When I was in my early 20s, a Bible teacher posed a rhetorical question that continues to haunt me to this day: "If Jesus was your only source of information about what Christianity should look like, how would you live your life?"

Palestinian and Israeli youth making happy, hopeful music together? When pigs fly! Seriously though. "Bukra Fi Mishmish" (When Pigs Fly) is a song ...

For 44 years I have read, pretended to read, heard, slept through or spaced out through the reading of the Haggadah. For some reason, this time around, I seemed to focus on how screwy and shocking it was that the final action to attain freedom involved a low blow.

I tend to approach these cultural phenomena with a concern that my comfort level will be jolted. What I should be concerned about is what these phenomena say about our culture.

When the Charter for Compassion was launched in November 2009, I didn't know that by 2012 more than 85,000 people would have affirmed it online or that we would have 150 active partners around the world.

Let us not turn our rage, our fear and our violence against those "others" who have bloody streaks amid their wisdom, while pretending there are no such streaks amid our own. Shalom, salaam, solh -- Peace!

Why did 4,000 people from 41 states and 20 countries come to this, a clearly Christian-faith-based conference on justice?

I grew up in the America of the '30s and '40s that often was as anti-Semitic as it was racist. The cultural and political climate of my youth was a shadowy and often sinister terrain.

t's easy to forget that we are up against something bigger than flesh and blood people. And it's particularly easy to forget that people are not the enemy when people are shooting pepper spray in your face.

If I listen to ordinary Americans talking candidly about their views of Muslims, I too often hear deep grief, anger, bitterness and resentment. But I believe that most of these folks are actually not Islamophobic and don't want to be.

A delegation from the Council of Elders (veteran leaders of the freedom and peace movements of the mid-20th century) recently led an interfaith service at Zuccotti Park. Hundreds of OWS activists took part.

Our forefather Jacob taught us that only by challenging evil and standing up for what is good, can peace be brought to the world. If we can learn from these achievements of the past, then we are likely to repeat them.

How wonderful it would be if we could give our children the gift of peace! Too many toys promote violence instead. It doesn't have to be that way.

A focus on the book and God makes a religion conclusive, exclusionary and separative. In these three ways, the Indic notion of dharma is very different from the notion of religion.

Today, as the United States celebrates Veteran's Day, the Church celebrates Martin of Tours, a conscientious objector to war. Let us follow this subversive centurion in the way of Jesus, our ultimate Commander.