April 2008
18 posts
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Catholic Stories
Alda Balthrop-Lewis, Production Intern Catholics of all sorts have been responding to our call for their stories. They’ve been writing to tell us about their experiences in the Catholic Church — the beauty and the pain and the hope they feel belonging to this vast and ancient tradition. We have been amazed by the depth and feeling with which these people have told us their stories. In an...
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Former Guest Under Threat →
Shiraz Janjua, Associate Producer Kind of sad and/or maddening news coming from Britain: our former guest Ed Husain has, through his think-tank, received death threats. Whether or not one agrees with the political stance of a co-religionist, the last thing anyone wants to see is more death and violence.
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Asking the Questions, Developing the Answers
Trent Gilliss, Online Editor Pesach (Passover) is upon us. In a recent entry by Rachel Barenblat (a rabbinical student who writes the Velveteen Rabbi blog), she recounts a seder in which three questions were asked and were answered with prescribed responses. A Sephardic custom (according to Barenblat, Iraqi or Afghani in origin), the seder opens with a person circling the table of participants...
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Who Am I
Shiraz Janjua, Associate Producer We’ve been asked to redo our staff bios on our About Staff page to make them more, well, human and quirky. Writing your own bio is a very odd experience. You refer to yourself in the third person, possibly like something Napoleon might do. We (and I do mean the royal “we”) hope to get those brushed up over the next few days and up online.
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How Great Thou Art
Maria Montello, guest author Editor’s note: Our parent organization, American Public Media (APM), is a large and diverse organization. Maria is the manager of software development for the company. She’s a fan of SOF who travels extensively and is planning an introspective journey to myriad spiritual sites around the world. We invited her to contribute to SOF Observed on occasion and...
Looking to Be Literate
Alda Balthrop-Lewis, Production Intern Over the past week I have been travelling. I must make a choice about my education, and I have been visiting the schools I am considering attending, asking questions of their students, staff, and faculty. People who study religion are often full of questions. So at The Divinity School of the University of Chicago someone raised the following: “What...
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Presidential Candidate Forum on Faith Issues
Colleen Scheck, Producer CNN is broadcasting a presidential candidate forum on faith issues this Sunday, April 13, at 8:00pm ET that includes both Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (as of this post, John McCain had not accepted the invitation to participate). I hate to admit it, but I think I’m not alone in acknowledging that my attention to this year’s presidential election ebbs...
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Poetry Month →
Kate Moos, Managing Producer
I subscribe to a daily poem from the Academy of American Poets. For me, it’s the pause that refreshes, like the videos that Trent likes to watch. This one bonked me on the head. Click on the header above to read this beautiful poem by Alan Shapiro. (text of poem removed from post in deference to author copyright).
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A Peabody Award!
by Krista Tippett, host
We’re all a little giddy around here today. This morning we learned that we won a 2008 Peabody Award, for our program on Rumi. This is broadcasting’s highest award, and for us it is a sign of arrival. Speaking of Faith launched almost five years ago as a weekly show. In the beginning, many simply didn’t believe that it would be possible to put a program...
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Spirit of Language
Rob McGinley Myers, Associate Producer (photo: Lastexit/Flickr) As we prepare to do a show on endangered languages, I’ve been thinking a lot about the intersection of language and spirituality. This came up recently with my three-year-old daughter, who has been asking about death since we buried her fish in our back yard. We were driving across town the other day and she said out of...
March 2008
22 posts
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"The Humanness of Catholic Identity" →
Trent Gilliss, Online Editor With Pope Benedict XVI’s upcoming U.S. visit, we’re taking the opportunity to start a broad-ranging conversation about the rich tradition of Roman Catholicism. With all the recent headlines, diverse practitioners of the faith have had little voice in telling their stories. This is where you come in. If you are or were Catholic, we’d like to hear your...
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Secrets and Families →
Kate Moos, Managing Producer Honor Moore has a memoir coming out in May called The Bishop’s Daughter, which was excerpted recently in The New Yorker. It tells the story of her father Paul Moore, a prominent, progressive Episcopal bishop in New York who passed away in 2003, and it reveals what had been a personal and family secret: that this father of nine children and sitting bishop had many...
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The Prophetic Voice of Science Fiction
Shiraz Janjua, Associate Producer In the next few days, we’ll be rolling out a new program exploring the tradition of humanism. During Krista’s interview with Greg Epstein, Humanist Chaplain of Harvard University, he mentions how he looks to modern literature as a source of understanding. The next book on my personal reading list is George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four....
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At War with the Utopia of Modernity →
Shiraz Janjua, Associate Producer Former SOF guest Pankaj Mishra has written a very interesting analysis about the current situation in Tibet: “Tibetans’ rage is directed not at communist rule, but the consumerist threat to their traditions and sacred lands.”
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The Ancients
Alda Balthrop-Lewis, Production Intern While conducting some research for our upcoming show on humanism, I was reminded of an amazing truth about ancient texts. Greek philosophy doesn’t come to us whole; it is an inheritance in pieces. The passage of time always edits, and of Epicurus, the ancient Greek philosopher who died in 270 BCE, barely any original writing remains. The scarcity of...
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The Face of the Prophet: Cartoons and Chasm →
Krista Tippett, Host Last month, leading Danish newspapers reprinted the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that sparked protest and rioting two years ago. They did so as a demonstration of freedom of speech, they explained, after a plot was discovered (and stopped) to kill the man who drew the cartoon. The reprints were cited as provocation in new recordings that surfaced, purportedly by Osama...
