“Across the US and around the world, I’ve witnessed the many ways people worship, express their spirituality, seek the sacred, and build community. The perseverance of faith and hope, even in the most difficult circumstances, continues to inspire me.”

“I see it all the time,” says Father Michael Doyle, a Roman Catholic priest in Camden, New Jersey, “a beauty that’s deep and wonderful and sometimes tragic, but beauty absolutely, I do. Their faces are there with their burdens and their wrinkles and their difficulties and so forth, but ...

“Any ritual should have the capacity to deepen your mindfulness,” says University of Virginia professor Vanessa Ochs. It helps you “deal with the chaos of life.”

After almost 20 years of distinctive coverage of religion on mainstream television, Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly is coming to an end. In its last two episodes, the series looks back at some of its most memorable reports and interviews. This … More →

“What makes me a believer,” says writer Frederick Buechner, “is that from time to time, going back almost as far as my memory will go back, there have been glimpses I had, sometimes literally a glimpse, which have made me suspect the presence of something extraordinary and beyond the realm of ...

“In the last 20 years,” says correspondent Tim O’Brien, “we’ve seen five vacancies on the Supreme Court and changing attitudes on a wide range of social issues. Times do change, and so do the justices. For better or worse, what the Constitution really means would seem to have changed over ...

“Many of my stories have concerned human suffering,” says correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro, “and one of the most effective ways to tell these is through the work of social innovators and entrepreneurs, many driven by deep faith.”

“I think the purpose of the monastic life in the modern world is to show that we don’t need a purpose,” says Brother Paul Quenon of Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky. “The purpose of life is life, and you are to be just to be. Everybody measures their importance by how useful they are. That’s ...

Kansas classrooms are using mediation skills and restorative justice circles to resolve conflicts peacefully; Catholic seminarians travel from Minnesota to Calcutta to serve the poor and suffering the way Mother Teresa did; and a Texas imam visits Syrian refugee camps … More →

“Conflict is a part of human experience,” says Wichita West High School psychologist Janet Fox Peterson, “and teaching about speaking and listening is so very critical, and we’re not working on that very much as a society.”

The sisters don't go out and try to fix the society,” says seminarian Peter Ludwig. “They really embrace the culture that they're in, find people, the absolute poorest of the poor. It's what's so different about Mother Teresa. She doesn't go and try to fix all the problems in the world. She goes ...

“They are human beings, and so they have a right to live in peace and security,” says Imam Omar Suleiman, who has made several visits to the refugee camps on the Jordanian-Syrian border. “And if we’re not contributing to the betterment of their situation...are we really the moral standard ...

Faith communities across the country are offering their houses of worship as places of sanctuary for undocumented immigrants; and it was Martin Luther, a stubborn monk and towering thinker, whose own spiritual crisis began a momentous religious revolution in 1517.

Bob Feinman of Humane Borders says he “didn’t spend a whole lot of time paying attention to the rabbis” when he was in religious school as a child. “But the one thing I remember was the Seder every year at Passover, the Exodus. We were the ones that walked around in circles following Moses ...

“We hope to celebrate this anniversary without hiding the problematic side, the dark side of Martin Luther,” says Rev Johannes Block, pastor of the Evangelical City and Parish Church of St. Mary’s in Wittenberg, Germany, where Luther himself preached hundreds and hundreds of sermons in the ...

“I don’t see Protestant-Catholic unity coming in the immediate future,” says Michael Root, professor of systematic theology at the Catholic University of America. “There are real differences. The question we face is how do we both affirm the commonalities while being honest about the ...

Follow along as managing editor Kim Lawton visits several key sites in Germany associated with Martin Luther and the beginning of the Protestant Reformation 500 years ago.

Some communities of faith and religious leaders have responded sharply to the president’s recent directives; more and more lay people want to associate with and experience monastic life; and a new movie about Jesuit missionaries in 17th-century Japan makes visible … More →

“We have a government now that is trying to legislate what it means to be faithful—faithful to America, faithful to a particular religious perspective,” says Rabbi Jack Moline, president of the Interfaith Alliance. “We heard that in the pre-inaugural sermon that the president was presented ...

“We’re going back to where it all began,” says Fr. Columba Stewart, a scholar of monasticism and a Benedictine monk at St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, “with a variety of models of Christian ascetic life, and by ascetic I just mean disciplined. That’s what people are ...