Europe’s largest student union on Monday issued its support for the social protests taking place across Israel, two days after more than 400,000 Israelis took to the streets in the movement’s biggest series of demonstrations yet.

Religious art, arguably like religion itself, ultimately deals with the trials of being human, and this is something those of all faiths and none can share in. The pope is right when he says that "art can express and render visible humanity's need to go beyond what one sees, revealing a thirst and quest for the infinite", but that "infinite" is the unfathomable in ourselves, whether we call that "God" or not.

Jesus Daily, a page that has 8.4 million “Likes” and belongs to a North Carolina-based diet doctor...features a picture of Jesus dressed as a shepherd and is updated daily with biblical quotes, prayers and reflections on the man who Christians call the savior. The New York Times notes that Jesus Daily is hardly the only wildly popular religious page and that the page speaks to a trend of people connecting with their faith outside of traditional religious institutions.

As Turks returned Monday from a month of fasting and holidays over Ramadan, their government proudly declared the amount of aid they had gathered together to send to fellow Muslims in Somalia: More than $237 million. Turkey has made no secret of its desire to increase its influence in the Middle East and Muslim Africa.

When people think of social media and revolutions, I think the tendency is to think solely of activists organizing rallies on Twitter and Facebook (they do do that too.) But more important seems to be the way that social media and shared cell phone video footage help in building a shared consciousness.

A carrier of culture will not be popular worldwide if it is unpopular in its own country. For example...the Peking Opera does not enjoy much popularity among contemporary Chinese youth. China should make practical efforts to foster the people's interest in the Peking Opera, both at home and abroad, in hopes that someday this art form will be as popular in the West as the Western opera is in China.

Rather than focusing on meaningful strategy, Washington's policy elites appear to have spent the past decade obsessed with finding a winning narrative. Grand strategy should be about connecting ends and means on a global scale that transcends administrations and their peculiar obsessions and preoccupations, whether it be Iraq, Afghanistan, or China...In all cases, it still lacks a coherent vision grounded in a realistic grand strategy.

A particularly frustrating feature of the U.S. narrative, for Muslims, is that it divides Muslim society into a progressive liberal and secular sector on one hand and on the other a regressive Islamist sector that seeks to impose backward Islamic traditions. America then seeks to promote the liberal forces and to undermine the Islamist forces.