News
Meet the religious leaders shaping the next generation of social justice activism
Rev. Dr. William Barber has long been known for his civil rights activism, including being arrested as part of nonviolent demonstrations.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images North America
Most public policy lecture halls do not echo with call-and-response Gospel hymns. But on a recent Tuesday afternoon, singer and musicologist Yara Allen warms up a class in New Haven, Conn.
“Woke up this morning with my mind stayed on Jesus,” she sings, her voice filling the room. Quickly, the fifty or so students pick up the tune and the words and then repeat the verse.
The class is one of the new offerings of Yale Divinity School’s Center for Public Theology & Public Policy. The goal is to prepare the next generation of ministers to not only think deeply about the Bible, theology, and church history, but also equip them for public ministry and leadership in the wider community.
Teaching this class is one of the most well-known religious leaders in America: Rev. William Barber, whose work with the Poor People’s Campaign and Repairers of the Breach has been his own public ministry.
Rev. Barber rises and begins his lecture. “The forces that are perpetrating extremism are not weak,” he says as his eyes dart around the room, “and they are well-funded.”
He admonishes his students that as future church leaders, they cannot argue political positions like everyone else. He tells them their arguments and reasoning must be deeply moral positions, rooted in scripture. “Your language,” he says, “has to be different.”
Rev. Barber is the founding director of the Center, having come here after three decades of parish ministry in North Carolina.
“I always wanted to train others, even as a pastor,” he says. “If I pastored somewhere 30 years and nobody gets called to be a preacher and nobody gets trained, what kind of preaching have I done?”
Teaching the politics of moral fusion
What Barber’s done is lead one of the most prominent efforts to unite diverse groups around issues of justice, from voting rights to anti-poverty measures.
“What are the major tenets of religion as it relates to the public square?” he asks. His answer is a litany his repeats often: “Love, truth, justice, mercy, grace, the least of these, the poor, the sick, the imprisoned. Look at this piece of legislation. How are these policies affecting people? How is it affecting their living and their dying?”
While he continues his activism around the country, he’s now helping upcoming leaders prepare for what he describes as urgent public witness.
“If you don’t stand in challenge to poverty and denial of health care in this moment, in this life, you’ve wasted part of it,” he says.
In an age of atomization over identity politics, Rev. Barber’s teaching what he calls moral fusion politics.
“When people sit down across the lines that have tended to divide us – race, geography, sexuality – and then take an honest look at the politics of extremism,” he says, “they figure out that the same people who are voting against people because they are gay are also blocking living wages.”
If extremists, says Rev. Barber, are working together, then his side needs to come together too.
Working beyond the classroom and pulpit
This work extends beyond the classroom, into the divinity school’s daily chapel. A student stands to lead the opening prayer: “God, you have chosen in your Grace to be a God who shares the work. You invite us to labor alongside you and one another in the pursuit of hope, justice and peace.”
Sitting near the back is Rev. Barber, praying and singing with his students. He has a word of encouragement for each of them. Before and after chapel students huddle around him, offering updates on projects, papers and field work.
Summer placements in churches focusing on voting rights and poverty are central to the work of his Center. Student Benjamin Ball spent part of his summer in Alabama.
“We were standing outside of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery,” he says, “which is the church where Dr. King preached and worked, which is right outside of the Montgomery State Capital.”
For Ball, who’s from Tennessee, the experience was transformative.
“To stand outside of the doors of that church and see the state capital right in front of you,” he says, “I don’t think there’s a more profound image. If you walk out of church and ignore this, you’re missing something right in front of you.”
The point is that morality isn’t the sole province of religious conservatives, says ministry student Ed Ford, from Connecticut.
“The Gospel is telling us to do justice, love, mercy and walk humbly with our God. It’s saying, ‘If you’re sick, would you care for me? If I’m a stranger, would you take care of me? If you are poor and those who are really suffering in the world?” Says Ford. “Those are the things that we’re supposed to be talking about. Jesus calls us to help the least of these. Right?”
Help needs to come, says Ford, not just through traditional direct services churches often provide such as food banks, but also help through legislation and public policy.
“Poverty doesn’t know if you’re Black, White, Asian, Latino,” he says. “It knows, though, at the root of it all in our country is this: ‘Is our government going to step in and help people? Is our church going to speak up and talk about what’s right?”
