Thousands of migrants and asylum seekers who left Myanmar for better opportunities in Malaysia are facing uncertain deportation. After Myanmar’s coup, the new military regime announced it would send three ships to collect 1,200 citizens from a Malaysian detention center that houses both migrants and asylum seekers. If deported, religious and ethnic minorities would return to the persecution in Myanmar that they fled.
Read More(REVIEW) Church historian Massimo Faggioli's new book “Joe Biden and Catholicism in the United States” offers background of the three previous times a Catholic candidate has been the nominee for the highest office in the land and why Biden's candidacy and now presidency comes at a particularly fraught moment for not just American Catholicism but the global church.
Read MoreOn Feb. 14, President Joe Biden reestablished the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships — an office largely ignored by the Trump administration — and announced Melissa Rogers as executive director, who served the same role in the Obama administration. The office was created by President George W. Bush two decades ago to improve communication with and ensure equal access to government funding by faith-based and secular civil society organizations helping local communities, in part to reduce the need for welfare spending.
Read More(OPINION) How do you define anti-Semitism? Jews are wrestling with this idea as President Biden handles international relations with Israel. This leaves Jews asking, what constitutes fair political criticism of Israel and what is unfair — or biased — criticism of Israel that bleeds into hateful anti-Semitism?
Read MoreThis week’s Weekend Plug-in explores the U.S. Supreme Court’s order stopping California’s ban on indoor worship in most of the state, while allowing a 25 percent capacity limit and a prohibition on singing and chanting. Plus, catch up on all the top reads in the week’s religion headlines.
Read MoreA rock formation in rural Kenya attracts pilgrims from a variety of Christian sects that mix Catholic and Anglican practices with traditional African paganism. Some even receive angelic messages, they say.
Read MoreWhat is the future of American conservatism? This question and others were discussed in a Feb. 11 webinar in the “Conservative Conversations with ISI” series.
Read More(REVIEW) “Minari” is the story of a Korean American family that moves from California to a stretch of farmland in the Ozarks to start over. What they encounter there grows their family through trial and brings them closer to the land they tend to.
Read More(OPINION) What has been the result of some Catholic news websites giving Trump any form of editorial support? Catholic news sites across the doctrinal spectrum should have done a better job calling out both sides — something the mainstream press no longer does, especially on moral, cultural and religious issues.
Read More(OPINION) Farah Shaheen, a 12-year-old Christian girl, was kidnapped from Faisalabad in June 2020 and abused by three men who chained her to a cattle pen. They claimed that she married one of her abductors, a 29-year-old Muslim man, of her own will. However, her family tells a different story.
Read MoreThe National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul claims a 1,200-year-old Hebrew prayer book at the Museum of the Bible was stolen from their collection in the nineties. It’s the latest in a series of scandals about looted and forged antiquities that has rocked the Museum of the Bible since its 2017 opening in Washington, D.C.
Read More(ANALYSIS) Recent global headlines sparked by a former BBC reporter claimed that 750 Orthodox Christians were killed in northern Ethiopia, but there is not evidence of these deaths. Moreover, international media has mischaracterized the recent crisis in Ethiopia and ignored decades of history that’s pitted federal armed forces against the powerful, well-funded Tigrean People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).
Read More(OPINION) President Biden, in his first hours in office, directed each government agency to spend the next 100 days reframing all gender policies surrounding transgender students. The backlash from other Catholics in power has brought further controversy about Biden being a “fake Catholic.”
Read More(ANALYSIS) The share of Americans who self-identify as evangelicals has not changed in any meaningful way over the past decade. In fact, larger shares of Americans have said that they have had a born-again experience in 2018 than at any point since 1972, according to the General Social Survey. Moreover, their link with politics may in fact be a central reason evangelicals are not declining significantly as a share of the U.S. population.
Read MoreSince the fall of President Suharto in 1998 and especially since the establishment of regional autonomy in 2001, there has been controversy over the practice by many Indonesian public schools to require Muslims and non-Muslims to wear symbols related to religion, like a headscarf.
Read More(OPINION) Katherine Stewart, Times reporter outwardly against the Christian Right, makes the surprising assertion that to understand Sen. Josh Hawley’s role in the unprecedented furies of recent weeks we must look back 16 centuries to one of the hottest theological disputes in Christian history.
Read More(OPINION) Nearly half (49%) of participating pastors agreed with the statement: “I frequently hear members of my congregation repeating conspiracy theories they have heard about why something is happening in our country,” revealing that QAnon conspiracy theorists are spreading from the Internet to the pews.
Read MoreThe Catholic Church in Germany is already the most disruptive and wealthiest national church in communion with the Pope of Rome. Now, the bishops of the German Catholic Church are dropping a massive, controversial document onto the Vatican’s lap that seeks to break away from Catholic doctrine in the realms of sexual morality, ordination of women and episcopal authority.
Read More(ANALYSIS) Myanmar’s military has held a prominent political position in the country for decades. For almost 50 years, the country was under successive military regimes. These regimes displayed an ambivalent attitude to the country’s main religion, Buddhism – Buddhist movements, which were on the whole in opposition to military rule, were severely repressed.
Read MoreNearly a dozen pastors and church workers in Florida and elsewhere have been charged with possessing child pornography and/or other sex crimes against children in recent months.
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