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Every week, a group of mostly native-born Americans travel from a church in Manhattan to a detention facility in New Jersey.

They call themselves the Sojourners and their mission is to change the immigration detention experience, largely through friendship.

Through the clear security barriers that separate them, the Sojourners, part of the social justice mission at Riverside Church, develop relationships with detainees via simple conversations about life. It’s the group’s simple response to the complex political issue of immigration reform.

The Dalai Lama’s four-day New York City visit ends with an interfaith dialogue at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The cathedral is home to 10 monks from South India’s Drepung Loseling Monastery, who created a Sand Mandala in honor of the Tibetan spiritual leader’s visit.

The colorful mandalas, which take hours of painstaking work to construct, are destroyed as a symbol of the Buddhist belief in the fleeting nature of the material life.

A grassroots organization is stepping up its efforts to combat harassment on the streets, buses and trains.

For years, Holla Back NYC has been encouraging women to snap pictures of cat callers and harassers, and post the photos on the group’s site. Now the founders want to make that process easier. They are planning to launch an iPhone application this summer that will immediately send the photo and other information to a database. From there, Holla Back will compile data that organizers hope will encourage greater enforcement of anti-harassment laws in the city.

New Yorkers often fester in silence when they encounter rude subway behavior – the man who saunters up the left side of the stairs during rush hour, the woman who files her nails in the seat next to you, the kid who sings out loud to his iPod.

But Brooklyn comedian Tom Sibley doesn’t let public transit offenders off so easy. He targets them with his camera phone.

Sibley’s blog, Subway Douchery, exposes subway riders who violate the understood rules of public transportation, by plastering their pictures on the Web. The blog’s popularity has exploded in the past three months. But not everyone is a fan.

While some applaud Sibley’s nod to common courtesy, others say he’s violating his targets’ privacy.