World Religions News

After their conversation with financial expert Bobbi Rebell, Tom and Amber return to a surprisingly thorny question: How much should we tell our kids about our money? From sharing your income to explaining a budget cut, they explore the delicate balance of authenticity, care and preparing kids for the real world of money.

Drawing on listener stories, family dynamics and wisdom from spiritual traditions, Tom and Amber unpack how age, maturity, personality and values shape these decisions. They wrestle with what transparency looks like in practice — and when discretion might be the more loving choice.

Along the way, they dive into real-life dilemmas: correcting a kid’s misconception about your wealth, responding to bragging, making generosity visible and deciding what your kids need to know about inheritances.

It’s a thoughtful, practical guide to the conversations that shape how kids understand money — and themselves.

For more episodes and info, visit Money, Meet Meaning.

Comics have swagger. When they use humor to speak the truth, it gets through for the simple reason that people love to laugh.

The post It’s Time to Add Humor to Our Fight appeared first on Jewish Journal.

(RNS) — I did not grow up with Ash Wednesday. My childhood was mostly spent in nondenominational churches that were liturgically spare and spiritually intense. Sundays promised altar calls and extended prayer, but no liturgical calendar to speak of — no seasons of penitence, no purple vestments and certainly no ritual smudging of foreheads. If someone had mentioned Ash Wednesday to me as a teenager, I would have had only the vaguest idea of what it meant.

It was only after a painful church split in my early adulthood that I began wandering into traditions unfamiliar to me. One February evening I found myself at a small Lutheran church and, for the first time, received the imposition of ashes.

It was an evening service, and the early darkness felt merciful as it meant I did not yet have to decide to carry the swipe of black ashes on my forehead into the daylight. But I could sense, if not find the words to explain, that something important was taking place.

A few years later, when I was a student at Fuller Seminary in Seattle, I was assigned to lead a pre-class devotion. It just happened to be early February, and I so decided — somewhat nervously, given Fuller’s evangelical low-church tradition — to attempt a version of an Ash Wednesday liturgy. Some classmates participated; others politely declined. I remember how awkward it felt to press ash onto the foreheads of fellow students. I remember, too, how foreign and slightly transgressive it felt to be handling something so tactile and liturgical. I felt myself caught between church traditions.

Yet that moment marked a turning point for me. For the first time, I experienced spirituality as something not confined to thought or emotion, but enacted in and through the body. The Ash Wednesday rite’s words, taken from Genesis, the first book of the Bible, “You are dust, and to dust you shall return,” were no longer simply a text used to formulate a doctrine about human mortality. Spoken while touching skin, they became something more immediate. Faith had become material.

That instinct, of spirituality tethered to materiality, led me further into liturgical worship and eventually to the Episcopal Church, and the priesthood.

Along the way I learned that Ash Wednesday has its own complicated history. In England, the imposition of ashes was explicitly abolished in 1548 under Edward VI, along with the blessing of candles and palms, which in my tradition and others we brandish on Palm Sunday to commemorate Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, then burn to make the ashes for Ash Wednesday. But the Tudor reformers were rejecting late medieval Christians’ propensity to regard such practices as the imposition of ashes as conveying grace in their own right. Thomas Cranmer and others feared that such rites, however venerable, risked obscuring the power of Christ as the sole source of salvation.

For centuries, then, Anglicans kept the somewhat anachronistic name “Ash Wednesday” while dispensing with the ashes. Only in the 20th century, amid broader liturgical renewal and cross-pollination with other Christian traditions, did the imposition of ashes become a mainstream feature of Anglican, and broader mainline Protestant, worship.

Even before the Reformation, however, the practice was not immune from satire. In his 1992 history of the late medieval British church, “The Stripping of the Altars,” Eamon Duffy recounts a story from the late medieval jest-book “A Hundred Merry Tales” in which a priest, hearing confessions on Ash Wednesday, is so hung over from the previous night’s revelry that he collapses in the confessional. The humor works because it exposes the gap between public penitence and private vice. Ritual, however solemn, has always lived under the shadow of hypocrisy.

These historical layers deepened my own understanding of the ritual, but they were not what keeps me returning to Ash Wednesday. What I have come to cherish as a priest is something simpler and, I think, more urgent: the ritual’s insistence on finitude.

