“Hymnody touches people so much because most people learn hymns when they are children, and then it reminds them of something...Hymns that represent this ideal of the afterlife—that’s the world I love.”

The Christian message, says musical artist Lecrae, “rocked me in a way I’d never been rocked.” But now his Christian music is being described as “phenomenally relevant” and “musically edgy,” and it has achieved huge mainstream success.

“Can you be Christian and rap at the same time? I think you can take rap and use it for redemptive purposes...I want to provide a landscape of hope for people.”

“The wall is coming down between Christian music and mainstream music,” says this Christian hip-hop and pop artist, who adds that he and other Christian musicians are all “flawed people depending on grace.”

“Holiness is the vocation of all Christians. It’s what we’re called to be. It doesn’t mean to be canonized. It doesn’t mean to be called 'saint'…It means to be the person God wants us to be, to be a person whose life reflects the love of Christ.”

The latest news from Timbuktu, according to Professor Shamil Jeppie, is that 25,000 Islamic manuscripts were quietly moved out of the fabled Saharan city to protect them from destruction by Islamist militants.

Her letters, papers, photographs, and library all remain inaccessible to the public, so historians and scholars are unable to tell her story in full.

"We’re not promoting faith. We’re not even promoting interfaith. We’re promoting understanding,” says Dr. Douglas Kindschi, director of the Kaufman Interfaith Institute at Grand Valley State University.

The president’s second inaugural address embraced American exceptionalism and invoked the "founding creed" of the Declaration of Independence.

A mature religious faith,” says Rev. Lillian Daniel, is “practiced in community over time.” It is “reasonable, rigorous, real, grounded in tradition, and centered in worship.”

“We saw the president as the one who would bring us together as a country, and what we learned in the first administration is that we were not yet ready to be that country,” says Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington.

Three religious leaders continue their conversation about the mood of the country as President Obama’s second inaugural approaches and consider the crisis of gun violence and the inability of American society to deal with conflict. Violence, says theology professor Harold Dean Trulear, is “who ...

We ask religion leaders what they hope for during President Barack Obama's next term, including former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, who says, "If we can make sure that Israel has a proper nation with safe borders and at the same time allow the Palestinians to have their own state...then ...

“I marvel at people’s ability to not only live through what they experienced, but not to become consumed by hatred…they recognized that even in the midst of evil, God was still with them.”

Maha Kumba Mela or Big Pitcher festival commemorates a story that describes the god Vishnu's fight with demons to gain possession of a golden pitcher containing the nectar of immortality. During the battle, some drops fell to the earth on the pilgrimage sites.

One subtheme of the series, says Rev. Ian S. Markham, dean and president of Virginia Theological Seminary, is that “there are complexities in our past, there are ambiguities, there are moments of pain that we live with but don’t want to share with everybody.”

"There are no scriptural barriers to the ordination of women,” says Jane Via, a Roman Catholic woman priest in San Diego. But theology professor Thomas Rausch maintains that “the Catholic Church is not ready for the ordination of women right now.”

“In Louisiana, you’ve got all these prison entrepreneurs who are mostly local sheriffs who have built these prisons, and the prisons function just like hotels. They get a payment per person per day, and if they don’t keep the beds full they’re going to lose money,” says reporter Cindy ...

Protestants still make up most of Congress, but this week a Hindu and a Buddhist were also among those sworn in.

Some Turkish Alawites say their concerns are driven less by sympathy for the Assad regime than by a fear of what might replace it.