Word: sri
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...have a new domestic dispute that threatens to become another culture-war circus, complete with a clash-of-religions angle to boot: the battle for Rifqa Bary, a 17-year-old girl from Columbus, Ohio, who ran away to an Evangelical church in Orlando, Fla., because, she claims, her Sri Lankan Muslim family has threatened to kill her for recently converting to Christianity...
...Wearing a white dress and a silver cross, her dark hair often falling over her scared eyes, the small and slender Rifqa insisted in the TV interview (now on YouTube) that her father Mohamed Bary, a Columbus jeweler, "said he would kill me or send me back to Sri Lanka," where she said "they have asylums where they put people like me." She said her death would be a Muslim "honor killing," the kind of murder that women in deeply conservative Muslim societies are sometimes victims of when they're deemed to have shamed their families. (The U.N. Population Fund...
...more about Sri Lanka...
...danger before. In the late 17th century, the Protestant Dutch tried to eradicate the Roman Catholicism brought to the island by the Portuguese. The Virgin Mother had been moved from the shrine then as well and secreted away. In the 21st century, the statue shared the fate of many Sri Lankans, becoming a refugee as it was carried from church to church until July 2008, when it was in a more secure spot. By November, it was once again at the shrine, ready for the outpouring of piety during this year's Feast of the Assumption. Last week...
...shrine's grounds, people spoke of how the statue was a symbol of peace and hope for all Sri Lankans, even during the darkest hours of war. "What you see is a miracle. The church has not been damaged; it has survived. So has the statue, and you see people from all religions flocking here," says the Rev. Mahavilachchiye Wimala Thero, a Buddhist monk from the central district of Anuradhapura. "This is the miracle, that this statue can bring together all Sri Lankans - that is the hope it gives these people." As the statue was paraded around the compound, many...