Looking at the spectrum of candidates today, there is again hope that the first free presidential elections will not intensify already existing tensions in Egyptian society. Still, there are many issues unresolved. With the constituent assembly in tatters over its composition and legality, it is unlikely that there will be a decision on the constitutional framework before the presidential elections. What does seem likely is that, despite the Brotherhood’s domination of the political scene, Egypt is not about to become an Islamic state.

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These Islamists could teach us a thing or two about democracy. When the Nour Party, which speaks for Egypt’s ultra-radical Salafi movement ”“ the one with the long beards that wants no-questions-asked sharia, including bans on bikinis, booze, and Western bankers ”“ set about deciding which candidate to endorse for the presidential elections, its leaders put together an 11-strong committee. On it were two practising psychologists.

One of the interviewees was Hazem Abu Ismail, a charismatic lawyer and preacher with a big grassroots following, who believes in all the things the party believes in, and who everyone assumed would get its backing. But the psychologists threw in a spanner. He was too emotional, they said: too egotistical to be president. The one thing the party knew, its sharp-suited spokesman Nader Baker told me, was that the era of the strongman was over.

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Hopes that Arab Christians can enjoy full recognition in their countries’ post-revolution politics appear to have suffered a setback. The political parties that have swept to power in Egypt and Tunisia are attempting to define their nations in narrow ethno-religious terms ”“ as Islamic with sharia as the principal source of law. In Tunisia, for example, the constitution explicitly prohibits Christians from fielding candidates in the presidential election.

Attacks against Coptic churches and Christians in Egypt have increased during and since the revolution, and Arab Christians have allegedly been attacked in Syria. This has led to much soul-searching in the Arab Christian community, whose numbers and political influence have dwindled significantly over the past two decades owing to significant bouts of emigration.

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For a glimpse of how Mormons see themselves….it’s worth visiting the Church History Museum of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints here. Created by believers, for believers, the museum shows how close to the center of American life Mormons consider themselves to be.

The gap is enormous between that perspective and the one embedded in the wider culture. The hit Broadway musical “The Book of Mormon” riotously mocks the church’s doctrine. The high-toned HBO soap “Big Love,” which ended last year, relished the complications of polygamy (once endorsed by the church and long since renounced). Reports of posthumous Mormon baptisms of Holocaust victims have fueled outrage. Accusations of extremism and murder appear in thrillers reaching back to Sherlock Holmes’s first case in “A Study in Scarlet.”

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Prelate of the Methodist Church, Dr. Sunday Ola Makinde, has described as ”˜careless and unguarded statement’ the comment made by American government that years of neglect and poverty led to the insurgence of Boko Haram sect in Nigeria.

Speaking at the weekend during the launch of a book titled “Women as Teachers and Character Moulders” written by Mrs. Ezinne Elizabeth Abimbola Makinde at Hoare’s Memorial Methodist Cathedral, Yaba, Lagos, the prelate declared the premises on which such a statement was based as poor research that lacks every credibility.

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The Gideons in Germany give away 2,000 Bibles a day and nobody complains. The Koran is another matter. A group called the True Religion has handed out 300,000 copies, many from “information stands” in shopping areas. All told, it wants to give away 25m in German-speaking Europe. Intelligence agencies are alarmed; politicians have condemned the plan. The printing firm has even cancelled its contract. “The public pressure was too great,” it explained.

The problem, critics say, is not the gift but the giver. The True Religion espouses Salafism, a fundamentalist branch of Islam. Its leader is Ibrahim Abu Nagie, a Palestinian-born, Cologne-based preacher with intolerant views and a knack for getting others to embrace them. The Cologne prosecutor wanted to try him for inciting violence against Christians and Jews but could prove nothing worse than predictions that they would end in hell. The case was dropped in January.

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Overheard next to me last week while getting a facial on West 72nd Street on the Upper West Side:

Woman in her 80s reclining next to me with green cream on her visage asking her facialist: “So, do you Russians have brisket for Passover?”

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As war looms between Sudan and South Sudan, Christians of southern origin living in Sudan fear retribution from its Islamic government.

As of April 8, at least half a million ethnic southerners (the majority of whom are Christian) living in Sudan are now considered foreigners if they have not registered for citizenship. Officials in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, gave southerners another 30 days to register or leave the country.

