Jessica Mendoza/The Christian Science Monitor

A group of guests, press, and local leaders gather on Saturday, Dec. 8, 2018, for a tour of an abandoned building that will soon house the local offices of software services company Pillar Technology in Jefferson, Iowa.

California Rep. Ro Khanna vaults up the stage in one long stride, ignoring the steps that lead up the wooden platform.

It's a frigid December night, and the congressman is in Jefferson, Iowa, in a 120-seat theater in the back of a historic-furniture store. (Think salt boxes and trestle benches built with 18th-century tools.) His audience is a blend of tech executives and local educators, Silicon Valley innovators and community leaders. Everything smells of sawdust.  

Khanna is here to talk about bridging divides. From the podium on stage, he brings up opportunity and inequality, and how we need to find a way to unite rural and urban America. “It’s what will allow our country to be stronger and win in the 21st century,” he says.

From where most Americans stand today, Big Tech has fallen short in a big way. Data privacy and diversity issues, compounded by partisan politics, have dogged some of the industry’s leading names. Jobs and and talent still tend to cluster in big cities and leave smaller towns behind – in fact, the gap has only widened since the Great Recession – despite hopes that telecommuting and the internet might make it easier to spread the wealth around. Amazon’s recent decision to build its new headquarters in New York and Washington, D.C., was proof positive to skeptics that the industry has no desire to shake up the status quo.

Khanna, however, has made it his mission to find a way for technology to fulfill its potential. His reasons seem at once rational and romantic: Sustainably “outsourcing” well-paying jobs to rural areas could mean a drop-off in migration into his district, where a bunch of the world’s top tech firms are based. Over time, he says, that could curb the overcrowding, congestion, and soaring housing prices he’s been elected – twice now – to deal with.

But Khanna also seems to genuinely believe in the promise of equity and opportunity that made Silicon Valley the world’s tech hub in the first place. If there’s even a chance this work could help revive struggling rural communities, close the widening wealth gap, and blur the cultural and political fault lines that have sharpened along the way, then he sees no reason not to try.

That’s why the congressman is in Jefferson, an agricultural and manufacturing town of about 4,300 an hour northwest of Des Moines. And it’s why he’s asked the likes of Microsoft’s Kevin Scott and LinkedIn’s Allen Blue to be here, too.

“This is not just about economic integration,” Khanna tells me later, at a dinner for guests and community leaders at a photography studio downtown. “It’s also about stitching this country back together. And it starts with respect.”

Jessica Mendoza/The Christian Science Monitor

Rep. Ro Khanna (D) of California chats with Tim Ritchie, president and CEO of the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, Calif., during a tour at the bell tower on Saturday, Dec. 8, 2018, in Jefferson, Iowa. Representative Khanna flew to the rural town with a delegation of tech executives from his district in Silicon Valley, hoping to combine their expertise and support with local leadership. 'This is not just about economic integration,' the congressman says. 'It's also about stitching this country back together. And it starts with respect.'

‘We want to be part of the future’

The event that brought Khanna to Jefferson reflects the broader hopes for revival that exist in small towns across the United States. Community leaders are here to sketch their vision for a renaissance. The Silicon Valley execs have come to pledge their support. Plans by one firm to create a few dozen software jobs here in the next few years are the talk of the town.

Khanna himself is just one piece of the story. But he is positioned to help promote an American future where small towns and Big Tech don’t travel on separate tracks.

Raised outside Philadelphia in Bucks County, Pa., Khanna grew up nurturing a blend of pragmatism and optimism inspired by his family’s immigrant roots. His grandfather was a freedom fighter and later a politician in India. His parents’ decision to come to the US to build a better life for their children planted the seed for his ideas about wealth and opportunity.

In 2016 – after two previous runs – Khanna was elected to Congress on a platform that embraced the tech industry’s responsibility to share its success with the rest of the country. “Silicon Valley needs to answer the nation’s call to service,” Khanna says when we meet at a coffee shop outside the Capitol in Washington, a few weeks ahead of his Iowa trip. “I really believe that it’s a fundamental shift in the economy, and that people in the Valley are uniquely poised to help with it.”

Throughout his first term, Khanna brought that message with him to so-called flyover country. In Paintsville, Ky., he met with coal mining families and Republican congressman Hal Rogers to talk about iOS and Android skills training. In Youngstown, Ohio, residents shared with him their hopes for a future in 3-D printing. In Beckley, W.Va., students at West Virginia University Tech showed him their health data devices and intelligent musical instruments.

Khanna began to see a pattern. “The country is saying, ‘We want to be part of the future, but our problem is we don’t see how we get there,’ ” he says. “The future can’t be [that] they’ll move to San Francisco or Silicon Valley. We want to make sure people have optionality, that they have choices. Just like in my district.”

‘No magic pill’

In an op-ed for The New York Times, economics writer Eduardo Porter calls agglomeration – the flow of investment to places where innovation and talent are already concentrated – “one of the most powerful forces shaping the American economy over the past three decades.” It’s one reason rural revitalization programs keep falling flat, he writes.

