World Religions News

(RNS) — If you were wondering what “globalize the intifada” means, it happened at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township, Michigan, on Thursday (March 12).

An armed man drove an explosives-laden truck into one of the largest Reform temples in the country, carrying weapons and prepared to create lethal mayhem. Security confronted him. Shots were fired. The attacker died at the scene. A security guard was injured, but miraculously, there were no casualties among congregants or children in the synagogue preschool.

The suspect, Ayman Ghazali, was a Lebanese immigrant. Though a motive has not been determined yet, officials said four of his family members were killed in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon in recent days, multiple news outlets reported. The Federal Bureau of Investigation described the synagogue attack as a targeted act of violence against the Jewish community.

The suspect could just as easily have been a right-wing antisemite — a devotee of Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes or Candace Owens. The hateful rhetoric and violence are interchangeable and indistinguishable. The irrational hatred makes Jews targets everywhere. Anti-Zionism — or what I sometimes prefer to call Israel-phobia — and antisemitism are one and the same, as anti-Zionism gives permission to antisemitic acts.

I refuse to understand why Israel’s military actions translate into terror attacks on Jews, just as I would refuse to understand how a Ukrainian-American might attack, say, a Russian nightclub in Brooklyn because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

The places where American Jewish vulnerability has been demonstrated are like pins in a map of the United States: Pittsburgh; Poway, California; Colleyville, Texas; Jackson, Mississippi. In the last few weeks, synagogues in Toronto have been attacked. Now, we add a Detroit suburb to the list.

Thousands of families pass through Temple Israel’s doors every year. Toddlers learn their first Hebrew songs there. Teenagers wrestle with Torah and identity. Adults gather to learn, worship, sing, celebrate, argue and mourn. I have friends and colleagues who serve as its clergy, and who grew up there. It is, in many ways, a model of what synagogue communities can be.

The attack was not just on a synagogue. It was not just an attack on Jews. It was an attack on the Jews.

This Shabbat, Jews will finish reading the Book of Exodus. In that portion, Moses gathers the Israelites together and begins the work of building the Mishkan — the portable sanctuary that would accompany the Israelites through the wilderness. They needed the Mishkan because chapters before, Israelites had made themselves another god, the infamous golden calf.

How does the Torah respond to the idolatry of the Calf? By telling the Israelites to build a Mishkan. It would bring the Divine Presence into the midst of the people and into the world. The Calf was to be a tangible god, but the Mishkan would make God tangible.

We don’t have the Mishkan anymore. Today, it is the synagogue that accomplishes that holy task. Our sacred places bring Jews together, and they bring God into our midst.

Our enemies know that. Jewish sacred places are not God, but they represent God. 

Go back to Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass in Germany and Austria, November 1938. On that night, Nazi thugs attacked and destroyed synagogues. They took special delight in desecrating those synagogues and their sacred objects, such as Torah scrolls.

When you visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., you will see a holy ark from the synagogue in Essen, Germany. It had been torn from the sanctuary wall and thrown into the street. The words “Know before Whom you stand” have been scratched out. In the midst of that melee, someone actually took the time to deliberately obliterate those words as if to say, there is no One Before Whom you stand.

When a synagogue is attacked, it is not just attacking a Jewish space but sneering at the holy. The perpetrators are laughing gleefully at our celebrations, our prayers, our texts — and mostly, our values. They are attacking God. 

What did Moses do when he saw the Israelites worshipping the golden calf? He shattered the tablets of the Law.

How do Jews respond to breaking? By building and affirming.

Jewish history is the story of that stubborn impulse. When the Romans destroyed the Temple, Jews reinvented Jewish life around prayer and study. When the Spanish crown expelled Jews from their land, those Jews built new communities across the Mediterranean and invented Jewish mysticism. When the Cossacks destroyed Jewish communities in Ukraine, the response was Chasidism — a recapturing of Jewish joy. Out of the ashes of the Holocaust, we built Israel and American Jewish life. 

When the tablets are shattered, we put them back together again. As Leonard Cohen sang, “There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.” Rebuilding is always how our light gets in.

This Shabbat and coming weekend, Temple Israel congregants, like Jews around the country, will worship. Rabbis will teach ancient and modern texts. Cantors will sing ancient and modern melodies. People will learn. Children will come to religious school. Next week’s bar or bat mitzvah kid will have their final rehearsal. 

