The incident took place just days after attacks on a Coptic church and another Christian-owned shop also south of the Egyptian capital that killed more than 10 people, as security forces braced for attacks against the Arab world's largest Christian minority ahead of Orthodox Christmas celebrations.
Pope Francis described migrants and refugees as the world's "weakest and most needy" on Monday, using his traditional New Year's address to "give voice" to people he has urged leaders to do more to help.
As one who enjoys the benefits of privilege in today's world, I felt it important to submit my own sense of what is just and right to other perspectives, especially other perspectives that are informed by biblical witness and the Christian gospel. The 2017 Summit represented that sort of challenge for me.
How do we become more prophetic?
First, we spend time with God each day growing into the vision. Day by day, we see ourselves and our world through God’s eyes a little more clearly.
2. From Evangelicals to Witches: How Religion Shaped 2017
Vox highlights four major religious trends, shifts, and changes in 2017, and ends with a little dose of optimism for 2018.
3. Real Gratitude Shouldn’t Be Easy: On ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’
“At our frequent worst, gratitude isn’t something we feel so much as calculate, tallying our advantages to weigh against the miseries of others. In the privacy of our own minds, our gratitude can bear a family resemblance to schadenfreude—a secret reassurance that others will always have it worse.”
Start by saying yes: to God’s love, to engaged citizenship, to service to what is right, and courageous resistance to what is wrong.
Francis, leader of the world's 1.2 billion Roman Catholics, urged people to see the defenseless baby Jesus in the children who suffer the most from war, migration, and natural calamities caused by man today.
In the midst of fear and despair, Jim Wallis finds comfort and joy through living and trusting Christmas.
“I am so pro-protest and call-out and raising hell. I feel it coming,” one Auburn graduate and Alabama native, who recently moved to Minnesota, told me.
"I think the opportunities to act on these convictions for the good of others will continue opening. I hope they do. I’m ready for them.”
2017 was a year in which people were all too often treated as means to an end.
Perhaps in 2018 we can inscribe a different kind of a lesson.