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(RNS) — A combination of recent events has illuminated for me, once again, the power of sacred resistance in the face of cruelty and oppression. Sacred resistance is more than just protest, more than social media posting, more even than advocacy. Sacred resistance can include those things, but it is also embodied, it is done in community, it is aspirational in its call to joy, to the celebration of humanity, to justice. It embraces the prophetic power of art — in music, in poetry, in paintings, in film — alongside the strength of a crowd with a common purpose. Sacred resistance is subversive, but it is wholly human.

I have witnessed this sacred resistance in Bad Bunny’s defiantly joyful Super Bowl halftime show, in a group of monks walking hundreds of miles for peace, in protesters singing in the streets and in our very homes as we care for one another in a time of immense violence.

Each offers an example of how we can resist the status quo of hate, greed, colonialism, racism, xenophobia and sexism — by showing up with joy, movement, poetry, long walks, music, online and in-person presence and by holding space with one another to rest and to heal along the way. 

During Bad Bunny’s halftime show — itself a stunning tribute to Puerto Rico — Ricky Martin sang the lyrics to “Lo que le paso a Hawaii,” a story of survival, grief and dreams living on despite colonialism.

Hawa’ii and Boricua, what we call Puerto Rico today, share a history of brutal colonialism. Puerto Rico has lived under colonial rule since 1493, when Columbus arrive on Taíno land. Today, the island holds the status of “territory” in the United States, with little agency and no congressional representation. The United States overthrew the monarchy of Hawa’ii in 1893, devastating the Native Hawaiian population and culture, which continues today through an extravagant and extractive tourist industry.

A few of the lyrics in Ricky Martin’s song spoke to the struggles in both Puerto Rico and Hawa’ii:

Quieren quitarme el río y también la playa (They want to take away the river and also the beach)

Quieren al barrio mío y que abuelita se vaya (They want my neighborhood and they want grandma to leave)

Que no quiero que hagan contigo lo que le pasó a Hawái (I don’t want them to do to you what they did to Hawa’ii)

Benito Ocasio’s halftime show was about more than music; it was a celebration of Puerto Rican culture and community, a celebration of the whole of the American continents, looking to the future while also speaking the truth about the past and about the present that we find ourselves in.

And then there was a group of Vietnamese Buddhist monks, nuns and their dog, Aloka, who walked from Texas to Washington, D.C., for peace, marching on bruised feet because they believed the world needed to bear witness not just to violence but to the power of spiritually grounded practices. Every time I saw the monks in a reel on Instagram or in the news, I was reminded of the power we hold in our very bodies — that our spiritual life, our commitment to justice and care in the world, happens not just through prayer but through action rooted in kinship and belonging. When we begin to understand the threads of community that build webs of resistance in the world, we can prepare ourselves for whatever is next.

I was recently with an elder who is the tribal chairman of the Grand River Band of Ottawa Indians, and he talked to me about The Long Walk, a march organized by the American Indian Movement in the 1970s from Alcatraz to Washington, D.C., over five months. They gathered together with their allies who joined them along the way to protest the United States government’s broken treaty promises, especially around land sovereignty and water rights. What began with around 3,000 people ended in more than 30,000, speaking to the power of building community through movement. The march was a political statement, but, like the monks’ walk, it was also a spiritual one. Along the way they passed a peace pipe, they danced, sang and educated the masses on Indigenous rights and care for the earth.

And now, Indigenous peoples dance in the streets of Minneapolis, holding vigil, praying and caring for their community through sacred resistance. Earlier this month, a group of Indigenous peoples led by Migizi Spears of the Red Lake Nation set up a prayer camp in front of the Whipple building, a building tied to the oppression of the Dakota and Ho-Chunk people, to protest the violence and wrongful detention of people by ICE. They held vigil, prayed, sang and named the truth of history so that it won’t be repeated. It was a form of sacred protest and a vision for who we should be in this time.

In an era in which Donald Trump is president, the necessity of resistance is visceral and clear. But how do we show up to this moment in ways that will create change?

Maybe it begins with looking up the lyrics to a song in Spanish or learning about the history of places like Puerto Rico, Cuba or Hawa’ii, histories that will make clear how borders are a colonial construct. We learned this in Bad Bunny’s halftime show, and as a lesson that many Indigenous people have taught again and again. Constructed borders keep us from recognizing the humanity present in those beyond our colonial boundaries and markers.

