Donald Trump campaigned, in part, on returning political power to American Christians. “If I get in, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used before,” Trump promised a room full of religious news broadcasters in February 2024. “With your help and God’s grace, the great revival of America begins on November 5.” At different campaign events, he vowed both that Christian leaders would have a line “directly into the Oval Office—and me” and that he would create a federal task force to “stop the weaponization of our government against Christians.” Now, not even three weeks into his new term, he has begun down quite the opposite path.

Among the Trump administration’s first efforts were orders that delivered a stunning blow to humanitarian organizations, including the suspension of foreign aid pending review, the halting of refugee-resettlement programs, the dismantling of USAID, and the freezing of all federal grants that normally flow to nonprofit organizations such as Catholic Charities USA, the official domestic relief agency of the Catholic Church. Catholic Charities represents a network of 168 local groups nationwide offering disaster assistance, meals, and housing for people in need, and refugee services and programs for migrants. According to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, the freeze was part of a broader effort to root out “wokeness,” though it’s difficult to match that descriptor to this particular organization. And although the freeze on federal grants and loans was paused two days after Trump signed the order, many organizations are still unable to access funds.

[Read: You can’t just unpause USAID]

Late last month, hundreds of leaders from Catholic relief and aid organizations met for the annual Catholic Social Ministry Gathering in Washington, D.C. What ensued was “a scene of real panic,” Stephen Schneck, the chair of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, told me. “They were in shock, and they were disturbed, and they were feeling really panicky about the situation and wondering what to do.” Schneck recalled speaking with an attendee from El Paso, Texas, who was suddenly unable to buy diapers for babies in his charity’s care. “And this happened with no warning, no extensions,” Schneck said. “It just happened overnight.” Catholic agencies providing relief overseas were also affected by the freeze on foreign aid, which came with a stop-work order that suspended operations.

Along with the shutdown of federal funding for so many Catholic charitable organizations, Trump also revoked a Joe Biden–era policy that prevented Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from apprehending people in or near “sensitive locations” such as churches and schools. The change elicited a statement from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which registered its dismay at the transformation of places for “care, healing, and solace into places of fear and uncertainty for those in need,” and called for “a better path forward that protects the dignity of all those we serve, upholds the sacred duty of our providers, and ensures our borders and immigration system are governed with mercy and justice.”

The statement set off a back-and-forth between the bishops and Vice President J. D. Vance, who responded to the bishops on Face the Nation late last month, saying that “the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?” The USCCB followed up with another statement, saying that “faithful to the teaching of Jesus Christ, the Catholic Church has a long history of serving refugees … In our agreements with the government, the USCCB receives funds to do this work; however, these funds are not sufficient to cover the entire cost of these programs. Nonetheless, this remains a work of mercy and ministry of the Church.”

[Read: Bishop Budde delivered a truly Christian message]

Vance, speaking with the Fox News host Sean Hannity, provided further Catholic reasoning for his administration’s approach to migrants and refugees, arguing that he thinks it’s “a very Christian concept that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world”—a statement to which the bishops have not responded. If they did, however, I imagine they would point out that Jesus addresses this matter in his Sermon on the Mount, saying, “If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” The Christian mandate is more arduous than Vance’s account seems to allow.

Catholic politicians disputing the bishops’ witness to the faith is nothing new, though the allegations of avarice and corruption are somewhat surprising, and presage bitter conflict ahead. Perhaps that could be helpful, insofar as it would sharply distinguish the teaching of the Church from certain politicized versions of Catholicism tailored to the ideological preferences of their confessors. The Church is called to be a sign of contradiction—a bulwark of Christian priorities against the demands of the political and cultural eras that the faithful pass through. Comporting with political and cultural demands is what politicians do; the degree to which Catholic politicians do the same is the degree to which they ought to suspect themselves spiritually compromised. Perhaps they all are, and perhaps so are we.

