Death, dying, and faith in America

Death, as the cliche goes, is one of life’s few certainties.  

At some point in time, all of us with loved ones will be bereaved by their passing. We will attend services, gather with family and friends, and otherwise memorialize the dead we once knew.  

And, eventually, all of us will die.  

Though death is a universal experience, the nature of death and dying in the United States continues to evolve.   

Thanks to technological advances, shifting healthcare norms, the rearrangement of families, communities and social structures, ongoing differences due to class and race, as well as alterations to America’s religious landscape, death and dying in the U.S. have changed dramatically in recent decades.  

Over the last century, life expectancy has continued (with occasional setbacks) to increase — with the current lifespans lasting an average of 77.5 years — and three-quarters (74.76%) of the nearly 3.1 million deaths in the U.S. in 2023 were to persons aged 65 and older. Death is also a progressively protracted and isolating affair. Occurring after a chronic illness, long-term discomfort, or slow-but-steady cognitive decline, many face the egress alone, as smaller families, divorce rates, and the continuing breakdown of connections among individuals’ social networks leaves many with fragile networks of community and care at the end of their lives.  

And while religion in the U.S. may not be dying, our changing relationship with faith has important implications for how individuals and communities face the end of life in 21st-century America.  

Religion + Culture: Top 24 Books of 2024

In the early hours of January 1, 2024, I completed a lifelong dream: to run 24 hours nonstop. What a start to the year!

A few hours later, I was unable to bend my left knee. A few days later, I was in a hospital bed with a blood clot (TMI? Sorry).

It was not, as you could imagine, how I hoped to start the year.

But as I lay there in the hospital, I had a book with me. A companion to distract me, humor me, entertain, or otherwise engage me.

I’m not sure what your 2024 was like. Maybe it was full of finish lines. Maybe it was full of metaphorical clots. Whatever the last year held I hope you had the chance to read some good books along the way.

Whether the year was wonderful, the worst, or decidedly in between, I hope reading helped you get here. I know I wouldn’t be where I am today if it wasn’t for the books I’ve read, in 2024 or any other year.

And so, without further adieu, here are my top 24 books of 2024 (some new, some old), in the order I read them. Maybe you’ll find one of your next reads among them:

📖 The Longmire Defense, by Craig Johnson (2023) - I don’t read fiction all that much. And when I do, I’m picky. And the Longmire series from Craig Johnson continues to deliver. A crime thriller with grit and spirituality mixed in, I appreciate how nature plays such a distinct role in the series as well — letting the seasons of the planet, and life, have their due.

📖 Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart, by Brian McLaren (2024) - In this bracing study, theologian McLaren (Faith After Doubt) challenges readers to recognize “the dangerous future into which we are presently plunging ourselves, our descendants, and our fellow creatures.”

📖 Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, by Nicholas Shakespeare (2023) - I’m a Bond fan. I make no qualms about that. But what I enjoy most about the Bond œuvre is the ability for the films, books, and assorted other phenomena to be time capsules revealing the culture, sexual ethics, politics, and economics of the times they were produced in. The same goes for Ian Fleming, the man. Say what you want about “the man who would be Bond,” but his life is one we should reckon with in order to understand Britain in the 20th-century.

📖 For His Eyes Only: The Women of James Bond, by Lisa Funnell (2015) - Speaking of the Bond universe’s sexual and gendered ethics, enter one of the best books I’ve read on the subject. Funnell, as her podcast declares, is “licensed to critique.” And critique she does. A phenomenal anthology on femininity and feminism in the Bond series.

📖 Righting the American Dream, by Diane Winston (2023) - A provocative new history of how the news media facilitated the Reagan Revolution and the rise of the religious Right. Read more HERE.

📖 Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo, by Christiane F. (1978) - Still as haunting and hard-hitting as it was over 50 years ago. No glitz and glam here. This is a descent into the depths of human nature and misery. A poignant reminder that we are all just a few steps away from a life on the streets.

📖 Diesseits der Mauer: Eine Neue Geschichte der DDR, Katja Hoyer (2023) - A controversial history of the DDR, but one I thoroughly appreciated. Living in the former East, I appreciated the perspective shift this book presented on the history of Germany post World War II.

📖 Strangers No Longer: Latino Belonging and Faith in Twentieth-century Wisconsin, by Sergio M. González (2024) - I read a lot of books about immigration this last year. This one stood out for its focus on local history and the minutiae of how ministries in the Badger State accepted, expanded, and adapted because of an influx of Latino immigrants in the 20th-century.

📖 The Other Americans, by Laila Lalami (2019) - Staying on the topic of immigration, this is a telling tale of belonging and “Other”-hate in California’s High Desert. Lalami rarely takes a misstep with her works and this one is no different.

📖 The Bible: A Global History, by Bruce Gordon (2024) - An ambitious study of how a collection of prophecies, poems, and letters became a sacred text that has shaped cultures across time and space.

📖 The Unclaimed: Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels, by Pamela J. Prickett and Stefan Timmermans (2024) - If I ranked my favorite books in 2024, this one would be at the top of the list. A touching ethnography of death and dying in the wicked city of Los Angeles. I listened to this book while walking the streets of Venice Beach and Skid Row, Culver City and Hollywood. Every word resonated with what I saw. And while there is beauty and hope to be found, most of it was harrowing. A must read on the ethics of care in 21st-century America.

