(ANALYSIS) A recent report by U.N. Women revealed that female empowerment has been a top priority in Malaysia, the southeast Asian country of 35 million people. From running tech startups, costume and jewelry businesses to driving public buses, women in Muslim-dominated Malaysia are largely economically, socially and culturally independent.
Read More(REVIEW) “The Many Lives of Anne Frank” is trenchant, elegant and relevant — beautifully written, almost like a novel. Franklin achieves the seemingly impossible: Allowing the reader to see the flesh-and-blood Anne — complex, rambunctious, talkative, critical, acerbic, funny and vivacious — rather than the homogenized and sentimentalized figure enshrined in pop culture.
Read MorePastor Landon Schott and his Mercy Culture Church gave Michael Brown a hero’s welcome, with confetti and applause, as he returned to ministry this week following sex abuse allegations.
Read MoreAs a Christian ecologist and professor at Gordon College, Dorothy Boorse has endeavored to connect science to faith communities for over 30 years. Throughout her writing, she links the core Christian values of justice, compassion, and caring for the least of these to pressing climate issues. She recently spoke with Religion Unplugged about her career shift from pre-med to wetland ecologist, loving your neighbor, and polarization on environmental issues during the Trump administration.
Read MoreWhether or not this gender swap happens in the film, this should not be a surprise. Hollywood is moving toward a full-scale change in how it treats faith. Instead of elevating secularism over faith, Hollywood is adopting it as good when driven by women, but bad whenspearheaded by men. This change is putting it on a collision course with a growing alternative media, setting the stage for a new gender-coded culture war.
Read More(REVIEW) “Fallen,” the love story of a girl loved by a fallen angel, has been adapted to the screen twice since the original book was released in 2009. Its most recent adaptation to television, an eight-episode season now streaming on AMC+, suggests a more negative view of religion that’s developed over the past decade — and it’s worse off narratively for not embracing the original story’s theology.
Read MoreThe Rev. Dr. Fran Tilton Shelton’s ministry as a Presbyterian (PCUSA) pastor has always been focused on pastoral care and grieving — so much so that her late husband Bob humorously called her “Funeral Fran.” Now a parish associate at the First Presbyterian Church of Dallas, Shelton is also a spiritual director and the co-founder of Faith & Grief Ministries.
Read More(ANALYSIS) In the United States, April is designated as Genocide Prevention and Awareness Month and is aimed at commemorating and raising awareness about genocides that occurred in the past, including the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust and the Rwandan Genocide.
Read More(ANALYSIS) In January 2025, Trump’s administration halted visa processing for refugees. All refugee travel to the U.S. was to be canceled. This included the travel of nearly 1,660 Afghans cleared to resettle in America — including many women and girls who were facing serious risk upon return.
Read More(ANALYSIS) Now we are in the phase of cellphones, screen time and socialization. The data about the social lives of high school students is incredibly bleak and honestly makes me very worried for the next generation. Let me show you what I mean by generating a handful of graphs from this great dataset called Monitoring the Future.
Read MoreThe Texas House passed a bipartisan bill banning nondisclosure clauses in sexual abuse settlement agreements April 8, championed on the House floor by Rep. Jeff Leach, a Southern Baptist who is among the bill’s five authors. Known as Trey’s Law, the bill outlaws the use of NDAs in settlement agreements regarding sexual abuse, regardless of the age of the abused.
Read MoreFive cases addressing religious liberty ranging from parental rights to age verification on pornographic sites will be decided when the Supreme Court announces its decisions in the coming months.
Read More(REVIEW) Janis Ian’s songs are known for their sharp social commentary, but what director Varda Bar-Kar uncovers in her new documentary “Janis Ian: Breaking Silence,” is how central Ian’s Judaism was to her activism. Ian, who was born in New Jersey, legally changed her name from Janis Fink to Janis Ian in 1964, adopting her brother Eric’s middle name as her last name.
Read MoreGrief can take many forms — the echo of a loved one’s laugh, a favorite saying or even a silly joke. It’s a belonging on a living room table, clothes you can’t quite bring yourself to donate or a domestic animal who wanders the house aimlessly after a loved one’s death.
Read MoreIn many countries around the world, a fifth or more of adults have left the religious group in which they were raised. Christianity and Buddhism have experienced large losses from this “religious switching,” while rising numbers of adults have opted to have no affiliation, according to Pew Research Center surveys of nearly 80,000 people across 36 countries.
Read MoreAmerican men have outpaced women in church attendance, reversing a longstanding trend of more women in the pews that narrowed in 2016, Barna said in its 2025 State of the Church release, created in partnership with Gloo. Women had outpaced men in attendance since 2000, then at 47 percent to 38 percent, before men began outpacing women in 2022.
Read More(REVIEW) If you were to visit a home in Amsterdam in the 17th Century, you might find, in the kitchen, the library, or even inside the fireplace, a scene of the biblical Queen Esther approaching her husband the king. In galleries, you could see the queen, who Jews commemorate every Purim for her salvation of the Jewish people in ancient Persia, in paintings by Rembrandt, his pupils and contemporaries.
Read More(ANALYSIS) If she were still alive, March 25 would mark Flannery O’Connor’s 100th birthday. This milestone invites us to explore the many ways in which her Catholic faith shaped her literary genius. O’Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, where Protestantism was the norm. Her decision to follow Catholicism wasn’t just a personal faith choice, but a key part of her identity and a driving force in her writing.
Read More(ANALYSIS) The Iranian regime continues to ramp up efforts to restrict the rights of citizens across the country, and this is to crush dissent. According to a new report of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran, Iranian authorities have committed gross human rights violations, some of which amount to crimes against humanity.
Read More(ANALYSIS) Even though the Empress Dowager Ling’s rule was problematic and short — resulting in her assassination — she laid the foundation for other, more successful female rulers across medieval East Asia. Empress Dowager Ling was not a warrior, but she embraced martial symbols of her own power that were available to women in Taghbach culture, not in Chinese culture.
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