That quiet courage rarely appears in headlines. It is the courage of ordinary Jewish life. It is how the light gets in.

People will laugh together, cry together and thank God for life itself, and pray for the healing of the security guard who was injured doing his job keeping that synagogue safe. 

(Which means, friends: If you attend synagogue, thank your security guards. They make communal Jewish life possible.)

The last words of the Book of Exodus describe the cloud that descended upon the ancient sanctuary. Often, a cloud symbolizes the premonition of sadness, or that ethereal place where we store all our cyber stuff. But the Torah understands this cloud as the wandering presence of God. 

God still wanders with this people. He still has a home in which to hang out with us, if just for a while.

This Shabbat, the haters lose. God wins. And so do we. 

BERLIN (AP) — Ali Darwich, a gay Muslim influencer in Berlin, picks up a date from his plate, takes a sip of water, and addresses the 15 friends sitting around the table and breaking the Ramadan fast with him.

The 33-year-old German with Palestinian and Lebanese roots — who goes by @alifragt or “Ali asks” on Instagram — has a quickly growing following on Instagram, where he draws attention to the difficulties of living as a young, queer Muslim and calls for more tolerance and inclusiveness.

“Tonight we want to send a message that no matter where a person comes from, no matter who that person loves, no matter how queer that person is, they cannot be too queer … because they are exactly as they should be,” Darwich says, smiling at the diverse group of Muslims and Christians, Germans and immigrants, gay and straight people sharing this meal with him as the sun sets over Berlin.

“I am a believer, I believe in God, and I find Islam beautiful, just like Christianity or Judaism and many other religions,” he says. But he adds that it’s not always easy for homosexuals to be accepted — not just for Muslims but also for queer Christians and believers of many other religions.

Indeed, attacks against LGBTQ+ people and gay-friendly establishments are rising across Germany, including in Berlin, a city that has historically embraced the community.

According to the latest figures from 2024, there was a 40% increase in violence targeting LGBTQ+ people in 12 of Germany’s 16 federal states as compared to 2023, according to the Association of Counseling Centers for Victims of Right-Wing, Racist and Antisemitic Violence.

Darwich calls for inclusion of homosexual Muslims

In one of his Instagram videos, Darwich sits by himself on a table during Ramadan and talks about the loneliness some Muslim homosexuals face when they are shunned by their families. It makes life hard, he says, especially during holidays that are usually a time of togetherness.

He calls on people to open their hearts and doors to queer Muslims so they don’t have to be alone for Iftar, the evening meal during Ramadan.

And for his gay followers he also has a message on Instagram: “You deserve to break your fast surrounded by people who accept you — fully and without conditions.”

Darwich’s coming out a few years ago wasn’t easy.

When he told his mother about it, she at first didn’t want to believe him, then she cried and they didn’t talk for half a year. Many other members of his extended family also were taken aback.

“From one day to the next, I was no longer invited. Not only to Ramadan, but also to family celebrations, and that was a very difficult time for me,” he told The Associated Press in an interview this week.

Friends stepping up when your family shuns you

While Darwich and his mom are getting along just fine now, he said it helped him tremendously at the time that his friends stepped up and became a kind of family for him, supporting and accepting him.

For this week’s “real life” Iftar in Berlin, his friend Randa Weiser, 40, a German-Palestinian influencer who shares her everyday life with three kids and husband on social media under the handle @randa_and_the_gang, has opened her home for Ali and his and her friends.

She cooked up a feast of freekeh soup, fragrant yellow rice with almonds, raisins and cardamon, grilled chicken drumsticks, and a variety of sweets for desserts.

“It’s an absolute colorful mix tonight,” she said referring to the crowd around the Iftar table. While most people are German, many of their families originally come from faraway places like Jordan, Lebanon and Morocco, Turkey, Chechnya and Syria, Iran and Peru.

Weiser said she got “some hate” on Instagram when she posted earlier in the day that she was about to host an inclusive Iftar, but mostly, she says her followers agree that “you can be Muslim and gay or lesbian.”

As the crowd — many of them influencers as well — dug into Weiser’s food, they didn’t miss an opportunity to shoot video of one another and post it quickly on their accounts.

