About 40 leaders addressed a packed audience during the candlelit interfaith gathering at First United Methodist Church of Chicago on Clark and Washington Streets.
AMSTERDAM — On April 30, 1941, a Jewish man here in Amsterdam wrote a desperate letter to an American friend, pleading for help emigrating to the United States.
Four Hindu priests sat cross-legged on the floor in front of silver trays of rice, flowers and vermillion powder, chanting in low baritones that reverberated off the bare walls of the old brick temple.An iPhone propped on a chair captured the service — known as a puja — and beamed it via Skype to a home in San Francisco, where a middle-aged woman wearing a red bindi and a head scarf watched intently.Every so often, the priests peered into the screen and instructed her to mimic a gesture or repeat an invocation.
The leaders of the Catholic and Orthodox churches called on Europe to show greater compassion for migrants, a move widely welcomed by migrants as well as residents on the Greek island of Lesbos.
“One of our great strengths is to make visible in appropriate ways the migrant men, women, and children we serve,” says Rev. Sean Carroll, SJ, executive director of the Kino Border Initiative, a Catholic ministry in Mexico and the US. “The more visible they become, even to our political leaders, I think that will change their minds and hearts and help them find the political will to pass immigration reform that’s just and humane.” More →
An ambitious plan for the 69-acre Regent Park neighborhood is disrupting entrenched notions of class, race and religion, at a time when concerns over income inequality and immigration are growing.
“The countries neighboring Syria—Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan—have been extremely generous to the refugees,” says Michel Gabaudan, president of Refugees International. “But they’re bursting at the seams now, and that’s why we see people moving out. I think perhaps where we have failed is not to give sufficient support to these countries so that the host communities would feel the world was sharing the burden, and that’s a feeling that they don’t have.” More →