Jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard spoke August 17th with Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly about his recent CD, A TALE OF GOD'S WILL: A REQUIEM FOR KATRINA, when he was playing in Washington at Blues Alley.

Kim Lawton looks at how the US works out the sometimes complicated relationship between freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion.

Watch scenes from an emotional meeting of transplant donors and recipients after the largest kidney donor exchange ever.

"We can open up the question of financial incentives" for organ donations "without worrying about undue coercive pressures."

Watch religious leaders speaking this week about Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and American ideals and values and the New York City Islamic center controversy.

The director of the Presbyterian Church USA's Public Witness, Compassion, Peace and Justice Ministry speaks about the biblical meaning of neighbor and family and how that shapes the perspective of some faith communities on comprehensive immigration reform.

"People are not poor because they have weak characters," says human services professor Bill Oswald. "They're poor for lots of different reasons, but my experience is they're the hardest working people I know."

"I'm doing the best I can to live out my faith as I understand it," says Episcopal priest and Vanderbilt University chaplain Becca Stevens. "Love is the most powerful force for social change."

Germany has twice as many mosques as the United States, but it still has a long way to go to provide equal opportunities for Muslim immigrants and their children.

"For me Reiki is another form of prayer," says spiritual director Lauri Lumby Schmidt. But a member of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops says this holistic healing practice is "not of God."

In a new book, this historian and professor of international relations writes that America's long military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq "demonstrated the folly of imagining that war could be mastered" and demolished "Washington's pretensions to moral superiority."

“Being religious or spiritual has a very profound effect on our biology and our brain,” says neuroscientist Andrew Newberg. “It can change our brain and change ourselves over time.”

"What binds us together and what binds God to us is food," says Father Leo Patalinghug, a Roman Catholic priest who has his own cooking show.

Read more of Kim Lawton's interview with Father Leo and watch him talk about his television cook-off with celebrity chef and restaurateur Bobby Flay.

An interactive museum in Brooklyn teaches children and their families the universal values rooted in Jewish tradition.

According to US government figures, more than 40,000 people have been brought in to help clean up the oil and deal with the crisis. But many in the fishing industry say they haven’t been able to get work, and they don’t know when they’ll be able to resume their livelihoods.

Watch more from New Orleans Roman Catholic Archbishop Gregory Aymond, Margaret Dubuisson of Catholic Charities of the New Orleans Archdiocese, and Rev. John Dee Jeffries, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Chalmette, discussing the spiritual toll of the oil spill crisis for people along the Gulf ...

At the time of Saddam Hussein's overthrow, an estimated one million Christians were living in Iraq. Now about one-third of Iraq's Christian community have fled the country in order to escape increasing violence and hostility from their Muslim countrymen.

This week marked the 6 month anniversary of the devastating earthquake in Haiti, which killed more than 230,000 people. Humanitarian groups say while there has been some recovery, an overwhelming amount of work still needs to be done.

Religious communities are part of a growing movement across America that is concerned with the ethics of how food is grown and how it gets to our tables.