One of them, Darwich’s good friend Haidar Darwish, a belly dancer and artist who came from Syria in 2016, had dressed up for the occasion with a red fez and a white, gold-embroidered gallabiyah.

“The hate and crimes against women, Muslim people, Jewish people also, and queers and trans siblings of mine have increased,” said Darwish, who goes by @thedarvishofficial on Instagram.

“But no matter how much the others will show us hate, we can show more love only if we are believing in ourselves,” he said, adding that they will be fine as long as they have “the help of our allies and friends and people that have our backs.”

Statistically, attending a weekly worship service is a remarkably safe thing to do. Global annual attendance totals many billions; the number of people killed in attacks on individual houses of worship in any given year is generally less than a few hundred.

But an ambush Thursday targeting one of the nation’s largest synagogues — the latest in a spate of recent attacks targeting religious buildings — has intensified fear among clergy and worshippers worldwide.

Here is a list of some of the notable attacks that have occurred on houses of worship in the past 15 years.

United States

March 12, 2026: A man armed with a rifle rammed his vehicle into a major reform synagogue in a Detroit suburb and was fatally shot by security. The attacker drove through a set of doors and into a hallway where something in the vehicle ignited, a sheriff said. In the minutes after the attack, smoke billowed from the synagogue, which also houses an early childhood center. No one was injured.

Sept. 29, 2025: An ex-Marine smashed a pickup truck into a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints church in Michigan, opened fire and set the building ablaze during a crowded Sunday service and then was fatally shot by police. Four people were killed and eight wounded.

Aug. 27, 2025: Two children were killed and several others were injured in a shooting during Mass at the Church of the Annunciation in Minneapolis. The shooter, who authorities say died of a self-inflicted gunshot, was a former student at the parish’s school.

Oct. 27, 2018: Eleven Jews attending services at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh were fatally shot by a white supremacist with a history of antisemitism. The gunman, Robert Bowers, faces execution after his conviction on multiple federal charges.

Nov. 5, 2017: A family feud is believed to have prompted the deadliest mass shooting in modern Texas history. Twenty-five people, including a pregnant woman, were killed at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs.

June 17, 2015: A young man walked into a Bible study session at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and killed nine people. The victims included the senior pastor, Clementa Pinckney. The shooter was an avowed white supremacist who is awaiting execution after his conviction on multiple federal charges.

Aug. 5, 2012: Six people at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in the town of Oak Creek were shot to death by a 41-year-old white supremacist who had discussed a racial holy war. One of the injured victims died in 2020 from his head wound, becoming the seventh fatality.

Australia

Dec. 14, 2025: A father and son fatally shot 15 people at a Hanukkah festival on the famous Bondi Beach. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called the massacre an act of antisemitic terrorism that struck at the heart of the nation.

Dec. 6, 2024: As part of a wave of antisemitic attacks, a synagogue in Melbourne was firebombed. The building was heavily damaged, and a congregation member was injured. Australian authorities have accused Iran of directing that attack.

Congo

July 27, 2025: Several dozen people were killed in Congo’s Ituri province when rebels stormed a Catholic church during a vigil and opened fire on worshippers.

Egypt

Egypt reeled in November 2017 from the killing of more than 300 people in a startlingly grisly militant attack on a mosque in northern Sinai frequented by Sufis, followers of a mystic movement within Islam. At that point, Egypt’s military and security forces had already been waging a campaign against militants in northern Sinai.

April 9, 2017: Suicide bombers struck hours apart at two Coptic churches in northern Egypt, killing more than 40 people and turning Palm Sunday services into scenes of horror and outrage. The Islamic State group claimed responsibility and vowed to continue attacks against Christians.

Britain

Oct. 2, 2025: An attack on a synagogue in Manchester, England, by a knife-wielding assailant left two congregation members dead. According to police, it was carried out by a man who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group.

June 19, 2017: A man drove a van at pedestrians near a mosque in London as worshippers were leaving after prayers. One man died; a dozen others were injured. The attacker was sentenced to at least 43 years in prison. A judge said he had been radicalized by far-right and Islamophobic propaganda online.

France

Oct, 29, 2020: Three people were killed in a stabbing attack at a Catholic basilica in the French Riviera city of Nice. A Tunisian man charged with the attack was later sentenced to life imprisonment without parole, France’s most severe sentence possible.

