Ireland, which enriched the English language with the word boycott,* has invented a refinement of the term. The new word: fethardism, meaning to practice boycott along religious lines.When, eight years ago, Sean Michael Cloney, 22, a Roman Catholic farmer, married Sheila Kelly, 22, Protestant, in London, she made the usual agreement imposed by the Catholic Church on mixed marriages: the children would be brought up as Catholics. Sean brought Sheila back to his big brown farmhouse called Dungulph Castle, a 600-year-old rebuilt Norman mansion in the southern ...

Human rights campaigners in Kenya have accused police of carrying out hundreds of extrajudicial executions during an operation against the Mungiki criminal sect. A shadowy and fractured quasi-religious movement, the Mungiki were blamed for a string of grisly murders earlier this year. The Kenya National Commission on Human Rights , an independent body set up by an act of Parliament, says it has evidence that almost 500 suspects were shot and their bodies dumped during the past five ...

With few job openings available for graduating seniors, recruiters are an especially welcome sight on college campuses these days. When Josh Dickson, a recruiter at Teach for America, would show up at liberal-arts colleges this year, the earnest 25-year-old would hear student after student explain that their most urgent desire had always been to teach in a low-income community. It may sound like exactly the kind of interaction that takes place on hundreds of campuses across the ...

Early in the evening of June 7, children swarmed in front of the Virgin Mary Church in Cairo's Imbaba slum, carrying pink carnations. They were there to greet Egypt's interim Prime Minister, Essam Sharaf, who had arrived to inaugurate the $1 million rebuilding of the church, which had been burned in an outbreak of sectarian strife in May. But while the initial wave of violence, in which 15 people were killed, made front-page headlines around the world and stoked fears ...

Punjab Province in India was curry-hot with religious conflicts and revolts against British rule until 1937, when moderate Sir Sikander Hyat Khan, member of a distinguished Moslem family, became Premier of the Punjab. By straightforward administration and sense-making pleas for Hindu-Moslem unity, he succeeded in uniting the major political parties of the Punjab's 28 millions—56% Moslems, 27% Hindu, 13% warrior Sikhs—into a coalition Government which brought internal peace to the Province and has raised 500,-ooo troops to fight the Axis. ...

They dress in everything from miniskirts to medieval mantles. They do everything from classroom teaching to police work. One has a job with Cesar Chavez, another with Ralph Nader. There is a deputy attorney general and an Air Force lieutenant. They live in inner-city slums, in posh suburbs, on farms, even in the desert. They come singly, by the dozen and in battalions. They are the new American nuns who, in the decade since the Second Vatican Council first provided ...

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford has never shied away from talking about his religious faith. So perhaps it should have come as no surprise that he invoked "God's law" throughout his long, rambling press conference on June 24 — after going missing in Buenos Aires for six days — to confess his yearlong extramarital affair with an Argentine woman. But in acknowledging his infidelity, Sanford was actually admitting that he had broken a state law: adultery is ...

Of all the trials in human history, none has had greater consequences. In Jerusalem, in April of either the year 30 or 33, Jesus of Nazareth was arrested, hauled before a religious court, tried by a Roman governor, sentenced to death and crucified. And what did that come to mean? That, explained the Apostle Paul, "God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us . . . We are now justified by ...

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 ...

Three experts--the Rev. George Handzo, a chaplain with the HealthCare Chaplaincy of New York City; Dr. Andrew Newberg, a radiologist and psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania; and Dr. Richard Sloan, a psychiatrist at Columbia University--discuss the role that belief should play in science What role does religion play in health, and health in religion? Dr. Richard Sloan: Spirituality and religion play a substantial role in helping patients overcome discomfort. But I don't think that it's any business of medicine, ...