(ANALYSIS) Some cannabis proponents baptize modern drug culture in ancient authority. This isn’t the first effort to combine cannabis with Christianity — and it won’t be the last. Proverbs warns again and again: “Wine is a mocker, strong drink a brawler.” And Ephesians drives the point home: “Do not get drunk with wine… but be filled with the Spirit.”
Read More(ANALYSIS) Bad Bunny is more than a global music phenomenon; he’s a bona fide symbol of Puerto Rico. The church choir boy turned “King of Latin Trap” has songs, style and swagger that reflect the island’s mix of pride, pain and creative resilience. His music mixes reggaetón with the sounds of Puerto Rican everyday life, where devotion and defiance often live side by side.
Read MoreIn the last decade, more than a dozen coups have shaken West Africa and the Sahel. Amid this turmoil, religious leaders are emerging as stabilizers who are guiding dialogue and providing a moral compass in societies caught between soldiers and fractured civilian states.
Read MoreTwo soccer teams — each comprised of eight Muslims and eight Christians — faced off as a mixed crowd cheered. Only months earlier, 52 people were killed in yet another religious massacre nearby. Some of the players on the field had lost relatives in that attack. Yet, they chose sports over revenge.
Read MoreWhen other boys his age were trading Pokémon or Yu-Gi-Oh trading cards, Eric Lavin was collecting saints’ relics. In seventh grade, Lavin began writing to other dioceses to request relics, and now, more than 16 years later, Lavin has grown one New Jersey church’s collection from 20 to more than 600 relics.
Read MoreThe bottom line: There have been important, newsworthy trends taking place on the “religious left” as well as the “secular left.”
Read MoreThough his name is virtually unknown today, Isaacs went on to play a pivotal role during the period of first contact between the Zulu and Europeans. His widely reviewed 1836 memoir, “Travels and Adventures in Eastern Africa,” offers an eyewitness account of the Zulu under the indomitable King Shaka, who reigned from the 1810s to 1828.
Read More(ANALYSIS) Street protests spill into riots. Universities host intimidation campaigns. Digital mobs savage anyone who dares step outside the script. Across America, political anger is spilling into the open, and on the left it increasingly takes a violent shape. What begins as dissent can tip quickly into destruction.
Read More(REVIEW) Visitors to Canterbury Cathedral in the U.K. have been surprised to find that parts of the building’s majestic architecture are currently daubed with eye-catching graffiti. But this is not the work of vandals. The colorful graphics are part of a thought-provoking art installation centered on the idea of asking questions to God.
Read More(REVIEW) It can be easy to forget the role physical space plays in sustaining religions, for good or for ill, and why talks of bringing about a “New Jerusalem” were not so far-fetched. They started in places made of brick and stone — and as Fergus Butler-Gallie points out, “Jerusalem is a somewhere, not a nowhere. Specifically, it is here.”
Read More(ESSAY) Again and again, deadly incidents occur at Cuba’s largest garbage dump — sometimes from sudden eruptions of violence, sometimes from hunger or disease. But a group of about 50 locals, led by a pastor, have banded together to look out for one another. “Sometimes they kill each other over a piece of copper,” said one local woman.
Read More(EXPLAINER) When a life-size skeleton dressed like the Grim Reaper first appeared on a street altar in Tepito, Mexico City, in 2001, many passersby instinctively crossed themselves. The figure was La Santa Muerte — or Holy Death — a female folk saint cloaked in mystery and controversy.
Read More(ANALYSIS) As Charleston demonstrates, these projects are not only about preserving the past – they are acts of recognition, respect and reconciliation, helping communities nationwide confront and honor the histories long denied to African-descended peoples.
Read MoreAn intrepid puppy who marches for labor rights. A 6-year-old girl who sews herself a locomotive to carry her away from her daily chores. A Jewish boy who would be pope. These stories — written in Yiddish — are all entertaining and whimsical, and like so much writing for young people, may be seen as less than serious.
Read MoreThe authors propose a revised, even countercultural way of relating to one another despite our differing views on controversial issues. Based on more than 100 interviews, the book proposes that LGBTQ Christians have something to teach us about Christian faith, and they, in turn, might learn something from conservative Christians.
Read MoreThis past September marked the 175th anniversary of the legal restoration of the Catholic Church in 1850. Pope Pius IX issued the papal bull Universalis Ecclesiae, restoring the Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales and creating 13 new dioceses. Since then, figure show that the number of Catholics has grown steadily.
Read MoreAblution, or wudu, is often performed before prayer and involves washing the hands, face, mouth, nostrils, arms, and feet in a certain sequence with running water. “I always travel across Africa with work. Many buildings and public spaces have no wudu facilities. This makes most Muslims uncomfortable,” said one frequent traveler.
Read More(ANALYSIS) Halloween used to be different. Very different. Before Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger, before trick-or-treating and crowded costume parties, it was All Hallows’ Eve. It was a night when candles burned for the dead and prayers rose into the dark. Families across Europe gathered in solemn silence, marked more by reverence than by revelry.
Read More(REVIEW) “The Exorcist” has always stuck out to me as a movie because of its universality, its appeal to both the religious and secular. “Exorcistic” is a byproduct of the movie’s lasting influence in media that certainly leaves a wild impression of its own. It’s worth seeing if you want something to put you into the Halloween spirit.
Read More(ANALYSIS) Two hundred years ago, on Oct. 26, 1825, New York Gov. DeWitt Clinton boarded a canal boat by the shores of Lake Erie. Amid boisterous festivities, his vessel, the Seneca Chief, embarked from Buffalo, the westernmost port of his brand-new Erie Canal.
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