Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Sen. Rand Paul (R) of Kentucky (c.) speaks with reporters about health-care legislation outside the Senate floor at the US Capitol on July 18, 2017. Sen. Paul has criticized the GOP plan as not going far enough to fulfill the party's promise to voters to repeal Obamacare.

The failure of Senate Republicans to close ranks on health-care reform this week put on display an old challenge: How conservatives can reform social safety-net programs when there’s a growing acceptance of them – even among Republican voters.

Chastened, some GOP lawmakers are talking about trying to pivot toward other issues, notably tax reform, after failing to fulfill their pledge to “repeal and replace” Obamacare.

Yet the safety-net challenge won’t go away. If anything, the health-care debate is a reminder of its staying power, and of how the politics of social welfare have been shifting within the Republican Party.

The party of rugged individualism and free markets hasn’t traditionally seen government-led programs for the poor or middle class as its stock-in-trade. Yet as safety-net programs have expanded, there is more political pressure to keep those benefits – even as fiscal pressure is mounting to reduce the cost of entitlement programs. 

Politically, the party’s own base of voters increasingly includes people who have a personal stake not just in Social Security or Medicare but also in antipoverty programs like Medicaid and food stamps. Often GOP proposals involve reform ideas that critics and even fellow Republicans cast as callous or heartless.

“Facts on the ground have changed many Republicans’ views of what we do with safety-net programs,” says Steve Bell, a former senior Senate aide on Republican budget plans, now at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington. “I think you saw people on the health-care vote say, ‘Wait a minute, we cannot be the party that decides we're going to throw a lot of people off of Medicaid.’ ”

Pointing to House Republicans’ just-released budget plan for 2018 fiscal year, he says proposed steep cuts to social programs could again prove politically toxic.

“This current budget resolution in its present form I do not believe will be able to pass the House,” Mr. Bell says. “I certainly do not think it can pass the Senate.”

GOP's role in social-welfare programs

The moral of the story, though, isn’t that Democrats will forever have their way when it comes to health-care policy, welfare, Social Security, and the like. Far from it.

Both major political parties have historically played a role on social-welfare programs, and that appears certain to continue.

Social Security and Medicare, although not masterminded by Republicans, passed with bipartisan support. Enduring changes or reforms of those programs, moreover, have generally had bipartisan collaboration.

Those programs became broadly popular in part because they defy a “handout” label, says Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute.

“The genius of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was designing Social Security as a social insurance that requires payroll taxes to be paid in,” says Mr. Riedl, also a former Senate aide on economic issues. “That creates the view of earned benefits that are not welfare.... A voter gets angry when Social Security and Medicare are even referred to as ‘entitlements.’ ”

Some more narrowly targeted programs, aimed at reducing poverty, have been created under the watch of Republican presidents. The Earned Income Tax Credit, created under Gerald Ford and expanded under Ronald Reagan, is a prominent case in point. The refundable tax credit puts cash in the pockets of low-income households without discouraging work.

2018 budget cuts

But the GOP has long been torn between trying to shape safety-net programs with conservative ideas and paring them back in the name of small government, fiscal responsibility, or tax cuts.

That dynamic took center stage in the Republican debate on health care – which may not be over.

“It’s pretty obvious we’ve had difficulty in getting 50 votes to proceed,” Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R) of Kentucky said on Wednesday. “But what I want to disabuse any of you of is the notion that we will not have that vote next week. We’re going to vote on the motion to proceed to the bill next week.”

And that dynamic could resurface in considering a House Budget Committee proposal for 2018 that includes at least $203 billion in cuts to entitlement spending over 10 years.

Traditionally, cuts to anti-poverty programs have been less politically sensitive than those to Social Security or Medicare. That’s still true, but to some extent it’s changing – partly because of Republicans’ own success as engineers of reform.

In the 1996 bipartisan reform of welfare, time limits and work mandates resulted in a program (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) that fewer Americans stigmatize as “the dole.” So it’s harder to make the case today that such a program needs to be pared back.

