"This is not just about the Vatican versus the nuns," says Sister Maureen Fiedler. "This really is about the future of how we interpret the message of the Second Vatican Council."

“One of the great gifts of Vatican II was that it sent us back to study what the Gospels were saying.”

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

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

"Drought does not need to mean famine," according to Niger's president, who adds that the country is tired of needing help and not being able to feed its own people. "We need to escape from emergency aid. We need to help our population produce and provide for itself."

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

"It was the first successful labor union for farmworkers,” says author Miriam Pawel. “It was very much the civil rights movement of the West,". But fifty years after its founding by the late Cesar Chavez, the UFW is struggling to retain membership and influence.

A national debate is underway over the First Amendment, federal law, and whether “reasonable minds can disagree” about what religious freedom means. Watch excerpts from some recent interviews.

Activist groups should bring about a greater awareness of worker rights issues and add a moral voice to global economic matters, says David Schilling of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility.

The disabled, says religion writer Mark Pinsky, “are not just people who need help, but they are people who can help."