Listen to the stories of the oppressed. Read books and celebrate art created by those on the margins, whose stories don’t often get told. When we diversify the stories we take in, especially during a time when those stories are being suppressed, we expand our perspective and grow our community.

Grieve what America isn’t — and never has been. Many people are afraid to grieve the loss of an image of America they deeply wanted to be true. We have to come to terms with the foundational violence of this country: the genocide of Indigenous peoples, the enslavement of Black people. Those violences did not simply end; they are perpetuated through racist policing strategies, discriminatory housing and lending practices, the extraction of natural resources from Indigenous lands. Grief is essential in resistance work.

But you don’t have to do it alone. Show up to a community meeting, to a vigil, to a march, get involved in resistance art (like this Philadelphia art community knitting anti-ice hats once a week). Our resistance movements fall apart if they aren’t sustained by communal care and joy.

One of my favorite elders, Choctaw teacher Steven Charleston, writes in his book “Ladder to the Light”:

“When we share our questions together, we become our own answer. We discover there is no one right way to do everything. We understand that no single plan will encompass the way forward. If we seek to bring light into darkness, then we must rely on the wisdom of us all.”

May we ask the questions we need to ask, and may we realize we are also capable of the answer.

(Kaitlin B. Curtice is an award-winning author and poet. She is the author of several books, including “Native: Identity, Belonging and Rediscovering God” and “Living Resistance: An Indigenous Vision for Seeking Wholeness Every Day.” She is also the director of the Aki Institute. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

(RNS) — When I was 19, I found myself abandoned at a Super 8 motel near the Portland, Oregon, airport, where I had been dropped by the youth pastor at the church where I had been working. Nine months into my internship at the church, the youth pastor had looked at my internet history and discovered that I had been spending time in gay online chatrooms.

There was “no place for people like me” in the church, he had said before depositing me at the motel. Five days later a family member came from Illinois to fetch me. 

Desperate, I spent the five days before a family member could come to bring me back to Illinois reading “Growth into Manhood,” a book that promised to “fix” my sexuality. It began my eight-year journey through the grueling world of conversion therapy — the roundly debunked practice of attempting to deter homosexuality by psychological means.

In January, I was back in Portland to speak at the Q Christian Conference, one of the largest gatherings of queer-identified people of faith. They had invited me to talk about the harms of the “pray the gay away” movement, the subject of my forthcoming memoir, “Conversion Therapy Dropout: A Queer Story of Faith and Belonging.”

Being in the city where I once bought the book that tried to erase me, only to return years later with a book of my own, felt like the ultimate reclamation. But the most significant moment of my trip occurred at a quiet breakfast spot as I sat across from the man who was once the face of the movement that nearly cost me my life: John Paulk.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Paulk was the “poster child” of the conversion therapy movement. An “ex-gay” man who married Anne, a former lesbian, he was held up by many in the conversion therapy world as living proof that homosexuality could be overcome through faith in God, adherence to its practices and heterosexual marriage. 

While working for Dr. James Dobson at Focus on the Family, Paulk founded the Love Won Out conferences, which were held across the United States and abroad, regularly drawing thousands to hear testimonies from people who claimed to have “left the gay lifestyle.” The events presented a pseudopsychology that framed same-sex attraction as a preventable, treatable and, most of all, spiritual condition. Pastors, Christian counselors, concerned parents, church leaders and LGBTQ+ people struggling with their sexuality all came — and I did too, having devoured Paulk’s books, desperate for answers.

Paulk later became chairman of the board of Exodus International, the umbrella organization for more than 400 conversion therapy ministries in 17 countries. He and Anne appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” “Jerry Springer” and “60 Minutes” and made the cover of Newsweek, presenting their marriage and three children as the ultimate proof that change was possible. 

After photos of Paulk leaving a gay bar in Washington, D.C., shattered his public image, the conversion movement simply reframed the story as a cautionary tale. It reminded all of us that even a “healed” man had to remain on guard against temptation.

But the public performance became unsustainable. Paulk left Focus on the Family in 2003 and moved to Portland with his family to make a fresh start.

In April 2013, Paulk issued a formal apology, dismantling the very foundation of the “ex-gay” testimony he once popularized. “I truly believed that it would happen,” he wrote of the promise of change. “And while many things in my life did change as a Christian, my sexual orientation did not… I do not believe that reparative therapy changes sexual orientation; in fact, it does great harm to many people.”