July 26, 2016: Two assailants slit the throat of an 85-year-old priest after staging an attack on a Mass at a Catholic church in Normandy. The attackers were killed by police as they left the church. The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack.

Germany

Oct. 9, 2019: A right-wing extremist tried to shoot his way into a synagogue in Halle on Yom Kippur while broadcasting the attack live on a popular gaming site. After failing to open the building’s heavy doors, he shot and killed a woman in the street and a man at a nearby kebab shop. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

March 9, 2023: A former member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses opened fire during a service at a Witnesses hall in Hamburg, killing six people and then himself. Nine other people were wounded.

Oct. 18, 2023: Assailants threw two Molotov cocktails at a synagogue in Berlin. The firebombs burst on the sidewalk next to the building, and two people who had approached the synagogue with them ran away with their faces covered. The attempted arson shortly after Hamas’ attack on Israel drew strong condemnation.

New Zealand

March 15, 2019: A white supremacist gunned down worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch during Friday prayers, killing 51. The attacks prompted new laws banning an array of semiautomatic weapons and high-capacity magazines. They also prompted global changes to social media protocols after the gunman livestreamed his attack on Facebook. The assailant was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, the first time the maximum available sentence had been imposed in New Zealand.

Norway

Aug. 10, 2019: A white nationalist Norwegian, Philip Manshaus, killed his Chinese-born stepsister and then drove to a mosque in an Oslo suburb where three men were preparing for Eid al-Adha celebrations. He fired rifle shots at the mosque’s glass door before being overpowered by one of the men.

Syria

June 22, 2025: A suicide bomber opened fire and then detonated an explosive vest inside a Greek Orthodox church near Damascus filled with people praying, killing more than 20 and wounding dozens, state media reported.

(RNS) — John M. Perkins, an influential Baptist author, Bible teacher and longtime racial reconciliation advocate, died Friday (March 13). He was 95. 

Perkins died surrounded by his wife and family, they announced on social media Friday. On March 4, his daughters, Priscilla and Elizabeth Perkins, co-presidents of the John and Vera Mae Perkins Foundation based in Jackson, said he was under hospice care.

A civil rights veteran and co-founder of the Christian Community Development Association, Perkins was dedicated to a collaborative approach to ministry, including through a weekly Zoom Bible study that carried his name but has featured more than 200 people, some of whom took turns leading it.

“I’m learning from them because they are doing really good research,” said Perkins, then 92, of his co-leaders, who have included Shane Claiborne, co-founder of Red Letter Christians, and megachurch co-founder Rick Warren, as well as civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson. “We want our Bible class to be a model of what the influential pastor or the influential leader can do back in their own hometown.”

His family had posted on social media accounts the summer of 2024 that Perkins had been hospitalized. The postings, including one on Facebook, also featured a message from Perkins: “Thank you for our life together, for being my friend, and for joining with me in this mutual ministry of discipleship.”

The Rev. Barbara Williams-Skinner, co-founder of the Skinner Leadership Institute who knew Perkins for decades, said he helped her learn develop multiracial networks after meeting him through her late husband, Tom Skinner, who Perkins befriended when Skinner developed a ministry in Harlem, New York. 

“John Perkins is probably one of the true unsung heroes in America — not in Black America, not in the church community, but in America,” she said in a 2023 interview. “He’s really done more to break down racial barriers and walls than almost any other person we know. We hear of Dr. King, we hear of others like John Lewis, but he lived the gospel of loving your neighbor as yourself. He lived the gospel of the Good Samaritan.”

RELATED: 8 over 80: At 92, John Perkins still mobilizes Christian communities

In recent years, Perkins had been on a bit of a farewell tour, realizing that in his 90s, he might have limited time to share his wisdom with younger generations who have embraced the 3 R’s — relocation, redistribution, reconciliation — through which he sought to address systemic racism with social action.

In 2021, shortly after surgery for colon cancer, Perkins traveled from Mississippi to Missouri to attend the meeting of the CCCA he had helped organized decades before. It was worth the journey from Mississippi to Missouri, he said, to see his friends and to continue to motivate them while he could.

