When the festival of Passover approaches, observant Jews search their homes for any yeast or leaven and then give it away, donate it to charity, burn it, or authorize a rabbi to sell it for them to a non-Jewish buyer. “People who don’t share our faith are helping Jewish people in the observance of their faith,” says Rabbi Yosef Landa of Chabad.org.

“People need to talk about this issue,” says Diane Rehm, author of On My Own. “Doctors need to be taught about this issue. The whole idea of doctors being taught about helping to keep people alive but not being taught how to listen to those who are ready to die—that seems to me sad and misguided.”

“The thing that’s dying is a kind of old allegiance to particular institutions or institutional manifestations of the divine. There’s just not much interest in that. The thing that seems to be coming alive is this awareness of God, a … More →

“People want to be their own theologians. People don’t just want to receive truth from an institution. They want to participate with a tradition and make a truth that is meaningful for their own lives.”

“It wasn’t that there was a failure on the part of the church at all,” says Millie Cain, a parishioner at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, Virginia. “It was just that I was hungry for a more visceral experience of the divine. And it’s such a gift to experience that together in community, that awakening of the God within.”

“One of our great strengths is to make visible in appropriate ways the migrant men, women, and children we serve,” says Rev. Sean Carroll, SJ, executive director of the Kino Border Initiative, a Catholic ministry in Mexico and the US. “The more visible they become, even to our political leaders, I think that will change their minds and hearts and help them find the political will to pass immigration reform that’s just and humane.”

“There’s no abstract family. There’s no ideal family,” says Father Tom Reese, SJ, senior analyst at National Catholic Reporter. The pope, he adds, “is tired of the church being judgmental and laying down rules. Instead, he wants us to walk with these couples with compassion. Treat them as Jesus would treat them.”

“I look at crime or violence as a violation of relationships. Some people are harmed, some people do that harm. So the role of restorative justice is to repair, as best we can, those relationships” says Father Dave Kelly. He directs the Precious Blood Ministry of Reconciliation on Chicago’s South Side, a center that offers support to survivors of gun violence.

In The Relevance of Religion: How Faithful People Can Change Politics, former Missouri senator John Danforth, an Episcopal priest, explores how an over-emphasis on religion has changed the tone of American politics and whether religious values can help to mend a badly fractured political system.

“Sometimes the pain that’s resident in the community—it can be overwhelming,” says Rev. David Watkins III, pastor of Greater Bethesda Missionary Baptist Church in Chicago’s Washington Park neighborhood. “However, part of the hope of the gospel is that even in the midst of despair, you always have a way out…This community should be better off because as a church we are in it.”