Here's a puzzling finding from the recent Gallup Poll on the attitudes of Americans towards different religions.

Only two percent of Americans say they have a great deal of knowledge about Buddhism, and 14 percent report feeling some prejudice towards Buddhists. Meanwhile, only three percent of Americans claim they have a great deal of knowledge about Islam, and yet 43 percent claim some prejudice towards Muslims.

How is it that a little knowledge about Buddhism correlates with broadly positive feelings towards Buddhists, but a little knowledge about Islam is linked to frighteningly negative views of Muslims?

My friend Reza Aslan always has his finger on the pulse of innovation. In 2005, he recognized the importance of people having an appreciative understanding of the history of Islam and wrote what I think is the most lyrical narrative of the religion I have read in No God but God.

Last year he published a book, How to Win a Cosmic War, on how to not cede the power of symbolism to terrorists.

This year he is involved in launching an interesting new iPhone application called "MeccaLocator".

Newsflash: People who hate Jews also hate Muslims. Anti-semitism is linked to Islamophobia. If you are spreading the former, you will reap the latter. And while the recent Gallup Poll didn't report directly on this, my guess is if you are spreading the latter, you will reap the former.

That bias is hateful to God is an ancient religious teaching. Take the Qur'anic idea that all human beings have the breath of God, or the Judeo-Christian teaching that we are all made in God's image.

In my work as Executive Director of Interfaith Youth Core, I get to be on stage with a lot of experts. I don't get to be on stage with that many heroes. Last night was different - I had the privilege of interviewing Rev. Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners, for an event at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

I first met Jim Wallis about 15 years ago when I was a college student. I had recently studied a woman named Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Worker Movement. Much to my parent's chagrin, instead of getting an internship, I took the summer after my sophomore year of college to travel through Catholic Worker houses up and down the eastern seaboard. One of my questions was always "Who is the Dorothy Day of this era?" - and the answer that I got was Jim Wallis.

Time Magazine recently did a piece on evangelicals bridging the racial divide. It describes the work that Willow Creek founder Bill Hybels and his colleague Alvin Bibbs (men that I know personally and respect greatly) are doing to make 11 o'clock on Sunday morning a vision of the American ideal of racial harmony instead of -- as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said -- "the most segregated hour the week." It involves everything from growing minority membership to including references and worship styles from the African American tradition into services. Like any big change, this has involved sacrifice. When Hybels had his 'conversion experience' about America's race problem (after reading a book that Alvin Bibbs, an African-American, passed on to him), he committed to making Willow a model of the solution. Going against the 24-year history of Willow Creek, Hybels started preaching about the importance of engaging race as a justice issue. A few years later, he threw down the gauntlet: bridging the racial divide is "part of who we are, and if it can't be part of who you are, you probably need to find a church that doesn't talk about this issue." He lost members, but living more deeply into his faith made the sacrifice worth it.

This is what I love about evangelicals, about religious people period, actually. Their willingness to follow a cosmic sense of what's right, even if there are earthly sacrifices to be made.

Here's the thing about extremists: their strategy is transparent.

Think about this. The most high-profile terrorist attacks of the past few years have occurred on Thanksgiving (the Mumbai murders) and Christmas (the Amsterdam flight attempt).

Extremist groups are well aware that on those two days large numbers of Americans are home with their families. The TV is most likely on, and when the news anchor interrupts the football game with "Breaking News", there are a dozen people in the living rooms of tens of millions of households listening to the report about "Muslim extremists attack luxury hotel / transatlantic flight."

By Eboo Patel and Becca Hartman

We were talking to Rita Moskowitz Tuesday morning when she said, "After I get off the phone with you, I am going to put a call to Oral's hospital - it sounds like he is really not doing well." Four hours later, his passing was announced.

Rita Moskowitz and her husband, Frank, were good friends with Oral Roberts, the country's preeminent televangelist (on air since the 1950s), famous for his revivals and healings.

Oral Roberts' ministry is not without contention. His legacy includes Oral Roberts University (ORU), complete with a 60-foot, 30-ton praying hands statue, and the City of Faith Medical and Research Center, built with inspiration from a vision in which a 900-foot-tall Jesus spoke to Oral. His legacy includes the spiritual, emotional, and, many say, physical health of millions. His legacy also includes a bar mitzvah commentary.

Today's guest blogger is Benjamin Bechtolsheim, a Faiths Act Fellow hosted by The Center for Interfaith Action on Global Poverty (CIFA).

Last week, hundreds of senior Nigerian faith leaders gathered in a crowded hotel conference room to launch Faiths United for Health - a cooperative effort between Muslim and Christian communities in Nigeria to combat malaria, a disease that kills over a quarter of a million people each year in that country alone. At the launch, the Sultan of Sokoto, the most powerful Islamic leader in Nigeria, and the Archbishop of Abuja, his counterpart among Christians, stood together as leaders of the project and partners in the ambitious and lifesaving work that the campaign will undertake.

Christian-Muslim collaboration of this scale is unprecedented. The Center for Interfaith Action on Global Poverty (CIFA), an innovative new development agency, has pioneered this model of interfaith collaboration around public health issues. However, its lessons need not be left in Nigeria. Jean Duff, CIFA's Executive Director, made that clear: "The significance of Faiths United for Health goes well beyond better health and development in Nigeria. It showcases Nigeria's interfaith action as a model for interfaith collaboration in the global fight against poverty and disease."

Today's guest blogger is Cassie Meyer, Content Director at the Interfaith Youth Core. She has a Master's Degree from the University of Chicago Divinity School focusing on American Religious History.

When my colleague Jenan and I were in Melbourne, Australia a few weeks ago training a group of young people at Monash University, everyone asked us, "Why are you here?"

People were surprised to see two American interfaith organizers in Melbourne, not because interfaith work is foreign to Australia, but because we were three weeks too early for one of the world's biggest interfaith events, the Parliament of the World's Religions.

I'm ambivalent about President Obama's decision to surge in Afghanistan for the same reasons many others are: Too many American soldiers and Afghan civilians killed over eight long years, too little to show for it, and the light at the end of the tunnel is too far away and could well be a freight train.

But here's what I appreciated about Obama's speech at West Point: It got the enemy right, it got us right, and it got the big picture of the fight right. As Sun Tzu wrote in the Art of War, "If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle."

For our first date, I took my wife to see the jazz master Kurt Elling sing at the Green Mill, a club on the north side of Chicago. Last night, we saw Elling sing again, this time at the White House State Dinner, given in honor of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India. For a pair of middle-class Chicagoans who hail from India and who went to a 30-person Obama event when he was considered a long shot in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in Illinois, it was the perfect ending to a magical evening.

For all the glitter (I spent the whole night spotting people I generally see on TV, and observing to my increasingly agitated wife, 'Wow, he's short in real life'), the most memorable part of the evening was walking into the White House with General Colin Powell and Alma Powell.

Alma is the Chair of America's Promise, one of the nation's leading youth empowerment groups. She talked about their goal of dramatically cutting the dropout rate over the next ten years. She was impressive on the analytics of the issue, but I was more struck by her deep conviction that all young people can make a powerful and positive contribution to our society - if we can get our institutions up to the task of nurturing them in that direction.