History
Sojourners magazine was originally published in 1971 [3] under the name The Post American, coming out of the Sojourners Community. [4] The name was changed to Sojourners in 1975, when the community moved from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, to Columbia Heights in Washington, D.C. The mission of Sojourners is "to articulate the biblical call to social justice, inspiring hope and building a movement to transform individuals, communities, the church, and the world." [5]
The magazine was originally published quarterly, then every other month, and since January 2004 has been published eleven times per year, with a single issue published for September and October.
The Sojourners Collection is maintained by Wheaton College in its archives and special collections. Collected materials include magazine issues, correspondence, original manuscripts and administrative papers, as well as information on the Sojourners Community, founder Wallis, and other communities and organizations affiliated with the publisher. [6] [7]
Recent work
Responding to the global economic crisis
Wallis's latest book, published in January 2010, is Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street and Your Street. [12] As part of his nationwide book tour, Wallis was interviewed on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Morning Joe on MSNBC, [13] and PBS's The Tavis Smiley Show . [14] The Jon Stewart interview and the first chapter of Wallis's book, "Sunday School with Jon Stewart", are on their sojo.net website. [15]
Sojourners is leading faith groups in support of comprehensive immigration work through its Christians for Comprehensive Immigration Reform campaign. As a June 2010 Brookings Institution panel on "Religious Activism and the Debate over Immigration Reform" affirmed, "largely because of the activism of these religious groups, immigration has remained on a legislative agenda crowded with other pressing domestic concerns." [16] A Sojourners letter to President Obama – calling for leadership on immigration reform that reflects the nation's best values – was signed by more than 40 prominent faith leaders and 28 national organizations. Sojourners was one of the primary faith organizers of the March 21, 2010, national immigration rally that brought 200,000 people to Washington, D.C. As part of a coalition of evangelical groups, Sojourners came out in full support for a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants as part of any immigration reform legislation in the United States on March 18, 2013. Wallis stated that it was part of a "sea change" in the evangelical community, driven in part by the increasing numbers of immigrants in congregations. He went on to state that evangelical leaders have concluded that "we don't believe there are second-class images of God, and therefore we don't believe in a second-class status for people who are willing to follow an earned path to citizenship." [17]
Climate change, green energy, and the Gulf oil spill
Sojourners urged constituents to reduce energy use and advocate for laws that hold polluters accountable, support green energy technology, and prioritize people and the planet above corporate interests. It mobilized its grassroots base and engaged in advocacy at the highest levels in support of action to stop climate change. Faith leaders called for increasing funding from Congress to help the most vulnerable communities worldwide who are affected by climate change. Wallis led a delegation of faith leaders who traveled to the Gulf of Mexico for a listening tour sponsored by the Sierra Club. A reporter from CNN participated in the delegation and covered the Gulf Coast tour. [18]
Rejecting LGBT advertising
In 2011, the Sojourners website, sojo.net, rejected a Mother's Day advertisement from Believe Out Loud that featured a same-sex couple. [19]
Author Becky Garrison wrote that she "lost [her] position on the Sojourners masthead for protesting their rejection of an LGBT welcome ad." [20]
Countering extremism
Wallis and other faith leaders played an important behind-the-scenes role in preventing the Quran burning by pastor Terry Jones on September 11, 2010. Wallis's opinion piece in The Washington Post's "Sunday Outlook" section describes the role he and other faith leaders played. [21] The article also highlights how the welcoming stance of a church in Tennessee had global implications in Pakistan and what that could teach us about interfaith understanding and fighting terrorism. The column was reprinted in newspapers globally, including in publications with predominantly Muslim audiences.
Michael Scott Horton is an American theologican who is the J. Gresham Machen Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary California. He is a scholar and theologian, having written and edited more than forty books and contributed to various encyclopedias, including the Oxford Handbook of Reformed Theology and Brill’s Encyclopedia of Christianity.
The emerging church, sometimes wrongly equated with the "emergent movement" or "emergent conversation", is a Christian movement of the late 20th and early 21st century. Emerging churches can be found around the globe, predominantly in North America, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Africa. Members come from a number of Christian traditions. Some attend local independent churches or house churches while others worship in traditional Christian denominations. The emerging church favors the use of simple story and narrative. Members of the movement often place a high value on good works or social activism, including missional living. Proponents of the movement believe it transcends labels such as "conservative" and "liberal"; it is sometimes called a "conversation" to emphasize its developing and decentralized nature, its range of standpoints, and commitment to dialogue. Participants seek to live their faith in what they believe to be a "postmodern" society. Disillusionment with the organized and institutional church has led participants to support the deconstruction of modern Christian worship and evangelism, and the nature of modern Christian community.
Progressive Christianity represents a postmodern theological approach, which developed out of the liberal Christianity of the modern era, itself rooted in the Enlightenment's thinking. Progressive Christianity is a postliberal theological movement within Christianity that, in the words of Reverend Roger Wolsey, "seeks to reform the faith via the insights of post-modernism and a reclaiming of the truth beyond the verifiable historicity and factuality of the passages in the Bible by affirming the truths within the stories that may not have actually happened."
James E. Wallis Jr. is an American theologian, writer, teacher and political activist. He is best known as the founder and editor of Sojourners magazine and as the founder of the Washington, D.C.–based Christian community of the same name. In 2021, Wallis joined Georgetown University as the inaugural Archbishop Desmond Tutu Chair in Faith and Justice. He also leads the Center on Faith and Justice at Georgetown. Wallis is known for his advocacy on issues of peace and social justice. Although Wallis actively eschews political labels, he describes himself as an evangelical and is often associated with the evangelical left and the wider Christian left. He worked as a spiritual advisor to President Barack Obama. He is also a leader in the Red-Letter Christian movement.
