(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DANIEL ESTRIN, HOST:
Leaders of many faiths have been confronted with all kinds of needs this past year - sometimes spiritual heartaches and sometimes immediate crises. We invited representatives of three major world religions to tell us how they've been guiding their flocks through this year of faraway wars, layoffs, immigration crackdowns and social change. Rabbi Ari Saks told us that bloodshed across the world is constantly on people's minds at his synagogue, Torat Yisrael in East Greenwich, Rhode Island.
ARI SAKS: The events of October 7 - that moment isn't just something that goes away. It's something that reminds us of thousands of years of antisemitism, including the latest at Bondi Beach. The story of the Middle East has carried itself over to all the different four corners of the Earth.
ESTRIN: In California, Nihal Khan is mending hearts as an imam on UCLA's campus and trying to staunch unimaginable pain.
NIHAL KHAN: We have students from Gaza who have lost, without any exaggeration, dozens if not hundreds of family members and who have been displaced. It's been a difficult year overall in that - from that perspective, and just providing space to students to collect themselves and to move forward in the precarious and unknown future.
ESTRIN: Ginger Gaines-Cirelli is senior pastor at Foundry United Methodist Church in Washington, D.C. Economic uncertainty is starting to break some of the people in her care.
GINGER GAINES-CIRELLI: A member of my congregation lost his job at USAID. One day, he had received the letter in his email box - I think it was a Tuesday - that the coming Thursday, he was going to have 15 minutes to go into his office that he had been in for over 20 years and clean out all of his personal effects. And he said, I got the letter, and I finally broke. And he said, I don't know what I'm going to do with my life.
ESTRIN: We invited Imam Nihal, Rabbi Saks and Pastor Ginger to join us for a little interfaith dialogue about people turning toward religion during times of trouble. I asked Pastor Ginger about the sweeping changes we've seen under President Trump, some in the name of Christian values.
GAINES-CIRELLI: I have to take a deep breath before jumping into that one.
ESTRIN: (Laughter) Please do.
GAINES-CIRELLI: The 25 years that I have been serving in ministry in this country, I've had to serve as an apologist for the Christian faith because so much of what has been said, done by folks claiming the name Christian has felt so completely alien to my own experience of the God of Jesus and the faith that I have been formed. And I have folks who don't want to claim the name Christian because it has been so tarnished.
ESTRIN: Wow.
GAINES-CIRELLI: Christianity is not about controlling others or protecting privilege. It's about following Jesus, who consistently chose love over domination and who chose compassion over cruelty, every time. The conversation we're having is, what does it really mean to love God and love our neighbors? The neighbor is not necessarily just your family member or just your tribe or just your country. Jesus was crossing boundaries. Jesus was caring for the vulnerable, not kicking them out.
ESTRIN: ICE has been picking up undocumented immigrants on the streets this year. Has that been happening around your congregation? Has that been sparking dialogue?
GAINES-CIRELLI: Yeah, so the congregation I serve is part of interfaith work. To try to interrupt occasions where ICE is showing up, we sort of track where things are happening. We have people who are just simply not coming into D.C. because they're afraid of being picked up. Our faith teaches us that we're to love and care for the stranger and the sojourn or the migrant trying to find refuge and asylum.
ESTRIN: On the opposite side of the country, Imam Nihal, many of the students you work with on campus are undocumented, right? And they're also being impacted by the immigration crackdowns this year.
KHAN: Yeah, I mean, if - that's the other issue that's been on everyone's mind, that many students that are here, like, particularly within Los Angeles, that are undocumented - they're living in a constant state of fear. Just a few weeks ago, I remember there was a app that basically tracks and shows where there have been ICE sightings. So we saw that there were three or four locations that were near some of the dormitories. So that had people on edge, obviously. And as the pastor was mentioning, this cannot be farther than what Jesus would have wanted because as Muslims - for us, Jesus is a very important figure, and the narratives of his birth is something that Christians and Muslims most definitely can connect over and makes us wonder that - is that how, if Jesus was here in 2025 in the United States, whether we would welcome him in, or would we push him out from the borders of our country?
