"I see the future going in this direction, that more and more people will realize how important interreligious dialogue is."

The New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care is training chaplains, caregivers, and health care professionals in how to listen to patients and lighten the burden of their suffering.

Benyamin Cohen has written a book about his year-long exploration of Christianity, and he uses what he learned to reflect on the meaning of his own Jewish faith.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is not a prosperity gospel, according to megachurch leader David Platt. It is "a homeless and wounded gospel" about "adversity, persecution, struggles, poverty, and helping one another out."

Gidon Bromberg of Friends of the Earth Middle East says the Jordan River, holy to half of humanity, has become a mixture of sewage water and agricultural runoff unsafe for the pilgrims who come to be baptized in it.

Novelist Allegra Goodman say that entering into the minds of religious people is "a very rich place to be as a writer." Her new book is called "The Cookbook Collector, "and we spoke with her at the National Book Festival in Washington, DC.

If you are a patient who is poor, says this doctor-nun, "sometimes in this society your are taught not to care about yourself…You are denigrated and told you are not an important person."

She is a quadriplegic who has spent more than 40 years in a wheel chair, and she says living with suffering teaches you who you are.

Singing, drawing, and painting are unique forms of expression for this evangelical speaker and writer and also a means of encouraging others.

At a press conference this week in Washington, DC, religious leaders gathered to denounce anti-Muslim bigotry and "to promote a culture of mutual respect and the assurance of religious freedom for all."

"There's something happening inside of the hearts and minds of people that has brought us all together," says Rev. John Dee Jeffries of the First Baptist Church in Chalmette, Louisiana.

"The fear people have is that if my child is raised in the other parent’s religion, then the child will grow closer to the other parent," says one interfaith family mediator.

"For me Reiki is another form of prayer," says spiritual director Lauri Lumby Schmidt. But a member of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops says this holistic healing practice is "not of God."

“Being religious or spiritual has a very profound effect on our biology and our brain,” says neuroscientist Andrew Newberg. “It can change our brain and change ourselves over time.”

According to US government figures, more than 40,000 people have been brought in to help clean up the oil and deal with the crisis. But many in the fishing industry say they haven’t been able to get work, and they don’t know when they’ll be able to resume their livelihoods.

"There's no such thing as a hermetically sealed religion or culture. We human beings have been talking to each other since the beginning, and every time we talk to each other we change each other."

"As chaplains we absorb people’s sadness, their brokenness, their depth of spiritual despair," says Dennis Gibbs, an Episcopal chaplain at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in Los Angeles. "In many ways we hold for these inmates what they cannot hold for themselves."

Jean Sweeney is a spiritual director who says everyone has a story to tell about their spiritual life.

Benyamin Cohen has written a book about his year-long exploration of Christianity, and he uses what he learned to reflect on the meaning of his own Jewish faith.

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."