July 2011
46 posts
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“A voice said, ‘There he is — that one, you see, with the flowers.’ I...”
– —Ellen Graf, on meeting her husband in China for the first time.
This quotation is excerpted from her memoir The Natural Laws of Good Luck, which was just released in paperback.
~Susan Leem, associate producer
June 2011
65 posts
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Anonymous asked: For a few years, my son and I have been practicing yoga as a means of quieting our noisy minds. I personally have had limited success with this, and although many of the asanas are meditative, I have not actually tried formal meditation techniques. I am interested in exploring this further, and wonder if anyone can suggest a good reference for a beginner. I am especially interested in one which...
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“You get to the point where you evolve in your life where everything isn’t...”
– —New York State Senator Roy McDonald
The Republican politician said this statement to reporters about his decision to support same-sex marriage legislation. McDonald was the 31st senator to support the Marriage Equality Act. McDonald is a Vietnam veteran and former steelworker. As a politician,...
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“Dear Friends, I just launched http://t.co/fVHpS9y Praised be our Lord Jesus...”
– Pope Benedict XVI, who posted his very first tweet on @news_va_en, the Vatican’s Twitter account.
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“I just figured if I liked a song, it was mine.”
– —Jazz vocalist Nancy Wilson delivers a humdinger of a line on this week’s American Routes.
~reblogged by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
Anonymous asked: Good Meditaion Downloads, please.
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Anonymous asked: Hello,
I appreciate that there is an anonymous option for posting. I wonder though if every question is posted or if there is a way to ask something only for your (and your staff's) consideration. It is a question having to deal with an emerging effort in one community to bring the practice of mindfulness into the public education system.
Be well,
Kendall
I appreciate that there is an anonymous option for posting. I wonder though if every question is posted or if there is a way to ask something only for your (and your staff's) consideration. It is a question having to deal with an emerging effort in one community to bring the practice of mindfulness into the public education system.
Be well,
Kendall
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Transformation Is Compatible with the Heart of...
by Krista Tippett, host
Rich, a U.S. soldier who fought in Iraq, is hooked up to electrodes that monitor his brain activity while in Richard Davidson’s lab. (photo courtesy of “Free the Mind”)
I still remember when I began to hear about Richard Davidson’s work. More to the point, I remember the warmth and excitement with which the immunologist Esther Sternberg first told...
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Do You Know the Way to Sacromonte?
by Taline Voskeritchian, guest contributor, with photos by Tamar Salibian
The road may be — and almost always is — made of our footsteps, as Antonio Machado said, but there are places in the world, sacred sites, where arrival is at least equal to the effort of getting there, where our beginnings and our ends do actually know each other. The Camino du Sacromonte, which we recently climbed all...
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Danish Filmmaker Spends Year in Wisconsin...
by Nancy Rosenbaum, producer
For the past year, Danish filmmaker Phie Ambo has been trailing neuroscientist Richard Davidson at his lab in Madison, Wisconsin. Best known for studying the brains of Tibetan Buddhist monks, Davidson’s research has shown that meditation can literally change the brain.
He’s the featured guest in our show titled “Investigating Healthy Minds.”...
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Will Muslim Women Feel at Home in Their Home...
by Anna Mansson McGinty, special contributor
Muslim men and women stroll down the Champs-Élysées in Paris. (photo: Archibald Ballantine/Flickr, cc by 2.0)
“Of course, I’m at home (laughter). Who else’s (country) am I in? I feel at home. I have my family here, we live, we eat, we cry, we laugh, we suffer, we don’t suffer. Some people are pleasant, some insult us. But truthfully, the day...
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Anonymous asked: I would like to know the scientific advances in teleportation and materialization. Both have been repeatedly proved by great Hindu spiritual scientists...
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Twitterscript of Jane Gross, a "Dear Abby" of...
by Susan Leem, associate producer
Krista brought Jane Gross to our attention at our weekly Monday staff meeting as someone who knows aging intimately from the “far shore of caregiving.”
This Pulitzer-nominated journalist developed her expertise on caregiving and aging not just vocationally, but through living this experience with her elderly mother in her final years.
She started...
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“It was not in my nature to be an assertive person. I was used to looking to...”
– —Jhumpa Lahiri
(Photo by Scott Gries/Getty Images)
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author has said that she feels more comfortable observing other people than being a participant on the stage of life. But in this week’s New Yorker, Lahiri opens up and tells the story of how she became a writer....
