DEBORAH POTTER, correspondent: The Boy Scouts of America has long argued that homosexuality is incompatible with its basic principles. As a private organization, its right to exclude gays was upheld by the Supreme Court a decade ago. But the issue has remained divisive.

Pascal Tessier, for one, hopes the scouts will lift the ban.

PASCAL TESSIER: I’ve had wonderful experiences with all the other boys and learning all my life skills and becoming a leader and all that.

POTTER: Pascal is now 16 and just a few steps away from becoming an Eagle Scout, the highest rank in scouting. He’s also openly gay.

TESSIER: Right now I’m on the line. I could get a letter any day saying I’m not part of scouts anymore. I’m kicked out. I would…that’s it, that’s the end of it. That’s the end of ten years of scouting.

POTTER: The policy change proposed by the Boy Scouts of America would affect more than two-and-a-half million boys. Most of them—70 percent—belong to troops that are sponsored by religious organizations. And the reaction from faith-based groups has been mixed. The Mormon Church, the largest single sponsor of scout groups, is on record as saying that homosexual acts are sinful. But it surprised many by giving its blessing to the Boy Scouts’ proposal just weeks before the vote. United Methodist churches, like Metropolitan Memorial in Washington, DC, supported the change from the start. Senior Pastor Charles Parker is a former scout and father of a seven-year-old boy.

CHARLES PARKER (Senior Pastor, Metropolitan Memorial United Methodist Church): I think the scouts are actually wrestling with the same thing the church is wrestling with in terms of an erosion of membership over the years, and if they really want to communicate to a new generation of folks, my son is not going to understand bigotry towards homosexuals and wouldn’t be part of a group that was bigoted. So if we want a new generation of scouts, we’ve got to do this.

POTTER: Opponents of the proposal to accept gay scouts say it flies in the face of a basic tenet of scouting: the oath boys take to be “morally straight.”

Boy Scouts reciting oath: “To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight.“

Family Research Council video: “Over 100 million boys have taken the scouts’ oath.”

POTTER: The Christian conservative group Family Research Council produced a national webcast to rally the opposition.

CHRISTIAN SACRA (Eagle Scout) (from “Stand With the Scouts” video): Changing the scout policy on homosexuality really brings up concerns of making sure the scouts live by the scout oath and law, when really we’re supporting an idea that goes against it.

PASTOR ROBERT HALL (Calvary Chapel Rio Rancho, NM) (from “Stand With the Scouts” video): The problem is that we as churches are setting a moral code in people’s lives, as we’re the conscience of the nation. And we have all our scout volunteers sign our statement of faith. And it’s within that environment we’re all in agreement of what we believe, that we’re training our boys and teaching them to honor God and to be, as you say, “morally straight.” And that would be incompatible with this change in scouting. We could not continue our relationship with them.

POTTER: To Pascal Tessier, the concerns makes no sense.

TESSIER: Sexuality does not have a place in scouts. It’s about having good morals and be able to be a good person. So I think that bringing sexuality into it doesn’t have any effect. Your sexuality doesn’t affect your morals.

POTTER: And some supporters of admitting gay scouts say the policy change doesn’t go far enough. The Boy Scouts have drawn the line at 18, still refusing to accept gay adults as scout leaders.

PARKER: I think the issue of trying to intellectually justify that being gay and being a scout is fine, but being gay and being a leader is not fine is an odd one, because on some level you’re training scouts to be leaders, and so if you’re training gay scouts to be presumably gay leaders, but then you don’t want gay leaders in the scouts, that’s sort of an odd message to send.

POTTER: Some troops undoubtedly will leave the Boy Scouts of America if the new policy is approved. But the organization faces a possible economic backlash if it retains the ban. Measures are under review in several states to withhold funding or tax breaks from the scouts unless the ban is lifted.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Deborah Potter in Washington.

Boy Scouts reciting Scout Benediction: “May the great Scout Master of all great scouts be with us until we meet again.”

BOB ABERNETHY: This commencement season, when graduates are encouraged to go out and change the world, we have a Belief and Practice segment on a man with a new graduate degree who wants to do nothing less than change the political climate of Washington, D.C. He is Mike McCurry, an old Washington hand, and we caught up with him last Monday as the Washington National Cathedral opened its doors for the commencement ceremony of the Wesley Theological Seminary.

Choir singing: “The glories of my God and King, the triumphs of his grace.”

ABERNETHY: Mike McCurry is a United Methodist who was press secretary for President Clinton at the White House in the 1990s. Later, he worked in public relations and also served on the board of the Wesley Theological Seminary.It was then that he decided to get a graduate degree, a Master of Arts, and try to change the way Washington works.

Commencement Ceremony Announcer: Michael D. McCurry, with honors.

MIKE McCURRY: i think the single biggest missing ingredient in our political system right now are real relationships of trust, you know, human relationships where people really think about and care about each other. And that’s right where the church has to be. To me, that’s what the church is about.

I’m a guy who comes out of the world of political communications and how we express things in the media. I think we have got to tone it down a lot.

I want to be very clear. We’re not talking about taking church dogma and putting that front and center in the way we do policy-making. We’re not saying there ought to be a theocracy here. But I think there are ways in which people who are guided by the spirit, and who have a deep respect and love for God, treat each other a little bit differently.

