In almost any discussion of religion and Africa, stereotypes recur. Depending on where they have been, outsiders portray the continent either as an arena of looming conflict between rival faiths””or else as a happy-go-lucky world where different beliefs can easily co-exist, sometimes in the same person’s head.

Neither notion is completely true nor completely false, according to a survey of religion in sub-Saharan Africa by the Pew Research Centre, a polling outfit based in Washington, DC. After interviewing 25,000 people in 19 countries, the pollsters found that in certain ways Africa’s Christians and Muslims view one another with respect. Most Muslims saw Christians as tolerant, honest, and decent to women; in most countries, a majority of Christians returned the compliment. But many Christians (among the countries surveyed, the median level was 43%) saw in Islam a potential for violence; fewer Muslims (the median was 20%) saw Christianity in a similar light. In almost all countries where Muslims are at least 10% of the population they seem more concerned about extremism among their co-religionists than among Christians. In a few mainly Christian countries, including South Africa, people were worried by Christian extremism.

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According to the survey, 98 percent of respondents in Senegal say religion is very important, following by 93 percent in Mali. The lowest percentage was reported in Botswana, 69 percent, which is still a healthy majority.

“That begins to paint a picture of how religious sub-Saharan Africans are,” Lugo said.

The study is part of the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures Project. More than 25,000 sub-Saharan Africans responded in face-to-face interviews in more than 60 languages.

While the study confirms that Africans are, indeed, morally conservative and religiously pious, researchers explored a variety of topics, including religious tolerance, polygamy, the role of women in society, and political and economic satisfaction.

Islam and Christianity dominate as the most popular religions in the region — a stark reversal from a century ago when Muslims and Christians were outnumbered by followers of traditional indigenous religions.

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Africa’s biggest country has long been one of its most ungovernable. For a start, it is a grossly artificial, colonial creation. The Muslim Arabs in the north, who have run Sudan since it broke free from Britain in 1956, have little in common with their blacker-skinned Christian and animist compatriots in the south, whom they have periodically enslaved over the centuries. During more than four decades of strife since the British left, at least 2m southerners have been killed. More recently the government in Khartoum, under President Omar al-Bashir, has bludgeoned the disaffected inhabitants of the western region of Darfur since the start of a rebellion in 2003, killing some 300,000 of them and displacing another 3m. Just in the west and the south together, more than 9m people depend on food handouts from abroad. Mr Bashir is wanted by the International Criminal Court at The Hague for alleged crimes against humanity.

It is hardly surprising, then, that the election for parliament and president and a slew of other bodies due to take place on April 11th is likely to be horribly flawed….In the past year or so, Mr Bashir’s ruling party has been stacking the odds in its own favour. The main southern party has withdrawn its candidate for the presidency and is refusing to compete for most of parliament’s northern seats. The main opposition in the north says it will pull out altogether. The brutal Mr Bashir, who came to power in a coup in 1989, is almost sure to retain the presidency. The conundrum of whether Western governments must continue to treat with an ICC indictee in the hope of sustaining a wider peace will be awkwardly unresolved. Foreign governments that have given money to finance the polls no longer hope for “free and fair” elections but ask that they be minimally “credible”.

The election may still be postponed. Yet, despite all these flaws, it is to be hoped that it will go ahead. If it does, the outside world should hold its nose and accept the result.

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The central Nigerian city of Jos is at the crossroads of the country’s Muslim-dominated north and the mainly Christian and animist south. In recent months, renewed clashes between Muslim and Christian communities there have left hundreds dead.

Nigerian authorities are under mounting pressure to prosecute those behind the unrest. Nighttime curfews and an increased military and police presence are maintaining order ”” for now.

But observers warn that while religion may be the fault line for a decade of periodic fighting, underlying grievances in Jos go much deeper. The area is plagued by poverty, joblessness and fierce competition over land and scarce resources.

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The remarkable remains of two ancient human-like creatures (hominids) have been found in South Africa.

The fossils of a female adult and a juvenile male – perhaps mother and son – are just under two million years old.

They were uncovered in cave deposits at Malapa not far from Johannesburg.

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Anglican Archbishop Eluid Wabukala of Kenya has chosen to differ with other Christian leaders in his country over a draft constitution that would permit Islamic “Kadhi” courts, and authorize abortion.

The archbishop has urged Kenyans to back the law, while suggesting that controversial clauses in it could be revised in future.

