Many preparations go into the celebration of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, which starts Monday.

There’s cleaning and decorating the house, buying new clothes, visiting friends and family — and of course preparing and sharing food. And although the foods associated with Diwali vary from culture to culture, one central theme is snacks and sweets.

The holiday honors the goddess Lakshmi, goddess of prosperity. It celebrates light over darkness, new beginnings, and the triumph of good over evil.

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Officials at a North Carolina university are being criticized after an incident in which a Sikh student was detained for wearing a kirpan, a curved dagger carried by some Sikhs as part of their faith.

The incident took place Thursday in a student union building at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. A 44-second video of the...

As Pope Francis pays a historic visit to Canada, he is encountering a country that is less Catholic, more secular and more religiously diverse than the last time it hosted a pontiff two decades ago.

And the city where he landed on Sunday — Edmonton — reflects that diversity more than outsiders might expect from a provincial capital in Canada’s prairie heartland.

Edmonton and its province of Alberta do have a large, long-settled population of Christians of European descent.

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The Sikh Coalition was born in the hours after 9/11, out of self-defense. In those raw days after the attacks, Balbir Singh Sodhi was shot outside the gas station his family ran in Mesa, Arizona. In the months following, American Sikhs were beaten and their temples, called gurdwaras, were set on fire. Less than a year after Singh Sodhi’s murder, his brother was shot while driving his cab near San Francisco.

In those early days, and as violence against Sikhs has continued — the latest wave of anti-Sikh harassment hit Queens, New York, earlier this year — coalition members were...