📖 Everything Now: Lessons from the City-state of Los Angeles, by Rosecrans Baldwin (2021) - For all the critique of this scattershot portrayal of the “city-state” Los Angeles, I loved Baldwin’s take on the megalopolis and its many sides. In particular, I thought the chapter on those in pursuit of Hollywood’s dream both textured and compassionately critical.

📖 The Lincoln Lawyer, by Michael Connelly (2005) - I said I don’t read much fiction. And yet, this is my third fiction book on the list. Set in Los Angeles, this is the first in “The Lincoln Lawyer” series. I’m hooked and already started book two: The Brass Verdict.

📖 Our Migrant Souls, by Héctor Tobar (2023) - I had the opportunity to hear Héctor Tobar when he accepted the Zócalo Book Prize for this book in 2024. As he said that night, there are whole aspects of the Latino experience not yet encountered by the American masses. This book goes a long way in sharing those stories with poetic and powerful prose narratives of Latinx experience in the U.S.

📖 Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts, by Oliver Burkeman (2024) - “Your limitations aren’t obstacles to a meaningful existence”—they’re key to building one, according to this refreshing guide from journalist Burkeman. Amid a sea of efficiency-focused, do-it-all self-help guides, this is a welcome alternative.

📖 Puerto Rico: A National History, by Jorell A. Meléndez Badillo (2024) - Ever since I read Fernando Pico’s 2006 History of Puerto Rico: A Panorama of Its People, I was looking for the next history of Borinquen to come along. This not only provides the necessary updates, but goes beyond, abandoning “great man” approaches to the nation’s history in favor of telling the story of its people, from the people themselves.

📖 Floss, by Roger Erickson (2024) - Erickson, who in 2003 became the first Black photographer to shoot the cover of Vogue, serves up an eye-popping debut collection full of artists, celebrities, and musicians. Hip-hop fans will take special delight in this vibrant celebration of American pop culture.

📖 Berlin Calling, by Paul Hockenos (2017) - On the theme of music, this book captures the spirit of punk in Berlin, expertly surveying the landscape out of which its leading luminaries and most radical expressions emerged. Next up on the list: Der Klang der Familie: Berlin, Techno, and the Fall of the Wall.

📖 Borders: A Very Short Introduction, by Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen (2024) - This has become one of the two books I assign to students when we start talking about borders (the other being Glorida Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera). A handy introduction to our bordered world and how, while borders are make believe, they remain very, very real.

📖 A Few Words in Defense of Our Country: The Biography of Randy Newman, by Robert Hilburn (2024) - Biographer Hilburn (Paul Simon) serves up an affectionate tribute to Randy Newman, the singer-songwriter and film score composer best known for “I Love L.A.” and “You’ve Got a Friend in Me.”  Throughout, Hilburn astutely analyzes how Newman uses literary devices like the unreliable narrator to probe the absurdities of “a strange and tragic period in [America’s] history.” In the process, Hilburn makes clear, Newman broadened the boundaries of what pop music can do.

📖 Islamic Thought Through Protestant Eyes, by Mehmet Karabela (2021) - A thorough exploration of how (mostly) German Lutherans engaged with Islamic thought and helped give shape to Protestant identity in the wake of the Reformation. Karabela testifies to the ways in which the “strange” is not only more “familiar” than we at first might think but has played a role in the evolution of our own thought and practice.

📖 Searching for Jimmie Strother, by Gregg D. Kimball (2024) - In this thoroughly researched forensic biography, Kimball pieces together the life of James Lee Strother: a blind singer, guitarist and banjoist found at the Virginia State Prison Farm on a 1936 expedition by folklorist John Avery Lomax on behalf of the Library of Congress’s folk song archive. A fine-tuned, and rich retelling of a life too long lingering in the shadows of American folk history.

📖 Life Worth Living, by Matthew Croasmun, Miroslav Volf, and Ryan McAnnally-Linz (2023) - Welcome to the humanities! An excellent little primer on how to approach “the Question” of all our lives (and the many questions that come with it): what is really worth wanting?

📖 The Muslims of Caricom, by Sabir Nakhuda (2019) - As I write this, I am in Barbados conducting research with the Muslim community on the island. Nakhuda’s thoroughly researched oral histories are a gift to me and others who want to learn more about the vibrancy of Muslim life in a part of the world we rarely associate with global Islam.

Top Ten Stories at KenChitwood.com

Each day, as I settle onto my stool, place my coffee mug on my Scottish rugby coaster, adjust my desk height, and open my laptop, I pinch myself.

I’ve long been the annoying kid on the play ground asking what people are doing, why they’re doing it, and if I could join in. Now, as an ethnographer and journalist, I think it’s pretty crazy that I get to call my incessant drive to wonder “wait, but why?” a profession. What started as curiosity, turned into a hobby, then a blog, then a column, and then a full-fledged career. I couldn’t be more thankful.

I could not do it without you, the reader.

That’s why I crunch the numbers at the end of each year to see what stories resonated with you most.