Ford echoes Rev. Barber’s own language from the earlier lecture when he concludes: “Are we going to be chaplains of Empire? Are we going to be prophets of God?”
These students are learning the ways of the biblical prophets, who broach impolite topics and speak truth to power, whether within congregations or the public square.
These are lessons student Lizzie Chiravono, from South Carolina, began learning early in life. “Being from the South,” she says, “there’s no way to disconnect religion and politics because every social setting I walked into was both political and religious.”
As an example, Chiravono describes how both the government and churches provide food to poor families.
“I grew up in poverty,” she says. “And for people who are impacted by poverty and other forms of suffering, politics or religion are never far from their minds.”
Institutionalizing the Center’s movement for civil rights
What these students are learning is to take these early lessons and develop them into a way of thinking, a way of living and a way of working.
“To be able to get the courage to then go and talk — that’s what this is about,” says longtime civil rights leader and labor attorney Rosalyn Woodward Pelles, who helps direct Yale’s Center for Public Theology & Public Policy here in New Haven.
“It’s about spreading an understanding once you have it,” she says. “This is institutionalizing the movement. And so it ends up in people’s hearts. It ends up in changing religious education. And it ends up in strengthening the movement we’re trying to build.”
This program goes beyond simply educating these aspiring ministers. It’s also about formation and tapping into a longing, says another of the center’s leaders, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove.
“Students here have a deep spiritual hunger connected to their sense that something is wrong with the way the world works,” he says. And the mission is to direct that sense of wrong into a sense of purpose.
“It doesn’t have to be this way. And God doesn’t want it to be this way,” says Wilson-Hartgrove. “And something inside of them tells them that it could be otherwise, and they can be part of that. They want to know ‘How does that work?’”
Speaking out against the “heresy” of Christian Nationalism
It’s late afternoon at the Berkeley Episcopal Center, a few blocks from the Divinity School. Again, singer Yara Allen is rousing the crowd.
“We shall not. We shall not be moved,” she sings, as Rev. William Barber punctuates the verse with “Oh Lord!” in his resonant bass voice.
He’s here to be interviewed for a podcast called The Leader’s Way.
“Welcome everyone,” says host Brandon Nappi. “Thank you for your presence.”
Some students have followed Barber to this recording and sit in the audience. Other people, from the larger university community and the public, show up to hear him talk as well.
No matter where he appears – in class, in chapel or an off-campus podcast recording — he draws a crowd eager to take up what Barber calls the cause of the Hebrew prophets and Christian Gospels.
“If you don’t deal with public theology and you don’t deal with issues of how we treat the least of them,” he says, “you actually cut the scriptures apart.”
He says that’s what he sees Christian Nationalism doing today — using religion to divide rather than unite and harm rather than help. He calls this movement to unite religion with official government power heresy. Rather, he says the Bible teaches something different.
“‘Thy kingdom come’ is a direct announcement to Caesar that your stuff is not real, that your way of life has to pass,” Barber says. “We’re praying for another kind of kingdom to come that’s rooted in love and justice and lifting all people.”
When Stuart Sepulvida arrives at St. Francis de Sales Roman Catholic Parish in Tucson, Ariz., for Mass, which he attends most mornings, he passes a display honoring local soldiers and encouraging parishioners to pray for their safety. Hundreds of small cards record their names: Robles, Arenas, Grajeda. A portrait of Pope Leo XIV hangs across the lobby.
Mr. Sepulvida, 81, is a Vietnam veteran whose patriotism and Catholicism are deeply intertwined. He voted for President Trump three times but has never felt more betrayed by an American president than when Mr. Trump denounced Pope Leo as “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy.”
“It was very disturbing to me to hear both of them clashing like they did,” Mr. Sepulvida said, standing outside the church one morning this week. Now, he is reconsidering whether he will vote Republican this year.
The Republican Party is struggling to hold onto the support from Hispanic voters who helped propel Mr. Trump back into the White House in 2024. Yet as many party leaders have acknowledged the urgent need to stop the backsliding among Latinos, the president has enraged many of even his strongest supporters by clashing with the pope.
