Ethics · Society · Theology · Mission · Sociology of Religions
As was announced only now due to security reasons, the Syrian-Orthodox Patriarch Ignatius Aphrem II and the Associate Secretary General of the World Evangelical Alliance, Bishop Thomas Schirrmacher, two days before Christmas 2017 addressed the highest Muslim leaders of 40 countries and called upon them to protect their Christian minorities.
Thomas Schirrmacher published his speech at the opening of the religious freedom chair at the Gießen School of Theology. In it he thanks Hermann Gröhe for the “most momentous rebuke in all my life”.
On April 7th, the “Stephanus-Prize for Persecuted Christians” was awarded in Bonn to Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, the former bishop of Hongkong, for his courage and his persistence in decades of strong engagement for the rights of freedom, notably of religious freedom.
Whoever was thinking, that the claims of converts from Islam to Christianity of being threatened, whether it be by relatives and by fellow countrymen, or by their home countries are overstated or ostensible, has now once more received evidence, that this is a matter of bitter reality.
“The Persecution of Christians Concerns Us All” is currently the most comprehensive and biblically theological analysis of Christian persecution worldwide.
The German newsletter on persecution of Christians of the International Society for Human Rights has endorsed your German yearbooks on religious freedom and on the persecution and discrimination of Christians. It also quotes in length from my advocacy for the unguilty improsined former major of Jakarta, „Ahok“.
The Co-Director of the International Institute for Religious Freedom, Prof. Dr. Christof Sauer, welcomes in an extensive analysis that the “Ecumenical report on the religious freedom of Christians around the world” has renewed attention for the discrimination and persecution of Christians.