Goodbye Harvard Divinity School, hello America.

This is my quest: Find the soul of America.

How hard can that be, right? We’ll find out together.

America’s faith story is not simply Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu or Muslim, but all these things -- and Native American, Taoist, Pagan, agnostic, atheist, and other beliefs, too. It is a story that crosses religions, generations, geographies, cultures, ethnicities and genders. And it is a story that may look a lot different than it did a century or two ago.

For the next six months, I will travel around the United States for On Faith in search of who we are and what we believe. The purpose is to explore America’s new religious landscape. This is not an academic study. I saw plenty of statistics and scholarly papers during three challenging and exciting years studying religion in society at Harvard. What I didn’t see was average people explaining and living their faith. I found my mind wandering outside those Ivy League walls, back to mosques and synagogues and churches I visited as a journalist. I thought back to the mentally ill mother who said she killed her toddler so he could be with God, the days sitting in churches covering political candidates on the campaign trail, the Virgin Mary in the cheese sandwich, the small-town minister who after a hurricane destroyed his church told of standing in a field outside the shredded building to deliver his service but no one came. Those stories too are part of the American religious landscape.

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STOCKBRIDGE, Mass. -- Claire G. Williams was 29 when she modeled for Norman Rockwell, whose illustrations for Saturday Evening Post still define for men and women of a certain generation what it means to be a good, patriotic and faithful American.

Some 49 years have passed since Rockwell himself phoned her. She still remembers the event in detail. The periwinkle dress she wore. Her two-hour studio session with Rockwell -- she posed while he sketched. Rockwell’s studio, now preserved on the grounds of the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., looks exactly as it did then. The Shalom sign, the brushes meticulously cleaned, an African Christ hanging on a cross, a Zenith radio.

“We came through the door right there,” Claire said on one of her recent tours. She's retired now, and her husband has passed away, but she still volunteers at the museum.

Many of Claire's former neighbors show up in Rockwell's famous illustrations. The postmaster is a model for an Imam in The Golden Rule. The dry goods store owner is a town hall clerk, waiting on a young couple applying for a marriage license. Then there's a classic Rockwell painting called "The Runaway," in which a little boy and a policeman are sitting together at a lunch counter. "That's Dick Clemens," she said of the policeman. "I went to school with him, and he really did grow up to be a state trooper." The boy who modeled for the runaway is a maintenance person in the area, she said.

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NEW LEBANON, N.Y. -- A typical vision of Sufism might look like whirling dervishes or religious aesthetics in white robes participating in Islamic art, music or dance as a form of religious expression. Americans, if they’ve heard of Sufism at all, have probably heard of the poet and Sufi mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi, who died in 1273 and is arguably the most widely known Sufi in the world.

Rumi, whirling dervishes and Islam aren’t the subjects of casual conversation in the former mill town areas of Western Massachusetts. So it was a surprise to learn that Joseph Aubert, manager of visitor services at the Norman Rockwell Museum, is a member of the Sufi Order International and a religious retreat center called The Abode of the Message in New Lebanon, New York.

“Technically, I’m not a Buddhist or a Muslim, but I honor all traditions,” said Aubert, a 62-year-old administrator who wears a suit and tie to work.

Aubert grew up Methodist but now calls himself an interfaith minister. He belongs to the Abode of the Message, a religious center that follows the teachings of an Indian mystic, Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan. Its leaders describe the Abode as a “spiritual school,” comparable with Buddhism or yoga. An estimated 10,000 members participate in its spiritual training, “for the purpose of spiritual awakening, and also for service to God and humanity.”

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GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. -- Folk singer and social activist Arlo Guthrie’s church here is the kind of place someone could get lost in – or maybe even found.

But not through any traditional sense of religion.

“We’re not trying to start a religion,” said Guthrie Center Director George Laye, who answered the church door one recent afternoon in jeans, a black sweater and white sneakers – a far cry from the uniform of tie-dye and bell-bottom pants that reigned during the wild beatnik and hippie days when Alice and Ray Brock, of Alice’s Restaurant fame, lived in the building. “I don’t think God was religious.”

