The following is a guest contribution. Reuters is not responsible for the content and the views expressed are the author’s alone. Matthew Weiner, the author, is the Program Director at the Interfaith Center of New York. He is writing a book about Interfaith and Civil Society.

When terror attacks like those in Mumbai occur, many people of faith want to stand together despite their differences to condemn them with one voice. Faith leaders in New York, having seen their own city targetted in 2001, quickly responded with a show of support for their sister city in India. Their news conference on the steps of New York’s City Hall on Monday was an example of how faith communities in the world’s most religiously diverse metropolis can join hands to speak out against such violence.

(Photo: New York interfaith meeting, 1 Dec 2008/Edwin E. Bobrow)

Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, senior vice-president of the New York Board of Rabbis, Mo Razvi, a Pakistani-American Muslim and community organizer, and the Interfaith Center of New York organized the meeting while Councilman John Liu got the green light to use City Hall as the venue. Potasnick worked through Thanksgiving weekend to make it happen and insisted on having representatives from every faith. “It is very important to condemn the attacks…but it is imperative we stand together with one voice,” he said.

Indeed almost everyone was there. Imam Shamsi Ali of the Islamic Cultural Center of New York spoke condemned the attacks by Muslim extremists as un-Islamic. Jaspreet Singh of the United Sikhs spoke on behalf of a community rooted in the Indian Subcontinent. Imam Syed Sayeed, a Muslim from India and longtime New Yorker, recalled his homeland has been a religiously plural place for thousands of years. Ven. Kondannya of the New York Buddhist Council called for a non-violent response to the attacks, as did Jain community representative Naresh Jain, who lost a friend in the killing. Members of Chabad, the Brooklyn-based Hasidic community who lost a rabbi in the attacks, were also present.

Dr. Uma Mysorekar, president of the Hindu Temple Society of North America, said she had trained in a Mumbai hospital that treated many victims and remembered the discussions that students of different faiths used to have there. “In Mumbai now, they are getting back to work,” she said. “This is all we can do. It is what the terrorists want to stop us from doing.” Dr. Mysorekar had held a prayer service with Mayor Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn just hours after the attack and prayers have continued at her temple in Queens ever since.

(Photo: Taj Mahal hotel, Mumbai, 27 Nov 2008/Punit Paranjpe)

“We know how hard it is to build relationships across difference in times of crisis, and our hearts go out to Mumbai,” Said Rev. Chloe Breyer, the Executive Director at the Interfaith Center of New York. In fact, it was not easy to assemble members of all the main religions represented in Mumbai; in the rush to arrange the meeting, we could not contact the Zoroastrians in time. But how often do Hindu, Ultra Orthodox Jewish and Muslim leaders get together?

Actually, they get together more often than one would think. Potasnik and Mysorekar first met at an Interfaith Center news conference two days after 9/11. It was there that Mysoekar witnessed the courage of a dozen Muslim leaders denouncing those attacks and realized how interfaith contacts could help keep the peace. She invited a Muslim speaker to her Hindu program in Queens, which did not go over all too well among some of her more conservative members.

In the years since then, many of these faith leaders have met regularly despite reservations in their own communities. Monday’s press conference was not be held at Mysorekar’s temple in part from fear the Orthodox Jews would be uncomfortable. Many Muslim leaders were invited but there are serious tensions among some of them and the Jewish leadership in this city, tensions that will not go away with this small victory. But the day-to-day ties forged since 9/11 helped assemble this interfaith group quickly to respond to the Mumbai violence. To date 13 different local Muslim organizations have condemned the Mumbai attacks.

(Photo: World Trade Center, New York, 11 Sept 2001/Brad Rickerby)

On Wednesday, the Jewish Community Relations Council and the Interfaith Center plan a program in Queens with mostly Hindu and Jewish groups (including an Indian Jewish congregation). Dr. Mysorekar wants to hold another program at her temple and all will be invited. The work of interfaith dialogue in the world’s most religiously diverse city goes on.

This could be very interesting … or maybe a flop. Islam Channel, a British Muslim TV channel broadcast on satellite and webcasts, plans to host a weekly religion quiz show called “Faith Off” from mid-June. It’s meant to promote better understanding among religions by pitting teams from different faiths against each other. As the Guardian’s religion correspondent Riazat Butt put it, the show will pit “Jews against Muslims, Sikhs against Christians and Hindus against Buddhists, with contestants competing for cash prizes.” Sounds like an interesting idea, but I don’t know if it will make great TV.

Like all quiz shows, its success will depend on how well it’s presented, how interesting the questions are and how knowledgable the contestants are. But one of the recurring religion stories you see is the survey about how little many people know about their own religion. In fact, they’re hardly news anymore.

So I wonder how well contestants will do even with questions about their own faith, let alone anything dealing with another religion. And what about issues where there are differences of opinion within one religion? If the producers weed out all the difficult and contentious questions, is there enough left to make a lively and challenging show?

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Posting vacation photos is not what this blog is about, but this one has a religion angle. I just spent a week in India and attended the ordination of the new Roman Catholic bishop of Nashik, a city near Mumbai in an area where Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) is a potent political force.

Archbishop Felix Machado (standing at top of stairs) was under-secretary of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue in Rome before his appointment. So he invited leaders of all the religions in the city to join him and give a novel touch to his episcopal ordination. In the picture, Hindu, Jain, Sikh, Muslim and Buddhist leaders stand behind him as Acharya Swami Sanvindanand Saraswati, who heads a Hindu monastery in the city known across India as a Hindu pilgrimage centre, welcomes him to Nashik.

Michael Gonsalves, Special Correspondent for UCA News (Union of Catholic Asian News Agencies), wasn’t on vacation and he wrote this report on the event.

Some international crises drag on so long that outsiders can forget what life in the area was like before the unrest began. Look at Kashmir, the beautiful mountain region split by war between India and Pakistan at Partition in 1947. The Muslim separatist unrest in Indian Kashmir flared up again in 1989 and led to clashes 10 years later that threatened to spark a full war between the two nuclear states. These years of unrest have fanned tension and suspicion between the majority Muslim population and the minority Hindus and Sikhs. But peace efforts in recent years have brought the violence down to the point where the Hindus could revive a religious tradition they dared not celebrate publicly for 18 years. The violence is not over, as our photo of the police protection for the ceremony vividly shows, but progress is being made.

As our Srinagar correspondent Sheikh Mushtaq wrote,

Hundreds of chanting Hindus burnt a huge effigy of a demon king to mark one of their biggest festivals for the first time in Kashmir since Muslim militants launched a revolt 18 years ago.

The celebrations late on Sunday came at the end of the nine-day Dusshera festival, which celebrates god-king Ram’s victory over the mythological king Ravana, symbolising the triumph of good over evil.

Although the Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley is home to about 10,000 Hindus, they had stopped celebrating Dusshera in the open due to fear of Islamist militants who targeted the community after the anti-India insurgency erupted in 1989.

But with militant violence falling to an all-time low this year, more than 400 Hindus, known as Kashmiri Pandits, marched through the streets of Srinagar, Kashmir’s summer capital, and burned Ravana’s effigy in a highly guarded cricket stadium.

Read the full story here.

This doesn’t mean fighting is not continuing out in the hills. As our colleagues in India reported on October 8, more than 26 separatist guerrillas and seven soldiers were killed in fierce firefights in the first eight days of the month before the Pakistan-based United Jihad Council declared a three-day truce to celebrate the end of Ramadan.

Tourism, which would be a valuable moneyspinner for the region if public safety were better assured, has also suffered badly. Check out a video by our television producer Stefanie McIntyre: