In a news year that’s brought us a fundamentalist, Koran-burning Christian preacher, pan-religious outcry against a proposed mosque near Ground Zero and threats of an exclusive Israeli conversion bill, leave it to the New York Times to celebrate the holiday season with a story about ecumenicalism.

Deputy Metropolitan Editor Peter Applebome traveled to Pleasantville, N.Y. — roughly 28 miles north of Manhattan in Westchester County — to report on an interfaith Thanksgiving service that concluded Sunday with a joint rendition of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.”

And joining Jews, Christians, Muslims and Buddhists — along with a gaggle of musicians — at the Pleasantville Community Synagogue bimah was the late folk singer’s daughter, Nora, who lives nearby.

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The service included readings from the Old and New Testaments, the Koran and “Thankfulness and Buddhism on Thanksgiving.” Already members of a local community organization, the Pleasantville Clergy Association, religious leaders saw this Thanksgiving as an opportunity to defy swirling notions of religious exceptionalism — the classic Guthrie tune, of course, was used to affirm America as a land of equality.

“It was natural,” Applebome writes, “that the interfaith group’s members saw a metaphor in their midst — a story line about diversity, tolerance and the changing nature of religious experiences that went counter to much of the imagery of discord and division in the news.”

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