We look at the challenges facing those who decide to leave the confines of the tight-knit ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, and we visit a program in San Quentin prison that helps inmates deal with the emotional pain at the root of their criminal behavior through meditation and contemplation.

A support group called Footsteps is providing counsel to those who have chosen to leave the confines of the ultra-Orthodox world in which they were raised.

Watch more of our interview with sociology professor Samuel Heilman about the difficulties of leaving the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.

"These are safe men. Not only will they not create conflict and violence in your community, they can help resolve it," says Jacques Verduin. His program in San Quentin prison is helping inmates deal with the emotional pain at the root of their criminal behavior.

What US Muslims can do to stop extremism; Iraqi refugees resettling in San Diego and the groups who are helping them adjust to life in America; and a former Microsoft executive who founded a nonprofit called Room to Read.

"What we can do, number one, is to ensure that there’s a counter narrative, that there’s a narrative of life, of positivity," says Haris Tarin, director the Washington office of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.

"Just like we help the veterans who come home from the wars, and they have a lot of challenges, so also we have a responsibility and a need to help these folks as well," says Mike McKay, director of refugee services for Catholic Charities in San Diego.

When former Microsoft executive John Wood discovered the world’s need for books, he was trekking in Nepal and recalling what he had read in the Dalai Lama’s book “The Art of Happiness” about the importance of giving something to someone in need.

Iconographer Seraphim O'Keefe talks about how icons play a role similar to fasting in the Orthodox tradition. Both, he says, are ways of finding order and beauty.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: At the Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham, Alabama, local students are on a field trip, learning how 50 years ago, kids around their age played a pivotal role in the struggle against segregation. One of them was … More →

Watch an extended interview with Freeman Hrabowski, president of University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who in 1963 was one of many children who was placed in jail for marching in Birmingham.

Baseball, like religion, has its own relics, prophets, rituals, and in the game's most magnificent moments, a sense of "the ineffable," according to John Sexton, president of New York University and author of "Baseball as a Road to God."

 

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Faith communities in Boston and beyond should pray “for a sense of our connectedness to each other,” says Rev. Samuel Lloyd, priest-in-charge at Trinity Church in Boston’s Back Bay.  In the midst of a terrible trauma, they should be “grateful for a God of love working through all of ...

Interfaith Power & Light brings together people of different faiths to be better stewards of creation by responding to global warming and by supporting changes in environmental public policy.

Climate change “is probably the most moral issue of our time," says the president and founder of Interfaith Power & Light, a coalition of thousands of religious people putting their faith into action through energy stewardship.

"We saw in our texts, in the Qur’an and Hadith, that there's so much about protecting the earth and seeing nature as a sign for us to reflect upon, but we weren't seeing that in our communities."

If the environment is just one more important issue, “it won’t gain the traction that it needs. We need to redefine creation care as the underlying mitzvah or commandment or good deed.”

Watch this week's show.