An excellent Christianity Today profile of Nina Shea, of the the Center for Religous Freedom, tireless and heroic fighter for human rights and religious freedom.

In Haiti, Shea met a Dutch priest and former classics professor who was starting schools and soup kitchens in "the worst slum of the Western world."

"They were living under constant threat, constant violence, and they were doing it out of love," she says. "It had a powerful impact on me. I saw this repeated in country after country."

What resulted was an "intellectual awakening" where the importance of religion, worship, and the role of religious figures became clearer, Shea says. "It was a rational commitment I made before becoming a Christian.

"I recognized there was something very powerful here, something that I found deeply attractive. At the same time, I observed prejudice in the secular culture against the people I found deeply heroic. Because of their love for others, these people were being persecuted, marginalized, and ignored.

"I started seeing how churches were crushed, and how religious people of all faiths were being crushed." She watched in Nicaragua as communists tried to manipulate the churches as they did in Eastern Europe. "They were replacing the priests with Marxist liberation priests.

"This was a powerful witness to me. It provoked a reckoning within me about what life was about and whom I admired." In addition, the fact that "these people were often dismissed by the press and human-rights groups" proved a powerful motivator. Aside from a few Jewish groups, "no one was speaking out on behalf of persecuted religious figures," Shea says. "Certainly no one was speaking out for persecuted Christians. Something had to be done."