Part of the study of scripture is that business about loving your neighbor as yourself. Well, there’s not a whole lot of that kind of love in Washington. But we are a community, and I think there are ways and with various faith traditions—Christianity, obviously, in my case, but others as well can bring us to a point where there’s a little more spiritual bonding that can happen in this town.

ABERNETHY: I asked him whether he could imagine that happening in Congress.

McCURRY: It’s hard sometimes, you know, it would require a lot of prayer, probably.

ABERNETHY: Later, McCurry acknowledged his sense of mission.

McCURRY: I wanted to take courses at the seminary, first and frankly, out of intellectual curiosity. But the more I did it, the more I felt some sense of call, that 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, to do something to create a little more civil discourse in this country.

ABERNETHY: And that’s what you’re going to do?

McCURRY: That’s what I’m going to use my degree to do.

SAUL GONZALEZ, correspondent: It’s these kinds of images that have defined Iraq over the past decade, as America’s 2003 invasion was followed by a long insurgency against U.S. forces. Brutal sectarian violence among Iraqis followed and continues to this day in the country.

At least 100,000 Iraqis have died in the conflicts. And fears of violence and religious persecution have led more than a million and a half Iraqis to flee their country, with most settling in other Middle Eastern nations.

Thousands of these Iraqi refugees have wound up on the very distant and unlikely shores of San Diego, California, a place better known for the tanned and toned southern California good life than its connection to turmoil in the Middle East.

(to Milheer El Anny and his wife Hebba): When did you get here, may I ask?

MILHEER EL ANNY: About 42 days ago.

GONZALEZ: You got to the United States only 42 days ago?

EL ANNY: Yeah. (laughs)

GONZALEZ: Iraqis Miheer El Anny, his wife Hebba, and young daughter Jumana are trying to adjust to their new life in the U.S. after leaving Iraq and then spending a year in Turkey as refugees.

EL ANNY: We left Iraq because there was a direct risk on our lives. It is very risky, especially for us because our lives are in danger. So, for the time being we can’t go back to Iraq.

GONZALEZ: We met the El Annys in the San Diego offices of Catholic Charities, a nonprofit group which helps new Iraqi refugees resettle in the community, regardless of their faith.

MIKE MCKAY: They are what we call the unintended consequences of the war.

GONZALEZ: Mike McKay is Catholic Charities’ Director of Refugee Services in San Diego. He says because of America’s long and controversial military involvement in Iraq, the U.S. has a moral obligation to help the Iraqis now here.

MCKAY: 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.

GONZALEZ: In the early years of the Iraq War, the United States only accepted a trickle of Iraqi refugees. But that changed in 2007 when resettlement restrictions were loosened.

In the years since, more than 64,000 Iraqi refugees have been allowed in to the United States, with thousands of them coming to the San Diego area.

That migration has transformed some communities, like El Cajon, where a quarter of it’s 100,000 residents are now Iraqis, and where on some streets it’s easy to feel like you’re in the Middle East.

For the Iraqis who come to the United States, they’ve traded the violence and desperation of their own country for the relative peace and prosperity of the United States. But for many it can be like traveling between two worlds and that creates its own problems.

MUHAMMED: My name is Muhammed, and I’ve been in the United States since 2009 as a refugee.

GONZALEZ: Muhammed is like many in the Iraqi expatriate community when he requests that we don’t reveal his identity. He fears it could put family members back home at risk, either from militants or criminal gangs.

MUHAMMED: They kidnap one of your family, thinking that because you are living in America you are a millionaire or something and asking for a ransom. That happens many times.

GONZALEZ: Muhammed says he was forced to leave Iraq. He says just because he was an English teacher, militants thought he was working with the Americans. Many Iraqis who worked with the U.S. military or private contractors as translators have been killed.

MUHAMMED: They start targeting teachers, educated people. So we received a threat note to leave or you will be killed.

GONZALEZ: And why did so many Iraqis, like Muhammed, choose to come to San Diego? Well, many of them had family connections here because of an older, established Iraqi community that’s been in the city for years.

That’s especially true for Iraqi Christian Chaldeans, who have put down deep roots in San Diego.

Local Chaldean churches, along with mosques and groups like Catholic Charities and the International Rescue Committee offer aid and orientation to the Iraqi refugees.

INSTRUCTOR: …By using the three techniques at least. Apply online. What else? Networking.

That help often comes in the form of classroom instruction, where the newly arrived Iraqis learn survival skills for everyday life in America.

Erica Bouris is a resettlement manager for the International Rescue Committee in San Diego.

ERICA BOURIS: We provide cultural orientation. We help with housing and, you know, making sure that kids are immunized, kids enroll in school, those are the kinds of things that we are doing with folks in the first couple of months.

GONZALEZ: Really nitty-gritty things?

BOURIS: Very nitty-gritty things. Absolutely. Get your driver’s license. Do you know how to take the bus? We just saw in the class practicing how to write a check. Do you know how to pay your rent and pay your bills?

GONZALEZ: Some institutions which try to help the refugees, such as San Diego’s most prominent Iraqi Christian church, acknowledge providing assistance has stretched resources.

Father Michael Bazzi is the church’s pastor.

