Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly PBS

“Across the US and around the world, I’ve witnessed the many ways people worship, express their spirituality, seek the sacred, and build community. The perseverance of faith and hope, even in the most difficult circumstances, continues to inspire me.”

“I see it all the time,” says Father Michael Doyle, a Roman Catholic priest in Camden, New Jersey, “a beauty that’s deep and wonderful and sometimes tragic, but beauty absolutely, I do. Their faces are there with their burdens and their wrinkles and their difficulties and so forth, but beauty that’s just jumping at you.

“Any ritual should have the capacity to deepen your mindfulness,” says University of Virginia professor Vanessa Ochs. It helps you “deal with the chaos of life.”

“What makes me a believer,” says writer Frederick Buechner, “is that from time to time, going back almost as far as my memory will go back, there have been glimpses I had, sometimes literally a glimpse, which have made me suspect the presence of something extraordinary and beyond the realm of the immediate."

“In the last 20 years,” says correspondent Tim O’Brien, “we’ve seen five vacancies on the Supreme Court and changing attitudes on a wide range of social issues. Times do change, and so do the justices. For better or worse, what the Constitution really means would seem to have changed over the years right along with them.”

“Many of my stories have concerned human suffering,” says correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro, “and one of the most effective ways to tell these is through the work of social innovators and entrepreneurs, many driven by deep faith.”