Society

The imperative betrayal

The mystery of why Judas forsook Jesus goes to the heart of Christianity. A newly translated gospel offers a new view

David Brakke

An unholy alliance

Authoritarian leaders who play the religious card are not mere hypocrites. There’s something far more troubling going on

Suzanne Schneider

Blue-eyed Buddhist

The story of a working-class radical from Ireland who became a celebrated monk and challenged the British Empire in Asia

Laurence Cox

Sisters in dharma

In Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, Parwati Soepangat pioneered a Buddhist feminist theology with deep roots

Jack Meng-Tat Chia

The Calvinist conquest

In the 17th century, Dutch proselytisers set out for Asia, Africa and the Americas. The legacy of their travels endures

Charles H Parker

Buddhist missionaries

Buddhist monks have mostly escaped the label of proselytisers, but they’ll still spread the word to those who seek them out

Brooke Schedneck

The meaning of Purgatory

Think less of a holding pen for Heaven and more as a flow of love from the living, and the weirdness starts making sense

Magnus Course

What the ancient city of Kars looks like from the perspective of its stray dogs

9 minutes

East of Zionism

In 1900 my grandfather’s generation imagined a modernising Arab world, multireligious and progressive. What happened?

Ussama Makdisi

How the Hindu myth of Annapurna, goddess of food, connects sustenance with spirituality

5 minutes

Fiddling while Rome converts

A generation of pagan bureaucrats amassed wealth and status while Roman emperors Christianised the world around them

Edward Watts

Lockdown is a way of life for the US asylum-seekers living in churches

15 minutes

How hundreds of small ‘Gardens of Eden’ guard against total deforestation in Ethiopia

9 minutes