FATHER MICHAEL BAZZI: We used to have them coming to us a thousand, two thousand every year, three thousand every year, and lately, more than five thousand people. And I established here a committee to show them how to live as Americans here, and we have many committees that take them to the schools and to, you know, insert them into American society.

GONZALEZ: Although grateful to be here, many Iraqis complain that settling in the United States has been difficult, especially when it comes to jobs. According to Catholic Charities, only about a third of Iraqi refugees find employment during their first year in the United States. Anecdotally, the refugee agencies say long term unemployment or underemployment continues for most of the Iraqis. Muhammed blames the refugee resettlement process for many of the Iraqi community’s problems.

MUHAMMED: We didn’t get any orientation about life in America or even the law, so we were lost. It’s not about the person himself. It is about applications and system software that you have to fit in. It doesn’t matter what your life was. But for me no one can sit and talk to you.

GONZALEZ: Mike McKay of Catholic Charities empathizes with the Iraqis.

MCKAY: They have very conflicted feelings. They’re grateful about being out of harm’s way and have a chance to start a new life and seek the American Dream. But at the same time, not unlike the Hebrew people who left the slavery of Egypt, when they got in the desert, they said, “Oh, Lord, Moses, why did you bring us here? Take us back. Life is too hard in the desert.”

GONZALEZ: For the El Annys, freshly arrived in this country, the choices and freedoms America offers is both confusing and exciting.

EL ANNY: These 42 days, it’s like introducing for a new world because the system here is different than the system in the Middle East, especially the option things. Here in the United States, everything, there are options.

HEBBA: There are many options.

EL ANNY: Yeah. Many options. Everything, there are options.

GONZALEZ: A little fear at times, do you feel a little fear?

EL ANNY: Sometimes we feel fear. Yeah, sometimes. But, you know, with all the support we have, things will be fine, I think.

GONZALEZ: When we left Catholic Charities, the staff were preparing for new refugees from Iraq at the airport in the coming days.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Saul Gonzalez in San Diego.

SERAPHIM O’KEEFE: It’s traditional to fast and pray as part of the process of painting icons and make an image that’s harmonious and ordered. The details are all serving the whole. Painting the icon is a way of praying using the paint, but it’s a prayer and it’s to manifest prayer. It shows prayer and it calls the people in the church to prayer. That’s the idea, is to have this concentrated, directed sense in the icon that people can respond to so that when you come into the church, your heart is lifted up in a way. Your whole…not just your heart and your eyes, your mind, and your body as one are immediately called to a higher place.

For most saints, the church has a tradition of making an icon of any given saint. And so the most important thing is to pay attention to what they look like and other icons. It’s not supposed to look like a naturalistic portrait of a person. It’s supposed to be in a way a transfigured person—the light is coming from inside. But through the process of painting here I have come to believe that they do look like the person depicted.

Sometimes I’ll be working and I’ll try to imitate the tradition of how a particular saint looked, and I’ll be failing miserably. And I feel like, maybe on every one of them, there’s a time when I feel like the saint steps in and gives some guidance. And then I’ll stand back and say, “Oh this actually looks like the tradition of how this person looks. You know, that’s him.”

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: At the Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham, Alabama, local students are on a field trip, learning how 50 years ago, kids around their age played a pivotal role in the struggle against segregation. One of them was Freeman Hrabowski, who is now president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He was 12 at the time and a math whiz.

FREEMAN HRABOWSKI III (Univ. of MD, Baltimore Co.): I was not a courageous kid. I did not get into fights. The only thing I would attack was a math problem. And so, this was not about courage at all, it was about having a dream of a better day.

LAWTON: In 1963, Birmingham was considered one of the most segregated places in the US.

HRABOWSKI: Children knew, children of color were well aware we were considered second class.

LAWTON: Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to Birmingham in January 1963 to support local efforts to end segregation through non-violent protests. But the campaign didn’t take off as he had hoped.

TAYLOR BRANCH (Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author): He prepared for three months and started the demonstrations in April. They fizzled quickly, nothing went according to plan.

LAWTON: While King was trying unsuccessfully to inspire adults to march and get arrested, civil rights leaders including Rev. James Bevel and Dorothy Cotton were holding special meetings for Birmingham elementary and high school students.

DOROTHY COTTON (Civil Rights Leader): We knew that they were curious about what was going on in their town. We were not there to recruit them. They just started hanging around, coming around and it swelled.

BRANCH: When Dr. King was about to retreat from Birmingham, the people running the children’s workshops said, “Don’t do it because we’re out of people. I got plenty of foot soldiers.”

LAWTON: It was a controversial prospect. Birmingham’s police commissioner Bull Connor was notorious for his efforts to stop any protests. Movement leaders argued among themselves about whether this was the right strategy.

REV. VIRGIL WOOD (Civil Rights Leader): Dr. King was severely criticized for allowing the children to be involved, but the children insisted themselves. The children were their own self-initiators of their own freedom. They said, “This is our future and we want to help shape it.”

LAWTON: Rev. Carolyn McKinstry was 14 and volunteering in her church, Sixteenth Street Baptist, when she overheard the ministers calling on children to march.

REV. CAROLYN MCKINSTRY (Author, While the World Watched): It was such an excitement in the air I knew I wanted to be part of it.

LAWTON: She didn’t tell her parents, especially her strict father, about her decision.

