Opinion
In New York City, many home care workers work 24-hour shifts for up to five days straight, and are only paid for 13 hours of each shift. If they do not agree to this, they risk losing their job.
Home care workers provide 24-hour, live-in care for elderly and disabled patients, as defined by Medicaid. Home care workers feed, bathe, and administer medicine to patients. These workers attend to their vulnerable patients’ unpredictable needs around the clock. But because insurance companies like UnitedHealthcare and New York Healthfirst receive fixed public Medicaid payments to manage care, they make a profit by hiring only one worker for an entire shift.
A recent ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court reminded me of Jesus’ words at the end of the Sermon on the Mount: “Watch out for false prophets,” Jesus says. “They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them” (Matthew 7:15-16).
Last week, in Louisiana v. Callais, the court voted 6-3 along ideological lines, rendering the Voting Rights Act practically meaningless. When it was passed in 1965, the act was the crowning achievement of the Civil Rights Movement. The law created enforcement mechanisms to uphold the 15th Amendment and prevent states from discriminating against Black and other minority voters. Section 2, the specific provision weakened by the court last week, prohibits voting procedures—including districting maps—that hinder voter participation on the basis of race. In 1982, Congress amended this section, making it easier to challenge voter district maps that, intentionally or otherwise, diluted the power of minority voters.
There are moments when a system fails so completely that it reveals its design. For me, that moment was in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast. I watched from Newark as floodwaters submerged New Orleans, Black families were stranded on rooftops and packed into the Superdome while the state and national media moved with a deadly indifference. As a young adult, I learned something important: Systems don’t collapse; they are disinvested in and allowed to fail when people are deemed expendable.
It was 23 years ago that Rev. Jeremiah Wright delivered one of the most profound and misunderstood sermons in U.S. history. In “Confusing God and Government,” delivered on Palm Sunday in 2003, Wright tells the story of race and war throughout U.S. history, arguing that the country had failed Black and Indigenous populations. Toward the sermon’s climactic end, Rev. Wright stated, “No, no, no. Not ‘God Bless America;’ God Damn America! That’s in the Bible, for killing innocent people. God Damn America for treating her citizen[s] as less than human. God Damn America, as long as she tries to act like she is God and she is supreme!” This moment would cause controversy during the 2008 presidential campaign, when Barack Obama, who attended Wright’s church, was accused of anti-Americanism.
But Wright was right. If the United States, as a nation, has a soul, it is currently hellbound.
I’ve heard the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness described as a warning against testing God. Maybe. But lately I’ve been thinking that the story is about testing your luck.
Here’s how the scene might look in 2026: The devil isn’t a shadowy figure on a mountaintop. He’s a sleek betting app. A notification lights up the screen: Turn this stone into bread. Massive payout. No one will know. Another notification appears: Jump from the temple. Stick the landing. Viral moment. Your followers will explode. Then there is the final notification, the final temptation: Bow to me just once. Lifetime guarantee. Unlimited upside. In the story, Jesus swipes away the temptation for the massive payout. But today, with the rise of predictive markets and sports gambling, it’s getting hard for us to do the same. It’s harder to resist this modern temptation because, for a lot of people, it now takes something big just to get by.
I have never felt so alone as when I was caring daily for my father, who has advanced dementia. It wasn’t that I was actually alone. I had a loving family surrounding me, including my mom and brother; we had weekly care plan meetings where we would try to understand my dad’s patterns, his growing agitation, and what we might do to ease his suffering and sustain our village of care.
But even with that loving collaboration—more than most people have when they are in the throes of caring for loved ones with dementia—we felt deeply isolated from the wider world. A neighbor we’d never met came and knocked on our door one day, chastising my mom for not keeping better track of my wandering dad. The cashier at the local natural food store looked angry as my dad grabbed a day-old muffin and began unwrapping it before we’d paid for it. (He’d lost all sense of the norms regarding paying for things.) Bringing him with me on errands was the only way I could manage it all as a “sandwich generation caregiver” (a popular shorthand for caring for children and aging parents at the same time), and yet I knew that his presence would complicate everything and leave me even more depleted.
Joe Kent, the former head of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned on March 17 in an act of protest over the war in Iran. Kent self-identifies as a proponent of the America First ideology. He claimed in a letter posted on X that Israel deceived President Donald Trump into believing that war with Iran was necessary. Trump has said the war in Iran was his choice alone.
Before praising Kent’s actions, it should be noted that his resignation reveals a stark divide within the Republican Party, which has pitted America First advocates against those who believe the U.S. should offer uncompromising support to Israel. Kent’s resignation highlights fault lines that threaten to fracture the Republican Party and the evangelical voting bloc.
In the midst of a civil war, married couple Ernesto and Linda Fuentes fled their home country of El Salvador and headed for Philadelphia, via Mexico, in November 1983.
Ernesto was an activist who dispensed food and medicine in Salvadoran refugee camps. Linda was a union organizer for banks and clothing factories.
