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“They are human beings, and so they have a right to live in peace and security,” says Imam Omar Suleiman, who has made several visits to the refugee camps on the Jordanian-Syrian border. “And if we’re not contributing to the betterment of their situation…are we really the moral standard for the world?” More
Faith communities across the country are offering their houses of worship as places of sanctuary for undocumented immigrants; and it was Martin Luther, a stubborn monk and towering thinker, whose own spiritual crisis began a momentous religious revolution in 1517.
Bob Feinman of Humane Borders says he “didn’t spend a whole lot of time paying attention to the rabbis” when he was in religious school as a child. “But the one thing I remember was the Seder every year at Passover, the Exodus. We were the ones that walked around in circles following Moses for all those years. People here are walking in circles, facing an uncertain future and facing death, as we did.” More
“We hope to celebrate this anniversary without hiding the problematic side, the dark side of Martin Luther,” says Rev Johannes Block, pastor of the Evangelical City and Parish Church of St. Mary’s in Wittenberg, Germany, where Luther himself preached hundreds and hundreds of sermons in the 16th century. “The Reformation said you are responsible for yourself,” he continued. “Everybody is responsible for his faith. It’s a step of democracy. Everybody is equal in the church.” More
“I don’t see Protestant-Catholic unity coming in the immediate future,” says Michael Root, professor of systematic theology at the Catholic University of America. “There are real differences. The question we face is how do we both affirm the commonalities while being honest about the continuing differences?” More
Follow along as managing editor Kim Lawton visits several key sites in Germany associated with Martin Luther and the beginning of the Protestant Reformation 500 years ago. More
Some communities of faith and religious leaders have responded sharply to the president’s recent directives; more and more lay people want to associate with and experience monastic life; and a new movie about Jesuit missionaries in 17th-century Japan makes visible … More
“We have a government now that is trying to legislate what it means to be faithful—faithful to America, faithful to a particular religious perspective,” says Rabbi Jack Moline, president of the Interfaith Alliance. “We heard that in the pre-inaugural sermon that the president was presented with, and if you don’t fit into that pretty narrow definition of what it means to be an American religious person, that has a chilling effect on your sense of being at home in this country.” More
“We’re going back to where it all began,” says Fr. Columba Stewart, a scholar of monasticism and a Benedictine monk at St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, “with a variety of models of Christian ascetic life, and by ascetic I just mean disciplined. That’s what people are discovering, and they’re figuring out ways they can live as individuals, as families, as loose associations of friends who find this particular path to be helpful, sustaining, and nourishing to them.” More
“What St. Benedict is doing is providing a charter for making a community that really endures and that can encompass a variety of people who aren’t all there because they have the same personality or like the same music or have the same hobby. They’re all there for some purpose that’s really beyond themselves, this spiritual quest, and they recognize they can’t do it by themselves.” More