“The countries neighboring Syria—Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan—have been extremely generous to the refugees,” says Michel Gabaudan, president of Refugees International. “But they’re bursting at the seams now, and that’s why we see people moving out. I think perhaps where we have failed is not to give sufficient support to these countries so that the host communities would feel the world was sharing the burden, and that’s a feeling that they don’t have.”

“We’ve seen a spike in women trying to do abortions on themselves,” says Amy Hagstrom Miller, founder of Whole Women’s Health. “That is not in the best interests of women’s health and safety.”

Watch more of our interview with actor Geza Rohrig, star of the Holocaust film “Son of Saul,” who talks with R&E about Max Weber, Martin Buber, Primo Levi, Franz Kafka, and his character, Saul Auslander. “The only person who is … More →

“I don’t think history turned a page” at Auschwitz, says Hungarian actor Geza Rohrig. “Genocide is a permanent possibility. I thought, the bloodiest century is just behind us; the 21st must be much better. Well, 15 years into the 21st, it doesn’t seem very promising.”

“He was a deep thinker and a great writer, “ observes legal correspondent Tim O’Brien, “and he had an enormous impact on the thinking of his fellow justices…His vote will be lost. For conservatives, that’s a big loss."

"The story of migration is rooted in our history as Catholics,” says Jeanne Atkinson, executive director of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network. “It’s everything from the Jewish people’s exile in Exodus to the holy family’s flight to Egypt…This is who we are as American Catholics. We are an immigrant people and an immigrant church.”

"In culture today we tend to spend a lot of time thinking about how to succeed in one or the other endeavor that we undertake. But we tend to spend very little time thinking about how we succeed as a human being," says Professor Miroslav Volf, head of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture.

“One of the attractions of this strategy is that we’re not just a relatively small Christian community in the United States taking an action,” says Rev. John Thomas, former president of the United Church of Christ. “We’re joining a much broader movement.” But Rev. John Wimberly, a Presbyterian minister, says US churches supporting the BDS movement “are empowering the most extreme voices and the harshest voices on both sides.”

“Some say that the patriarch is very close to Putin,” says managing editor Kim Lawton, “and so who knows what kind of Russian geopolitics may also be affected by this meeting” of Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill and Pope Francis.