Meanwhile, the voter base of America’s conservative party has been evolving.

For all the party’s avowed dislike of Obamacare, 41 percent of Republicans say their party should work with Democrats to improve the Affordable Care Act, versus 54 percent who favor “repeal and replace” – according to an early July poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Lower-income Republicans are especially supportive of the federal government playing a role in helping people get out of poverty. A 2015 Pew Research Center survey found that fully 53 percent of “red” voters in the under-$30,000 income group were in favor of such government support, more than twice the level of upper-income Republicans.

“To a certain degree the welfare state is here to stay,” Riedl says. “It’s more effective for Republicans to promote work and family formation than to try to tear down the welfare state.”

Some leading voices in the conservative movement have been sounding that note for some years.

“We have to declare peace on the safety net,” Arthur Brooks, president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington, said at a 2013 event.

Impetus for bipartisan action is growing

On the left as well as the right, many policy experts say that, although the climate for bipartisan action is harsh at present, it’s only a matter of time before the two sides must work together.

“Any major change in the architecture of [safety-net] policy is only durable if you do it on a bipartisan basis,” says Will Marshall, president of the center-left Progressive Policy Institute in Washington.

The impetus for bipartisan action is growing as baby boomers retire. “The closer we get to the crunch points in Medicare and Social Security, the more urgent the case for action is,” Mr. Marshall says.

Elise Amendola/AP

Danielle Ramos poses at MassBay Community College in Wellesley, Mass., where she pursued her education after being defrauded by a for-profit college. Former students are waiting to hear what Education Secretary Betsy DeVos will decide about rules of conduct for for-profit colleges, now that she has put regulations set up by the previous administration on hold.

On Sept. 6, 2016, Kevin Thompson switched on his car radio to the news that ITT Technical Institute was permanently closing its campuses nationwide. The Navy veteran was then 10 months into an 18-month bachelor’s program at the for-profit school’s campus in west Phoenix. The announcement came as a shock.

“I had a class that following Tuesday,” recalls Mr. Thompson, who had been using his benefits under the Post-9/11 GI Bill to cover the institute’s tuition fee of about $17,000 a year. He had hoped that higher education would help him in the transition from military service to civilian life.

He never got his degree. Worse, he found that no other schools recognized the credits he had earned at ITT Tech.

“They promised a job while I was going to school and a job after I completed the degree. They didn’t follow through with any of them,” says Thompson, a father of four. “And then they took all of my money.”

On July 10, Thompson testified at a public comment hearing in Washington – the first of two held last week as the Department of Education restarted negotiations over two Obama-era rules aimed at protecting student borrowers.

Thompson added his voice to a growing chorus of consumer rights advocates, educators, and former students urging Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to reconsider her June decision to suspend and rewrite the rules. A group of 18 Democratic state attorneys general and the District of Columbia also joined the fray when they filed a lawsuit on July 6^, accusing the Education Department and Secretary DeVos of violating federal law.

At issue is how best to protect students from fraud while not unduly restricting for-profit schools from running their businesses. When announcing her decision, DeVos criticized the previous administration’s efforts, calling the result “a muddled process that’s unfair to students and schools, and puts taxpayers on the hook for significant costs.” For their part, the attorneys general say that she exceeded her authority by unilaterally delaying one of the rules – set to take effect July 1 – without a period of public comment.

Now, students, like Thompson, who had hoped to be closer to resolving their tuition woes are again on hold, wondering what will happen next.

“I’m now in this limbo, quite literally stuck,” says Ryan Clark, a former online student at DeVry University.

Mr. Clark had been deployed to Iraq as a translator with the United States Army, and chose DeVry in 2010 because of the school’s flexible hours. DeVry ended up delaying processing of the military tuition assistance he qualified for until he could no longer claim it. He had to quit the school – and his transcripts were withheld when he couldn’t pay the $9,000 he owed. “I got caught in a very horrific catch-22,” he explains.

