Under Caesar's Sword: Christian Response to Persecution

I just returned from a fascinating, engaging, and challenging conference in Rome, called "Under Caesar's Sword:  An International Conference on Christian Response to Persecution."  For more on the conference -- and on the multi-year research project of which it is a part -- go here. 

"Under Caesar’s Sword" is a collaborative global research project that investigates how Christian communities respond when their religious freedom is severely violated. It is a partnership of the Center for Civil and Human Rights at the University of Notre Dame and theReligious Freedom Project at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University.

We heard from religious leaders, activists, scholars, and believers from around the word -- from the Chaldean Catholic Patriarch of Babylon, the Syriac Patriarch of Antioch, the Cardinal Archbishop of Yangon, the General Bishop of the Coptic Orthodox Church in the United Kingdom, the U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom and many, many more.  Big kudos to my friends and colleagues, Dan Philpott and Tim Shah, and their colleagues.

The testimonies of those living under often very severe persecution -- in some cases, of members of communities facing obliteration -- and oppression was powerful and moving.  And, frankly, "convicting," in the sense that a common theme of the presentations from those living and working in troubled lands was "why are you (that is, those of us in the west) standing silent, on the sidelines, while this is happening?  How can you just stand by?"  Indeed.