Red Letter Christians

Here is a Tuesday in my part of the world. My friend is a Palestinian Christian living in a village near Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank. On her way to work, she drives on a Palestinian road. Above it, close enough to see the paint on the guardrail, runs another road built for the Israeli settlement that now sits on land that belonged, until recently, to families in her v...

Kristen Hansen, minister of music, rings a bell in opposition to the death penalty outside First Evangelical Lutheran Church, Thursday, Aug. 13, 2026, in downtown Nashville. (Photo courtesy of Death Penalty Action) Editor’s Note: Previously published on Religion News Service on August 13, 2026. RLC is one of the endorsers at For Whom the Bells Toll. (RNS) — On the first day i...

Unity as seen within Scripture is just something we don’t tend to think about or talk about much in our current Christian culture, and honestly, the fruit proves it. We don’t address the topic because it’s uncomfortable, time-consuming, and requires collective effort. But what benefit is there in avoiding a hard topic? Don’t we see the bad fruit it nurtures in other parts of ...

I asked my mom the other day, how far back our Norwegian ancestors are: my mom’s paternal grandfather came as a young adult to the US, and her great grandmother immigrated as a child, passing through Ellis Island. Both sets of parents fled because they didn’t have enough food and to provide a better future for their children. It is all too familiar a story. The majority of us...

I didn’t decide to study women’s history until I was already in graduate school. My initial plan was to study religious and intellectual history—the history that really mattered, or so I thought. But my very first semester, one of my professors, Gail Bederman, introduced me to the study of women and gender, and I was hooked. This was the history that really mattered, I decide...