Episodes
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This week on Beliefs, we return to a conversation with one of our favorite guests, scholar and writer Susan Jacoby.
Secularism and atheism finds a full-throated defense in this episode. Jacoby takes us on a journey of where we were just one year ago: presidential politics on the rise, the rise of secularism, no pandemic in sight, and a world less complicated.
Jacoby brings together the threads of various moments in history to identify her view that religion and politics have never comfortably coexisted.
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From Our Archives:
We revisit a conversation from our first season with the Rabbi of Congregation Beth Elohim. She describes the clarity she feels from what she calls the unfinished business of America. Reparations for slavery, the rights of women to control their bodies, and opposition to xenophobic oppression; all a part of the central moral character Rabbi Timoner feels is her purpose. As a rabbi, as a Jew, and as a social justice activist.
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Missing episodes?
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Speaker, Pastor and Scholar Dr. Christopher A. House resigned from Liberty University recently in protest of President Jerry Falwell Jr’s deleted tweet featuring both blackface and KKK characters.
To speak to us about the moment when belief becomes action, Beliefs producer Jay Woodward asked Dr. House for a conversation.
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Writer and historian Jemar Tisby, Pastor Tyler Burns of New Dimensions Christian Center in Pensacola, Florida co-host the podcast Pass The Mic for their organization The Witness - A Black Christian Collective.
We gratefully thank Religion News Service reporter Adelle Banks for leading the conversation.
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The steady call to reopen churches –amplified by Presidential encouragement- is thrilling to some and alarming others. How do we return to worship when the act of group singing, chanting, and praying can be so dangerous?
How can churches be told to cease their primary function?
Beliefs producer Jay Woodward spoke with RNS opinion columnist Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin, and RNS Editor-In Chief Bob Smietana to assess the tensions facing churches across the country.
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A ministry of song and service, with devotion to the most invisible among us.
The husband and wife singer-songwriting team of Al and Andi Tauber, Urban Mennonites:
They seek and value the simple life – in much the same way as their Amish and Quaker spiritual cousins, but their calling returns them to urban spaces; to pressing societal concerns. This episode of Beliefs was produced by Monique Parsons in collaboration with KALW's The Spiritual Edge, the University of California’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture, and Religion News Service.
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We all have Beliefs on where our soul goes upon death. What remains is just that – remains. How do we honor the vessel that held the person we used to know? From earth to water, and even to the sky, delivering the body back to dust contains deep ritual for many faith traditions.
Bill Baker speaks with Hamilton College Professor S. Brent Rodriguez-Plate to find guidance on the comfort of the ritual of passing.
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To understand who we are, and what our numbers signify, we turn to the math, to the staticians.
Some among us combine psychology, algebra, opinion, and faith to read the rivers of American opinion.
Greg Smith is associate director of research at Pew Research Center. He helps to coordinate the Center’s domestic polling on religion.
As the world gets stranger, we look for answers - from the divine, and from the numbers...
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For decades, the political influence of faith has been seen in the might and the dominance of the Religious Right.
A new book from Religion News Service political correspondent Jack Jenkins called American Prophets, The Religious Roots of Progressive Politics and the Ongoing Fight for the Soul of the Country charts the so-called Religious Left.
Beliefs producer Jay Woodward and I spoke with Jack about his new book and the emergence of a powerful new political identity.
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Houses of worship across the world are adapting to the challenges of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Keeping congregants feeling tied to their faith, themselves, and one another has been a challenge felt by all. But what if faith isn't at the center of the congregation? How are humanist, atheist and agnostic spiritual communities handling the isolation caused by the pandemic?
James Croft, a clergyman at the Ethical Society of St. Louis, spoke with Beliefs producer Jay Woodward this week to share insight on how his congregation has handled the past several weeks.
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On Feb. 3, 1943, the U.S.A.T. Dorchester - carrying 902 service men, merchant seamen and civilian workers was sunk in the cold Atlantic. Among those lost were four Army chaplains whose rescue efforts became the foundation of post-war interfaith activism.
