Religion News Service Top Ten Religion Stories by Rabbi A. James Rudin:
1. Islamic extremist groups, especially the Islamic State and Boko Haram, dominated the year’s news with atrocities that included beheadings, crucifixions, mass killings and persecution of religious minorities, including Christians in Africa and the Middle East. …
2. The pope continued to reshape both the global Roman Catholic Church and the Vatican’s central leadership. …
3. The decline of religious identity and observance in much of Europe and the United States continued in 2014. …
4. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict attracted headlines because of the war in Gaza; …
5. Twenty-five years after the collapse of the self-proclaimed atheistic Soviet Union, Orthodox Christianity is surging in Russia, …
6. 2014 saw significant gains for the LGBT communities. …
7. Violent clashes continued between Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. …
8. Clergy wrongdoing, both sexual and financial, crossed religious lines during the year….
9. Mormon church leaders publicly acknowledged that the church’s founder and prophet, Joseph Smith, had at least 40 wives, including a girl who was just 14. …
10. Notable deaths during the year included 110-year-old pianist and Holocaust survivor Alice Herz-Sommer; Jewish public intellectual Leonard Fein; mysticism scholar Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi; and Bishop John J. Nevins, the first Catholic bishop of Venice, Fla., and a pioneering leader in Catholic-Jewish relations.
Read all here.
What are your top stories?
Posted by Ann Fontaine
By Diariocritico de Venezuela (flickr) [CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons