WASHINGTON (RNS) The Obama administration’s embattled nominee for religious freedom ambassador is comparing herself to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as she tries for a second time to land the post. “They called Margaret Thatcher the ‘iron lady,”‘ the Rev. Suzan Johnson Cook said Tuesday (April 5) in an address to a dinner of…

(RNS) A British theoretical astrophysicist who has achieved renown for his study of the cosmos and for sounding warnings about the future of humanity has won the $1.6 million 2011 Templeton Prize. Martin J. Rees of Cambridge University, a former president of Britain’s prestigious Royal Society, was announced the winner on Wednesday (April 6) by…

NEW YORK (RNS) The Cross at Ground Zero was one of thousands of I-beams used to construct the iron skeletons of the World Trade Center towers. This one fell from the fiery, apocalyptic heavens during the 9/11 terror attacks and stuck upright in the ground, in a field of similar but smaller crosses. The iconic…

CANTERBURY, England (RNS/ENInews) A self-effacing multimillionaire has become a local hero after buying a series of 17th-century religious paintings and then donating them back to the Church of England in a bid to help boost art tourism. Jonathan Ruffer, 59, paid 15 million pounds (about $21.3 million) for a series of paintings of the biblical…

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