Hard hit: Vulnerable populations

As of 2015, about 1.1 million students attended for-profit colleges, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That's down from a peak of 1.7 million in 2010, or a drop of 38 percent.

Veterans are one target of the for-profit schools, observers say, because of a loophole in the 1998 Higher Education Act. The law limits to 90 percent the amount of federal aid that proprietary schools can receive from the Education Department. But other forms of federal student funding – such as military benefits – can count toward the remaining 10 percent. In the 2012-13 academic year alone, for-profit colleges received $1.7 billion through GI Bill benefits, according to the report of a two-year Senate investigation released in 2014.

Critics of the for-profit institutions charge them with exploiting vulnerable populations desperate for training in a stable career.

“They don’t explain the ins and outs of the process,” says Ashley Harrington, an attorney with the nonprofit Center for Responsible Lending (CLR) in Washington. “They’re banking on the fact that these are people who are looking for a better life.”

Erika Arellano was waiting for the revised borrower defense rule to take effect on July 1 because it would have spelled out the steps she would need to take to secure loan forgiveness. (Student loans, unlike credit card and other debt, typically cannot be discharged through bankruptcy.)

“That process to discharge [the loan] would be basically heaven,” she explains.

Ms. Arellano was aiming to become the first person to graduate from college in her family when she was wooed by the promise of an easy payment plan and post-graduation job placement offered her by the Ontario, Calif., campus of Everest College. That went away when the school’s parent company, Corinthian Colleges Inc., closed in 2015 in the face of a $30 million government fine for misrepresenting job placement data and altering student records. Today, still without a degree, Arellano is struggling to raise three children and pay off her own and her father’s loans to the school.

“It’s really just easy money [for them],” adds CLR’s Ms. Harrington. “They’re running businesses.” 

For some, a good path to a degree

Industry representatives say their schools offer low-income and nontraditional students a fast, flexible, and hands-on path toward earning a degree in a marketable trade. The regulations, as they currently are, represent an overreach that choke even the best of these institutions, says Steve Gunderson, president and CEO of Career Education Colleges and Universities, an industry association that has applauded the delay.

“It’s as though the proprietary sector is inherently bad and anything they can do to stop us is good,” he says.

Christine Armario/AP

Students wait outside Everest College in Industry, Calif., in April 2015, hoping to get their transcripts and information on loan forgiveness and transferring credits to other schools. Parent company Corinthian Colleges, Inc., shut down all of its remaining campuses on Monday, April 27, displacing thousands of students.

In 2011 the Obama administration released “gainful employment” regulations that required career college programs to ensure their students were employed in a recognized occupation that could help them repay their student loans. Institutions that failed to meet the Education Department standards risked losing access to federal financial aid. The final version of the rule took effect in 2015, after a wave of for-profit colleges abruptly closed, leaving students saddled with debt.

A year later, the department announced a second set of regulations, designed to protect students from predatory practices and clarify a process for loan discharges in cases where institutions defrauded their students. Enforcement of the revised “borrower defense to repayment” rule would have started July 1.

To Mr. Gunderson and industry advocates, the decision to rethink the rules is a much-needed reprieve from what they see as a smear campaign against their sector. As currently written, they would strip schools of the power to push back against frivolous claims while giving legal firms an easy avenue for class action suits that they can file – for a fee.

“These requirements could lead to irreparable financial and reputational harm to some [institutions] that are, in fact, providing quality educational opportunities to students,” said Cheryl Smith, senior vice president of public policy for the United Negro College Fund, a nonprofit that provides scholarships to private historic black colleges and universities, in a statement shared with the Monitor.

“I think that we all completely agree that if a student has gone to a school that has frauded them in any way there needs to be a process for them to obtain a refund,” adds Lynelle Lynch, president of Bellus Academy, a cosmetology school that operates three campuses in and around San Diego.

She says that the rules as they stand fail to account for real-life conditions. For instance, gainful employment requires a program’s graduates to meet a specific debt-to-income standard. In the beauty industry, she says, the ebb and flow of tips can have a big impact on income. Some graduates also opt for part-time work even if they received full licensing and accreditation, she adds.