“The document is better than the current one. It is my feeling that Kenyans should accept it and amend some clauses later,” Wabukala told journalists on April 3 in Nairobi, two days after the country’s parliament had passed the law.

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Sudanese Christians have long awaited the 2011 independence referendum that promises finally to give their southern region a voice in the Muslim-majority nation. But ironically, Sudan’s first democratic election in 24 years (to be held April 11, unless opposition parties boycott as threatened) may derail their hopes.

Observers believe the presidential election this spring will test whether the strife-torn nation will hold together until the January 2011 nation-wide vote over unification. The vote is mandated by the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) signed in 2005 by the northern National Congress Party and the southern Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Movement.

“It is my understanding that most, if not all, of the church leaders of South Sudan want to secede,” said Faith McDonnell, director of the Religious Liberty Program at the Institute on Religion and Democracy. However, she believes the election of a Northern candidate friendly to the South could result in a vote against secession.

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The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Tanzania (ELCT) has distanced itself from the recognition of same-sex marriages by Lutheran churches in the US and Sweden.

The head of the ELCT, Bishop Alex Malasusa, said during his Easter Mass sermon at the Azania Front Church in Dar es Salaam that the local church did not support the decision because it was against God’s word.

He said Lutheran churches in the US and Sweden had strayed from the Scriptures, and it was up to Africa to bring them back into line.

“ELCT has refused to recognise the decision to allow same-sex marriages because it is against the Holy Bible. It is in direct contravention of God’s word, which has not changed,” Bishop Malasusa said.

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I’m not saying Christians are more to blame than Muslims for the world’s diverse Christian-Muslim tensions. In Nigeria, for example, the intensity of Christian proselytizing comes partly from past persecution by a Muslim majority; the Christians seek safety in numbers, so the bigger their numbers, the better. (Griswold explained this to me, and confirmed that, yes, assertive Christian proselytizing exacerbates tensions in Nigeria.)

Still, even if proselytizing isn’t the prime mover, my guess is that it pretty consistently falls in the “not helpful” category from the point of view of world peace and, ultimately, American security. And some of it ”” e.g., the “Camel Method” ”” is particularly antagonistic. Which explains why I’m not a big fan of that first headline, “A Christian Overture to Muslims Has Its Critics.” Overtures, when effective, don’t heighten tensions.

I’d like to be able to report that the “critics” in this headline are Christians who worry about heightening tensions and so refrain from offensive proselytizing. Alas, they’re Christians who favor assertive proselytizing but are offended by any suggestion that Muslims and Christians might worship the same god. One of them, Ergun Caner, president of Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary, in Lynchburg, Va., said in a recent podcast, “There’s nothing that the two gods ”” the god of the Koran and the god of scripture ”” have in common. Nothing.”

Well, to look at the bright side: Maybe that’s a basis for interfaith rapport; Caner can sit around with Malaysian Muslims and agree that they worship different gods.

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As Allan Fitzgerald explains in his excellent introduction the homilies are a unique artefact: “The first and only commentary dedicated to the Gospel of John in ancient Latin literature.” Even more importantly, they bring us as close as we’re ever going to get to the real, raw and clearly rattled Augustine.

As one scholar has written, they show us Augustine in the “unpredictable, popular setting of a diversified and boisterous Christian community”.

This volume contains the first 40 homilies (out of a total of 124). Donatism features heavily. The first 16 pieces are dripping with anti-Donatist contempt but there is much more on display here. Whether he is chastising people for their sins and their addiction to astrology or showing them how to appreciate Scripture and grow in their faith, Augustine is revealed as a passionate, winningly meandering pulpit-basher. Even those of us who have our doubts about Augustine’s theological trajectory would concede that crowding into the Basilica Pacis and hearing his fulminations, witticisms and memorable wordplay must have been a rare privilege.

Hill’s translation of the homilies isn’t stellar, but I’d still advise you to take a look. If you’d like to know how Augustine confronted the fractured world of fifth-century North African Christianity, if you’d like to hear him hold forth on why God created flies and fleas, and if you’ve any interest in seeing a brilliant, bewildered theologian groping towards his version of the truth, then this is the book for you. I couldn’t put it down. It reminded me that the history of North African Christianity deserves more of our attention and it proved that Augustine, love him or hate him, should be seen as more than a theological commodity to be used and abused by his acolytes and enemies. Once upon a time, he was just a befuddled bishop in a bewildering situation. He didn’t always makes things better, but even when he made things slightly worse he did so with a rhetorical flourish or two.

