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Date: 5 June 2008

Fethullah Gulen, Turkey's Most Famous Preacher

Meet the man who’s in a category with the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Mother Teresa… but is almost unknown in the West.  This highly influential Muslim writer and preacher has inspired people across Turkey – and now the world – to build top-notch schools, engage in interfaith dialogue and champion religious freedom. 

Dr. B. Jill Carroll, Executive Director of the Boniuk Center for the Study and Advancement of Religious Tolerance at Rice University in Houston, Tex.,  author of A Dialogue of Civilizations: Gulen’s Islamic Ideals and Humanistic Discourse

Commentary: Peace in Lebanon

Begins at 18:34 

When Maureen left for Turkey and Lebanon last month, it seemed unlikely she would be able to enter Lebanon.  Tensions between Sunni and Shia Muslims were at a boiling point, and gunfire had broken out in the streets of the capitol. But during her stay in Turkey, it happened—a compromise was finally reached. Maureen reflects on being among the Lebanese people when their prayers for peace were finally answered.

 Maureen Fiedler, Host

Two months after Rev. Jeremiah Wright first made headlines, Rev. Rob Hardies reflects on the ongoing hailstorm.  Hardies, a white Unitarian pastor, traces suspicion of the Black Church back to slave times, calling on his white peers to step out of the "master's house.”

Rev. Rob Hardies, Senior Pastor, All Souls Church, Unitarian, Washington, DC

Einstein's God

Begins at 27:21 

Most people have assumed that Albert Einstein, the enigmatic genius of modern science, was an atheist.  But according to Einstein biographer Walter Isaacson, Einstein was something of a man of faith—a faith stemming from his awe at the great order of the cosmos.  For Einstein, the face of God was revealed in the smallest details of the universe, like the curve of a cosine and the absoluteness of a prime number. As he wrote in the summer of 1930,

"The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious… To sense that, behind anything that can be experienced, there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity teaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness."

Walter Isaacson, author of Einstein: His Life and Universe

Begins at 39:31

A short passage in the Koran, along with a handful of quotes attributed to the prophet Muhammed, condemn homosexuality as a crime in the eyes of many Islamic scholars.   A new documentary called "A Jihad for Love" tells the stories of more than a dozen gay and lesbian Muslims from around the world—all of whom stay devoted to a faith that sometimes doesn't seem to want them. The film is playing in select theaters now. Laura Kwerel explains.

Parvez Sharma, director of "A Jihad for Love" and Muhsin Hendricks, a subject of the documentary and founder of Al Fitrah, the first queer Muslim organization in South Africa