Shusaku Endo may not have liked the title “greatest Japanese Catholic novelist,” but his works—including ‘Silence’—are powerful meditations on the nature of belief and the vitality and viability of Christianity.
A tiny population of about 60,000 Armenian Christians remain in Turkey today. Most, uprooted from villages in eastern Anatolia, now live in neighborhoods in Istanbul.
Long before the earthquakes in February, the viability of the Christian community in Samandag had been under cultural and economic threat. Many from the city’s minority Christian community had already departed, seeking economic or educational opportunities elsewhere.
Seventy-five years after Gandhi’s death, when Hindu nationalism has risen to the highest echelons of the Indian government, his legacy in the nation he helped liberate is complex and, in some cases, denigrated.