"What is a woman religious? If we can come to some clarity as to what a woman religious is in the life of a church, then we can understand the relationships of women religious to the church."

Watch excerpts from our interview with the Right Rev. Jane Holmes Dixon, who presided over a ceremony at the National Cathedral blessing a South African panel of the AIDS Memorial Quilt.

"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.

Some estimates predict that the glaciers of Mount Kilimanjaro will disappear completely by 2020. Without the ice and snow, the rivers that flow down the mountain will simply dry up. "Then there is no life here. The people will have to move or they die," says assistant bishop Frederick Shoo.

"We empower national Masai to do the ministry. I didn’t start any of these churches. I’m not the leader of any of these churches. But we’ve trained these people so that they could move out and do it," says Gary Woods, a missionary who has been preaching in Africa for 25 years.

“She had to have been the least naïve nun that I can think of,” says Kathryn Wat, curator of an exhibition of prints by graphic artist Sister Corita Kent (1918-1986) at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Individual liberty versus the common good and the ongoing need for comprehensive immigration reform are among the issues religious groups continued to debate as the High Court’s term came to a close.

“Just plant the seeds in hope and faith, and you see early fruits that are terribly encouraging," says the head of the Lilly Endowment's religion division. Its efforts, according to one observer, "have paid off in deeper church life and more faithful ministry."

At the Episcopal Church of the Holy Comforter in Atlanta, most of the congregation is made of up of people with mental illnesses—bipolar disorder, clinical depression, schizophrenia—who worship and pray together.

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.