HuffPost: Monique Parsons.
“There are good things happening in many places, but Chicago seems to me to kind of have it all,” said Jane I. Smith, who recently retired as a dean at Harvard Divinity School. “It’s got all different backgrounds represented, and different ways of approaching Islam.”
CHICAGO (RNS) Religious affiliation may be on the wane in America, a recent Pew study asserts, but you wouldn’t know it walking into the storefront near the corner of West 63rd Street and South Fairfield Avenue.
Inside a former bank in a neighborhood afflicted with gang violence, failed businesses and empty lots, a team of volunteers drawn by their religious faith is working to make life better for Chicago’s poorest residents.