Episodes

A mysterious mass- text invoked faith and economic justice to promote data centers. Aleja Hertzler-McCain followed the trail. A few weeks ago, residents of Prince George’s County, Maryland, received a text message telling them about the benefits of data centers: jobs, investment, economic opportunity. The message wasn’t signed. It didn’t say who had paid to send it. But it linked to a website belonging to something called the Interfaith Action Movement. Sounds like a coalition of religious lea...

RNS reporter Bob Smietana on Gloo, the faith-tech company chasing a one-stop IT/AI solution for churches. Nearly half a billion dollars, gone, over thirteen years. That's how much a company called Gloo has lost trying to build an all-in-one digital & administrative powerhouse for what it's calling the "Faith & Flourishing Ecosystem" of American churches. A tech company that can handle email & texting, data analytics, web hosting, podcast hosting, IT infrastructure, sermon-to-social video clips...

When Tradition Becomes Trouble On the side of a mountain in Switzerland, in the shadow of the Alps, a fanciful event attracting a small but ardent group of Catholic traditionalists gathered to celebrate the consecration of 4 new bishops… Who were then promptly excommunicated from the Catholic Church along with the bishop who appointed them. The group is called the Society of St. Pius the Tenth, or SSPX. It has spent decades claiming to defend the true Catholic tradition against a church it see...

Philip Reed-Butler, Black AI, and the future of healing For the last few weeks, we’ve been talking about artificial intelligence. We’ve talked Vatican positioning, Silicon Valley philosophers, Catholic ethics, corporate power, doomsday language, all circling the question of who gets to shape the future these machines are confining us in. But most of those conversations begin from the same assumption: AI is a tool built somewhere else, by someone else, to give us answers. Productivity. Efficien...

Anthropic, the Vatican, and the Moral Branding of AI Imagine you're an engineer at one of the most powerful AI companies in the world. You've built a system that can write poetry, pass the bar exam, and hold a conversation that feels startlingly human. And then someone asks you: but does it know how to say it's sorry? That question — about fault, correction, forgiveness — is not a technical question. It's a theological one. And the fact that engineers at Anthropic were asking it, and that they ...

A theology of sorts has been building in Silicon Valley, where questions about digital, biological and spiritual life are beginning to converge. For most of us, AI means chatbots, recipe tips, work tools and strange little images. But in other circles, the conversation is darker and far more existential. Some believe AI could give humanity powers that once belonged to science fiction: curing disease, extending life, even overcoming death. Others look at the same advances and see catastrophe — e...

In 1891, Pope Leo 13th looked at the Industrial Revolution — factories, machines, workers being displaced and exploited — and decided the Church had a role to play. The result was an encyclical: Rerum Novarum, translated as “On New Things,” it became one of the foundational documents of modern Catholic social teaching. 135 years later, another Pope Leo sees another technological revolution enveloping humanity: his first encyclical is about artificial intelligence. The Ethics of AI is not a qu...

Who gets to tell America's story? Hillsdale College is small by most reckoning, but punching above its weight in influence, with its ethos and teaching saturating all levels of education far beyond its campus in Michigan. It is showing up in charter schools. In civics curriculum. In state-level fights over history education. In Trump-aligned patriotic education projects. And recently, in Rededicate 250, a faith-filled gathering on the National Mall where conservative Christian leaders, politica...

The Baptist preacher (and Texas Lieutenant Governor) who stood before the White House Religious Liberty Commission had a message: there is no separation of church and state in the Constitution. That's a shift... For two centuries, Baptists didn't just support the wall of separation between church and state — they built it. They famously asked Thomas Jefferson for it. And then as recently as 1960, Southern Baptist leaders argued that a Catholic president would surely subordinate the Constitution ...

A year after his death, the Catholic Church is moving forward—and revealing what Francis actually changed. While he was alive, Francis' papacy was interpreted in real time: praised, criticized and debated. It was difficult to separate what was truly changing from what simply felt different because of him. Now, the Church moves forward, and this movement offers something new. A chance to see what was durable. What still feels like Francis? What has been absorbed into the Church’s way of operati...

The playbook for dismissing a pope just stopped working. Trump called Pope Leo weak. Catholics — including some of Trump's own — aren't buying it. Vatican reporter Claire Giangravé joins Amanda Henderson to explain why Leo, a Chicago-born American pope, can't be dismissed the way his predecessors were, what his quiet first year was actually building toward, and whether the unlikely Catholic coalition forming behind him can hold. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tim Schrader Rodriguez spent eight years trying to "pray out the gay". He modulated his voice. He stopped listening to music with female lead singers. He sat weekly with a therapist who watched him come apart — and said nothing. Last week, the Supreme Court ruled 8–1 that therapists have a First Amendment right to pursue conversion therapy with their patients, upending a Colorado ban on the practice. This isn't history, nor is it a Colorado-only case. Bans that advocates spent years winning in...

