One of my great pleasures here at Faith In Public Life is putting together the daily newsreel. It is a fun process, and it forces me to take a pretty wide view of what's going in faith and politics news. On Fridays I like to take a look back at the way things unfolded over the course of the week. The week-in-review will become a regular Friday feature here, but next week I'll instead be live-blogging the Family Research Council's "Washington Briefing." (That's the artist formerly known as the Values Voters Summit.)

The past two weeks have been chock full of stories that pointed to seismic activity on the right. Ever since Salon.com's Michael Scherer broke the story on September 30 that religious right leaders were threatening to back a third party candidate if Giuliani got the GOP nomination, stories about the Religious Right's political future (or lack thereof) have surfaced every day, largely by design of Dobson, Perkins, et al. If I were so inclined (and allowed), I could spend an entire day clipping video of Religious Right leaders on cable news and Sunday morning shows.

But by the end of this week, The Great Right Rift started to feel more like a shift in the wind. Stories of the cataclysm that will inevitably follow Giuliani's inevitable nomination shared space with news that the religious right was beginning to take a shine to Romney, and Giuliani agreed to show at the Family Research Council's straw poll next weekend. Turmoil abounds, and a schism is definitely possible, but the situation's beginning to look less like armageddon and more like politics.

As readers of this blog are well aware, there was this paper about "common ground" released this week by some groups called "Third Way" and "Faith In Public Life," but a different story about common ground was my favorite news item of the week. As first reported in Time and Newsweek, 138 preeminent Muslim leaders and scholars sent a letter to Christian leaders appealing to interfaith harmony and peace. (Full text of the letter here.)

Why care? Because getting such a broad and prominent group to sign onto a single statement of peace shows that all that talk about Islam being a religion of peace isn't just a bunch of politically correct nonsense. Says Time:

It points out that both religions are founded on goodwill, not violence, and that many of the fundamental truths that were revealed to Muhammad — such as the necessity for the total devotion to God, the rejection of false gods, and the love of fellow human beings — are the same ones that came to other Christian and Jewish prophets.

Because of this, the letter says, Muslims are duty-bound by the Koran to treat believers of other faiths with respect and friendship — and that Muslims expect the same in return. "As Muslims, we say to Christians that we are not against them and that Islam is not against them — as long as they do not wage war against Muslims on account of their religion, oppress them and drive them out of their homes."

With Christians making up about 33% of the world's population and Muslims making up around 22%, the letter says that finding common ground, "is not simply a matter for polite ecumenical dialogue between selected religious leaders." It is, instead, essential for the survival of humanity.

The New York Times noted that no Wahhabist signed the letter, but that doesn't invalidate this gesture of solidarity and peace. We can all hope that this bears greater fruit, but the statement is a blessing in and of itself.