LUCKY SEVERSON: They live conspicuously pious lives in a secular world, especially in enclaves and suburbs of New York. Ultra Orthodox Hasidic Jews observe the strict rules of the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, and its 613 commandments.

Their structured lifestyle seems to work for the majority. But, for some, the lack of choices is too rigid, so they choose to leave, even though doing so can be very painful. Hasidic groups remain some of the most insular religious sects in the U.S. Sol Feuerwerker knows, he was one of them.

SOL FEUERWERKER: I think that’s what surprises most people, you know, most outsiders, is that how can something this insular be happening right here in the middle of New York City. You know, as I’ve moved farther away from it, it kind of shocks me too actually.

CHANI GETTER: When I tell people that I grew up 30 miles north of New York, that I went into the city and I had never seen a movie before I was in my 20s, they think I’m insane.

SEVERSON: Chani Getter grew up, married and had three children before she broke away from her Hasidic community. Those who leave Hasidism paint a picture of a very puritanical and sheltered way of life.

GETTER: When I left, I moved into my own apartment and I started driving, and as a woman who was driving, my parents disowned me. In our sect, women did not drive. And so, for eight years, they didn’t talk to me.

SEVERSON: In Hebrew, the word Hasidim translates to mean the “pious ones.” They are defined by their devotion to a hereditary leader known as the “Rebbe”, by their distinctive clothing and Yiddish language. Professor Samuel Heilman is a Jewish scholar at Queens College.

PROFESSOR SAMUEL HEILMAN: They have everything that makes up a culture, social norms, language, a career pattern in life. Even the ones who leave say that there are aspects of their lives that they left behind that they miss. To go to a Hasidic gathering and to sing the songs and to dance in the circle and to be enfolded into the community, and to hear your voice in a chorus of other voices. This is a tremendously exciting experience and when you leave and you’re all alone, all alone in the city…

SEVERSON: Professor Heilman says there are as many as 350 thousand Hasidic Orthodox in the U.S. and Canada, and an even larger population in Israel. And the numbers are increasing fast, he says, because Hasidism strongly encourages very large families.

PROFESSOR HEILMAN: They don’t believe in birth control. They believe that the commandment of “be fruitful and multiply” is incumbent upon all Jewish people and they practice it. Not only do they have large families but they are the poorest of all Jews because they don’t go to college, so they lack often some of the skills that are necessary for high income. They are all literate in Jewish education, but their secular education is limited. That is not to say there are not some who are successful…in the diamond business, electronics business, in trading on Wall Street.

SEVERSON: Relatively few leave, in professor Heilman’s view, because they’ve been taught to shun the secular world.

PROFESSOR HEILMAN: They’ve been told that the world outside their own is demonic, corrosive, dangerous, they wouldn’t want to be part of it, that they live a superior kind of life.

GETTER: One of the things that they teach you is that we get to choose what we allow our eyes to see. We get to choose what we allow our ears to hear. And so when you go into the city, you make a conscious choice not to allow your eyes to see.

FEUERWERKER: There’s this whole, like belief or narrative in the community that if you, if you try to break away or change you will fail and you won’t be happy and you’ll just end up on drugs.

SEVERSON: Lani Santo is the Executive Director of a non-profit group called Footsteps, founded in 2003, not to proselytize but to provide counsel and support to those who want to explore life outside the confines of the world in which they were raised. They’ve assisted over 700 altogether so far, a majority are young men.

FOOTSTEPS GROUP DISCUSSION: “I mean my mother still hasn’t called me. My mother hasn’t spoken to me this whole time.”

LANI SANTO: We are seeing a lot more, just in this year alone, we’ve seen a 60% increase in our membership and in new people coming to us, and that’s compared to a 35% increase that we’ve been on for the last few years.

SEVERSON: In the past, it was easier to shelter those in ultra religious communities from the outside world. Television, magazines, radio, even libraries were off limits. Then along came the internet.

PROFESSOR HEILMAN: The internet is a real problem for them. There has been, there have been efforts, for example there was a recent gathering at Citi Field here in New York that was against the internet. But it’s a case of trying to close the barn after the horses are out.

SEVERSON: Lani Santo says those who do leave suffer serious bouts of loneliness and guilt.

SANTO: It’s more about guilt in terms of impacting their families. If they have younger siblings, the fact that they’re leaving is putting at risk the marriage prospects for their younger siblings and that’s a real challenge.