When Sarah Mullally was installed as Archbishop of Canterbury, it looked like a breakthrough. It was. But it didn't happen by accident. In this episode, Amanda Henderson talks with Catherine Pepinster, a journalist who reported on Mullally's rise and the network who helped make it possible. Before women could even become bishops in the Church of England, a small group of clergy saw a gap: being allowed to lead and actually getting there are two very different things. So they built Leading Women,...

Inside a growing spiritual movement built around awakening, ascension, and the search for something bigger At a packed conference in Los Angeles, thousands of people gathered to explore a different way of understanding reality—through crystals, energy healing, and the belief that some humans didn’t originate on Earth. They’re called starseeds: people who believe they were sent here from other planets to help humanity “ascend” to a higher dimension. According to our guest RNS reporter Kathryn P...

Muslim families in Texas are asking: does school choice include us? A Houston father went to enroll his kids in Texas's new school voucher program and discovered his school wasn't on the list — along with every other Islamic school in the state. Texas launched one of the country's largest school choice programs promising families public funds for religious private schools, but roughly a hundred Muslim schools were excluded without official explanation. State officials have posted publicly about ...

Troops are maybe being briefed for Armageddon. We saw this coming. Unit commanders are reportedly telling troops the Iran war is God's plan to trigger the rapture. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has received 200+ complaints. This is the episode that saw it coming. RNS reporter Jack Jenkins joins Amanda Henderson to unpack how Pete Hegseth's faith-driven military leadership — Pentagon worship services, Lord's Prayer over fighter jets, a Secretary of War calling the nation to "accept Ch...

When empathy became toxic and cruelty became strength for Christian women. Christian womanhood has changed—and not in the ways many expected. In this episode, Amanda Henderson talks with the co-hosts of the Saved By The City podcast Katelyn Beaty and Roxanne Stone about the shift from 1990s purity culture to today’s trad wives, MAGA moms, and warnings against “toxic empathy.” They unpack how pandemic burnout, influencer culture, and widening political gender gaps reshaped the ideal Christian wo...

Are six decades of solidarity giving way to generational strain? For much of the last half-century, support for Israel was a defining pillar of American Jewish life. It shaped institutions, philanthropy, politics, and identity. The consensus wasn’t always quiet — but it was broad. Today, that consensus is under strain. Younger American Jews — many raised in synagogues, camps, and on Birthright trips — are expressing a different relationship to Israel than their parents and grandparents. Some a...

"We're the people everyone hates." That's what Rabbi Steven Burg hears when he asks young Jews who they are. October 7 accelerated this. In the aftermath of the attacks, lines were drawn between support for an occupied Gaza and the security of the Jewish state and people. Progressive coalitions found themselves fracturing. Interfaith partnerships strained to stay together. Students found themselves abandoned by people they thought were allies. But Burg says the problem runs deeper than politics...

Complexified welcomes the Rev. William Barber II, architect of the Moral Monday movement in North Carolina, as he sets out to reclaim voters that ran to the right in the last presidential election. Who are these voters? Low-income voters earning less than $50,000 who favored Donald Trump by roughly 1% in 2024. That margin, according to Rev. Barber, is reversible, by campaigning being for something instead of against. Join host Amanda Henderson as she and Rev. Barber discuss the presumptions arou...

"This Is Our Selma"—and a debate challenge to Speaker Mike Johnson. Turn out 1,500 more voters per county in North Carolina. That's the threshold. The Reverend William Barber II has analyzed the numbers and believes that's where districts flip. Gerrymandering typically assumes 45% turnout. At 50%, the map changes. Barber's 's launching "This Is Our Selma" February 11-14 in Raleigh—a mobilization focused on organizing around voting rights, healthcare, and wage policy rather than resistance mess...

The applause was muted when Trump appeared on video. One year ago, the March for Life felt like a rock concert. This year, JD Vance had to contend with detractors from the stage. The pro-life movement got what it wanted—Dobbs overturned Roe. But abortions in America have actually risen since the decision. Nearly two-thirds now happen through medication abortion, mifepristone prescribed via telehealth, accessible even in states with bans. The Trump administration won't restrict it. Vance called...

Trying to put smoke in a box That's what it feels like to map why churches are dying. Most people who leave can't tell you why. They drifted. Three times a month became twice, then never. Ryan Burge, a sociologist and pastor, tracks the contradictions: the religiously unaffiliated climbed to 30% and stopped. Some churches that should close stay open. Others with resources fold anyway. Organizations scratch and claw past their expiration dates in ways no model captures. New Atheism ran out of ste...

Faith leaders thought their collars would protect them. They were wrong. The Presbyterian minister was wearing his collar. DHS shot him with pepper balls anyway. Across American cities—LA, DC, Chicago, Minneapolis—clergy are learning their moral authority no longer protects them as they resist Trump's mass deportation raids. Faith communities have built sophisticated networks: ICE observers, whistle brigades, cross-city organizing. In Minneapolis, where federal agents nearly double the police fo...