At the Helping Up Mission in Baltimore, executive director Bob Gehman says, "If we were not able to discriminate in our hiring practices based on our faith and religion, that would change us."

As Mideast turmoil spreads, a professor of international affairs says we are witnessing changing interpretations of religion and "a struggle over which interpretations have authority over whom."

As protests and rebellion break out across the Arab world, R & E looks back at insights from interviews with scholars and experts on the compatibility of democratic values and Islam.

The fight is not over whether faith groups are subject to the law, says the president of the Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance, "because they are subject to whatever the law is, which in many cases makes this exception for them. The question is should this exception be allowed to continue?"

"I don't see any special right in the Constitution or elsewhere that allows a church to take money and discriminate," says the executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

In the world's largest Muslim nation, says Professor Dewi Fortuna Anwar, "there seems to be a greater willingness both to be openly religious and to be modern and educated at the same."

President Barack Obama is in Turkey, where he is reaching out to a majority Muslim country and talking about bridging the East-West divide.