PROFESSOR HEILMAN: Marriage is critical. And it’s all by matchmaking. Finding single people in this community is rare, and if they’re single then it means they’re problematic…and problematic can be that you have someone in the family who’s not Orthodox or that there’s some mental or physical ailment in the family or that there are, it can even be somebody has too many people with red hair in the family.

SANTO: Any mark of difference is a mark of shame. So whether it’s a mark of having a child that’s leaving the community, whether it’s a mark of having a child that’s sexually abused or whether there’s some sort of ailment in the family, um, or someone who’s committed suicide, all of that will be covered up.

MICHAEL JENKINS: The first thing that really struck me was the courage in the room.

SEVERSON: Michael Jenkins is Footsteps’ senior social worker. He says he’s amazed at the risks young Hasidim are taking by even walking through the front door. He conducts group therapy and private counseling, says a number of people he meets with lead dual and deeply conflicted lives, with one foot in their Hasidic community and one foot out.

JENKINS: There’s things in the community that I love, that work for me, family, friendships, relationships … this is where I’ve always been and this is where I want to be, yet there are things that I disagree with…and I want to be able to talk about that or express that somewhere else.

FOOTSTEPS GROUP DISCUSSION: “I want to be who I want to be. And if I find God, I find God on my own, you know? I don’t go any more according to what I was told as a kid.”

SEVERSON: In Hasidic communities, young men study the Torah in Hebrew at least 7 hours a day and spend only one hour on secular education. So those who leave are woefully unprepared to go out on their own. Sol was 19 when he broke away.

(to Feuerwerker): What was your education level at that point?

FEUERWERKER: If I had to estimate it would probably be, you know 4th or 5th grade.

SEVERSON: Was that pretty standard for most of the men of your age?

FEUERWERKER: That’s the norm, yeah. And in fact I believe I was actually a little bit more advanced than some of my friends at the time.

SEVERSON: Another consequence of the insularity is that if a crime is committed, it often goes unreported.

FEUERWERKER: I have many friends, men and women who have been abused, sexually, physically, emotionally…

SEVERSON: Sol is now in his 4th year as a pre-med student. He says it hasn’t been easy. Some old friends speak to him, some don’t. He says he has a message for others who are worried about leaving the sheltered world of Hasidism.

FEUERWERKER: My point is it’s challenging and it looks really, really scary at the beginning. Um, but it’s, it’s possible.

SEVERSON: Chani Getter says Footsteps has made leaving the Hasidic community a little less scary.

GETTER: Since Footsteps opened the thing that I saw different is that when people used to leave the community before it would be through alcohol and drugs. In order for them to leave, they had to become a total outcast.

SEVERSON: When Chani left, her parents were traumatized, and then she announced that she is gay. Now she’s studying to be a rabbi.

GETTER: They’re hurt by the fact that I will not live, you know, that kind of life, because my soul is in danger. And yet they don’t understand why my eyes sparkle and why I’m so happy.

SEVERSON: As the world continues to shrink because of access to modern technology, like the internet, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for anyone or any group to shield their families from the outside world.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson 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.

RABBI JAMIE KORNGOLD (Adventure Rabbi): The desert is absolutely the right place to be telling this story. The core of this story is that the Israelites went down to Egypt as a family. They come out, 600,000 people, and then they wander in the wilderness and become a nation. It’s in the wilderness where they meet God. It’s in the wilderness where God speaks to Moses. It’s in the wilderness where the people get the teachings of the Torah.

On Passover, we’re taught to embody the story, to act out the story, and so when we walk through the desert, we really get that idea of freedom, of being out in the wilderness and all the spiritual moments that are possible.

I talk a lot about the idea of cultivating the patience to see burning bushes. The idea being that if Moses had been called from God and the burning bush today, he would have just walked right by it because his cell phone would have rang. So one of the things that we work on a lot out here is just reminding people to just slow down and just be fully present noticing this amazing environment.

Our seder has most of the elements of a traditional seder but, ironically, we’ve taken the “seder,” which means “order,” out of the seder. We hike a mile and a half up to the seder, we do some teachings along the way. And then we have the first part of the seder underneath the arch.

(reading to group): “On all other nights, we eat leavened bread or matzah. Why on this night only matzah?”

RABBI KORNGOLD: One of the practices that we do that’s very unusual, is we read the story of the Exodus directly from the scroll, from the Torah scroll. We’re trying to take this spiritually rich experience that people have out here and ignite their Judaism.

