faith & ideas

 

Russian Orthodox Solovetsky Monastery complex, founded in the second quarter of the 15th century 

 

Russia's Orthodox Church has finally won its battle to make religious education compulsory in schools, says Russian Orthodox Church official Viktor Malukhin. But the secularists have won concessions too

The Qur'an as training-manual in a war on unbelief. Plus: Omar al-Qattan tours Disneyland Islam, Murat Belge tracks the fundamentalist mind (archive)

The Danish filmmaker uses image as a "celluloid icon" to explore the depths of the Christian unconscious

The Polish philosopher demolished Marxism in the west. How did he get away with it?

A voice for reason, truth and decency amid the deceits of the communist era is stilled

In her concluding report from the launch of a global initiative to reform Muslim Family Law, Cassandra Balchin finds solidarity in diversity and a growing convergence around human rights values. 

Muslim scholars and activists from forty eight countries are today launching a global initiative insisting that in the twenty first century "there cannot be justice without equality" between men and women.

Barack Obama remains a political enigma. Is that because he doesn't believe in politics?

The shrillness and point-scoring of much net-based discussion is closing the space for politics

The ideas of a great 17th-century English Christian radical can still subvert power  

The visceral art of Francis Bacon exposes the shallow godlessness of the new atheists

An influential Turkish network fuses faith and modernity in search of a new social order

For generation under communist rule religion was largely discouraged and heavily persecuted. But nearly twenty years after the collapse of the USSR worshippers and pilgrims are once again flocking to the country's revered shrines. Stella Rock joined Russian pilgrims in their spiritual attempt to unify and cleanse post-Soviet Russia.

The pope's revival of the Latin mass has reignited a Catholic culture war his supporters mean to win

The bursting of the credit boom is a lesson in the human as well as the financial cost of debt

Religions need to honestly see the outsider as a constituent of themselves to be true to their open promise.

The Church of England has survived a test. But the arc of history still poses it a larger challenge

A rising generation will take Muslims' post-7/7 intellectual ferment forward, testing institutions

How new evidence and insight is enriching historical understanding of early Islam (archive)

The formation of Pakistan is a case-study in the argument over whether religion can be a variant of political ideology