“Really to pass on, in my own way, this mission that we have arrived at together,” he said in a phone interview. “I just came to encourage and to say goodbye.”

Perkins’ life was accentuated by loss and violence, as he overcome the deaths of loved ones and his own hatred of white people, specifically police who took his brother’s life and, years later, nearly took his. Once one of the few Black leaders in predominantly white evangelical circles, Perkins credits particular white people for introducing him to the Christian faith, caring for his wounds and comforting him when he was mourning.

His mother died of starvation in 1930, the same year he was born in Mississippi. While a teenager, his brother was killed by a police chief after the young man grabbed the blackjack the officer had used to strike him.

Fleeing to California in the 1940s after his brother’s death, Perkins started a union of foundry workers in that state a decade later. He later was drafted and served three years in Okinawa, Japan, after the start of the Korean War. Returning to the United States, he became a Christian and was ordained a Baptist minister.

In 1960, he returned to his native state and started a ministry in Mendenhall, providing youth programs, day care, cooperative farming and health care.

An activist who registered Black voters and boycotted white retailers, Perkins visited college students who had been arrested after a 1970 protest. He was tortured and “beaten almost to death,” he said in his book, “Count it All Joy: The Ridiculous Paradox of Suffering.”

“He was beaten for just attempting to be a human in Mississippi,” added Williams-Skinner. “But instead of being bitter, he became a better human and taught us to be better humans.”

After Perkins recovered, he continued to support college students, and, in 1976, published “Let Justice Roll Down,” which codified his “3 Rs.” It was placed, in 2006, at No. 14 on Christianity Today’s list of the top 50 books that had shaped evangelicals over the previous five decades.

Christianity Today Editor-in-Chief Marvin Olasky referenced the book in a tribute to Perkins published by the magazine March 4, the day Perkins’ daughters announced their father was under hospice care.

“His most-read book, ‘Let Justice Roll Down,’ came out 50 years ago, so now some have forgotten him — but this great leader deserves remembering both for his own achievements and the way his life demonstrates God’s mercy,” Olasky wrote.

“Justice is an economic issue,” Perkins told Religion News Service in 2021. “It’s the management and stewardship of God’s resources on the Earth.”

Ron Sider, former president of Evangelicals for Social Action (now Christians for Social Action) who died in 2022, told RNS that Perkins had “phenomenal” influence, cultivating — possibly more than “any single American” — holistic ministries meeting both physical and spiritual needs of people in rural and urban settings.

His efforts on racial reconciliation, Sider said, also contributed to a more diverse “evangelical center,” to the point that the National Association of Evangelicals — on whose board Perkins served in the 1980s — chose an African American board chair, an Asian American president and a woman vice chair in 2019.

Perkins encouraged “collective prosperity,” where wealth is distributed equitably, and living in neighborhoods close to the poor, something he had done in the West and in the South.

“I’d say a lot of white suburban folks like me were deeply challenged by his call to justice and to the three Rs of his ministry,” said Jo Kadlecek, who was inspired by “Let Justice Roll Down” and later co-authored a book with Perkins after he sought her out.

“‘You know, Jesus didn’t commute from heaven,’ he’d say frequently,” she said in 2021, referring to urban ministers’ belief that Christians who help poor and underserved communities should consider residing near them.

In the 1980s, Perkins returned to California and his family founded the Harambee Christian Family Center in a high-crime area of Pasadena, offering teen and after-school programs and providing urban missions training to visiting church work groups.

“You win the trust of parents, you win the trust of community leaders, because you’re proving, day by day, that you want to develop children and young people,” said Rudy Carrasco, who served as the center’s executive director, told RNS in 2021. “I learned that from John Perkins.”

In the 1990s, after returning to Jackson, Perkins founded the Spencer Perkins Center, named for his son who died in 1998, to continue his longtime focus on affordable housing, evangelism and helping poor children and families.

During the last two decades, Perkins has been honored by institutions of higher learning, including Calvin University, which hosts a fellows program named for him, and historically Black Jackson State University, which named a scholarship after Perkins and his wife of seven decades, Vera Mae.

In 2023, his family honored Perkins and his wife with a gala dinner for their 63 years dedicated to reconciliation, Christian development and justice.

