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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.
Frayed Nerves for Jews and Muslims in France
France is home to half a million Jews, and many of them are terrified. The recent Kosher market attacks by an Islamic extremist are just the latest acts of violence against France’s Jewish community in the last 15 years, and most are linked to religious zealotry on the far edges of Islam. And Muslims are bracing for a backlash. This week, what’s behind the brewing anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim sentiment in France.
Featuring : Akbar Ahmed, author of Journey into Europe: Islam, Immigration, and Empire
Charles Asher Small, Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Anti-Semitism and Policy
Maud Mandel, author of Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict
Anne Rice-Called Back to the Darkness?
Vampire novelist Anne Rice has a conflicted soul. When we talked to her in 2009, she had abandoned atheism and returned to the Catholicism of her youth, committing herself to chronicling the life of Jesus. She told the world she was “called out of darkness,” and swore off books about the fashionably undead. But just a year later, her faith fled once again, and the vampires came back. Guest interviewer Mark Oppenheimer of the “Beliefs” column in the New York Times finds out what happened.
Hazzans: Judaism’s Cantors
For more than a thousand years, sacred singers called cantors, or hazzans, have led Jewish congregations through sung prayers. The melodies are a mix of traditions, designed to make worship more effective, and more beautiful. Now there’s an online home for more than 100 examples of cantor songs, first recorded in the mid-1980s for the “History of the American Cantorate” project.
