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Fifteen years of work, with 650 internationally renowned authors writing 1350 lemmata, has resulted in a book spanning 5000 pages across six volumes: The Brill Encyclopedia of Early Christianity. This comprehensive work will be published next month, but is also available online. The chief editors are professors David Hunter (Boston College), Paul van Geest (Tilburg University, Erasmus University Rotterdam), and Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte (VU).

Since the summer of 2016, archaeologists from Innsbruck have been carrying out excavations in a late antique hilltop settlement in the municipality of Irschen in southern Austria. Two years ago, they made a sensational discovery: a Christian reliquary was still hidden in a previously unknown church.

Papyrologists decipher manuscript fragment and date it to the 4th to 5th century. For decades, a papyrus fragment with the inventory number P.Hamb.Graec. 1011 remained unnoticed at the Hamburg Carl von Ossietzky State and University Library. Now papyrologists Dr Lajos Berkes from the Institute for Christianity and Antiquity at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU), and Prof Gabriel Nocchi Macedo from the University of Liège, Belgium, have identified the fragment as the earliest surviving copy of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas .

On behalf of Raiffeisen Switzerland Cooperative, researchers examined the beginnings of the Raiffeisen movement in Switzerland. Their focus was on antisemitism as well as Raiffeisen during National Socialism. Raiffeisen Group in Switzerland today has 219 cooperative Raiffeisen banks. It is based on the cooperative movement started by F.W. Raiffeisen in Germany around 1860.

In a speech to a group of religious broadcasters in February, Donald Trump promised to create a task force to counter "anti-Christian bias," which he said would investigate the "discrimination, harassment and persecution against Christians in America." It's not the first time Trump has claimed that Christians are being persecuted, and he's not alone.

Archaeological excavations in Iraqi Kurdistan point to a place of worship for the water goddess Anahita Besides being a fortress for military use, the ancient mountain settlement of Rabana-Merquly in

Two Cambridge-led studies suggest that the psychological distress caused by lockdowns (UK) and experience of infection (US) was reduced among those of faith compared to non-religious people. People of religious faith may have experienced lower levels of unhappiness and stress than secular people during the UK's Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020 and 2021, according to a new University of Cambridge study released as a working paper.