News & Views

News and Views

July 1, 2025

Religious The Anti-Defamation League states that the number of antisemitic incidents in the United States reached a record high in 2024, noting that 58% of the 9,354 incidents were related to Israel, particularly through chants, speeches, and signs at rallies protesting Israeli policies. The report indicated that this is the first time in 46 years of tracking Israel-related incidents — 5,422 in 2024 — that Israel comprised more than half of the total. — AP, 5/22/2025 In many countries, a fifth or […]

News and Views

May 1, 2025

Religious Christians in India are experiencing a rise in persecution, according to a new report that has documented 745 instances of alleged violence against members of the minority community — an all-time high — during the first 11 months of 2024. The report, released by United Christian Forum (UCF), claims that anti-Christian violence across the Hindu-majority South Asian nation has risen steadily over the past decade, accompanied by apparent in—difference from officials toward the victims. The incidents include acts of physical violence, […]

News and Views

March 1, 2025

Religious In 2017 scholars Eshbal Ratson and Jonathan Ben-Dov of the Department of Bible Studies at the University of Haifa published one of the last two remaining Dead Sea Scrolls in their article “A Newly Reconstructed Calendrical Scroll from Qumran in Cryptic Script” in the Journal of Biblical Literature (Winter 2017). For more than a year, the scholars diligently pieced together 62 Dead Sea Scroll fragments, on which there was writing in code. Ratson and Ben-Dov deciphered the code on the reconstructed […]

News and Views

January 1, 2025

Religious In the original Hebrew, the name of God is given as four letters, YHWH, known as the Tetragrammaton; these letters are the root of both Jehovah and Yahweh. In “Parsing the Divine Name” in the Fall 2024 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, biblical scholar Ronald Hendel explains how scholars and archaeologists came to the conclusion that Yahweh was the most likely pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton. As Hendel argues, “The vocalization of the first syllable is actually preserved, mostly in liturgical expressions […]

News and Views

November 1, 2024

Religious Pakistan has long had some of the harshest blasphemy laws in the world. In addition to state-sanctioned execution, Pakistani Christians and other religious minorities face abductions, indentured servitude and all manner of discrimination. The laws are rampantly exploited to systematically oppress Christians, Hindus, Sikhs and anyone who doesn’t follow the teachings of Islam. According to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom’s Freedom of Religion or Belief Victims List, more than 50 Pakistani Christians and religious minorities are currently detained […]