INSIDER
Qatar says the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas will go into effect at 8:30 a.m. local time (0630 GMT) on Sunday.
Behaving at their best, a dozen dogs attended Mass at Mexico City’s cathedral, waiting for their turn to de doused with holy water.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has visited the site of Nazi German extermination camp of Auschwitz.
Hundreds of Guatemalan faithful found the sounds and colors of their tropical homeland during the biggest-yet celebration of the Black Christ of Esquipulas in the heartland farming town of Worthington, Minnesota.
Israel’s Cabinet has approved a deal for a ceasefire in Gaza and the release of dozens of hostages that will pause the 15-month war with Hamas for six weeks.
Many colleges accused of tolerating antisemitism on their campuses have been settling with federal civil rights investigators in the weeks before the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump, who urged a tougher response to campus protests against the war in Gaza.
Tens of thousands of naked Hindu ascetics and millions of pilgrims are taking dips in sacred rivers in the first of a series of major baths in the Maha Kumbh festival, the largest religious congregation on Earth.
Israel and Hamas have been holding indirect talks for more than a year aimed at ending the war in Gaza and returning scores of militant-held hostages in exchange for Palestinians imprisoned by Israel.
Millions of Hindu devotees and mystics have gathered in the northern Indian city of Prayagraj for the Maha Kumbh festival, which is the largest religious congregation on earth.
Conservative lawmakers across the U.S. are pushing to introduce more Christianity to public school classrooms, testing the separation of church and state.
Among the thousands of buildings destroyed in the Los Angeles wildfires were a mosque, a synagogue, a Catholic parish and a half-dozen Protestant churches.
Anita Bryant, a former Miss Oklahoma and popular singer who became known over the second half of her life for her outspoken opposition to gay rights, has died.
Pope Francis has told ambassadors accredited to the Holy See that he wasn’t up to delivering his annual foreign policy speech and asked an aide to deliver it instead.
At least 1.8 million mostly barefoot Catholic worshippers are marching in an annual procession in the Philippines that venerates a centuries-old black statue of Jesus.
Three years ago, a Somali-American mom in Minneapolis founded a group for Muslim women who want to enjoy the great outdoors.
Pope Francis has denounced the “scourge” of child labor and other abuses suffered by children, saying anyone who harms or exploits a child will have to answer to God.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor and theologian from Germany executed by the Nazis in 1945 at age 39 for his role in a resistance movement.
Shortly before he was hanged by the Nazis in 1945 at age 39, Dietrich Bonhoeffer reportedly told a fellow prisoner: “This is the end — for me the beginning of life.”.
Gunmen opened fire on a bus carrying Israelis in the occupied West Bank on Monday, killing at least three people and wounding seven others.
A soccer-loving nun from Brazil is believed to have become the world’s oldest living person at nearly 117 years old following the recent death of a Japanese woman.
Syria’s new foreign minister has met with his Qatari counterpart and Qatar’s prime minister in Doha on Sunday.
Jimmy Carter’s long public goodbye began in Georgia, where the 39th U.S. president’s life started more than 100 years ago.
Pope Francis ushered in the New Year with an appeal for the faithful to reject abortion, calling for a “firm commitment” to protect and respect life from conception to natural death.
Former President Jimmy Carter was widely known as a man of faith, a born-again Christian who defined himself as a progressive evangelical.
Sarah McBride made history in Delaware, as the first openly transgender state senator in the United States.
U.S. Rep.-elect Sarah McBride will be sworn in as the first openly transgender member of Congress on Jan. 3.
From Sydney to Mumbai to Paris to Rio de Janeiro, communities around the world are welcoming 2025 with spectacular light shows, embraces and ice plunges.
Amada Cardenas, a Mexican American woman who lived in the tiny border town of Mirando City in South Texas, played an important role in the history of the peyote trade.
Peyote, a cactus that contains mescaline, a hallucinogen, grows naturally in South Texas and northern Mexico.
Pope Francis in his traditional Christmas message has urged “all people of all nations” to find courage during this Holy Year “to silence the sounds of arms and overcome divisions” plaguing the world, from the Holy Land to Ukraine, Africa to Asia.
Jake Bates was standing on the turf in his hometown of Houston when asked to reflect on an unlikely journey from learning how to sell bricks to making game-winning kicks for the Detroit Lions.
This holiday season, some religious congregations across the U.S. are holding events designed to be accomodating to and inclusive of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
The city of Bethlehem in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the traditional birthplace of Jesus, will not have the usual trappings of the city's favorite holiday: no public Christmas tree, no raucous scouts march, no decorations and no twinkling lights, in deference to the ongoing war in Gaza.
Pope Francis is formally inaugurating the 2025 Holy Year, reviving an ancient church tradition encouraging the faithful to make pilgrimages to Rome.
