“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.”

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."

"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.

Iconographer Seraphim O'Keefe says icons play a role similar to fasting in the Orthodox tradition. Both are ways of finding order and beauty, and painting the icon, he says, "is a way of praying."

One of the pivotal moments in the struggle for civil rights came in May 1963, when hundreds of children faced police dogs, fire hoses and arrest, to march against segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. As the 50th anniversary approaches, we speak with some of those who participated as children.

Watch an extended interview with Freeman Hrabowski, president of University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who at the age of 12 was one of many children arrested and put in jail for protesting segregation 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: Seeing Beyond the Game."

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 this.”

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.