Episodes
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Looking Back: Kim Lawton
“Across the US and around the world, I’ve witnessed the many ways people worship, express their spirituality, seek the sacred, and build community. The perseverance of faith and hope, even in the most difficult circumstances, continues to inspire me.”
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Looking Back: Lucky Severson
“I see it all the time,” says Father Michael Doyle, a Roman Catholic priest in Camden, New Jersey, “a beauty that’s deep and wonderful and sometimes tragic, but beauty absolutely, I do. Their faces are there with their burdens and their wrinkles and their difficulties and so forth, but beauty...
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Looking Back: Rituals
“Any ritual should have the capacity to deepen your mindfulness,” says University of Virginia professor Vanessa Ochs. It helps you “deal with the chaos of life.”
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Looking Back: Bob Abernethy
“What makes me a believer,” says writer Frederick Buechner, “is that from time to time, going back almost as far as my memory will go back, there have been glimpses I had, sometimes literally a glimpse, which have made me suspect the presence of something extraordinary and beyond the realm of the...
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Looking Back: Tim O’Brien
“In the last 20 years,” says correspondent Tim O’Brien, “we’ve seen five vacancies on the Supreme Court and changing attitudes on a wide range of social issues. Times do change, and so do the justices. For better or worse, what the Constitution really means would seem to have changed over the…
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Looking Back: Fred de Sam Lazaro
“Many of my stories have concerned human suffering,” says correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro, “and one of the most effective ways to tell these is through the work of social innovators and entrepreneurs, many driven by deep faith.”
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Looking Back: Judy Valente
“I think the purpose of the monastic life in the modern world is to show that we don’t need a purpose,” says Brother Paul Quenon of Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky. “The purpose of life is life, and you are to be just to be. Everybody measures their importance by how useful they are. That’s not it....
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Conflict Resolution in Public Schools
“Conflict is a part of human experience,” says Wichita West High School psychologist Janet Fox Peterson, “and teaching about speaking and listening is so very critical, and we’re not working on that very much as a society.”
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In the Footsteps of Mother Teresa
The sisters don't go out and try to fix the society,” says seminarian Peter Ludwig. “They really embrace the culture that they're in, find people, the absolute poorest of the poor. It's what's so different about Mother Teresa. She doesn't go and try to fix all the problems in the world. She goes...
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Perspective on Syrian Refugees: Imam Omar Suleiman
“They are human beings, and so they have a right to live in peace and security,” says Imam Omar Suleiman, who has made several visits to the refugee camps on the Jordanian-Syrian border. “And if we’re not contributing to the betterment of their situation...are we really the moral standard for the...
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Sanctuary Movement
Bob Feinman of Humane Borders says he “didn’t spend a whole lot of time paying attention to the rabbis” when he was in religious school as a child. “But the one thing I remember was the Seder every year at Passover, the Exodus. We were the ones that walked around in circles following Moses for…
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500th Anniversary of the Protestant Reformation
“We hope to celebrate this anniversary without hiding the problematic side, the dark side of Martin Luther,” says Rev Johannes Block, pastor of the Evangelical City and Parish Church of St. Mary’s in Wittenberg, Germany, where Luther himself preached hundreds and hundreds of sermons in the 16th...
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Extended Interview: Professor Michael Root
“I don’t see Protestant-Catholic unity coming in the immediate future,” says Michael Root, professor of systematic theology at the Catholic University of America. “There are real differences. The question we face is how do we both affirm the commonalities while being honest about the continuing...
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In the Footsteps of Martin Luther
Follow along as managing editor Kim Lawton visits several key sites in Germany associated with Martin Luther and the beginning of the Protestant Reformation 500 years ago.
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Religious Reaction to Trump Executive Orders
“We have a government now that is trying to legislate what it means to be faithful—faithful to America, faithful to a particular religious perspective,” says Rabbi Jack Moline, president of the Interfaith Alliance. “We heard that in the pre-inaugural sermon that the president was presented with,...
