Revathi Masoosai should be the perfect embodiment of Malaysia. Her ethnic Indian parents were both born in the ancient port of Malacca in 1957, the very year the colony of Malaya gained independence from the British. Her father was Christian, her mother came from a Hindu family, but they both officially converted to Islam, the religion practiced by Malaysia's majority Malays. Yet Revathi does not feel welcome in her ethnically and religiously diverse homeland. According to Malaysian law, Muslims can ...

In Thailand it's often referred to, usually in hushed tones, as "the institution." In a land where the holy trinity consists of nation, religion and king, talking about the monarchy, except in terms of adulation, can be risky business. Political activists, university professors, webmasters and now even a U.S. Citizen have found that out the hard way — arrested and charged with lse majest: insulting the King, Queen or heir to the throne. Last Friday, Thai police announced ...

Kurt Godel was born in 1906 in Brunn, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now part of the Czech Republic, to a father who owned a textile factory and had a fondness for logic and reason and a mother who believed in starting her son's education early. By age 10, Godel was studying math, religion and several languages. By 25 he had produced what many consider the most important result of 20th century mathematics: his famous "incompleteness theorem." Godel's ...

"Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth," said Jesus, "for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." Yet it is a widely argued thesis that Protestantism is a pillar of the profit system, and that piety and "treasures upon earth" can live comfortably together. German Economist Max Weber broached the theory in 1905 with The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Calvinism and the Protestant sects, he maintained, lacking the absolution of sins provided by ...

There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, and Islam is the world's fastest-growing religion. If the evil carnage we witnessed on Sept. 11 were typical of the faith, and Islam truly inspired and justified such violence, its growth and the increasing presence of Muslims in both Europe and the U.S. would be a terrifying prospect. Fortunately, this is not the case.

In the continuing war between science and religion, the issue last week was sex. From Science's corner, Anthropologist George Peter Murdock of Yale threw out the challenge. Said he: "There is . . . nothing in man's social experience to indicate that the ideal of premarital chastity has any scientific value."Out of 250 human societies he had studied, 70% permit "sexual experimentation" before marriage, Professor Murdock told the 37th annual meeting of the American Social Hygiene Association, in Manhattan. Anthropologist Murdock wished more power to "socially controlled premarital ...

The Rev. Dr. Samuel Moor Shoemaker, 61, is a ruggedly handsome divine who thrives on Gilbert & Sullivan and finds the preacher's lot a challengingly happy one. Ever since his unlined face and gentle voice became a fixture in Pittsburgh's Calvary Episcopal Church three years ago, religion has been moving out of the Sunday-morning shadows and into the steel mills and executive suites. The casual young members of the "Golf Club crowd" have found themselves talking religion at cocktail parties and even turning out for Bible-study meetings ...

In Montpellier, France toward the close of the 13th Century was born one Roch, son of the town's wealthy governor. Orphaned, Roch gave away his fortune, set out for Rome as a mendicant pilgrim. In town after town on the way, plagues miraculously disappeared upon his advent. But in Piacenza he fell ill himself, was expelled to a forest where he would have died save for the devoted ministrations of a dog. Roch died in his 30s, was identified by a red cross which, according to tradition, ...

Flying to Niigata, a northern Japanese city not far from the earthquake zone I was covering, I opened the All Nippon Airways in-flight magazine and read an article in Japanese. It was a multipage ode to the rakkyo, a Japanese shallot that is usually eaten pickled. The story detailed the laborious planting, harvesting, cleaning and pickling that the little onions go through. My grandmother used to pickle her own rakkyo, and reading the article made me ...

Brother C. Thomas Patten had little contact with religion as a youngster in Tennessee. "My Daddy was baptized a Baptist in a mountain stream," he explains, "but a crawfish bit him on his big toe and he never went back." Tom got to be a carouser, "drank like a fish," even got himself a suspended two-year prison sentence for driving a stolen car across a state line. But he saw the light after he met Evangelist Bebe Harrison, "the only woman I ever saw that ...