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 Peace of God began in 989 C.E. at a French monastery, where bishops and huge crowds gathered around the bones of saints to declare clergy, peasants, and the poor off-limits to war. Violators faced excommunication. It stands as one of the medieval world’s earliest attempts to shield ordinary people from organized violence.
Borobudur rose on Java’s Kedu Plain in the 8th century, a nine-tiered mountain of andesite stone commissioned by the Buddhist Sailendra Dynasty. Pilgrims walk upward through 1,460 narrative relief panels and past 504 Buddha statues, ascending symbolically from the world of desire toward the formless. Twelve centuries on, it still holds that pilgrimage in stone.
The Imamate of Oman, founded around 750 CE in the Hajar Mountains, was built on a radical idea: rulers should be elected by the community, not born into power. Shaped by Ibadi scholars returning from exile in Basra, it endured in various forms for more than 1,200 years — a quiet counterpoint to the hereditary dynasties of its era.
Somapura Mahavihara, completed in the late 8th century in what’s now Bangladesh, was one of the ancient world’s great centers of learning. Spread across 11 hectares with 177 monks’ cells, it drew students from as far as Tibet. Its terraced, cruciform temple would echo in Buddhist monuments from Java to Cambodia.
The Uthmanic codex, commissioned around 650 C.E., gave Islam its first standardized written Quran. Caliph Uthman tasked a committee led by Zayd ibn Thabit with producing identical copies for distribution across the expanding Islamic world, drawing on an earlier manuscript safeguarded by Muhammad’s widow Hafsa. It remains the archetype behind every Quran in use today.
The Hijrah migration began in the summer of 622 C.E., when Muhammad and Abu Bakr slipped out of Mecca by night, hid three days in a cave, then rode 260 miles north to Medina. There, a compact among Muslim, Jewish, and Arab tribes took shape — a founding moment still anchoring the calendar of roughly 1.9 billion Muslims today.
Muhammad ibn Abdullah was born around 570 C.E. in Mecca, orphaned young and raised by his uncle in a bustling trade city at the crossroads of Arabia. Around age 40, he began reciting what became the Quran, and the community he founded grew into a tradition now followed by roughly 1.9 billion people.
Ise Grand Shrine, deep in a cypress forest in what is now Mie Prefecture, was founded according to tradition in 4 B.C.E. to honor Amaterasu, the Shinto sun goddess. Princess Yamatohime enshrined her sacred mirror and became its first high priestess. Every 20 years since, the shrine is rebuilt from scratch — a living tradition now more than two millennia old.
Buddhism took shape in northeastern India around the 5th century B.C.E., when a former prince named Siddhartha Gautama sat beneath a fig tree and worked out why human minds suffer. He taught in everyday languages, reaching merchants, farmers, and women long excluded from sacred learning. Today, more than 500 million people follow the path he described.
Jesus of Nazareth, the Galilean Jew executed under Pontius Pilate in first-century Judea, is one of the best-attested figures of the ancient world. At least 14 independent sources written within a century of his death survive, and virtually every scholar of antiquity accepts he was real. A craftsman’s son whose echo still reaches 2.4 billion people.
