Pastor Ray says that the Good Samaritan story leads Christians to ask, Where is the church in the healing of these wounds?
“The healing of our wounds becomes the healing of your wounds as well,” he says.
Fewer men than women show up in U.S. churches, and women are markedly more likely to pray and to hold up religion as important. But in Muslim nations, it’s the women who are missing in action at the mosque — and yet they’re on par with men in upholding almost all the Muslim pillars of faith.
Sophie Kasiki, one of the few Western women to have seen the Islamic State group’s harsh “caliphate” in Syria and escaped, recounts her life in the jihadists’ stronghold Raqqa with detached calm and inner rage. Born to a Catholic family in Cameroon and living in Paris since the age of 9, she converted to Islam as an adult. She traveled with her 4-year-old son to Syria in February 2015, to join three friends who had left for jihad a few months before.
Belgian Muslim and Catholic organizations are condemning the terrorist bombings in Brussels. A statement issued by the Belgian Muslim Executive (EMB) committee, an umbrella group, said the organization “condemns with force and without reservation” what it called “acts of extreme cruelty against innocent civilians.”
The highest calling of our civil government is to enable people to flourish, secure in communities with liberty and justice for all. In pursuit of that goal, they must at times take appropriate action in pursuit of public safety. However, as the recent police shootings in Chicago and elsewhere have shown, civil servants can commit injustices in the pursuit of their goals. I fear that this happened last March when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested more than 2,000 “criminal aliens” in a sweep it called Operation Cross Check. I fear it is happening again in recent raids to deport Central American women and children seeking asylum and safety from violence.
With Australia’s Harmony Day falling during Holy Week this year, this is a timely opportunity to meditate upon Jesus’ call to love thy neighbor and ask, “What is the connection between loving God and neighbor?” And, “Can you have one without the other?”
On this first day of our campaign, Louisa Hope — taken hostage and shot in Sydney’s Lindt Café siege, that made international news just over one year ago — tells her story. It’s a challenging testimony of how Jesus’ love, seen in his death on the cross, can overflow into love of others.
An Italian bishop has clashed with a pair of priests who want to invite Muslims to pray inside their churches in a bid to promote tolerance in a diocese in Tuscany.
“The deserved, necessary and respectful welcome of people who practice other faiths and religions does not mean offering them space for prayers inside churches designed for liturgy and the gathering of Christian communities,” Bishop Fausto Tardelli of Pistoia said in a statement reported on March 19.
In 2016, I celebrate 20 years of walking in the footsteps of many women who have paved the way for me to me to become a leader. On this day in Women’s History Month, I write about two women of God who stand out most. You’ll find the name of one in the Bible and the other on my birth certificate.
In 2005, Amina Wadud stepped in front of a crowd of one hundred Muslims, women and men, to offer a sermon and lead them in prayer — something previously unheard of for a woman to do. Wadud has been vocal about gender equality in Islam for decades. She is a prominent speaker, writer, and scholar of Islamic studies. But I didn’t know of her until my senior year of college. In my last class as an undergraduate student, I decided to take a class on Islam. I was intrigued by our reading list at the beginning of the semester, but Amina Wadud and her book, Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam, were just words on my syllabus.
I am a big believer in shaking things up and approaching ideas through an unexpected perspective. Like the billboard I saw in Minnesota: It read, at the top, “Minnesota Cremation Society.” In the middle was a photo of a casket, and underneath, it read, “Think outside the box.”