Our guest today is Eboo Patel, Founder and President of the Interfaith Youth Corps. He sees the beginnings of a new interfaith understanding coming with the trauma and international struggle against the novel coronavirus.
Religion News Service Editor-In-Chief Bob Smietana spoke with Eboo Patel for Beliefs. -
Last episode we spoke to Father James Martin to ask simple questions about God, suffering, and the pandemic. His episode is the anchor of a daisy chain of conversations taking us around the world – faith to faith, place to place.
Father Martin nominated our next guest, Sister Norma Pimintel, the Executive Director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley. Her position servicing immigrants and refugees in the borderlands gives her unique perspective. If the pandemic can come for anyone from Prime Ministers to Louisiana Parishioners... what will we learn about human equality in the face of such a threat?
Sister Pimintel spoke to Beliefs Producer Jay Woodward from her office in Texas.
This episode is part of a series of interviews speaking to the moral, ethical and spiritual takeaways from the global pandemic experience.
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It’s a personal note from me this week. Not usually appropriate for news the way I prefer it, but these are very different times. My friend Father James Martin wrote a short piece that ran in the New York Times called, ‘Where Is God In A Pandemic’. Like so many other people, I wanted to know what this man – whom I admire – would say to me, to us, during a moment of universal human suffering. We spoke, as everyone must these days, on the phone.
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Asking how ethics occur naturally, or emerge through faith takes us to speak to Professor Christine Firer Hinze. Hinze is a professor of Christian Ethics at Fordham University and the director of the Francis and Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies.
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This week's guest, Martin Doblmeier, is a documentary filmmaker specializing in content touching on faith, religion, and spirituality. He joined me for a discussion on his recent PBS film: "Revolution of the Heart: The Dorothy Day Story”.
'Revolution of the Heart: The Dorothy Day Story' traces Dorothy Day's journey from a young communist journalist, to a Catholic convert, to the co-founder of The Catholic Worker newspaper and the first "houses of hospitality," which sheltered New York City's homeless during the Great Depression.
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Bishop John Michael Botean is the head of the Eparchy of St. George in Canton, Ohio. Botean's diocese, which permits priests to marry, is the only one of its kind outside of Romania. This week on Beliefs, host Bill Baker interviews Botean at his cathedral in Ohio.
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Jana Riess is a senior commentator and author of the popular column, Flunking Sainthood for Religion News Service.
Sharing her personal experience with writing critical commentary on an aspect of her Church’s teachings, Riess stumbled into a strong backlash and an opportunity to re-think her opinion.
Then she did what sometimes seems unthinkable in the public sphere – she apologized and reconsidered.
Jana Riess spoke with Beliefs producer Jay Woodward to sort through the experience.
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Spiritual advisor to President Trump Paula White was recently filmed in her church giving a sermon that employed idiosyncratic and fiery rhetoric. What is the new language of spiritual warfare? Where is it coming from and where is it taking us?
Andre Gagne is Associate Professor in the Theological Studies Department of Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec. His work focuses on the Christian right, charismatic Dominionism, fundamentalism, religious violence and the interpretation of the Bible.
This week on Beliefs, Gagne discusses spiritual warfare rhetoric through the lens of Paula White's recent sermons.
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Stephen Johnston has narrated and sold more translations of the Bible than any other person in history. He graduated from college with a BA in Radio and Television and planned to become a news announcer. In 1976 he was approached about narrating the New Testament on cassette. The rest is scripture.
He has international reputation as a narrator; receiving many awards including an Emmy, the New York Film Critics Award, the National Silver Microphone Award and the Army Commendation Award.
Stephen joins Beliefs from his home in California.
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The Rev. Mary Bredlau officiates 350 to 500 funerals a year.
For Bredlau, an Episcopal priest and former Roman Catholic nun, there’s nothing more important than this painful ministry. Bredlau is a thanatologist, certified by the Association of Death Education and Counseling.
Beliefs producer Jay Woodward sat down with her in her adopted hometown of Las Vegas, Nevada.
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