Recognizing Religious Freedom

For Christians around the world, Holy Week, beginning on Palm Sunday and ending on Easter, is spent contemplating the scandalous story of the torture and execution of an innocent man. Although here in the U.S. we live a comfortable distance away from the kind of wickedness and misery so vividly captured in the Gospel narrative, many are not so fortunate. This past Palm Sunday, the Egyptian church bombings served as a shocking reminder that in many parts of the world, notably the very region where those biblical scenes took place two millennia ago, religious intolerance rages, and innocent followers of that same Jesus suffer simply for peaceably remaining in the faith.