Each year I stand before a congregation, often filled with young professionals, parents, students and retirees, and trace the sign of the cross in ash on their foreheads. I’m not attempting to dampen their spirits or add to the litany of modern anxieties. We have no shortage of those. Rather, I am inviting them to tell the truth about what it means to be human.

In an age when tech executives speak openly about uploading consciousness and companies promise to preserve our digital selves indefinitely, we are everywhere being encouraged to imagine that the self might outlast the body. Against that backdrop, the church dares to say something unfashionable: “You are dust.”

In a culture increasingly oriented toward the denial of limits, that truth is not self-evident. We track our health metrics, optimize our productivity and entertain serious conversations about radical life extension. Even our digital lives encourage a kind of curated permanence, an illusion that the self can be endlessly projected and refined. Mortality is treated either as a technical problem to be solved or as an inconvenience to be quietly ignored.

Ash Wednesday counters that denial, quietly and without spectacle. The mark of ash does not announce spiritual achievement or moral superiority; it simply names our condition: We are creatures, and we are finite.

Sometimes the young professionals and students I mark with ashes ask whether it’s OK to wipe them off before heading into work or going to school. I have no objection if they do. I do not regard the ash as an evangelistic badge. In fact, I am wary of treating it as such. In my view, the rite belongs most properly within the gathered community, embedded in confession, prayer and Eucharist. There is something profoundly ecclesial about kneeling alongside others and hearing the same words spoken over us all. In a time of increasing atomization, that shared reckoning with mortality binds us together in ways few other rituals can.

I understand the appeal of “Ashes to Go,” now common in many cities (and often a highlight of the liturgical year for my seminarians). Clergy and volunteers stand outside subway stations offering commuters a brief imposition on their way to work. I respect the pastoral impulse behind it. Yet the deeper power of Ash Wednesday, I’m convinced, lies less in public visibility than in the formation of a community. There is something uniquely human about facing mortality not alone, but together, kneeling shoulder to shoulder, hearing the same sentence spoken over every life.

In an atomized age, where so much of existence is individualized and curated, our acknowledgment of our shared finitude becomes a quiet form of social glue. It binds us not through ideology or preference, but through the simple truth that none of us escapes dust. The rite is not primarily about being seen; it is about being formed, together, by that truth.

As an amateur potter, when I leave the pottery studio after hours of working with clay, I am often covered in dust and mud. It is an outward sign of what I have been doing, but I don’t walk around the city in order to be seen. The point is the work itself: shaping, forming, learning the resistance and fragility of the material. Ash Wednesday feels similar. The mark may linger on the forehead for a few hours, or it may be washed away before the next meeting. What matters is the truth it signifies and the community in which it is received.

For those of us who stand each year to be marked with ash, the ritual is not about advertising piety. It is about remembering who we are and, just as importantly, who we are not. We are not infinite. We are not immune to decay. We are not self-sufficient. We are dust and, in the Christian story, dust beloved by God.

(The Rev. Michael W. DeLashmutt is dean of the Chapel of the Good Shepherd and senior vice president at the General Theological Seminary in New York City, where he also serves as associate professor of theology. His most recent book is “A Lived Theology of Everyday Life.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

(RNS) — Last week, California beauty queen Carrie Prejean Boller was booted off President Donald Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission after criticizing Israeli actions in Gaza. In a commission meeting, she claimed her Roman Catholic faith does not support Zionism, and she verbally attacked a witness for portraying popular conservative YouTubers Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson as antisemites.

That, according to the commission’s chair, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, amounted to hijacking the commission for her own “personal and political agenda.”

And yet, these days, the smart money on the right is on the antisemitic side. A sign of this is the current tempest over the Israeli American conservative political theorist Yoram Hazony.

Several years ago, Hazony captured the attention of the right with a book, “The Virtue of Nationalism,” which he’s parlayed into an annual gabfest called the National Conservatism Conference. In an interview with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat back in November, he called antisemitism on the right “pretty bad,” noting how it was particularly gaining ground among the younger generation.

“We’ll see whether five years, 10 years, 25 years from now, whether American nationalism is going to be fundamentally like the movement that Trump built, which is very welcoming to Jews, or whether it’s going to be something very different,” he said in the interview.

