NAT TURNER (Our School at Blair Grocery): This garden is the result of a lot of blood, sweat and tears and hard work in a neighborhood that a bunch of folks had given up on.
JUDY VALENTE, correspondent: Community activist Nat Turner is surveying a site people rarely see in the battered Ninth Ward of New Orleans. His community garden provides fruits and vegetables to people hard pressed to find fresh produce in these parts.
TURNER: Anybody in the neighborhood can come by and some time this morning somebody’s going to stop by and say, “You got any okra? You got any Creole tomatoes? You got some bell peppers? You got whatever?” And some people just come by the garden and if they want to pick it themselves, they can pick it themselves.
VALENTE: New Orleans’ Ninth Ward is what the U.S. Department of Agriculture calls a “food desert.” Food deserts are communities with little or no access to healthy food. For the urban poor, here and elsewhere, grocery shopping is often limited to places like this: higher-priced local convenience stores that are short on fresh healthy food and long on snacks and liquor. The problem extends well beyond New Orleans. The Agriculture Department estimates that 23.5 million Americans live in food deserts, more than a quarter of them children. The reason food deserts exist comes down to simple economics: large grocery chains and high-end supermarkets say they don’t have enough of a customer base in some neighborhoods to make opening a store profitable.
KATHLEEN MERRIGAN (Deputy Secretary, USDA): There are a lot of different solutions to food deserts and one size doesn’t fit all.
VALENTE: Increasingly though churches and other faith-based organizations are stepping in to help. Nat Turner’s project is called Our School at Blair Grocery, a learning center named after a store that existed on the site before Hurricane Katrina. His garden or “urban farm,” as Turner likes to call it, is more than just a pipeline for providing fresh produce. His students learn composting, poultry husbandry, and greenhouse management, among other things.
TURNER: It’s a safe space for young people to work in and be around in a neighborhood that otherwise is kind of wild, wild West and a little bit dangerous. We have classroom time, we have outside time, we’ve got just kind of casual kicking and hanging out time.
VALENTE: The produce is free for people in the neighborhood. Through a combination of government and private funds, young people are paid to work in the gardens and also learn to cook the food they grow.
TURNER: The other challenge is people don’t really know what to do with food. You know, they’re not sure how to cook fresh vegetables. So it’s easier to buy meat and make French fries, right? And so what you end up with is kids who have full bellies, but they’re starved.
VALENTE: Food deserts contribute to high rates of diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease. The problem is particularly acute in areas where the only option for food shopping is a small neighborhood convenience store.
KEVIN BROWN (Trinity Christian Community): We really need to care about the entire person, holistically. If we’re just caring about a person’s soul, their spiritual part, then we’re not really caring about people.
VALENTE: Kevin Brown grew up in Holly Grove, another neighborhood devastated by Hurricane Katrina. His father was the pastor of a church in the neighborhood.
BROWN: In our community, there was a high incidence of heart disease, diabetes and food-related illnesses. And so we envisioned using space that had been ruined by Katrina in a new way, repurposing this old nursery to become a farm and market so that we can feed the people of the community and take care of some of those food-related illnesses.
VALENTE: Brown’s project receives funds from Trinity Christian Church and Tulane University.
BROWN: We have a discount for community residents. One of the benefits of eating locally is you don’t have to ship in it from California, so we can keep the cost down a little bit. The other thing is if somebody volunteers here—we have a lot of community volunteers—we give them the vegetables.
VALENTE: These days, small neighborhood gardens are also popping up all over the city on previously abandoned lots and even in some residents’ backyards. This past summer, 30,000 teenage volunteers—unmistakable in their in brightly colored T-shirts—arrived in New Orleans from Lutheran congregations across the country to help till and plant. Sanjay Kharod works to connect local residents with organizations and groups, like these Lutheran volunteers, that can help them grow food.
SANJAY KHAROD (New Orleans Food and Farm Network): There’s a long history of growing in the city, and what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to encourage people to do that again.
VALENTE: By and large, residents have reacted enthusiastically.
HENRY MARSHALL, JR. (Gardener): I go to the store, if I decide to buy me some strawberry, pop one of them open, taste it, and there’s no taste to it. You know, and I grew strawberries in my yard and picked that, and they’re nice and sweet.
VALENTE: Food deserts have become more numerous in New Orleans since the hurricane. According to the Congressional Hunger Center, the average grocery store here now serves 16,000 people—twice the national average. Not having a full-service grocery store ultimately costs communities millions of dollars in what’s called “grocery leakage, money that people spend outside their community for food.
DEBRA SURTAIN (Apostolic Community Garden): We built a 40-foot raised bed and in that raised bed we started growing tomatoes, basil, mint and peppers. We grew and we harvested already the collard greens and mustard greens.
VALENTE: Another trend is for churches to plant their own gardens. The Apostolic Outreach Garden is the dream come true of Debra Surtain. A trained master gardener, Surtain felt compelled to act after learning that her state ranks in the top 10 for obesity or diabetes. Now, 27 members of her church are part of its garden club.
SURTAIN: It doesn’t cost anything right now, we just ask them for a donation because of limited funds.
VALENTE: Surtain and other food activists say what they are doing can only be a start. They insist the nation needs a broader discussion about how—and what—its citizens are fed. First Lady Michelle Obama has made battling childhood obesity a personal cause and has championed teaching children how to garden.
MERRIGAN: People say to me, “How can you have obesity and hunger at the same time?” They seem like they’re problems at odds. But in fact they have the same root cause, and that’s lack of access to good healthy foods.
