Tuesday, April 10, 2018, marks the twentieth anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, a key moment in the Northern Ireland peace process. This historic event was of global significance, made possible through the work of political and religious actors from Northern Ireland, Great Britain, the Republic of Ireland, and the United States. After decades of sectarian conflict, the agreement brought a peace to the region which remains to this day. However, the result of the United Kingdom’s 2016 referendum on its membership in the European Union has cast doubt over the continuation of this stability, and the force and longevity of the Good Friday Agreement. Though the United Kingdom as whole voted to leave the EU, nearly 56 percent of Northern Ireland residents voted to remain. While some argue that this stretch of peace in Northern Ireland proves the agreement is no longer necessary, some fear the possible return of a “hard border” on the island of Ireland will fracture the relationship between the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom. Others point to the continued self-imposed segregation between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland as indicative of an uneasy peace that could be upended without the Good Friday Agreement.

The recent Passover holiday, commemorating the liberation of the Jewish people from slavery in ancient Egypt—a story that has been such an inspiration for countless struggles for freedom ever since—permeated my thoughts in late March, as I visited Rohingya refugee camps on the Bangladeshi-Myanmar border. Together with a delegation of Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, and Jewish leaders, we met in the camps with religious leaders of the community, with women who had suffered trauma, with fathers who had witnessed infant children killed, and children whose parents were slaughtered. They had arrived through their own exodus from oppression to safety.

Every three years heads of state and government from the Western Hemisphere gather to discuss common policy issues, “affirm shared values and commit to concerted actions at the national and regional level,” and address continuing and new challenges. The eighth such summit meets in Lima, Peru on April 13 and 14, focused on the topics of governance and corruption (hot issues across the hemisphere today). Georgetown University and the Berkley Center supported a meeting on the eve of the summit to explore the roles of religious actors in fighting corruption.

Saba Mahmood, professor of sociocultural anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, passed away on March 10. Dr. Mahmood’s research examined the relationship between religion, secularism, and gender in postcolonial societies. In particular, she questioned traditional liberal assumptions about the limits of ethics and politics, freedom and agency, and the dynamics between the religious and the secular. Her work often analyzed the role of gender in these discussions and the significance of religious freedom for religious minorities.

In the 1960s, Marty served as a pastor in Lawndale, near Martin Luther King’s residence at the time. Following the events of Bloody Sunday on March 7, 1965, King and his supporters put out a call to the community to join them for a second march. That march came to be known as Turnaround Tuesday.

Pope Francis has inspired both admiration and concern among Catholics and Protestants in the United States, with many religious scholars and observers struggling to predict the ultimate direction and scope of his reformist ideas.

Fundamentalism and fundamentalist reinterpretations of religious texts are a distinctly modern phenomenon, closely connected to the rapid developments in communications technology that forced previously closed groups to confront new, alien ideas.

The year 2017 saw worldwide celebrations and retrospectives of the sixteenth-century reformations in the Christian church—reformations that helped germinate new visions of human subjectivity and freedom, gave rise to a variety of Protestant churches, and propelled reform within the Catholic Church. The turmoil of the sixteenth century gave rise to the Enlightenment world that has advanced human progress through the economic, political, and technological revolutions of the last few centuries. Yet this same progress is now dialectically suspect since it has simultaneously unleashed a range of modern injustices.

As Jews around the world celebrate Purim, the feast commemorating Queen Esther saving the Jewish people from massacre by the ancient Persian empire, we are reminded that religious intolerance can still be an influential factor in modern-day international relations. The potential for these dynamics can be readily observed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Throughout the past few decades, observers have raised the issue of whether criticism of Israel’s policies, or more broadly criticism of the state of Israel as a whole, is synonymous with or leads to anti-Semitism. For instance, the United Nations Human Rights Council has repeatedly focused on criticizing or condemning Israel. Additionally, some observers have denounced the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement as an attempt to delegitimize Israel that contributes to a worldwide increase in anti-Semitism. However, some who object to this characterization argue that it serves to invalidate their criticisms of particular Israeli policies, especially in regard to Palestine.

Under the new administration and its interpretation of protections for religious freedom, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is now working to protect health practitioners who decline patients or refrain from conducting certain procedures based on their moral or religious convictions. Roger Severino, the official behind the new Division of Conscience and Religious Freedom, has cited religious freedom as a “primary freedom, a civil right that deserves enforcement and respect.” Under this interpretation, health practitioners are able to refuse to perform procedures like abortions or vasectomies, and companies are allowed to refuse to cover contraceptives and/or sterilizations in their health insurance plans. Religious freedom claims in the field of healthcare have come up frequently in the past, especially with regard to morally and emotionally charged issues such as abortion. For example, in January 2018 a nurse in Illinois complained to the HHS about abortion mandates that were in conflict with her religious beliefs and therefore violated her constitutional right to religious freedom.