This archive gathers 60 stories about meaningful progress at the intersection of faith, community, and public life. From interfaith cooperation on climate and poverty to congregations expanding social services, these articles document what religious communities are doing — and achieving — across the U.S. and around the world.
The Kirk’s general assembly, meeting in Edinburgh, instructed officials to consider changes to church law that would allow ministers to preside over same-sex-marriage ceremonies.
Rastafari took shape in early 1930s Jamaica, rising from Kingston’s poorest neighborhoods and the hills above them. Shaped by Marcus Garvey’s pan-African vision and the crowning of Haile Selassie, it gave Afro-Jamaicans a spiritual language for dignity under colonial rule. Today, an estimated 700,000 to 1 million practitioners carry that vision across the world.
In the spring of 1912, a 67-year-old ʻAbdu’l-Bahá stepped off a ship in New York Harbor, freshly released from four decades of Ottoman imprisonment. Over 239 days, he crossed the continent preaching the oneness of humanity, dining with Black Bahá’ís in segregated cities and addressing the NAACP — an unusually public voice for equality in his era.
A-Ma Temple rose on the rocky southern tip of the Macau peninsula in 1488, built by Fujianese fishermen and traders who needed somewhere to pray before facing the South China Sea. When Portuguese sailors later asked locals the name of the place, the answer eventually became “Macau.” A working people’s sanctuary, quietly lending its name to a city.
Ibn Khaldun, a Tunis-born scholar, withdrew to a remote Algerian castle in 1375 and wrote the Muqaddimah, a sweeping preface to a world history that quietly founded the social sciences. Drawing on decades in North African and Andalusian courts, he argued civilizations rise and fall through observable patterns — centuries before anyone called that sociology.
In October 1279, the Buddhist monk Nichiren inscribed the Dai-Gohonzon, a mandala carved into a half-log of Japanese camphorwood in gold and black lacquer. He did so days after peasant farmers were tortured and three beheaded for refusing to renounce his teachings. For his followers, enlightenment belonged to everyone — not just monks and aristocrats.
Westminster Abbey broke ground on July 6, 1245, when Henry III tore down Edward the Confessor’s old Romanesque church to build something taller and more luminous in the French Gothic style. Master mason Henry of Reynes led a crew that grew to 400 workers in peak summers. The abbey has since hosted the coronations of 40 English monarchs.
Angkor Wat construction began around 1113 C.E., when Khmer King Suryavarman II set tens of thousands of laborers to work on the plains of present-day Cambodia. Over roughly three decades, they floated millions of sandstone blocks from a mountain 25 miles away. Nine centuries later, it remains the world’s largest religious complex.
The Edict implicitly granted Christianity the status of religio licita, a worship that was recognized and accepted by the Roman Empire.
A codex known as the “Yuta Tnoho” that belonged to the Mixtec culture in the 1500s B.C.E. is the earliest historical record of psilocybin use in human history.