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Attackers killed 12 people Wednesday morning in a small Christian village in central Nigeria, officials said, cutting out most of the victims’ tongues in the latest violence in a region where religious fighting already has killed hundreds this year.

The attack almost mirrored the tactics used by those who carried out similar massacres in Christian villages last week when more than 200 people were slaughtered.

Under the cover of darkness and a driving rain, raiders with machetes entered the village of Byie early Wednesday, setting fire to homes and firing gunshots into the air to drive frightened villagers into the night, witness Linus Vwi said.

“It was raining. They took that advantage,” Vwi said.

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The Vice President Kalonzo Musyoka Thursday met a group of religious leaders and exchanged views on the draft constitution and other national matters.

The leaders included Bishop Philip Sulumeti, Vice Chair of the Kenya Episcopal Conference of the Catholic Church, Archbishop Eliud Wabukala, Head of Anglican Churches of Kenya, Rev. Canon Peter Karanja, Secretary General, NCCK, Rt. Rev. David Gathanju, the P.C.E.A. Moderator and the Head of Methodist Church, Bishop Stephen Kanyaru among others.

They church leaders reiterated their position on abortion and emphasized that life begins at conception and any contrary position in the draft should be amended before being taken to referendum.

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It is hard for people in the rich world to imagine what it is like to live on $2 a day. But for those who do, the problem is often not just a low income, but an unpredictable one. Living on $2 a day frequently means living for ten days on $20 earned on a single day. The task of smoothing consumption is made more complicated if there is nowhere to store money safely. In an emergency, richer people might choose between dipping into their savings and borrowing. The choice for the great mass of the unbanked in the developing world is limited to whom to borrow from, often at great cost.

That they can borrow at all is partly due to the rapid growth of microfinance, which specialises in lending small amounts to poor people. Several big microfinance institutions (MFIs) also offer savings accounts: Grameen Bank in Bangladesh is a prominent example. But the industry remains dominated by credit, and the ability to save through an MFI is often linked to customers’ willingness to borrow from it. Of 166 MFIs surveyed in 2009 by the Microfinance Information Exchange, a think-tank, all offered credit but only 27% offered savings products. Advocates of a greater variety of financial services for the poor argue for more balance.

This may be on the horizon. More MFIs are becoming interested in the potential of savings, thanks partly to the global financial crisis….

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Q: Many Christians of course, out of fear of this recent spate of violence have packed their belongings and left for the south. Is this a threat for Christianity in the north of Nigeria that so many Christians are living?

Archbishop [Ignatius] Kaigama: Yes, some Christians from the south who live and work in the north return home when there are such crises and this because when their businesses are destroyed, their houses are destroyed they have no reason to stay on, but that does not mean that Christianity is dead in the north because you still have the indigenous population. For instance in Kano, you have the Maguzawa ethnic group. They are Hausas and normally everybody would expect a Hausa man to be a Muslim. They are not. They are adherents to the traditional religion and when they are not adherents of the traditional religion they are Catholics, Anglicans or whatever. So they are there. They don’t migrate. The only problem is that they suffer a lot because of their Christian identity and Christian faith. They are denied education. They are denied government employment of the highest ladders; they are employed as night watchmen, cleaners or things like that but never higher than that. And this is what they suffer for being Christians. And the Church has come helping in a very decisive manner by empowering these people, by starting primary schools, again building bush chapels in order to bring them together to bring awareness, and enlighten them and get them going. And it is working. Now, I can tell you that there are five or more people from those ethnic groups that have become priests and they are working very well. This is to tell you how far we have come and that even though the Catholic Church has been persecuted there are people who live there and still are ready to sacrifice everything in order to proclaim their Christian faith and identity.

Read it carefully and read it all.

A video posted on a militant Web site calls for Muslims in Nigeria to use “the sword and the spear” to rise up against Christians in Africa’s most populous nation, according to a translation released Tuesday by a U.S. group that monitors militant sites.

The video on the Ansar al-Mujahideen forum, a Web site sympathetic to al-Qaida, comes in the wake of a series of religious massacres and riots in central Nigeria. The video shows television news footage and graphic images of those killed as a narrator tells viewers “the solution is jihad in the cause of Allah,” according to a translation provided by the SITE Intelligence Group.

“Negotiations, dialogues and protests will not stop the advancement of the enemies and their massacres,” the narrator says. “Nothing will stop them but the sword and the spear.”