 “We’re still looked at as the gum on the bottom of everyone’s shoe,” says Shea Green, a Bellus graduate who now works in admissions at the school’s campus in Poway, Calif. “It’s so sad to see, because there are so many people [who come from these schools] that make a killing with their career.”

Meanwhile former students are forced to wait as policymakers and advocates battle it out.

“I could’ve had my degree by now. I would’ve been graduated. I would’ve found an actual job that has a bachelor’s degree,” says Thompson, who works as a cable technician in Arizona. “But now I’m stuck.”

Ann Hermes/Staff

Bruce Reilly, deputy director of Voices of the Experienced (VOTE) on May 22, 2017, in New Orleans, La. VOTE is a nonprofit that works on behalf of ex-offenders to help them reintegrate after incarceration.

Six months after Ronald Doyle’s wife died, he got a call from a public housing officer. Her turn had come up, and a family unit was available. For Mr. Doyle, who had three young children at home, it sounded like a lifeline. 

But when Doyle tried to transfer the unit into his name and move his family in, he was denied. No reason was given, but as a former felon he knew the drill. “It’s all about my record,” he says.

That record includes a 10-year sentence for armed robbery in Providence. When Doyle got out of jail in 1991 after serving eight years, he had nowhere to go. “I never knew my father. My mother died at 44. My grandma died while I was in jail,” he says.

Public housing wasn’t an option for a felon like Doyle, so he drifted between addresses. Eventually he found steady work in construction, enough to pay the rent and later start a family with his wife. In 2006, he trained to handle contaminated materials and was sent to New Orleans to help clean up in the wake of hurricane Katrina. It was good money, and Doyle felt a sense of purpose.

Then he got the news that his wife had been diagnosed with a terminal illness. He flew back to Providence and stayed with her until her death, while taking care of their three young children. “I was their father and their mother,” he says.

When the housing officer called him after his wife’s death, he says he was informed that it wouldn’t be a problem to change the lease, provided he had legal custody of the children.

What happened next isn’t clear; Doyle says he got into a heated row when he visited the housing project after an official told him that he wasn’t entitled take over the lease. He believes that he was barred because of his criminal record. Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE), an advocacy organization in Providence, has highlighted Doyle’s case in its campaign and invited him to speak at public hearings.

“All I want is to live affordably,” says Doyle, an African-American who gets by on disability checks for a heart condition. He lives with his teenage children in a one-bedroom apartment on which he owes three months back-rent, and has applied repeatedly for public housing. “I want my kids to have a safe place, a nice safe place.”

For anyone who’s been in prison, finding stable housing is a challenge that is handicapped by tough, “one-strike” rules on public housing aid. From federally funded housing projects to voucher programs, criminal records can be the difference between having shelter and being on the streets. Families who take in formerly incarcerated members – spouses, children, siblings – run the risk of eviction for violating the rules.

In recent years, some cities have begun to rethink this rigid approach, encouraged by former President Barack Obama who sought to extend a “second chance” to ex-offenders and tackle record rates of incarceration. Experts argue that stable housing, along with support services for ex-offenders, including drug treatment and education, can ease their reentry and reduce high rates of recidivism.

“Housing is more than shelter for the night. Housing is really fundamental to people staying out of the criminal justice system,” says Marie Claire Tran-Leung, a staff attorney at the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law in Chicago.

The Trump administration has yet to lay down a marker on this reform movement. But public housing executives say they haven’t seen any change of federal guidelines.

“We want HUD [the Department of Housing and Urban Development] to continue to take the lead on this,” says Ms. Tran-Leung, who has studied housing reentry programs in New York and other cities. “But at the end of the day, the policies that are going to impact people on the ground are going to come locally.” 

Last year New Orleans became the largest housing authority to end the automatic rejection of felons and give all applicants a hearing. Housing agencies in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles have run pilot programs on rehousing former prisoners, including family reunifications.

