Workers in Wisconsin have mounted a fierce battle to preserve their collective bargaining rights. Here, thousands pack the Capitol Rotunda in Madison, Wisconsin, to protest anti-union legislation in February 2011. Credit: Creative Commons/Jessie Reeder. More

Cassandra Conlin After euthanizing the fallen squirrel, James lifted it in his hands, carried it across the field, and said a prayer over it. “It was the marriage of fierceness and reverence that made this a profoundly religious act,” Levy-Lyons writes. More

AP Photo/Paul Sakuma Steve Li embraces his mother after a news conference in 2010. Li’s friends and professors mobilized a fierce campaign to halt his deportation after his unexpected arrest. More

Kobi Gideon/Flash90 An Israeli woman rebukes Israeli soldiers in January 2012 after troops demolished her home in an illegal South Hebron Hills settlement. While some settlers are fiercely loyal to the state, others call for violent resistance to state actions such as the evacuation of settlements. More

Above: Laura Beckman ( laurabeckman.com ). Why do we so often imagine religious people as delicate and sheltered, when in fact religion calls us to struggle fiercely against the militarism and materialism of modern culture? This drawing, Woe to an Empire of Blood by Laura Beckman, pays homage More