In fact, the tendency of humankind to be self-serving and deceitful is part of what makes me believe that Christianity is at its purest and most beautiful when it is counterintuitive and unwieldy—that is, when it is least amenable to human convenience. The command to love even those who aren’t your kith and kin is an excellent example of just that. The command to serve the weakest and most outcast members of society is another. Thus, the decision to love and serve the stranger, the refugee, and the foreigner with charity is a hallmark of the Christian faith, such that a government crackdown on this work seems to be a threat to Christian practice itself, or an attempt to reshape it into something else altogether.

Taking stock of your life can be simpler when you’re half a world away from home. For Tove Jansson, arguably Finland’s most famous writer of the 20th century, a vacation in 1971 marked an unexpected turn following a tumultuous year. After more than two decades of acclaim thanks to her fictional creatures, the Moomins, Jansson, then 57, was on the brink of potential burnout. Instead of coasting on her reputation as a beloved children’s author, she was trying something new, writing novels for adults. In the middle of this career pivot, in 1970, her mother died, compounding Jansson’s feeling that her life was changing irrevocably. “I am going around in a great sense of unreality, calm, but so alien,” she wrote to friends. She needed an escape.

That vacation—culminating in a long trip to the United States—upended her outlook on the balance of work and life, as well as on the key subject of her fiction: a sense of home. Throwing out a packed work schedule, Jansson submerged herself in not only an entirely new landscape, but also an alien culture undergoing post-’60s social upheaval. This experience changed the tenor of her work, and it helped her become the author Americans continue to discover more than 50 years later.

Though Jansson’s global fame still derives from those cheeky Moomins captured in comics and illustrated novels, her books for adults are rich and complex, revealing the stickiness of human coexistence. Jansson conveys a wry, layered empathy rooted in her Nordic traditions, informed by her queerness, and tested by her encounters with American morals and migratory habits. Thanks to a steady parade of recent reissues with introductions by Ali Smith, Lauren Groff, and others, this mature work has quietly developed a readership in the United States. A recent film adaptation of her sweet autobiographical novel The Summer Book may win new converts, but true enthusiasts will seize on the latest rerelease, Sun City, which explores an aspect of American life—the isolation of the aging—that often goes unseen.

Before her American journey, Jansson had been living a life both idyllic and in many ways restricting. She’d been raised by well-known Finnish Swedish artists and remained inseparable from them, leaving art school in Stockholm at 19 to return home to Helsinki, where she would continue her education while writing and creating commercial artwork to better support her family. By 1970, she was tending to her aging mother, Ham, and in a relationship with her longtime partner, Tuulikki Pietilä, that was technically illegal. In Helsinki, the couple lived separately in neighboring studios, though they spent summers in a house on the island of Klovharun, where they could live together in relative privacy. Within a year of Ham’s death, homosexuality was decriminalized in Finland. Jansson felt as though a chapter of her life had ended.

Fulfilling an old dream, Jansson and Pietilä took an eight-month journey. Beginning with a business trip to Japan, they gradually made their way to the continental United States. In New Orleans, Jansson completed The Summer Book, which idealized her spartan life on Klovharun. The next book she wrote, mostly after returning from the U.S., couldn’t be more different: Sun City depicted a Florida retirement home with none of the sentimental warmth of Finland.

[Read: What you should be reading this summer]

Sun City was inspired by a stay in St. Petersburg, Florida, where the couple had gone to see the ship used in the film Mutiny on the Bounty. Charmed by the town during what was supposed to be a short visit, the couple checked into a guesthouse called the Butler Arms. The perspective of distance, the novelty of the southern United States, and the break from routine presented unexpected creative gifts.

What began as a short story evolved into a novel about loneliness and contrived community. Sun City renders St. Petersburg as a place where “streets lie empty in their perpetual sunshine.” Setting the novel in the fictionalized Berkeley Arms, Jansson follows people on the margins who are reaching the end of their life without strong communal ties. Residents have drifted from all over the country into this boardinghouse arrangement. Among these loners, miscommunication abounds and short tempers flare. One guest tearfully reflects, “Distrust was a poison that made a person shrink up and lose all contact with real life.” This false Eden, sunny but stark, feels like a photonegative of Jansson’s cozy but rugged Klovharun (lovingly rendered in another recent reissue, the nonfictional Notes From an Island).