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How You Perceive Free Will May Not Be a Choice
by Susan Leem, associate producer
photo: Toni Blay/Flickr, cc by-nc-sa 2.0
The nature of “free will” is central for those who study ethics, the law, and religion. And science is getting in on the discussion.
Researchers cannot determine whether humans can make truly voluntary choices or if we’re justifying unconscious impulses. But their findings around the edges of it are...
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Anonymous asked: About half-way through the Aimee program I thought I heard Krista mention a book about the all-consuming nature of ministry from a woman's viewpoint. Perhaps I was distracted while driving but I thought the book was written by a woman. It sounded like an ideal gift for my pastor, who's going on sabbatical for 8 weeks. Didn't see it referenced on the website. Does anyone recall...
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“When I go to a campus where the Muslim Student Association and the Hillel are...”
– —Eboo Patel, from “An Effort to Foster Tolerance in Religion” in today’s New York Times
Eboo Patel is one of the busiest, most energetic people we know. We produced a show with him as the featured guest several years ago and titled it “Religious Passion, Pluralism, and the...
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“Don’t pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world?”
– —Haruki Murakami, from Sputnik Sweetheart
A perfect Monday reminder as you look at your work calendar this morning.
~reblogged by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
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Reminder of an On-Stage Exchange Thanks to...
Ms. Tippett: So Sylvia, one thing following on that. Lovingkindness meditation is also towards one's self. You share a story in your writing about precisely that, but you share what you often say to yourself when you're in a moment of anxiety. OK. So I think this is just great advice. I'm going to hang onto this. "Sweetheart, you are in pain. Relax, take a breath, let's pay attention to what is happening, then we'll figure out what to do." I think that's a fabulous sentence for one's self and for one's children.
Dr. Boorstein: I'm so pleased that you found that. It's tremendously pleasing to me because I meet people in some significant numbers who tell me that they say to themselves in moments of distress. I say — they say, "I say to myself, 'Sweetheart, you're in pain. Relax, take a breath.'" I love that. A whole bunch of people out there saying to themselves, "Sweetheart."
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“A powerful store of social capital still exists. It is called religion: the...”
– —Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the United Kingdom
In his article in the New Statesman, the chief rabbi builds on Robert Putnam’s recent research on the role of religion in public life. Sacks argues that religion and its institutions can, and should, play an important role in civil society —...
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“It is no coincidence that the big debate over the nature of society – the red...”
– —Giles Fraser, from his commentary in the Guardian on Archbishop Rowan Williams’ recent article challenging government officials on issues of social justice and human welfare.
by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
(photo: Steve Punter/Flickr, cc by 2.0)
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What Confucianism and Pentecostalism Have in...
by Susan Leem, associate producer
A visitor looks at the statues of the 72 Disciples of Confucius in the courtyard at the Koshi-byo, or Confucius Shrine in Nagasaki, Japan. (photo: Kiyoshi Ota/Getty Images)
Dogma, well at least its noted absence, has made its way into two of our recent shows. And it is non-dogma itself that binds two very disparate belief systems. Astrophysicist Lord Martin Rees...
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“Every person processes and embodies their tradition in an original and organic...”
– —Paul Raushenbush, the wise and elegant editor of Huffington Post Religion, has just written an outstanding piece on the art and work of bringing religious ideas and difference into our public spheres. It’s sentences like the quotation above that deserve slow reading and pondering.
He then...
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Power, Politics, and the Downfall of Men
by Debra Dean Murphy, guest contributor
Marilyn Monroe holds a framed portrait of Abraham Lincoln. (photo: Milton Greene, via Michael Donovan/Flickr, cc by-nc-sa 2.0)
This spring I’m finally reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s masterful work, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. It’s been instructive to read her historical account in the midst of this season of...
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Anonymous asked: It is time for you to bring The humanist & environmentalist E. O. Wilson on your show. Mr. Wilson would be a leveling influence to those guests on your show that feel that the answer to society's disfunctional lifestyle is prayer and more technology. I would guess that he would tell you that society has a bright future but only in relation to our allowing the environment to also have a...
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“In each generation we see sparks which we ignore just because they don’t fit...”
– —Isaac Bashevis Singer
~reblogged by Trent Gilliss
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“Health is not a commodity. Risk factors are not disease. Aging is not an...”
– David Loxtercamp, author of A Measure of Days: The Journal of a Country Doctor, as read in his interview with NPR’s Liane Hansen. 