This year took me to Tijuana, Mexico and Tampa, Florida, from Vaduz, Liechtenstein to Lampedusa, Italy. Working as Faith and Immigration Reporter for Sojourners, Europe Correspondent for Christianity Today, Senior Columnist for Interfaith America, Editor for ReligionLink and starting my Habilitation at Universität Bayreuth, I wrote about immigration and artificial intelligence, climate catastrophe and democracy.

Along the way, some stories caught your attention more than others. You clicked on and read through narratives of solidarity between Puerto Rico and Palestine, psychedelic-assisted spiritual care, a jazzy church plant in Berlin, a Lutheran church offering refuge to Muslim migrants in Los Angeles, and voters of faith who abstain from voting for religious reasons.

Thank you (once more) for reading along this way year. I am already working on the first stories of 2025 and I can’t wait to share them with you.

From Puerto Rico to Palestine, with Solidarity

For some Puerto Rican Muslims, their faith imbues their solidarity with divine purpose. For others, it is solidarity that leads them to faith in the first place.

On the Frontiers of Psychedelic-Assisted Chaplaincy and Spiritual Care

How new studies, therapies, and theological revolutions may lead to a breakthrough in the use of psychedelics for religious insight and remedial spiritual care.

Berlin Like Jazz

One part church plant, one part jazz project, Kiez Church (Neighborhood Church) in the multiethnic district of Wedding is led by Ali and Rich Maegraith, Australian missionaries who say they want to bring the gospel to the cosmopolitan city’s art scene.

That Europe may know

How church planters in Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany are meeting with success…and failure.

AI is coming to your house of worship...if it isn't already there

Background, related stories, sources and relevant resources for understanding how AI is already impacting the everyday realities of our spiritual lives.

Haunted lands, popular saints

How people of faith honor the dead along the US-Mexico border.

“It’s Changed Everything”

Interfaith dialogue in the wake of October 7, 2023.

Their church basement used to host quinceañeras.

Now, it houses 20 Mauritanian Muslims seeking asylum in the City of Angels.

Righting the American Dream

A review of Diane Winston’s Righting the American Dream: How the Media Mainstreamed Reagan’s Evangelical Vision.

The religious “no” vote

Why some voters of faith boycott elections.

No Christmas in Italy?

Imagine a December without seasonal decor, special treats, parties with friends, or a nativity. In other words, imagine a December without Christmas.

For many evangelicals in Italy, that is exactly how it should be.

Not celebrating Christmas — nor Easter — is a way to distinguish themselves from a Catholic holiday that they feel has lost any real meaning or focus on Jesus. It is a way, they say, to assert their identity by opposition to the status quo.

According to a 2023 survey by Ipsos (a France-based research center), over two-thirds of Italy’s residents are Christian (68%), with 61% saying they are Catholic, just 4% Protestant, and 3% identifying as “other Christians.” Over a quarter of Italians are non-religious (28%).

Evangelicals in Italy feel that as a small minority, Christian identity has been largely defined not by who they are, but who they are not — not Roman Catholic, not theologically liberal, not culturally secular. “In such a situation, evangelicals feel a need to better assert their identity based on core Gospel essentials rather than on cultural features,” says JD Gilmore, a church planter in Palermo and coordinator of Impatto (Acts 29 in Italy).

That is why Donato Trovarelli says he skips the aperitivi, the Christmas eel, the panettone and other trappings of what is often held up as Christianity’s biggest holiday. The charismatic author of three books says traditions in Italy have nothing to do with “born again” evangelicals. That is why, Trovarelli says evangelicals and Pentecostals like him “drive out of our places of worship all the traditions of the tree, the nativity scene, the figure of Santa Claus, Jesus as a child, and every other popular tradition of any non-Christian nature or religion.”

Keeping religion at home: learning about, and from, domestic devotion

While shopping for a home outside Austin, Texas, James Yonkers — a self-confessed religion nerd — came across an unexpected find.

“We were looking at this lovely duplex and the real estate agent was showing me everything in the house, except for the downstairs closet next to the kitchen,” said Yonkers, “so, I got curious.”

Left alone to look around the house one more time, Yonkers could not help but open the closet door to look inside. What he found was the last thing he expected. Inside was a lavishly adorned altar to Ganesha, “with candles, a coconut, marigold, mango leaves and all these other elements around it,” said Yonkers.

Readily identified by his elephant head, Ganesha is widely revered in Hindu, Jain and Buddhist traditions as a remover of obstacles and bringer of good fortune.

“Whoever owned the duplex before us, I hoped the good luck from Ganesha would stick,” Yonkers said, “because we bought the place!”

Domestic religious practices — that is, religious conduct within a household setting — provide an outlet for expressing and addressing the concerns of everyday life. An altar to Ganesha, where devotees can regularly perform puja — an act of reverence and worship — in the intimate surrounds of their home, not only beckons good luck but serves as a touchstone of resilience through the ups and downs of day-to-day life. 

Archaeologists have found protective deities, tools for conducting rites of protection and healing and shards of pottery used to hold libations and offerings in the homes of ancient peoples in places as diverse as Egypt to North America, Mesopotamia to Oceania. These practices were not divorced from a wider continuum of religious practice outside the home, but part-and-parcel to them.

