Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly

Bruce Lasky, founder of Bridges Across Borders Southeast Asia, is setting up legal clinics and instilling in Asian law students the moral obligation to help the poor.

As it celebrates its 100th anniversary, one of the main branches of Judaism faces challenges as membership declines and leaders look for ways to expand outreach, especially to younger Jews.

“A Franciscan told me once, ‘Don’t keep track of the score. The score will take care of itself.’” Writer James Lee Burke’s best-selling crime novels are full of biblical imagery, messianic language, the influences of his Roman Catholic boyhood, and a longing for redemption.

Watch excerpts from a panel discussion at Georgetown University examining the influence of Pope Francis' leadership on American public life six months after his election.

"For the protection of government as well as for the protection of religion, they need to be separate. I think when government gets involved in religion, it corrupts religion, and I think when religion gets involved with government, it can corrupt government," says plaintiff Susan Galloway.

Programs to vaccinate children here have been hampered by a suspicions about the purpose of the vaccinations, violence from extremists, and critics who say Pakistan has more pressing problems to deal with.

In this predominantly Muslim nation, religious extremism and resentment of the West both contribute to violence against Pakistani Christians. "We feel most of the time we are not equal. Not only not equal, but the growing feeling is that we are not even wanted," says the Catholic archbishop of Karachi.

"As a person of faith, if I am to turn my back on people who have needs, medical needs, physical needs, I have turned my back on my faith," says Rev. Art Cribbs, executive director of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice. But Biola University religion and ethics professor Scott Rae believes Obamacare takes too much authority out of the hands of individuals.

“The Arab world will always be a religious place,” says film director Haifaa Al-Mansour, but “it’s important not to see ourselves as us against the world. It’s more of us with the world.”

The United Methodist Church’s Book of Discipline states that “the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching,” and it prohibits Methodist ministers from performing same-sex marriages. But “these are unjust laws,” says Rev. Thomas Ogletree, “and therefore they do not really have the authority of law.”

The oldest surviving English version of the New Testament Gospels withstood Viking raids and the Dark Ages to be exhibited this summer at Durham Cathedral.

This modern artist’s body of work was based on the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish Jesus, often depicted with tallit and phylacteries.

"It is only the threat of force that has brought the Syrians to this point, a point that they’ve resisted for decades," says Brookings Institution senior fellow William Galston. "So it is unrealistic to forswear the use of force unless and until an agreement can be reached."

"If four little girls dressed in white for Sunday school can be blown to pieces because of hatred, everyone has to stop and think, where are we going as a society?"

“Sixteenth Street Church had unwillingly come into the civil rights movement and was quick to exit the movement—and yet in many ways it becomes the symbol of the movement in Birmingham—so much so that following the dynamite blast, many of its members leave.”