FaithWorld

(Pastor Nazir Alam smiles as he talks to a journalist at a church in South Waziristan November 28, 2012.REUTERS/Faisal Mahmood )

This Christmas, Pastor Nazir Alam will stoke up a fire, lay a fresh cloth on the altar and welcome parishioners as they arrive at his church in Waziristan, a Pakistani tribal area known as an al-Qaeda haven.

“The lights are all up, and the choir boys are ready. The church is looking its best,” said 60-year-old Alam, a former missionary who has celebrated his last ten Christmases there. “There’s not much left to do but to pray and rejoice.”

Outsiders might see little cause for joy. Pakistan is the sixth most dangerous country in the world for minorities, says London-based watchdog Minority Rights Group International. Christians, Shiite Muslims and Ahmadis are victims of a rising tide of deadly attacks.

But Alam’s church, and the homes of most of his 200 parishioners, are nestled inside a Pakistani army base in South Waziristan, a mountainous region that was a hotbed of militancy until a military offensive in 2009.

(A computer screen is pictured before a scientific seminar to deliver the latest update in the search for the Higgs boson at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Meyrin, near Geneva July 4, 2012. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse)

Scientists at Europe’s CERN research center say they may be able to definitively announce at a conference next March that they had discovered the elusive Higgs boson.

But they dismissed suggestions circulating widely on blogs and even in some science journals that instead of just one type of the elementary particle they might have found a pair.

(Policemen stand guard near a poster outside the constitutional court put up by supporters of Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi as they stage a sit-in, in Cairo December 23, 2012. REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah)

An Islamist-backed Egyptian constitution won approval in a referendum, rival camps said on Sunday, after a vote the opposition said would sow deep social divisions in the Arab world’s most populous nation.

The Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, which propelled President Mohamed Mursi to power in a June election, said an unofficial tally showed 64 percent of voters backed the charter after two rounds of voting that ended with a final ballot on Saturday.

(A female polio worker gives polio vaccine drops to a child in Lahore December 20, 2012. REUTERS/Mohsin Raza)

Pakistani health worker Bushra Bibi spent eight years trekking to remote villages, carefully dripping polio vaccine into toddlers’ pursed mouths to protect them from the crippling disease.

Now the 35-year-old mother is too scared to go to work after masked men on motorbikes gunned down nine of her fellow health workers in a string of attacks this week.

(An Iraqi boy holds a page from a half burned holy book of Koran in a house damaged in a raid by Iraqi and U.S. forces in Baghdad’s Sadr City July 23, 2006. REUTERS/Kareem Raheem)

A mob broke into a Pakistani police station and burnt a man accused of desecrating the Koran alive, police said Saturday, in the latest violence focusing attention on the country’s blasphemy laws.

The man was a traveler and had spent Thursday night at the mosque, said Maulvi Memon, the imam in the southern village of Seeta in Sindh province. The charred remains of the Koran were found the next morning.

(God creates the Sun and Moon, Sistine Chapel ceiling by Michelangelo)

A minister in Angela Merkel’s government has sparked a pre-Christmas row among Germany’s ruling parties by suggesting God be referred to with the neutral article “das” instead of the masculine “der”.

Family Minister Kristina Schroeder made the comments when asked in an interview with German weekly Die Zeit how she explained to her young daughter the use of the masculine form for God.

“The article is not important,” she responded, adding that it was fine to use “das” instead of the traditional “der” when referring to God.

By Jim Young

"ram nI' tay"

Which in the Klingon language means “Festival of the long night”, because fictional alien cultures obviously don’t observe Christmas.

SLIDESHOW: A Klingon Christmas Carol

Having seen Christmas decorations up since before Thanksgiving Day and hearing the cringing sound of carols in shopping malls everywhere, I was looking for a different way to ring in the holiday cheer and what better way than to cover a take on the Charles Dickens classic “A Christmas Carol” as performed by Klingons.

Klingons, for those not fortunate enough to be raised on Star Trek as a child, are aliens from the television series and though the show has been off the air for over 40 years, it continued on through movies and devoted fans everywhere.

(Doomsday tourists walk on the streets of Sirince December 21, 2012. REUTERS/Osman Orsal )

Friday was a quiet day under a clear blue sky in the small village of Sirince  in western Turkey, where the population is only 600 people.

Thousands of tourists from around the world had flocked here, believing it would be spared a apocalypse predicted by ancient Mayans to occur on Friday. Others had come to this  picturesque village of little white houses in the hills east of the Aegean Sea to witness the event but did not expect the world to end.

(Pope Benedict XVI attends Christmas greetings with the Roman curia at the Clementine hall at the Vatican December 21, 2012. REUTERS/Alessandra Tarantino)

The pope’s latest denunciation of gay marriage came in a Christmas address to Vatican officials in which he blended religion, philosophy, anthropology and sociology to illustrate the position of the Roman Catholic Church.

The Vatican has gone on the offensive in response to gains for gay marriage in the United States and Europe, using every possible opportunity to denounce it through papal speeches or editorials in its newspaper or on its radio station.

Baghlan, Afghanistan

By Fabrizio Bensch

There are thousands of miles that separate the German soldiers in Afghanistan from home.  For up to one year, they may be stationed in Afghanistan, but for most of them no more than four to five months.

The lead up to Christmas in Germany has a very long tradition and the arriving season is dominated by beautifully decorated shop windows in department stores and the smell of gingerbread and cinnamon. Christmas trees are festively illuminated in the streets with Christmas decoration and Christmas markets and Santa Claus are in every city.

But for the German armed forces Bundeswehr soldiers far away, each of them tries to maintain a little bit of these traditions and so everywhere in the camps are signs of Christmas.