For Manitobans, North Dakota is a place to take vacations and go shopping — or, at least, it was until Donald Trump imposed tariffs on Canada and threatened our country with annexation or invasion.

While many of us aren’t going to Fargo and Grand Forks anymore, we still retain a fondness for our North Dakota neighbours. For me, that includes being interested in the role religion plays in that mostly Lutheran and Roman Catholic state.

I have long known that North Dakota is a red state — that it votes Republican. But last month I also found out that it ranks high for supporting Christian nationalism.

That news comes from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), which found that 42 per cent of North Dakotans believe in Christian nationalism — the idea that the U.S. is a Christian nation, that its laws should be based on Christian values, and that to truly be American a person should be Christian.

WEST BLOOMFIELD, Mich. (AP) — A man with a rifle who crashed into a large Michigan synagogue in what federal officials say was an attack had lost four family members in an Israeli airstrike in his native Lebanon last week, an official said Friday.

Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, 41, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Lebanon, was killed by security after ramming into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township near Detroit and driving down a hallway in a vehicle that then caught fire, according to authorities.

The FBI, which is leading the investigation, described the attack on one of the nation’s largest Reform synagogues as an act of violence targeting the Jewish community.

About 140 people — 106 children and more than 30 staff — were at the synagogue at the time of the attack, said Cassi Cohen, Temple Israel's director of strategic development. None of them were injured, according to Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard.

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said during a Pentagon briefing Friday, without providing evidence, that Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei “ is wounded and likely disfigured. ” Khamenei has not been seen in public since taking over leadership. Hegseth also said in regards to Iran's chokehold on global oil shipments that “we have been dealing with it and don’t need to worry about it."

All six crew members aboard a U.S. military KC-135 refueling aircraft that crashed in western Iraq are dead and the circumstances are being investigated, the American military said. The crash brings the U.S. death toll in Operation Epic Fury to at least 13 service members.

A large explosion struck Iran’s capital, Tehran, near a square filled with people for annual Quds Day demonstrations in support of the Palestinians, Iranian state television reported. Thousands chanted “death to Israel” and “death to America.”

And more than 100 children are among the 773 people killed by Israeli strikes in Lebanon, the Lebanese Health Ministry said Friday. Israel said Friday its strikes on Hezbollah targets are “continuing and intensifying.” U.S. President Donald Trump said the war would end “when I feel it in my bones.”

ROME (AP) — Pope Leo XIV on Thursday entrusted the Vatican’s charity works to a fellow Augustinian, signaling a line of continuity with Pope Francis who had elevated the centuries-old job to a position of action and prominence that helped define his legacy.

Leo named Archbishop Luis Marín de San Martín, a Spanish member of Leo's religious order and an undersecretary in the Vatican’s synod office, as his chief almsgiver and prefect of the Vatican’s charity office.

Marín replaces Polish Cardinal Konrad Krajewski, 62, who becomes the Archbishop of Lodz, in Poland, his home archdiocese that has been without an archbishop for a year.

Francis had redefined the role of the Vatican’s chief almsgiver and had asked Krajewski to essentially be the hands-on extension of his own personal acts of charity that he could no longer do himself as pope.

How can people try to build bridges during this polarizing time in the world?

Chris Rice, an award-winning author and global peacemaker who is dedicated to fostering social healing and spiritual renewal, will address this question.

Rice, who directed the Mennonite Central Committee’s office at the United Nations for five years, is being brought to the province by the committee on March 11 to speak on the topic “Being Peacemakers for a World of Surging Polarization.”

Building bridges is tough, but necessary work, said Rice, from his home in North Carolina.

In January, the provincial government announced a new resource for schools to address Islamophobia. Two years ago, it announced the creation of a new curriculum about the Holocaust.

Those are good things. They will help students know more about Islam and Judaism, and the challenges facing members of those groups. But I wondered: What resources are available to help students develop an even broader sense of religious literacy?

As it turns out, the province has an optional grade 12 course titled “World of Religions: A Canadian Perspective.” It’s designed to help students build interfaith and intercultural understanding as they explore the diversity of religions and religious perspectives within Manitoba and Canada.

That’s also good. Knowing more about other religions is important. But my next question was: How many schools are using it? The answer, it turns out, is not many.

In his new book about the Roman Catholic Church’s groundbreaking Synod on Synodality, Michael W. Higgins begins his entry for Oct. 2 this way:

“On the same day that the synod formally opened with a solemn pontifical Mass with several thousands in attendance, a small group of women — including representatives from the Canadian Network for Women’s Equality — staged a gentle, humour-laced, and earnest demonstration on the Lungotevere Castello near the Castel Sant’Angelo, variously a papal citadel, residence, and prison.

“The group was stating their opposition to the exclusion of women from ordained ministry — diaconal and presbyteral.

“While watching the protestors kick their empty tin cans (which they dubbed their ‘vati-cans’), I noticed two young cassock-wearing clerics walk by them with studied indifference, if not a smirk of condescension. And that is clerical Rome.”

Ramadan began this past week, and it runs until March 19. For Muslims, it’s a sacred time when they pray and fast daily from dawn to sunset, seeking to grow closer to God.

While Ramadan is for Muslims, other religious groups can see it as a good opportunity to learn more about Islam — including during Christian worship services.

That’s the view of Anna Piela and Michael Woolf in their new book, Confronting Islamophobia in the Church: Liturgical Tools for Justice. (Judson Press.)

In the book, the married couple say that taking time to learn about Islam at church can help Christians combat Islamophobia and be better neighbours to Muslims in their communities. As a bonus, it can also help them develop a deeper understanding of their own Christian beliefs.