There’s also the unhelpful idea that technology is some kind of cure-all for struggling communities, says David Swenson, an associate professor of community and regional planning at Iowa State University – as though all it takes to buck a decades-long trend of urbanization and rural aging and decline is to have a couple of high-tech companies set up shop in a rural outpost and teach locals how to code.

Jessica Mendoza/The Christian Science Monitor

The small town of Jefferson, Iowa, spreads out into the distance on Saturday, Dec. 8, 2018.

The fact is, Professor Swenson says, most of the work has to come from communities first. Stable, well-paying jobs might encourage people to come, but infrastructure and amenities – a solid school system and daycare centers, high-speed internet and good restaurants – are the reasons they stay.

“There are successful processes that communities can work through,” Swenson says. “But they involve dialogue, communication, goal setting, solving problems, eliminating barriers and hurdles. There is no magic pill.”

Chris Deal thought as much when he first suggested that Pillar Technology, a Columbus, Ohio-based software services company, open offices in his hometown. Mr. Deal, a mechanical engineer whose family has run an apple orchard in Jefferson for a hundred years, had helped design a Des Moines “forge” – what the firm calls its operations – for Pillar two years ago.

Deal had moved back to Jefferson after years working abroad and around the country. He and his wife wanted to raise their kids in the kind of community they had growing up. But unlike Deal, others who had left Jefferson and surrounding Greene County never came back. The population dropped nearly 4 percent between 2010 and 2017. Unemployment was also down, but only because fewer people were around to take the jobs.

Still, the local Main Street group had launched an overhaul of Jefferson’s downtown, pushing the city to buy and renovate the dilapidated buildings that dotted the town square to encourage businesses to move in. There was talk of passing a school bond that would put about $21 million into the construction of a new county high school and a regional career academy, to be staffed by Iowa Community College. Another returnee, Jamie Daubendiek, had taken over his family’s local telecom business and outfitted the whole town with high-speed internet.

When Deal saw what was going on, he went to Linc Kroeger, the Pillar executive in charge of the company’s development in the state. Mr. Kroeger, another small-town Iowa native, jumped on the idea. The software company already has forges in Ann Arbor, Palo Alto, and Des Moines. Why not build the next one in Jefferson?

“Things just seemed to fit into place really well,” Deal says.

In April, Greene County residents voted 68 percent to pass the school bond issue. The same month, Jefferson won a $100,000 grant from the Iowa Economic Development Authority to turn a century-old building downtown into the new forge. The plan now, Mr. Kroeger says, is to form a career pipeline that will kick off with 25 to 35 company jobs that would pay between $55,000 and $75,000 a year – huge in a town where the median household income is just under $45,000. The new forge is set to open midway through 2019. 

By the time Khanna heard about the plans this past summer, Jefferson was ready for outside help. “He asked me questions for two hours,” Kroeger says. “And at the end he said, ‘This is one of the most important projects happening in the country. How do I help you succeed?’ ”

Jessica Mendoza/The Christian Science Monitor

Linc Kroeger gives a tour on Saturday, Dec. 8, 2018, of the abandoned building in downtown Jefferson, Iowa, that will soon house the local offices of software services company Pillar Technology. Mr. Kroeger, the Pillar executive in charge of the firm's development in Iowa, is among the community leaders spearheading an effort to revive Jefferson and surrounding Greene County through jobs training, education, and urban planning.

‘Lightning in a bottle’

At the December gathering, guests and community leaders take turns talking about why they want in on the Jefferson project.

Microsoft’s Mr. Scott talks about his upbringing in rural Virginia and how hard it was to leave his hometown to pursue a career in tech. He announces that the Scott Family Foundation will donate $25,000 in scholarships to local students at the new career academy.

Brad Garlinghouse, chief executive of currency-exchange service Ripple, plans to fund a computer lab for the academy. Venture capitalist Greg Sands, who runs Costanoa Ventures, says his firm will host a version of “Shark Tank” in Jefferson, awarding $50,000 to the most innovative business idea. Zach Mannheimer, a Des Moines-based community planner, unveils a vision for all of Greene County – complete with an artist colony, parks, and apartments.

The event closes out with LinkedIn’s Mr. Blue. “You have an amazing bit of lightning in a bottle here,” Blue, whose own father hails from Iowa, tells the crowd. “Jefferson could be a place where it's a lighthouse for attacking this problem all across the United States.”

There are plenty of challenges ahead. Jefferson’s next big problem is housing: Most of the homes in the area are aging and not the kind of places up-and-coming singles or young families are interested in living in. There are some concerns about gentrification, though it seems residents – at least those who show up to the event – are more troubled by a lack of change in their town than too much of it.

Khanna has got his work cut out for him, too. When the new session starts in January, he plans to introduce a bill that would establish a multibillion-dollar grant program to build technology institutions at universities in parts of the country that look like Jefferson. Khanna will need bipartisan support to push it through – a tough ask in a Congress at least as divided as the country, if not more so. And he says Jefferson needs to succeed before he can even think about scaling.

