February 2012
85 posts
2 tags
“A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.”
– —Jackie Robinson (January 31, 1919–October 24, 1972), from the epitaph engraved on his tombstone in Brooklyn, New York
The Hall of Fame baseball player is credited with being the first African American to play in the Major Leagues, debuting with the Brooklyn Dodgers. He not only excelled...
January 2012
69 posts
3 tags
4 tags
Civil Pen Pals as a Way to Know the Other
by Susan Leem, associate producer
After listening to our On Being’s Civil Conversations series, Michigander Carolyn Peterson wrote us expressing her hope for real-life opportunities to engage civilly with others differing in perspective:
“I would like someone to set up a website in which people could find political pen pals for civil, substantive conversations. For example, I am a...
2 tags
6 tags
Shared Paradise: Church of Kopimism Reshapes...
by Robert M. Geraci, guest contributor
There’s a new flying spaghetti monster in the spiritual marketplace: the Church of Kopimism. The newly “established” religion has become the talk of the internet, in part because of its transparently “unreligious” outlook and in part because of the group’s social perspective. The Church of Kopimism, which received official recognition as a religious...
6 tags
minneapolismusette asked: What inspires you?
4 tags
5 tags
3 tags
5 tags
5 tags
3 tags
“Your identity is not equivalent to your biography.”
– John O’Donohue, from “The Inner Landscape of Beauty”
7 tags
8 tags
Detroit Becoming, Detroit Jesus
by Susan Leem, associate producer
Kids play at the Campus Martius Fountain in Detroit. (photo: Maia C./Flickr, cc by-nc-nd 2.0)
After listening to this week’s show with Grace Lee Boggs (“Becoming Detroit”), Peter Putnam sent this inspired response:
“Time Inc. was here for a year — and this is the story they missed: Detroit becoming. Full disclosure: I’ve known...
5 tags
“If I did not see light in the story, I could not tell it.”
– —Tiya Miles
Our interview with the public historian who is unearthing the “complex interrelationships between African American and Cherokee people in pre-colonial America” is in the final stages of production. Look for our interview next week.
~Trent Gilliss, senior editor
5 tags
5 tags
8 tags
Moms are Solutionary Revolutionaries
by Barbara A. Stachowski, guest contributor
Grace Lee Boggs speaks at Hull-House in Chicago. (photo: David Schalliol)
This past summer, I drove to Chicago with Grace Boggs and Myrtle Thompson of Feedom Freedom Growers for some book-signing events and radio interviews. During the four- to five-hour drive from Detroit, Myrtle and I shared stories about raising our children. Grace didn’t say much.
...
3 tags
8 tags
Are Arab Jews Extinct?
by Naava Mashiah, guest contributor
A man holds a misbaha in the old city of Jerusalem. (photo: Flavio Grynszpan/Flickr, cc by 2.0)
The growing rift between Israel and the Arab world makes it hard to imagine that Jews and Arabs once coexisted across the Middle East. At one point these identities could be found not only in the same neighborhood, but even in the same person.
Is it an oxymoron to...
3 tags
“One of the things I learned from my father is that a crisis is both a danger and...”
– Within Crisis, Opportunity
by Susan Leem, associate producer
“That’s in the Chinese characters.” This passing reference by the 96-year-old Chinese-American philosopher Grace Lee Boggs got us wondering. What exactly does she mean? And what do those characters look like?
As it...
6 tags
7 tags
“I get a kick out of folks who call for equality now, the people on the left,...”
– —Rick Santorum speaking to a crowded restaurant in Boiling Springs, South Carolina before today’s vote, as reported by ABC News.
~Trent Gilliss, senior editor
5 tags
“If you have, let us say, a theory about man, and if you can only prove it by...”
– —G.K. Chesterton, from the chapter “Spiritualism” in his 1908 book All Things Considered
Image by Bill Rogers/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
7 tags
7 tags
7 tags
Meredith Monk: A Twitterscript
by Susan Leem, associate producer
Last Wednesday, the artist Meredith Monk joined our host Krista Tippett for a 90-minute conversation via ISDN. We live-tweeted highlights of this interview and have aggregated them below for those who weren’t able to follow along. Look for our show with her in the coming weeks, and follow us next time at @BeingTweets.
For those not familiar with Ms. Monk, she...
3 tags
9 tags
Running with the Dalai Lama
by Chris Miller, guest contributor
“Action” (photo: Alessandro Pautasso/Flickr, cc by-nc-nd 2.0)
Most people listen to songs like “Eye of the Tiger” or the theme from Chariots of Fire when running. I am not most people. I prefer a good old-fashion podcast.
A few days ago I was listening to the interfaith forum “Pursuing Happiness” while out on a five-miler....
Anonymous asked: how do I obtain a hard copy of the Jan. 15 show "The Art of Peace" with John-Paul Lederach? Stephen Foehr
3 tags
5 tags
Anonymous asked: I've got my black socks. I've got my sandles. I've got my stretchy pants pulled half way up my chest, and I don't care what anyone thinks. Aww, man. This is heaven, it really is. What do you think?
6 tags
5 tags
A Free Ride to Religious Groups in Secular Times?
by Martin Marty, guest contributor from Sightings
Photo by swatjester/Flickr
Those who observe United States Supreme Court decisions on “church and state” are dealing with what many call the most important “religious liberty” case in decades, at least since the 1940s. Like so many cases, this one had a parochial start.
The details are familiar, and we need not rehearse...
6 tags
3 tags
4 tags
“King constantly pointed out to those in the freedom movement that their refusal...”
– —Grace Lee Boggs, from her article “The Beloved Community of Martin Luther King” commemorating the 75th anniversary of his birth.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speaks in Paris in March 1966. (photo: AFP/Getty Images)
8 tags
The Echoing Silence of Your Mind
by Hudson Gardner, guest contributor
Separating oneself from the natural, real world is like uprooting a plant, putting it in sandy soil, watering it only to keep it alive:
you may find yourself growing,
and living,
and acting,
but there will always be something beyond, another sort of subtleness,
and you may find after many years that something is missing,
but you don’t...
Anonymous asked: shameless commerce?
5 tags
8 tags
3 tags
“The life of God and divine cognition may well be spoken of as a disporting of...”
– —Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, from the German philosopher’s 1807 work, Phenomenology of Spirit
Photo by Fox Wu (Flickr, CC by 2.0)
7 tags
“Before we marry the guy next door, don’t you think we ought to have a...”
– —Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention
Does anybody else find this statement by a leading Evangelical voice a bit incongruous? I understand what he’s getting at — not settling for Mitt Romney when there may be a better alternative for Evangelicals and social conservatives — but it...
8 tags
5 tags
