The main challenges for religious leaders in addressing sexual and gender-based violence are intimately connected to the fact that sexuality is a dee… - Azza Karam

How can you defend the human rights of a person who takes actions which are deemed harmful by society and governments, but this person believes that he/she is acting out of religious convictions? This actually opened for me the door to a conversation about convictions and faith. This evolved into learning about other people’s beliefs and trying to understand what it is that moves people to behave in certain ways. This is how I got interested in the “pulse of faith” inside each of us

To date, we, development practitioners, researchers and policy-makers, have focused the responsibility for development action rightly mostly on governments. More recently, we began to pay attention to the private sector and to assess corporate social responsibility. When we finally woke up to the role of civil society, we focused almost entirely on secular members of civil society.

Political leadership and religious leadership have to be seen as unique and distinct, when there is too much of an overlap between the political institutions and the religious institutions, it doesn’t become so much about faith anymore for the religious—it becomes more about power politics.