MCKINSTRY: I know if I had asked he would have said no.

LAWTON: Hrabowski came from an educated middle class family. He says his parents dragged him to a civil rights meeting, and he was sitting in the back of the church doing his math homework when he heard King give the call.

HRABOWSKI: And I’ll never forget listening, but doing the math and hearing a man say, if the children participate in this demonstration, in this peaceful demonstration, all of America will see that even children understand the difference between right and wrong and that children want the best possible education.

LAWTON: Afterward, he told his parents he wanted to march.

HRABOWSKI: And they said, absolutely not. And I was very upset, and I said to them, “Then you guys are hypocrites. You told me to go and listen to the minister. I did. I want to do what he suggested and you’re saying no.” But at that time you did not say that to your parents. So my father said very calmly, “Go to your room.”

LAWTON: He says the next morning, his parents came in and sat on both sides of his bed.

HRABOWSKI: I could tell they had been crying. I’d never seen my parents cry. And they said they’d been praying all night. And they said this to me: “It wasn’t that we didn’t trust you. We simply didn’t know who’d be responsible for you and how you’d be treated if you were placed in jail.” And so they thought about it and they said, “But we have decided to leave it in God’s hands.”

LAWTON: Before they could march, the young people were trained about the importance of non-violence.

MCKINSTRY: We were told what to expect when we marched, if we did encounter the police. They might hit you, they might spit on you, they will have dogs and billy clubs but the only appropriate response ever is no response, or a prayerful response.

LAWTON: On Thursday May 2nd, “The Children’s March” began. Students left their classrooms mid-day and gathered in Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. They came out marching and singing, row after row after row of them, some as young as six years old. Waiting police arrested them for parading without a permit, but the kids kept coming, and when the paddy wagons were full, the police had to get a school bus to take them all away. Nearly a thousand children had signed up to march, and more than 600 were taken into custody on that day.

LAWTON: As hundreds and hundreds more children showed up to demonstrate and face possible arrest, Bull Connor was anxious to restore order. He instructed his forces to bring out the fire hoses and the dogs.

Some of the most shocking confrontations happened in Kelly Ingram Park, across from the church, where monuments to the marchers now stand. Officials aimed the water hoses full blast at the marching children. McKinstry was among those hit.

MCKINSTRY: The water came out with such tremendous pressure and, uh, it’s a very painful experience, if you’ve never been hit by a fire hose and I thought, whoa. You know, I got knocked down and then we found ourselves crouching together and trying to find something to hold onto. People ran, people hid, people hugged buildings or whatever they could to keep the water hoses from just…just knocking them here and there.

LAWTON: Then, bystanders watched in horror as the police used dogs to try to control the crowd. News reporters captured images of young people being attacked by the German Shepherds. The marching, and the arrests, went on for several days. Energized by the children, adults soon joined in.

COTTON: People felt, they felt it and their actions and their involvement came from that feeling that we were on to something that needed, that was right and that was to change this society.

LAWTON: Hrabowski was in a group of children who marched to city hall.

HRABOWSKI: The police looked mean, it was frightening. We were told to keep singing these songs and so I’m singing, [sings] I ain’t gonna let nobody turn me round, keep on a walking, keep on a talking, marching on to freedom land. And amazingly the other kids were singing and the singing elevates when you can imagine hundreds of children singing and you feel a sense of community, a sense of purpose.

LAWTON: He says he had a direct confrontation with Connor.

HRABOWSKI: There was Bull Connor, and I was so afraid, and he said, “What do you want little nigra?” And I mustered up the courage and I looked up at him and I said, “Suh,” the southern word for sir, “we want to kneel and pray for our freedom.” That’s all I said. That’s all we wanted to do. And he did pick me up, and he did, and he did spit in my face, he really…he was so angry.

LAWTON: Hrabowski was arrested, and like hundreds of other children, held for five days. When the jails got full, the kids were held in the fairgrounds.

HRABOWSKI: I will never forget, Dr. King came with our parents…outside of that awful place. We’re looking out at them, if you can imagine children encaged…it was, it was worse than prison. It was like being treated like little animals, it was awful, crowded, just awful. And he said, what you do this day will have an impact on children who’ve not been born and parents were crying, and we were crying, and we knew the statement was profound, but we didn’t fully understand.

LAWTON: News reports and pictures of what was happening in Birmingham were transmitted around the world. According to Pulitzer Prize winning author Taylor Branch, those reports had a dramatic impact on public opinion.

BRANCH: Millions of Americans who had been seeing demonstrations for years and saying, “Well, there’s something wrong about that and we should do something but it’s not for me, it’s for somebody else,” that broke down those emotional barriers when they saw those children suffering it and millions of people said, “I need to do something about this.”

LAWTON: Branch says the children’s march touched him personally as well.

BRANCH: I was 16. And doing my best to avoid the fearful civil rights movement and when I saw the pictures of those kids half my age singing songs, just like the ones I sang in church, marching into those dogs and fire hoses it had a tremendous effect on me.

LAWTON: Upset about the image of their city, white leaders negotiated a plan with movement leaders to start ending segregation. The Kennedy Administration was also prompted into action and on June 11th, citing the events in Birmingham, President Kennedy announced his intention to introduce new federal civil rights legislation.

