It was a year that saw Muslims taking to the streets in violent protest, venting their fury over cartoons that dared to suggest that theirs was a religion of violence.

A year too, when an obscure quotation from a 14th-century critic of Islam resurrected by the pope in a scholarly lecture at a German university made its way onto the world’s front pages, sparking more Muslim riots and the pope being burned in effigy.

Twelve months ago, no one would have seriously believed that the publication of some Danish cartoons — far more mild that routinely appear in the world’s editorial pages would provoke so much outrage.

But it did, and the incident raised real and serious questions about whether Muslims, seculars and Christians living alongside each other in Europe in 2006 truly know one another.

For Pope Benedict XVI too, 2006 was a defining moment. In the first year of his papacy, Benedict had seemed destined to live under the shadow of his predecessor, John Paul II, who many revere as the man who changed history by confronting Communism.

Now, some observers are suggesting Benedict is taking on a similar role, confronting what many perceive as the central danger of these times, a radical Islam that believes that God will bestow blessings on those who kill in the name of God. . Whether by design or not, Benedict’s lecture to scholars at Regensburg, Germany, put him into the forefront against those who believe in spreading their religion by the sword.

Benedict argues that violence has no place in advancing religion — one might hear him saying to suicide bombers and terrorists that any religion that acts against reason is acting against the nature of God.

The fear that his visit to Turkey last month would provoke more rioting and drive the two world religions further apart proved unfounded, however.

The protests never materialized, and Turkish Muslims, apparently moved by his visit to the Blue Mosque and willingness to drop his opposition to Turkey’s joining the European Union, came in the end to see him more as a friend.

His trip also had deep ecumenical implications, reflected by his embrace of the Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, during a Divine Liturgy and their joint affirmation that their unity was urgently needed to combat the forces of relativism and secularism.

Here in Rhode Island, Muslim leaders have been quick to recognize that killing and rioting over cartoons is never a way to win friends. To show fellow Rhode Islanders that they are not that way — and in fact that they regard such violence as tarnishing Islam —one local mosque held an open house, while most of the state’s imams agreed in February on a joint statement urging “all the communities of faith” to turn the troubling controversy into a “positive experience” of dialogue.

As for other developments in 2006, controversies in the U.S. Episcopal Church over homosexuality continue to raise the prospect of a split in the 70-million member Anglican Communion. According to one recent study, the Episcopal Church in the U.S. has lost 115,000 members in the last three years alone, bringing its total down to 2.2 million, due in part to the strife over the 2003 ordination of an openly gay man, V. Gene Robinson, as bishop of New Hampshire.

The refusal by the church’s General Convention to endorse a moratorium on ordaining any new openly gay bishops as had been recommended by a special Anglican commission, along with the church’s election of first-ever female presiding bishop, Katherine Jefferts-Schori, who supported Robinson’s ordination, seems to have intensified the desire of some of the more conservative parishes to jump ship. The Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin, Calif., has already signaled it wants to quit, and eight parishes in Virginia have voted to place themselves under the jurisdiction of a more conservative Anglican bishop in Nigeria

The effect on Rhode Island has been more limited. When parishioners of the Church of St. Peter and Andrew (now the Church of the Apostles) in Coventry voted early in the year to secede from the diocese and to place themselves under the jurisdiction of a bishop in Kenya, Rhode Island Bishop Geralyn Wolf took the unusual step of trying to make it less painful for all by allowing the congregation to buy the church building at half the appraised value.

Bishop Wolf celebrated her 10th anniversary this year as Rhode Island’s Episcopal bishop. She says the thinks the church is at a crossroads, but believes it can weather the storms.

In other news:

• The school house shootings of five Amish girls in Pennsylvania put international attention on the Amish community’s ethic of forgiveness, as grieving parents sent words of forgiveness to the family of their children’s killer and even established a fund for the killer’s family. It did not mean that they would ever forget what had happened, but they felt compelled to follow the example of Jesus.

• The refusal by Providence College’s president, the Rev. Brian J. Shanley, to allow an on-campus performance of the off-color play, Vagina Monologues, triggered demonstrations for and against. While supporters of the play said the piece was important to raising awareness about violence toward women, critics said they agreed with Father Shanley that it degraded women. By year’s end, at Father Shanley’s urging, the college staged a week of events exploring the issue in a more sensitive way.

• A long-running related controversy over Rhode Island College’s refusal to allow signs saying “Keep your rosaries off our ovaries” at the campus entrance took an unusual twist when Roman Catholic Bishop Thomas J. Tobin visited the quadrangle and led 200 people in a recitation of the rosary organized by the student anti-abortion group. The Women’s Studies Group, which put up the signs, recently announced that the Rhode Island affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union will be filing suit in its behalf against what the studies group called an infringement on their rights to free speech.

• Clergy made themselves heard on the casino question, with a coalition of Protestant and Catholic clergy calling for rejection of the question on last month’s ballot on grounds that gambling is motivated by greed and contrary to trusting God for one’s daily bread. The stand contrasted with Bishop Tobin, who wrote that Catholics don’t regard gambling as inherently immoral and that even he has even made some “pilgrimages to Foxwoods, paying my tithe to the slot machines.”

• Catholic worries that the movie version of Dan Brown’s book, The DaVinci Code would undermine people’s faith seemed to fizzle after most movie reviewers gave it a thumbs down.

• In October, Rhode Islanders Wendy Becker and Mary Norton married before a minister and a judge in Attleboro after a ruling that nothing in Rhode Island law prevented their Bay State same-sex wedding from being recognized in Rhode Island.

• Exit polls showed that voters in last month’s elections felt that moral values were a key component in their decision on who to vote for, though this time more voters saw Democrats as having the moral edge. An analysis by John Green of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life identified Catholics as the biggest swing voters, though on balance those Catholics attending church weekly still tended toward Republican candidates Less frequent attendees favored Democrats.

Among the other news events of 2006:

• Widespread anxiety continued over events in the Middle East, with Orthodox clergy expressing concern over the beheading of a priest in Mosul, Iraq, even as others expressed dismay over the earlier fighting between Israel and Hezbollah guerillas and worsening conditions in Iraq.

• Brown University celebrated the appointment of its first-ever Muslim chaplain, while later in the year it banned, without any full explanation, an evangelical student group that had been operating on the campus for years.

• The Rev. John E. Holt stepped down from his post as executive minister of the Rhode Island State Council of Churches to become CEO of local American Red Cross, while the Rev. Donald Rasmussen retired from his long-held post of executive minister of the American Baptists of Rhode Island.

• The Catholic diocese announced plans to close Notre Dame Church in Central Falls and the Spiritual Life Center in Narragansett.

• The Rev. Ted Haggard resigned as president of the National Association of Evangelicals after allegations surfaced about gay sex and methamphetamine use.