The American Community Gardening Association (ACGA) works build community by increasing and enhancing community gardening and greening across the United States and Canada. The ACGA works with churches and synagogues to plant organically grown fruit and vegetable gardens to help feed poor communities.

Michelle Lelwica is an associate professor of religion at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn. She is the author of Starving for Salvation: The Spiritual Dimensions of Eating Problems Among American Girls and Women and The Religion of Thinness: Satisfying the Spiritual Hungers Behind Women’s Obsession With Food and Weight. She wrote a commentary for Newsweek and The Washington Post linking the quests for thinness and […]

Steve Reynolds is pastor of Capital Baptist Church in Annandale, Va., and author of Bod for God: The Four Keys to Weight Loss (2009). He urged his congregation to join him in a Christian-themed weight loss program. Reynolds eventually lost 100 pounds.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services posts data and other information about child abuse on its Child Welfare Information Gateway.

Debra Orenstein is a rabbi and leader of Makom Ohr Shalom congregation in Los Angeles. She wrote a Torah portion commentary about teshuvah, the return to God, and weight loss.

The Earth Day Network was born out of the first Earth Day in 1970 and works with more than 22,000 partners in 192 countries to broaden, diversify and mobilize the environmental movement. In addition to coordinating Earth Day activities, the network, which is based in Washington, D.C., works throughout the year to promote green policies. […]

The Catholic Church is not the only religious community battling the ministerial abuse problem. A May 25, 2011, article in The Forward, titled “Ultra-Orthodox Group Affirms Abuse Cases Go First To Rabbi,” shows how some Jewish religious authorities contend that Jews must consult a rabbi before going to law enforcement with suspicions of sexual abuse committed by community […]

Myriam Klotz is a Reconstructionist rabbi and the director of yoga and embodied practices at the Institute for Jewish Spirituality.

Read “Another Long Lent,” an April 8, 2011, essay in Commonweal magazine about the Philadelphia crisis by Nicholas P. Cafardi, Cafardi is a civil and canon lawyer and one of the original members of the USCCB’s National Review Board for the Protection of Children and Youth. He is the author of Before Dallas, a history of the clergy child sexual-abuse […]