In other words, practitioners the world over have long made religion a domestic affair, utilizing religious beliefs, actions and imagery to give shape and substance to hearth and home for millennia.

Beyond temples, synagogues and other places of public and communal devotion, a range of practices, material objects and rituals have provided solace, inspiration and an opportunity for regular devotion for individuals and families in the privacy of their personal space.

Today, the increasing privatization and individualization of spirituality and its associated customs means the home can often be a substitute for, or supplement to, communal houses of worship and the public display of religion.

Diverse Democracy: Reflections Covering Religion and the 2024 Elections

In the wake of elections, there are scores of analyses and proffered insights on how the results speak to the future of the country and its democracy.  

This year, what looked to be razor-thin margins and minuscule measures in swing states shifted the media’s focus to a range of demographics among the U.S. voting-eligible populace and how they could sway the election one way or another.  

This included a wide range of “swing faith” voters — religious actors from a range of traditions who could push the polls in favor of one party or another.  Covering several of these communities in recent months, and breaking down the data and demographics among different faith groups across the U.S. for ReligionLink, I found myself wondering (with many, many others) what it all means for the U.S.’s diverse, interfaith democracy in the decades to come.  

In my latest as Senior Columnist, I offer reflections on what happened with, and what might be in store for, America’s diverse democracy.

Five religion stories to follow after the election

The 2024 elections are (finally) over.

Donald J. Trump is returning to the White House, Republicans look set to regain control of Congress and a range of measures and propositions have gone one way or another on matters such as abortion rights and immigration.

Though there may be a natural drop-off in the frequency, and intensity, of religion+politics coverage in the weeks and months to come, the storylines we have been tracking will not slow down.

As we transition from the nonstop election cycle to map its aftermath and look to what is ahead, the latest ReligionLink guide offers an overview, data and resources for following five ongoing religion stories in the weeks and months to come.

• Faith shifts

• The election’s global ramifications

• Minority concerns, with a focus on Indigenous land protections

• The 2024/25 U.S. Supreme Court term

• A whole range of issues with religion angles, including the economy, immigration, reproductive rights, debates about gender and sexuality and more …

The religious "no" vote

Twenty years ago, John D. Roth thought members of his Anabaptist tradition should stop voting — if only for a season. 

In an essay he distributed among clergy of the Anabaptist movement, which includes pacifist traditions such as the Mennonites, Amish and Hutterites, Roth called for a five-year break from voting to pray and reflect, rather than campaign for one candidate or the other. He argued that the differences between political aspirants were illusory and that in national elections Christians might better fulfill their role by questioning, challenging and discomfiting those holding power, rather than tacitly or explicitly supporting any particular party or person. 

Roth believes his summons to a voting “sabbatical” is just as relevant today. “I wrote that essay 20 years ago, when the deep cultural divisions were just beginning to show up in our churches,” Roth told New Lines. “The idea was that we were in need of a deeper spiritual grounding in the face of the highly polarized political climate. Not surprisingly, that idea went nowhere.”

In a supercharged political landscape with MAGA evangelicals, “Hindus for Harris” and rising numbers of Muslims rallying behind Donald Trump, Jill Stein and Cornel West, it may come as a surprise that some people of faith in the U.S. abstain from voting entirely — or at least don’t take sides. 

But understanding their reservations and motivations, experts say, might speak more to the current state of U.S. politics than any partisan zealotry coming from voters of faith this election cycle.

While MAGA evangelicals — and those who oppose them — get a lot of play in the headlines, there is a steady tradition of Christians abstaining from partisan politics completely, explained Michael Budde, a professor at DePaul University, a private Catholic university in Chicago, who teaches on religion and politics.

“Not all Christians have made their peace with secular powers,” Budde said. Whether it’s the early centuries of the Christian era and monastic dissenters in the desert, those who refused to take up the sword within the church after the Roman Emperor Constantine, or the Catholic Worker Movement and people like Daniel Berrigan, a Catholic Jesuit priest who vigorously opposed the Vietnam War, multiple Christian communities have resisted allowing empires and states to borrow their legitimacy from the church. In addition to these pacifist traditions, there are fundamentalist Christian groups that teach that Christians are not of this world and are not to become involved in its politics.

And this election cycle, a larger number of U.S. Christians seem set to sidestep the ballot box in accordance with their interpretation of the Bible and their evaluation of current politics. According to research from the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University, 104 million “people of faith” might abstain from voting this year — including up to 32 million churchgoing Christians. As political scientist Robert Postic wrote for the evangelical magazine Christianity Today, “given short-term political dynamics or the candidates available, declining to vote can be the best way to reflect our values and acknowledge the importance of an election.”

 “Sometimes, the right choice,” Postic wrote, “may be not voting.”

Interfaith Action at American Borders

Every border has a story. Every dividing line on a map, every marker and monument and wall and fence comes with a narrative.  

And at the U.S./Mexico border, that story is an increasingly international and interfaith one.  

Not only are people on the move arriving at the U.S.’s southern border representing a broader swathe of global society and the world’s religions, but organizations across a range of faith traditions are teaming up to provide for their needs — both immediately and in terms of securing their rights to movement and to seek asylum once they arrive safely in the country.  

