"My goal is to be present,” says this writer and spiritual teacher, to the “emotional reality” of Native Americans and “put it in the voices and characters of real people. My job is to present a truth that you will embrace more fully if you believe it as you read it."

“It’s an opportunity for us to not just think about the bottom line, which is important. But there are other things that are as important," says Suzanne McDowell, co-CEO of King Arthur Flour Company. "The environment, our society, community, all of our shareholders—not just the bottom line.”

"Corporations are going to have to live up to a new standard if they are going to be able to hold on to the freedom of free enterprise, and the B Corp might be the way for that to happen," says this professor of business ethics and corporate responsibility.

“Who will protect the environment? In the West and in China, it’s the government's responsibility," says Tashi Sange, a Tibetan Buddhist monk and conservationist. "This is not the Buddhist way. If you think that way you are not Buddhist. You are the protector. You have the responsibility."

"The question for our government" says Lenni Benson, executive director and founder of the nonprofit Safe Passage Project, "will be, even if they have deportation orders, is it ethical and legal to remove a child to a country of origin if we aren’t assured that child will be safe upon return?"

The new St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, set to be rebuilt at the World Trade Center, will be a national shrine and will include a nondenominational bereavement center.

“We should be thinking about how we can more vigorously and effectively help the people of West Africa and how we can protect health care workers in the United States. We can afford to do both quite well,” says bioethicist George Annas.

“I love the Lutheran tradition, the Lutheran theology, the message of grace,” says Rev. Margaret Kelly, a Lutheran pastor in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her food-truck church offers meals, prayer services, and a feeling of community to the hungry and homeless.

“What’s wrong with us that we don’t have space for folks to transcend and expand our understanding of what it can be to be female and what it can be to be male?” asks Rev. Emily McGinley of the Urban Village Church in Chicago. Her ministry reaches out to and welcomes transgender people, whom she says pose complex theological questions for faith communities.

“Music has been, in a sense, my religion, and it is what brings me closest to God or truth or whatever you want to call it.”

“If we don’t in some concrete way help people to have a decent life here on earth, we are not fulfilling the gospel. It’s that simple,” say Pastor Dan Bryant, senior minister of the First Christian Church Disciples of Christ in Eugene, Oregon, and president of the board of Opportunity Village.

For decades now, the mission of this Nobel-Prize-winning humanitarian group has been “medical care and bearing witness.” But bearing witness has had to be tempered by real-life considerations, observes medical sociologist Renee Fox. “When they were young, they thought witnessing was an unmitigated virtue. As they matured they came to see how complex the ramifications of witnessing might be.”

We set the stage for the October 5 opening of the Vatican’s two-week discussion and debate, called by Pope Francis, on the church and the pastoral challenges of contemporary family life, including topics such as marriage, divorce, remarriage, annulments, and cohabitation.

Does a Muslim inmate have the religious freedom to grow a beard he says his religion requires? According to Douglas Laycock, one of his lawyers, this is not just about Gregory Holt, the American Muslim convict who now goes by the name of Abdul Maalik Muhammad and who is the plaintiff in Holt v Hobbs, a religious liberty case the US Supreme Court will decide.

"I think you come to the practice through the fact that gratefulness happens to you. Two things have to come together: something has to be valuable to you, and you have to become aware that it’s given to you," says Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk. "Then spontaneously in everybody’s heart, gratefulness arises."

“This is an issue about protecting the incredible gift of life that God has given us,” says Rev. Fletcher Harper, executive director of GreenFaith, which led an interfaith delegation at the People’s Climate March in New York this week.

"I think there are several prominent pulpits in which women are now coming into those jobs and that's exciting and I think it's an indication that society is shifting, in many different ways. Women are increasingly moving into leadership roles in other parts of our society and so it's appropriate and it's time for that to happen in the church."

"The three pulpits that are historically important in mainline Protestantism have women senior pastors now is a very big deal. It is hard to imagine as recently as even 20 years ago that women would have achieved that level of leadership... It signals a change in American Protestantism."

Finding out for the families of the missing what happened to border crossers who disappeared is "the sacred baseline” for her work," says anthropologist Robin Reineke, cofounder of the Missing Migrant Project at the Colibri Center for Human Rights in Tucson, Arizona. "Care of the dead is such a key part of the Catholic faith."