"The Rebbe was as profoundly a religious and spiritual figure as you can imagine. He was of course scrupulous in his observance of Jewish law. He prayed with a sense of tremendous profundity, and you actually felt, when you were dealing with him, that you were with a person who was suffused with a ...

Dogs, says Tim Hetzner of Lutheran Church Charities, are “a very gifted part of God’s creation.” In disaster situations they sense when someone is hurting, and together with their handlers they minister compassionately to the needs of victims.

"I’m particularly concerned when I see white people and African-American people not having conversations with one another about what’s happening in Ferguson," says Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. "I think that needs to ...

Best-selling writer and journalist Sara Davidson felt completely unprepared for the reality of dying. Then she met Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, founder of the Jewish Renewal movement. Their weekly conversations about mortality led to their book "The December Project." "When you feel you’re ...

"Africa is finding, just as it found its political and economic voice it's also finding its theological voice, which oftentimes may be different in perspective," says J. Peter Pham of the Atlantic Council's Africa Center, "because of background, because of history, and because of the way they have ...

"Of course I was angry for everything that was happening to me, but as time went on in captivity, I just realized for my own self, for self-preservation, that I couldn’t stay trapped in that emotion, that I had to try to find ways to let it out, and that’s when I started developing practices ...

“It’s not like your typical disaster, where churches… clean up after a hurricane or a tornado,” says Kevin Eckstrom, editor-in-chief of Religion News Service. “This is much more complicated.”

Her music often emphasize the sacred in the ordinary, and it is rooted in her Quaker faith. “Some of my best language has come out of the silence” of Quaker meetings, she says, “when I’ve taken the time to listen to something beyond myself."

Extremist rebels have expelled virtually the entire Christian community in Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city. “It’s mass cleansing based on religion,” says the Syriac Catholic leader of the region, Patriarch Ignatius Youssef III Younan.

As thousands of unaccompanied migrant children cross the US-Mexico border, Americans are being challenged by how to respond. "This is what our Catholic faith calls us to do," says John Andrews of the Catholic Diocese of San Bernardino County. But in Murrieta, California, Andrea Rockwood has a ...

"The Catholic bishops had a really strong statement saying don't send the kids back; that would be morally wrong to send them back to dangerous situations. Others in the religious community are saying it's a matter of law and order."

With millions of people in India suffering from mental illnesses and only five thousand psychiatrists to treat them, many seek out faith healers to fill in the gap. "Access to care is not there, lack of professionals, lack of medication, lack of awareness, lack of knowledge, so all this leads to ...

"The greatest passport I have personally to work across the world is what I’ve lost," says Father Michael Lapsley, who lost both hands in an assassination attempt. "When people see me, they know I’ve suffered loss, and even though their loss may be very different, they’re still able to ...

"The court will have to sort of decide where one person’s freedom ends and another person’s begins on something like this. But it does point to this larger question that we have," observes Kevin Eckstrom, editor-in-chief of Religion News Service, "should religious groups or religious people or ...

Phil Jones was told that he had an incurable bone marrow cancer, and that he was too old for the procedure that might save his life. The Moffitt Cancer Center of Florida disagreed, and a perfect donor match appeared in a naval officer who was also an ordained minister. Jones says he "felt God’s ...

"We encourage people to have conversations," says Reverend Rosa Lee Harden, producer of the Wild Goose Festival. She finds that sometimes people "who weren’t raised in Christian families, who follow other faiths more deeply understand the message of Jesus than sometimes we do."

"You may come home feeling good, you did your duty, you helped people, you helped keep your unit alive. Then at some point you may start to think," observes Rita Nakashima Brock of the Soul Repair Center at Brite Divinty School, "who am I that I could do those things? That's when moral injury kicks ...

"It is not that you ever forget what happened to you in war, it is part of your life story. There are no other institutions in our society that I know of except religious institutions that support people over their entire life course."

Leaders of the largest Buddhist temple in the world want it "to be like Mecca is in Islam, a global center," says Rachelle Scott, an expert on the group and assistant director of religious studies at the University of Tennessee. "Critics question the intentions of the temple. They think that the ...

“I have a hard time conceiving of a God completely removed from suffering,” says Christian Wiman, a lecturer in religion and literature at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. “Once I understand the notion of Christ participating in suffering, then it makes more sense to me.”