From The Desk of Holy Heresy

Like a toddler playing with a box of matches in a dynamite factory, President Trump has finally managed to blow the roof off the Middle East. And true to form, he’s standing amidst the smoke and rubble of Tehran, beating his chest and waiting for applause. ​The assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei during "Operation Epic Fury" this weekend is being hailed by the MAGA chorus as a masterstroke, a definitive end to the Iranian menace. But let’s be clear about what actually happened. The United States, in a spasm of unilateral recklessness, just decapitated a sovereign government without a single cohesive plan for what happens the morning after. ​We have botched a historic opportunity. For months, the brave people of Iran were already in the streets, bleeding for their own freedom. They were doing the hard, dangerous work of dismantling the regime from the inside. But instead of supporting that organic change, instead of building the kind of diplomatic and economic pres...

If you listen closely to the wind blowing through Washington this week, you can hear a sound. Pundits reacting. They are reacting to the same thing, a breathtaking display of situational ethics from FBI Director Kash Patel that threatens to snap the spine of American law enforcement. ​The catalyst was the tragic shooting in Minneapolis of Alex Pretti, a nurse and lawful gun owner, by federal agents. In defending the shooting on Fox News this Sunday, Director Patel laid down a new, absolute standard for American civil unrest: "No one who wants to be peaceful shows up at a protest with a firearm that is loaded with two full magazines! That is not a peaceful protest... You cannot bring a firearm loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want." ​On its face, this is a coherent, if strict, law enforcement perspective. But placed against the backdrop of the last five years of MAGA orthodoxy, it reveals a hypocrisy so vast it creates its own weather system. ​Fro...

As a theologian and organizer who has studied history, I offer you these lessons not as distant academic theories, but as survival strategies for the spirit and the streets. You are facing a moment where the ground is shifting, where an authoritarian shadow looms, attempting to reshape reality into something rigid and exclusionary. ​We look to the saints of the past for wisdom, as they often have the wisdom to show us the way. They had to figure out how to be faithful, active, and relevant in a society undergoing radical, often polarizing transformation. They refused to disappear. They refused to be irrelevant. ​Here are four real lessons for us, here and now, on how to organize and keep the faith under a regime that demands our submission. ​1. Reclaim the "Theology of the Way" ​The first temptation under an authoritarian regime is to retreat. It is easy to lock the doors of our sanctuaries (or our homes), protect our own circles, and practice what theologians call a "th...

 I have spent much of my life practicing restraint. I have believed, deeply, in live and let live, in ecumenical humility, in interfaith cooperation that treats difference not as a threat but as a gift. I have broken bread across traditions, prayed alongside people whose theology I do not share, and traveled internationally with mission partners who understand that presence can be holy without being coercive. But there comes a point when silence stops being a virtue and becomes complicity. That line was crossed for me recently in conversations with mission workers connected to the Southern Baptist Convention. What I heard was not zeal tempered by love, nor conviction held with humility. What I heard was contempt dressed up as faith. “These people are Muslim.” “These people are heathens.” “They worship statues.” The language was not descriptive. It was dismissive. It was the language of disposal, as if whole cultures and centuries of spiritual meaning were refuse waiting to be clear...

 The text we have in Isaiah 10:1–4 bears its own urgency: “Woe to those who enact unjust statutes, who write oppression as law, to turn aside the needy from justice, and rob the poor of my people of their right… What will you do on the day of visitation, when the spoil has been divided and the lame taken as prey?” (NRSV‑inspired). Scholars highlight that Isaiah is condemning those in positions of authority, legislators, judges, who craft laws that institutionalize injustice, who write in statutes the privilege of the powerful at the expense of the vulnerable.  These few verses are brutally simple, and devastatingly relevant. They call to account: those who decree unrighteous decrees, those who turn aside the needy from justice, those who rob the poor of their rights. The cry is “Woe!” not because the system is broken only at the margins, but because the system is broken at its very heart: the making of laws and the writing of statutes that say loud and clear: the weak will be ...

Poverty in America isn’t an act of God or some twist of fate. It’s a set of decisions made in smoke-filled rooms, boardrooms, and courtrooms by people who think struggle builds character, as long as it’s not theirs. Every time this country stood at a crossroads where we could’ve built a nation that treats dignity as a right, conservative power slammed the door. They did it with a smile, a flag pin, and a sermon about self-reliance. Don’t be fooled. The war on the poor has never been hidden. It’s been policy. After World War II, America could’ve locked in prosperity for everyone who worked. Organized labor was strong, wages were rising, and a middle class was being born. Then came the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, sold as “balance” between workers and bosses but written to break labor’s knees. It outlawed solidarity strikes, let states pass “right-to-work” laws that really mean “right-to-work-for-less,” and tied unions in legal knots. Truman vetoed it; Congress overrode him. That was the first...