After another disputed election, street protests wrack Mozambique. while a northern province, Cabo Delgado, endures a deadly Islamist insurrection.

“Each day is becoming more difficult, but we do not surrender,” Father Igor Boyko, 48, the rector of the Greek Catholic seminary in Lviv, told Gerard O’Connell. “To surrender means we are finished.”

The freed hostages also said they hoped the incoming Trump administration would work with the outgoing Biden administration to bring the remaining hostages home.

The Editors: This moment cries out for the kind of decisive action that perhaps only a lame-duck presidency can bring about: putting the burden of peace on Israel for bringing the war in Gaza to an end.

Joseph Hazboun, CNEWA’s regional director in Jerusalem, described expanding difficulties for the Christian Arab community on the West Bank but added that nothing, of course, compared to the complete humanitarian breakdown being experienced in Gaza.

Few writers have ever captured in fiction the American religious sense that underlies so much of our history more than Willa Cather.