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After spending a year exploring life in digital Islamic communities, a new project finds that people are building new narratives to find ways to coexist; their report even includes a policy recommendation for the Obama administration’s diplomacy efforts in the Middle East.

King and Obama have in common a confidence that people can be moved to do something different. King devoted his life to and for that confidence. He was not the first, and Obama will not be the last.

Unlike the recent document claiming reconciliation between evangelicals and progressives the only way democracy has ever been expanded in the US, according to the Rev. Sekou, is by the defeat of conservative evangelical positions.

Drawing connections between history’s heroes and today’s leaders is one way to tell a political story. But invocations of Obama as Lincoln, as MLK, or as FDR are double-edged.

Nonviolent resistance movements were part of the 20th century’s eternal contribution to human history; can those ideals be sustained and reinvigorated for a new era?

Controversial mega-pastor Rick Warren gave a little-noticed sermon at King’s home church in Atlanta on Monday. In it he seemed to dance around the controversy, invoking King’s unpopularity seemingly in reference to his.

Christians should neither excoriate Israel nor remain silent in the face of horrendous attacks in Gaza and elsewhere. Rather, according to Rev. Laarman, American Christians must heed King and make the issue about US policy and the kind of nation we aspire to be.

The best-selling poet in America today was born in Afghanistan, practiced a form of Islam that originated in Iraq, and has been dead for 800 years. How did a white man from Tennessee, who doesn’t read a lick of Persian, make Rumi accessible to mainstream America?

There is a temptation to regard Obama’s inauguration as the end of a forty year “wilderness” experience, but symbolism and symmetry can only take us so far. We, as citizens, are going to need to hold Obama accountable.

In a series of short essays, special to Religion Dispatches, religious historians, philosophers, and ethicists celebrate Obama’s place in American history while heeding Dr. King’s continued prophetic challenge for our nation.