After watching for years as newly independent South Sudan has succumbed to civil war fought largely along ethnic lines, displacing one-third of the population, church leaders in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan are working hard to ensure that their small enclave of liberated territory will not go the way of its neighbors to the south.

On a Sunday night in early July, four men -- two of them indigenous -- were brutally murdered in Assis, a tiny Brazilian town on the border with Peru.

Tweeting with hashtags that translate as "Closed ports" and "Open hearts," Italy's interior minister disputed claims that the Italian government was complicit in leaving a migrant to die in the Mediterranean Sea as she clung to a board from a destroyed fishing boat.

Delegates came to learn about the parish-based, immigrant-to-immigrant peer ministry that began in the archdiocese 10 years ago. Leaders now want to create a national network of dioceses that use Pastoral Migratoria.

The "prosperity gospel" that U.S. President Donald Trump and many of his advisers and followers seem to espouse does not promote solidarity for the common good, but sees God as giving his blessings to the rich and punishing the poor, said an influential Jesuit journal.

Theologians, religion scholars and activists have rushed to aid a theology student arrested while protesting a white supremacist’s appearance in Charlottesville, Va., raising money for his legal fees and calling his demonstration against racism a “model” of “scholar-activism.”