Following this bombshell, Paulk’s marriage dissolved, and he faded from the spotlight. He spent the next decade establishing himself in Portland’s culinary scene, mostly distant from his “ex-gay” past and far from the church pulpits and national talk shows he once frequented. 

But while Exodus International closed and Love Won Out has withered away, conversion therapy is not a thing of the past. In the last year alone, according to research by The Trevor Project, the number of LGBTQ+ youth threatened with or subjected to conversion therapy doubled in a short period, rising from 11% to 22% between September 2023 and March 2025.

And Paulk’s own movement continues under familiar leadership. Although Love Won Out is gone, Anne, his ex-wife, serves as the executive director of the Restored Hope Network, a group of more than 30 ministries that continue to promote conversion therapy across the country. While John has spent a decade in the slow, difficult work of rebuilding his life, the organization his ex-wife leads has simply rebranded the same ideologies he now seeks to dismantle.

So even as the public view of LGBTQ+ issues has shifted, Paulk seemed to realize his hard-won private peace couldn’t outweigh his public responsibility. His first public reappearance in nearly two decades came in the 2021 Netflix documentary “Pray Away,” where he admitted: “My role was to get the message out that homosexuality was changeable, but I ached to love and be loved by a man.”

Now, John is taking part in a new six-part narrative podcast series, “Atonement: The John Paulk Story.” “I agreed to do this because silence doesn’t undo harm,” Paulk told me. “I want to pull back the curtain and show how these ministries operate and their goals, their ambitions and how far they stretch. For many years, I perpetuated an idea that hurt people. This is my attempt to tell the truth plainly.”

Paulk isn’t the only voice on the podcast. He’s joined by conversion therapy survivors, therapists, one of Paulk’s sons and even gay activist Wayne Besen, who had released the photo that outed Paulk. They echo what the American Psychiatric Association and other mental health organizations have said for decades: that any effort to change one’s sexuality is harmful.

The stakes of this truth-telling are personal and painful.

For conversion therapy survivors, encountering a former leader like Paulk can be triggering. We’ve seen too many perpetrators publicize their “redemption arcs,” prioritizing their healing over justice for victims. Victims’ stories shine a light on the damage caused by conversion therapy; focusing on a former leader, even if he is repeating his admission of the lie, undermines the anti-conversion movement. It validates our truth from the inside out.

Paulk seems to understand that atonement isn’t a plea for absolution. “I’m not returning to public life to recast myself as a victim or a hero,” Paulk said to me. “I’m here to tell the truth, to call out tactics that still exist and to support the broader work of protecting LGBTQ+ people.”

Our conversation felt particularly urgent given the current legal climate. In October, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Chiles v. Salazar, a case in which a Colorado therapist argues that her state’s 2019 ban against practicing conversion therapy on minors violates her First Amendment rights. Paulk warns that if the court decides in the therapist’s favor, it will award conversion therapy a “veneer of legitimacy.”

“Once something is labeled ‘therapy,’ it sounds safe and credible—especially to fearful parents,” he said. “That legitimacy creates a pipeline into shame-based interventions that teach young people to distrust themselves. These practices rarely look overtly abusive. They are framed as love.”

Paulk had once used “theological hooks,” as he called them, to achieve the same erasure of the self. “The lie I most regret perpetuating,” he admitted, “is that abandoning your homosexuality was the only way to be acceptable to God.”

Paulk, who no longer attends church, didn’t mince words when I asked what message he would preach to churches today. “The church should judge its teaching by its fruit. If it produces despair, shame and harm, it is not the gospel,” he said.

Paulk and I are not the people we were two decades ago. I am no longer the scared kid in the Super 8 parking lot, and he is no longer the man on the cover of Newsweek. We are both survivors of a machinery that demanded we trade our truth for a highly conditional belonging.

“I live today with a deep respect for the people who were harmed, a clear-eyed understanding of my role in that harm and a quiet hope that honesty — however delayed — can still help prevent it from being repeated,” Paulk told me. “If there is any grace in telling this story now, it is found not in being seen, but in helping others live without shame, fear or conditions placed on who they are allowed to be.”

