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As Passover approached, Tobi Kahn worked in his studio in Queens, New York, putting washes of glaze on a silver-painted peg, a miniature sculpture soon to join 48 others.

The 49 pegs fit into a two-foot-high case. Hang the case on your wall, and you have a sculpture that evokes the grids of modernist art. Remove or add a peg daily, and you’re counting the Omer, a Jewish practice marking the days from Passover until the festival of Shavuot, which marks Moses receiving the Ten Commandments. This year it falls on June 11.

Darlene Marquez-Caramanzana, a United Methodist deaconess and National Council of Churches executive in the Philippines, received an award for her work documenting the stories of women survivors of human rights violations, including how those women fought for justice.

Ruth Messinger was a politician in New York City in the 1980s and 1990s before she took the helm of a respected but low-profile nonprofit focused on international development: the American Jewish World Service.

After 17 years, Messinger, 75, is giving up the presidency of AJWS, which grew into a major player in the fight against global poverty under her leadership. In 2015, the group gave out nearly $40 million for projects in 19 nations.

James M. Robinson, a prominent scholar of the Gospel source known as “Q” and of Gnosticism, died March 22 at age 91.

He taught at the school now named the Claremont School of Theology from 1958 until 1964. After that he was professor of religion at the school now named the Claremont Graduate University until he retired in 1999. A member of the Jesus Seminar, he also directed the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity from 1968 to 2000.

(The Christian Science Monitor) Alia Khalaf al-Jabouri, a poor Iraqi widow, has become a symbol of self-sacrifice and transcendence of Sunni-Shi’a conflict.

In 2014 her son, Khalid Ismael, got a desperate call from an army friend saying militants had surrounded him and five other soldiers.

“I told Khalid, ‘You have to go—Iraq needs its sons,’” said al-Jabouri, known as Um Qusay, whose husband and oldest son were killed by the extremists known as the Islamic State.