Listen Live on KKFI
Every Sunday at 3:00amAbout the Show
Inspired
Inspired is the nation's leading public radio show about faith, ethics and spirituality. Each week we offer you analyses of the big headlines alongside lesser-told stories – those of Orthodox Jewish artists and African-American atheists, Muslim feminists and spiritual seekers. Through these stories, a rough sketch of our country’s religious landscape begins to emerge. It’s a marketplace of beliefs and ideas too complex for sound bites, and too important to ignore.
Oksana Chapman: An “A” In Atheism
In the first installment of our Chaplains series, we spend a day with Rabbi Oksana Chapman, a Russian-speaking chaplain who grew up under Soviet rule and once got an ‘A’ in Atheism. At Hebrew SeniorLife in Boston, she offers the solace of song and ritual to Russian-speaking residents who had to keep their Jewish identity quiet. Produced by Ruth Morris and introduced by Trace Haythorn, executive director of the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education.
The Contents of a Spiritual Toolbox
Our guests, a physician and a hospice chaplain, discuss the importance of attending to the spirit as well as the body at the end of life. They describe how they work with elderly patients who aren’t religious to build meaning, and they introduce us to the concept of gerotranscendence– a theory suggesting that as we age we become less self-occupied and more expansive in our spirituality. Featuring Dr. Christina Puchalski, author of A Time for Listening and Caring, founder and co-director of the George Washington Institute for Spirituality and Health and Kerry Egan, hospice chaplain and author of On Living.
Baptized in the Sea
In a soundscape of surf, sand and spirituality, Father Christian Mondor, Franciscan priest living in Huntington Beach, Southern California, recounts how he began riding waves at age 70. In water, he finds a metaphor for the holy trinity. And in the surf, he finds a kind of baptism. Read Fr. Mondor’s entry in the Surfing Walk of Fame!
