CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Wedged between a walkway and an Episcopal Divinity School building here, a statue entitled Christ in the Garden of Gesthemane and a plaque commemorate the life of a former divinity school student, Jonathan Myrick Daniels.

Daniels was killed during the Civil Rights struggle in Hayneville, Alabama, in 1966, by a shotgun blast meant for an African-American teenager named Ruby Sales, who he pushed out of the way.

Rev. Ed Rodman, who became an Episcopal priest in 1967, attended school with Daniels. And if you look closely, past the figurine and the iron peace symbol Rodman wears on a leather cord around his neck, the cigarette smoldering in his fingers, the eyes half-closed in concentration in that strong, weathered face on a Boston fall afternoon, you might see all the way back to the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s – movements centered in large part around issues of racism that tore and split much of a country.

Rodman, 65, grew up in Virginia and, like Daniels, was part of the student movements that helped desegregate public schools, lunch counters and other public places.

He is now an Episcopal priest and professor at the Episcopal Divinity School, where he studied as a student 40 years ago. The school has a strong history of social justice activism.

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Rev. Ed Rodman.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- I was curious about former Civil Rights activist and Episcopal priest Rev. Ed Rodman's view of terrorism, and how he thinks our definition of terrorism has changed since he was demonstrating for racial justice in the 1960s. Rodman counseled the Weathermen and terrorist factions of the Black Panthers against using violence to bring about social change.

He says terrorism hasn't changed at all. The terrorism of 1960s America -- the bombings, the killings, the beatings -- is the same as today's terrorism. It's the same tactic -- acts of violence aimed directly at hurting people -- since humanity began.

He understands that "one person's terrorist is another's patriot."

“An advocate and a change agent has a face, is public and transparent, and is willing to take responsibility for their actions,” he said. “A terrorist is anonymous and only takes credit for their acts, not for the consequences of their actions.”

He tries to teach his students at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., that public policy and social advocacy happen within a political context. Who gets defined as a terrorist and who gets defined as an advocate can depend on who has power and who wins a battle.

"What do you do when the President of the United States on your behalf bombs Iraq or sets up Guantanamo Bay? That's where my class starts...making the case for nonviolent resistance as opposed to violence."

The third choice, he says, "is to give up and go fishing. That's what most people do."

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- There’s something vaguely European about Mishy Harman, a Harvard undergrad I met during a candle lighting ceremony on a frigid afternoon this week of Hanukkah right across from the white New England steeple of Memorial Church in the Old Yard. Maybe it’s the plaid pants and the rainbow scarf and hat. Or maybe it’s that he seems at the same time young but also more grown up than many young Americans, at 24 having already traveled extensively to many different countries.

An Israeli citizen, Mishy grew up in a conservative Jewish household in Jerusalem. He considers himself secular now.

“I don’t think that much about questions of whether I believe in a God, and what kind of a God I believe in, whether it’s kind of a grandpa God with a big white beard sitting above, or some kind of God within us,” he said. “I mainly have faith in the power of being part of a group of people that together have faith.”

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One of the first people I called when I embarked on this blog was Harvard Professor Richard Parker. Parker, who teaches a course on religion and U.S. policy at the Kennedy School of Government, is an excellent tour guide for the 30,000-foot view of religion in America.

“What you’re going to see is an extraordinary variety” of religions and beliefs out there, Parker told me.

“You find people developing highly individualized interpretations of their faiths,” Parker said. “And the degree to which they hold onto those, the intensity with which they hold onto those, is part of why we have probably more than 1,200 different religious denominations in the United States today. If you counted one off parishes, congregations,” he said, “some sociologists of religion estimate there are as many as 10,000 different denominations functioning today.”

Just as blogging about faith in America is about as wide open as faith itself, no journey is complete without its sidetracks and shortcuts. Yes, the road is all out ahead of us and we’re adjusting course.

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DORCHESTER, Mass. -- Wait until four people have been murdered in one bloody spree beneath your daughter’s window, someone has shot into your house a few times, and your home has been burglarized six times before you tell the Rev. Eugene Rivers III you “know” about poverty.

Rivers lives in Dorchester, one of the poorer neighborhoods in the Boston area. Roxbury, Mattapan, and some slivers of Jamaica Plain and South Boston make up the others. Rivers, a former Harvard College student, is pastor at Azusa Christian Community, a Pentecostal congregation. Its ministries include the Ella J. Baker House, a non-profit organization that tries to curb youth violence by working through the courts and directly with at-risk young people.

There’s a disturbing corollary between violence and poverty, says Rivers, a sometimes embattled, often outspoken community leader who has been a point person between the poor and those in political power.

Rivers, 57, has been working with the poor most of his adult life – long enough to know faith grows from a youthful idealism that aims to save the world to a more mature perspective that aims to save as many as possible. He says he knows poverty can only be reduced, not eliminated. People clinging to the margins of life don’t provide any incentive, either as voters, campaign donors or taxpayers, for politicians to help the poor. And liberals have moved on to other more trendy concerns.

“Blacks are no longer interesting,” Rivers says. “It’s polar bears and the North Pole and the Earth.”

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BOSTON -- Wind, sleet and ice pelt volunteers and ministers of Common cathedral as they prepare for Sunday services – outdoors -- this week on the steps of the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Boston.