Still, as folks file out of the theater to dinner down the street, the chilly air is bright with optimism. “I honestly think it's one of the most exciting evenings that we’ve had and one of the best opportunities that's ever been presented to rural Iowa,” says Douglas Burns, publisher of the local area newspapers and a longtime member of the regional economic development board.

Khanna is also cautiously hopeful. “I think people coming here showed that they understand that talent and intelligence and work ethic are in rural America,” he says. “Reciprocally, I think Jefferson understood that these folks from Silicon Valley are patriots, that they grew up all over America, that they care about communities in America.

“That kind of mutual respect and understanding, transcending stereotypes, is what we need,” he adds. “This is how we’re going to bridge the divide in this nation.”

Kriszta Tóth has been on the streets of Budapest since the protests against the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán began last week. Like many of her fellow demonstrators, Ms. Tóth sees taking to the street as the last avenue they have left for expressing dissent, thanks to Mr. Orbán’s effective monopoly of the media.

“I don’t think there is any other way but demonstrating,” the social worker says. “That is why I go every night.”

For eight years, Mr. Orbán has been steadily eroding democratic norms and the rule of law in Hungary. He has consolidated control over the media and the judiciary, changed the electoral system to benefit his party, and cracked down on civil society, all while stoking nationalist hatred against immigrants. And he has done so with relatively wide support from the populace. Dissent has been muted, partly because Orbán has cemented control of the media.

But when Orbán’s ruling party, Fidesz, passed two controversial laws last week, it spurred raucous protests in the capital, united the opposition, and electrified Hungarians critical of their leader’s tightening authoritarian grip. On Sunday the protests moved to the state television building, a powerful symbol of Orbán’s dominance. While the demonstrations do not pose an immediate danger to Orbán, they appear to have invigorated the opposition – and show how critical they consider the threat to the media to be.

“Freedom of the press is just the basis of everything,” says Tóth. “This is the most important pillar of a democracy. If you cannot be informed fairly about what is going on in the country, you cannot make a reasonable decision about whom to vote for and what to think about the regime.”

Francisco Seco/AP

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán arrives for a meeting prior to an EU summit in Brussels on Dec. 13.

Confronting 'the Death Star'

The two laws that sparked the uproar were pushed through parliament last week by Fidesz. One, which many in Hungary have dubbed the “slave law,” allows companies to demand their employees work up to 400 hours of overtime a year, a move the opposition says weakens labor protections. The other creates a new court system for cases related to “public administration,” and Orbán’s justice minister will oversee the hiring of its judges. Critics say it’s a dangerous expansion of executive power over the judiciary that erodes judicial independence.

The government says that the judicial law conforms with European norms, and that the labor law would allow workers to work and earn more. Government spokesman István Hollik condemned the protests in a statement, calling them violent. “It was apparent that the aggressive political activists who were on the streets yesterday do not respect anybody or anything. They don’t respect Christianity, they don’t respect the law and they don’t respect others.”

The ruling party prevented the opposition from debating the controversial moves, spurring opposition lawmakers to protest, first in parliament, and then on the street. Thousands joined them by the weekend, and took the protest to the state television building, which one member of parliament, Bernadett Széll, referred to as “the Death Star.” Parliament members tried to enter to read a petition, but some – including Ms. Széll – were dragged out of the building by security guards, and at least one was injured.

The state media refuses to air voices critical of Orbán, and its coverage has steadfastly ignored the protests happening right outside the studios. As parts of private media have been consolidated under Orbán allies, many Hungarians no longer have access to independent news. Most of the daily newspapers in Hungary, and many radio stations, local television stations, and popular online news sites, are now friendly to the prime minister and his party.

The public television building has become “the symbol of lies and the unscrupulousness of Orbán’s increasingly authoritarian regime,” says Krisztián Szabados, a political analyst and head of Political Capital, a think tank in Budapest.

“This media dominance is key for Orbán’s power, as being the most effective tool to control political discourse and prevent the escalation of public discontent over the high level of corruption, the poor quality of health care, and the deteriorating education system,” he says. “It is without precedent in any democracy that members of the opposition parties are not allowed to appear on public TV and radio, where government criticism is censured and the public broadcaster is the main source of Russian-style fake news and unrestrained government propaganda.”

Shades of 1956?

Opposition member of parliament Bence Tordai filmed himself confronting Orbán in parliament last week about the “slave law.” That’s something Hungarians have not seen in some time amid such a docile media landscape. Many Hungarians who do not support Orbán and Fidesz have been frustrated that the opposition has been unable to muster any coherent alliance to work against the ruling party. That changed Wednesday, as a broad range of previously fragmented opposition parties – including the far-right Jobbik party – came together to protest, and have been working together since.

“We want to offer an alternative to the voters as well, so we started to work together with every party of the opposition in order to have a program for the new world that we want to achieve,” Mr. Tordai says. He compared the protests at the public television station to the beginning of the revolution against the Soviet regime in 1956, when Hungarians marched to the state radio station to demand their petition be read on the air, and security forces fired on the crowd. “Although there is no violence, people are equally desperate and decisive about what they want to achieve this time,” he says.