“An increasingly interfaith affair”  

Rick, 46, a San Diego resident who volunteers with various organizations at the U.S. border with Baja California, Mexico, said he’s noticed the uptick in migrants with backgrounds he would not necessarily expect. 

“I mean, across the years, it’s traditionally been a lot of people from across Latin America — Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala,” he said, “but nowadays, my Spanish is pretty useless. 

“People from all over the world are making their way here,” he said.  

In spring 2024, Rick regularly came down to the Iris Ave. trolley station in South San Diego — just 3 miles from the San Ysidro Border Crossing — to hand out waters to new arrivals waiting for onward transportation in the shade of eucalyptus trees next to the station.  

When he showed up, Rick said he was surprised by the people he met there. “There were Sikhs from Punjab, Buddhists from China, Christians from Haiti, Muslims from Bangladesh and Afghanistan,” he said, “it was like the United Nations in South San Diego.” 

That was quite the shift, Rick said. “It used to be mostly Catholics, a smattering of Pentecostals and Protestants; I met a few Mormons from Mexico a few years ago. But now, it’s an increasingly interfaith affair,” Rick said.

How Latter-day Saints, Muslims in Michigan, Black Protestants or Latino Catholics might sway the 2024 election

In the lead-up to the 2024 elections, white Christian nationalists and “MAGA evangelicals” are sucking up a lot of the air in the religion media space.

And for good reason. As Tobin Miller Shearer of the University of Montana wrote for The Conversation: 

In the 2016 race, evangelical voters contributed, in part, to Republican nominee Donald Trump’s victory. Those Americans who identified as “weekly churchgoers” not only showed up at the polls in large numbers, but more than 55% of them supported Trump. His capture of 66% of the white evangelical vote also tipped the scales in his favor against his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.

Evangelicals look set to support the former president in outsized numbers again — with a Pew Research Survey indicating 82% of white evangelical Protestants are likely to vote for Trump in November — and a significant “subset of Christian nationalists, which some suggest amounts to roughly 10% of the US population,” are rallying around him as they push “for Christianity to be the official, dominant religion of the US.”

But religious Americans from other backgrounds and traditions, such as Catholics, mainliners and Black Protestants — whom Bob Smietana and Jack Jenkins of RNS called “swing state faith voters” — could also prove critical to electoral victory due to their influence in key swing states. 

In this edition of ReligionLink, we offer a roundup of stories, perspectives and sources from a broad swath of faith constituencies around the U.S., addressing questions such as: How might Hindus be approaching local and state elections? How might Muslims in swing states prove decisive for the Electoral College? How might the nonreligious approach key ballot issues differently from others? 

Haunted Land, Popular Saints: Rituals of Death along the U.S./Mexico Border

It’s a gray, mid-May morning in Panteón Municipal #1, a city cemetery in Tijuana’s Zona Norte neighborhood. Alberto, the gatekeeper, saunters down a rocky pathway lined with palms, jacaranda, and gravestones to a prominent, red brick chapel, built over the tomb of one Juan Castillo Morales.

The shrine is covered wall-to-wall with candles, flowers, and plaques with names and messages of thanks to “Juan Soldado” (Juan the Soldier), as Castillo is known. Amid the array sits a stylized bust of a young soldier, resplendent in military attire, this morning bearing a black rosary and a blue-and-white Los Angeles Dodgers snapback hat.

The shrine is one of many unofficial memorials where loved ones remember lives of immigrants lost along the U.S.-Mexico border. From chapels erected around the graves of unofficial saints such as Castillo to digital memorials people carry with them into the desert to the crosses, flowers, and other mementos left along the border boundary itself, these monuments not only pay tribute to the individuals lost but bear witness to the ubiquity of death — and faith — in America’s southwestern borderlands.

Rosalba Ruiz-Hernández, a 46-year-old mother of five, stands in the shrine. Ruiz-Hernández, originally from the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, was deported back to Tijuana after her own failed attempt to start a new life in the U.S. Two of her grown children still live in Long Beach, Calif., near her former husband. They are undocumented, she said, but they make a living. Two others are in Tijuana with her. Matías, her middle son, died in the desert on his way north to join his siblings in Southern California.

“I come to Juanito’s chapel to give thanks for the children who have their new life in Long Beach,” Rosalba said, “and to pray for Matías’ soul.”

Juan Soldado is an unlikely saint. According to the Roman Catholic Church, he isn’t a saint at all. On Feb. 17, 1938, Castillo was executed for the rape and murder of Olga Camacho Martínez, a young girl who is buried in a cemetery just up the road. William Calvo-Quirós, an associate professor of American and Latino/a Studies at the University of Michigan, said the young soldier, a convicted murderer and rapist, transformed over time into Juan Soldado — a “folk saint” who is venerated as a victim of state violence.

And Tijuana holds many such stories, of border “saints” who, in death and in life, suffered at the intersections between worlds. And beyond Tijuana, there are numerous other unofficial saints’ shrines populating the U.S.-Mexico borderlands: El Tiradito in Tucson, Ariz.; Jesús Malverde in Culiacán, Sinaloa; Niño Fidencio in Espinazo, Nuevo León; the Virgen de San Juan del Valle, outside McAllen, Texas; and El Señor de los Milagros in San Antonio. Each memorial is part of a rich tapestry of rituals and beliefs that immigrants and their loved ones carry with them, or depend on, to sustain them amid migration, uncertainty, and death.