While we cannot erase the past, we can dismantle the systems that try to repeat it. If there is grace to be found in the ruins of the ex-gay movement, it is in the quiet, rigorous work of telling the truth, no matter how long it takes to surface.

Timothy Schraeder Rodriguez is a writer and LGBTQ+ advocate whose work explores the intersection of faith, sexuality and belonging. His forthcoming memoir, “Conversion Therapy Dropout: A Queer Story of Faith and Belonging,” tells the story of his eight years in conversion therapy and his journey to healing.

NAIROBI, Kenya (RNS) — A Lutheran pastor inspired in her youth by a Catholic priest and nuns is set to become the first female presiding bishop of the Kenya Evangelical Lutheran Church.

The Rev. Catherine Ngina Musau, a 55-year-old mother of two adult children, was elected on Nov. 28 at the church’s general assembly in Malindi and will be installed in June. “This was by the grace of God because it came at the time God needed me to serve his church in this capacity,” Musau told Religion News Service.

The bishop-elect will lead the 50,000-member Kenya Evangelical Lutheran Church, a Bible-based Protestant denomination with missions in eastern and southern Kenya, where it has a strong following among the Masai ethnic community, near the Tanzania border. It’s known for its relief work, especially flood, hunger and poverty response, care of orphans, HIV and AIDS interventions and the fight for gender justice.

The first female pastor in the Kenya Evangelical Lutheran Church when she was ordained in 2003, Masau become one of the few women bishops in the country, where deep patriarchal church structures and local culture pose a challenge to women who aim for senior positions.

“Women priests who ascend to be leaders in the church and to the office of the bishops face significant challenges, but their presence in these offices is a sign of progress,” she said. “The journey towards full equality remains ongoing.”

Musau, who holds a master’s degree in Christian-Muslim relations from St. Paul’s University in Limuru, has headed the Kilifi Deanery in Kenya for the past two years. 

Her journey to priesthood started in Machakos County, in eastern Kenya, where she was born in 1971, as the fourth child in a Christian family of 10. “Being raised in a very committed Christian family, I was privileged to start serving my Lord at an early age of my life. I served as Sunday school teacher in my parish by then after my confirmation class until I joined theological school,” she said.

At Mulala Mixed Secondary School, a Catholic mission school, she said she accepted Jesus as her savior in her second year. “My principal was the priest in charge of the mission and several teachers, being nuns, modeled and mentored me to join the ministry of serving God,” said Musau.

The Kenyan Lutheran Church owes its origin to the work of German and Swedish Lutheran missionaries who arrived in Africa before the First World War, initially arriving in Tanganyika, today part of Tanzania. Until its inauguration in 1992, it operated as a synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tanzania. In 1965, members of the denomination working in Kenya had requested the establishment of Lutheran services in Nairobi and Mombasa, and a synod was registered in 1968. It was permitted to register as an independent entity in 1989, paving the way for the inauguration of the church.

Divided into four districts, the church operates in 25 of the 47 Kenyan counties and has 50 parishes. It also has strong partnerships with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, as well as Lutheran churches in Germany.

“My areas of priority will be on mission, evangelism and discipleship, spiritual formation and leadership integrity for all leaders, ordained and lay and diakonia — compassion, holistic care and service — faith in action,” said Musau.

She also plans to focus on financial stewardship (transparency and accountability) to help the denomination achieve self-sustainability, among other areas. The church risks losing trust and confidence among people and lists the reasons, among others: power abuse, financial mismanagement, disunity among the congregants and politics.

As for expanding women’s leadership in the church, Musau said that Scripture is often interpreted selectively to justify subordination of women. “There is a need to reflect on the Biblical narratives, which highlight the role of women in leadership and spiritual calling, for example, Deacon Phoebe, Deborah, among (other women leaders named) in the Bible,” she said.

At the same time, younger women in the church need to be mentored in the complexities of leadership so they can gain the confidence to challenge cultural norms that block their rise in leadership. “Men leaders should be encouraged to use their public platforms to affirm the gifts of women leaders and share their experiences with women leadership,” she said.

History proves that organized Jewish action can reshape institutions and strengthen security. The question is whether we are willing to place our efforts in the right fight.

The post From Fighting Antisemitism to Rebuilding Jewish Strength appeared first on Jewish Journal.

The comparison between the Garden of Eden and the Mishkan offers a message about humanity’s ability to recover from sin and failure.