“They say ‘a prophet is not recognized in his own home,’” Priscilla Perkins said in a report from Jackson Advocate News Service. “That can be said of my father, but we will fight on for justice for the voiceless and make our community a place where children can thrive.”

When he was feted in 2022 as a Black Christian “elder” at a Museum of the Bible gala, Perkins continued to preach about the need for love.

“The only way we can go forward now is with ‘love one another,’” he said at the Washington, D.C. ceremony, quoting the New Testament Book of 1 John, as he spoke about elevating the church as a whole over congregations attended by Black or white people. “‘He that loves knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God.’”

This is a developing story and will be updated.

RELATED: John Perkins: On race and the church, authentic friendship, considering heaven

(RNS) — At a recent check-in at our local U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office, a friend and fellow parishioner at our Catholic church came out wearing an ankle monitor.

Several months before, in a June 2025 memo, Dawnisha Helland, ICE’s acting assistant director for management of non-detained migrants, had ordered ICE staff to place ankle monitors “whenever possible” on the more than 180,000 migrants enrolled in the alternative detention program, which allows them to stay in their communities while being processed. According to The Washington Post, fewer than 25,000 migrants were wearing ankle monitors at the time of Helland’s order.

But neither my friend nor the few of us fellow parishioners who accompanied her to her ICE check-in had gotten the memo, so to speak. We were anxious about the possibility that she would be detained. She disappeared into the back office with an interviewer. A half-hour went by. As we counted the minutes, a woman entered the lobby with a perfect little baby in a car seat and sat down in front of us. As I cooed over her baby, her chubby cheeks and the large bow tied around her head,I noticed a large black box on her mother’s ankle.

Finally, our friend walked out into the waiting room. We were so relieved to see her that the black box on her ankle did not immediately sink in.

This ankle monitor — most weigh about a pound — now marked our friend as someone dangerous, someone the state had a right to invade the privacy of and track their movements. The ankle monitor declared that she was stripped of the freedoms most of us enjoy. She was not free to go anywhere she wanted, unwatched, unmonitored, in privacy, in liberty.

This is our friend who dedicates her time to feed the homeless each day. This is our friend who has followed every law, a model citizen-applicant. She is a mother, a wife, a vibrant member of our parish community. She crosses divides between people’s languages and cultures, throws herself into learning English, passionately shares her culture with high school students and retirees alike, shows her love by cooking for friends and strangers and makes each person she meets feel seen and loved.

“I struggle to call ankle monitors humane,” the Rev. Brian Strassburger, a Jesuit priest, said in response to a question at a Zoom panel at Holy Spirit Church in Palmyra, Pennsylvania, in January. Strassburger, the founder of Del Camino Border Ministries in Brownsville, Texas, spoke about the current administration’s philosophy of immigration. “It’s not looking for more humane treatment of migrants, unfortunately,” he said. “They’re trying to make it uncomfortable and get people to leave.”

Ankle monitors are indeed uncomfortable. Our friend, whose legs swell from working on her feet eight hours a day, said hers cut into her ankle. The first night she wore it, the monitor made it impossible for her to sleep. After a week, with the help of a doctor’s note, the ankle monitor was removed and replaced with a wrist monitor.

The wrist monitor looks like a smart watch, but cannot be adjusted — or removed. My friend said she was told that she would have to “check in” via an app on her watch once a week. When the watch beeps, my friend clicks a few prompts on its screen. Then, she takes a picture of herself. Although she was told this would happen once a week, she said this happens basically daily. “I am so beautiful, ICE wants to look at me every day,” she joked to me when the check in went off in the middle of our lunch.

My friend Martha Hennessy called ankle monitors “electronic stigmata.” Hennessy wore an ankle monitor between July 2019 and August 2021. Her first stint was while she was out on bail after she and six other peace activists walked onto the U.S. Navy submarine base in Kings Bay, Georgia, to protest nuclear weapons. She wore one again after spending six months at a federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut.

“It hurt constantly,” Hennessy told me by phone. The weight did not bother her so much as the blocky plastic box’s sharp edges. She wore a nylon stocking underneath to protect her skin. Hennessy, the granddaughter of American radical Dorothy Day, is an avid swimmer. She was disappointed when her parole officer initially told her she could not get the device wet except in the shower. She learned later that she could indeed swim with it. She felt that was another example of exerting control, the stealing of freedom. “It’s a torture device,” she said.

