(RNS) — Each week Religion News Service presents a gallery of photos of religious expression around the world. This week’s gallery includes Valentine’s Day festivities, the first anniversary of the school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, and more.
African penguins compete for a heart-shaped valentine handed out by aquarium biologist Piper Dwight at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, on Feb. 12, 2019. The hearts were handed out to the penguins who naturally use similar material to build nests in the wild. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)
Novice monks react as a masked dancer performs a traditional dance during Cham dance festival as part of Tibetan New Year celebrations, at the Triten Norbutse Monastery in Kathmandu, Nepal, on Feb. 13, 2019. According to Bön Tibetan Buddhism, this masked dance is a purification ceremony that eliminates negative energy and bad luck in the beginning of the new year. (AP Photo/Niranjan Shrestha)
Roses are placed next to mailboxes vandalized with swastikas covering the face of the late Holocaust survivor and renowned French politician, Simone Veil, before the vandalism was removed in Paris, on Feb.12, 2019. According to French authorities, the total of registered anti-Semitic acts rose to 541 in 2018, up from 311 in 2017, an increase of 74 percent. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)
Students at Fort Lauderdale High School participate in a moment of silence during the one-year anniversary of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, on Feb. 14, 2019, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee)
Men leave a flower shop on Valentine’s Day in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Feb. 14, 2019. Flower shops in the Afghan capital’s famous “Chicken Street market” were festooned with bright red-and-white heart-shaped balloons to mark Valentine’s Day, a sharp contrast from Taliban rule when the holiday was banned. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul)
Palestinian observers, in blue vests, watch as children walk past Israeli soldiers on their way to school in the West Bank city of Hebron on Feb. 12, 2019. Following Israel’s expulsion of an international observer force from this volatile West Bank city, Palestinian activists are trying to fill the void by launching their own patrols to document alleged Israeli settler violence. (AP Photo/Majdi Mohammed)
Couples raise their glasses for a toast as confetti falls, after they were pronounced married in a mass wedding ceremony in Mexico City on Valentine’s Day, on Feb. 14, 2019. Hundreds of couples of all ages, many accompanied by their children, gathered to legally tie the knot in a mass ceremony in the capital’s Venustiano Carranza neighborhood. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)
Suzanne Devine Clark, an art teacher at Deerfield Beach Elementary School, places painted stones at a memorial outside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School during the one-year anniversary of the school shooting, on Feb. 14, 2019, in Parkland, Fla. A year ago on Thursday, 14 students and three staff members were killed when a gunman opened fire at the high school. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee)
Thousands of students and faculty from the Catholic-run St. Scholastica’s College in Manila, Philippines, perform a mass dance on Valentine’s Day at their campus to mark the seventh anniversary of “One Billion Rising,” a global dance aimed at eradicating violence against women and children, on Feb. 14, 2019. The annual mass dancing is held every Valentine’s Day. (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez)
