FaithWorld

(Buddhist monks take part in a protest in support of demonstrators who were injured during a copper mine riot, in Yangon December 12, 2012. REUTERS/Soe Zeya Tun)

Pyinyananda was chanting with dozens of fellow Buddhist monks when an object landed in the folds of his orange robes and blew up.

The canister contained tear gas, the police later said, but the explosion flayed so much skin from his arms and legs that he remains in hospital weeks later.

“The police gave no warning before they fired,” said Pyinyananda, 19, nursing his bandaged arms.

He was one of at least 67 monks and six other people injured on November 29, when riot police raided camps set up by villagers protesting against a $1 billion expansion of the Myanmar Wanbao copper mine in northern Myanmar.

Pakistan has been facing gun and bomb attacks for so long, it is tempting to think it will continue to muddle along, the situation never becoming so bad as to galvanise it into action. And maybe it will.

But a series of attacks in and around Peshawar this month should give serious pause for thought.

First came a raid on Peshawar airport in mid-December, for which the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) claimed responsibility. Then political leader Bashir Ahmed Bilour - an outspoken critic of the Taliban and a senior minister in the provincial government of the Awami National Party (ANP) - was killed in a suicide bombing.

(An Iranian cargo plane on the tarmac during inspection at Baghdad’s airport October 2, 2012. REUTERS/Iraqi Civil Aviation Authority/Handout )

Iran’s parliament has banned airplanes from flying in the country during the Azan call to Islamic prayer, the semi-official Mehr news agency has reported.

“According to the new directive, airplanes are banned from flying during Azan, especially during the call to morning prayers,” Mehr quoted the spokesman for parliament’s cultural committee Ali Taheri as saying.

(Pope Benedict XVI baptizes a baby during a mass in the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican January 10, 2010. REUTERS/Osservatore Romano )

Thousands of Dutch Catholics are researching how they can leave the church in protest at its opposition to gay marriage, according to the creator of a website aimed at helping them find the information.

Tom Roes, whose website allows people to download the documents needed to leave the Church, said traffic on ontdopen.nl – “de-baptize.nl” – had soared from about 10 visits a day to more than 10,000 after Pope Benedict’s latest denunciation of gay marriage this month.

(Pope Benedict XVI (R) leads a mass of Vespers at Mary Queen of the Apostles Basilica in Yaounde March 18, 2009. REUTERS/Alessandro Bianchi)

One of Cameroon’s most senior Christian leaders on Tuesday called same-sex marriages a “crime against humanity”, ramping up anti-gay rhetoric in the Central African state.

As in most African nations, homosexuality is illegal in Cameroon. But a number of incidents have highlighted the clash between a largely conservative culture backed by draconian law and youth for some of whom it is less of an issue.

(Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, addresses the theology think tank Theos in London October 1, 2012. REUTERS/Paul Hackett )

The leader of the Church of England on Tuesday said a vote last month that struck down proposals to allow women to become bishops had been “deeply painful”, but that Christianity was still relevant in Britain despite falling numbers of believers.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who leads the global 80-million-strong Anglican Communion, said in his Christmas day sermon that the answer to the question of whether Christianity had “had its day” was a “resounding no”.

(A woman holds a poster during a vigil in memory of Savita Halappanavar and in support of changes to abortion law in Dublin November 17, 2012. REUTERS/Cathal McNaughton )

The head of Ireland’s Catholic Church urged followers in his Christmas Day message to lobby against government plans to legalise abortion.

Ireland, the only EU member state that currently outlaws the procedure, is preparing legislation that would allow limited access to abortion after the European Court of Human Rights criticised the current regime.

Merry Christmas! Maybe it's because of some vestigial religious undertones to this holiday, or maybe it's because the end of the tax year is rapidly approaching, along with the urgency of maximizing your annual deductions. Either way, this is a particularly philanthropic time of year. And since I'm personally feeling very charitable right now, I've decided to do you all the favor of telling you that when it comes to philanthropy, you're doing it wrong.

Interestingly, philanthropy is one of those areas where the richer you are, the more likely you are to be doing it spectacularly wrong. So to make you feel better still, this is aimed mainly at the mega-philanthropists: the people who give away millions of dollars and feel fantastic for doing so. These are the people at the heart of the debate over capping the mortgage-interest tax deduction: they receive an outsized proportion of its costs, on the grounds, to quote Bob Shiller, that

charitable giving can substitute for a good part of the things that the government would otherwise be doing itself, a factor that is rarely introduced into budget calculations. Indeed, in many cases, individual philanthropy may be more effective than government expenditures.

(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.”

(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.