“Christianity in the Niger Delta is seriously questionable, putting a traditional religion together with Christian religion – and it makes nonsense out of it,” he says. “If you are not rich and don’t have anything to eat, you look to blame someone. And if you don’t get anything, you blame it on the witches.”
Seventy years ago last night the Holocaust formally began in Nazi Germany during an organized riot since known as “Kristallnacht.” On the night of November 9-10, 1938, 92 Jews were murdered and as many as 30,000 were sent to concentration camps, more than 200 Synagogues and thousands of Jewish businesses and homes were ransacked or destroyed.
In this time of extreme violence against Christians in Iraq, the Rt. Rev. Michael Lewis, The Anglican Bishop of Cyprus and the Gulf, whose diocese
Christians in eastern Indian state of Orissa are being told “Embrace Hinduism, and your house will not be demolished, otherwise, you will be killed, or
Nearly 1,000 Christian families have fled their homes in Mosul since Friday, taking shelter on the northern and eastern fringes of Nineveh province, according to provincial governor Duraid Kashmula. He said the violence was the worst against Christians in five years.
Iranian students have released a book containing cartoons of the Holocaust, including some depicting hospitalized Jews on respiratory machines attached to canisters of Zyklon B, the gas used to exterminate Jews during World War II. Meanwhile, a British publisher’s house was set afire, after he decieed to publish a novel about the early life of one Muhammad’s wives.
The poll of 600 Southern white evangelicals was released Sept. 11 in Atlanta in connection with a national religious summit on torture. It shows not only are white evangelical Southerners more likely than the general populace to believe torture is sometimes or often justified, but also that they are far more likely—to tweak a phrase from Proverbs—to “lean on their own understanding” regarding the subject.
September 11 is a good day to remember the late Father Mychal Judge, the Franciscan chaplain of the New York Fire Department who died when the twin towers fell. Judge was gay, a fact that writer Mike Kelly says aroused little concern–or even interest in the fire department. The Vatican, however, is not equally enlightened. Can the church accept a gay saint?
On Sunday, The Washington Post wrote that while China was allowing Olympic athletes freedom of worship, the policy did not extend to its own citizens.
End-time thinking – the belief in a world purified by catastrophe – could once be dismissed as a harmless remnant of a more superstitious age. But with the rise of religious fundamentalism, prophets of apocalypse have become a new and very real danger, argues Ian McEwan in The Guardian.