Weekly Roundup: April 3
Here’s the weekly roundup from A Public Witness. In addition to an announcement of a class on media and religion and a review of a new book on deconstruction that are free for anyone to read, paid subscribers to A Public Witness received a consideration of Caesar-like actions by Donald Trump.
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Top 5 at wordandway.org
Pete Hegseth’s War Prayer. Brian Kaylor reflected on a violent prayer during a recent Christian worship service at the Pentagon and on Mark Twain’s satirical work “The War Prayer.”
Pope Leo XIV Rejects Claims That God Justifies War in Palm Sunday Mass Message. Saying we serve the “King of Peace” who cannot be used “to justify war,” Pope Leo added, “He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: ‘Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood.’”
Review: Becoming Neighbors. Robert D. Cornwall reviewed Becoming Neighbors: The Common Good Made Local by Amar D. Peterman.
Judge Rejects Johnson Amendment Settlement, Keeping Ban on Pastors Endorsing Candidates. Bob Smietana reported on a win for church-state separation.
His Arrest Went Viral. Now Rev. Michael Woolf Is Preaching What He Calls ‘Sanctuary Values.’ Jack Jenkins profiled an American Baptist pastor in Illinois who has been protesting and preaching against ICE.
by Brian Kaylor, Word&Way Editor-in-Chief
Pete Hegseth, who likes to call himself “secretary of war,” has sparked controversies by firing various military leaders and blocking the promotions of Black and female officers. Yesterday, news broke that he fired the Army’s chief of staff, the highest-ranking officer in the Department of the Army. On the same day, Hegseth also fired the Army’s chief of chaplains.
Army Maj. Gen. William Green, who had served as the chief supervising officer in the Army Chaplain Corps since 2023, is a minister in the National Baptist Convention USA, the largest Black Baptist denomination in the country. After enlisting in the Army and then becoming a pastor, he’s served as an Army chaplain since 1994.
This unprecedented move by a secretary of defense to fire the Army chief of chaplains comes as Hegseth is promising to overhaul the military chaplaincy program to make it more evangelistic. He’s also establishing his own version of Christianity in the Pentagon with monthly worship services and by using sectarian language to talk about war and justify public policy decisions. All of that makes his unexplained firing of the chief of chaplains highly suspect.
The White Christian Nationalist Crusader running the Pentagon pushed out a Black Baptist chaplain during Holy Week. Let us not confuse the faith of imperial leaders with the Jesus who was killed by the empire on that Friday.
Other News of Note
A federal judge ruled that a
graven imagemonument of the “Ten Commandments” on the grounds of the Arkansas Capitol violates the U.S. Constitution. Not noted in the ruling is that the text of the commandments is highly edited and not found in any Bible.As a Jewish group seeks to create a sectarian public charter school in Oklahoma, residents and church-state groups are suing to block the proposal. Meanwhile, Florida’s attorney general announced he will not enforce that state’s constitution if a group seeks to receive public funding for a charter school.
An antiabortion pastor running as a Democrat for the U.S. Senate seat in Nebraska is accused of being a GOP plant after CNN reported he attended a conservative training event for candidates and said he repeatedly voted for President Donald Trump.
At a White House “Easter” faith event this week, Trump’s spiritual advisor Paula White-Cain compared Trump to Jesus, saying that “no one has paid the price” like Trump and that the president had been arrested, betrayed, and falsely accused but then “rose up.”
“I used to teach this as, ‘This is this fringe thing that’s out there.’ Now I teach it as, ‘This is no longer fringe.’” —Beth Allison Barr in a New York Times article about a patriarchal church in Arizona that opposes women voting.
The Wall Street Journal profiled Mark Lanier, the attorney who just won a major case against Meta and Google and who is also a longtime Baptist Sunday School teacher.
Gaya Gupta of The London Guardian wrote about churches developing underutilized land into affordable housing.
Megan Fowler of Christianity Today reported on churches trying marketing gimmicks like drone shows and skydiving Easter bunnies to get people to attend an Easter-weekend service.
Photo of the Week
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