The Londoner

Home  -   A bomb explosion in a market has killed 22 minority Shia Muslims and wounded 45 others in Pakistan’s Kurram tribal region near the Afghan border, officials said. The bomb exploded on Sunday when the market in the town of Parachinar was crowded with shoppers, said Mahtab Hussain, a local government official. Husain said some of the critically wounded people were airlifted to hospitals in other cities. All 22 killed were minority Shia Muslims, said another local government official, Nek Mohammad. The explosion was caused by a remote-controlled bomb planted in the market, the two officials said. Parachinar is the main town in Kurram, a predominantly Shia area that has been troubled by Islamic militant and sectarian violence. Pakistan’s military has carried out regular operations in the region to eliminate militants and control sectarian strife. Read the full story here. 

Christmas will be more widely celebrated in China this year than at any time in memory. Everyone who claims any knowledge of the subject believes that the number of Chinese Christians has been growing steadily over the last decade. Communist bureaucrats harass Christians , isolate them, try to manipulate and divide them. And yet by the standards of recent decades, Chinese Christianity now seems remarkably resilient. No one knows how many Chinese are Christian . The State Administration for Religious Affairs, which supervises all religion, says there are about 25 million, apparently the government’s optimistic understatement. Christian activists , on their many blogs, claim 50 million to 100 million. The Global Religious Landscape , a demographic study released this week by the Pew Research Center, estimates 68 million, based on 2010 data. Whatever the real number, no one denies the memorable comparison made on the BBC in September by Tim Gardam, a journalist and...

The rich heritage of Tunisia, maybe the only place where the Arab Spring stands a chance JACOPO RIPANDA, “HANNIBAL CROSSING THE ALPS”/GIANNI DAGLI ORTI/THE ART ARCHIVE AT ART RESOURCE, NY Modern-day Tunisians, more Westernized than most Arabs, see themselves as descendants of the great Carthaginian general who invaded Italy. T he Arab Spring began in Sidi Bouzid, a small Tunisian town, at the end of 2010. In a desperate protest against the corrupt and oppressive government that had made it impossible for him to earn a living, food-cart vendor Mohamed Bouazizi stood before City Hall, doused himself with gasoline, and lit a match. His suicide seeded a revolutionary storm that swept the countryside and eventually arrived at the capital, Tunis, where it toppled dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in January 2011. Just weeks later, Hosni Mubarak was thrown from his palace in Egypt. Muammar el-Qaddafi was lynched later that year in Libya. Syria’s Bashar al-Assad may be the ...

IT hasn’t been a good year for evangelicals. I should know. I’m one of them. In 2012 we witnessed a collapse in American evangelicalism. The old religious right largely failed to affect the Republican primaries, much less the presidential election. Last month, Americans voted in favor of same-sex marriage in four states, while Florida voters rejected an amendment to restrict abortion. Much has been said about conservative Christians and their need to retool politically. But that is a smaller story, riding on the back of a larger reality: Evangelicalism as we knew it in the 20th century is disintegrating. In 2011 the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life polled church leaders from around the world. Evangelical ministers from the United States reported a greater loss of influence than church leaders from any other country — with some 82 percent indicating that their movement was losing ground. I grew up hearing tales of my grandfathe...

All Christians confess that Jesus is Lord, but he’s a poor choice for a computer password, according to an annual listing of passwords on the Internet most prone to hacking. “Jesus” for the first time made the list of SplashData’s “25 Worst Passwords of the Year” – the most common passwords stolen by hackers. The list, which made its debut last year, suggests that despite several high-profile hacking incidents over the past year at major sites including Yahoo, LinkedIn and eHarmony, many people continue to put themselves at risk by using easily guessable passwords. “Even though each year hacking tools get more sophisticated, thieves still tend to prefer easy targets,” said Morgan Slain, CEO of the 12-year-old company based in Los Gatos, Calif. “Just a little bit more effort in choosing better passwords will go a long way toward making you safer online.” The top three passwords, "password," "123456” and "12345678," remain unchanged fr...

By S. JOSHUA SWAMIDASS Sen. Marco Rubio recently touched a land mine in America's culture wars: evolution, creation and the age of the Earth. When GQ magazine asked him how old the planet is, Mr. Rubio's winding response never directly answered the question. Instead, he noted his lack of scientific qualifications ("I'm not a scientist, man"), posited a need to teach the "multiple theories out there on how the universe was created," and settled into the platitude that the Earth's age is an unsolvable "mystery." Predictably, his response made headlines. In keeping with Democratic talking points, the answer was framed as part of the Republican "war on science." His response also highlighted a divide between evangelical conservatives and the rest of the Republican Party at a time, in the aftermath of a disappointing election, ...

By Akbar Ahmed Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, addresses the theology think tank Theos in London on Oct. 1, 2012. (REUTERS)    The proximity to a great spiritual master is always inspiring. And perhaps there are few masters as eminent as the archbishop of Canterbury . On Oct. 8, 2012, my daughter Amineh Hoti and I had been invited to participate in what was probably the last major public event of the Most Rev. Rowan Williams during his ten-year engagement with Muslims as the archbishop of Canterbury. The event was held at Lambeth Palace, the archbishop’s London residence. The who’s who of Britain was there including the archbishops of Wales and Ireland, several bishops and Baroness Sayeeda Warsi , the first-ever female chairman of the Tory Party. Also present was my dear friend James Shera, MBE , a Pakistani Christian, the first Pakistani mayor of Rugby and the only Pakistani in the United Kingdom with a road named after him. The lectures o...

The news has been full, this election cycle, of Mitt Romney’s evangelical problem . The conservative evangelical Protestants who form the core of the Republican Party continue to be wary of Romney’s Mormon faith, and that wariness could translate to a lack of enthusiasm that drives down Republican voter turnout on election day—which could sink Romney’s bid for the presidency.  This evangelical problem is particularly of note in swing states in the South, a red state region that has long been defined by conservative evangelical Protestantism. But as a Southerner and a scholar of Mormonism, I’ve long been puzzled by many Southerners’ suspicion of or even hostility toward the Latter-day Saints. For one thing, the two groups have been fighting the common stereotypes and biases of their fellow Americans for more than a century. Most recently, the similarities between popular images of Mormons and Southerners have caught my attention thanks to TLC’s reality television ...