"It is the responsibility of the international community, of the global civil society, to come and take care and assist the transformation of Syria, in collaboration with the Syrian civil society," says the exiled leader of the Deir Mar Musa monastery near Damascus.

"We are together in front of God and recognize each other as believers...these Muslim, Christian and Jewish, they worship God in a kind of choir," Father Paolo Dall'Oglio told correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro in describing the work of his monastery before violence erupted in Syria.

Watch excerpts from the July 2nd arrival of "Nuns on the Bus" on Capitol Hill and listen to Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of NETWORK, talk about the Ryan budget versus the nuns' "faithful budget."

The Washington Post columnist and author of Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent says, “Religion is always there below the surface in our politics.”

A national debate is underway over the First Amendment, federal law, and whether “reasonable minds can disagree” about what religious freedom means. Watch excerpts from some recent interviews.

It is a painful rite of passage for girls in many African and Middle Eastern countries. But in Senegal there has been a remarkably successful campaign to change people's attitudes towards female circumcision in an effort to eliminate the practice altogether.

World Vision’s vice president for advocacy and government relations says the leaders attending this weekend’s G8 summit in Washington should invest in agricultural and nutrition programs to lift people out of poverty because “it’s the right thing to do, it’s the moral thing to do, and it’s the smart thing to do.”

In the wake of White House counterterrorism advisor John Brennan’s speech on drone ethics and targeted killing, we talk to Yale Law School professor Stephen Carter, author of The Violence of Peace: America’s Wars in the Age of Obama.

"The administration says that the drone is the smallest amount of force that we could use. They say it's accurate and therefore it discriminates perfectly," observes Yale Law School professor Stephen Carter.

In this territorial dispute between India and Pakistan in what may be the world’s most militarized region, there are direct links between water availability, rising terrorism, and religious extremism among Hindus and Muslims.