Faith: Muslim
Days after 9/11, Rais Bhuiyan was shot in the head by Mark Stroman in a hate crime targeted at Arabs. Bhuiyan survived the attack, and Stroman was sentenced to death, but Bhuiyan felt compelled to not let the story end there. “I need to forgive him in public and do something to save the life,” says Bhuiyan, “because if Mark Stroman was given the chance I had in my childhood, he would have become a different person. More
“There’s a fear among large segments of the Buddhist population in Myanmar,” says Matthew Smith, executive director of Fortify Rights, an independent organization to protect and defend human rights, “that the country is at risk of being taken over by Muslims. It’s a very unreasonable, irrational fear.” Originally broadcast April 18, 2014 More
“Behind each of these wonderful people is a life that is completely disrupted. We see God in all of these people. We see that these are brothers and sisters like us,” says Catholic Relief Services president Carolyn Woo. More
“Africa is finding, just as it found its political and economic voice it’s also finding its theological voice, which oftentimes may be different in perspective,” says J. Peter Pham of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center, “because of background, because of history, and because of the way they have interpreted revelation as different from what those in the West, in Europe, or North America, are used to or are necessarily comfortable with.” More
“Of course I was angry for everything that was happening to me, but as time went on in captivity, I just realized for my own self, for self-preservation, that I couldn’t stay trapped in that emotion, that I had to try to find ways to let it out, and that’s when I started developing practices like choosing forgiveness in captivity.” More
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
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
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
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
Of all the social issues facing our world, President Jimmy Carter says the abuse of women and girls is the greatest injustice of all, and that the pretext is often religion. More