SOF Observed

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The Eight Is Magical
Shiraz Janjua, Associate Producer

Here’s a little 55-second taste of next week’s show. Krista interviewed anthropologist and filmmaker Mayfair Yang about religion in China. This came toward the end of the interview after the “serious” questions.

1 month ago

What Do Pets Do For You?

Rob McGinley Myers, Associate Producer

So we’ve been trying to finally find someone to interview about the human animal bond, a show topic that’s been in the works for quite a while now. I was shocked to learn in my research just how much the relationship between humans and animals had changed over time. About 100 years ago, dogs in this country were primarily used for work on the farm, and rarely allowed inside the home. Today, 60-80% of dogs sleep with their owners at night in the bedroom, either in or on the bed.

Why have we gotten so much closer to these creatures? Is it our growing sense of displacement from nature that makes us want to form a bond with something non-human? Is it the same longing many people for natural places that a recent guest talked about in our show Pagans Ancient and Modern?

Of course, our desire to get close to animals is not new, as this amazing article from the New Yorker points out: the earliest artworks human beings are known to have created were cave paintings of animals. Maybe we bring animals into our home today for the same reason those first artists chose not to depict themselves but rather the living creatures around them. We want to get ahold of that wildness somehow. But I have to wonder what those cave painters would think if they could see us today, feeding the fish, changing the kitty litter, or doling out doggy anti-depressants.

(photo: m-louis/flickr)

1 month ago

Who Wrote (or Spoke) the Serenity Prayer First?

Mitch Hanley, Senior Producer

This article from The New York Times cites the recent discovery of archival clippings which suggest that Reinhold Niebuhr was not the composer of the famous Serenity Prayer (i.e. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things that I cannot change…”). Questions raised in the article include who first uttered the words, who actually wrote them down and was there some cross-pollination without attribution.

What is not widely known is that the Serenity Prayer that has been adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous was an adaptation of a sermon Niebuhr gave back in 1943. That specific year and sermon is attributed in the article to his daughter, Elisabeth Sifton. Following is widely believed to be Niebuhr’s composition:

God, give us grace
to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
courage to change the things
that should be changed,
and the wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.

If only Reinie had a blog back then, but then again maybe that would not have helped, either.

Listen to the program and review the exhaustive online treatment on Niebuhr we produced as part of our occasional biographical series.

1 month ago

Mental Blocks

"crosswords" by m_m_mnemonic

Shiraz Janjua, Associate Producer

After a group conversation about which Star Wars movie was the best one (discounting the new trilogy, obviously, my favorite The Empire Strikes Back has a strong following), I went out for lunch. In the food court nearest to our building, I saw at a distance a man sitting at a table, pencil in hand, his palm squeezing his forehead. He was looking down at some paper, and looked like he had to figure out a way to balance his finances or die. As I got closer, I saw what he was working on: a crossword puzzle. He was completely taken.

As I walked back to the office, I thought, “Gee, I should take up a new hobby.” I thought of just a few weeks ago when I was playing with my cousin’s son, following the instructions of a Lego jet, sifting through the pieces to find a red block with two studs, and feeling this kind of meditative calm come over me. I remembered being lost, as I would be in childhood, sifting through the blocks the same way. Maybe I should become a Legomaniac as an adult. (Unfortunately, sitting on the floor isn’t much fun anymore.) I guess I’m noticing all this because we just recorded some promotional language for our upcoming rebroadcast of Play, Spirit and Character.

(photo: “crosswords“ by m_m_mnemonic/Flickr)

1 month ago

Iranian Potter's "40 Angels"

Maryam Kouhestani's 40 angels from "Clay in Her Hands"

Colleen Scheck, Producer

Fatemeh Keshavarz, our guest in “The Ecstatic Faith of Rumi,” periodically distributes a personal newsletter sharing her thoughts and opinions on Iranian news, culture, and US-Iranian relations and politics. What I enjoy most about these newsletters are the visual elements she includes that highlight photography, art, and multimedia features that you wouldn’t find in U.S. media.

