Should houses of worship damaged by wind and water receive federal money to rebuild? Rabbi Majorie Slome calls her temple in Queens “a community institution” as well as a house of worship, and she doesn’t think insurance money will be enough to cover the cost of repairing it.

Walk through West End Temple in the Rockaways section of Queens, New York, and see some of the destruction Hurricane Sandy left in its wake, from pews and prayer books to stained glass windows, bricks and mortar.

“Christmas is about Jesus’ birth and honoring Jesus with the priorities that Jesus would have in the world, especially amongst marginalized people. But what we’ve done is made it more about us,” says Rev. Mike Slaughter.

He buries the poor, feeds the hungry, houses the homeless, and says the goal of his orphanage for Haitian children is “to raise the children together so they have memories of their own restored childhood and later in life become aunts and uncles to each other's children.”

The Chabad Center of the Five Towns in Cedarhurst, New York has been providing up to 2,000 meals every day.

Find out more about how you can help faith-based disaster relief organizations working in areas affected by Hurricane Sandy.

The destruction caused by Hurricane Sandy “is just as much a physical crisis as it is a spiritual and emotional crisis for people,” says Mike Ebert of the Southern Baptist Convention’s relief arm.

The militarized island of Mindanao is the only area of the Philippines with a significant Muslim presence. It is also the place where international civilians are working with local civic groups to monitor a ceasefire and advance the peace process.

Watch more of our interview with Tony Blair, who says faith can provide strength and spiritual consolation, but “it can’t tell you the right answer. You’ve got to work that out, in a sense, on your own.”

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