...[There] are a few faces looking less than confident about what comes next. Barbra Taylor, from Hawaii, and Terry Goldsmith, from Bury, Greater Manchester, are two of them. They're not Muslim, but guests for nine days. This is part of "Muslim for a Month" - a programme from social enterprise group The Blood Foundation where participants get to "test-drive" a religion.

As part of an ongoing foray into digital media, the Vatican will unveil an online portal for papal news and information. The portal, which will aggregate information from the Vatican's various print, online, radio and television media into a single, centralized destination for all things papal, will be the most extensive online venture that the Vatican has undertaken yet.

For the third time, Indonesian and Austrian civil society met in an interfaith dialogue. This year, dialogue took on a theme of “Religious Pluralism, Freedom of Religion – Responsibilities of the State, Society and Religious Communities”. The interfaith dialogue between Indonesia and Austria has become the model for many nations in establishing similar dialogue with Indonesia.

America’s war on terrorism created a tougher atmosphere for China’s 10 million Muslim Uighurs, most of whom live in western Xinjiang province. The burden of proof is on the Chinese government to convince the international community that it faces the threat of extremism.

Jonathan Slye spent part of last summer at a Christian rock camp learning how to be a lead singer. But by November he had another thought: he should throw a rock show in his hometown. Slye wanted to do this as an outreach to his friends to show them Christian music could be cool and have a positive message.

After decades of neglect by policy-makers, religion is once again a legitimate topic of conversation in public diplomacy, international relations and domestic affairs. Much of the current discourse has been sparked by what is viewed as widespread religious resurgence that has diminished the force of the secularization hypothesis. This new perspective on religiosity is prompting diplomats to increase their religious literacy and to explore ways to harness the religious communities’ potential for problem solving, development and collaboration.

Faith-based Engagement as a Tool for Public Diplomacy

A recent journey to Auschwitz with some 200 leaders from across the Muslim and Arab world, with 10 of the camp’s survivors, was remarkable, making it clear that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was not speaking in the name of all Muslims when he made perverse declared the Holocaust a “myth.”