Thirty years after Florida required schools to teach African American history, how the subject is taught remains inconsistent across Florida classrooms, a review by The Associated Press has found.
President-elect Donald Trump says he’s nominating the president of the advocacy group CatholicVote to be the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican.
Federal education officials say the Philadelphia school district failed to show it protected Jewish students from harassment despite “repeated, extensive notice” that students, teachers and administrators were engaging in antisemitic behavior.
The U.S. Department of Education said Friday it has reached an agreement with the University of California system resolving complaints from Jewish and Muslim students of discrimination and harassment during protests last spring over the war in Gaza.
When Pope Francis formally opens the Holy Year next week, he will launch a dizzying 12-month calendar of events that include special Jubilee Masses for the faithful from all walks of life.
An official at the Wisconsin school where a student shot and killed a teacher and a fellow student says the 15-year-old was in her first semester there.
When Israel seized the strategic Golan Heights from Syria in 1967, many families were separated by a buffer zone created between the Israeli-controlled region and the rest of Syria.
Police say the shooter who killed a student and teacher at a religious school in Wisconsin this week brought two guns to the school.
A New Orleans judge has sentenced a 93-year-old former Catholic priest to spend the rest of his life behind bars for raping a teenage boy in the 1970s.
As the war in Gaza rages, Syria's government transforms, and the Israeli-occupied West Bank seethes, Armenian residents of the Old City of Jerusalem fight a different battle.
Community members in Wisconsin are continuing to wrestle with grief and calling for change in the aftermath of a school shooting that killed a teacher and a student and wounded six others.
United Methodist News Service reports that a religious schism has turned deadly in Nigeria, with a church member fatally shot and two young children killed as homes were set ablaze.
A former leader of the Church of England has resigned as a priest following allegations that he failed to properly handle the case of a priest accused of sexual misconduct.
Moravian missionaries named the Pennsylvania city of Bethlehem after the biblical birthplace of Jesus on Christmas Eve in 1741.
Investigators in Wisconsin are trying to determine a motive in a school shooting that left a teacher and a student dead and two other children in critical condition.
For decades, a little-known Christian sect has dealt with its abusive ministers and spiritual elders mostly in secret, shunning legal action and urging victims to simply forgive the predators in their midst.
A small Christian sect that for decades was little noticed by the outside world has found itself riven by a very public child sex abuse scandal.
Pope Francis on the first papal visit ever to the French island of Corsica on Sunday called for a dynamic form of laicism, promoting the kind of popular piety that distinguishes the Mediterranean island from secular France as a bridge between religious and civic society.
Have you ever watched a holiday rom-com on Hallmark Channel or Lifetime — or any of the other many networks and streaming services that now air them — and thought, “I could write that”.
The African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of largest Black Protestant denominations in the world, has been wrestling with whether to change a policy that threatens to punish any of its clergy who recognize same-sex marriages.
More than 600,000 people annually visit Santa Claus Village, a winter-themed amusement park in the small town of Rovaniemi in Finland.
One of the Vatican's Nativity scenes raised eyebrows when it was unveiled because it featured a keffiyeh, the Palestinian headscarf.
President Joe Biden designated a national monument at a former Native American boarding school site in Pennsylvania to commemorate the resilience of tribes whose children were forced to attend the school and similar abusive institutions.
Australian law enforcement authorities have declared an arson attack on a synagogue last week a terrorist act in a decision that increases resources available to the investigation.
One of the largest statues of the Buddha in the United States springs up unexpectedly in the middle of a backyard just off a busy New Jersey state highway.
Notre Dame is reopening its doors for the first time since a fire five years ago nearly destroyed the beloved 12th-century cathedral.
Pope Francis is installing 21 new cardinals, many of whom are key figures in his reform agenda.
The reopening this weekend of Notre Dame is a succession of ceremonies to breathe life back into the iconic cathedral and celebrate the recovery from its devastating fire in 2019.
Arsonists have extensively damaged a Melbourne synagogue in what Australia’s prime minister has condemned as an antisemitic attack on Australian values.
The day after an inferno struck Notre Dame cathedral in 2019, its chief architect, Philippe Villeneuve, walked despondently into its remains.
The U.S. military has strived over recent decades to present itself as religiously diverse, welcoming personnel of all faiths – or no faith – as it seeks cohesion and mutual respect in the ranks.
Colombia hosts the largest population of migrants and refugees from Venezuela, where more than 7.7 million have left since 2014 for economic, political and safety reasons.
The captains of two Premier League teams are in the spotlight for their choices as the competition celebrates LGBTQ+ inclusion in its campaign to promote equality and diversity.
The Black pastor of a multiethnic congregation in Anaheim, California, has started a string orchestra for young musicians of color.
Border Patrol agents are tasked with enforcing hotly contested immigration policies as many Americans at both ends of the political spectrum look askance at the border — and the agents.