The post The Way Back to the Garden of Eden appeared first on Jewish Journal.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (RNS) — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth greeted the annual convention of the National Religious Broadcasters on Thursday (Feb. 19) by quoting from a famed Christian hymn, often sung on Palm Sunday: “All glory, laud and honor to you, Redeemer King. To whom the lips of children made sweet hosannas ring.”

“No matter what we have accomplished, what levels of success we may have reached, what joys or what trials are in our lives, it is to God alone that the glory belongs,” Hegseth told convention attendees, most of whom are evangelical Christians, in a ballroom at the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center in Nashville.

Hegseth, who was greeted with cheers and music from an Army band, was a headliner of a patriotic celebration at the Christian communications convention, anticipating the 250^th anniversary of America’s founding later this year. After an opening prayer from a pastor who thanked God for protecting the country from “pandemics and plan-demics” — a reference to conspiracy theories about COVID-19 — and asked God to protect the United States from communists and foreign invaders, Hegseth took to the stage.

“My fellow Americans, patriots, brothers and sisters in Christ, I bring greetings from a fighter for the people of faith, President Donald J. Trump,” Hegseth said.

The defense secretary then launched into listing Trump’s accomplishments in office and his dedication to conservative Christian causes, like providing funding for religious charter schools, restricting abortion and gender-affirming care, and fighting anti-Christian bias.

Trump addressed the NRB in 2024 while on the campaign trail, appealing to attendees to help him save America and promising to serve their interests. “If I get in, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used before,” he said in 2024. 

In an address that lasted just under a half hour, Hegseth repeatedly tied the founding of the U.S. to the Christian faith and the Christian Bible and attacked what he called “the Godless left.” He said that the country was based on a “sacred covenant” with God and pointed to references to God in the Declaration of Independence and from early American leaders.

“As you know, there’s a direct throughline from the Old and New Testament Christian gospels to the development of Western civilization and the United States of America,” he said.

Hegseth said he’d brought an emphasis on faith back to the Pentagon, including through a monthly prayer service. Among the speakers at those services has been Brooks Potteiger, who was the pastor at the church Hegseth attended in Tennessee, and Douglas Wilson, a pastor known for founding Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, and defending slavery, arguing that women should not be able to vote, and promoting Christian nationalism.

“We do it because I need it more than anybody else, a time where we pause during a very busy day to give thanks, praise and glory to God in the name of Jesus Christ,” Hegseth said.

Hegseth also said he had helped strengthen the military Chaplain Corps and had eliminated diversity, equity and inclusion and climate change programs. He also said the military is stronger spiritually since he took office.

The secretary urged the pastors and religious broadcasters in attendance to be bold and to speak about politics and social issues, knowing that God is on their side. He also promoted the Trump administration’s immigration policies. “Protecting our borders from criminals who steal from us, assault our loved ones and poison our citizens, is not political. It’s biblical,” he said. “Protecting our culture and our religion from godless ideologies and pagan religions, not political. It’s biblical.”

He ended by telling attendees that “Christ is king.”

Vince Haley, director of the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, who also spoke at the event, told attendees about plans for faith events celebrating the nation’s 250^th anniversary, including a prayer event on May 17, aimed at rededicating the U.S. to God.

Other speakers included David Barton, a popular Christian nationalist author whose book on Thomas Jefferson was retracted by its publisher after historians pointed out its factual errors, as well as Seth Dillon, CEO of the Babylon Bee, a Christian satire site.

Barton and his son, Tim, warned attendees that Americans were forgetting the role religion played in national history. They encouraged attendees to come to D.C. and other patriotic sites to recall that history — but told them to ignore tour guides because “they don’t know what they are talking about.” (The Bartons conduct patriotic tours of their own.)

“The reason we are on shaky ground right now is because we have secularized our nation more than at any point in our history,” Tim Barton said.

Dillon told the story of the Bee’s battle with Twitter — the website was suspended from the social media platform in 2022 after a joke about transgender Biden administration official Rachel Levine was deemed as hateful content. That led to an unexpected friendship with billionaire Elon Musk, who, after he bought Twitter, now known as X, the same year, let the Babylon Bee back on the platform.

“We have to stop caring what freedom might cost us,” Dillon said. “If you aren’t willing to pay a price for freedom, you don’t value it.”

