More than 160 million people in India are dalits or "Untouchables" people tainted by their birth into a caste system that deems them impure, less than human. Christian communities are helping India's untouchables and many of them are converting. But the Indian government is now proposing legislation that would give the very people who have oppressed the dalits for generations the authority to block their conversions.
Canada is not a totalitarian state, but the totalitarian impulse is very thinly disguised indeed, and the signs on the horizon are ominous.
With a price on her head in Azerbaijan and a prison sentence in Sudan, Baroness Caroline Cox is always in danger. Moving illegally across borders, to see firsthand "man's inhumanity to man," has become the life business of this extraordinary crusader for Christian rights.
It is common for religious believers to lament the Supreme Court's barely concealed hostility to the free exercise of religion, at least since the middle decades of the twentieth century. But in the long term, even more damage is likely to be done by the influence of ideas advocated by a cluster of political and legal theorists in the academy. For these writers, religious liberty itself is a pernicious idea.
Although I had read many books on this subject during my youth, it was not until I was thirty years old that I met anyone who had seen first-hand the evidence of how brutal that persecution really was.
Persecution that's the name for it. Tolerance might be the highest virtue in our popular culture, but it doesn't often extend to Christians these days. Christians are increasingly being driven from public life, denied their First Amendment rights, and even actively discriminated against for their beliefs. So argues David Limbaugh in his new book.
One of my claims to fame is that I am a graduate of the fire breathing, fundamentalist Bob Jones University. This is the college deep in the Bible belt that gave Ian Paisley his honorary doctorate and still makes headlines for its anti-Catholic bigotry.
It is a dramatic sign of the rampaging secularization of North American and European life during the past half-century that a book like "The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice" by Philip Jenkins, has come about.
The American media, usually painstaking in their efforts to offend members of no racial, religious or gender category, consistently make one major exception the Roman Catholic Church. So argues Philip Jenkins, distinguished professor of history and religion at Penn State and an Episcopalian, in his new book "The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice".