VALENTE: Government can advise and educate the public about healthy eating, but ultimately it can’t demand people change their eating habits or force supermarkets to locate in poorer neighborhoods.
MERRIGAN: Maybe you have to do something innovative. Maybe you actually have a mobile supermarket, grocery, that comes into a community. So on Wednesday night when the bookmobile comes and the community health facility comes on wheels, the grocery comes on wheels as well so people can get access to the food that they need.
VALENTE: Nat Turner says the national discussion about food has to move beyond “food security”—whether or not the poor have enough food to eat—to something broader.
TURNER: A more important conversation is to talk about food justice where people not only have access to it, but they can afford it, where the food is grown sustainably so it’s not full of chemicals and all that kind of stuff. That the money for the food stays in the community, and so moving, bringing it up a notch from food security is bringing it up to food justice, right?
VALENTE: Food justice, these activists say, is not merely a question of health, it is both a fundamental right and moral imperative.
For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Judy Valente in New Orleans.
ABERNETHY: The president also called on world leaders to speak out forcefully against extremism.
Meanwhile, several world leaders urged the UN to do more to end the conflict in Syria. Many warned of a looming crisis facing the nearly 300,000 Syrian refugees who have fled to neighboring countries. UN humanitarian officials called for more international aid and said if the fighting doesn’t end, the number of refugees could rise to 700,000 by the end of this year.
ABERNETHY: The calls at the UN for outlawing offensive speech produced strong defenses of such speech not only by President Obama but also from leaders in the American Muslim community.
TARIN: I think we are. We are. We’ve put out 
LAWTON: I found it interesting American Muslims seem to be speaking to two audiences in effect, because on one hand you’re speaking to Muslims around the world, but on the other hand you’re also speaking to American societies and trying to say not all Muslims are like the people who are in the streets doing violence. I mean, has that been a challenge for you all?
DE SAM LAZARO: Taking notes on incidents and conditions in the camps are unarmed observers—foreign and local—with a group called Nonviolent Peaceforce. 
Journalist Glenda Gloria, who wrote a book about the Mindanao conflict, says its as much about economic inequality as religion. She says much today’s problems trace back to the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled from 1965 to 1986.
Philippine Officers: As far as we are concerned, it’s not growing. They are still confined. Just one of the successes of our government security forces in that portion of Mindanao.
DE SAM LAZARO: A few minutes later, the monitors were relaying the citizens’ concerns to the Philippine military, which is in charge of security in this region. 
DE SAM LAZARO: The group is now based in Belgium but was started in Minneapolis. Co-founder Mel Duncan, who was in Mindanao during our visit, says his earliest inkling that the concept might work came in the eighties. He was living in Nicaragua where he’d gone as a peace activist during the civil war there.
DE SAM LAZARO: In contrast, monitors hired by Nonviolent Peaceforce are full time and salaried—about $1500 per month. They come to stay, hire local staffers and work with local civic groups. Raghu Menon, trained as a lawyer in India, says it makes a big difference.
FISCHER: I am just observing the bright line that the IRS has established. This is what the IRS has said, that’s the bright line, and I observe that line.
PASTOR BRYAN COLLIER (Lead Pastor, The Orchard United Methodist Church): It’s not something we’re going to do, not going to participate in. We’re called as the community of faith to do what we’re supposed to do, and I think the status that has been afforded to us by the government is a nice bonus, but status or no status, it doesn’t change what our mission is.
SEVERSON: Pastor James Hull of the Mount Hope Missionary Baptist Church in Taylor, Mississippi says, contrary to popular misconception, black churches that he knows of do not endorse political candidates.
GARLOW: There’s not a single church that’s lost its nonprofit status in 58 years.
OWENS: That’s how one changes the law in a democracy, yes.
FATHER JOHN TRAN (Vocation Director, Congregation of the Mother Co-Redemptrix): We were born in 1952, so we’re very young, and we’re proud to say our founder is a Vietnamese priest. You know how most religious communities enter into Vietnam from other country, but we proudly say we are the one that was founded by a Vietnamese priest for the Vietnamese people.
VALENTE: About 500 people came in 1978, the first year of the festival. Today, between fifty- and sixty-thousand people attend, making it one of the largest ethnic festivals in the U.S. The centerpiece of the pilgrimage is this statue of the Virgin Mary, one of only six like it in the world. Vietnamese mothers usually take the lead in passing on the faith, and this has translated into a deep devotion within the community to the Blessed Mother. Sister Maria Nguyen, a Benedictine sister from Kansas, says many families also credit Mary with helping them escape communism.
FATHER BASIL: When I was in army, I felt that I am going to die. And then in my heart, I just, you know, maybe the God’s Holy Spirit inspire me and I just raise up my heart, my mind to God, and I pray. I pray and then God protect me and I escape from mine explosion. I heard the explosion, and I fell down, and I didn’t get any injury. My friend behind me got hit, and the other one got hit, too. And I think that’s a sign of God’s providence, that he wanted me to be a future priest. He protect me from harm.
DONNA FOURMAN (Parishioner): His speech when he got here wasn’t really good, but every week it gets better, until he gets excited, and then he talks too fast. But we just love him. And he’s always happy and smiling, until he gets up on that altar. And then he’s all business.
VALENTE: But preserving religious traditions from Vietnam is also important to these first- and second-generation immigrants. The Marian Days Festival draws thousands of teens. This drum group traveled to Carthage from San Jose, California. Many youngsters accompany their grandparents, though they admit they are more likely to speak to them in English than Vietnamese.