That’s an optimistic comparison. Mr. Szabados, the analyst, says the protests do not pose a danger to Orbán, at least in the short term, considering Orbán’s strong grip on government institutions. But it’s significant, Szabados adds, that “the long-time fragmented … opposition parties have acted [with] surprising unity in the last days, applying unusually radical tools against the oppressive power.”

Budapest is the center of anti-Orbán sentiment in the country but he has high support in rural areas. To keep momentum going, Tordai says it would be important to take the protests outside the city and to employ other tactics like strikes and barricades. Opposition groups have said they will organize a general strike if the president signs the law. In a sign that momentum was carrying, on Tuesday night protests were organized in rural cities where demonstrations have been rare. Many Hungarians abroad have protested as well, including in Britain, where many Hungarians opposed to Orbán have emigrated.

Some protesters said they were determined to continue. Erika Miskolci, who was demonstrating Monday, says she is upset with a range of government actions: the control of the media, the new court system, corruption, the decimation of public healthcare and education. “I don’t see any other way to show them that we are unhappy and we want them to go than protesting as long as we can,” she says.

•Kristen Chick contributed from Cambridge, England.

Joshua Roberts/Reuters

Former US National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and his wife, Lori Andrade, depart after his sentencing was delayed at US District Court in Washington on Dec. 18, 2018.

President Trump, ever the salesman, pushes hard to depict events in ways most favorable to him. His presidency has been an unending narrative of the world as Mr. Trump sees it – or wishes others to see it – stitched out of his tweets, press statements edited by him, and his answers to shouted press questions as he pauses en route to a waiting Marine One.

But sometimes reality pushes back against the salesmanship. And this week, other institutions of the American government have pushed back as hard as they ever have, jamming a stick into Trump’s unspooling narrative of a best-ever presidency and exposing the story’s exaggerations and flaws.

The disbanding of Trump’s foundation. Trump’s retreat after threatening to shut down the government to force Congress to fund his border wall. A federal judge’s outrage over former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s implication that a devious FBI had tricked him into lying.

That last event might be particularly ominous for the White House. The president’s overarching strategy for dealing with special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation has been to attempt to discredit Mr. Mueller and his team and thus undermine their possible conclusions. “Witch Hunt!” “No collusion!” Those are among Trump’s most often repeated Twitter phrases.

Federal District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan’s harsh rebuke of former Trump adviser Flynn showed what happens when such a public relations strategy gets exposed to the real world of the courts. At a sentencing hearing, General Flynn and his lawyers essentially tried to have it both ways. In a legal memo, Flynn asked for lenient treatment due to his cooperation with Mueller’s prosecutors – but also implied that the FBI had treated him unfairly. Judge Sullivan wasn’t having it. Under the judge’s questioning, Flynn admitted he’d known what he did was wrong, and he accepted responsibility for his actions.

The incident underscored the seriousness of the Russia allegations and the methodical manner in which the legal system is plowing through them.

“What happened is Flynn’s lawyers did this too-cute-by-half argument. I think that backfired,” says Andrew Wright, an investigations lawyer and research scholar at New York University.

Other institutions belittled by the president have demonstrated resilience in recent days. The press – perhaps Trump’s favorite target – is one.

That’s because reporters played a big role in the demise of the Trump Foundation. In particular, Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold documented how it acted not as a normal charity but as an arm of the Trump business and campaign. It paid for personal legal settlements and made illegal political donations, for instance. It purchased portraits of Trump. Its largest outlay was to fix the fountain in front of a hotel Trump owned.

New York State Attorney General Barbara Underwood accused it of “a shocking pattern of illegality.” New York will continue a lawsuit aimed at recovering restitution and preventing Trump or his children from serving on nonprofits’ boards. Meanwhile, under an agreement announced Tuesday, the charity will disband and contribute remaining assets to court-approved organizations. 

Congress is confronting the White House with a dose of reality as well. The situation remains fluid, but as of this writing the Senate appears poised to pass a short-term funding bill that will keep the government open until Feb. 8, when Democrats will control the House. The bill does not contain money for Trump’s border wall. Trump, who days ago was promising to shut down the government if Congress didn’t approve $5 billion in wall funding, has reportedly said he’ll sign the short-term measure.

“White House strategy on shutdown appears to be repeating that the president ‘is not going to back down’ as he, in fact, backs down” tweeted Politico reporter Eliana Johnson on Wednesday as the deal emerged.

As to the Flynn affair, it was widely depicted as a defeat for conservative commentators and others who had said that the independent-minded Judge Sullivan might just throw out Flynn’s guilty plea, shaking the Mueller investigation to the core. The reason? Alleged FBI misconduct. Flynn was entrapped into lying, his supporters argued, because agents didn’t tell him that lying to them was a crime and that he could have a lawyer present at their interview. 

In his sentencing memo, Flynn and his attorneys argued that he had been wronged by the aforementioned FBI moves and by the fact that agents didn’t tell him his answers weren’t consistent with what they already knew, allowing him a do-over for correction.