The Rev. Kathy McAdams, wears a long ski parka, woolen hat and heavy gloves, as she directs traffic, hefts boxes and greets men who trickle up the stone stairs. Some are visiting pastors from other churches. Others are men she recognizes as regulars to Common Cathedral, a street ministry that tries to fulfill the spiritual needs of homeless men on Boston Common.

“How are you?” she asks one man with a backpack slung over one shoulder. Backpacks, duffles and plastic garbage sacks make up the baggage of homeless men and women always on the move from shelter to shelter, from bench to doorway to food line.

“Cold,” says the man, wearing a hooded sweatshirt and no coat.

“Where’d you stay last night?” she asks.

The answers, depending on the time of year and the weather, could be a shelter, or a doorway, or beneath blankets and tarps out in the open. McAdams greets the men with genuine interest and concern as ministers set up food and a makeshift altar on the damp steps of the historic church. A few men who attend these services are what some call passing-through homeless, but the priest will tell you that many have lived on these streets for years, decades even.

McAdams dispenses hugs and a kind and willing ear as she and her ministers prepare for an informal service, given against the backdrop of beeping machinery, honking car horns, and snow plows scraping paved paths across the street.

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CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Fifteen years ago, when she was the communications director of Harvard Law School, the Rev. Dr. Deborah Little-Wyman had an epiphany that changed her life and started a movement.

“There was one day I was driving up Mass Avenue in Cambridge,” Little-Wyman says. “I was stopped at a stoplight, and I think I was dictating into a tape recorder and making notes on my lap … and I just happened to look over on the steps of an apartment building beside the car. And there was this woman there who I’m sure I described at the time as a bag lady with her bags around her. I had this instant desire -- it just happened so quickly – just a whole-hearted desire to have a life in which I could go and sit down next to that lady and stay with her until she got whatever she felt she needed.”

She struggled for six or seven years with the idea of going to seminary and becoming ordained as a priest and the overwhelming urge to “take the church to the street.”

In 1994, she began taking sandwiches and socks in a knapsack to the Boston Common.

“I was terrified going out to the street the first time, the first bunch of times,” she said. “I didn’t want to go. Having sandwiches in my backpack gave me a little confidence.”

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BOSTON -- Steven Maki threads his way between men and women clad in dark wool coats and carrying bags of Christmas gifts. He is under-dressed for Newbury Street, one of Boston’s high-rent shopping districts, stocked with $10,000 couture dresses, expensive hotels and soft Italian leather shoes.

Maki glances around, looking into corners and doorways.

At 31, he looks a little like a kid. He is small. He wears a thin beard, a nylon parka, dark pants, and sensible shoes. His bangs cut straight across his forehead. A silver stud pierces his right eyebrow. There is a hoop in his left ear. If you look past the piercings, you’ll notice that around his neck is the white collar of an Episcopal priest.

The Rev. Steven Maki, as he is properly known, has been on the job about one month, ministering to the homeless on the streets of Boston. He grew up in the Bay State and has recently come home after a stint in a small parish in Newfoundland, Canada.

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BOSTON—He was married once, for 13 years. They bought and sold a few houses together. One day she told him she was seeing someone else, and he packed his things and tucked them into a corner of the garage. Now, Jim Oldread’s things are few: A backpack, his clothes, the change in his pockets from the day’s panhandling with a cup on a sidewalk.

Back then, he still believed in heaven, or at least that Roman Catholic version of it he had learned in Sunday school. Now he believes more in what he calls karma, or “do the right thing and good things will happen to you. Do the wrong thing and bad things will happen to you.”

That’s the sum of pretty much everything life has taught him in 46 years, four of which he’s spent on the streets of Boston, mostly trying and failing to be sober.

Oldread comes by drinking naturally: He grew up admiring an alcoholic father and hard-drinking uncles who drank themselves senseless at Patriot’s games. Back in the years when he was married and living in a house, he and his buddy would split a six pack on their way home everyday from his construction job. He drank then, but not as much as he does today.

Now, there is nothing really stopping him, except the fear that this winter may be his last. Also, the nagging thought that if he’s ever going to do anything more with his life, he'd better get to detox.

He doesn’t know if there is a God in the formal sense that he’s been taught, but sometimes on a clear night before he sleeps, he looks up at the sky in wonder and thinks about all those stars.

“I know that there is something definitely bigger than me,” he says. “If people choose to call it God, fine.”

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GRANITE FALLS, Wash.— The road from Seattle to the Tsubaki Grand Shrine of America winds past cities, strip malls and suburban sprawl, past old farms, mobile homes and lawns decorated with junk cars. It does not feel like a sacred pilgrimage.

But here, about an hour northeast of Seattle, the Rev. Koichi Barrish -- a former California surfer turned aikido teacher and Shinto priest -- prays, performs purification ceremonies, and teaches aikido, a Japanese martial art. The shrine itself consists mainly of a large open and airy hall with wooden floors, Japanese style doors, and windows that open out onto a statue garden. Beyond that is the Pilchuck River, which borders the 25-acre property.

The shine is a product of what initially began as Barrish’s fascination with human beings’ relationship to nature and blossomed into a full-scale Japanese style shrine, complete with fountains, stone archways, lions and Japanese lanterns.

“I was really interested in the idea of human beings in harmony with nature, that whole thing. Really being a part of stuff, really acting appropriately and not feeling a dichotomy between oneself and nature was really kind of a pretty big deal to me as a young person, and still is today,” Barrish, 57, said, explaining how he got from growing up surfing in 1960s California to Shinto.

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