Nobody knows how many of these saints exist, wrote historian Paul J. Vanderwood. But the popular devotions and informal canonizations that emerged around them are a testament to the unjust circumstances of their deaths and, by extension, the deaths of many in the borderlands. These are souls with “unfinished” business, Vanderwood wrote — they “clamor for assistance” and cry out for justice.

Hundreds of migrants die every year along one of the world’s deadliest land borders. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency reports that 8,050 people died attempting to cross the border between 1998 and 2020. The agency recorded an additional 568 deaths in 2021 and 895 in 2022 — the most deaths recorded in a single year. Many more, who die from some form of exposure (heat stroke, hypothermia, or dehydration), are left unaccounted for and unclaimed. Then there are those who die somewhere in Mexico or Central and South America, en route to the U.S.-Mexico border.

This, said Calvo-Quirós, makes the border a nearly 2,000-mile stretch of “haunted land.”

“It’s Changed Everything”: Interfaith Dialogue in the Wake of October 7, 2023

I sat down for tacos with a colleague in Culver City, California, one early summer’s eve. The conversation was light.   

That is, until it wasn’t.   

Involved with interreligious dialogue at the local, state, national, and intergovernmental level, my acquaintance was concerned about the impact of Hamas’ attack on Israel that killed nearly 1,200 individuals and the Israeli Defense Force’s (IDF) brutal reprisal against Gaza and its people in the months that followed had done irreparable harm to cause of peacemaking in the U.S.   

The intense, seemingly endless violence and the chilling prospect of a ceasefire without lasting peace, my acquaintance feels, is having a profound emotional, psychological, and practical impact on people who care about connecting across religious, cultural, and political differences.   

“It’s set us back at least 20 years,” they said. Communities that used to connect, colleagues that used to be in conversation, groups that used to meet, and initiatives that used to be shared have all been impacted. “It’s changed everything.”   

As Thomas Banchoff wrote for Commonweal, “the Israel-Hamas war illustrates the fragility of interfaith diplomacy” and dialogue.   

While many said numerous theological, social, and political gains had been made through interreligious engagement in the U.S. and abroad in recent years, the damaging impact of savage violence, polarizing discourse, divisive protests, and tiptoeing around political landmines is a stark reminder of interfaith dialogue’s delicacy and potential limitations.   

Since October 7 last year, the strain between the Jewish and Muslim communities — and beyond — has challenged the ability of interfaith spaces to function as facilitators for positive dialogue, let alone spaces for solidarity.   

While various initiatives can claim decades of leadership in interreligious dialogue and relationships built between leaders and laity from numerous traditions, many have struggled to gather communities during the conflict. 

In various private exchanges, leaders and community members express their frustrations with their community’s lack of speaking out but are unwilling to call out a lack of mutual accountability for what happened and continues to happen.   

This, say practitioners nationwide, has eroded and stifled opportunities for sustainable peace. 

Berlin Like Jazz

It’s Saturday night and you’re looking for jazz in Germany’s capital. You could catch an after-midnight jam session at A-Trane in Charlottenburg, get cozy in the stylish, intimate ambience of the Zig Zag Club in Friedenau, or catch a solo saxophonist serenading the crowd at Berlin’s oldest jazz club, Quasimodo.

And there’s one more option: You could wait until morning and go to church in the Wedding district. 

One part church plant, one part jazz project, Kiez Church (Neighborhood Church) in the multiethnic district of Wedding is led by Ali and Rich Maegraith, Australian missionaries who say they want to bring the gospel to the cosmopolitan city’s art scene.

Berlin is a magnet for musicians—a place to connect and prove your chops. The German capital is a hub for many different European music scenes, from electronic dance to Afropop, classical to klezmer, and attracts creative people from all over.

The Maegraiths, who moved to Berlin in 2015, say that’s their in. The music provides them with evangelical opportunities. Rich, a professional jazz musician, and Ali, a vocalist and songwriter, moved to the city to serve with the European Christian Mission agency.

“We’ve met many people through jam sessions, performances or just busking on the streets,” Ali told CT. When they first arrived, Rich said he would go to jam sessions every night, all over the city. “In Berlin, the jazz scene is already a community, where people will play and hang out together until the early hours of the morning,” he said, “they even call it ‘jazz church.’”

Berlin’s nightlife is more readily associated with techno and punk, but it also has a long, historical relationship with jazz. The improvisational, syncopated music first came to the German capital at the end of World War I, when it was warmly received by the post-war population of the Weimar Republic.

When the American-born French singer and dancer Josephine Baker visited Berlin in 1925, she found the city dazzling with a vibrant jazz scene. Her performances were received with warm adulation. And popular acts like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington took the city by storm at a time when it was the third largest metropolitan area in the world by population.

Nazis put an end to jazz when they took control, but the music came back with the American victory in World War II. Soldiers stationed in the city brought the music of Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman and Miles Davis with them. This time, jazz stuck.

Today, Berlin is one of the best places in Europe to hear a live jazz show. And one of the places you can do that is at Kiez Church Wedding.

