A senior French Protestant has called growing income inequality a form of violence and has asked for self-restraint among high earners in a time of austerity.
The gap between very high incomes and low salaries has been widening for several years, says Laurent Schlumberger, president of the national council of the Reformed Church of France. Where governments and consumers are reluctant to act, there is still a moral imperative on high earners to refuse grossly unequal remuneration, he argues.
According to census figures, some 600,000 French residents are members of evangelical churches, with 460,000 regularly practicing; a ten-fold increase on 1950.
Meeting in Paris, the Protestant Federation of France examined the issues chaplains face in hospitals, prisons and the military and urged support for chaplaincy work.
A bill passed by the French Senate makes it a criminal offence to publicly question events termed as genocide under French law, raising serious free speech issues.
A law banning the burqa will not resolve the identity crisis many European countries are going through, nor will it help towards the integration of European citizens, says Valerie Hartwich. The burqa is but a crystallisation, an expression of these tensions.