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The Nigerian religious sect Boko Haram had been sporadically attacking police stations and people for years with machetes and sometimes guns to create an Islamic state in its corner of Africa’s largest nation.

Then, in 2010, the group exploded into violence with suicide bombings, car bombs and coordinated assaults, months after an al-Qaeda leader in Algeria disclosed that the terror group had decided to help the Nigerian radicals….

“This new Jihadist nexus in Africa” is a rising danger that the West has yet to fully comprehend,” said Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

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The British authorities on Tuesday rearrested Abu Qatada, a radical Muslim cleric who was released from prison in February after a European court overruled British judges and blocked his deportation to Jordan on terrorism charges. They said they would resume efforts to remove him from Britain.

The cleric, 51, whose real name is Omar Mahmoud Mohammed Othman, was convicted in absentia by Jordan of involvement in a series of terrorist bombing plots more than a decade ago. Jordanian officials have said he will face retrial for the bombings if he is repatriated from Britain.

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Andrew Bowen sat yoga-style in his armchair, absent-mindedly fingering a set of Muslim prayer beads in his left hand as he talked about 2011 — his year of conversion.

But he’s not Muslim. In fact, the 29-year-old Lumberton resident doesn’t call himself by any of the 12 faiths he practiced for a month at a time last year.

Not Hindu (January). Not Baha’i (February). Not Zoroastrian (March). Not Jewish (April). Not Buddhist (May). Not agnostic (June). Not Mormon (July). Not Muslim (August). Not Sikh (September). Not Wiccan (October). Not Jain (November). And not Catholic (December)….

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Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith has hovered over his 20-year political career like a thick layer of incense at Easter Mass. Negative perceptions of the religion so worried his 2008 presidential team that the dilemma had its own acronym in campaign power point presentations: TMT (That Mormon Thing).

Worries persisted this year as skeptical evangelical Christians flocked to other candidates””any other candidate it seemed ”” causing Romney to avoid all things Mormon in public….

Read it all. Also, Jacques Berlinerblau has further thoughts on this in “How Romney should talk about religion”.

Sadakat Kadri is an English barrister, a Muslim by birth and a historian. His first book, The Trial, was an extensive survey of the Western criminal judicial system, detailing more than 4,000 years of courtroom antics.

In his new book, Heaven on Earth, Kadri turns his sights east, to centuries of Shariah law. The first parts of his book describe how early Islamic scholars codified ”” and then modified ”” the code that would govern how people lead their daily lives. Kadri then turns to the modern day, reflecting on the lawmakers who are trying to prohibit Shariah law in a dozen states, as well as his encounters with scholars and imams in India, Pakistan, Syria, Egypt, Turkey and Iran ”” the very people who strictly interpret the religious and moral code of Islam today. And some of those modern interpretations, he says, are much more rigid ”” and much more draconian ”” than the code set forth during the early years of Islamic law.

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Some people suggest that faith should be confined to the home and the house of worship, and play no role in public life. I believe that every person has a right, really a responsibility, to contribute his or her perspectives to the public forum, including perspectives of faith. But faith must never be the final word when it comes to writing the law.

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On my late summer visits to Bubbie Birshtein in Norfolk Virginia, my mother’s mother, a surprise was in store for me. The Titanic words became real when I was introduced to a man in his forties, Mr. Aks, a family friend, and I was told that he was one of the babies who survived the sinking of the Titanic in 1912.

Amazingly, he was taken from his mother’s arms that terrible night as the ship began to carry its passengers under water and thrown overboard.

He was caught by a woman in a lifeboat, whose last name was Astor. She wrapped him in a blanket since he was only nine months old. Later he was returned to his mother, who did survive.

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Not the least of the church’s problems now is the growing number of highly educated, formerly prominent Mormons who have left the LDS and are only too ready to tell the world exactly why.

As a molecular biologist studying forest trees in Brisbane, Australia, Simon Southerton was in many ways a Mormon role model. He was 10 years old when his parents joined the church and he was baptised into the faith in 1970. He rose steadily through the ranks and became a bishop to his flock. Over the years he was vaguely aware that some of the historical events described by the Book of Mormon did not match the archeological or scientific record. “But I hadn’t dwelt on it,” he said. He loved his church for its emphasis on families and the sense of community it fostered.
Yet there was one key aspect of church doctrine that began to trouble him. The Book of Mormon describes a migration of Israelite clans across the Atlantic to America long before Columbus. The notion of a New Jerusalem, founded on American soil by the ancient forefathers of Mormonism, is one of the faith’s key tenets. Yet Southerton, familiar with the use of DNA to chart early human migrations, began to worry about the sheer weight of scientific evidence undermining the Book of Mormon’s account.

