#religious-challenges

#religious-challenges

Sajjad's despair captures the suspended reality of millions in the Iranian capital. The absence of bombing does not equate to peace, as stark disparities in recovery persist across the city.

President Trump’s proclamation for Religious Freedom Day in 2026 emphasized Americans' 'God-given right to practice their faith' while linking support for religious liberty with eliminating 'anti-Christian bias.'

How reductive is Buddhist reductionism in the Nikāya Suttas? Soo Lam Wong examines the implications of reductionism within Buddhist texts and its philosophical significance.

In 2025, the nonreligious share of the American population declined again, with the atheist-agnostic share back down to levels seen in 2014, suggesting a potential revival.

Mistakes are almighty: you can't ever guarantee that the next moment will host no manifestation of a mistake. According to evolution theory, the diversity of life on Earth entirely emerges from copying mistakes of DNA polymerase.

U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson described Iran's majority faith tradition, Shiite Islam, as a 'misguided religion' while discussing the ongoing U.S. strikes against Iran on March 4, 2026.

Every year on Remembrance Day, the bishop of London leads a public Christian act of lamentation in the open air, accompanied by hymns, Bible readings, and prayers in the name of Jesus Christ.

We are living through one of the most disorienting periods in recorded history. The AI race is accelerating toward ever faster, ever more sophisticated automation and optimization. Agentic AI systems are moving from research labs into workplaces, healthcare, and governance. Geopolitical tensions are restructuring alliances faster than institutions can adapt. And planetary systems are signaling, with increasing urgency, that our current trajectory is unsustainable. Amid all this, it is dangerously easy to lose sight of a foundational question: What are we actually optimizing for?

The widespread practice of showing the Eid Al Adha slaughtering to children can desensitize them to violence, as many families take pride in this tradition.

Psychology researcher and professor Lisa Miller in her book The Spiritual Child explains that spirituality often increases in adolescence. The teenage brain has a larger gap between experiencing and interpreting than in adulthood. As a result, adolescents' feelings are strong, dramatic and oscillate more wildly than the playground swing you so recently used to push them on.

A mentor once told me that, when writing a research statement for a professorship, I had to start with the most ambitious pitch I could imagine - and then go ten times bigger. It's tricky enough to do this as a cosmologist, given that the topic of study is the entire Universe. But there is a quest that is more ambitious still: to find out 'what are we doing here?'

Traditionally, asteya is described as not taking what is not freely given. Stealing pertains not only to physical things. It is taking time. Taking ideas. Taking labor. Taking credit. Taking content.

Witnessing the presence of God at a bus stop in 2011, I felt overwhelmed by something indescribably majestic, which bared my soul to a profound realization.

So, a Christian Nationalist regime with their Jesus on their side, allied with a Jewish Nationalist regime with their HaShemon their side, have gone after an Islamic Nationalist regime with their Allah on their side, while each Nationalist regime believes they have morality on their side. And religious wars continue to bring humanity to the brink!

Church House has provided a veneer of spiritual legitimacy to Reform's anti-migrant and anti-Muslim politics, and their cynical scapegoating. As followers of Jesus, we must refuse to let the architecture of [the venue be used as a moral backdrop for policies that contradict the very heart of the Christian faith].

This was not random violence. This was a planned attack motivated by extremist ideology and inspired by a violent foreign terrorist organization. With this, she promptly raised the profile of both the suspects, Emir Balat and Ibrahim Kayumi, and of ISIS itself. It hardly seemed to matter that no evidence has surfaced that directly ties these men to the larger movement.

Shortly after the orderlies wheeled Jim away to be intubated, an intensive-care doctor explained to me and Alice that our brother was suffering from acute respiratory failure. This man, whom we'd never seen before, casually added that Jim was unlikely to make it to morning. Then he continued on his rounds. The first thing we did, once he'd left, was pray.

They escaped persecution in the form of violent antisemitism and came to Canada with next to nothing. They built their lives from the ground up and understood, through lived experience, what the normalization of cruelty did to the human spirit, how quickly people can be swayed by the opinions of the day, and how easily one could forfeit the human capacity to stop and truly think about what one is doing.

Some citizens might see themselves as Christian nationalists simply because they are Christian and patriotic. Others, however, assert that the United States is rightfully a Christian nation that ought to be governed by Christian leaders, ethics and laws. As a historian, I'm aware that Christian nationalism relies upon a selective and often distorted view of American history.