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Global Currents

Tracking flows of people, news and ideas as they interact with secular and religious dynamics.

Featured in Global Currents

  • Our Jerusalem of Unspoken Stories

    For Palestinians, the loss is real and sustained, mostly spoken of privately, like a wound you would not like to expose openly....


  • Freedom of Speech? Palestine as an Exception

    Can a Jew speak about Palestine not as a Jew, but in the name of solidarity? Can the question of Palestine ever become more than essentially a Jewish question?...


  • Producing Motherhood? Uterus Transplantation for Infertility

    Uterus transplant makes visible the ways in which social expectations and ideas about the normative body interact with the ethical ends of medicine....


  • Beyond Aztlán: Latina/o/x Students Let Go of Their Mythic Homeland

    Names are always ambivalent, contingent, and contested, and utopias are always unfinished works-in-progress....


  • From “Shooting and Crying” to “Shooting and Singing”: Notes on the 2019 Eurovision in Israel.

    The days of shooting and crying are over. Shooting continues, but crying has stopped. It has been replaced with laughter: hysterical, cynical, crude, perhaps ev...


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Global Currents Articles

Pope Francis, Liberalism, and a New Theology of Poverty

Series: The Legacy of Pope Francis
David Lantigua
September 3, 2025

The way of poverty, as lived by the earliest followers of Jesus, was the stubborn anchor and controversial standard of Francis’s reform papacy.

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Cracks in the Wall: Pope Francis and Palestine

Series: The Legacy of Pope Francis
John Munayer and Samuel Munayer
August 28, 2025August 28, 2025

Through both his public declarations and private acts, Pope Francis offered a holistic witness to Palestinian humanity.

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Papal Sins Part II: The Four Papal “Sins”

Series: The Legacy of Pope Francis
Scott Appleby
August 25, 2025August 25, 2025

According to his detractors, Francis, in addition to “downplaying” the Church’s condemnation of abortion, failed sufficiently to condemn so-called sexual sins.

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Zohran Mamdani and Strategic Islamophobia

Series: Zohran Mamdani and Islamophobia
Sarah Eltantawi
August 18, 2025November 11, 2025

Islamophobia is one of the ideological currents that significantly undergirds our current world order . . . and Zohran Mamdani’s election disrupts the flow of that ideological current.

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The Eyes of Silwan: The “Undefeated” Powers of Palestinian Struggle

Mark Lewis Taylor
August 15, 2025August 15, 2025

The eyes of Silwan represent the power of the dead for the living in Palestine.

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Papal Sins Part I: Opposition to Pope Francis in the American Catholic Church

Series: The Legacy of Pope Francis
Scott Appleby
August 12, 2025August 12, 2025

The U.S. Catholic community—numbering 53 million self-identified Catholic adults, or roughly one-fifth of the U.S. population—is complex and layered (as is the phrase “opposition to Pope Francis”).

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The Enigma of Pope Francis

Series: The Legacy of Pope Francis
Sarah Shortall
July 29, 2025July 29, 2025

That Pope Francis seemed to resist the logic of the progressive/conservative binary is an indication of how ill-equipped we are to make sense of religious actors using categories derived from a political framework.

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God is Getting Tired

Thandi Gamedze
June 30, 2025June 30, 2025

It’s clear that God is getting tired

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Making America White Again

Series: Afrikaner Refugees and the Geopolitics of White Supremacy
Shaun Casey
June 27, 2025June 30, 2025

To the extent that there is a comprehensible theology underlying the Trump Administration’s engagement with the world, it is not premised upon an understanding or tenet of Christianity.

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Trump’s Afrikaner Refugee Policy: Religious Resistance & the Palestine Factor

Series: Afrikaner Refugees and the Geopolitics of White Supremacy
Julie Schumacher Cohen
June 20, 2025June 26, 2025

The resettling of Afrikaners and the shunning of South Africa makes a mockery of refugee resettlement based on international norms and the claim of genocide.

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