Articles

“It is a moral failure for young people to become system-involved in the first place,” said Alice Wilkerson, executive director of Advance Maryland and the Advance Maryland Education Fund, reflecting a perspective shared by many youth justice advocates. Her organization is a member of the Maryland Youth Justice Coalition, which advocates for policies aimed at […]

A recent forum convened by the Brookings Institution and Wake Forest University School of Divinity brought together legal scholars and public leaders to examine how the Trump administration has approached religious freedom through executive action, administrative policy, and public rhetoric. Rather than focusing narrowly on individual conscience claims, the conversation also focused on institutional religious […]

In 2025, across the courts, Congress, and federal agencies, questions of institutional religious freedoms, about how faith-based organizations (FBOs) participate in public life, have surfaced repeatedly. For those of us committed to a vision of public justice grounded in principled pluralism, 2025 offered both encouraging developments and cautionary lessons for churches, schools, charities, and other […]

On November 1, outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility near Chicago, Catholic Auxiliary Bishop José María García-Maldonado and eight other faith leaders attempted to celebrate Mass and offer the Eucharist to immigrants being held inside. They were denied entry. According to the Catholic News Agency (CNA), “Mass organizers said they followed the […]

Throughout this past year, something far more consequential than a funding crisis has taken shape across faith-based civil society. Public partnerships that once allowed churches, synagogues, mosques, and faith-rooted nonprofits to accompany vulnerable neighbors have narrowed, stalled, or been recast under political conditions that many sacred institutions simply cannot accept without compromising who they are. […]