Instead of pitching the guilty plea out, Sullivan threw the book at Flynn. The judge professed “disgust” for Flynn’s actions and made him affirm that he knew he was guilty, knew well that you can’t lie to the FBI, and so forth. In the end, Flynn’s lawyers agreed to delay his sentencing, to give Flynn more time to prove his worth to the government as a cooperating witness.

Trump has tweeted in support of Flynn. Echoing some conservative commentators, Trump said that “the FBI said he didn’t lie” and that prosecutors “want to scare everybody into making up stories.”

Prior to the sentencing fireworks on Tuesday, Trump tweeted “Good luck in court today to General Michael Flynn.”

That didn’t happen. Instead, if anything, Sullivan seemed outraged by the leniency of Flynn’s plea deal, in which prosecutors agreed to ask for no jail time in return for his cooperation. He strongly hinted he was considering locking Flynn up for an undetermined period.

Sometimes judges do that to emphasize the gravity of offenses, says Mr. Wright, who is also a founding editor of Just Security.

“It’s about public trust – ‘I’ll give you something symbolic so everyone will notice,’ ” says Wright.

Elaine Pagels, people say, is a heretic.

It’s an ancient accusation, of course, and it hardly wields as much power as it used to, especially in the free-wheeling religious landscape of America. And Ms. Pagels is, in fact, one of the globe’s foremost experts in early Christian heresies.

But as a woman who has been disrupting established orthodoxies for nearly half a century, her name still has the power to arouse disdain in certain religious circles.

“You know, people have sometimes called me ‘Elaine Pagan’,” the Princeton University professor says during an interview with the Monitor, smiling as she reflects on the trajectory of her life’s work, her many orthodox critics, and her new book, “Why Religion? A Personal Story.”

Forty years ago, Pagels’ first book, “The Gnostic Gospels,” was an unlikely sensation. A young historian without tenure and a specialist who read 1st century languages like Coptic, she was one of the first to illuminate an ancient trove of long-lost gospels and other writings about Jesus, writings which were simply stumbled upon by a local farmer near the Egyptian town Nag Hammadi in 1945.

“That’s lucky, since some of us need heresy – ‘choice,’ that is,” Pagels writes in her new book, noting, as specialists do, the meaning of the original Greek word hairesis.

That need for religious choice is actually a quintessential feature of the spiritual yearnings that have long defined America’s cacophony of religious voices: Puritans, Baptists, Pentecostals, Mormons, Christian Scientists, as well as self-reliant transcendentalists, counter-cultural communitarians, poets, artists, and hosts of others have each felt free to throw off existing institutional constraints and follow the longings in their hearts.

Her admirers and critics both marveled at how the work of such a young scholar could resonate with a much wider audience. Published in 1979, it won the National Book Award and other literary prizes. It brought her a MacArthur Fellowship and its “genius” grant. Modern Library later named it one of the 100 best nonfiction books since 1900 – as did the late music legend David Bowie.

Yet if “The Gnostic Gospels” made Pagels one of the most celebrated and reviled religious scholars of the past 100 years, her memoir “Why Religion?” helps put her work’s remarkable cultural resonance into a deeper spiritual context.

“Many of us, of course, have left religious institutions behind, and prefer to identify as ‘spiritual, not religious’,” she writes at the outset. “I’ve done both – had faith, lost it; joined groups, and left them.”

“What matters to me more than whether we participate in institutions or leave them is how we engage the imagination – in dreams, art, poetry, music – since what each of us needs, and what we can engage, obviously differs and changes throughout our lifetime.”

In a number of ways, Pagels is describing the language of the fastest-growing religious group in the country right now, the so-called “nones,” a cohort of mostly younger Americans who have begun leaving places of worship in droves. Rejecting the array of choices presented by the institutions and traditions that have long flourished in the country, most “nones” still maintain their own self-defined relationships with the divine.   

Still, at the heart of “Why Religion?” is a quiet meditation on the meaning of human mortality, and the grief and soul-shattering anguish the famous scholar experienced over the course her life.

More than 25 years ago, her firstborn son, then 6, collapsed in her arms and died of a rare respiratory illness. Just a year later, with her two younger children under her care, she lost her husband, who fell to his death while hiking in Colorado.

“I needed to write this, partly because I needed to bring forth those experiences that I had buried, because they were so difficult to deal with at the time,” Pagels says of the reasons for writing such an intensely personal book. “And I think for anyone, whether it’s people who write poetry or music or any other kind of expressive forms, you can ask, ‘Why do we really need to do that?’ ”

“But I’ve been asking these sorts of questions since I was a teenager,” she says. “Questions of, well, where do I belong? And how are we supposed to live? I wondered if there are sort of axioms in the universe about these things, but I just wanted to find out.”

Such questions, too, were springing from a life that seemed to always be at the center of major parts of American culture. A teenager in the early 1960s, Pagels bristled in “the clipped suburban lawns of Palo Alto,” and “living in the a world that felt flat, where emotional intensity was suppressed.” Her father was a botanist who despised religion, and her mother was emotionally aloof.

When she was 15, Pagels had a profound “born-again” experience after she answered one of Billy Graham’s famous altar calls. Among Evangelical Christians, she writes, “I’d begun to find a much larger family, in which people talked freely and passionately, hugged each other, and shouted praises to God.”

