America magazine has just published an issue on international religious freedom — five feature pieces, all worth reading. Two are by ArcU contributors, Mary Ann Cusimano Love and myself. Mary Ann writes brilliantly on the responses of Catholic to persecution — echoing the theme of the Under Caesar’s Sword conference in Rome this past December, which she attended — and brings to bear her first-hand research on the plight of Iraqi Christians. She shows how responses to persecution can be motivated by mercy and mesh with peacebuilding.
My own piece expands on an op-ed I published back in November arguing that the Catholic Church’s long historical road to religious freedom, culminating in the Declaration on Religious Liberty at Vatican II, can be a usable model for Islam to expand its religious liberty.
See the other pieces, too, by Fr. Drew Christiansen, S.J., Elias Mallon, and a jointly authored piece by Fr. Thomas J. Reese and Mary Ann Glendon.