"What have I done this year? Am I facing God? Am I facing myself?...T'Shuvah says each day we can improve one grain of sand. We just don’t have to be perfect.”

"T’Shuvah is repentance, return, and new response. T’Shuvah is change," explains Rabbi Mark Borovitz of Beit T’Shuvah, the House of Return, in Los Angeles and author of the memoir The Holy Thief. "T’Shuvah says that change is possible, and change is mandatory."

US Muslim leaders joined together to denounce extremism and terrorism. The brutality of the ISIS militant group “has no basis in the teachings of Islam,” says Azhar Azeez, president of the Islamic Society of North America.

Religious freedom activists are raising new concerns about the persecution of Christians in the Middle East. “It is nothing less than ethnic cleansing, and we cannot continue to be silent,” says Bishop Angaelos of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria.

Chris "Comes with Clouds" White, of Cherokee descent, discovered a pre-historic stone circle near his home that carries a significant spiritual meaning for him. "We’re born, we have a youth, we get old, we die, but we believe that there’s something beyond that where our ancestors are, so that’s a circle."

As the leaders of Ferguson, Missouri start addressing the lessons of their community’s violence, the experience of other cities may be helpful. When there was violent unrest in Boston, members of the clergy learned to work both with the police and with potentially violent youth. They achieved much-publicized changes, but they also may have claimed success too soon.

Haris Tarin, Washington office director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, discusses the US response to ISIS and the efforts of American Muslims to respond to potential future threats.

Reverend Toby Larson of Celebration Anglican Church felt like he failed as a pastor when a young man from his congregation suddenly died of a heroin overdose. "Unfortunately, we’re pretty good at pastoring families that have lost people. We’re pretty good at burying people. We’re pretty lousy ten years earlier when problems started," he says.

Days after 9/11, Rais Bhuiyan was shot in the head by Mark Stroman in a hate crime targeted at Arabs. Bhuiyan survived the attack, and Stroman was sentenced to death, but Bhuiyan felt compelled to not let the story end there. "I realize that I need to forgive him in public and do something to save the life," says Bhuiyan.

"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 God-consciousness."

"These are folks that in many cases couldn’t pay like a two hundred dollar fine or ticket. They’re put on probation. They have to pay interest on what they owe, and they have to pay that company for the privilege of being supervised by them," says Caroline Issacs, Arizona program director of the American Friends Service Committee. "It’s like a payday loan they end up paying ten times over."

It was the campaign of one American woman, Jenny Bowen, in Berkeley, California, that brought loving care into the lives of millions of Chinese orphans, most of them girls. Bowen and her husband began by adopting one girl. Then another. Now Jenny Bowen leads Half the Sky, a foundation to deliver responsive care to all China’s orphans. “They’re being treated like their lives matter,” says Bowen.

"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, "I think that needs to change in our own congregational life, when we have congregations where reconciliation is modeled within the pews of the church."

"Jesus matters so much because of the incarnation," says Edward Blum, a history professor at San Diego State University and co-author of The Color of Christ. "So if God takes a particular body with particular hair length and particular eye color, then perhaps that says something about the value of that body."

"Africa is finding, just as its 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 interpreted revelation as different from what those in the West."

"I’ve seen it more than once where it’s the family members simply can’t let go or decide we can leave no stone unturned," says Richard Klein of the FDA patient liaison program, "whether or not it’s what the patient really wants." But do families and patients have a right to try unapproved drugs without going through the FDA?

"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 like choosing forgiveness in captivity."

Listen to singer-songwriter Carrie Newcomer read from her book “A Permeable Life.”