The Religion and Ethics Report

In the three years since the gruesome Hamas attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people, and included the documented use of sexual violence, Israel has responded with its own fierce bombardment of the Gaza strip. An estimated 70,000 people have died, mostly from Israeli air attacks. From the October 7 massacre, flowed twin tragedies: a humanitarian crisis in Gaza and a global explosion of antisemitism, most obviously the 2025 Hannukah massacre at Bondi Beach. 
They pose behind luxuriant, often ludicrous moustaches, smoke pipes and affect an air of genteel intellectuals. But these so-called "theo bros", as in theological, have very radical agenda to change America that hearkens back to the country’s worst times. Bob Smietana has been tracking this online group as it preaches a version of Christianity to lost young men. 
GUESTS:
David Myers is a distinguished professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a lifelong activist for Israeli-Palestinian peace and human rights
Bob Smietana is a senior writer based in Chicago for the Religion News Service.

In the three years since the gruesome Hamas attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people, and included the documented use of sexual violence, Israel has responded with its own fierce bombardment of the Gaza strip. 
An estimated 70,000 people have died, mostly from Israeli air attacks. 
From the October 7 massacre, flowed twin tragedies: a humanitarian crisis in Gaza and a global explosion of antisemitism, most obviously the 2025 Hannukah massacre at Bondi Beach. 
GUEST:
David Myers is a distinguished professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a lifelong activist for Israeli-Palestinian peace and human rights

They pose behind luxuriant, often ludicrous moustaches, smoke pipes and affect an air of genteel intellectuals.
But these so-called "theo-bros", as in theological, have very radical agenda to change America that hearkens back to the country’s worst times. 
Bob Smietana has been tracking this online group as it preaches a version of Christianity to lost young men. 
GUEST:
Bob Smietana is a senior writer based in Chicago for the Religion News Service.

The plan was that, at 8am on Sunday, 35 men dressed in orange sashes and black bowler hats would march up a street in Portadown, in Northern Ireland. 
By 8.30, it was supposed to be over. 
Now, the planned march, which never took place, has become a stand-off that threatens to bring down Norther Ireland’s provincial government. 
The controversy has also reopened a tension between the town’s Catholic nationalists and Protestant loyalists that’s been contained for almost three decades. 
GUEST:
Professor Dominic Bryan is a specialist in politics and religion at Queens University in Belfast.

France is a country that, since the early 20th century, has built its politics and civil life around a strict practice of secularism. 
The law even bans the wearing of crosses and other religious symbols in some public institutions. 
So how much of a shock has it been to see Pope Leo draw massive crowds during his brief visit to France? An estimated 800,000 people turned out to see him in Paris. 
And does it suggest a religious revival in a country where only about 5% of people attend church each week?
GUEST:
Professor CHARLES MERCIER specialises in public religion at the School of Advanced Studies in Paris.