MCKINSTRY: It led me to believe, especially after the laws were changed, that there were many things that were worth fighting for.

LAWTON: McKinstry, who became a Baptist minister, continued to fight for civil rights. And today, she works to keep the story of the struggle alive.

MCKINSTRY: It is disappointing to me when I meet people, young people especially, whatever culture they are, and they don’t know the story. We’ve been in some very difficult places, but we’ve come a long way, and we continue to grow and to learn.

LAWTON: Hrabowski says in his work with students, he also continues to draw on the lessons he learned in the Children’s March, lessons, he says, about the power of community, discipline and faith.

HRABOWSKI: The message is this, the world doesn’t have to be the way the world is. That good people can act and the world can be better and so can we.

LAWTON: I’m Kim Lawton in Birmingham.

Read an excerpt from BASEBALL AS A ROAD TO GOD: SEEING BEYOND THE GAME by John Sexton

BOB FAW, correspondent: New York University president John Sexton oversees more than 40 thousand students and a $2.5 billion budget. He’s expanding the university at home and abroad while contending with some faculty members who oppose his high-powered management style.

JOHN SEXTON (President, NYU): (speaking to students) We’re going to do just a little bit of a wrap up.

FAW: And yet, like few university presidents, Sexton also finds time to teach four classes. He is famous for greeting his students and anyone else, for that matter, with a hearty hug, and demanding nothing less than their absolute best.

SEXTON: (speaking to students) Eugene O’Neill famously said he who stops at mere success and does not press on to glorious failure is a spiritual middle-classer. I don’t want you stopping at the easy. None of you.

FAW: Now the former law school dean and distinguished legal scholar has written a most unusual book: “Baseball as a Road to God.” That’s right, baseball.

SEXTON: The similarities between baseball and religion abound. The ballpark as cathedral; saints and sinners; the curses and blessings. But then what I’m arguing is beyond that surface level, there’s a fundamental similarity between baseball and religion which goes to the capacity of baseball to cause human beings, in a context they don’t think of as religious, to break the plane of ordinary existence into the plane of extraordinary existence.

FAW: John Sexton says that what happens here is more than just a game—that it reveals a dimension beyond the eyes and mind letting us, in his words, “see through to another, sacred space”—what John Sexton calls “the ineffable.”

SEXTON: “Ineffable” is the word we use for things we can’t capture in our language. The ineffable is the character of this religious dimension, sometimes labeled God. We’re talking about this place where the depth of being is.

FAW: And baseball can be an avenue to that?

SEXTON: Baseball is an avenue to that in the sense that there is this dimension that we experience in baseball of that which can’t be put into words.

FAW: In baseball, as in religion, says Sexton, the seemingly impossible is part of the game:

In 1956, when hard-drinking journeyman pitcher Don Larsen went from sinner to saint by hurling the only perfect game in World Series history; when Willie Mays made that seemingly impossible catch and throw in the 1954 World Series; and in 1955, when Sexton’s beloved Brooklyn Dodgers, after decades of coming oh-so-close, won their first and only World Series with an extraordinary catch made by Sandy Amaros. Those moments in baseball, like religion, says John Sexton, give a glimpse of something beyond.

SEXTON: The beauty and the experience in the intensified heightened sensitivity of the moment that comes with the Amaros catch, that comes with the Mays catch and pivot. The ecstasy of those moments can for some transport one to this transcendent plane.

FAW: The excellence of Brooklyn Dodger great Jackie Robinson, now celebrated in a major motion picture “42,” sparked Sexton’s infatuation with baseball. Now he’s had Robinson’s number 42 sewn into his academic gown, and in his old office there’s one of Robinson’s original jerseys and a battered glove Jackie Robinson might have used, although true-believer Sexton isn’t about to check to see if Robinson actually did.

SEXTON: I chose to live in ignorance. This was the equivalent of saying, “Don’t tell me that the world’s not flat,” because I would rather… my stories, my feelings are much more comfortable in this world of heaven above, earth in the middle, flat as it is, and hell below.

FAW: You gotta believe?

SEXTON: Yeah, you gotta. There’s faith, and there’s ignorance, and in this case I chose ignorance.

FAW: Sexton says he chooses baseball over other sports because, like religion, it has its own sacred relics, prophets, and rituals. And like religion there is a kind of timelessness.

SEXTON: (reading from book) Baseball encourages, almost requires in its most meaningful moments, an appreciation of living slowly and in the moment—the kind of differentiated experience that separates the sacred in life from the profane. This experience is where religion begins.

FAW: It’s an insight, and an avenue to religion, which he imparts every week to a small class of undergraduates.

SEXTON (speaking to students): This is the essence of this religious experience, the phenomena that we are going to study.

FAW: Initially, some of the students, most of them juniors, were skeptical that baseball was the avenue to anything.

JAKE HANSEN (Student, NYU): To be completely honest, when I read the title of the course I thought, well, this sounds a little hokey, but, you know, I took one course with him. It was great. I’ll give this one a shot, but, you know, he really does make his argument well.

FAW: The students are personally approved by Sexton. They are assigned a long list of books and essays, some about religion, some about baseball.

SCOTT COHEN (Student, NYU): I feel I have a more open mind as to what religion can be. I no longer see it as something that needs a deity. It can be something that helps someone better themselves, something that gives them a reason to be moral or ethical.