The narrator also says the “crusader West” is interested in Nigeria for its abundant oil reserves. He also refers to President Umaru Yar’Adua, a Muslim from northern Nigeria, as a “tyrant” who allowed for the killing of a sect leader whose group’s attacks on police stations and rioting left more than 700 people dead in July.

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A video posted on a militant Web site calls for Muslims in Nigeria to use “the sword and the spear” to rise up against Christians in Africa’s most populous nation, according to a translation released Tuesday by a U.S. group that monitors militant sites.

The video on the Ansar al-Mujahideen forum, a Web site sympathetic to al-Qaida, comes in the wake of a series of religious massacres and riots in central Nigeria. The video shows television news footage and graphic images of those killed as a narrator tells viewers “the solution is jihad in the cause of Allah,” according to a translation provided by the SITE Intelligence Group.

“Negotiations, dialogues and protests will not stop the advancement of the enemies and their massacres,” the narrator says. “Nothing will stop them but the sword and the spear.”

The narrator also says the “crusader West” is interested in Nigeria for its abundant oil reserves. He also refers to President Umaru Yar’Adua, a Muslim from northern Nigeria, as a “tyrant” who allowed for the killing of a sect leader whose group’s attacks on police stations and rioting left more than 700 people dead in July.

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Sunday’s killings were an especially vicious expression of long-running hostilities between Christians and Muslims in this divided nation. Jos and the region around it are on the fault line where the volatile and poor Muslim north and the Christian south meet. In the past decade, some 3,000 people have been killed in interethnic, interreligious violence in this fraught zone. The pattern is familiar and was seen as recently as January: uneasy coexistence suddenly explodes into killing, amplified for days by retaliation.

Mr. Adamu, a Muslim herder, said he went to Dogo Na Hawa, a village of Christians living in mud-brick houses on dirt streets, to avenge the killings of Muslims and their cattle in January.

The operation had been planned at least several days before by a local group called Thank Allah, said one of Mr. Adamu’s fellow detainees, Ibrahim Harouna, who was shackled on the floor next to him. The men spoke in Hausa through an interpreter.

“They killed a lot of our Fulanis in January,” Mr. Adamu said, referring to his ethnic group. “So I knew that this time, we would take revenge.”

His victims were sleeping when he arrived, he said, and he set their house on fire. Sure enough, they ran out.

“I killed three people,” Mr. Adamu said calmly.

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Sunday’s killings were an especially vicious expression of long-running hostilities between Christians and Muslims in this divided nation. Jos and the region around it are on the fault line where the volatile and poor Muslim north and the Christian south meet. In the past decade, some 3,000 people have been killed in interethnic, interreligious violence in this fraught zone. The pattern is familiar and was seen as recently as January: uneasy coexistence suddenly explodes into killing, amplified for days by retaliation.

Mr. Adamu, a Muslim herder, said he went to Dogo Na Hawa, a village of Christians living in mud-brick houses on dirt streets, to avenge the killings of Muslims and their cattle in January.

The operation had been planned at least several days before by a local group called Thank Allah, said one of Mr. Adamu’s fellow detainees, Ibrahim Harouna, who was shackled on the floor next to him. The men spoke in Hausa through an interpreter.

“They killed a lot of our Fulanis in January,” Mr. Adamu said, referring to his ethnic group. “So I knew that this time, we would take revenge.”

His victims were sleeping when he arrived, he said, and he set their house on fire. Sure enough, they ran out.

“I killed three people,” Mr. Adamu said calmly.

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For a little over a year, five Canadian and six African dioceses have engaged in diocese-to-diocese theological dialogue on matters relating to human sexuality and to mission. With one exception, each diocese has established a theological working group to prepare papers and responses which were shared with their partner diocese on the opposite continent (see below for list of participants). Ontario and Botswana exchanged documents related to sustainability in the context of mission. These dialogues have emerged from, and are a deepening of, relationships established during the Indaba and Bible Study processes at the Lambeth Conference of 2008.

From February 24 to 26, the bishops of these dioceses met at the Anglican Communion Office, St. Andrew’s House in London, England. In a context grounded by common prayer and eucharistic celebration we reflected together on our local experiences of mission and the challenges facing the Church in our diverse contexts. Though the initial exchange of papers had been related in most cases to matters of human sexuality and homosexuality in particular, our face to face theological conversation necessarily deepened to explore the relationships between the Gospel and the many particular cultural realities in which the Church is called to mission.