In April, Providence, R.I., where Doyle lives, revised its housing admissions policy, halving the “look back” period for violent and drug-related crimes and no longer weighing arrests and minor crimes. Like New Orleans, it ended automatic denials in favor of individual hearings.

“It means a one-on-one consideration of people’s circumstances,” says Melissa Sanzaro, deputy executive director of Providence Housing Authority.

She says she can’t comment on Doyle’s case but questions whether the account was complete. “Some allegations from DARE we found not to be valid at all,” she says. She conceded that applicants like Doyle could have been excluded under the old policy of blanket rejections.

Public records show that Doyle had other arrests and citations when he was on supervisory probation. Last year, he was charged with possession after he gave a ride to an acquaintance who was carrying drugs. Under Providence’s revised policy, applicants engaged in drug use in the previous six months are excluded. Doyle could be penalized if they suspect he was using.

Providence’s policy is too new for any change to be felt. In New Orleans, though, a six-month review found that 15 of 17 applications with criminal records had been approved by the panel. The other two were withdrawn. All were applicants who had been denied under the old policy.

Politics of crime prevention

There are more incarcerated people in the US than any other country in the world. After decades of rapid expansion undergirded by strict sentencing laws, US prisons are slowly paring the numbers behind bars, currently 2.3 million.

In addition to offenders released from state or federal prisons, many more cycle annually through local jails: Roughly 25,000 are released a day, according to a 2016 White House study. They can still be excluded from public housing on account of their arrests or reported drug use, even if they never stood trial.

The White House study noted that 77 percent of inmates in state prisons were rearrested within five years of their release. Nearly half re-offended in their first year.

Like the policies that fueled that prison boom, public housing exclusions are rooted in the politics of crime prevention.

In 1996, President Clinton called for a one-strike strategy. “Criminal gang members and drug dealers are destroying the lives of decent tenants. From now on, the rule for residents who commit crime and peddle drugs should be ‘one strike and you’re out,’” he said.

Punitive measures for offenders had strong support from minorities living in public housing plagued by gun violence and drug dealing. Many African-American politicians and civil rights leaders sided with lawmakers in mandating long prison terms for drug traffickers, particularly during the crack epidemic that peaked in the early 1990s.

Housing agencies began to impose automatic bans for criminal activity and to look at arrests as well as convictions. Families faced eviction if their children or grandchildren sneaked drugs into the house, a policy since ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court.

Today, federal law has changed; it only prohibits housing aid to registered sex offenders and those convicted of producing methamphetamine in public housing. That leaves broad discretion for the roughly 3,000 agencies, from big cities to rural towns, that oversee federally funded public housing and voucher programs.

Campaigners say it’s impossible to know how many ex-offenders are excluded from housing, and for what reason, since most agencies don’t keep track and there is no national tally.

Compounding the problem, the White House has proposed deep cuts to housing subsidies. Currently, only 1 in 4 households eligible for federal aid receive public housing; ex-offenders who pass screenings join long waiting lists for new units.

In Providence, criminal record denials made up 61 percent of rejections for public housing in 2014. Appeals were rarely successful. “It’s like a kangaroo court,” says John Prince, a former prisoner who works on criminal justice at DARE.

Like many former inmates, Mr. Prince struggled to find shelter after his release in 1998 and ended up on the streets of Providence, a college town and state capital with a population of 180,000. Its housing authority has 2,600 units in nine developments and 2,700 vouchers for private rentals. None were open to Prince.

Ms. Sanzaro says housing tenants in Providence have fought in the past to “clean up their communities” and as Providence considered changing its policies, they were wary of former prisoners moving in. “They said it was really risky, that was the word they used,” she says. “But at the same time, people deserve a second chance.”

Indeed, critics say this type of exclusion is unfair to former prisoners who have done their time behind bars. While housing aid is taxpayers’ money, denying ex-offenders at risk of recidivism may be a false economy. Rhode Island’s cost per prison inmate in 2015 was $58,564, or $177 per state resident, according to the Vera Institute, many times what an annual housing subsidy costs.

