2004 Christy Fiction award winner! Paul Stepola, an agent working for the National Peacekeeping Organization (NPO), has been assigned to enforce compliance with the world government's prohibition on religion. Paul relishes his job and is good at it. He is determined to expose underground religion-flush it out, expose it, and kill it-until his life is turned upside down and he is forced to look at life in a different way. As Paul begins to unravel...

This astonishing exploration of the dark side of Christianity follows former priest James Carroll on a journey of remembrance and reckoning. Carroll, a National Book Award winner, is a practicing Catholic whose search for the truth leads him to confront persecution and violence in the name of God – today and in the Church’s past. He discovers a terrible legacy that reverberates across the centuries: from the Emperor Constantine’s vision of the...

In 1979, the Islamic Revolution in Iran brought a twenty-five- hundred-year-old history to a close for the Jews who left their homeland for America. Uncertain about their safety and fearing religious persecution in Khomeini's Islamic Theocracy, an estimated 80,000 of Iran's 100,000 Jews fled the country. This documentary tells the story of those Jews who reestablished a tight knit community in Los Angeles.

During the more than a quarter of a century that her husband spent in jail, Winnie Mandela was persecuted by the white authorities, first to put pressure on her husband, and then because she developed as a leader in her own right. Under enormous constraints, Winnie Mandela slowly developed a heroic public relations campaign that kept Nelson's image alive, and the attention of the world on South Africa. Directed by Peter Davis.

In the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union, ten-year-old Sasha idolizes his father, a devoted Communist, but when police take his father away and leave Sasha homeless, he is forced to examine his own perceptions, values, and beliefs.

CIA torture, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and other examples of U.S. military abuse, have a history. A key part of it is revealed in Father Roy: Inside the School of Assassins. Through his extraordinary life and daring actions we learn about Fr. Roy Bourgeois and his struggle to find and reveal the truth about the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA), and growing efforts by grassroots activists and Congress to shut it down. PBS "Global Voices"...

"Eunsun Kim was born in North Korea, one of the most secretive and oppressive countries in the modern world. As a child Eunsun loved her country...despite her school field trips to public executions, daily self-criticism sessions, and the increasing gnaw of hunger as the country-wide famine escalated. By the time she was eleven years old, Eunsun's father and grandparents had died of starvation, and Eunsun was in danger of the same. Finally, her mother...

The danger is palpable as maverick activist Ye Haiyan (a.k.a Hooligan Sparrow) and her band of colleagues travel to Hainan Province in southern China to protest the case of six elementary school girls who were sexually abused by their principal. Marked as enemies of the state, the activists are under constant government surveillance and face interrogation, harassment, and imprisonment. Sparrow, who gained notoriety with her advocacy work for sex workers'...

In 1943 ten-year-old Lida is torn away from her home in the Ukraine, separated from her little sister Larissa, and sent to a slave labor camp in Germany, but when she is moved and set to making bombs she sees a way to strike back at the Nazis.