My late wife Mirjam, when she died, was a co-director of the International Institute for Religious Freedom, and the executive editor of its journal. One of her primary concerns was the emphasis of the debate surrounding religious persecution. This tended to focus, she said, on definitions, facts, and interventions -- or how things ideally should be in this world. However, it placed little emphasis on pastoral theology or a theology of suffering -- which is coping with the way things really are. People needed to be able to cope with persecution, she said, as well as having the issues of rights addressed. OBSERVATION: Her next mission was to study the effects of persecution on children in Sri Lanka, which I expect she would have embarked upon around the time of her death.
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