Spirituality and Community
What spiritual presence or practice do you bring to the communities you belong to and why? Fetzer gathered people from various traditions to talk about how they nurture the spiritual dimension while in community.
Our Work
Our work today is in collaboration with inspiring partners as we all work to reveal, inspire, and serve a more loving world. Learn more about our priority initiatives below and engage with the work through stories, events, resources, and other opportunities to add your voice.
Something More
Secular communities increasingly fulfill religious functions and new religious communities barely resemble their institutional forebears. Meanwhile, 3,500 churches close each year. To organized religions in crisis, this report issues a challenge: how might they transform to meet a rising generation?
Inviting a Larger Conversation About How Religion Can Be Faithful to Its Purpose Today
In our country there is a deep and abiding faithfulness to our religious traditions and institutions, alongside which a growing number of Americans are identifying as “nones,” and “spiritual but not religious,” and many religious institutions are seeing dwindling membership and attendance numbers.
Is an Apology Necessary for Forgiveness?
In this nine-minute video from our Consider Forgiveness series, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim religious leaders and scholars from around the world explore whether an apology is required in order to forgive. The approaches and beliefs shared in this video provide great food for thought and discussion.
Multidimensional Measurement of Religiousness/Spirituality for Use in Health Research
This publication is the product of a national working group that examined key dimensions of religiousness/spirituality as they relate to physical and mental health outcomes. Its 12 papers include brief literature reviews, recommended instruments, and bibliographies for each of the 12 identified domains. Also included is the Brief Multidimensional Measure of Religiousness/Spirituality, an instrument substantially based on select questions from each domain.
Prophetic Religion in a Democratic Society
Steering between what distinguished sociologist of religion Robert Bellah calls “Enlightenment fundamentalists” on the one hand, and religious fundamentalists on the other, this essay argues against both the common secularist view that religion should be excluded from public life and the dogmatic view that would exclude all secular and religious views except one. Instead it proposes a more moderate, nuanced, and robust role for faith and religion in the common life of America and Americans.
Milestones for a Spiritual Jihad: Toward an Islam of Grace
Author of Standing Alone: An American Woman's Struggle for the Soul of Islam, Nomani shares her perspective on realizing an Islamic dream that creates progressive, inclusive, compassionate, and peaceful communities. “We have abandoned spiritual enlightenment for ritual prayer and dogma. This is a struggle that has challenged all faiths….It is time,” she says, “that we rise to a higher expression of Islam, create a new reality, and reclaim the principles of social justice, women's rights, pluralism, and tolerance with which Islam was born.”