Extremist rebels have expelled virtually the entire Christian community in Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city. “It’s mass cleansing based on religion,” says the Syriac Catholic leader of the region, Patriarch Ignatius Youssef III Younan. More →

July 25, 2014

With millions of people in India suffering from mental illnesses and only five thousand psychiatrists to treat them, many seek out faith healers to fill in the gap. “Access to care is not there, lack of professionals, lack of medication, lack of awareness, lack of knowledge, so all this leads to only one thing,” says mental health advocate Milesh Hamlai. “You go to the easiest and the most available source of help.” More →

July 18, 2014

Vietnamese women and children from rural villages are regularly targeted for labor and sex trafficking. They are often lured with opportunities for work in China, and then sold as wives, prostitutes, or forced labor. “We were told that if we didn’t agree to be wives, we would be sold into brothels,” says one victim who managed to escape. More →

June 20, 2014

Pope Francis visited sacred sites recognized by Muslims, Christians, and Jews, including the Western Wall. He met with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and a range of other religious leaders, made unexpected stops at a terror memorial and at the separation wall that surrounds the West Bank city of Bethlehem, and he inserted himself into the peace process with a surprise invitation to a prayer summit at the Vatican. More →

May 30, 2014

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. More →

May 30, 2014

The number of people in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is going up steadily as a result of the lower age limits for both men and women who want to serve as missionaries. More →

May 30, 2014

The pope’s pilgrimage is intended on one level to commemorate the 1964 meeting between Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras that ended a thousand years of estrangement between Eastern and Western Christianity. But there are other agendas as well: interfaith dialogue, the Middle East peace process, the diminishing Christian presence in the Holy Land, encounters with Jewish and Palestinian religious and political leaders. More →

May 23, 2014

“It’s not that religious leaders are in a position to take political initiatives. But they represent the identities of the people, and to ignore the possibilities of interreligious support is rather short-sighted.” More →

May 23, 2014

The Holy Land meeting of Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew should “reaffirm our commitment to the dialogue of love, to the dialogue of truth, and to a sense of unity moving toward a sense of communion.” More →

May 23, 2014

“Yoga’s techniques and goals move in and through and outside of religion in very interesting and complex ways,” says Debra Diamond, associate curator of south and southeastern Asian art for the Smithsonian Institution’s Freer and Sackler galleries. Following its Washington debut, “Yoga: The Art of Transformation,” an exhibition on yoga in Indian art history, was at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, and it will soon travel to the Cleveland Museum of Art for the summer. More →

May 16, 2014