“Once I started looking at it seriously, it didn’t take me very long at all to realise that the Book of Mormon wasn’t real history,” he said. According to Mormon doctrine, Native Americans are descended from one of the Israelite clans. “But there’s been no serious mainstream belief in anything other than Asian origin for Native Americans for much of the last century,” Southerton added.

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The mother of a 6-month-old girl has been wrongly jailed for more than a month, as Pakistani authorities have failed to file a charge sheet within the mandatory 14-day period against the young Christian woman falsely accused of “blaspheming” the prophet of Islam, her attorney said.

Shamim Bibi, 26, of village Chak No. 170/7R Colony, in the Fort Abbas area of Bahawalpur district, was charged under Section 295-C of Pakistan’s “blasphemy” statutes after neighbors accused her of uttering remarks against Muhammad. She was arrested on Feb. 28.

Speaking ill of Muhammad in Pakistan is punishable by life imprisonment or death under Pakistan’s internationally condemned blasphemy laws.

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The leader of a radical Islamist sect in Nigeria has challenged the nation’s president, saying he could never destroy the group blamed for hundreds of killings this year alone, according to an online video posted Thursday.

The video featuring Imam Abubakar Shekau came as authorities blamed gunmen from the sect known as Boko Haram for killing two civilians in northeast Nigeria.

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…if there’s one element of Judaism I’d love to share with everyone it’s this: If you want to survive and thrive as a people, a culture, a civilization, celebrate the family. Hold it sacred. Eat together. Tell the story of what most matters to you across the generations. Make children the most important people. Put them centre stage. Encourage them to ask questions, the more the better. That’s what Moses said thirty three centuries ago and Judaism is still here to tell the tale having survived some of the most brutal persecutions in human history, yet as a religious faith were still young and full of energy.

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Father Alfons Marzou shuffles across a complex that is home to sisters for the Catholic Missionaries of Charity, whose nuns provide medical care and food to impoverished children living amid heaps of garbage.

“Look around,” Marzou says, motioning to the filthy streets outside the walls where families live among refuse for resale in what is known as Garbage City.

Little has improved for these people in the year since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, Marzou says, “The situation is bad in so many ways.”

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Abroad, Christians are facing persecution and even death in many countries; the Arab Spring is threatening to turn into winter for Christian communities and the conflict in Syria is fraught with menace for a minority that is being driven out of parts of the Middle East it has inhabited for two millennia. The Coptic Christians in Egypt are suffering murderous attacks and the Lebanese patriarch is warning of dire consequences as a result of revolution across the Middle East, with militant Islamists now looking like the main beneficiaries rather than secular democrats. The courage of the embattled Christian communities in those areas is the most eloquent embracing of the Easter message that could be imagined. For the Easter drama illustrates the worst and the best of human behaviour: Judas’s betrayal, Peter’s craven denial, Pilate’s abdication of responsibility, contrasted with the humility, sacrifice and forgiveness of Christ. Christianity is no soft option.

In Britain, the tide may be turning. There is a sense that the Dawkins years are coming to an end. Richard Dawkins and the militant secularists are confronting the inevitable limitations of their atheist creed: how do you energise a crusade around a vacuum? Even when competing religions historically clashed, they had rival narratives to proclaim. “There is nothing” is not a message to which people in our stressful, increasingly fragmented society will warm. It is cold comfort to bring to a recession-hit household, a hospital ward or a deathbed. Yet to all those forums of human misery the Christian faith has a more consoling message to take: that of the empty tomb, the risen Christ, the joy that is to come. We wish all our readers a very happy Easter.

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Witches have been breaking into churches and graveyards to perform black magic rituals, a leading Church in Wales cleric has revealed.

Bishop of Monmouth Dominic Walker said the incidents coincided with a resurgence in witchcraft in recent years, with the number of occult groups performing both wicca ”“ or white magic ”“ and black magic on the rise.