Then, at an antisemitism conference in Jerusalem at the end of January, he blamed Jews and Christian Zionists for failing to prove that Carlson is an antisemite. After ticking off seven of Carlson’s antisemitic positions, he asked:

[W]here is the 15-minute explainer video, that I can show my friends on the political right, which proves that this very serious accusation against Tucker is true? Where is the carefully assembled research, with links and dates and timestamps, that could convince an impartial public figure who is open to being convinced?

The answer is: There is no such 15-minute explainer video. There is no such serious research. They don’t exist because, for some reason, there are no Jews or Zionist Christians, who think it’s their job to produce such things. Or if there are people who think it’s their job, they haven’t circulated anything of the sort — to me or to anyone else in Washington who’s in a position to do anything with it.

This is an extremely high level of incompetence by the entire anti-Semitism-industrial complex, some of whose representatives are sitting right here in this room. Maybe some of you think you were persuasively “fighting anti-Semitism” over the last six months. But the unfortunate truth is that you weren’t.

It turns out, however, that a 15-minute explainer video does exist and it was produced by Hazony’s own Edmund Burke Foundation, according to that organization’s former communications director, who worked to produce it. Hazony refused to release it, she claimed in a Tablet Magazine article.

Gobsmacked understates the reaction of Jewish conservatives. “Yoram Hazony’s Fifteen Minutes of Infamy,” is the headline on Josh Blackman’s column in Reason. In Commentary, James Kirchick compares Hazony to the obsequious rabbi who, in Philip Roth’s counterfactual novel “The Plot Against America,” becomes Charles Lindbergh’s court Jew after Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt in 1940, and keeps the U.S. out of World War II.

Hazony’s real charge against the antisemitism industrial complex is not that it has failed to make the case (video or no video), but that it has leveled too much of its fire against what he calls the “nationalist wing” of the Republican Party — as distinct from the “alt-right” (antisemitic) and liberal (Zionist) wings. In the past, he has defended members of this nationalist wing when they refused to condemn the antisemites in their midst. For example, after Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts was pilloried for declaring the foundation’s undying support for Carlson, Hazony tweeted in response to critics of Roberts, “This story isn’t over yet. But whatever happens, I’ll never forget how these jackals circled, sniveling for blood.”

Hazony’s conservative critics seem to have a sense that he mainly wants to make sure the Trumpian tent is as big as possible. But the deeper problem is with his faith-based conception of nationalism.

“If America’s going to change, it’s going to change because you decide that Christianity is going to be restored as the public culture of the United States, or at least most parts of it where it’s possible,” he told attendees at the National Conservatism Conference in 2022. Don’t be afraid to say, he said, “This was a Christian nation, historically, and according to its laws, and it’s going to be a Christian nation again.”

An Orthodox Jew who makes his home in Israel, Hazony is hardly a proponent of worldwide Christendom. Rather — and unsurprisingly for a right-wing Israeli — his concept of nationalism requires a given nation to valorize its own religious tradition: Christianity in the United States, Judaism in Israel, Hinduism in India, maybe even Islam in Muslim countries.

But once you make a particular religion intrinsic to your nationalist ideology, you open the door to ancient religious hostilities. Is it any wonder the American right is experiencing a revival of the old-time antisemitism?

What religious silence reveals when power moves faster than conscience

(RNS) — Religious leaders stayed quiet after the United States seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and flew him to New York to face drug charges — a dramatic move that scrambled political instincts and left many faith leaders unsure how to respond.

As details emerged, the silence was striking. American evangelical leaders hesitated. Mainline churches paused. And then, from Rome, Pope Leo broke the quiet — calling for respect for Venezuela’s constitution, the rule of law and the dignity of its people. It was language that sounded less like pastoral concern and more like diplomacy.

In this episode of Complexified, Amanda Henderson talks with Religion News Service Editor-in-Chief Paul O’Donnell about how the story unfolded in real time, why so many religious leaders waited and what made the pope’s response feel different — not just morally, but legally and politically.

It’s a conversation about power exercised faster than moral consensus, about what silence signals when institutions don’t yet know the stakes and about how religion functions not just before decisions are made — but after the world has already changed.