On Easter Sunday, Pope Leo, the first U.S.-born pontiff, spoke of the need to “abandon every desire for conflict, domination and power, and implore the Lord to grant his peace to a world ravaged by wars.” Within days, Mr. Trump, who has led the United States into a war with Iran, said the pope was “catering to the radical left” and posted an AI-generated image portraying himself as a Jesus figure. Mr. Trump later deleted the image, saying he thought it depicted him as a doctor.
“It just isn’t what a president should do,” Mr. Sepulvida said. “The pope speaks for his people. He is beyond politics.”
Mr. Trump won 55 percent of Catholic voters in the 2024 election, compared to 43 percent who voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris, according to Pew Research Center. The most sizable gains came from Hispanic Catholics. While Joseph R. Biden Jr. won their votes by a 35-point margin in 2020, the Democratic advantage shrunk to 17 points in 2024. Now, just 18 percent of Hispanic Catholics said they support most or all of President Trump’s agenda, according to a poll from Pew released earlier this year.
If the president’s quarrel with the pope sours more Latinos on the Republican Party, it could affect midterm races across the country, including in South Florida and South Texas, where Republicans have notched important victories in predominantly Hispanic districts in recent years.
In Arizona’s Sixth Congressional District, which stretches from north of Tucson to the Mexican border, voters were still grappling with the fallout this week.
The district is roughly evenly divided among Republicans, Democrats and independent voters. Nearly a third of the district is Hispanic, and there is a significant population of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as well as a large Catholic community with deep history in the region. It also has one of largest numbers of military veterans of all congressional districts in the country.
“The president is looking for a lot of attention from everything,” said Maria Ramos, 60, who regularly attends weekday Mass at St. Francis. A registered independent, she usually votes for Democrats but often declines to cast a ballot if she views a candidate as too liberal. “He believes he can put God in his place. He’s meddling in countries that he’s not in control of — he wants to control the world.”
“It is not just a very serious lack of respect — it is a mortal sin,” she said, shaking her head. One word comes to her mind again and again, she said: disgust.
Like so many others in southern Arizona, Ms. Ramos has several relatives who serve in the military — a path they saw to both serve the country and as an entry into the stable middle class. Many of them, she said, voted for Mr. Trump for president.
The Tucson district is now widely seen as one of the most competitive in the country. Republican Juan Ciscomani narrowly won the district in 2022, in part by emphasizing his biography as a Mexican immigrant and a devoted father of six children. He is also an evangelical Christian, a group that has driven much of the growth among Hispanic Republican voters in recent years.
Mr. Ciscomani declined a request for an interview, but when a local radio host asked Mr. Ciscomani what he thought of Mr. Trump’s comments “as a man of faith,” the congressman declined to criticize the president but said, “You can trust that you won’t see any meme like that coming out of my account.”
JoAnna Mendoza, the Democrat challenging Mr. Ciscomani this fall, has made her 20-year career in the U.S. Navy and Marines a key aspect of her story on the campaign trail. While she rarely speaks about her religious background and no longer considers herself a practicing Catholic, she said she briefly considered becoming a nun as a teenager. She criticized Mr. Ciscomani for not condemning the president’s remarks.
“You can’t make faith a central part of your campaign and then allow this to stand,” she said in an interview.
Across Tucson, Latino Catholics, regardless of their past voting preferences, were similarly quick to condemn the president’s remarks.
When Cecilia Taisipic, 71, heard about it, she said, she winced with shame about her vote for him in 2024.
“I thought he would make the country better, but apparently it’s the opposite,” she said as she left Mass at St. Francis earlier this week. She is so fed up with politics, she said, that she is unlikely to vote at all this year. “When it comes to my faith, I don’t like anybody to challenge it. Now I don’t want to hear anything on the news. I just want to pray.”
Matilde Robinson Bours, 63, teaches a weekly Spanish Bible study class at St. Thomas the Apostle Parish, and like nearly all of the women in her class, she immigrated from Mexico decades ago. She has voted for Republicans in nearly every election since she became a citizen. Though she has never liked President Trump, she said, his comments about the pope enraged her more than anything else he has said or done in the past.
“This surpassed everything, every social and political norm — this is personal to all Catholics,” she said. “The arrogance and ego is disgusting. To think that he is God? The pope has every right and responsibility to talk about peace.”