Rabbi Evon Yakar: (speaking at seder) As we look back and hold on to the tradition, the story, that we come from, it’s also our responsibility to continue telling, and continue writing, that story.

RABBI KORNGOLD: And for a lot of people that come on our trips, they’ve never seen a Torah up close. And what we’re trying to do is create a relationship between the people and their Torah.

Cantor Rollin Simmons reading from Torah scroll: “Here was the bush burning in flames, but the bush was not consumed…”

RABBI KORNGOLD: So you’re already feeling elevated and then you read from the bible, or then you read from the liturgy. Suddenly the words, the ancient words take on the power that they were supposed to take on all along.

The dancing that takes place at the end of the first part of the seder up under the arch is so exuberant. We’re joyful just that we’re up here, that we can be in this gorgeous place. And then we all hike back down, and then finish the seder along the banks of the Colorado River.

Rabbi Yakar: “We now turn to the karpas, parsley…the saltwater represents the tears of enslavement…”

Group reading together: “This is the bread of affliction that our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt.”

RABBI KORNGOLD: One of the things that I love about the Adventure Rabbi retreat in Moab is looking back over my shoulder at this snake, this line of people, walking through the desert. It looks so much like the wilderness of Zin, it looks like the Negev, it looks like the land through which the people walked. It’s an amazing feeling of, “Hey Moses, hey Miriam, hey Aaron! It worked. It worked. All 600,000 of you made this trek through the wilderness and here we are, thousands of years later, going through the wilderness as Jewish people. Your ideas were good. They held out guys!”

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: New York has been called the most secular city in America. But don’t tell that to Tony Carnes. He has made it his mission to systematically document all the religious sites in New York’s five boroughs, as he puts it, block by block, alleyway by alleyway. He and his team of freelancers have found a lot to document.

TONY CARNES (Editor and Publisher, A Journey Through NYC Religions): New York is experiencing a religious surge.

LAWTON: The project is called “A Journey Through NYC Religions.” Since they began in July of 2010, Carnes and his team have visited nearly 6,500 houses of worship and other religious sites. He estimates that’s more than 70 percent of them. They interview, photograph, videotape, even draw, and post their articles and other material on their website, nycreligions.info. Carnes says he launched the project because he believed a vital part of New York life was being given short shrift.

CARNES: I noticed two things: one, that religion was really booming here in the city, and I also noticed it wasn’t covered very intensively.

LAWTON: Carnes says for his team each visit, or journey, should be an adventure.

CARNES: A classic journey is we just go cold and we try to perfect a…sort of like a foreign journalist parachuting in a land and making a real sync with people and really getting into the story all in one day. Now if we find something that’s really interesting, we would go down in deep, and we’ll come back.

LAWTON: On this weekend, we followed along as they focused on the historic neighborhood around Eldridge Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. In the late 1800s, this was a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, where many Eastern European immigrants worked in the garment industry and lived in crowded tenements. In the 1920s, new legal restrictions curtailed Jewish immigration and the neighborhood slowly became a center for Greek immigrants. Then, New York’s famous Chinatown began spilling over and the street took on a distinctly Asian character. Today, Latino families are moving in, as are Muslims from Asia and Africa.

CARNES: People’s faith paths come from all over the world and flow into Eldridge Street from the head of it and then go on down to the end and you have the history of world religions. Right here.

LAWTON: Our first stop, a Saturday morning service at the Buddhist Association of New York, where monks and nuns in the Mahayana tradition are chanting the Lotus sutra. Many of the people here are Fujinese-speaking Chinese immigrants, but after talking with some of the leaders, Carnes and his associate, Christopher Smith, learn the temple is reaching out to people from other backgrounds as well. When they visit a site, “A Journey”’s reporters begin with a set list of questions they ask everybody.

CARNES: What’s unique about this place? If you came to me and you said, “Tony, you should come to our congregation because…” Well, what’s that’s because? How do you impact your neighborhood or your network of people?

LAWTON: After the Buddhist temple, Smith heads over to the Aasafa Islamic Center, to catch a Qur’an memorization class for young immigrants from Bangladesh. Smith is a former bond trader on Wall Street who left business to attend seminary. He now interns at the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. He says visits like this enhance his faith practice.

CHRISTOPHER SMITH: Learning the scriptures is important in many walks of faith, and it’s a struggle for me as a Sunday school teacher. But to see kids dedicated to studying the scriptures on a Saturday afternoon is inspiring.