Sun City operates as a series of vignettes without a strong unifying plot—appropriate for a work about idiosyncratic humans who may share a pretty veranda lined with rocking chairs but occupy hermetically sealed worlds of their own. A proud woman named Rebecca Rubinstein dines alone with a cab running its fare outside the restaurant. She muses about her fellow residents: “We are also afraid, but we don’t show it, and we don’t open up to anyone. Our bodies no longer express anything. We have to get along entirely with words, nothing but words.”

Americans are often said to prize their personal space, but from Jansson’s perspective, the distance among these residents is a chasm, which prevents them from connecting with others. Their private histories remain fixed in amber rather than coalescing into a collective culture. After the sudden deaths of two sisters, one resident reflects, “None of us liked them and none of us wanted to know about their lives. We are being admonished to be more careful with each other.” No heartwarming community rises from these ashes. There’s too little time and not enough at stake.

The Berkeley Arms is a stately hotel run by Miss Ruthermer-Berkeley and Miss Catherine Frey. Ruthermer-Berkeley is 93, reflecting back on her life. Frey is her harried employee, whose patience is wearing thin. Linda, a young immigrant from Mexico, maintains the guest home as best she can. Linda’s distracted lover, Joe, works on the famous ship—the Bounty—and cruises around town on his motorcycle. She dreams of a passionate rendezvous in the marshes, while he anxiously awaits word from a group of Christians in Miami who promise him that Jesus is coming to whisk them away. The lovers talk past each other; neither shares the other’s innermost desire.

[Read: The antisocial century]

If Sun City represents Jansson’s thoughts on American society—particularly the way it treats its elders—it feels less like a quirky collection of tales, of the sort that made her famous, and more like a moral indictment. It may well be a product of extreme culture shock.

Jansson was not oblivious to the dangers of displacement before she visited Florida. Her best friend moved away to the U.S. during World War II; her father’s shocking sympathies with the Nazis could be traced to the trauma of the Finnish Civil War; her Swedish-born mother was homesick even after decades of building a home in Finland. Ham had supported the family with commercial work while her husband pursued his artistic ambition as a sculptor. Witnessing these marital compromises, Jansson was sure that she would never marry or have children. Yet she seems to have taken the stability and interconnectedness of family life as a given. Though she’d endowed her Moomins with freedom and rootlessness, the precarious independence she described in Sun City felt new in her mature, realist work.

The months-long break that spawned the novel didn’t represent a rupture from Jansson’s earlier life—or not exactly. But after the experience, she became a different kind of writer, partner, and person. Sun City, her third novel for adults, proved that she was not merely a whimsical artist and storyteller, but also a keen cultural critic who could transpose her observations into powerful prose. It served as a response to skeptics who may have considered her literary work delightfully regional but not globally significant.

Rethinking her many obligations after her trip, Jansson delegated some of the work that had been weighing her down (including the Moomins; she never wrote another Moomin-centered novel after her return). More broadly, she began to find a more harmonious balance between love and work, devotion and freedom.

The best evidence for this evolution lies in a work published 15 years after Sun City, the quasi-autobiographical novel Fair Play. When, at the close of the book, the main character’s partner—clearly based on Pietilä—leaves Helsinki for a year’s work in Paris, the couple’s resilience is tested. But this is not a road to alienation, American-style. It’s only a temporary fissure, leading to a more profound connection for both partners. In Fair Play, Jansson allows herself to envision a far more satisfying kind of independence than what she’d wrought in Sun City. As her fictional stand-in reflects: “She began to anticipate a solitude of her own, peaceful and full of possibility. She felt something close to exhilaration, of a kind that people can permit themselves when they are blessed with love.”