be plenty of room for violence of the apparently nonpolitical sort: federal immigration agencies have used the recent push for mass deportations to accelerate their long and violent history with high-profile murders on the street and in their detention centers; as of April 23, the U.S. military has killed at least 186 people in a consistent campaign of bombings in Latin American waters; and there were 121 mass shootings in the first 112 days of the year, making mass shootings of the kind attempted at the Correspondents’ Dinner a statistically daily occurrence. Public officials are appalled, then, to live in the same world the rest of us do.”
Currently reading: Transcription - Ben Lerner
Currently listening: We Won - Sevendust