WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court said Monday that a high school football coach who knelt and prayed on the field after games was protected by the Constitution, a decision that opponents said would open the door to “much more coercive prayer" in public schools.
ROME (AP) — One the most spectacular examples of ancient Roman baths, the Baths of Caracalla, has become more spectacular. Authorities in Rome on Thursday opened to the public a unique private home that stood on the site before the baths, with a frescoed ceiling and prayer room honoring Roman and Egyptian deities.
DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) — Thousands of people marched in Bangladesh's capital and in parts of India on Friday to urge Muslim-majority nations to cut ties with India and boycott its products unless it punishes two governing party officials for comments deemed derogatory to Islam's Prophet Muhammad.
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — The chant in Arabic blasted from rooftop loudspeakers, drowning out both the growl of traffic from nearby interstates and the chatter and clinking glasses on the patio of the dive bar that shares a wall with Minneapolis’ oldest Somali mosque.
VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis, the archbishop of Canterbury and the leader of a the church of Scotland will together lead a prayer vigil for peace while visiting South Sudan next month, the Vatican said Saturday.
ROME (AP) — Pope Francis has sent a protocol greeting to the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, assuring him of prayers on his patron's feast day and stressing the value of human life and wisdom, as the Vatican insists on maintaining cordial relations amid the war in Ukraine.
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Wedged into a recliner in the corner of her assisted living apartment in Portland, Skylar Freimann, who has a terminal heart condition and pulmonary illness, anxiously eyed her newly arrived hospital bed on a recent day and worried over how she would maintain independence as she further loses mobility.
LAGUNA WOODS, Calif. (AP) — When a gunman began shooting at a Taiwanese American church luncheon, Shoei Su said he froze.
The retired appraiser uses a walker and said he and many of the elderly congregants didn't immediately know what was happening.
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) — Sri Lankan protesters lit flames and offered prayers Wednesday remembering thousands — including ethnic Tamil civilians — killed in the final stages of the country’s decadeslong civil war, in the first-ever event where mostly majority ethnic Sinhalese openly memorialized the minority group.
NEW YORK (AP) — Top leaders of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops called on the faithful to pray and fast Friday, in hopes the Supreme Court is on track to overturn the constitutional right to abortion.
SRINAGAR, India (AP) — Muslims across India marked Eid al-Fitr on Tuesday by offering prayers outside mosques, with the celebrations this year following a series of attacks against the religious minority during the month of Ramadan.
CAIRO (AP) — For the Islamic holiday of Eid al-Fitr, the smell of freshly baked orange biscuits and powdered sugar-dusted cookies typically fills the air in Mona Abubakr’s home. But due to higher prices, the Egyptian housewife this year made smaller quantities of the sweet treats, some of which she gives as gifts to relatives and neighbors.
SEATTLE (AP) — The clock ran down at the end of the homecoming game and spectators stormed the football field, knocking over members of the high school band — all to gather around an assistant coach as he took a knee in prayer, surrounded by uniformed players.
ROME (AP) — The war in Ukraine loomed over the traditional Good Friday Colosseum procession in Rome, after the Vatican’s choice of a Russian woman to share bearing the cross with a Ukrainian woman had angered Ukrainians.
JERUSALEM (AP) — Palestinians and Israeli police clashed at the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem on Friday as thousands gathered for prayers during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. Medics said more than 150 Palestinians were wounded — Palestinians threw rocks and Israeli police fired stun grenades in what was the most serious violence at the site in nearly a year.
LAS CRUCES, New Mexico (AP) — Sitting cross-legged on the floor as his wife and six children laid plates of fruit on a red cloth in front of him, Wolayat Khan Samadzoi watched through the open balcony door for the sliver of new moon to appear in the cloudless New Mexico sky, where the sun had set beyond a desert mountain.
(RNS) — American Jews say they were blindsided by the U.S. Senate’s lightning-fast passage of a bill to make daylight saving time year-round and intend to fight it.
The Sunshine Protection Act, which passed the Senate on March 15, will make it nearly impossible for Jews to pray communally in the morning, Jewish advocates say, and still get to work or school on time during the winter months.
ROME (AP) — Pope Francis prayed for peace in Ukraine in a ceremony Friday that harked back to a century-old apocalyptic prophecy about peace and Russia that was sparked by purported visions of the Virgin Mary to three peasant children in Fatima, Portugal, in 1917.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court said Thursday that states must accommodate the wishes of death row inmates who want to have their pastors pray aloud and even touch them during their executions.
BERLIN (AP) — Alona Fartukhova has been coming to Berlin’s Ukrainian Orthodox Christian community every day since she arrived in Germany five days ago from war-torn Kyiv. The 20-year-old refugee has been attending daily prayers for peace and helped organize donations for her compatriots back home.
Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, leader of Russia’s dominant religious group, has sent his strongest signal yet justifying his country's invasion of Ukraine — describing the conflict as part of a struggle against sin and pressure from liberal foreigners to hold “gay parades” as the price of admission to their ranks.
PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) — The Islamic State says a lone Afghan suicide bomber struck inside a Shiite Muslim mosque in Pakistan's northwestern city of Peshawar during Friday prayers, killing at least 56 worshippers and wounding 194 people.
BEIJING (AP) — Chinese people rang in the Lunar New Year on Tuesday despite pandemic restrictions, as small crowds gathered at temples to offer traditional prayers for the Year of the Tiger.
At the Lama Temple in Beijing, dozens of people bowed in prayer before the ornate west gate of the Tibetan Buddhist site that was shut because of pandemic restrictions.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court said Friday it will hear the case of a former Seattle-area football coach who was removed from his job because he refused to stop praying on the field.
NEW YORK (AP) — Prayers and the compelling need to bury the dead filled a Bronx mosque Wednesday, as a bereaved community began saying goodbye to those lost in New York City’s most devastating fire in decades.
JERUSALEM (AP) — When Israel's new government took office last June, it indicated it would press ahead on an egalitarian prayer site at Jerusalem's Western Wall — a sensitive holy site that has emerged as a point of friction between Jews over how prayer is conducted there.
CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — South Africans from all corners of retired Archbishop Desmond Tutu's “rainbow nation” filed past his plain pine casket by the hundreds on Friday to pay their respects to his life of activism for equality for all races, creeds and sexual orientations.
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — The remaining members of a U.S. missionary group who were kidnapped two months ago in Haiti have been freed, Haitian police and the church group said Thursday.
The spokesman for Haiti’s National Police, Gary Desrosiers, confirmed to The Associated Press that the hostages had been released, but did not immediately provide additional details.
SRINAGAR, India (AP) — Jamia Masjid, the grand mosque of Srinagar, dominates its neighborhood with an imposing main gate and massive turrets. It can hold 33,000 worshippers, and on special occasions over the years hundreds of thousands of Muslims have filled nearby lanes and roads to offer prayers led from the mosque.
WASHINGTON (AP) — In a video released Tuesday, President Joe Biden spoke directly to the families of those killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School nine years ago, saying the nation owed families of mass shootings “more than our prayers.
ROME (AP) — Pope Francis told Lebanon’s prime minister on Thursday that he was praying that God would help Lebanon “get up” and get back on its feet following an unprecedented economic crisis that has thrown three quarters of the country’s 6 million people, including a million Syrian refugees, into poverty.
PRISTINA, Kosovo (AP) — Kosovo’s health authorities are trying a new technique to persuade people to get the COVID-19 vaccine — cooperating with the Muslim community at Friday prayers.
Imams around Kosovo called on the faithful to get the jab while medical teams waited in the mosques’ yards to inoculate them.
When Amish gather for worship each week, they regularly sing the solemn, German-dialect hymns that their spiritual forebears composed nearly five centuries ago in a condition akin to that of 17 missionaries recently kidnapped in Haiti — captivity.
When Amish gather for worship each week, they regularly sing the solemn, German-dialect hymns that their spiritual forebears composed nearly five centuries ago in a condition akin to that of 17 missionaries recently kidnapped in Haiti — captivity.
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Suicide bombers attacked a Shiite mosque packed with worshippers attending Friday prayers in southern Afghanistan, killing at least 47 people and wounding 70, a Taliban official said.
BERLIN (AP) — The German city of Cologne will start permitting mosques to broadcast muezzin calls for prayer, the city said Monday.
The calls can be broadcast for five minutes every week for the Friday prayer around noon and audible outside the Muslim houses of prayer, city spokeswoman Katja Reuter said.
ROME (AP) — Pope Francis on Sunday asked for prayers for his visit later this month to “the heart of Europe,” a four-day pilgrimage to Hungary and Slovakia, which will be his first travels since surgery earlier this summer.
JERUSALEM (AP) — As police protected them, three Jewish men stepped forward, placed their hands out at chest level and began reciting prayers in low tones in the shadow of Jerusalem’s golden Dome of the Rock.
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The office of a Wisconsin lawmaker who has been an outspoken critic of vaccine and mask mandates declined to update his condition on Tuesday, even as a fellow legislator asked for prayers, saying the state senator was hospitalized with COVID-19-induced pneumonia.
TOKYO (AP) — Japan's defense minister on Friday visited a Tokyo shrine viewed by China and both Koreas as a symbol of Japanese wartime aggression to pray for the war dead just days before the nation marks the 76th anniversary of its World War II defeat.