“It changed my life, as the preacher had promised it would – though not entirely as he intended, or, at least, not for as long.”

At the same time she was attending Bible studies at a close-knit Evangelical fellowship, Pagels was also part of San Francisco’s revolutionary cultural scenes. Her crew included the young Jerry Garcia and his best friend Paul Speegle, who had quit high school and often painted furiously until dawn. “I responded to his extravagant declarations of love, and his vision of himself as artist, and me as his muse,” Pagels writes of the young artist she describes as “my friend Paul.”

But a car crash one night shattered that world for each of them: Speegle broke his neck and died. “My Christian friends, at first sympathetic, immediately asked, ‘Was he born again?’ When I said, ‘No, he was Jewish!’ they said, ‘Then he’s in hell.’ ... Numb, devastated, and alone, I left the church, and never went back.”

The tragedy helped shape her suspicion of orthodoxy and traditional Christianity – especially its insistence that “outside the church, there is no salvation.” It didn’t make sense to her that outsiders who did not accept Jesus Christ – or even those who did, but in ways considered “heresy” – would be consigned to hell.

Pagels didn’t attend her graduation at Stanford. She moved to New York City and again joined a community of would-be artists, musicians, and poets. She devoted herself to dance, attending the famous Martha Graham School.

She was talented, but not talented enough. And she was still wondering why her experience with Evangelical Christianity was so powerfully compelling. Her interest in religion and curiosity about Jesus never waned, and she eventually went to Harvard University and learned of the trove of long-lost gospels found at Nag Hammadi.

‘Like a window opening up’

Pagels was one of the first in nearly 2,000 years to read books like The Gospel of Thomas, a source that spoke to her, she says, from the moment she opened it.

There was a very different kind of spirituality in these pages, she noticed, even though much of it overlapped with some of the content of the canonical gospels. Instead of depicting Jesus as a divine being from a transcendent place, these 114 sayings, or “secret words” showed Jesus urging his followers to find the divine within themselves.

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you,” saying 70 says.

Pagels was one of the few women doing such work at Harvard, and she offers her own #MeToo story in her book. Her adviser, a short, balding Lutheran reverend, asked her to babysit and assaulted and groped her in the middle of the night. He continued to make passes for years after.

This added an important context to the fact that many of these lost traditions used feminine images for the divine.

“I feel like it sort of just opens some windows on a tradition that had seemed pretty much closed and sort of codified a long time ago, like, these are the correct ways to understand God, as a father, as a son,” Pagels says about the lost images. “And now people say, ‘Oh, well, there’s many different ways of thinking about this.’

“And for me that is like a window opening up, bringing fresh air and more light.”

In the book, Pagels describes a key moment in her career when Barnard College in New York asked her to give a lecture on women in early Christianity.  

At first she wasn’t sure what to say, since so little work, if any, had been done. So she began to gather references from these “gnostic” gospels to share with an audience of thousands of women. Her husband, Heinz, showed up with a Wonder Woman button, and the crowd listened eagerly as Pagels read a scene from the Secret Gospel of John: God is being arrogant and boastful, saying “I am father, and God, and there is no one above me!” But then the voice of his mother, divine Wisdom, comes down from above: “You are mistaken!”

Pagels describes her life in New York City with her husband, a noted physicist who had also published a successful book, “The Cosmic Code.” Deeply in love and rarely ever apart, they struggled to have a child, however, and she began to undergo difficult fertility treatments.

A year of loss

As Pagels begins to describe the agonizing years to come, her prose comes alive with the spiritual and miraculous. After years of longing, she gives birth to her son Mark after an artist friend suggests a simple ritual. Mark, however, is immediately diagnosed with a congenital heart problem, and Pagels and her husband were told he likely would not live long.

Mark lived for six years, and Pagels describes, in a voice calm, steady, and elegant, the experiences of being a mother to a son given little time. She drank, she felt an enormous sense of guilt, she had terrifying nightmares. But there were, as she writes, moment of grace with the funny and precocious boy.

“It’s the frustrations of life that drive people to ask questions about meaning,” Pagels says in the interview. “And one of the deepest sources of frustration and pain is certainly the death of people that you love and count on.”

She and her husband adopted a girl and, after Mark’s funeral, another little boy. But then came Heinz’s accident and again, a loss that could be described as beyond words were it not for Pagels’ steady voice.

“Throughout those nameless days, my temper exploded at slight frustrations. Trembling, starting in my stomach, would spread until my whole body was shaking,” she writes. “On the floor, I’d bend over involuntarily, head to the ground, emitting a strange keening sound I’d never heard before. Sometimes outbursts of sobs began uncontrollably; more often, I’d try to cry, but no tears would come.”

In the final chapters, Pagels explicates a number of writings from the Nag Hammadi library. She asks traditional questions that wonder at what happens after death. And she again questions some of the canonical traditions that suggest suffering is part of a reality of divine punishment for sin.

She finds deep comfort in many of the sayings and teachings she helped to restore to already cacophonous landscape of Christianity.