HANSEN: He uses baseball as an example, but a point he’s been hitting again and again is that baseball is just one possible road to God. The fact that it’s not academic and not typically thought of as religious is what makes the point so effective, is that there is a way to find God and the ineffable, you know, the divine, in everyday life, and it can really be anything that takes you there.

FAW: What this devout Catholic is trying to do here is fuse lessons from the diamond to the underpinnings of faith.

SEXTON: The objective of the class was to get students to think about religion differently. So by using the study of religion and getting them to see it in the context of baseball caused them to go back to their thinking about religion in a different way, that maybe made it less dependent on dogma and more liturgical. Leading some of the students to the fact that they touched the transcendent plane in ways they hadn’t before, or at least understood it was possible to do it in unexpected places.

FAW: When he’s not running a major university, this is what John Sexton teaches: that this quintessential American game, just like Van Gogh or Beethoven, can sometimes give a glimpse of what matters most.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Bob Faw in New York.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: At Thursday’s interfaith service, local religious leaders prayed for the healing of their city in the wake of the attack.

CARDINAL SEAN O’MALLEY (Archdiocese of Boston): We must overcome the culture of death by promoting a culture of life, a profound respect for each and every human being made in the image and likeness of God. And we must cultivate a desire to give our lives in the service of others.

LAWTON: Within moments of the bombing, clergy and faith-based groups mobilized to do what they could to help. As victims of the bombing were brought to Tufts Medical Center, Interfaith Chaplain Mary Lou Von Euew was on site to offer counseling and prayer. She says one injured woman expressed what many were feeling.

CHAPLAIN MARY LOU VON EUEW (Tufts Medical Center): She said “the hardest thing about this is that some human beings can treat other human beings like this. I just don’t understand it.”

LAWTON: Indeed, Von Euew says, after a tragedy like the bombing, clergy often hear age old questions about the nature of good and evil, suffering and the existence of a loving God.

VON EUEW: You know most of the time people deep down inside aren’t asking for an answer. They’re asking for you to fight and wrestle with the questions with them. We truly believe that God is with us when it happens, so we’re not suffering alone, that we have someone with us who loves us beyond all measure.

LAWTON: Rabbi Yitzhak Korff, Chaplain for the City of Boston, is helping to oversee counseling for first responders.

RABBI YITZHAK KORFF: It’s important that these people understand once they have fulfilled their duty to the citizens, the people they are serving and protecting and saving and making to feel safe and secure, they need to face any feelings that they might be having as well.

LAWTON: He says many of the victims and first responders are still in shock and will deal with theological questions later. Even then, he says, there will be little ultimate satisfaction.

KORFF: The macro answer is, we don’t know God’s plan. I don’t know of anybody that God’s called and said, “Here’s the deal.” And so there’s an unknown. And prayer and meditation can help bring a sense of calm.

LAWTON: Muslims in Boston, and across the US, were quick to condemn the bombing. Imam William Suhaib Webb of the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center says all the members of his mosque felt the attack.

IMAM SUHAIB WEBB (Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center): They felt very violated, and they felt the sacredness of the city was violated and that the trust of our populous was violated, so there was a sense of wanting this person to be caught and subjected to justice.

LAWTON: Webb helped organize the interfaith prayer service and urged his congregation to donate blood and find other ways to serve those who are suffering.

WEBB: Reminding people of God’s wisdom then also reminding that we are not allowed to use his wisdom to be placid or inactive. We have to go out and help and work and be positive and stay involved.

LAWTON: Some faith groups found unusual ways to offer help. Lutheran Church Charities dispatched its K-9 Comfort Dog Ministry.

TIM HETZNER (Lutheran Church Charities): People many times, all ages, will talk to a dog before they will talk to a person.

LAWTON: The ministry took the specially-trained dogs to Boston hospitals to visit victims and their families, and set up a petting station at a local church. Ministry leaders had also taken the dogs to Newtown, Connecticut after the school shooting.

HETZNER: Whether it’s a bombing or a shooting or divorce or death, whatever happens in life, which life throws stuff at us, they bring the mercy and the compassion of Christ and comfort to people that need to work through whatever it is they’re facing.

LAWTON: Rabbi Korff says the bombing had a profound spiritual impact on the city.

KORFF: We rely on a sense of knowing if I do this then this is what’s going to happen. And so, that’s what gets upset, what upsets the balance in these critical incidents, and that’s what needs to be restored as quickly and as easily as possible.

LAWTON: He and other religious leaders urged the community to come together in grief and then move forward with a new sense of hope. I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: We want to talk now via Skype with Reverend Samuel Lloyd, the priest-in-charge at Trinity Episcopal Church, right in Copley Square in Boston, where the bombs went off. We are old friends. Sam, welcome. What can a pastor say to his people at a time like this, a terrible time like this, and what are people saying to you?

REV. SAMUEL LLOYD (Priest-in-Charge, Trinity Church): I think the pastor first needs to acknowledge what a trauma this has been and listen carefully to what people are saying and what I hear a lot is a sense of the fragility of people’s lives and their sense of how vulnerable they’ve been. And so what I have been doing and will continue to do as I’m with my community is to remind them of the core convictions of a power behind all of life that is sustaining us and our faith in a God who goes with us even in the toughest of times and promises always to bring healing beyond the crisis at hand.