From the road, the rainbow peace flag in the front window hints at the building’s purposes now. A full-size modern industrial kitchen visible through the glass helps the center feed the hungry and the homeless. The sanctuary-turned-sound stage seats 110 people for musical acts that benefit the center. Although couples have been married at the Guthrie Center, no formal religious ceremonies are held there.

“Basically, we’re here to serve and take care of folks,” said Laye, who has been working for Arlo Guthrie for 30 years, the last three running activities at the Center.

A jumbled collection of religious icons displays the Center’s commitment to tolerance for all religions. A faded and weathered cross that may have once sat on the top of the building, which was burned then rebuilt by Connecticut shipwrights in 1866, now graces the walls. Church members found it discarded in nearby bushes. Pictures of Arlo’s guru, Ma, and her guru, dot a makeshift altar beneath a stained glass rose window upstairs. Incense, Hindu statues, crosses and other symbols compete for space on the low cloth-covered table. What once was the altar of the church is now a sound stage for folk acts. Upstairs, in the bell tower, the bell once used to call worshipers to prayer still works.

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GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. -- Chris Borek will look you straight in the eye and tell you absolutely positively there is no God.

It's not that she hasn't thought about it. She has.

"I believe that there is no God. I think that this is it. It's all a scientific process. I don't believe we have a soul," said Borek, a 37-year-old nurse. "I think we have our lives to live."

In the absence of God, there is still faith, says Borek, who was volunteering at the Guthrie Center here on a recent Friday. "I don't know if it's faith in humanity, or constant striving to have faith in humanity."

Borek was raised Catholic and shopped for different churches before finally rejecting all religion.

Her move to Great Barrington was in part a quest for a church-like community. She wanted to be near its "benevolent souls," as she calls them. A folk music fan, she loves the musical acts that perform there. But there's also a safe sense of community that nurtures all religious beliefs, including the absence of one.

"We don't have any dogma here," she said. "We just come together to support the community at large."

ACTON, Mass. -- It is summer and a van full of older teenage girls has pulled into the driveway of Hybid Farm. Some have eating disorders. Others may abuse alcohol or drugs. Some cut themselves. Some may have engaged in prostitution. None of this really matters.

For two hours of grooming, saddling and riding horses, they are simply like every other Hybid student – they are children who ride horses.

During the lesson, I lead an older teen on a horse at a trot, half steadying her with my hand on her calf while I run beside the horse and teach her how to balance and steer. She is scared but completely thrilled. Many of these kids have never touched a horse let alone ridden one. My heart is in my throat as I think how brave she is.

Later, back in the barn, Rita-Marie McConnon threads through the crowd of teens and helpers getting horses groomed and put away before dark. Along the way, she helps show the girls little skills like which brushes to use, how to pick rocks out hooves, how to lead the horses.

She brushes past me in the aisle full of horses and people, her smile lit from within. She stops and bends toward my ear. “This is why we’re here,” she whispers.

By that, she means this is why we teach. But she also means we all have a calling -- to love each other and to love God.

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Our Lady of Divine Mercy.

STOCKBRIDGE, Mass. -- The stone building is awash in the pregnant silence of mausoleums or empty football stadiums, punctuated by a cough or the cracking of knees bending toward the floor for silent prayer.

A nun in black kneels on the gleaming floor of the church of Our Lady of Divine Mercy, her fingers clutching a rosary, her eyes cast toward the Virgin Mary and elaborately carved and painted figures behind the altar. A middle-aged woman in brown slacks and tan sweater perches nearby on the edge of a pew, her hands tented in prayer. A man in a blue parka stands in the marble aisle, his eyes transfixed on holy scenes depicted in stained glass.

It is late on a Friday at this religious shrine which draws an estimated 40,000 Catholic faithful a year to the hill over looking Stockbridge. They swarm off tour buses over the pastoral grounds. They light candles and clutch their rosaries, as they pray and seek spiritual renewal and healing.