“Church history used to be much more a kind of church-based tradition about our faith, about how it was Jesus who taught this, and how there’s this great continuity here,” Pagels says. “And now we say, ‘Wait a minute, there’s a lot more complexity in this history than we never admitted or realized.’ ”

“So I think it’s become easier, now, for many people to think about these traditions, and instead of just saying, ‘Do you believe this?’ or ‘Do you not believe this?’ they can find something resonates more deeply.”

In her book, she keeps coming back to a singular theme: the immanent reality of the divine that connects all human beings together.

“In Thomas, then, the ‘good news’ is not only about Jesus; it’s also about every one of us,” Pagels writes. “For while we ordinarily identify ourselves by specifying how we differ … [these sayings] suggest that recognizing we are ‘children of God’ requires us to recognize how we are the same.”

At long last the killing stopped.

As a boy growing up in the late 1990s after genocide, Emmanuel Mugendashyamba ventured into the protected rainforest near his home, a mountainous region in Rwanda’s southwest. How many days had he and his father spent illegally hunting antelopes and wild pigs to get food for the family? Or killing monkeys to sell precious skins? They also cut wood for heat and set swaths of the forest on fire to reach beehives and steal honey.

Amid the desolation that followed the massacre of some 800,000 people, mostly minority Tutsis, poaching was often a matter of survival. Locals like Mr. Mugendashyamba as well as refugees returning home after the violence ate away not only the Nyungwe Forest, but also Rwanda’s two other protected national parks – Akagera in the east and Volcanoes to the north, home to endangered mountain gorillas.

Mugendashyamba’s destructive threat could have gone on longer had a local forest guide named Ange Imanishimwe not confronted him. Their paths crossed at the entrance of the Nyungwe Forest five years ago when Mr. Imanishimwe overheard Mugendashyamba talking about poaching.

“Ange said, ‘Why are you killing animals?’ ” recalls Mugendashyamba, a soft-spoken man. “Don’t you know we all belong to the same planet?”

Imanishimwe didn’t stop there. You don’t have to destroy the forest to survive, he said. There are alternatives. For instance, the nonprofit group that he had just created was aiming, precisely, at enlisting poachers like Mugendashyamba to help preserve the forest and the region.

That’s how Imanishimwe gave Mugendashyamba a job with his group Biocoop.

Mugendashyamba is one of 600 residents in and around Kitabi, Rwanda, whom Imanishimwe has hired to boost conservation and ecotourism near the Nyungwe Forest, among the largest mountain rainforests in East-Central Africa. From heights that offer stunning views of lush forest and green hills with tea plants, Imanishimwe works to reduce poaching, involve villages in conservation, and open this hard-to-reach corner to residents and tourists.

“My goal is to eradicate extreme poverty and malnutrition in Rwanda by creating 1,000 green jobs every year,” says Imanishimwe. “When we started giving jobs, we started with those who were poachers before.”

If Imanishimwe reaches out to locals such as Mugendashyamba, it’s in part because he speaks their language. Like so many Rwandan children, he knew some of his school friends were slaughtered because they belonged to the “wrong” ethnic groups. And he had to quit school because his parents could no longer afford the uniform.

But while Mugendashyamba’s family and others turned to poaching, Imanishimwe made a pact with himself: to devote his life to protecting nature in his native region, the Kitabi area. Seeing children destroy nests and torture birds had sealed his decision. Later, when a scholarship enabled him to resume school, “I said, ‘I got this opportunity, and now I want to give something back to my community,’ ” he says.

Launching his nonprofit and ecocenter

With a zoology and biodiversity conservation degree in hand, he became a forest guide and naturalist at the Nyungwe Forest. Then, after being named Rwanda’s top young innovator in 2012, he used the prize money to create Biocoop. Last year Imanishimwe broadened his vision and set up the Kitabi EcoCenter, a camping site at the top of one of Rwanda’s highest and most scenic mountains that combines ecotourism with his conservation projects.

Although he toured the world in search of grants, it was here in the Kitabi region that he found one of his closest allies. He teamed up with Craig Conard, a pediatrician from New Orleans, who was working to prevent malnutrition at a nearby hospital. When Dr. Conard saw the site of the future ecocenter, he “fell in love with the place” and gave time and money to the cause. “At the end of the day, preserving the culture, helping the people, and conserving the environment of that special place is the most important, and something we have to do,” Conard says.

Imanishimwe’s vision has drawn interest far beyond the borders of this country. He was one of 100 young African leaders invited to the United States in 2015 as part of an initiative, during which he caught then-President Barack Obama’s attention during a heated discussion on climate change. It’s a moment he shares via YouTube, not without pride.

And this summer, in a partnership addressing biodiversity and endangered species in the Nyungwe Forest, a delegation from Germany visited to study Imanishimwe’s model.

‘Filling in a gap’

The bustling Rwandan capital of Kigali, at least five hours away by bus, showcases how this nation has turned into one of Africa’s fastest-growing economies, some say. But the sparkling paved roads out of the city have yet to reach Kitabi, revealing how much remains to be done.

