(COMMENTARY) Last week’s State Department summit brought together representatives from nearly 100 countries and dozens of faith groups to discuss threats and successes of religious freedom globally.
Read More(COMMENTARY) We need both points of view to flourish as a society.
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The book Evangelicals and Power in Latin America attempts to explain how the rise in evangelical voters will affect power and politics, human rights and the future of democracy in Latin America.
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The practice, enforced by some conservative Sunni clerics and condemned by others, requires a divorced Muslim woman to consummate a marriage with another man before she can remarry her first husband.
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Samaritan’s Purse, the poverty and crisis relief organization known for sending millions of shoeboxes to orphans every Christmas, has said it is mobilizing resources to alleviate the U.S.-Mexico border crisis. The announcement came 10 days after Christian singer Nichole Nordeman wrote an open letter to Graham in the Washington Post.
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This month, thousands of Indian Hindu pilgrims are visiting the northern state of Jammu and Kashmir — a region of armed conflict between Kashmiri Muslim militants and Indian security officials — to pray at the Amarnath cave and shrine. Thousands of Kashmiri Muslims are setting up shops and travel businesses to accommodate them.
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(COMMENTARY) Religious freedom, an old-school liberal issue now largely taken up by conservatives, is often lost in mainstream news coverage. Lost in this coverage is an issue of such importance to Roman Catholics, that it may very well be the biggest fallout to come from years of clerical sex abuse when it comes to how it affects the law.
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(COMMENTARY) We often hear discussion about whether religion causes violence or makes the world more violent. But maybe we should discuss if, in the absence of true religion, violence can become a religion?
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(NEWS ANALYSIS) Rodrigo Duterte has wasted no time going after clergy, particularly when the church began opposing his human rights record. His bloody war against drugs has shocked the church, but has been met largely with approval from his supporters.
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A bill to ban triple talaq, or Islamic instant divorce, is creating controversy in India. The bill could be unconstitutional in two ways: it would criminalize only Muslim men for deserting their wives and it trumps so-called personal laws meant to provide religious freedom in civil matters like marriage.
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(COMMENTARY) The women’s soccer team representing the Vatican — yes, the Vatican has a women’s soccer team — canceled its planned international debut in Austria when sports, religion and politics made for a bad mix.
Read MoreSaudi Arabia, China, Russia and Myanmar are the world’s worst offenders of religious freedom in 2018, according to the U.S. State Department’s International Religious Freedom Report.
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A fragile Christian alliance that supported Pres. Bolsonaro’s election to office in October is weakening amid rising unemployment, budget cuts to education, and their leader’s negative comments about women, black people and the LGBT community.
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The Rohingya, an ethnic minority persecuted by some Buddhist groups in Myanmar, are facing one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises of this century. We spoke to Yangon-based activist Sam Naeem about the evolution of their struggle so far.
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(COMMENTARY) On the one-year anniversary of the revelations that exposed the past misdeeds of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the story doesn’t look like it is subsiding anytime soon.
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A recent report estimates 60,000 organ transplant surgeries happen in China every year, an industry adding $1 billion a year to the economy and cracking down on religious groups seen as a threat to the Communist Party.
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Rebuilding Notre Dame will be a painstaking task. Estimated to cost in the billions, the cathedral has also become a political pawn in a broader fight between traditionalists and secularists. In a country divided politically — the recent European election was another reminder of this — the fate of Notre Dame very much rests in the hands of the country’s warring lawmakers.
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We talked with Steven Waldman, founder of BeliefNet and author of the new book Sacred Liberty, about America’s battles for religious freedom— how the notion that the US was founded with religious liberty in mind is wrong— our current challenges for preserving it, and much more.
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(COMMENTARY) What has been lacking throughout the ongoing abortion debate, from a media coverage standpoint, has been broader context. This is especially true of covering those who are adamantly opposed to abortion.
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From the White House to London and Brooklyn, interfaith iftars — the fast-breaking meals of Ramadan — are trending this year.
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