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It is extraordinary to hear a song reverberating off stonewalls and then dissipate into thin air. The soaring beauty of ephemeral art! Sometimes I find myself holding my breath as the soloist hits a high note or that incredibly awkward person tells his testimony. Do we appreciate that moment? Because many of us are conductors of that symphony, curators of beauty and we don’t realize the importance of our position.

We tend to move past Mary’s perplexed and pondering, wordless response to Gabriel’s next words....

c. 2015 Religion News Service...

In Fra Carnevale’s Annunciation, Mary’s face signals she is pondering the angel’s message in full consciousness of the joys and terrors it will bring.

When we think of religious conservatism, we likely think in terms of slogging through the trenches of the great American culture war. But does the culture war serve as a useful paradigm for understanding religious conservatism?

Four times I’ve been pregnant during Advent. The first time. The second time. The third time. Now the fourth time. Four times I’ve teared up at all the hymns about waiting for a child. Four times I’ve connected with the stories of annunciation and visitation in a tender and touching way.

Fran Quigley offers a richly informed study of what ails Haiti and what a few dedicated activist lawyers are doing about it.

c. 2015 Religion News Service...

Which mother, I wonder, has more heartbreak. Hannah sacrifices the dailiness of raising her first-born son. Mary keeps her son with her, but as he grows she can surely see that he is heading down a dangerous path.

Youth programs at the nonprofit Metanoia are not just about education. Leaders see youth as motivated to revitalize their neighborhood.

Which mother, I wonder, has more heartbreak. Hannah sacrifices the dailiness of raising her first-born son. Mary keeps her son with her, but as he grows she can surely see that he is heading down a dangerous path.

In the latest issue of the Century, Philip Jenkins writes about how the veneration of Mary cuts across religious difference in Egypt. Egypt was the place where Mary first lit up the imaginations of Christians, but apparently her appeal is not limited by culture or religious heritage. Lately I’ve come across a couple of enchanting books that illuminate this for me.

I was sitting in a hospital room one morning with a dear old saint whose last few years have involved being shuffled from home to home, to the hospital and back again, and whose next destination is unclear. At one point, this person looked at me with a mixture of sadness, resignation, and nearly defeated longing and said, “I’m a person with no address.”

Writing at a safe remove from the fever swamps and the hate crimes—without, in fact, even mentioning them—Ross Douthat argues that pious Muslims must inevitably face conflict between the “lure of conquest, the pull of violent jihad” and the ambiguous, unsettled place of traditional religion in a secularizing culture.

(The Christian Science Monitor) When members arrived at the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community Baitus-Salaam Mosque in Hawthorne, Califor...

c. 2015 Religion News Service...

Jacques Mourad, a Syriac Catholic priest who survived being held hostage for months by militants from the self-described Islamic State, is certain that his interfaith work saved his life....

I could stay home on Sundays when visiting my parents. But I return to the pews of my childhood church because I love the people despite our differences.

I was raised in an ecumenical church community affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. When I later joined a Mennonite church, where many members were not raised with the church calendar, I became a bit of an Advent purist. Maybe a lot of one.

Radicalization is the buzzword of the day. We’re hearing that the couple who killed 14 people San Bernardino were “radicalized” before they even met and married. Many are wondering what exactly makes someone become similarly radicalized. Others are anticipating that Donald Trump’s inflammatory proposals would not make us safer, but in fact give a great boost to ISIS’s effort to radicalize recruits to their cause.