Imanishimwe is playing his part in the renewal of the region as well as the country, says Eric Rukinga, a financial administrator responsible for 20 villages in the Kitabi area.

When Mr. Rukinga’s family returned to Rwanda in 1994 after decades in exile, it found a country “where hope was dead.” He adds, “Young people didn’t want to get involved.” But now, Imanishimwe is “filling in a gap,” engaging locals in various tasks.

“In 1994, young people mobilized to destroy our country, and now young people are mobilizing to rebuild the country,” says Rukinga, soaking in the views during his lunch break at the Kitabi EcoCenter. “That gives me hope.”

When young people need training or a sense of direction, Rukinga connects them to Imanishimwe. “I explain to them how Ange made it that far,” he says. The success of the ecocenter has prompted similar tourist base camps to open up, Rukinga says.

Imanishimwe’s focus on conservation comes alongside increased government awareness of the economic importance of harnessing the opportunities offered by Rwanda’s protected national parks. After long neglect, numerous initiatives have emerged in recent years to combat poaching, reforest the country, and educate guides who can teach the benefits of biodiversity.

But for many struggling villagers, the initiatives can feel remote, theoretical. “Those people had felt let down,” says Patrice Nzamuye, a former warden at the Nyungwe Forest who now works for a company that harvests pine, cypress, eucalyptus, and acacia in a buffer zone around the forest to limit encroachment. “Ange is making them understand that even if they never understood the importance of the forest, it’s time now for them to know that the forest generates money and that the money is being allocated into the community.”

Mugendashyamba, who first worked for Imanishimwe as a “walker” clearing invasive species, is now a “man for everything” at Biocoop. Charged with anything from taking care of the base camp’s chickens to setting up visitors’ sleeping quarters at the Kitabi EcoCenter, the poacher-turned-nature-protector has a roof over his head and a salary to feed his two children.

“And I’m telling other poachers they don’t have to kill animals to survive,” Mugendashyamba says on a cold night as he keeps alive a bonfire for those who are enjoying locally made ginger carrot soup.

Other groups protecting animals

UniversalGiving helps people give to and volunteer for top-performing charitable organizations around the world. All the projects below are vetted by UniversalGiving; 100 percent of each donation goes directly to the listed cause.

• Merazonia runs a wildlife rescue and rehabilitation center on 250 acres of Amazon rainforest in Ecuador. Take action: Financially support the renovation of this organization’s clinic.

• Osa Conservation applies scientific and other expertise to safeguarding the biodiversity of the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica.

• Romania Animal Rescue aids animals from poor areas, with a focus on spay and neuter services. Take action: Make a donation to support this organization’s Homeless Animal Hospital Project.

Leah Millis/Reuters

Migrants receive food Dec. 12 at a camp in Tijuana, Mexico, that holds hundreds of migrants. They arrived at the US border from Central America in a caravan with the intention of applying for asylum in the US.

Tragedies at the US-Mexico border begin with tragedies in Central America. 

When conditions in countries like Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala become unbearable, desperate people make a tough but logical choice: Head north, and hope to find a better life.

The problems they create at the border for both the US and Mexican governments are well known. Many of them live miserable lives in camps and shelters waiting to find out if they’ll be allowed to enter the United States. Some have died. Youths waiting on the Mexican side are in danger of being recruited into criminal gangs. Some migrants have taken out loans to pay smugglers to bring them north; they dare not return home without any means to repay them. 

Americans, meanwhile, remain torn between deep compassion for the migrants’ plight and a desire to maintain an orderly and secure southern border.

Yesterday the Trump administration, along with the government of new Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, took encouraging steps to begin working together to address the root cause of the migration crisis: civil and economic chaos in the migrants’ home countries.

The US said Tuesday that it has pledged $10.6 billion to help develop Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, along with southern Mexico – that country’s most impoverished region. Much of the aid is in the form of loans or private investments or funds that were already designated for this use. 

Still, the move represents a 180-degree reversal by the current US administration, which had threatened to cut off aid to Central American countries unless they stopped the flow of migrants. The Trump administration had reviewed aid to the region during the Obama years and had concluded it had been ineffective.

For its part, the Mexican government pledged to spend $25 billion to develop southern Mexico over the next five years. Mr. López Obrador has argued that employment opportunities in that region could keep Central Americans looking for work from traveling on to the US border. 

While Mexican manufacturing jobs flourished along the US border under the NAFTA trade agreement and the tourism industry has lifted employment on the sunny coasts, Mexico’s south, which borders Central America, has languished.

The most encouraging aspect of the announcement may be that the US and Mexico have agreed to work together to solve a thorny issue. “The announcement reflects the importance that both countries grant to our bilateral relationship,” Marcelo Ebrard, Mexico’s foreign minister, said.

The agreement, which costs US taxpayers nothing in extra taxes, is a “creative solution” to the problem of how to take joint action, says Christopher Wilson, deputy director of the Mexico Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington. It’s a recognition that “migration from Central America [is] a regional issue, not something that one country can handle on its own,” he says.

At this stage the US-Mexico agreement may be more a gesture than a solution, but it is a step in the right direction.