Dan Sohail, accused of driving a car into the Chabad-Lubavitch world headquarters in January, has been charged with damaging religious property. The new charge in Brooklyn federal court adds to four charges Sohail already faces, which are being considered hate…
Metropolitan AME pastor’s new book offers ancestral veneration as guide to civic engagement
When visiting his maternal grandmother’s house in Florida, the Rev. William Lamar IV remembered feeling “frightened” when he stared at the picture of a great-aunt hung up prominently on the wall.
The cost of casting animals as heroes and villains in conservation science
Scientists are philosophers, explorers, data collectors and number crunchers. They are also storytellers, placing data within a broader scientific and societal context. How they tell these stories matters.
Mamdani sparks controversy with his Iran war statement offering solidarity to Iranians but not Israelis
Mayor Zohran Mamdani fiercely condemned the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran and the killing of Iran’s leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday, calling the attacks “a catastrophic escalation in an illegal war of aggression.”
Iranian evangelicals are staying put, tentative but hopeful, says pastor
Hormoz Shariat preaches to a congregation of millions of Iranian Christians around the world, those who have scattered because of repression at home and those who, having stayed, have long been the target of arrest by Iranian authorities, frequently accused of…
Unmarked graves found on land once owned by Catholic slaveholders trigger search for descendants
A team of student and professional history detectives — led by Laura Masur, assistant professor of anthropology at The Catholic University of America — have discovered what appear to be additional gravesites in a family cemetery on land once belonging…
The apocrypha, Christianity’s ‘hidden’ texts, may not be in the Bible – but they have shaped tradition for centuries
Of Jesus’ 12 disciples, Saint Peter is one of the most important. In the Book of Matthew, Jesus declares that Peter is the “rock” on which “I will build my church,” and Catholic tradition considers him the first pope. Martyred in…
Catholic bishops: Trump’s assault on birthright citizenship affronts Catholic teaching
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has filed an amicus brief in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court opposing President Donald Trump’s efforts to eliminate birthright citizenship, arguing to the majority-Catholic justices that doing away with it would undermine…
Who is Telling the Truth About American Religion?
Okay, I guess it’s time to write the post that I’ve been dreading for a long time because I don’t know how it’s going to be received. Be warned—this one is super nerdy and goes very deep into the weeds of…
Israel’s parliament moves toward ban on mixed-gender prayer at Jerusalem’s Western Wall
Israel’s parliament has given preliminary approval to a bill that would put the country’s Orthodox chief rabbinate in charge of the entire Western Wall in Jerusalem, raising fears among liberal Jews that mixed-gender prayer at the site will soon be…
What If Aliens Are Real? A Thought Experiment
This is how strange our times are: Last week, two United States presidents engaged the question of whether aliens are real, and it wasn’t even in the top 15 stories of the week. The debate was over not “aliens” as…
Checks, charities and conversion classes: What the Epstein files show about Jeffrey Epstein’s Jewish world
Sometime in the early 2010s, Jeffrey Epstein walked into Dr. Steven Kaplan’s office for a root canal.