“People who have criminal records ... can’t work here, can’t vote there, can’t live there, can’t go to school there, what do we expect them to do? And so then we end up, because of those exclusionary policies, actually creating more crime, because the only option available is crime,” says Bruce Reilly, deputy director of Voice of the Experienced in New Orleans and an ex-offender himself, who works with grass-roots campaigns for fair housing access in both Providence and New Orleans.

While the developments in Providence and New Orleans are heartening, he says, America “is not ready for things like actual forgiveness and real transformation.”

Opportunity to become productive citizens

Mr. Reilly spent 12 years in prison in Rhode Island after being convicted of second degree murder and larceny at 19. He became a jailhouse lawyer, writing motions for other inmates and helping them prepare for parole-board hearings, which is how he found out about public-housing exclusions.

He says prisoners told him they “couldn’t go back to live where they used to live. ‘I can’t go live back with my mom,’ ‘I can’t live with my kid’s mom,’ ‘I can’t live with my grandfather,’ because they’re in … public housing. And I was always like, ‘Why is this?’ ”

Some flout the rules and move in anyway, says Reilly.

“The family has been, and will be, the No. 1 reentry program that we’re ever going to have, and for most of time it’s been the only one we’ve had,” he says.

Reilly left prison in 2005. One of the first places he went was DARE’s office in Providence where he knew Prince and other activists from prison and his letter writing. He became involved in criminal-justice campaigns, including a successful ballot initiative to restore voting rights for ex-prisoners. He also wrote and directed plays about life on the inside.

In 2011, he enrolled at Tulane law school in New Orleans. That year, HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan wrote to housing agencies across the country to urge them to rethink their rules on ex-offenders. “People who have paid their debt to society deserve the opportunity to become productive citizens and caring parents, to set the past aside and embrace the future,” he wrote.

This shift in thinking galvanized criminal justice campaigners in Providence and New Orleans, including Reilly, who began volunteering at VOTE and later graduated from Tulane with a law degree – though it’s unlikely he can become an attorney, since Louisiana’s charter mandates “good moral character and fitness.”

Meanwhile, DARE, Reilly’s former organization, lobbied Providence for three years to reform its rules for former detainees. In April, the housing authority board in Providence voted unanimously to adopt new rules.

Among the changes introduced are a lookback period for felonies of five years, down from 10; no consideration of misdemeanors or arrests; and deferrals for applicants charged but not convicted of crimes so that they can remain on waiting lists.

For campaigners in Providence, it was a public victory, though not all their demands were met. And housing is only one small piece of the overall problem of mass incarceration and the rehabilitation of ex-offenders.

“This is a good change but it’s not enough,” says Prince. “We’re just chipping on an iceberg. I want to chip it all off.”

Staff writer Henry Gass contributed reporting from New Orleans.

Correction: Bruce Reilly was convicted of second degree murder and larceny at 19.

Sara Miller Llana/The Christian Science Monitor

Sherin Khankan sits in a room in the mosque where she serves as imam in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Sherin Khankan flits about the window sills, lighting wicks and placing bouquets of roses in just the right places as she prepares for Friday prayers.

“We being women, there are always a lot of candles and flowers,” explains Denmark’s first female imam, placing a single, deep pink rose in a potted plant.

A second-floor walk-up off an upscale street in Copenhagen, the Mariam mosque indeed feels as snug as it does spiritual, and is intended foremost as a faith community for Danish Muslims who’ve failed to find one at more traditional mosques.

But the efforts here, the first of their kind in Denmark, could have a much wider impact. Ms. Khankan says by challenging patriarchal structures, she and other women imams – they use the term "imamas" – can help counter growing Islamophobia across Europe. The imamas are undertaking the challenge amid a spate of terrorist attacks by Islamist extremists and raging political and cultural debates over everything from burkinis to Islam’s place in Europe.