TIVOLI, Italy (AP) — Long ago, when Romans wanted to build a new temple, they would head to the nearby quarries of Tivoli, chisel out blocks of porous rock called lapis tiburtinus — now known as travertine — and float the cargo downstream on rafts to craftsmen in town.

That’s how they made the Colosseum 2,000 years ago. That’s how they made St. Peter’s Basilica and Bernini’s great colonnade hundreds of years later.

Today, the same quarries that built Rome with their distinctive pock-marked travertine are still being dug out to build a new generation of churches, temples and mosques around the world — as well as banks, museums, government buildings and private homes.

While other countries have versions of the sedimentary limestone, Roman travertine is unique because it is quarried underground in the sulfuric springs and basins around Tivoli. Made up mostly of calcium carbonate minerals, Roman travertine was formed hundreds of thousands of years ago by deposits of calcium, sulfur and other minerals, and shows the region’s history of volcanic eruptions, forests and fossils in its striated layers.

It is prized by architects for a number of reasons: It’s strong, plentiful and can withstand any number of climactic and environmental assaults. Depending on how and where it’s cut, it has a variety of looks: rough or sleek, from a warm white with irregular black holes to sandy beige with gray, brown or even greenish veins.

A new Latter-day Saint temple in travertine

For four generations, the Mariotti Carlo SpA stonecutting firm has been carving travertine to order, fulfilling some of the world’s most distinctive architectural commissions: the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the Bank of China headquarters in Beijing, the Great Mosque in Algiers, Algeria, to name a few.

On a recent workday, pieces of a temple being rebuilt by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, widely known as the Mormon church, are lying neatly on the floor of Mariotti’s Tivoli warehouse — hunks of travertine carved from the nearby quarries and cut in made-to-measure puzzle pieces that will be assembled on-site in New York City.

After providing the travertine for the Latter-day Saint temple in Rome, Mariotti was chosen by the church’s architects to restore the temple on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The temple sits across Broadway from Lincoln Center and the Julliard School, both built with Mariotti-cut travertine decades ago when the rock first reached the U.S. market.

“Travertine is a classic stone known all over the world. It’s a bit like carrying the light of Rome everywhere, because the way travertine reflects light is very special,” said Fabrizio Mariotti, head of the family business.

A quarry that Bernini loved

All around the Tivoli quarries, the air is heavy with the stench of sulfur and the constant pounding, clinking and cracking of giant jackhammers blasting ancient rock into pieces.

At the Degemar quarries, drilled down to 30 meters (yards) under sea level, bright blue ponds of sulfur springs pool the travertine residue as flat-bed trucks haul stone slabs weighing 33 tons up to street level.

It was here that Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the great Baroque sculptor and architect, sourced the brilliant white travertine for the 284 columns and 88 pillars of the colonnade embracing St. Peter’s Square, as well as his other Catholic and Roman marvels.

Bernini spent so much time here selecting his rock that he had a home overlooking the quarry, which still stands today.

The quarry’s current head, Vincenzo De Gennaro, reminds visitors that Bernini’s tower still features the coop for the homing pigeons that would transport the orders to the quarry from Rome for the measurements of rocks that were needed.

Nowadays, the quarry is filling orders much farther afield: the new airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the new headquarters of China’s governing party in Shenzhen, among others.

“It is special, a special stone because it is a living stone, a stone that is born in a cocktail of mineral waters,” De Gennaro said as he dodged earth movers and walked among the sulfur pools.

A 2,000-year guarantee

Lest anyone question travertine’s durability, they need only look to Rome, he said.

“There is the concrete experience of a civilization dating back thousands of years that stands in the light of day and has been shining undisturbed for 2,000 years,” he said. “That is the guarantee.”

Marco Ferrero, professor of civil engineering at Rome’s La Sapienza University, said part of travertine’s appeal is that it harks back to ancient Rome “and therefore also to the magic of the classical world.”

He said it embodies Rome’s spirit in many ways: Travertine is solid, resistant and noble but not showy like its cousin, marble, which doesn’t fare as well over time when exposed to the elements.

“We can make this comparison: Marble speaks to us in beautiful Italian, in literary Italian, while travertine speaks to us in Roman dialect,” he said. “It is truly the stone of the Romans. And like Roman cuisine, which is made up of simple dishes, often using discarded ingredients, travertine is a genuine and traditional stone.”

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.