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Pastor Yohanna Gyang Jugu, of Church of Christ in Nigeria, sat outside his burned-down church, tears in his eyes.

“We were sleeping and we heard gunshots all around,” he said. “I woke up and went outside. There was nowhere to pass. Fulani men had surrounded the village. They caught my wife and killed her, and my daughter. They were cutting people down with machetes.”

During the burial service, Solomn Zang, the commissioner for works and transport in Plateau State, where Dogo Nahawa is located, said that the military was not sufficient for protection.

“God willing, we will do something about this,” he said. “Next time if this happens you shouldn’t call the police or the military, call on your neighbors to come and fight.”

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Certainly, religion is one of the many dividing lines in Jos and elsewhere in Nigeria. But it is not the main one.

In Jos, as elsewhere, the cause of fighting has, more often been the struggle for resources than it has religion. In Jos, my AFP colleague Aminu Abubakar reports that the original cause of the latest clash was the alleged theft of cattle, blamed by a group of settler-farmers on a group of cattle herders. Often the fighting in the north is between the semi-nomadic cattle herders (who happen to be mostly Muslim) and settler-farmers (who happen to be mostly Christian), fighting about the diminishing access to land.

“For all those who will go out and fight their Muslim or Christian brothers on the streets, there are many more (Nigerians) who will take them into their home to protect them, when fighting breaks out,” a Nigerian Islamic law student once told me, attending an animist festival in the south.

The reason these conflicts turn deadly in Nigeria is not any greater degree of religious animosity there than elsewhere, however much exists. The reason is poor government: one that fails to send in troops early enough to quell trouble when it flares and never jails those responsible when it is over. Mediation of disputes is too often left to others, too.

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Rioters armed with machetes slaughtered more than 200 people overnight Sunday as religious violence flared anew between Christians and Muslims in central Nigeria, witnesses said. Hundreds of people fled their homes, fearing reprisal attacks.

The bodies of the dead – including many women and children – lined dusty streets in three mostly Christian villages south of the regional capital of Jos, local journalists and a civil rights group said. They said at least 200 bodies had been counted by Sunday afternoon.

Torched homes smoldered after the 3 a.m. attacks that a region-wide curfew enforced by the country’s police and military should have stopped.

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As an Anglican archbishop who spent decades working to defeat apartheid and is widely considered the moral conscience of South Africa, what do you make of your country’s current president, Jacob Zuma, who is in the headlines again for fathering a child out of wedlock?

I think we are at a bad place in South Africa, and especially when you contrast it with the Mandela era. Many of the things that we dreamt were possible seem to be getting more and more out of reach. We have the most unequal society in the world. We have far too many of our people living in a poverty that is debilitating, inhumane and unacceptable.

But why is Zuma still president? He sets such a poor example ”” a polygamist with three wives who just fathered a 20th child with yet another woman. Why is that tolerated?

It’s not. Two of the major churches have spoken out very strongly. The Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Church have said that he’s undermining his own government’s campaign to deal with the H.I.V. pandemic. That campaign speaks about being loyal to one partner, practicing safe sex and generally using condoms, and he hasn’t done that.

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As the attention of the public and Congress has been drawn away to other global hotspots, the Interfaith Sudan Working Group hopes U.S. lawmakers will assist Sudan in grappling with an upcoming election, a recent cease-fire agreement with a Darfur rebel group and a referendum on independence for southern Sudan.

“Political milestones such as the upcoming election, cease-fire agreements and referendum carry great promise and great peril,” said Ruth Messinger, president of the American Jewish World Service. “That’s why we need the U.S. government’s focused attention now. If the agreements and peace process fall apart, they can’t just be put back together, again.”

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The outgoing Anglican Primate suggested that such approach to governance must change and advised the Rivers State Gov. Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi to join forces with other true democrats to bring about the needed change in the polity.

“This approach to governance must change and it is people like you who will be vanguards to bring about this change. I want to encourage you Mr. Governor to work with your peers and colleagues, those holding political power to lead the country,” [Peter] Akinola said.

He also condemned what he called “members of a cabal that engage in madness of self preservation and hold the entire nation to ransom”, and urged the state governor to work with his colleagues within and outside his party for the good of the country, “bearing in mind that should this nation collapse, you and I would not be spared”.