ABERNETHY: What about the old questions of where was God in this and how could God have permitted so much suffering? Are you hearing that at all?

LLOYD: I’m not hearing it as much as I did after 9/11. It’s more people’s sense of fragility but when those questions come they always invite an explanation of the fact that we are people who’ve been given extraordinary freedom, we in this human race, and with that comes the enormous possibility of love and delight and also the kind of terror we’ve seen.

ABERNETHY: And also comes the ability to do terrible things.

LLOYD: That’s right. To do unimaginable damage and yet that’s never the last word.

ABERNETHY: People around the country are being told by officials and pastors to pray for the people of Boston. What do you suggest we pray for?

LLOYD: Prayer is an enormously important gift in this time because it binds all of us together as a country. I think it’s a great gift that people are praying for the people of Boston. I’d ask them to pray for courage and strength as we continue to make our way through a time of trauma. I’d ask for them to pray for a sense of our own connectedness to each other. And I’d ask them especially to pray for the magnificent police, law enforcement people, medical people and first attenders who have done an amazing job and continue to be doing crucial work. They are a model for us all.

ABERNETHY: But the thing I’m interested in, that the primary thing that you’ve been hearing is fear and what do you say about how faith can cope with that?

LLOYD: Well one of the first things I say is that fear loves isolation and what we need to do is be in touch with each other so I’m encouraging my community to text and email and call people they know and love and care about, get together as they can because we are reminders to each other of the faith we carry and the trust we’ve known and the love we’ve known through the years that gives us the courage to continue on in what we’re doing. The second thing I do is I try to send them even back to their old scriptures where the psalm for this Sunday is the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want and I’m sending everyone back to be reading that day and night these days to be reminded that there’s someone holding us.

ABERNETHY: Anything good that you see coming out of the response to this terrible thing?

LLOYD: You know, amazing, there’s been immense good. It’s just, just as when the sky is at its darkness we can see the most light. In this dark time, we see the love and care that emerges. I’ve been thinking a lot about what Mr. Rogers said in response to 9/11. Someone asked him what his advice was and he said keep your eyes on the helpers and if you look at the helpers, you’re seeing this a story of enormous courage and compassion and devotion that makes you proud to be a Bostonian and proud to be a human being and grateful for a God of love working through all of this.

ABERNETHY: Reverend Samuel Lloyd, the priest-in-charge at Trinity Episcopal Church, in Copley Square in Boston. Sam, many thanks.

LLOYD: You’re welcome, Bob.

LUCKY SEVERSON: This would have been an unlikely occurrence only a few years ago: 80 clergy and lay leaders from a broad range of religions across the U.S., converging on Capitol Hill to lobby Congress about climate change and protecting the environment. They are all part of a national organization of faith leaders known as Interfaith Power and Light, or IPL, which was founded by the Reverend Canon Sally Bingham, an Episcopal priest.

REV. SALLY BINGHAM (Interfaith Power & Light): We started out asking congregations to respond to climate change. And as more and more religions got involved, we realized what we were actually doing was bringing religions together where they could all agree on something. There were Hindu, Baha’i, Mormons, Catholics, evangelicals, Protestants, Jews, Muslims all agreeing with each other, we are the stewards of creation.

SEVERSON: Altogether there are now over 14,000 houses of worship in 40 states connected to IPL. Places like Adat Shalom Congregation in Maryland. Fred Scherlinder Dobb is the Rabbi and he says religion is deepening his congregation’s concern for the environment.

RABBI FRED SCHERLINDER DOBB (Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation): Ultimately love of the creator and love of that which God has created are one and the same. If you don’t love creation what does it mean to say that you love God who so loved creation?

SEVERSON: Sarah Jawaid is the director of a Washington area group called Green Muslims, made up of young professionals like herself—she’s an urban planner.

SARAH JAWAID (Green Muslims): It’s an issue that isn’t a priority for a lot of the communities that we see. Mosque leadership, you know, they’re just now starting to talk about it. You see it more and more on university campuses, but it’s a recent, recent phenomenon.

SEVERSON: Reverend Bingham says she became a priest because God called her to speak out on the environment when no one else was.

REV. BINGHAM: They’re afraid to get into the pulpit and talk about something that they really don’t know a lot about. But how can you sit in a pew and profess a love for God and then watch, sit back and watch creation be destroyed?

SEVERSON: These Pennsylvania IPL members are practicing what they preach. They bicycled 200 miles from State College, Pennsylvania to Washington, stopping at churches along the way. They are here to lobby Congress to strengthen environmental laws. Jon Brockopp is a professor of History and Religious Studies at Penn State.

JON BROCKOPP (Pennsylvania Interfaith Power & Light): If you talk to people about their major faith experiences, something like 90% of people will think of something that happened to them out in the woods, on a mountain somewhere, somewhere along the beach. There’s something about the natural environment, the environment around us right now, that really speaks to people and speaks to us of a higher power.

SEVERSON: The Green Muslim board members meet once a week to discuss teachings from the Qu’ran and Hadith about protecting the earth. Sarah says the prophet Muhammad was a tree hugger literally because he actually hugged a tree after he heard it wailing.