“It’s very difficult to hold onto the narrative that Muslim women are suppressed, that Islam is a suppressive religion in its essence, when they can see that women are taking the lead and building up their own female-led mosque," says Khankan. "This is in itself proof that this anti-Islamic rhetoric is incorrect. It’s not the total picture.”

The Mariam mosque is rare but is not the first of its kind. Women have served as imams since the early 19th century in China, and now preach from the United States to South Africa. In June a well-known Muslim feminist, Seyran Ates, whose parents came to Germany as Turkish guest-workers, opened a liberal mosque in Berlin to welcome all sects of Islam, Muslims of all sexual orientation, and men and women to worship together. “There's so much Islamist terror and so much evilness happening in the name of my religion,” she told the Associated Press, “it's important that we, the modern and liberal Muslims, also show our faces in public.”

Mistrust of the Muslim community has deepened since 9/11, especially in the era of the so-called Islamic State. Denmark has not been spared. Copenhagen witnessed its own attack in February 2015. Ten years earlier, cartoons of the prophet Muhammad published by the Danish Jyllands-Posten newspaper sparked riots around the globe and thrust Denmark into the center of a debate over freedom of speech and cultural values. At the same time, many observers say the anti-Muslim rhetoric of the Danish People’s Party has hardened views, and politics, around immigration and Islam.

Lissi Rasmussen, a pastor and chairwoman of the Center for Coexistence, says that in this environment, young Danish Muslims have trouble finding a place to worship that they can identify with. “The young people, most of them don’t go to established mosques where they speak of the politics of Turkey, for instance, with imported imams,” she says. “That’s the older generation. They don’t feel at home there.”

That’s what has drawn many to the Mariam mosque. One member, Lea, who is half Iranian, half Nordic, attended a predominantly Shiite mosque in Copenhagen before this but often found herself “irritated,” she says.

“In Copenhagen, I feel a second-class citizen when I have to go all the way upstairs and not even look down at the men’s section,” she says. Instead, the 19-year-old gave her first khutbah (sermon) this day, after a rich, female voice sings the adhan (call to prayer).

Her sermon was on the cultural traditions that get too easily conflated with the religion of Islam, including myths about forced marriage and polygamy. It’s a perfect 101 for non-Muslims, but a worshiper visiting the mosque for the first time also said afterwards that she planned to bring some of the lessons home to her own father.

The Mariam mosque has been criticized on both sides. Traditionalists dismiss it as outside the realm of Islam. Ms. Khankan, the daughter of a Syrian refugee and Finnish mother who says she has bridged worlds her entire life, says not a single mainline imam from Denmark has visited. Progressives say it doesn’t go far enough. While the mosque is open to men and women, Friday midday prayers – the biggest weekly service – are reserved for women only, making them far less controversial than if women imams were to also preach to men.

Khankan says she originally wanted to open it up to both but in hindsight says she’s happy she lost that fight. “When you want to create change you have to do it very slowly,” she says. “Now I can see that there is greater wisdom, because we are on totally safe ground.”

Celebrating nearly one year since it opened for Friday prayers last August, today the mosque counts 100 members. They recently opened up a Sunday school for children and have performed more than a dozen Islamic marriages – with Islamic contracts that enshrine a bride’s right to divorce and to the children on equal terms as the father in case of a divorce. The contract also says that in the cases of polygamy or violence, the marriage is annulled.

On this day Khankan is in a lilac hijab and white jalabiyah, or robe covering. It was a gift from her father from Damascus, Syria, 15 years ago that she now wears as her “imama dress.” It’s symbolic because the inspiration to open this mosque came while she was doing her fieldwork for her thesis in Damascus, listening to the grand mufti and wondering what the words would be if he were a woman. “The inspiration came not from the West, but the East,” she says.

Last year when she was getting dressed in the jalabiyah the day the mosque opened, her youngest daughter – then age 5 – had a friend over who was looking at her and whispered “What is an imama?”

Khankan’s daughter, she says, looked at her mother and replied: “An imama is a woman who is doing great things.”

