Thursday, October 22, 2026

SojoMail - A cannonball in the cesspool of lies

Tyler Huckabee

Managing Editor, Sojourners digital

You Can See Everything, the three-hour Elizabeth Holmes documentary that’s becoming a cinematic phenomenon, argues two truths that shouldn’t be radical, but are: First, there is such a thing as the truth. Second, it can be really, really hard to figure out what the truth actually is.

The movie does a cannonball into our current cesspool of lying politicians, fake news, and new technologies that make reality feel ever more unknowable. Our social media algorithms are tailored to deliver us a bespoke version of reality that fits all our preconceived biases, and artificial intelligence-generated content supercharges those biases. The result is to make reality feel unspeakably confusing and tangled. “The truth will set you free,” Jesus told the disciples in John 8, but that promise comes with a condition: “You will know the truth.” The harder the truth is to know, the harder it is to be set free.

But Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s documentary posits that the truth is real, it’s there, and the struggle to take hold of it is worth the fight. That’s the crux of Georgia Coley’s review of You Can See Everything, where she argues that “Some truths can still be seen, and some must be, even when they are hard to stomach.”

Elsewhere this week:

-Moody Vs. Marx: D.L. Moody and Karl Marx were two contemporaries with very different ideas about how to help the poor. Amar Peterman and Yanan Melo try to figure out who was right.

-ICE’s Shock Gloves: Immigration and Customes Enforcement agents have added electric shock gloves to their toolkits. This tells us something important about how they think about power, argues Colin Martinez Longmore.

-A Civil Rights Landmark: 16th Street Baptist Church became a beating heart of the Civil Rights Movement. Evana Upshaw takes us inside its new plan to educate the next generation.

-Voting With Your Faith: As midterms approach, Sojourners president Adam Russell Taylor argues for casting your ballot as an exercise of your spiritual convictions.

-The Valley of the Shadow of AI: Data centers have become a surprise political flashpoint. Holly Flynn told us about a big one—right in her backyard.

-The Rise of Black Church Bankruptcy: Predatory lending has been a scourge for many Black churches. Now, Pamela Foohey reports that some have found a surprise way to fight back: through Chapter 11.

‘You Can See Everything’ But Can You Know the Truth?

Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s new documentary about Elizabeth Holmes raises an urgent question about how we discern truth in a world of competing realities.

Read the full article

Community Notes

A couple of weeks ago, we asked you about the increasingly rare practice of putting coats over your Halloween costumes. We heard from several of you, including these two gems:

All of our costumes in kindergarten and first grade were hidden by coats, so when I wanted to go as a red crayola crayon, you could only see my cap and the round red cheeks with the blue coat and snow pants messing up the middle. It did not take long for my creative mom to come up with costumes that went over the coats and snow pants. —Rev. Steph McClellan

I do remember having to change [costumes] to a ghost in a sheet, so my woolen ski pants would fit under and be hidden, and then got sweaty. That was 87 years ago or so. Good grief! —Dolly J. Marshall

We hope that no matter what your plans are for the end of October, you’re staying as warm (or as cool) as you’d like to be and you’re enjoying the cozier aspects of the season in community with each other.