Still, Ms. Robinson Bours said, nothing will stop her from supporting Republicans again this year. She has been delighted that her adult children have stopped supporting Democrats in recent elections.
“Almost everyone I know thinks the way I do,” she said.
Patricia Martinez, 86, who has attended the same Bible study as Ms. Robinson Bours for years, shook her head in disagreement. She said she cannot imagine voting for a Republican who supports Mr. Trump.
“This is different — this shows he is out of his mind,” said Ms. Martinez. “We have to have basic respect and teach that to people in this country.”
Patrick Robles, a 24-year-old native of Tucson, spent years alienated from the Roman Catholic Church, but returned to his faith more recently. “The craziness of the world sort of caused me to seek some sort of answers,” he said. Now, he attends Mass at the St. Augustine Cathedral in downtown Tucson, a few blocks from the office where he works as an aide to Representative Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat.
Mr. Robles said he saw Mr. Trump’s battle with the pope as both a personal affront and a political opportunity.
“The president is basically trying to draw a line between Catholics and what we perceive to be patriotism,” he said. “I believe we can be both.”
Last week, he texted one of his uncles who has supported Mr. Trump in every election asking him what he thought.
“I’m afraid we need divine intervention,” the uncle replied.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., takes questions at a news conference at the Capitol on Tuesday.
J. Scott Applewhite/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
J. Scott Applewhite/AP
Speaker Mike Johnson, R.-La., is forging ahead with his latest proposal to renew a key American spy power. His bill, revealed Thursday, is largely unchanged from a previous plan which failed in a series of overnight votes earlier this month.
The program at center of the debate, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), is set to expire on April 30.
FISA 702 allows U.S. intelligence agencies to intercept the electronic communications of foreign nationals located outside of the United States. Some of the nearly 350,000 foreign targets whose communications are collected under the provision are in touch with Americans, whose calls, texts and emails could end up in the trove of information available to the federal government for review.
For almost two decades, privacy-minded lawmakers from both parties have sought to require specific court approval before federal law enforcement can conduct a targeted review of an American’s information gathered through the program. The lack of any such warrant requirement helped sink an effort last week to extend the program for 18 months, as well as a separate vote on a five-year renewal.
Trump officials, like those in past administrations, have argued that such a warrant requirement would overburden law enforcement and endanger national security. Johnson’s latest proposal would reauthorize the program for three years, but does not include a warrant requirement. Instead, the bill calls for the FBI to submit monthly explanations for reviews of Americans’ information to an oversight official as well as criminal penalties for willful abuse, among other tweaks.
“I am willing to risk the giving up of my Rights and Privileges as a Citizen for our Great Military and Country,” the president wrote on Truth Social last week, advocating for the program to be extended without changes. “I have spoken with many in our Military who say FISA is necessary in order to protect our Troops overseas, as well as our people here at home, from the threat of Foreign Terror Attacks. It has already prevented MANY such Attacks, and it is very important that it remain in full force and effect.”
Glenn Gerstell, who served as general counsel at the National Security Agency during the Obama and first Trump administration, says Johnson’s reforms look like an attempt to find a middle ground.
“There’s not a lot of really substantive changes to the statute, but some gestures are made to people who are worried about privacy and civil liberties,” Gerstell said. “It seems like a pretty reasonable compromise that is going to be satisfactory to the national security agencies and yet at the same time represents some gesture to the privacy advocates.”
“This is not a reform bill and it’s not a compromise,” Elizabeth Goitein, a privacy advocate and senior director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, wrote on X. “It’s a straight reauthorization with eight pages of words that serve no serious purpose other than to try to convince members that it’s NOT a straight reauthorization.”
A bipartisan reform deal is still out of reach
Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence committee, told NPR on Wednesday, before the release of Johnson’s new proposal, that lawmakers were working on a bipartisan solution. He said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., was in touch with Johnson on the issue.
“There’s a lot of work being done here,” Himes said. “We’re sort of working out a process that will be inclusive rather than exclusive.” Himes said he was negotiating with Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat and constitutional law scholar, on a reform proposal they hoped could preserve and reform the program — reauthorizing it with bipartisan support.
But Johnson’s new bill appears to fall short of the inclusive approach Himes hoped for.
NPR obtained a memo written by Raskin to his colleagues urging them to oppose the bill, which he said “continues the disastrous policy of trusting the FBI to self-police and self-report its abuses of Section 702 and backdoor searches of Americans’ data.”