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New Camaldoli Hermitage
“We’re going back to where it all began,” says Fr. Columba Stewart, a scholar of monasticism and a Benedictine monk at St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, “with a variety of models of Christian ascetic life, and by ascetic I just mean disciplined. That’s what people are discovering, and...
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Extended Interview Fr. Columba Stewart OSB
“What St. Benedict is doing is providing a charter for making a community that really endures and that can encompass a variety of people who aren’t all there because they have the same personality or like the same music or have the same hobby. They’re all there for some purpose that’s really…
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Martin Scorsese’s “Silence”
His movie "Silence," says director Martin Scorsese, “is the struggle for the very essence of faith, stripping away everything else around it. You have to find a relationship with Jesus,” says Scorsese, “with yourself, really, because that’s the one you face.”
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Religion and the New Trump Administration
“I have heard that the Trump presidency could see the reemergence of a real Christian left in the United States,” says Stephen Schneck, director of the Institute for Policy Research & Catholic Studies at the Catholic University of America.
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Terry Waite
“I said this to myself in the face of my captors: You have the power to break my body, and you’ve tried. You have the power to bend my mind, and you’ve tried. But my soul is not yours to possess. In other words, my soul lay in the hand of God.”
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Millennials and the Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.
“There is a really important role that spirituality is playing among millennials and contemporary activists,” says Sarah Jackson, a professor at Northeastern University in Boston and an expert on social movements. But “it is a spirituality that is not necessarily tied to the formal structures of...
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Katie Meyler
“What defines you the most is what you do despite your fear,” says Katie Meyler, a 34-year-old American from suburban New Jersey who was working in Liberia in the midst of extreme poverty when Ebola struck. Now she runs a growing network of schools for girls and says, “Nobody chooses Liberia....
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Brexit and London’s Muslim Mayor
“I have never held myself out as a Muslim leader,” says Sadiq Khan, who became mayor of London shortly before Britain voted to leave the European Union. “But it’s a fact I’m a leader of Islamic faith, so that brings with [it] a responsibility, especially in current times.”
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Sean Callahan
The new president and CEO of Catholic Relief Services represents the spirit of American Catholicism by reaching out to suffering international communities. Even in the face of frightening crises around the world, says Sean Callahan, “the common good outweighs the evil that’s being done.”
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Shabbat/Sabbath
“God gave Shabbat to humanity,” says Rabbi Nissan Antine of Beth Sholom Congregation in Potomac, Maryland. “It’s about those more interior kinds of things, things about working on your soul, working on your friendships, your relationships. Those are really the important things in life. Those are...
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Look Ahead 2017
As the New Year begins, three journalists discuss the top religion stories they will be keeping an eye on in 2017 with host Bob Abernethy. He is joined by managing editor Kim Lawton, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, and Jerome Socolovsky, editor-in-chief of Religion News Service.
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Look Back 2016
In our final show before the New Year, we review the top religion and ethics stories of 2016. Host Bob Abernathy is joined by R&E managing editor Kim Lawton, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, and Jerome Socolovsky, editor-in-chief of Religion News Service.
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Mercy Chefs
“Hurting people don’t need to hear the gospel,” says Chef Gary LeBlanc. “They need to see the gospel.”
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The Threshold Choir
“When we sing to a patient, we are sending them love, we are wishing them well on their journey, we are saying we’re all in this together...We are learning from them how to do this thing called dying,” says Sarah Stott, a member of the Threshold Choir in Washington, DC.
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Hanukkah on the River
"When people stand together and see the menorah being lit, we're hoping to inspire them to a greater level of commitment and dedication to their own faith and tradition,” says Rabbi Chaim Block, executive director of San Antonio’s Chabad Center for Jewish Life & Learning.
About this show
An examination of religion's role and the ethical dimensions behind top news headlines.