Art, Immigration, and Faith

The amber appears to ooze across the floor like slow-flowing lava. Containing found objects and materials sourced from Salvadoran communities around Los Angeles, Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio’s artwork is expansive and expressive of the materiality of often-marginalized Central American migrants in Southern California.

His artistic craft, Aparicio said, speaks to the innovative, resourceful, and resilient voices of migrants throughout the city and beyond. Artists of many kinds hope works like Aparicio’s can tell new kinds of immigrant stories — ones often full of faith and spirituality, migration and baptism, encounters with Jesus and varying experiences with church life.

Amid the leaves, bones, broken dishware, condom wrappers, beer holders, and archival papers in Aparicio’s work is a single flier for a church — a “Casa del Dios” advertising their services with Jesus’ words in bold red across the top: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

The installation, on display at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, hints at how immigration and faith are represented in various artistic mediums.

While political conversations about immigrants and immigration policy tend toward broad, often dehumanizing stereotypes, artists such as Aparicio are using their art to help viewers reflect on the deep, and expansive, experience of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in the U.S.

Giselle Elgarresta Rios, the first Cuban-American woman to conduct at Carnegie Hall in New York, wrote that art — perhaps more than other media — can help us better “see the souls of immigrants.”

That Europe May Know

The goal is audacious. But as far as James Davis, founder of the Global Church Network, is concerned, Christians need deadlines. Otherwise, they will never do what they need to do to fulfill the Great Commission.

His group gathered in Zurich, Switzerland, last September with 400 ministry leaders from across Europe who committed to raising up and equipping more than 100,000 new pastors in the next decade. The network plans to establish 39 hubs in Europe, with a goal of 442 more in the years to come, for training church planters, evangelists, and pastors to proclaim the gospel.

“A vision becomes a goal when it has a deadline,” Davis said at the event.

“So many Christian leaders today doubt their beliefs and believe their doubts. It is time for us to doubt our doubts and believe our beliefs. We will claim, climb, and conquer our Mount Everest, the Great Commission.”

Davis has a number of very motivated partners in this project, including the Assemblies of God, the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), and the International Pentecostal Holiness Church. The network also counts The Wesleyan Church, the Church of the Nazarene, the Foursquare Church, the Church of God in Christ, and OMF International (formerly Overseas Missionary Fellowship) as members of a broader coalition working to complete the Great Commission in the near future. If it turns out their European goal is a bit beyond reach, they will still undoubtedly do a lot between now and their deadline.

And the Global Church Network is not alone. In Germany, the Bund Freikirchlicher Pfingstgemeinden (Association of Free Church Pentecostals) has announced plans to plant 500 new churches by 2033. The group, celebrating its 150th anniversary in 2024, told CT it is currently planting new congregations at a rate of about seven per year. Raising up new pastors is key to its growth strategy. 

And the Bund Evangelisch-Freikirchlicher Gemeinden in Deutschland (Association of Free Evangelical Churches in Germany) has planted 200 churches in the past decade. It has grown to about 500 congregations with 42,000 members. The Free Evangelicals also have plans to launch 70 new churches by 2030, at a rate of 15 per year, and then start another 200 by 2040. 

“Goal setting is a bit of a thing in Europe,” said Stefan Paas, the J. H. Bavinck Chair for Missiology and Intercultural Theology at the Free University of Amsterdam and the author of Church Planting in the Secular West.

He’s not convinced it’s a good thing for Christian missions, though. In fact, he doesn’t think ambition, verve, and goal setting actually work.

Paas’s research shows that supply-side approaches—the idea that if you plant it, they will come—seem promising and often demonstrate early success, but the results mostly evaporate. While it is widely believed that planting new churches causes growth, he said, that’s not what the evidence shows.

“Yes, newer churches tend to draw in more people and more converts, but they also lose more,” Paas told CT. “There’s a backdoor dynamic where people come into newer churches but then leave.”

He examined the Free Evangelicals’ membership statistics from 2003 to 2017 and found that church plants often correlated with quick growth but then slow decline. 

“It’s one thing to draw people, and another thing to keep them,” he said. 

Religion, Immigration and the 2024 Elections

Over the last six months, I’ve been covering religion and immigration for Sojourners Magazine.

I traveled to Tijuana, Mexico, Lampedusa, Italy, southern Arizona and downtown Los Angeles to hear from migrants making their way. I heard from Muslim aid workers on the front lines providing sanctuary and nuns serving the vulnerable asylum seekers living on the streets of Skid Row. I sat with mothers weeping over their children and praying for safe passage at a cemetery just meters from the bollard-steel border wall that rips through the Sonoran wilderness like a rust-colored wound. 

In my latest for ReligionLink and as part of my “What You Missed Without Religion Class” series at Patheos, I reflect on what you need to know about faith and immigration ahead of the 2024 elections.

At the border, a shelter for -- and by -- women

Anyone crossing the U.S.-Mexico border faces a journey fraught with violence and danger.

But for women and children, that journey is even more treacherous. Not only are many fleeing violence at home — including gender-based violence — they also experience higher rates of violence en route. Torture, mutilation, sexual violence, femicide,disappearances, and additional health complications are common occurrences for female migrants making their way north.

