Why is Pope Francis keeping quiet on the Hagia Sophia mosque conversion? That’s the question being asked above all by Orthodox Christians after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan signed a decree Friday handing control of the 6th-century basilica turned neutral museum in 1935 over to the Diyanet, the Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs.
The medieval Church’s ban on incest was decisive in the growth of individualism in the West, a new study has suggested.
Are the rules for the sacrament of penance laid out in the Bible? Should priests who refuse to break the confessional seal in abuse cases go to jail?
For its wealth of religious monuments, it’s known as “the City of a Hundred Spires”. But most of the churches in Prague are now just tourist attractions.
Would you want a robot for a priest? Like it or not, a $1 million machine named Mindar now preaches in a Buddhist temple in Japan.
For almost fifty years Albania’s communist regime waged a savage war on religion, which it called “the opium of the people”.
The fates of two very different priests in Poland are revealing the distance of the country’s institutional Church from the Gospel message.
The Irish Catholic Church is selling off its real estate holdings to provide compensation to abuse victims, to increase offers of social housing, and to change the shape of ministry in a more and more secular society.
Is there any future for “religion”? How might that idea change in the future? Will belief in gods die out altogether, or will new forms of worship emerge?
Ultraconservative Cardinal Robert Sarah has claimed in an interview on the occasion of his fifty years of priesthood that he…