This Grammy-Award-winning artist’s new album, "spirityouall," includes his interpretations of classic African-American spirituals as well as songs he composed. Through all of them he hears the influence of his father, Robert McFerrin Sr., who was an operatic baritone.

“To me, just being is a religious experience. Just being is holy.” Read more of correspondent Kim Lawton's interview with Bobby McFerrin, including his memory of the first time he heard jazz great Miles Davis play.

Watch Bobby McFerrin's recent performance of "Fix Me Jesus" in the Sheldon Concert Hall in St. Louis.

Economic prosperity and modernity are beginning to have an impact on religious life in Thailand, a country that is 95 percent Buddhist but that in the last 30 years has seen the number of Buddhist monks decrease by about half.

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“If you’re training gay scouts to be, presumably, gay leaders, but then you don’t want gay leaders in the scouts, that’s an odd message to send,” says United Methodist pastor Charles Parker, a former scout. But opponents of the proposal to accept gay scouts say it flies in the face of a basic scouting tenet: the oath boys take to be “morally straight.”

"Every time we talk about a cut you’re talking about many people who don’t have an expensive lobby in Washington, DC," says Baltimore mayor Stephanie Rollins Blake. Sequestration is "a social justice issue, an economic justice issue."

This former White House press secretary wants to change the political climate in Washington and restore trust. After graduating from Wesley Theological Seminary, McCurry, a United Methodist, says "God was putting on me a challenge to see if I could do something about this broken world of politics that I've worked in for so long."

"I think the single biggest missing ingredient in our political system right now are real relationships of trust, human relationships where people really think about and care about each other. And that's right where the church has to be."