And while not a frequent occurrence, Bishop Walker said he had been called on several occasions during his nine-year ministry to help people escape these “satanic groups”.

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In the service lay a story of black Christians and white Jews who once shared a kind of promised land, a peacefully integrated section of Indianapolis called Southside. Its decades of harmony were a rebuke to the Southern-style racial divisions that characterized Indiana for much of the 20th century, from the Ku Klux Klan’s heyday in the interwar years to George Wallace’s popularity with the state’s voters in the 1960s.

Upward mobility, Interstate 70 and the construction of a football stadium hollowed out the neighborhood starting in the late 1960s, scattering its residents and severing bonds of commerce and friendship. But in the last four years, an anthropology professor at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Susan B. Hyatt, has set about finding former Southsiders and restoring those ties through social events and reciprocal worship services at South Calvary and the Etz Chaim Sephardic synagogue.

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Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar was instrumental in helping Ilyas Khan, a British philanthropist and former Muslim, to become Catholic. But so too were many other distinctly Catholic influences, all amounting to a “pull” towards the faith rather than a “push” away from Islam.

Khan, a merchant banker by training and the owner of the Accrington Stanley soccer team, is also chairman of the prominent British charity Leonard Cheshire Disability ”” the largest organization in the world helping people with disabilities. In a revealing interview with Register Rome correspondent Edward Pentin, Khan explains in more detail what drew him to the Catholic Church.

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At least 38 people have died in a car bombing in the northern Nigerian city of Kaduna, officials said.

Many others were injured in the attack, which took place when officials stopped the vehicle as it approached a church.

Just hours afterwards, a bomb exploded in the central city of Jos, injuring several people.

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On Easter Sunday, the great hall of Grace Episcopal Church was quiet. The choir wasn’t singing, the Rector wasn’t preaching and Sunday school wasn’t ending because it hadn’t begun in the 166-year-old building in almost a year.

Last August, an earthquake centered in Virginia shook the congregation out of their home at Grace Episcopal in downtown Charleston.

Instead of pews, there’s scaffolding. Red ‘danger, do not enter’ tape covers the hall instead Easter decorations.

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Today is the first day of Passover, the most celebrated Jewish holiday, commemorating the Exodus of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt.

Families and congregations gather en masse for the observances. But many look past the details, the preparations and the moments that deepen the experience.

“We feel that if you go for Palm Sunday and Easter, you miss the (sorrow) of Holy Week,” said Barbara Manaker, James Island Presbyterian Church music director. “If you experience more of what Jesus went through, Easter Sunday becomes more meaningful. Without that, you go from one celebration to another.”

Read it all from the local paper.

With PowerPoint presentations and political promises, Egypt’s influential Muslim Brotherhood made its US diplomatic debut this week hoping to persuade Washington that the Islamist group is committed to democracy and rule of law.

A delegation from the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), the political wing of the once-banned Islamist movement, has been making the Washington rounds talking to officials and think tank experts about their growing role as Egypt heads toward presidential elections.

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Tim Sims recently shared some statistics on the lostness of Australia at a recent conference there. Scott Sanders provided these highlights of that research which I’d like to share with you:

“Church” has a negative perception among Aussies due to: church abuse, religious wars, hypocrisy, judgmentalism, and issues around money, as well as being seen as outdated, authoritarian and exclusive. Those not attending church have issues– real or perceived– which need to be addressed. The great news is Jesus is still viewed positively by the average Australian.

There have been little change in ‘Christian’ beliefs during the last 50 years: 74% of Australians still believe in God, 53% in heaven, 45% in life after death and interestingly 43% in the resurrection of Jesus. Yet as a church we tend to agree with the media’s perception that there is widespread disbelief. The reality is “Australians are very concerned about religion, just not sure that the religion we promote in our churches is the religion of Jesus.”

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Two fighters from the Islamist group Boko Haram were killed in a shootout Monday that reveals mounting frustration among residents of northern Nigeria with the group’s campaign of violence.

The two came into the Sheka neighborhood of Kano on a motorcycle, shooting bullets into the air, according to an eyewitness who requested anonymity for safety reasons. “People in the area summoned courage and nabbed them. As they were planning to hand them over to the police, gunmen came from nowhere and shot them instantly to death,” the witness said.

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