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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.
Learning to the Love the Dark Night of the Soul
Fear of the dark: many of us remember that feeling from childhood. As we get older, we can become fearful of other kinds of darkness: the emotional blackout of depression, or the spiritual gloominess of doubt. A new book offers a different way of looking at darkness, not as something to be feared, but as something to be embraced. Featuring Barbara Brown Taylor, author of “Learning to Walk in the Dark.”
Bob Mankoff: I’m Not Arguing; I’m Jewish
Sitting behind his desk at The New Yorker, Bob Mankoff thinks about humor all day, and then, he goes home to dream about it at night. He’s been the magazine’s cartoon editor since 1997. But Mankoff is more than a cartoon guru; he’s also a serious thinker about the history of humor and its role in society. As it turns out, cartoons provide a powerful lens through which to see religion today.
Mankoff spoke to Nadine Epstein, editor of Moment Magazine. This is part four of our occasional series, “Great Jewish Thinkers” – our collboration with Moment about Jewish trailblazers in arts, politics and culture. From April 2014.
Barbara Ehrenreich: Turning an Eye Inwards
Barbara Ehrenreich is best known for looking outward at injustices in society. In her 2001 book Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, she went semi-undercover as a minimum wage worker. In her latest book, she turns inward, struggling to sort out a strange mystical encounter she had at 17. Whatever it was, she says, it was most certainly not a brush with God, which she calls ‘the great non-answer.’ From April 2014.
Soundscapes: Christianity
For the third part in our Soundscapes of Faith series, we listen to the strange and beautiful sounds of sacred harp singing, an early form of American church music. There’s no harp in sacred harp singing; it refers to the instrument we all have: the human voice.
