Walter Lippman once said, "The way in which the world is imagined will determine at any given moment what men will do."

Think of that line as you watch the evening news or read the newspaper. The sad truth is that a large number of the images we see on a regular basis are about fear, mistrust and violence. Sometimes, those feel like the only possibilities.

Stories shape our lives and our societies. Extremists understand that very well. A few months ago, The Washington Post did an exceptional video news story on how Muslim extremists use film as a weapon in their war.

“Without the video, it’s just an attack,” details just how deliberate and strategic these groups are when it comes to using video. Murdering people is only one of their goals. Spreading the idea of Islam as a violent religion and convincing people that we are in a clash of civilizations is just as central to their agenda.

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I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I read last week that Nelson Mandela was on the terrorism watch list.

At least Condeleeza Rice had the grace to call the situation “embarrassing”.

Daniel Pipes, who earns his living by making Americans scared of their Muslim neighbors, has no such decency.

I suppose there is a case to be made for a file to exist somewhere in the national security apparatus with the name “Mandela” on it. After all, he did co-found an organization, Spear of the Nation, that carried out violent actions as part of the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa, albeit a half century ago.

When Pipes puts someone on one of his lists, it isn’t about what you did, however long ago. It is about who you are – especially if you are an Arab or a Muslim. The story of how he derailed Debbie Almontaser’s career is just the most recent egregious example.

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We host about two dozen international delegations every year at the Interfaith Youth Core - African journalists, Pakistani businesspeople, European activists, Central Asian religious leaders, the list is long and colorful.

They come to learn about the “American system”, and ask lots of questions about the Constitution, checks and balances, separation of powers – all the stuff of high school American history.

Those things are all necessary to understanding what America is about, I tell them. But they are far from sufficient. To really know America, I emphasize, you have to dig into the African-American tradition.

You have to know that a race of people who were enslaved and subjugated for centuries by America decided that instead of leaving this nation in disgust, they would create it anew.

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What if the only thing you knew about Thomas Jefferson was that he owned slaves?

What if, instead of the video of the I Have a Dream speech, elementary school students were taught that Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “My government is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world …”?

What if the single piece of information you possessed about Nelson Mandela was that he co-founded a terrorist organization called Umkhonto we Sizwe (abbreviated as MK), which stands for Spear of the Nation?

With apologies to William Blake, if you believe you can see the world in a grain of sand, you better make sure it is the right grain.

So, how well do the twelve words we know about Jeremiah Wright define the man, the nearly four-decades of ministry, the church he built, the denomination it belongs to, the black community, and whatever else we think he might represent? Are those words the right grain of sand?

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The Pope and the Dalai Lama got all the headlines last week, but they weren’t the only international religious leaders visiting the United States.

The Aga Khan, spiritual leader of the world’s 15 million Ismaili Muslims (the community I belong to; read my piece on the Aga Khan on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his Imamat), was also here.

It was the Aga Khan’s first public visit to America in over two decades. He spent time with his followers in California, Illinois, Texas and Georgia, and met with the governors of each of those states as well.

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As usual, Jews and Muslims got all the headlines when it came to the Pope’s interfaith meetings.

But one of the most interesting things to me about the interfaith event that I attended on Thursday (read my discussion of it here), was the presence of Jains, Hindus and Buddhists.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. -- “We have an early arrival,” a security person shouted.

A fire alarm couldn’t have quieted the 150 religious leaders gathered in the John Paul II Cultural Center awaiting the Pope’s arrival faster.

There was a hustle into chairs, a long hush as we craned our necks, and then a hum as the police cars and black SUVs rounded the corner, and we saw the Pope, wearing all white and (I thought) a wry smile, sitting straight up in his white Pope-mobile.

There has been much talk about this Pope’s respect for America, especially for our combination of religious diversity and devotion. America, he said approvingly, “opened the possibility for all confessions and all forms of religious exercise.”

It was the opening theme of this speech as well. He quoted Alexis de Tocqueville and Franklin Roosevelt on the positive role of faith in society, used the term “E Pluribus Unum”, and referenced America’s long history of interfaith cooperation efforts.

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Washington, D.C. -- The Pope is celebrating mass at Nationals Stadium in Washington DC, and I can’t help but think of the line from the old Paul Simon song, “The cross is in the ballpark.”

For me, that means there is the possibility of holiness in even the most pedestrian spaces and the most mundane moments.

