Human Trustees

In the first half of my review of Paul Rice’s book, I mentioned how the Fair Trade certifying nonprofit, Fair Trade USA (or Fair Trade Certified), he founded in 1998 was originally a branch of the global FT label, FLO (today called FairTrade International). But he gradually became dissatisfied with their unwillingness to certify anything but small farms organized as…

Can businesses do good in the world? Can multinational corporations with a public track record of chasing short-term profits while harming people, their communities and the natural environment change course over time and adopt new business models that lift poor farmers and factory workers from poverty and actually regenerate their environments? In his book out this year, Paul Rice tells…

This is my third attempt to examine the tenets and manifestations of Christian nationalism. I posted two blogs on this topic in 2020. The first was mostly a review of Messiah College’s history professor John Fea’s 2018 Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump, and the second mostly a review of journalist Katherine Stewart’s 2022 The Power Worshippers: Inside…

The Rev. Thomas J. Reese became a Jesuit priest in 1964 after earning a PhD political science at UC Berkeley, but he has mostly served as a journalist and academic. I find his pieces in Religious News Service consistently informing and thought provoking—including this one from a couple of months ago, “Amos, a prophet for social justice, is a prophet…

I end this series of eight posts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the prospects of ending it by framing the issue theologically. I am a Christian theologian, after all, and I spent my second career researching and writing about Muslim-Christian dialogue. And since the first and greater part of the Bible is the Old Testament, or the Hebrew Bible, and…

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), an international news agency going back to 1917 with stellar journalistic credentials, ran an article in mid-August 2025 with the title, “Jew vs Jew rhetoric breaks hearts in a bitter internal debate about the Gaza war.” In it, Andrew Silow-Carroll argues that almost two years into this Gaza war, “the Jewish conversation has shifted”: “Jews…