A year later, she says, she does have faith that a small group of people can change mindsets. “I do believe that Islamophobes see progressive Muslims as a greater threat than Islamists,” she says, “because we are able to change the narrative of Islam in Europe.”

Courtesy of Alan Nakagawa

Alan Nakagawa's artwork is part of his creative catalyst artist residency with the Los Angeles Department of Transportation.

When photographer Peter Svarzbein found out city planners in El Paso, Texas, were considering reviving trolleys to revitalize the downtown area, he had art ready to lend to help muster support.

In a conceptual piece about a trolley line that once connected El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, Mr. Svarzbein highlighted a shared story of the border cities. His posters and an actor dressed as a conductor tapped into nostalgia and a sense of possibility. 

The trolley cars will start rolling next year.

“What artists can do is imagine something not as it is, but as it can be,” Svarzbein says. Svarzbein is in an even better position to keep pushing for transit to Ciudad Juárez; he was elected to El Paso’s city council in 2015. 

For now, the new trolley that will serve El Paso is among an increasing number of innovative projects integrating arts into urban planning, says Ben Stone. Mr. Stone last year took a new position as director of arts and culture for Smart Growth America and the organization’s program Transportation for America, which advocates better transportation across the country.

Stone says artists are experienced at gathering diverse voices, celebrating local history, and connecting with communities. Planners want to do that better, particularly as they address past mistakes such as highways that destroyed poor and minority neighborhoods.

Mark VanderSchaaf, a former Minneapolis-St. Paul regional planner, says artists can help his colleagues do “full justice to the human experience of a place.”

Multimedia artist Alan Nakagawa was asked to help people envision Los Angeles roadways as spaces to linger, not just routes for cars. The “art perfumes” Mr. Nakagawa developed to waft over a corner of Venice Boulevard include a coffee-laced scent evoking the bistros that signal economic change. “Artists have always generated work in support of or in reaction to what the community is going through,” Nakagawa said.

Reuters

Demonstrators sing the national anthem next to violinist Wuilly Arteaga while blocking a street during a protest against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro's government in Caracas, Venezuela July 19.

A defining moment in a democratic revolution often comes when a nation’s poor, who mostly focus on daily material needs, join others in demanding basic rights and uncorrupted governance. A fruit vendor in Tunisia, for example, sparked a revolution in 2011 after taking a public stand for equality of law. In recent months, as Venezuela nears a breaking point in a political crisis, its poor have begun to join the peaceful efforts of others in seeking an end to the Maduro regime’s grab for indefinite power. 

This widening support among Venezuelans to restore democracy, reflected in months of protests and a large voter turnout for an unofficial July 16 referendum by the opposition, has forced other countries to seek a resolution as the crisis slides toward chaos. 

The Trump administration, for example, promises stiff sanctions if President Nicolás Maduro goes ahead with a pre-rigged vote on July 30 to rewrite the Constitution and move Venezuela closer toward Cuba-style authoritarian rule. The United States, says President Trump, “will not stand by as Venezuela crumbles.” The Obama administration first imposed sanctions in 2015.

So far, however, outside powers have yet to influence the regime other than to allow jailed opposition leader Leopoldo López to live under house arrest. The main action remains the steady loss of legitimacy of Mr. Maduro among the poor. His economic mismanagement has led to mass shortages despite the country’s vast oil reserves. Polls show 69 percent of citizens do not want him to stay in power. Nearly the same percentage oppose his attempt to alter the Constitution.

The opposition controls the National Assembly but its powers have been side-lined by Maduro by various maneuvers. Now, with widening dissent among the poor, the opposition has set up a parallel government and plans to name new judges for the Supreme Court. It has also called for a 24-hour strike by businesses on July 19. In addition, the government is heading toward a showdown with foreign creditors with a $3.5 billion payment on the national debt due in October. 

The crisis in Venezuela is the largest in Latin America in decades,but it is one that is now ripe in showing how much the region has embraced democratic principles. As is often the case, democratic progress can be led by poor or rich alike.