SARAH JAWAID: It just showed so much about his character as a compassionate being and it helps me be more compassionate and to really live more lightly in this world.

SEVERSON: They also get their hands dirty, working at a local farm, cleaning up parks and renting out reusable dinnerware.

JAWAID: We started renting out reusable dinnerware as a way to get individuals to lessen their waste during Ramadan. And so instead of wasting a bunch of Styrofoam, we actually take our tableware and we’ll take it home and wash it. We had about 600, 700 people over the month that were using it and that’s a lot of waste that was reduced.

SEVERSON: They say it’s their faith and scriptures and not their politics that drive their views on the environment.

RABBI DOBB: Deuteronomy, chapter 20, verse 19. It’s a law in wartime about not cutting down the enemy’s trees even when it could give you military advantage and perhaps even save combatants’ lives. If we’re not allowed to cut down a tree that belongs to the enemy under such direct circumstances, how much more should we not allow trees to be felled simply for the convenience of the international economy.

REV. BINGHAM: Very often we have a bigger impact with a congregation by talking to them about, “Do you want to save money on your energy bill?” And very seldom does a congregation say, “Oh no.” They usually say yes, how do we do that?

SEVERSON: A number of houses of worship that belong to IPL combine their purchasing power to buy cheaper electricity from renewable energy at rates which can amount to huge savings especially for larger churches. IPL also encourages utilizing renewable energy like the solar panels on the roof of the Adat Shalom Synagogue.

RABBI DOBB: We have saved many thousands of dollars over the course of eleven years running this building because of passive solar technology, because of sensitive lighting we put in place. It absolutely keeps operating costs down. So if you make an investment in something like a really efficient boiler, it makes a tremendous difference.

REV. BINGHAM: We are asking our congregations to serve as examples to the community, and the hope is that when the religious leader can tell his or her congregation that they’re saving money on energy that people will say, “Oh, I’ll go home and we’ll do some of these same things in our homes.”

SEVERSON: Reverend Bingham says in the beginning of her ministry she faced a lot of resistance.

REV. BINGHAM: I was accused of promoting world government. I was called a communist. I was accused of taking a political issue into the pulpit which was highly against anything Americans believe in, merging church and state. But I haven’t. That hasn’t happened in the last 5 to 6 years.

SEVERSON: There’s still pushback from some churches and groups with religious and political connections like the conservative evangelical Cornwall Alliance.

CALVIN BEISNER (Founder of Cornwall Alliance): (from Resisting the Green Dragon video, produced by Cornwall Alliance) “The religious and political environmental movement, what we call the Green Dragon, has become one of the greatest threats to society and the church in our day.”

FEMALE NARRATOR: (from Resisting the Green Dragon video) “Its twisted view of the world elevates nature above the needs of people of even the poorest and most helpless. With millions falling prey to its spiritual deception. The time is now to stand and resist.”

REV. BINGHAM: It’s complete nonsense. I mean, you can go into scripture and find that God put Adam in the garden to till it and to keep it and we are the gardeners. We have not done a very good job and I would dispute anything that is behind the Green Dragon.

SEVERSON: The Cornwall Alliance produced the Resisting the Green Dragon series and sent them to churches around the country.

BEISNER: (from Resisting the Green Dragon video) “The average poor household spends a much higher percentage of its budget on electricity and other energy sources than does the average middle class or wealthy household. That means when we raise the price of energy, we are hurting the poor more than we hurt everybody else.”

SEVERSON: Dave Hunter takes a view opposite of the Cornwall Alliance video. He thinks the poor, particularly in others countries, will be hurt the most if something is not done about climate change.

DAVE HUNTER: If we don’t do anything about climate change the people who are going to be hit most by that are the people who have the least. And so to me that becomes a moral issue.

RABBI DOBB: Climate change is going to cause food scarcity, the likes of which we have never seen.

SEVERSON: Just outside the Adat Shalom Synagogue, the congregation has built and is expanding an organic garden where members are taught how to grow their own vegetables and donate part of what they harvest to food pantries. Rabbi Dobb says observing the Sabbath or Shabbat as God did after he created the earth is one way to help preserve it.

RABBI DOBB: One day in seven is of course Sabbath and that is a day of just being, not of doing. It’s a stepping back from the rat race of production and consumption and as Jews it’s our most special time.

SEVERSON: Sarah Jawaid thinks the cluttered and polluted world around us is a reflection of what’s going on inside ourselves, and that the best way to find ourselves is in the quiet and beauty of nature.

JAWAID: When I pray, I feel the most connected when my prayers are outside or when I’m thinking about a natural setting, things like that. I feel God’s presence in those moments. I mean, He’s everywhere all the time and different parts of the faith speak to different people, but that speaks to me.

SEVERSON: On Capitol Hill, lobbyists from Interfaith Power and Light are becoming a fixture.

REV. BINGHAM: Even if they don’t persuade them in that meeting, they may be able to next time. If we can point out to skeptical legislators that this is a real issue, it’s not going away, they have a moral responsibility to serve the American people, and if the American people want climate legislation and want clean air and clean water, they’ll come around.

SEVERSON: She says if enough houses of worship join the effort, Interfaith Power and Light will become a force of nature. For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Washington, DC.