The Atlantic: Why Educated Christians Are Sticking With Church

New data from the Pew Research Center doesn’t disprove these claims, but it does challenge them. While Americans with college experience are overall less likely to attend services, pray on a regular basis, and say religion is very important to them, that’s not true within many faith groups. In fact, Catholic, Mormon, and Protestant college grads are all more likely to attend church on a weekly basis than their less educated peers. This was not the trend among religious minorities like Muslims and Jews, or among people who don’t affiliate with any religion at all, suggesting that education has a distinctive effect on religiosity within the world of Christianity.  [...]

Educational differences had a much bigger effect on religious practice. Sixty-eight percent of college-educated evangelical Protestants go to church every week, compared to 55 percent of those who only went to high school. In fact, college grads show up in the church pews more often in nearly every kind of Christian tradition: Among mainline Protestants, weekly attendance was 36 to 31 percent, more educated to less; among black Protestants, 59 to 52 percent; and among Catholics, 45 to 39 percent. The effect was perhaps greatest among Mormons: 85 percent of Mormon college graduates go to church at least once a week, compared to 66 percent of their peers with a high-school education or less. [...]

One other data point in the Pew study that supports this theory. Among people who don’t identify with any religion in particular, very few attend religious services every week, regardless of whether they’re educated or not. But 47 percent of high-school-educated people in this group still say religion is “very” or “somewhat” important to them, and 71 percent say they believe in God. Compare that to less than a quarter of their college-educated peers who say religion matters to then, and less than half who say they believe in God. This suggests that at least some of the less educated people identify as religious but don’t have a religious community, while a majority of the more educated people simply aren’t interested in religion at all.

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The Atlantic: Should France Have Its Own Version of Islam?

But Tareq Oubrou, the popular imam of Bordeaux’s Grand Mosque and a prominent theologian, told me he is not concerned. Nor does he blame those elements in French society that harbor fears of Islam. The morning after the results were announced, he spoke about “legitimate fears” among the French, and seemed to put the burden on Muslims to make Islam more compatible with France and its strong flavor of state secularism, known as laïcité. [...]

Tareq Oubrou: These results were expected; they weren’t a big surprise. But the rise of the National Front is an indicator that French society is in crisis, an economic and identity crisis. The same questions that animate America—globalization, unemployment, terrorism—these questions play an important role in our elections today. French society is scared of Islam, is scared of terrorism, and the advance of the National Front is a sign of that fear. [...]

There are Islamic practices that haven’t been adapted to French culture. The French don’t understand that. And Muslims don’t manage to explain why they do these practices. So ignorance leads a minority of French people to be scared. Take the question of women, for example. A certain way of practicing the religion gives the impression that Islam doesn’t give women their rights. There are prejudices that sometimes get confirmed by the behavior of a certain number of Muslims. When a woman goes to the hospital in labor and refuses to be examined by a male doctor, in France they don’t understand this. It’s bizarre! It’s enough for this to happen twice in a hospital for people to start asking themselves questions. [...]

Islam is poorly understood, poorly explained, and people are scared of what they don’t understand. The question of the headscarf, of religious visibility in public spaces—France has a particular history with religion, and we need to take that into consideration. France has lived through wars between religions—Protestants, Catholics—in its past. French laïcité was constructed in opposition to Catholicism, which dominated society, so religious visibility in public spaces is still viewed as threatening. Muslims need to make an effort to adapt to the culture.

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The Guardian: Unequal Russia: is anger stirring in the global capital of inequality?

Measuring levels of inequality, rather than simply tracking absolute poverty levels, has become a watchword for economists of late, with some believing it is the uneven distribution of wealth that is one of the key factors driving political discontent and disenfranchisement globally.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, the head of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, said increased inequality was one of a number of factors leading to the rise of populism around the world – adding she had first warned of these dangers four years ago, but that after the victory of Donald Trump in the US and the increasing popularity of far-right parties across Europe, she hoped people would now pay it more attention.

A recent report by Credit Suisse showed that Russia is the most unequal of all the world’s major economies. The richest 10% of Russians own 87% of all the country’s wealth, according to the report, compared with 76% in the US and 66% in China. According to another measure, by VTB Capital, 1% of the Russian population holds 46% of all the personal bank deposits in the country. [...]

Approximately 23 million Russians – about 16% of the population – now officially subsist below the poverty line, and there are increasing signs that the huge concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny percentage of the population is starting to annoy more Russians – especially as many of the richest people are government officials, or those close to them. A recent report found that 41% of Russians say they struggle to get enough money together for food and clothing.

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Vintage Everyday: 40 Breathtaking Black and White Photographs Capture Everyday Life in Palermo, Sicily in the 1950s and 1960s

Enzo Sellerio was born in Palermo, Sicily, in 1924. He studies law but in the meantime he discovers photography. He wins his first prize in 1952. He is considered one of the major photographers of the “Neorealismo”, an Italian artistic movement, which envisages a realistic approach in cinema, photography and literature.

In his photos he succeeds in capturing, thanks to a great technical quality and to an extraordinary sensibility, the soul of his homeland, Sicily, and of its people.

Among the street scenes, townscapes and landscapes, people working and at play, the ebb and flow of Sicilian life, the viewer of these photographs begins to recognise a master whose sense of composition has been influenced by the great European painters whose work he knows so well, by Breughel, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Vermeer and Millet.

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Quartz: In his TED talk, Pope Francis had some choice words for the world’s egotistical leaders

In the era of Brexit, the European refugee crisis and the Trump administration’s “America First” policies, the Pope preached solidarity, especially with the world’s 244 million immigrants displaced by war, calamity or poverty. “I myself was born in a family of migrants,” he said. “My father, my grandparents, like many other Italians, left for Argentina and met the fate of those who are left with nothing. I could have very well ended up among today’s ‘discarded’ people.” [...]

The pontiff also addressed TED’s tech-obsessed attendees, including SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who is scheduled to speak at the conference later this week. “If the growth of scientific and technological innovation would coincide with more equality and social inclusion,” the Pope Said. “How wonderful would it be if, while we discover far away planets, we could also rediscover the needs of the brother, or the sister, orbiting around us.” [...]

TED’s international curator, Bruno Giussani, explains that it took several tries to convince the popular pontiff to speak at the conference. “When I first approached the Vatican, it’s fair to say that not many there knew of TED,” Giussani said. “So there was a lot of explaining to do.”

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