Syria

Edward Curtis traces two successive generations of Syrian Muslims across small towns and cities in the Dakotas, Iowa, and Indiana. 

Jessica Goudeau’s new book embeds the memoirs of two very different women in a primer on what it means to seek refuge in America.

Despite protests, the group persisted in welcoming refugees to their community.

Ordinary people from Syria, Libya, and Iraq shed light on the costs of conflict.

The United States has been engaged for decades in a seemingly endless series of wars and military operations.

"Belief is not the 'substance of things hoped for.' Faith is."

Dennis Covington is famous for seeking faith in extreme places. Twenty years ago it was the snake-handling, poison-drinking Christians of southern Appa­lachia.

Aid organizations are overwhelmed by the scale of the current mass migration from the Middle East. So the work has fallen on other volunteers.

It's a humanitarian crisis that has riveted the international community: refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, and elsewhere seeking asylum from civil war and violence. Images of the small, drowned body of Aylan Kurdi ignited our consciences and challenged world leaders to begin addressing the needs of these refugees.

The surge of unaccompanied minors into countries like Sweden mirrors the marked increase of Central American children entering the United States in 2014, fleeing violence at home.

The wrenching dislocations of World War II were often pitilessly ignored by the world. What story will be told of our time, and of us?

"What's going on is a nation-building process. It's similar to what happened at the end of World War I, when major empires were destroyed."

“Two things about my own life became clear: I really did understand both sides, and I didn’t understand them at all.”

Gerard Russell’s account of disappearing Middle Eastern religions has an elegiac quality. It’s heartrending and often infuriating.

As many as 13.6 million people have been displaced by the conflicts in Iraq and Syria. What can American Christians do?

"I sell exclusively to fellow Shi'ites and to Christians," says one Lebanese arms dealer. "Demand from Christians has increased immensely."

The question isn't how frightening ISIS is. It's what actual threat it poses—and how to contain that threat without causing more harm.

“Why is the world silent while Christians are being slaughtered in the Middle East and Africa?” asks Ronald S. Lauder. The World Jewish Congress president frames the question in a larger paint-by-numbers argument defending Israel’s assault on Gaza and criticizing the moral instincts of “beautiful celebrities,” reporters, and the U.N. who have not responded adequately to the brutality of Boko Haram and ISIS.

An argument like Lauder's is liable to predictable demands for greater American military involvement in the region. But the silence he names is real.

Memphis is known for blues, barbecue, and kings. Elvis Presley, the "king of rock 'n' roll," shook, rattled, and rolled his way to stardom by drawing from the art of African Americans. He was, arguably, bigger than Jesus before John Lennon made that controversial claim for the Beatles in the 1960s. In that decade, Memphis became infamous for what happened to the preacher King. There to support the sanitation workers strike of 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and the legacy of bloodshed continues to haunt the city.

Elvis and Martin are not the only kings of Memphis. There's also the king of kings.