Editor’s Introduction

In the last several months, images of violent immigration raids across the US have shocked observers inside and outside the country. Armed ICE agents patrol the streets, stopping people without cause and demanding that they provide their documents and their cooperation. Undocumented people and their loved ones are afraid to leave the house lest they are kidnapped and disappeared by immigration authorities. Thousands of people, including children, have been separated from their families and held in detention centers. In the first two months of 2026 alone, at least six people have died in these centers.

Meanwhile, resistance to government control is increasingly criminalized. In January 2026, two white US citizens were shot and killed by ICE agents while supporting their vulnerable neighbors. The same month saw the high-profile arrests of several Black protestors at a predominantly white Southern Baptist church in St. Paul, Minnesota, where the pastor himself was an ICE agent. Those on the Christian right claimed that protest inside a church was a violation of the sanctity of religious freedom. Yet, because one of the first actions of the Trump administration in 2025 was to eliminate a long-standing policy preventing immigration raids at places of worship, many racialized congregations at churches, gurudwaras, mosques, and other places of worship are doing their best to protect their members, even when that means telling them to stay home.

And while raids, protests, and murders took place across the US in January 2026, the government kidnapped the president of Venezuela and his wife. In February the US, in alliance with Israel, launched a series of attacks on Iran and assassinated Ayatollah Khamenei in order to "liberate the people of Iran" from tyranny. On the same day, a bomb reportedly dropped by the US killed as many as 168 schoolgirls in Minab.1 While the true motives of these US actions are continually obfuscated, there is a stark clarity to the larger political project: a grand geopolitical shift toward right-wing populism and the violent enforcement of US imperialism.

It seems as though with each step deeper into this fascist abyss, as the news unfolds each day, we hear people say, "this is unprecedented," or "we thought this could never happen here." But it is only unprecedented for those who have forgotten what we have always known about violence and patriarchal power. In this issue of JFSR, Sally Mansfield Abbott's poem "What the Mother Says" offers a reflection from Eve, who, having plucked knowledge from the tree, sees this contradiction clearly (61):

Now I see them daily

Shrinking from the knowledge,

Blind and blinking

Their glassy eyes.

Pretending that was

All we ate.

Acting like

They don't know.

But we know. Feminist scholars know that violence against people on the margins has always been here. That means that we can also imagine what liberation might look like, and what it means to conceptualize solidarity across unfathomable differences.

The contributors to this issue of JFSR each probe epistemologies of marginalization and solidarity from different disciplinary and methodological perspectives. K. J. Wenell begins her essay by drawing our attention to murdered and displaced women and girls in Gaza and in South Sudan, observing that in these different places, gender-based violence is inadequately addressed as a humanitarian problem. Wenell draws on the work of Giorgio Agamben and Ronit Lentin to argue that the harmed woman in these scenes of violence is a kind of femina sacra, a sacred exception, rendered as bare life. Feminist solidarity, she writes, resists the "objectification of femina sacra, moving away from paternalism to a space where humanitarian action does not merely 'reproduce the isolation of sacred life'" (50). By offering a gendered reading of the story of the Good Samaritan, Wenell challenges us to see the woman on the side of the road not as a perpetual sacred victim, but as a fully fleshed subject.

Hannah Bowman's essay considers Paul Tillich's concept of the New Being through a decolonial feminist lens, arguing that rather than emphasizing a universal experience of being, Tillich's ontology must be interpreted through a feminist politics of difference. Calling upon Gloria Anzaldua's mestiza consciousness and Homi Bhabha's conceptualization of the split subject of colonialism, Bowman insists that marginalized subjectivities are essential to mobilize Tillich for resistance: "Tillich requires Anzaldúa; to reconstruct the New Being requires a turn to the particular, reconstituting New Beings from various forms of liberating self-relatedness that actually develop in the face of real and concrete oppressions" (32).

The essay by Joshua Turpin that opens this issue is the most personal of the three research articles. In "How Can I Do This Work Well? Toward a Womanist- Accomplice Hermeneutic," Turpin interrogates his own positionality as a white man growing up in the South and reflects on his interpellation by white supremacy. Turpin acknowledges that he was raised to assume his privilege, and that he must actively unlearn this ideological frame. His aim is to become what he calls a "womanist-accomplice," a white scholar learning from, and in dialogue with, Black womanist scholars, all the while becoming conscious of the ways that this very project might ultimately be extractive. Turpin writes that "as a white male writing primarily for other white people while drawing upon the words of Black women" (14), his work ultimately recenters white people, but does so in an effort to "call in" white allies and challenge them to think about accountability and solidarity.

This issue ends with a roundtable about purity culture. These eight short pieces were part of a larger panel at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting in 2025. In the introduction to this section, Lauren Sawyer writes that together, these short essays ask, "Where do purity culture logics show up in the policies and ideologies of the Trump administration 2.0 and broader US culture, and how can understanding them as such help us better challenge and dismantle them?" (67). At a time when reproductive rights are diminished through legislative action across the US and Christianity is weaponized by the conservative Right, these are crucial questions. Mihee Kim-Kort, Katie Heatherly, Victoria Houser, Flora x. Tang, Jennifer McGrath, and Indhira M. Udofia address the ways that purity culture relies on white-supremacist gender norms, and how promotion of this culture in churches and in social media might impact health policy and public attitudes.

This is the first issue of JFSR with Sailaja Krishnamurti in the role of coeditor alongside Michal Raucher. Michal, Sailaja, and the JFSR board of directors wish to extend our deepest gratitude to Kate M. Ott as she steps away from her role as coeditor, and we appreciate her many contributions and ongoing support.