The Salvadoran government viewed activists, especially suspected guerrilla fighters and union leaders, as threats to its regime. It placed activists’ names on “death squad hit lists.” The couple decided to leave after receiving threatening letters and phone calls.
Earlier this month, at a private Easter luncheon at the White House, President Donald Trump delivered some of the most revealing comments of his second presidency.
On April 13, President Donald Trump shared an AI-generated image that seemed to depict him as Jesus Christ. There was immediate backlash, even among those who have been Trump’s staunchest allies. “This should be deleted immediately,” wrote Trump ally and conservative activist Sean Feucht on social media. So severe was the backlash that Trump deleted the post.
Later, Trump denied he was portraying himself as Jesus, saying that he thought it showed him as a “doctor.” Still, many were quick to denounce his actions as a bridge too far. What seems most clear is that Trump’s sharing of the image caught many by surprise.
President Donald Trump has been playing Russian roulette with genocide. Ninety minutes before his own deadline expired, the man in charge of the most powerful and lethal military force in the world decided not to destroy a civilization. And the global response was simply a sigh of relief. There wasn’t a bullet in the chamber, at least this time.
At the beginning of 2026, President Donald Trump said that his New Year’s resolution was to accomplish “peace on earth.” As he asserted last year with his aggressive campaigning for the Nobel Peace Prize, and the White House dubbing him “THE PEACE PRESIDENT” on X, Trump was convinced that he would be the one to fulfill it with “no new wars.” But just two days after issuing this resolution, Trump had Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro kidnapped.
It is a pattern that has continued deep into 2026—promises of “peace” followed by bloodshed and violence. In January, Trump announced the Board of Peace, an international effort to “stop generations of hatred and bloodshed.” A month later, a joint U.S.-Israeli airstrike hit an Iranian all-girls elementary school as a result of outdated intel, killing at least 168 people, most of whom were children.
On April 7, Trump threatened the people of Iran if the government refused to reopen the contested Strait of Hormuz, a trade route through which about 20% of the world’s oil passes. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Trump threatened on his social media platform.
The Heritage Foundation brought you Project 2025 in order to completely transform the U.S. federal government. Now, it’s rolling out a new plan to save the American family.
To ring in 2026, the conservative think tank that provided the blueprints for the administrations of President Ronald Reagan and President Donald Trump released a new 168-page policy plan titled Saving America by Saving the Family. The Heritage Foundation’s plan claims that its goal is to encourage more “fertile” men and women to marry younger and have more children. But curiously, this plan for America’s families recommends programs like marriage boot camps and“community rest” laws, not policies that have been empirically shown to encourage family growth and stability—such as the expansion of paid parental leave and flexible work schedules.
As we journey through Holy Week, I’m meditating less on Jesus on the cross—I see that every day—and am instead meditating on Jesus razing hell.
Israel’s displacement and killing of Palestinians continues; the U.S. continues to escalate the war with Iran; and immigrants are still being hunted down by cowards in masks. Every day we see Christ crucified. What does the hope offered by Jesus, that these forces of evil can be stopped, look like? What are the lessons for us on the road from the crucifixion to the resurrection?
I want to talk about a Christian response to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s campaign, and to do that, we need to start with Batman.
As a pastor, I don’t use the word “hell” lightly, but I think it’s time. The war against Iran has oil and gas facilities across the Middle East burning. Three million Iranians and a million Lebanese citizens are displaced. Black rain laden with toxic chemicals is falling in Tehran, Iran, likely ensuring a legacy of cancer and birth defects that will rival or surpass the health legacy of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan.
The third No Kings Day this Saturday is shaping up to be the largest day of nonviolent protests in American history. There were more than 2,000 protests during the first No Kings Day in June 2025 and more than 2,700 at the second No Kings Day in October 2025. More than 3,000 events are already planned for this third edition.
“All I want is freedom for the people,” President Donald Trump told The Washington Post on Feb. 28. “I want a safe nation, and that’s what we’re going to have.” But as missiles rain down on Tehran—and reports state that every major city in Iran has been bombed—Christians must be wise enough to discern that the destruction of a country does not make it safe.
The New York Times’ report on allegations of sexual abuse by labor organizer César Chávez has been devastating to many people, me included. The news reminds me that long before I learned about power, faith, and movements from a church stage or a history book, I learned about them from an abuelita.
It has been a joy to deconstruct my religious trauma alongside 32-year-old comedian Taylor Tomlinson. Four years ago, as I was coming out as queer to my family, I found her Netflix special Taylor Tomlinson: Look at You to be a warm welcome into the community of formerly Christian queer kids and purity culture survivors. Dark humor gave all of us a silly sort of grace, a space where we could grieve and grow.
Tomlinson, who was raised in a conservative Christian household in Temecula, Calif., got her start in stand-up through the church comedy circuit. But as she grew up, she began deconstructing how her conservative Christian upbringing was hurting her mental health and sexual development, deciding instead to be a “secular” comic.