Dear Free Presser,

April was a month with a theme, even if we didn’t plan it that way: faith, identity, and what people believe in when they are forced to decide.

It started with Mattia Ferraresi’s inside account of the collapse of the relationship between the White House and Pope Leo XIV—the first American pontiff. Arthur Brooks followed with a quieter but no less urgent question: What is a good Catholic supposed to do when President Trump calls the pope “weak” and slashes aid to Catholic Charities? And Olivia Reingold opened the month with a personal essay about becoming an “October 8 Jew”—a reporter who grew up barely Jewish, watched her peers celebrate the October 7 massacre as a righteous victory, and found herself, in the wreckage of that moment, becoming an unlikely inheritor of a tradition she was on track to abandon entirely.

Then there was the Israel and Gaza coverage that you won’t find anywhere else. Matti Friedman dissected what he calls “Gazology”: a new literary genre that refashions the ruins of Gaza into a dark political parable with a familiar villain. Meanwhile, Haviv Rettig Gur took on, and quickly dismantled, Ezra Klein’s framework for understanding Israel.

And our regulars kept delivering. Coleman Hughes reviewed Ibram X. Kendi’s new book and found that America’s most famous “anti-racist” still lacks any real understanding of how people or politics work. And Abigail Shrier answered one of the hardest questions a reader has ever sent her: a 35-year-old woman’s husband has been accused of assault by another woman, and now she doesn’t know what to believe or what to do next. It’s the kind of question Abigail answers in a way no one else could.

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With gratitude,

The Free Press