GAINES-CIRELLI: It's a great question.
ESTRIN: Do you think about that, too?
GAINES-CIRELLI: For sure. I mean, I always said Jesus would likely be much more conservative than some would like and much more liberal than others would like, and nobody would like him, and he'd probably get ignored or kicked out.
SAKS: As you're having that conversation together, I'm reminded of...
ESTRIN: This is Rabbi Saks. Go ahead.
SAKS: ...A teaching from William Penn, who formed Pennsylvania in the late 17th century. He rebelled against his father's form of Christianity and became a Quaker. And at that time in England, Quakers were very much persecuted against. When he came to America and formed Pennsylvania, he said, I want this to become a holy experiment in that every religion could be able to find its place. And it's only because of him that we have embedded in our Constitution freedom of religion, that there should be no state religion. And embedded in that is the freedom of movement of people of different backgrounds, of different faith traditions to come to America, to be able to practice their way of life in a free way. And that behooves the society to be able to say there is all the ways in which we can learn from each other and grow with each other.
ESTRIN: All of you work with young people, students or members of your congregation. What do young people want right now, in their lives?
SAKS: In the class I just taught, which was over 30 undergraduate students on Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I asked a question about what gives them hope, and I can't tell you how many people said that their faith gives them hope. And so in thinking about to what extent is God real for many young people, I think that for many young people, it is and that they're looking for God, they're looking for their religions to give them a sense of hope for the future.
ESTRIN: Imam Nihal.
KHAN: I think many Muslims are looking to their faith not to merely socially ascribe to a group, but how does this faith provide me meaning? How does this faith provide me solutions to my life? How does this faith provide me the ability to traverse the world on hand? What does my faith tell me about responding to difficulties? What does my faith tell me about helping the oppressed and the downtrodden?
GAINES-CIRELLI: My experience is that young people are looking for community that feels engaged in what is going on in the world and has something to say about it and helps them make decisions and to discern how best to move around in a world that feels completely unmoored. I don't see young people and young adults moving away from spirituality and faith. I think that they're longing for so much of what our faith traditions offer.
ESTRIN: Looking ahead into the new year, 2026, can you leave us with a prayer, a verse, a quote that you think speaks to this moment that we all might benefit from? Imam Nihal, can we start with you?
KHAN: So one thing that I've been thinking about in regards to 2026 that may be helpful for all of us is, the Prophet Muhammad prayed, oh, God, allow us to see truth for truth and allow us to accept it and allow us to see falsehood as falsehood and allow us to keep ourselves away from it.
ESTRIN: Pastor Ginger.
GAINES-CIRELLI: Two-thousand and twenty-five times now, officially, we've celebrated the Christ light coming into the world again. And from the first time and every time since, that light has come into a world that was in pain and broken. In the midst of that, the light is joy. And so I'm going to leave us with some verses from Philippians, the letter to the Philippians.
(Reading) Rejoice in the Lord, always. Again, I will say rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God, and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
ESTRIN: Rabbi Saks.
SAKS: I'd like to share this final berakah, this final blessing, offering that appears throughout Jewish liturgy. Oseh shalom bimromav. May the one who makes peace, who makes wholeness possible in the highest of heavens, to be able to create the wonders of all that is creation. Hu ya'aseh shalom aleinu. May he be the one who makes peace upon all of us. V'al kol yoshvei tevel. And upon all of humanity, to be able to make humanity understand and experience that wholeness that comes when we feel at peace with one another as part of all of God's beautiful creation. And let us say, amen.
ESTRIN: Amen to that. Reverend Ginger Gaines-Cirelli is senior pastor of the Foundry United Methodist Church in Washington, D.C. Nihal Khan is the Muslim chaplain at UCLA. And Ari Saks is rabbi at Temple Torat Yisrael in East Greenwich, Rhode Island. Thank you all so much for being here, and I hope we all have a joyful and a peaceful 2026.
GAINES-CIRELLI: Thank you, Daniel.
KHAN: Thank you.
SAKS: Thank you so much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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