Fifty years ago at the beginning of America’s civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. went to India to walk in the footsteps of one of his heroes, Mohandas Gandhi. Dr. King was strongly influenced by Gandhi’s teachings of nonviolent resistance. Recently, Dr. King’s son and many civil rights veterans revisited India to honor both King and Gandhi.

Many pastors say issues such as teen sexual activity and marital infidelity are among the most common topics about which congregation members seek guidance. Yet few seminaries offer courses in sexuality, and fewer still require these courses.

Tim DeChristopher is a devoted environmentalist who purposely broke the law in an attempt to save land in Utah. Some believe that since he committed a crime, he should be punished. Others think breaking the law was the right thing to do in this situation.

David Miller, a business ethics professor at Princeton University, discusses the moral issues of how we treat the very wealthy during a financial crisis.

Norooz, the Zoroastrian New Year, occurs at the spring equinox. We visit a Zoroastrian family of Iranian Americans as they celebrate the Prophet Zoroaster's message of "good thoughts, good words, good deeds."

John Allen on New York's Archbishop

Sholem Aleichem is a writer best known for the stories that inspired the musical “Fiddler on the Roof.” He wrote in Yiddish, the everyday language of Eastern European Jews, and he wrote about everyday Jewish life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

A hard-living, cynical Hollywood writer is transformed by God after hitting bottom.

The US is the only Western democracy that still sentences youthful offenders to life in prison without parole for serious crimes. But there is growing resistance to that.

Father Damien de Veuster, a missionary priest from Belgium, arrived at the Hawaiian leper colony Kalaupapa in 1873 to cared for the outcasts, and eventually died of leprosy himself. He will be canonized in Rome and remembered for dedicating his life to individuals with leprosy, a disease that still afflicts more than 250,000 people a year.

During his first Inauguration, President Obama discusses his plans and hopes for the American religious community.

Alzheimer's disease gets progressively worse and there is no known cure. After a certain point, should an Alzheimer's patient be kept alive with a feeding tube? Many family members say, of course: they should do everything possible to prolong a loved one's life. But some doctors say inserting a feeding tube is inhumane, because it can just prolong a vegetative state for years.

Connections between Barack Obama and Martin Luther King Jr. are inevitable. Some see the presidential inauguration as a testament to the sacrifice of Reverend King and a as powerful expression of hope.

The notoriously tough maximum security Sing Sing Prison in New York State is a forbidding place, not where you would expect to find a program offering an accredited master’s degree in professional studies in religion. The course is sponsored by the New York Theological Seminary, and it’s been at Sing Sing for a quarter of a century.

Some Christians worry that people have forgotten who "jolly old Saint Nicholas" really was. "St. Nicholas was a real person—not a fairy, not someone who’s flying through the sky with reindeer, but an actual person who lived and worked and died and had a full life," says Canon Jim Rosenthal, founder of the UK/USA Saint Nicholas Society.

Cows, goats, worms, water wells, and sewing machines are being donated this holiday season to charitable organizations, including Heifer International, World Vision, and Oxfam.

In Washington, speculation is running high about where Obama and his family will attend church after they move into the White House. Earlier this year, Obama cut ties with his longtime Chicago congregation, Trinity United Church of Christ, because of its controversial former pastor Jeremiah Wright. Kim Lawton takes a look at some of the Washington churches Obama may want to consider.

Bob Abernethy looks back on the impact of religion on the 2008 campaign with R & E Managing Editor Kim Lawton, professor John Green of the University of Akron’s Ray C. Bliss Institute, and Eugene Sutton, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland.

"You have a talent. What do you want to do with it? Do you want to bury it? Or do you want to be average? Or do you want to really think, 'Every day someone's watching me, and it's not somebody watching me for the first time. It's somebody who knows what I can do, and somebody who knows what I should be doing,'" says premier flutist Sir James Galway.

Adam Hamilton, senior pastor at the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas and author of "Seeing Gray in a Black and White World: Thoughts on Religion, Morality, and Politics," suggests that people of faith have come through the long 2008 presidential campaign season tired of the politics of polarization and hungry for more thoughtful politicians.