Hennessy suspects the devices are big moneymakers for their manufacturers. Most of the ankle monitors used by ICE are made by BI Incorporated, a subsidiarity of GEO Group, one of the two largest private prison corporations in the United States. BI Incorporated sells, according to its website, “innovative products and services that offer an alternative to incarceration for community corrections agencies supervising individuals on parole, probation, or pretrial release.”

BI Incorporated began manufacturing the ankle bracelets in the 1970s for livestock. Since 2008, the Department of Homeland Security has awarded $188 million in contracts to BI Incorporated. BI Incorporated’s most recent contract was extended last summer without a competitive bidding process, according to The Denver Post.

In her case, Hennessy and her husband had to buy a $30-a-month dedicated phone line for the device for their Vermont farm. They paid that expense themselves — the taxes asylum seekers in the U.S. pay can end up funding their own surveillance. Austin Kocher, professor at Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University, reported on his Substack that ICE’s ankle monitors currently cost taxpayers roughly $250,000 a day. That’s around $90 million in taxpayer money to surveil their fellow taxpayers for an entire year. Kocher estimates that increased remote monitoring could cost taxpayers up to half a million dollars a day.

After our friend came out of her ICE check-in with an ankle monitor, a neighbor suggested to our weekly prayer group at the Harrisburg Catholic Worker to join in wearing ankle monitors with our friend and others like her. These monitors, he said, were like the yellow Star of David of this current moment.

When I was crafting our “ankle monitors” out of black plastic boxes and Velcro ankle straps purchased online, I was babysitting our 8-year-old Haitian neighbor. “Those look like ankle monitors,” she said.

“How do you know about ankle monitors?” I asked her.

“My neighbor has one,” she responded. “They keep you trapped in the house.” They beep, she said, to tell you not to go outside. And, she told me, you couldn’t take them into water. She wondered how her neighbor could take a shower. Her 8-year-old mind imagined that if you went into the shower, the monitor would break and the police “would think you’re outside, even though you’re in the house.”

My friend originally had the same worry. The first time she took a shower while wearing her ankle monitor, she feared it would break, and the police would barge into her home to arrest her, thinking she had gone on the lam.

Our small, crafted ankle monitors do not beep. They do not send the Department of Homeland Security an electronic ledger of our whereabouts over the course of the day. They are a fraction of the weight of a real GPS tracker, and we can remove them. In this sense, they are nothing like the weight that tens of thousands of our fellow Americans are carrying on their ankles each day.

But when I step into the shower, black band on my ankle, I instantly recall my friend’s anxiety at stepping into the shower wearing hers. I sit for a moment with her pain and fear. When I adjust the strap to make it more comfortable, I think of my friend who cannot.

As I walk into a bank, an airport security line or an important appointment — I wore mine while wedding dress shopping — I fear, for a moment, what people will think of me when they see that small black box. Will they wonder what I have done to deserve it? Will they think less of me, view me with suspicion? By marking someone with a black box on their ankle, are we signaling that they are worthy of suspicion, no matter how innocent they truly are?

For centuries, Catholics have displayed crosses on their churches, in their homes, hung around their necks. We carry around with us an instrument of torture that the Roman Empire reserved as a punishment for non-citizens. We have long demonstrated our faith in solidarity with those who are pushed to the margins and those whom the state treats as disposable, manipulable or surveillable. Our faith proclaims that solidarity with the outcast and the suspect is the road to righteousness and justice.

If you’re so inclined, join us in wearing ankle monitors this Lent. Five dollars at a local craft store can buy you a Velcro strap and small plastic box to create the seeds you need for growing solidarity with your neighbor. This small black box on our ankles invites us to enter into solidarity with those who, like Jesus of Nazareth, have committed no crime, yet have been declared suspicious and dangerous, outcasts unworthy of our pity or respect.

A regime dedicated to its own power divides our neighbors into the worthy and unworthy rather than dedicating itself to freedom and justice for all. But we don’t have to submit to its categorizations. Mark yourself suspect.

(Renée Roden, a freelance journalist and fellow at the Jesuit Media Lab, is editor of Roundtable, a newsletter covering the Catholic Worker movement. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)