That danger is amplified for the thousands of girls living in makeshift camps and tent cities along the U.S.-Mexico border without protection or accompanying support. According to the Washington, D.C.-based Kids In Need of Defense, “[u]naccompanied children are especially vulnerable to sexual violence, human trafficking, and exploitation by cartels and other criminal groups.”

Over the last few years, a group of Muslim women has stepped in to meet their needs in unique ways. Albergue Assabil (“the Shelter of the Path”), the first Muslim shelter along the U.S.-Mexico border, has been in operation since June 2022 under the leadership of Sonia Tinoco García, founder and president of the Latina Muslim Foundation. According to staff, the shelter served nearly 3,000 migrants in its first two years of operation. Many of those migrants have been women, attracted to the shelter because of its separate men’s and women’s facilities and the fact that Albergue Assabil is a female-led shelter.

And it’s not only Muslim women finding sanctuary under the shade of the shelter’s blue dome; there have also been other female immigrants looking to García and her team for assistance as they make the perilous journey north.

German Pastor to Pay for Anti-LGBTQ Statements

Nearly five years after a German pastor sparked controversy with comments about homosexuality, the legal dispute appears to be over with a settlement of 5,000 euros (about $5,550 USD).

Olaf Latzel, pastor of a conservative congregation in the state-privileged Protestant Church, called homosexuality “degenerative” and “demonic.” He condemned what he called the “homolobby” and slammed “these criminals” at a Berlin LGBTQ pride celebration, “running around everywhere.” Latzel made the comments during a 2019 marriage seminar. Only about 30 couples attended, but the seminar was later shared on YouTube.

He was charged with incitement of hate against a people group and found guilty in 2020 in the Bremen District Court. Latzel was ordered to pay a fine of 90 euros per day for 90 days—the equivalent of nearly $9,000 USD.

Latzel appealed and won in regional court. The judge ruled that while offensive, the pastor’s comments were nonetheless protected by constitutional protections of freedom of religion and freedom of expression.

Prosecutors appealed that decision and in February 2023 the Higher Regional Court deemed the case “incomplete” and sent it back to Bremen.

Now, the Bremen Regional Court has suspended the proceedings, with one condition: the pastor must give 5,000 Euros to the nonprofit Rat & Tat-Zentrum für Queeres Leben (Advice and Action Center for Queer Life) in Bremen.

Latzel has six months to transfer the funds. With that, the case against him will be dropped completely.

Crime and perception: Religion, public safety and the 2024 elections

On the second day of the recent Republican National Convention the theme was “Make America Safe Again.”

Addressing those gathered in Milwaukee, U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican and evangelical, warned against the threat the “radical left” posed to what he said were long-held American “principles of faith, family and freedom.”

Linking those principles to Americans’ safety, Johnson promised Republicans would remain “the law and order team.”

“We always have been — and we always will be — the advocates for the rule of law,” Johnson said.

But since the beginning of 2024, violent crime is down across the U.S. According to the FBI, there was a 15% overall decline in violent crime over the last several months and decreases in the rates of murder and rape (nearly 26%), robbery (18%), property crime (15%) and aggravated assault (12%).

Why then do more than half (54%) of U.S. voters — and nearly three-fourths (74%) of registered Republicans — consider crime a “major factor” in their considerations of who will be president?

Part of that, as CBS News’ Camilo Montoya-Galvez explains, is due to perceptions about the danger of incoming immigrants and increased numbers of encounters along the U.S.-Mexico border.

But as this edition of ReligionLink explores, religious adherence can also help explain the fear factor ahead of November’s elections and why Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump has much to gain from Americans’ anxiety around crime and public safety in 2024.

What faith and immigration leaders are saying about Kamala Harris' candidacy

The prospect of Kamala Harris becoming the Democratic nominee in August — and the possibility of a Harris presidency in 2025 — shook up the race for president last week.

And among faith leaders, it has reinvigorated hopes that her leadership could signal a commitment to both the rights and dignity of immigrants, as well as a secure, well-managed border.

Many fear a Donald Trump presidency and what it might mean for migrants already living in the U.S. or arriving at its borders. But President Joe Biden’s decidedly mixed record has also garnered condemnation from faith leaders who called his most recent executive orders — severely restricting most asylum claims at the border and expediting the removal of unauthorized migrants — as “cruel and racist.”

And though people of faith — and the wider U.S. population — want comprehensive immigration reform with increasing urgency, the practicalities of bipartisan legislation have remained elusive for multiple administrations, Republican and Democrat.

The end result is a status quo at the border that leaders like Dylan Corbett find unacceptable and hope Harris might be able to change.

“We need a new approach to managing migration at the border, one that works for our country, for border communities and the next generation of American immigrants looking to raise their families with dignity,” said the executive director of Hope Border Institute, an organization working to advance justice on the border in El Paso, Tx.

When asked what he expected from Harris on immigration in the months to come, Corbett emphasized that responsibility to reform the country’s immigration system lies with all sides. “Both parties need to undertake a serious examination of conscience on immigration policy, which has been needlessly politicized, to the detriment of all;” he said, “humane and safe immigration policies are possible and within reach.

“The only thing lacking is political leadership,” he said.