Religious faith and practice can make the most committed and powerful contributions to reconciliation and to economic justice. It can also use texts and traditions to avoid responsibility and to commit selfish or harmful actions, says Dr Olav Fykse Tveit, General Secretary of the World Council of Churches. Speaking to the UN, he offers an inspiring yet honest vision of the way churches and other religious communities can make a vital contribution to building justice and peace for the whole of humanity, while being held necessarily accountable before God and the world they are intended to serve.
At the end of April 2013, the Rev Rachel Mann, author of Dazzling Darkness: Gender, sexuality, illness and God, gave the 5th Annual St Anselm Lecture, on the topic of social media and faith, at St Anselm Hall, University of Manchester.
"Media, Faith and State post-Leveson" is the theme of a panel discussion on Tuesday 19 March 2003 in the Martin Hall, Edinburgh University School of Divinity, New College, Mound Place, Edinburgh, EH1 2LX.
Christianity and the Law have been in a more or less constant state of relational flux over the course of history, observes barrister Andrew Worthley, considering two of the recent European Court of Human Rights cases brought on grounds of religious discrimination. The idea that iron-clad secular law and immutable religion are on a collision course misunderstands both law and religion, as well as the nuances of history and of texts, he suggests.
Armed opposition groups appear to have deliberately destroyed religious sites in mixed areas of Northern Syria, at the end of 2012, Human Rights Watch says.
What are some of the implications of the discussion of critical religion for feminist and gender theory making? The gendered binaries of spiritual/material or spirit/flesh still haunt us, says Dr Alison Jasper, in the tendency to regard women and the female as better fitted for certain roles that tend to be less well rewarded in terms of money and influence.