“There’s a flaw in human nature, and it’s in all great writing, the tragic flaw... and yet there is the expectation that ultimately it’s going to be okay,” said this beloved author and lay Episcopalian, who described herself as “a writer who is struggling to be a Christian.”

Actress Vera Farmiga plays a woman who is “wrestling with the Lord and refusing to let him go until she understands and until he blesses her,” says writer and author Frederica Mathewes-Green.

Hindus honor thousands of deities, and every Hindu has a favorite god, but Ganesha is "a god that is chosen by almost everybody because he is the remover of obstacles," says Indian studies professor S. N. Shridhar.

“When you are reciting the Quran you feel like you are talking to Allah,” says Quran reciter Sheikh Mohammad Alraee. During Ramadan he has been chanting the Quran from memory at the Islamic Center of Northern Virginia.

"Ramadan is that really intense, focused way of fasting and working on our own selves," says Rahima Ullah, "and then working on our relationships to others and ultimately to God."

"We ought to pray here every day until Congress proves worthy of the calling of the nation to govern," said Rev. Michael Livingston, director of the National Council of Churches poverty initiative, at a gathering of religious leaders on Capitol Hill.

"We live by the work of our hands and also have some left for helping out those who are maybe less fortunate," says the abbess of St. Mary's, Ireland's only Cistercian monastery for women.

"That old Lutheran concept of the priesthood of all believers—Stephen Ministry helps you live that out,” says Rev. David Sloop of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Watch more of correspondent Deborah Potter's interview with the pastor and clinical psychologist who founded Stephen Ministries in 1975.

Stephen Ministry affirms the tremendous value of the laity in doing the work of congregational care, writes pastoral theology professor Tonya Armstrong.