Monthly Archives: December 2013

Women Take the Wheel in Saudi Arabia

In this week’s issue of the New Yorker, Katherine Zoepf writes about an emerging women’s revolution in Saudi Arabia. Yesterday, we posted a slide show focussing on the inroads that women have made in the workforce, particularly in the retail sector, in a … Continue reading

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It’s Salafist vs. Salafist in Syria’s civil war

DAMASCUS — Some extremist Sunni clerics help foment sectarian violence in Syria, one indication of how a popular uprising against President Bashar al-Assad’s government became a civil war. Both sides use religion to justify their grab for power. Egyptian Imam Sheikh Yusuf … Continue reading

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Seeing the Big Picture in a Small Story from Tunisia

A disciple of Hillel, the 1st-century rabbi who founded a dynasty of scholar-sages, exhorted students struggling with a perplexing passage from the Torah not to give up but to “turn it and turn it, for everything is in it.” Good … Continue reading

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LDS Church, US Government Swap Positions on Polygamy

Every other year when I was growing up, my family attend a reunion for all the descendants of all seven wives of one of my great-great-grandfathers. Born in Bavaria in 1825, John, who anglicized his name when he joined the … Continue reading

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(Not) Covering the New Gilded Age

A century ago, muckraking journalism was in its heyday, Progressive Era religious activists were organizing movements for social justice and a series of legislative initiatives—from Teddy Roosevelt’s “Square Deal” to the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913—imposed tight constraints … Continue reading

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Syrian Christians Battered by Extremist Rebels

Fighting between government troops and rebels continues in Syria. Christian areas of Damascus are under attack from rebel mortars, and tens of thousands of Christians have fled the country. Correspondent Reese Erlich filed this story for CBS Radio News from … Continue reading

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His Life in Our Hands: Remembering Nelson Mandela (1918-2013)

    On February 11, 1990, the day Nelson Mandela was released after 27 years in prison, I was driving from downtown Los Angeles to my apartment near Venice, having detoured through a sketchy part of Culver City in an … Continue reading

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Putting religious differences aside, Tanzanians craft new constitution

ZANZIBAR, Tanzania – Political divisions in this East African nation are so profound that to achieve some sort of unity may, paradoxically, require dividing the country even further—into as many as three governments within a single state. That’s the proposal … Continue reading

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For Roger Mahony, clergy abuse cases were a threat to agenda

A year after arriving in Los Angeles, the youngest archbishop in the U.S. Catholic Church had a schedule and an agenda befitting a presidential candidate. Roger Mahony raced around the city in a chauffeured sedan, exhorting labor leaders to support … Continue reading

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