The latest news from Timbuktu, according to Professor Shamil Jeppie, is that 25,000 Islamic manuscripts were quietly moved out of the fabled Saharan city to protect them from destruction by Islamist militants. Photo: REUTERS/Benoit Tessier

A mature religious faith,” says Rev. Lillian Daniel, is “practiced in community over time.” It is “reasonable, rigorous, real, grounded in tradition, and centered in worship.”

The president’s second inaugural address embraced American exceptionalism and invoked the "founding creed" of the Declaration of Independence.

Science has made rapid strides in genetic testing—especially in children—to understand serious birth defects or congenital abnormalities, or the child’s predisposition to disease later in life. But guidelines for the use of this technology are lacking, leaving questions about who should be tested, and how much parents should be told.

“We saw the president as the one who would bring us together as a country, and what we learned in the first administration is that we were not yet ready to be that country,” says Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington.

One of the big events of the new year will be the inauguration of Barack Obama to a second term, so we asked a wide variety of religion leaders what they hope for during the president’s next term.

Maha Kumba Mela or Big Pitcher festival commemorates a story that describes the god Vishu’s fight with demons to gain possession of a golden pitcher containing the nectar of immortality. During the battle, some drops fell to the earth on the pilgrimage sites.

It is one of the darkest stains on America’s history—the lynching of thousands of African-American men, women and children in the 19th and 20th centuries—and not only in the South. Bob Faw speaks with elderly African-Americans who either witnessed lynching or lived in fear of it, and who eventually found ways to forgive.

The Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington; John Garvey, a lawyer and the president of Catholic University; and Harold Dean Trulear, professor of theology at the Howard University Divinity School, continue their conversation about the mood of the country and perspectives on the next four years.

Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam, is associated with the dancing of whirling dervishes. They dance in a traditional form of Sufi worship, a continuous twirling with one hand pointed upward. Manjula Kumar, a program manager at the Smithsonian Institution, explains how the dancing of these whirling dervishes from Turkey serves as “a spiritual offering.”

"There are no scriptural barriers to the ordination of women,” says Jane Via, a Roman Catholic woman priest in San Diego. But theology professor Thomas Rausch maintains that “the Catholic Church is not ready for the ordination of women right now.”

"In Louisiana, you’ve got all these prison entrepreneurs who are mostly local sheriffs who have built these prisons, and the prisons function just like hotels. They get a payment per person per day, and if they don’t keep the beds full they’re going to lose money," says reporter Cindy Chang.

Protestants still make up most of Congress, but this week a Hindu and a Buddhist were also among those sworn in.

Some Turkish Alawites say their concerns are driven less by sympathy for the Assad regime than by a fear of what might replace it.

Rising costs and changing demographics have forced many Catholics schools to close. Now, as Bob Faw reports, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia has turned to a private foundation to manage 21 of its schools, promoting their programs and raising funds.

What will be the major religion news stories of the new year? Watch our discussion with Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, Religion News Service editor Kevin Eckstrom and Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly managing editor Kim Lawton.

We discuss the major religion and ethics stories of 2012 with Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, Religion News Service editor-in-chief Kevin Eckstrom and Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly managing editor Kim Lawton.

The Supreme Court has decided to take up the issue of gay marriage. “A state may enforce and dissolve a couple’s marriage, but it cannot sanctify or bless it,” according to a New York judge in one of the same-sex marriage cases the High Court will review next year.

More and more churches are urging “alternative” Christmas giving. “Christmas is about Jesus’ birth and honoring Jesus with the priorities that Jesus would have in the world, especially amongst marginalized people. But what we’ve done is made it more about us,” says Rev. Mike Slaughter.

“The rabbis going back to Maimonides and earlier felt that the lights of the Hanukkah lamp were sacred,” according to Susan Braunstein, curator at the Jewish Museum in New York City, and if you couldn’t afford a gold or silver lamp “you could use an egg shell, or a nut shell, or a potato carved out.”