The post enlightenment era fractured the sacred monolith in the Western worldview and social development.  There emerged what some hold to be  "purely secular" sectors of enterprise.  Void of sacred roots, from where will these sectors gain their ethical and moral guidelines?  This is the question we face. What are the points of interface for the sacred and the secular once the assumption of shared space is broken.

In this New York Times article, Nuns who won't stop nudging we read of a true modern effort to guide corporate behavior by people who live under spiritual vows.  The relationships seen here between profit seekers and champions of spiritual life, and social justice provides an encouraging model not just for economic behavior but for other secular enterprise as well.

Nuns Who Won't Stop Nudging

Long before Occupy Wall Street, the Sisters of St. Francis were quietly staging an occupation of their own. In recent years, this Roman Catholic order of 540 or so nuns has become one of the most surprising groups of corporate activists around.

The nuns have gone toe-to-toe with Kroger, the grocery store chain, over farm worker rights; with McDonald's, over childhood obesity; and with Wells Fargo, over lending practices. They have tried, with mixed success, to exert some moral suasion over Fortune 500 executives, a group not always known for its piety.

Please read about the Fetzer Institute

Helpful analysis from the founder of Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding.

What passes for "religious" violence, conflict, intolerance, and other misappropriations and misapplications of religious teaching and sentiments, invariably reflect ethnicity, history, and misuse of politics.

Professor Bennet's article sheds important light on the Nigerian situation, especially valuable in that it is based on knowledge from peace activists on the ground.

Armed conflict between Christians and Muslims is on the rise. Most recently, we have seen attacks in Egypt take on a disturbingly sectarian dimension, but this trend has been spreading through the Middle East and Northern and sub-Saharan Africa for some time. One need only look at the ongoing attacks on Christian churches in Iraq. Or, the decades of conflict in the Sudan, where Arab Muslims in the North slaughtered 1 million black Christians in the South. In recent years, there was a huge public outcry against the genocide-in-progress in Darfur, and we can now hope that the new country of South Sudan will provide some stability to its beleaguered citizens. But in spite of these small signs of improvement, the conflict between Muslims and Christians in Nigeria persists and is escalating again.

Following Christmas mass, 35 worshipers were killed in a Catholic Church in Madala, Nigeria, a suburb of the capital Abuja. It was a shocking and horrific event, but nothing new for Nigeria, where violence between Muslims and Christians occurs frequently.