LAWTON: Carnes encourages his freelance reporters to practice a philosophy of journalism he calls “sympathetic objectivity.”

CARNES: We start off with sympathy right up front. We do move to objectivity, but we tell our reporters, who are from all different walks of faith, as long as you do that you can write, cover anybody you want.

LAWTON: Carnes is open about the fact that he’s an evangelical Christian. But he denies that “A Journey” is a covert effort to convert people. He says the project has affected his own practice.

CARNES: I think I’ve had a really a spiritual transformation. I still am a believer in Jesus and, you know, and an evangelical Christian, but to me it’s a journey of my own faith. “A Journey” has made me more free to listen to people, and that may sound like a small thing, but it’s actually pretty big.

LAWTON: He says he wants people to value what sets them apart.

CARNES: We believe that people don’t have to give up their faith to relate to others. We want to say you can talk about your differences. You do things differently, and that’s pretty interesting, and we want to show how interesting things are.

SMITH: Pluralism doesn’t have to mean that everybody comes to the same conclusion eventually. It can mean in a vibrant city like this that there’s many experiences that coexist, sometimes on one street or even in a block.

LAWTON: “A Journey’s” members say they’ve been amazed at how open various houses of worship have been for them. But sometimes, they do strike out. At the end of a long day of journeying, the team often reconvenes at a neighborhood restaurant to debrief. For recent college graduate Chloe Nwangwu, this has been an opportunity to see how what she learned in school works out in real life.

CHLOE NWANGWU: It’s very easy to sort of speak for or assume certain things about religious experiences, but you know, unless you actually go out and get the word on the street you can’t really speak to that.

LAWTON: “A Journey’s” firsthand reporting often turns conventional wisdom on its head. For example, in the fall of 2010, when protests erupted over plans to build an Islamic center near Ground Zero, media outlets and political leaders made certain assumptions in talking about the controversy.

CARNES: Everybody said there were, you know, 99 mosques in the city. Well, the problem with that figure is we had visited 170 mosques. We knew that that was just nonsense.

LAWTON: “A Journey” now has 230 mosques on its list.

Sunday morning in the Eldridge Street neighborhood is a vivid picture of how religion in New York continues to evolve. Carnes and his team begin at St. Barbara’s Greek Orthodox Church, where the priest is doing the rituals to prepare for the worship service to come. This used to be a synagogue. St. Barbara’s thrived after its founding in 1926. Now only a few Greek families still live in the parish, although many come back to worship here on holidays.

A few blocks away, the New York Chinese Alliance Church has become one of the establishment congregations. There’s a traditional Protestant service upstairs in Mandarin, and an English service led by the youth downstairs. A few blocks beyond that, Lamb’s Church illustrates even more changes. The evangelical congregation is holding worship in three languages, English, Spanish, and a simultaneous translation into Mandarin. Pastor Gabriel Salguero, who is president of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, says religion is often an underestimated part of the city’s life.

REV. GABRIEL SALGUERO (Lamb’s Church): Faith leaders are thought leaders just like Wall Street and the government; we are one section that influences thought and the direction of the city.

LAWTON: The final Sunday stop is where it all began, the historic Eldridge Street Synagogue, once the jewel of the neighborhood.

MATTIE ETTENHEIM (Eldridge Street Synagogue): People coming through these doors when it was built 125 years ago were living in very small apartments; it was very dirty and very crowded out those streets here, and as you came in here, you really transitioned into another world.

LAWTON: By the 1960s, the building had fallen into disrepair. But after a $20 million restoration project, the synagogue has become a museum, preserving the history and offering programs to help Jews from other neighborhoods explore their traditions, such as this special event to celebrate Tu B’Shevat, the New Year for trees. “A Journey’s” members say New York’s religious diversity is playing out in similar ways throughout the U.S.

SMITH: I think we’re a microcosm of intense interaction, but it happens in a healthy way across the country.

LAWTON: And Carnes says he hopes documenting the challenges, celebrations, and uniqueness of New York religion can be a model for elsewhere.

CARNES: On many things, they’re not goning to agree on everything, but to live with each other, value each other, to cherish each other and to say, well, in these areas where we do agree we can do something for the sake of the city, and if we can do that here in New York, then I think we actually have a paradigm that can work in Cairo, have a paradigm that can work in Mumbai.

LAWTON: I’m Kim Lawton in New York.