US President Donald Trump says Turkey would face 'large sanctions' if it refuses to release pastor Andrew Brunson.
After seven years of closure of their old church by local authorities due to ‘security reasons’, the Coptic community in the Egyptian village of Kom el – Loufy celebrated the completion of the first phase of building their new church, the Church of Virgin Mary and Martyr Aban, by holding their first ever Mass on Sunday.
An unprecedented move removing rental fees for places of worship gives a sigh of relief to the country's ethnic and religious community whose religious rights were suppressed in the past.
A crowd of Turkish Christians from Andrew Brunson’s Izmir Resurrection Church greeted their pastor with cries of “We love you, Andrew!” as he arrived home under police escort on Wednesday afternoon, 25 July.
The Notre Dame de Sion sisters were founded to pray for the conversion of Jews; today, they are pioneers in Jewish-Catholic relations at the Ecce Homo Center for Biblical Formation.
If the Strait of Hormuz is the door to the Persian Gulf, controlling it means assuming geographic, economic and political power through controlling two-thirds of global oil traffic. Iraq, Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait all aim to control the Strait in front of Muscat, the capital of Oman.
The Russian Orthodox Church and the Vatican have forged a partnership to rebuild Christian sites in war-torn Syria. Following a meeting between Pope Francis and the Eastern Patriarchs in Bari, Italy on July 7, 2018, Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk (Secretary of State) said the church leaders agreed to implement a plan on how to reconstruct Christian churches and monasteries, reports Russian News Agency TASS.
The Turkmens of ethnically diverse Kirkuk province in Iraq finally feel that they are coming into their own, sensing a new beginning after being subjected to Arabization policies under President Saddam Hussein's regime and then to Kurdish domination after he was toppled in 2003. The tide turned after Baghdad rejected the September 2017 Kurdish independence referendum and forcibly reclaimed Kirkuk from the Kurds the following month.
About 15 million Christians, among the native and immigrant faithful, are estimated to live in the Middle East today. In some countries, they are in sharp decline (Iraq and Syria), if not on the verge of disappearing – in others they face growing difficulties, while they are increasing in the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula, mainly due to the arrival of Asian and European workers.
My wife had just dropped off our kids at the local Coptic Orthodox Church we attend in Cairo and sat down with her Egyptian friend at the adjacent church-owned cafe. After initial pleasantries, she spoke of this current article I was then researching.
When E.’s plane from Amman touched down in Rome, she started to cry. After spending a semester studying abroad in Jordan, E., in town to visit friends, felt she could safely put on her Star of David necklace and her prized “If I Forget Thee O Jerusalem” necklace.
Palestinian and left-wing lawmakers warn the Nation-State law will enshrine 'Jewish supremacy' in Israel. Israel passed a law on Thursday to declare that only Jews have the right of self-determination in the country, something members of the Arab minority called racist and verging on apartheid.