But on this day, most pilgrims have left. The confessionals in back of the church are dark, empty of sinners. The gift shop below is closing.

Only Brother Andrew Davy, a 26-year-old American University graduate in philosophy, lingers to talk with me about faith.

Brother Davy, who lives in Washington, D.C., is young and in love with his calling. He is in love with the Trinitarian God; in love with the rituals that have tied him to Catholicism his whole life; in love with his faith.

“It’s trust in God,” says Brother Davy, trying to explain his charismatic Catholic’s view of faith, “the Trinitarian God: The Father, Son and the Holy Spirit.”

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HARRIMAN, N.Y. -- When John Steinbeck searched for America for his book "Travels with Charley," he did so with a Standard Poodle, a hefty advance from his publisher and a cache of guns, whiskey, and tools in a large, handsome truck named Rocinante, the letters written in Sixteenth-Century script on the side.

I’m a reporter and recent divinity school graduate about to criss-cross the country on a shoestring budget -- with Diet Dr. Pepper, a laptop computer, a video camera, and a backpack full of clothes. My Rocinante is a trusty old two-door coupe that leaks oil like a sieve and bears the scars of three years of on-street parking in an urban neighborhood where parallel parking is a contact sport. I thought about calling the car Hermes after the Greek messenger god. But I think it’s best to go with something less pretentious … like Bob.

I would like to go on the record right here: Bob has never failed. Still, the grim humor of the situation was apparent as I peered down dark driveways somewhere out in the New York countryside on a recent Sunday night. I was trying to ignore the thumping sounds coming from the car as I looked for signs of a convent.

It had been two and a half years since I’d seen Sister Eileen Kelly, although I’d talked with her briefly by phone and by email.

I met Eileen at Harvard, just after she returned from 25 years of service at Holy Redeemer Church on Cat Island in the Bahamas. Some events in a person’s life shape them so profoundly that to reflect on them is to realize when one has felt truly alive. Cat Island and its people -- the 31-year-old grandmother who died of AIDS, the 14-year-old mother, the family matriarchs who dispensed wisdom with a stern stare or a parable – so shaped Eileen’s life that when she returned to the states as a nun in her late 60s, she had trouble re-envisioning what life stateside was going to be like.

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Sister Eileen Kelly.

HARRIMAN, N.Y. -- Before daybreak, in the upstairs parlor of the Sisters of Charity convent, a single candle flame flickers in the middle of a bookshelf-lined TV room. Four gray-haired women, their voices sleep-tinged, take turns reading Psalm 33 from prayer books open on their laps.

“It’s the source that binds us to other women like ourselves who live in groups,” Sister Eileen explains the daily prayer sessions later.

The nuns sit in armchairs or on a worn couch, beside floor lamps that bathe their books and the room in a kind of warm yellow light. They face the center and each other. And the road noise of early morning commuters on the busy highway below the hill gives the impression of an interior and exterior world – the world of the farmhouse-convent and the world of work and school and the struggle and joy of daily life. And for a moment, it is as if these four nuns are pouring their prayers into the universe.

Every weekday morning, the women gather to pray as daylight breaks. They then attend Mass at a local parish in shifts before scattering for their respective callings – teaching, counseling, administering. This might be the only time of day that they’re all in one room.

The practice of daily communal prayer also taps into an ancient cycle of praying rounds that bound Christians together before telephones, mass transportation, or the Internet.

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Two days with the sisters have provided plenty to think about.

One great challenge with having faith, Eileen says, is suffering. The questions of why we suffer and who is responsible for suffering are some of the biggest we face. In a monotheistic tradition – a religious tradition that believes in one God -- who do believers blame when a child dies? Or when innocent human beings are killed and tortured? When disease or drugs or crippling poverty lay waste to humanity?

Eileen believes we do “God’s work” while we’re here, but “not as puppets. We’re not manipulated.”

God refuses to withdraw the element of freedom to choose, whatever the consequences of those choices might be, she says. “There’s a part of the mystery in freedom that is the essence of living.”