I welcome a reminder of that, even from a spiritual leader I do not call my own.

I welcome whatever sacred gifts this Pope brings.

I welcome his speaking of the eternal to a world dominated by the material.

I welcome his teachings on love and hope, enshrined in his first two scholarly but poetic Papal Encyclicals. These are values that people of all faiths and no faith at all share. By highlighting them, the Pope creates the space for a respectful conversation between people from different traditions on how they understand and apply hope and love.

I welcome that conversation.

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Imagine being a Muslim kid in Pakistan or Indonesia. Every time you hear an American politician talking about Islam, it is invariably in a sentence about violence or terrorism, a sentence which always seems to be part of a larger paragraph about war.

Now imagine your surprise if you turned on the television, and listened to Barack Obama being interviewed for the Compassion Forum (the brainchild of my friends at Faith in Public Life) which CNN carried internationally on Sunday night EST. Here’s what you might think to yourself: “Finally, an American politician who understands something about my religion, and wants to relate to me in a way that doesn’t necessarily include missiles.”

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NEW YORK -- “I agree with about 90% of what you said,” Chuck Colson told me, shaking my hand as I stepped off the stage at the Q Conference,

I confess to being shocked.

But maybe not as shocked as the audience of 500 Evangelical Christians felt when the organizer of Q, a young visionary named Gabe Lyons of the Fermi Project, said “The next person I’d like to bring to stage is a Muslim, Eboo Patel.”

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There is an old joke about a Muslim in Northern Ireland who, at a restaurant one Saturday night, is asked what church he is going to the next morning.

He says that he’s a Muslim, and that his practice is not to attend church on Sunday but to pray at mosque on Friday.

The questioner looks confused for a moment, but finally manages to put the issue back in a framework he can understand. He asks the man, “Are you a Protestant Muslim or a Catholic Muslim?”

I wonder how many times the two Muslims who came to my talk in Belfast last week have been told some permutation of that joke, or asked some version of that question.

They were just one sign of the change that I saw in this town.

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In America, we frame oversize pictures of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and we miniaturize him at the same time.

We want him to be only a national hero, only a racial icon. A man who gave one great speech, helped black people sit at the front of the bus, led a march or two, got shot. On to the next question on the high school history quiz.

I’m in London, doing a series of talks on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and I am astounded by the diversity of the audiences -- Arabs and Africans, American expats and Indians, college students and senior citizens. A young British Muslim approached me after my talk at the British Library and said that reading King’s speeches and writings as a young woman changed her life. Her work for interfaith cooperation is inspired by him.

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The first thing my wife and I comment on when we go to a restaurant or a park is the diversity. We generally want more. We’re part of a generation of Americans raised on the “celebrate diversity” mantra. Our elementary school books were illustrated with pictures of kids of different colors. We read Toni Morrison and Richard Wright in college.

So reading Robert Putnam’s study on the downsides of diversity is disconcerting. Putnam put the term “social capital” on the map in his book, Bowling Alone. Civic engagement, he believes, is crucial to America, and it is seriously in decline.

In Bowling Alone, Putnam blamed much of this decline on television (which I’m happy to have as the culprit, even as I confess that the idiot box is on in the background as I write this).

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The piece I was going to write – “Who Speaks for Islam”, based on the exceptional new book by Dalia Mogahed and John Esposito – is going to have to wait for another day.

Last Saturday night, I went to see A Mystical Journey, a concert bringing together Muslim musicians from all over the world. It was everything that music should be. There were moments of hush and moments of roar, there was calm and there was storm. Which is to say, it felt like prayer.

I believe that discussions of the prose of religion – the rules and the laws of the tradition, statistics measuring what the members of the community think – are crucial. Those matters are the subject of most of my columns in “The Faith Divide”.

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When I moved back to Chicago in December of 2001 and started getting to know the city again, several people told me I needed to meet Barack Obama. He was on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago, a progressive grant-making institution where I knew several people. I figured I would run into him at a Woods Fund party or something. He was one of thirty or forty people I put on my “should meet soon” list.

By the time I got around to reading Dreams From My Father, it was too late. I literally looked up from the book and saw Barack all over Chicago-area newspapers and television, closing in on the Democratic nomination for the Senate seat in Illinois. Then there was the DNC speech. And, of course, the rest is history.