The Evangelical left is a Christian left movement in Evangelical Christianity that affirms conservative evangelical theology and are politically progressive. It is mainly based in the US, but is also found in Latin America.
Cathleen Falsani is an American journalist and author. She specializes in the intersection of religion/spirituality/faith and culture, and has been a staff writer for the Chicago Sun Times, the Chicago Tribune, Sojourners magazine, Religion News Service, and the Orange County Register in Southern California. Falsani is the author of several non-fiction books on religious, spiritual, and cultural issues.
Richard D. Land was the president of Southern Evangelical Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina, a post he held from July 2013 until his retirement in 2021.
Robert Holmes Bell Jr. is an American author, speaker, playwright, musician and former pastor. Bell founded Mars Hill Bible Church in Grandville, Michigan, and pastored it until 2012. Under his leadership, Mars Hill was one of the fastest-growing churches in America.
Christianity is the most prevalent religion in the United States. Estimates from 2021 suggest that of the entire U.S. population about 63% is Christian. The majority of Christian Americans are Protestant Christians, though there are also significant numbers of American Roman Catholics and other Christian denominations such as Latter Day Saints, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Oriental Orthodox Christians, and Jehovah's Witnesses. The United States has the largest Christian population in the world and, more specifically, the largest Protestant population in the world, with nearly 210 million Christians and, as of 2021, over 140 million people affiliated with Protestant churches, although other countries have higher percentages of Christians among their populations. The Public Religion Research Institute's "2020 Census of American Religion", carried out between 2014 and 2020, showed that 70% of Americans identified as Christian during this seven-year interval. In a 2020 survey by the Pew Research Center, 65% of adults in the United States identified themselves as Christians. They were 75% in 2015, 70.6% in 2014, 78% in 2012, 81.6% in 2001, and 85% in 1990. About 62% of those polled claim to be members of a church congregation.
Diana Butler Bass is an American historian of Christianity and an advocate for progressive Christianity. She is the author of eleven books.
The Sojourners Community is an intentional community that was started in the early 1970s by a group of students at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. The founders had the desire to further explore the relationship between their orthodox Protestant faith and the social crisis that surrounded them, particularly around the Vietnam War. In the fall of 1971, they began publishing the Post American, a newspaper that expressed the group's commitment to the faith and ideas about social change. The Sojourners Community is most widely known for Sojourners magazine and for the writing and speaking of its founding member Jim Wallis.
Faith in Action, formerly known as Pacific Institute for Community Organization, is a national network of faith-based community organizations in the United States. The organization is headquartered in Oakland, California, with additional offices in San Diego and Washington, D.C. The organization believes in a society free of economic oppression, racism and discrimination. Its stated mission is "to increase access to health care, improve public schools, make neighborhoods safer, build affordable housing, redevelop communities and revitalize democracy."
New Calvinism, also known as the Young, Restless, and Reformed Movement, is a movement within conservative Evangelicalism that reinterprets 16th century Calvinism under contemporary US values and ideologies.
The Two Futures Project (2FP) is a movement made up of American Christians who support and work towards the abolition of all nuclear weapons. This organization believes that human beings face two futures and one choice: a world without nuclear weapons or a world ruined by them. 2FP is supportive of concrete and practical steps to reduce nuclear dangers immediately, while pursuing the multilateral, global, irreversible, and verifiable elimination of nuclear weapons, as a biblically-grounded mandate and as a contemporary security imperative. In order to make these changes in the world they are using a strategy based around the creation of a non-partisan, conscience-driven, enduring majority of Americans who are committed to a nuclear weapons-free world. Two Futures Project seeks to join one voice of Christian conscience, to encourage and enable national leaders to make the complete elimination of nuclear weapons the organizing principle of American nuclear weapons policy. The founder and director of the Two Futures Project is Rev. Tyler Wigg-Stevenson.
Ruth Alex Mitchell was a British journalist who was the "editor and driving force behind the Christian current affairs magazine Third Way". She edited Third Way for five of its first six years and "established its reputation as making a significant contribution to Christian social thinking." Her hymn "Now We Sing a Harvest Song" is in the BBC's popular hymnal Come and Praise.
Samuel Rodriguez Jr. is an American Evangelical Christian leader born to Puerto Rican parents in the United States. He is a pastor, movie producer, author, civil rights activist and television personality. He is the president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference.
Johnnie Moore is an American evangelical leader and businessman who founded the Kairos Company, a public relations firm. Moore is a commissioner for the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom and president of Congress of Christian Leaders.
Traci D. Blackmon is an African American minister who was the Associate General Minister of Justice and Local Church Ministries for the United Church of Christ. She resigned her position on December 14, 2023. She resigned after a period of sabbatical citing that her vision and the vision of UCC Leadership no longer aligned. She is the former senior pastor of Christ the King United Church of Christ, Florissant, Missouri and was the, 2023 leading voice of frontline spiritual leaders influential in leading prayer vigils and engaging in peaceful protests during the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri after the murder of Michael Brown in 2014.
Adam Russell Taylor is president of Sojourners, a Christian nonprofit organization focused on the biblical call to social justice. He is also the author of A More Perfect Union: A New Vision for Building the Beloved Community and Mobilizing Hope: Faith-Inspired Activism for a Post Civil Rights Generation. Taylor is ordained in the American Baptist Church and Progressive National Baptist Convention.
The God Who Riots: Taking Back the Radical Jesus is the first book written by public theologian and YouTuber Damon Garcia, which was published by the 1517 Media imprint Broadleaf Books on August 23, 2022. In the book, Garcia argues in favor of church reforms, liberation theology, and greater support for the poor and oppressed.