“FBI agents can still collect, search, and review Americans’ communications without any review from a judge,” Raskin wrote.
FBI agents must receive annual training on FISA and are generally barred from searching for information about people in the U.S. if the goal of the search is to investigate general criminal activity, rather than find foreign intelligence information, and those searches need approval from a supervisor or an attorney.
Republican hardliners — who sunk Johnson’s last reauthorization attempt — also don’t all appear to be on board for Johnson’s latest revision. Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, a past chair of the Freedom Caucus, said “we’re not there yet” in a video he shared to X on Thursday.
“I didn’t take an oath to defend FISA, I didn’t take an oath to defend the intelligence community,” Perry said. “We can’t have them spying on American citizens and, when they do, there has to be accountability and I haven’t seen any that I’m satisfied with yet.”
The House Rules committee meets Monday morning, the first step toward advancing the renewal bill toward a vote.
President Trump announced a three-week extension of a cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon that had been set to expire in a few days, after hosting a meeting between Israeli and Lebanese diplomats at the White House on Thursday.
Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group that has been attacking Israel from southern Lebanon, did not have representatives at the meeting and did not immediately comment on the announcement. The prime minister of Israel and the president of Lebanon also did not comment.
A successful peace agreement would hinge upon Hezbollah halting attacks, which Lebanon’s government has little power to enforce because it does not control the militia. Lebanon’s military has mostly stayed out of the fighting and is not at war with Israel.
The cease-fire, which was scheduled to end on April 26, would last until May 17 if it takes effect as Mr. Trump described it. Before the cease-fire was brokered last week, nearly 2,300 people were killed in Lebanon and 13 in Israel. Since then, the number of Israeli airstrikes and Hezbollah attacks have been dramatically reduced, though the two sides have continued exchanging fire.
The Lebanese Ambassador to the United States, Nada Hamadeh, credited Mr. Trump for extending the cease-fire, saying that “with your help and support, we can make Lebanon great again.” Mr. Trump replied, “I like that phrase, it’s a good phrase.”
Asked about the potential of a lasting peace agreement between Israel and Lebanon, Mr. Trump said that “I think there’s a great chance. They are friends about the same things and they are enemies on the same things.”
But Lebanon and Israel have periodically been at war since Israel’s founding in 1948. Israel has invaded Lebanon for the fifth time since 1978, incursions that have destabilized the country and the delicate balance of power between Muslim, Christian and Druze communities.
In the hours before the president’s announcement on social media, Israel and Hezbollah were trading attacks in southern Lebanon, testing the existing cease-fire.
Mr. Trump said the meeting at the White House had been attended by high-ranking U.S. officials, including Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the U.S. ambassadors to Israel and Lebanon.
Earlier on Thursday, an Israeli strike near the southern Lebanese city of Nabatieh killed three people, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. Hezbollah claimed three separate attacks on Israeli troops who are occupying southern Lebanon, though none were wounded or killed.
Hezbollah set off the latest round of fighting last month by attacking Israel soon after the start of the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign in Iran. Israel responded to Hezbollah’s attacks by launching airstrikes across Lebanon and widening a ground invasion of the country’s south.
-
New York1 hour agoHistory of Domestic Abuse Can be Considered in Sentencing, Court Rules
-
Detroit, MI2 hours agoDetroit Tigers vs Cincinnati Reds – April 24, 2026 – Redleg Nation
-
San Francisco, CA2 hours agoSan Francisco ranks top in the U.S. for desserts. Here’s where to go.
-
Dallas, TX2 hours agoFC Dallas Injury Report vs. Seattle Sounders: Who Is In and Who Is Out?
-
Miami, FL2 hours ago‘The Mummy’ New Movie To Open in 2027, ‘Miami ’85’ Now 2028
-
Boston, MA2 hours agoAlexandria Ocasio-Cortez joins Boston Mayor Wu, Ayanna Pressley to slam Trump’s childcare funding cuts
-
Denver, CO3 hours agoDenver police still looking for help solving double murder at American Elm restaurant 3 years ago
-
Seattle, WA3 hours agoTraffic flagger, 70, hospitalized after dump truck strike on Seattle’s Capitol Hill