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Well, on balance the sad news is that [foreign aid] hasn’t worked. It hasn’t achieved the objectives that we had for the foreign aid program. The number one objective, of course, was to promote economic growth out of poverty for the aid receiving countries, and there we see a clear failure. The most aid-intensive countries have actually stagnated over the last fifty years. They’ve failed to see a rise in their living standards. That includes especially sub-Saharan Africa, some of the poorer Caribbean and Pacific Islands.

It’s been wasted both in actual corruption of aid money being stolen, because a lot of aid does go to very corrupt governments, and it’s also just been wasted bureaucratically by the ineffectual bureaucracies and the aid organizations themselves and in the ineffectual bureaucracies of the governments that receive the aid money.

Most of the success stories did not get a lot of aid, and most of the countries that did get a lot of aid are not success stories. We always have something in statistics we call confirmation bias, that if you strongly believe a given idea like aid works then you select a couple examples that fit the story. But when we look at the whole range of experience of success and failure, I’m afraid there is no reason to believe that aid has contributed to success.

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Ongoing political wrangling in Kenya’s coalition government is having a detrimental effect on its fight against corruption. Society of Missionaries for Africa Father Patrick Devine told us that unless the roots of conflict are addressed, Kenyans will never know peace.

Listen to it all (about two minutes).

Can you explain the entrepreneurial zeal of the Redeemed Christian Church? They want to grow, and they are growing.

They are growing. Growth equals life equals health equals prosperity at its most basic. Religion is about living an abundant life either here or the hereafter. Growth is necessary for that. The other thing is, to put this in the context of immigrant religion, in Boston, a supposedly highly secular city, a new church has been founded every 20 days. Most people don’t realize this. They think New England is secular. These are immigrant churches, storefront churches. This is the American way of building civic society, coming together for voluntary groups, helping each other, and then growth becomes a way to be prosperous in this American context of capitalism, competition, and so on.

In order to grow they have to have American followers as well as their own?

Yeah, though I don’t have the numbers, but there are hundreds of thousands of Nigerians in the United States, so you can start with Nigerians and work outwards. It can also be a unitive experience among Nigerians of different ethnicities. You have to remember Nigeria is a multiethnic country. So first if you can start with your own ethnic group of Nigerians and then expand outward, you can first build out to other Nigerians and then to Ghanains or people of other West African countries and keep moving out to North Americans.

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Abdulmutallab studied the Quran at the Rabiatu Mutallab Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies in Kaduna, a religious school named after his grandparents and funded by his father. By all accounts, he was a pious fellow. His neighbors say he was the first to arrive at the mosque for prayers and the last to leave. He kept to himself, says Shehu Sani, who lives down the road from the Mutallabs.

Sani, the author of books about religious violence and terrorism in Nigeria, says it is important to remember the backdrop to Abdulmutallab’s privileged childhood in Kaduna: Between 1979 and 2009, he says, there were more than 200 incidents of religious violence and killings in the area ”” including deadly clashes between Christians and Muslims. And there have also been violent protests in northern Nigeria against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Sani says Muslim youngsters like Abdulmutallab were absorbing this reality as they grew up, and some of them were most likely radicalized without even realizing it.

“People who are indoctrinated are those who already have the seed of violence in them, who have the seed of hate, the seed of their perception that things are wrong and must be addressed drastically,” Sani says. “Farouk Mutallab came from a society that has not embraced tolerance. He came from a society that has a history of violence, of extremism, and that is a fact.”

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Rosaria Bankundiye and Saveri Nemeye are neighbors in the tiny village of Mbyo, south of Kigali. On a steamy morning, they sit in the cool living area of the clay house Saveri helped build for Rosaria just a few years ago. Two of his sons roll around on the floor while the adults talk. At one point, Saveri leans over to say something to Rosaria and she starts laughing, her smile wide. They have known each other for a long time.

Nearly 16 years ago, during the genocide that wracked this African country of 10 million people for 100 days in 1994, Saveri murdered Rosaria’s sister, along with her nieces and nephews. Genocidaires also attacked Rosaria, her husband and their four children with machetes and left them for dead. Only Rosaria survived. Yet when Saveri came to beg her forgiveness after he was released from prison in 2004, Rosaria considered his request and then granted it. “How can I refuse to forgive when I’m a forgiven sinner, too?” she asks.

Nearly every religion preaches the value of forgiveness. To most of us, however, such an act of mercy after so much pain seems unthinkable ”” maybe even unnatural. Scientists have long suspected that we are born with an instinct to seek revenge against those who hurt us. When someone like Rosaria overrides that vengeance instinct with an act of radical forgiveness, it can only be a miracle from God.

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