The focus of this year's Week of Prayer for Christian Unity is on Christianity in India.

JERUSALEM – Bishops who traveled to the Holy Land to assess the local Church's needs noted the "profound anxiety" the "dark and dramatic events" of the past year have caused in the region.

Two stars dance together. Electromagnetic fields undulate in invisible light waves forging their silent way through the vacuum of space. When they reach Earth, the same waves become discrete particles and violently eject electrons in atoms inside a camera, recording telescope images like those I have analyzed.

Each year the churches throughout the world observe a Week of Prayer for Christian Unity from Jan. 18 to 25. How did this come about?

Pilgrims climb to touch the Black Nazarene during a procession in Manila, Philippines, Jan. 7.

In a wooded suburb of the fabled university city of Oxford, England, a battered typewriter sits on a desk beside a bay window that overlooks a tangled landscape of oaks and beeches.

Deploring war, civil conflict and poverty around the world, Pope Benedict told foreign ambassadors to the Vatican that peace-building requires charity, religious liberty, a proper understanding of human rights and openness to divine love.

Politicians who want to act as if God did not exist and as if there was no such thing as objective moral truths are bound to fail in their efforts to promote the common good, said the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Cardinal Anthony Olubunmi Okogie criticized oil pipeline vandalism that led to the death more than two dozen youths, saying if they had had jobs, their deaths might have been avoided.

The Catholic University of America in Washington is spinning off its current economics and business curriculum from its School of Arts and Sciences and fashioning a new business school with the idea of infusing ethics into all course offerings.