Amid news reports about children separated from their parents at the border and sex abuse victims being denied asylum, religious leaders have spoken out this week in new, significant, and surprising ways...…

Unfortunately, nativist hardliners in the Republican Party have the power to thwart any legislative solution. They have exercised that power for years, as House Speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan (both Catholics) cowered.
The problem that has brought us to this point on immigration is the GOP’s decision to stake its survival on being a white identity party.

Franklin Graham, the son of famous evangelist Billy Graham, has been one of Trump’s strongest supporters since he announced he was running for president.
But now he has come out strongly against an administration policy which has been separating children from their parents at the US-Mexican border, calling it “disgraceful.”

How Can World's Richest Man Jeff Bezos Give Back? Staffers at the Washington Post Think Decent Wages and Benefits Would Be Good Start....

Amazon CEO, Washington Post owner, and world's richest man Jeff Bezos is notorious for raking in enormous profits on the back of his overstrained and dramatically undercompensated workforce—all the while doing everything he can to avoid paying taxes.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops opened its spring meeting this week with a stern reproach of the Trump administration’s latest immigration policies, with the group’s president suggesting the new rules on asylum are a “right to life” issue.
Some bishops followed by urging protests, including “canonical penalties” for those who carry out the administration’s new rules.

Hundreds of thousands of women took to the streets in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on June 4 to demand an end to violence against women, and for the Congress to vote in favor of legal, safe and free abortion when it debates the question starting on June 13.
The movement is called Ni Una Menos, which can be translated different ways, but the basic meaning is “Not One More Murdered Woman.” It began as a protest against rampant femicide in Argentina. Although abortion is illegal, estimates put the number of abortions conducted in secrecy each year between 370,000 and 520,000. As a consequence, approximately 49,000 women end up in the hospital each year in Argentina owing to medical complications from back-alley abortions.

The belief system of a person or society is the set of beliefs that they have about what is right and wrong and what is true and false.

So, there it is. Belief in the "divine" is a belief in the existence of deities. Atheism is the disbelief in deities or the certain belief that no deities exist. The two things are incompatible, by definition.

Thirty-four protesters were arrested at the North Carolina Legislative Building on Monday while fighting for higher minimum wages and unions in North Carolina.
This is the fifth week of protests by the Poor People's Campaign, a coordinated effort across the country to push the plight of the poor to the top of the agenda in statehouses and the U.S. Congress.
The Rev. William J. Barber II, the former head of the state NAACP and architect of the Moral Monday protest movement, co-founded the campaign.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. outlined a multi-faith, multicultural plan in the late 1960s to draw attention to income inequality, working conditions and economic injustices that he thought the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 failed to address.

Omid Safi’s latest project was a labor of love, in the most literal sense.
Safi lives in North Carolina, where he leads the Islamic Studies Center at Duke University. His fiancée is based in Switzerland. “We had a long-distance romance, a kind of old-fashioned courtship with us exchanging letters every few days,” he said. So he began translating his favorite poetry from Islam’s mystical Sufi tradition to send to her.

With her encouragement, he compiled all the verses he’d translated into a book, “Radical Love,” published in May. It contains more than 200 poems translated from their original Arabic, Turkish, Urdu and Persian, including those by the 13th-century Sufi master Rumi.
The collection situates Safi’s translations of love-drunk Sufi poetry alongside selections from the Holy Quran and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, showing the deep Islamic roots of the writings of Sufi mystics like Rumi and Hafez.

For a Muslim audience, there is this extraordinary, rich, mystical, spiritual and poetic voice that has historically been the dominant Muslim worldview. In the last 1,400 years of Islamic thought, one would be extremely hard-pressed to think of a Muslim whose teachings and writings have been more influential on more Muslims in more countries in more time periods than Rumi. From India to Bosnia, Rumi was a dominant voice in all these places.

That argument is that Fred Rogers’s worldview, a kind of humanism that had roots in Rogers’s Christianity but expressed itself as a commitment to everyone’s dignity, is what helped many navigate the scariest events of childhood (RFK’s assassination, the Challenger shuttle explosion). And the power of that worldview, the film suggests, doesn’t stop when childhood ends.....


Rogers, the film proposes, was interested in “making goodness attractive in this next millennium,” as he says in a PBS segment recorded late in his life. The idea that everyone has inherent dignity was obvious to him; if you say otherwise, for him, “you might as well go against the fundamentals of Christianity.”
After all, Jesus’s answer to someone who asked him “Who is my neighbor?” was to tell the story of the Good Samaritan, a parable in which the most “righteous” and powerful members of his own society passed by a man lying in a ditch on the side of the road.

According to a Quinnipiac University poll 58 percent of Americans think that the protests by the NFL players are not disrespectful of America. Just 35 percent of poll respondents thought that taking a knee was an unpatriotic thing to do.