I was deeply impressed by Dreams, by Barack’s deep and powerful struggle with his own identity, and his ability to articulate his struggle as a metaphor for the American story. Dreams became one model for my book, Acts of Faith, about my struggle with my multiple identities as a Muslim, an American and an Indian.

If I had gotten a chance to chat over an omelet with Barack at Valois Restaurant in Hyde Park, the question I would have asked is, “How much has James Baldwin influenced you?” I heard echoes of Baldwin – the master at probing into personal identity and relating it to our national story – all through Dreams.

And I heard the same echoes all through Obama’s speech on race last week.

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When Nancy Murray and Erik Schwarz (a couple I know personally and admire a great deal) came back to New Orleans after the storm, what they were most impressed by was the faith-based groups doing the heavy lifting of rebuilding. Their organization, Interfaith Works, started connecting funders and writers across the country to these grassroots-level efforts.

One of the people they introduced me to on my recent trip to New Orleans was Dr. Kyshun Webster, CEO of Operation REACH, Inc. Kyshun grew up in one of the toughest housing projects in New Orleans. He saw his uncle killed when he was in first grade. That was the year that one of his teachers said he was “slow”, and held him back.

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The shoeshine guy checked out my scuffed-up right shoe and said, “I can get that mark off for you, my man.”

“It’s a water stain,” I told him. “I’ve polished it over and over, but it keeps coming back.”

“Gimme six bucks and five minutes and it’ll be good as new.”

He told me his story as he worked away. Born and raised in New Orleans, lost everything in the flood, lives in a FEMA trailer, bound and determined to get his life back to normal, and have his city return to glory. “I’m doing okay. Some parts of the city are back, the whole thing will take ten more years, but it’ll be better than before. We got a lot of good people here committed to getting the job done.”

“You’re all set to go,” he said.

I looked down at my shoe – better than new.

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A few weeks ago, I was on Radio Times, the mid-morning talk show on Philadelphia Public Radio. My colleague at work, Stephanie, used to live in Philadelphia and raved about the high level of conversation on the show.

Marty Moss-Coane was a fantastic interviewer – informed, funny, and genuinely curious. I enjoyed our conversation immensely.

I spoke about how Muslim history and theology support religious pluralism. I talked about many of my Muslim heroes, scholars and activists like Shaykh Hamza Yusuf and Imam Zaid Shakir who have articulated visions of a world where people from different backgrounds come together in positive ways. I described my book, Acts of Faith, which tells my story of how the discovery of my Muslim identity inspired me to start the Interfaith Youth Core.

(Listen to the podcast)

The phones started ringing off the hooks.

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People tell me all the time that they’re afraid to talk about religion – they don’t have the knowledge, they don’t have the language, they don’t have the courage.

Just remember, as the political philosopher Michael Sandel once observed, “Fundamentalists rush in where liberals fear to tread.”

A few years ago, I taught a student from a liberal arts college in Colorado named Kristin. She had grown up in a strong Christian family, but told me she stopped going to church in college and no longer calls herself a Christian. I asked her if she still found solace in the Bible, if she occasionally hummed Christian hymns, if she was still inspired by the words of Christian preachers. She answered yes to all of these questions. “I don’t understand,” I said. “If all of that is true, why do you not want to call yourself a Christian now?”

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Here’s the only thing better than getting to wish for anything you want: having over a thousand of the world’s most successful and creative people committed to making your wish reality.

That’s how the TED Prize works.

So when Karen Armstrong, who has written beautifully and sympathetically on the world’s religions in over twenty books, was awarded this magic prize, I couldn’t wait for her wish.

Her TED prize talk (which will hopefully be available on the amazing TED website soon) was delivered with characteristic grace and lyricism. She offered an alternative definition of the term “belief”, stating that for centuries it connoted “to commit oneself to something” rather than “to buy into dogma blindly”. She spoke of the core of compassion within all faiths, and put the challenge bluntly: “How to make the compassionate ethos speak to our torn, divided world.”

She went on to say, a bit wryly, that one of the problems with religious people is that they would rather be right than compassionate. That got laughs from religious and non-religious alike.

“How do we make the Golden Rule hip?” she asked, in an endearingly un-hip way.
It was a perfect TED moment: Here was this former nun, a somewhat reclusive scholar by her own admission, asking a group of celebrities, venture capitalists and Hollywood executives - people who do hip for a living - to help her help religion change the world

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