Recently she included a link to a slideshow of Iranian women potters describing their art. One potter, Maryam Kouhestani, talks about her striking piece of figures worshiping behind 40 angels:

“…My angels are children who were born old. They all look rough. They have not experienced the tenderness of childhood, but deep down they are still children. One of my angels is trying to tell her fortune. I got this idea from the children there. Their lives are so much at the mercy of fate and random events that they are always trying to find out what will happen to them next.”

1 month ago

Food from China
Andy Dayton, Associate Web Producer

Last week, while taking a break from updating the Web site for our program “The Ethics of Eating” I decided to see if I could find any images that would be useful for an upcoming program about China.

Next thing I knew, I found myself reading about ethical eating once again, stumbling upon the image above, which was used in a blog post about organic food products from China. The post briefly discusses the questionable certification of organic foods coming from China, and quotes a 2006 article from the Dallas Morning News:

Fred Gale, a senior USDA economist who has researched Chinese agriculture, said it was “almost impossible to grow truly organic food in China.”
“The water everywhere is polluted, and the soil is contaminated from industry and mining, and the air is bad.”

The story continues:

The USDA National Organic Program does not certify foods as organic; it certifies organic certification agencies. Forty of these are in foreign countries.

Many of the responses we’ve received for the recent rebroadcast of Krista’s conversation with Barbara Kingsolver were skeptical, to say the least. While this article by no means proves that all organic foods from China are fraudulent, it reaffirms for me that this sort of skepticism is probably necessary for this issue. Our cultural relationship with food continues to need reevaluation, but a larger solution may not be so simple as growing food on your own land (if you’re lucky enough to own land) or buying items stamped “organic” at the grocery store.

(Photo: Mike Licht/flickr)

1 month ago

Is “Sustainability” Sustainable?

Krista Tippett, Host

It’s been fascinating to watch the reactions to our recent rebroadcast of the Barbara Kingsolver. Last year we had a wildly positive response. This year, more than a few listeners experienced Kingsolver’s account of her experiment in a year of eating what she could grow herself — and my interview of her — to be elitist at worst or impractical at best.

Full confession here: I was more surprised by last year’s response, because I also felt that the odyssey Kingsolver undertook necessitated all kinds of basics that elude me and most of the human beings I know — a stay at home job where you set your own hours, a wildly cooperative teenage daughter, a farm you just happened to inherit — and that’s not to mention the southern climate. Still, I was compelled by her insistence that we can’t leave these problems to the next generation, and by her descriptions of the delights of homegrown food.

I did plant a garden last summer of the first time in my life, and loved it. I’ve made more of an effort ever since to buy food that has not travelled thousands of miles to get to me. But this year I haven’t managed the garden. I’ve become more acutely aware of how hard — if not impossible — it would be to live on what I could grow year round in Minnesota or even buy at coops or farmers’ markets. And I’ve learned about some of the ironies of this issue of food globally. For example, that New Zealand is producing such ecologically friendly food that, on balance, the kiwi fruit they produce might be an ethical choice for me to purchase. And on and on.

So here’s my question to you, to all of us: Is sustainability sustainable? Part of the challenge, it seems to me, is to be focused and mindful and accept the limits of what each of us can humanly do in the circumstances in which we live right now, and accept that in ourselves and others. Are we suffering from too little practical guidance on how the routines of our imperfect, already complicated daily lives can truly affect the environment? Or are we facing a debilitatingly guilt-inducing overload of information?

I’d like to hear others’ ruminations on this. What happened to the listening public’s excitement about eating locally between last year and this? Many of you asked if Barbara Kingsolver herself is still living this way. If she’s not, does that negate the whole effort? How can we stop sustainability fatigue from setting in?

1 month ago

Chilkoot Lake, Alaska
Trent Gilliss, Online Editor

With summer comes travel, and the SOF staff is on the move. The beauty of Kate having an iPhone is that she occasionally sends the staff photos she’s taken from her travels. I find these shared gems give an insight into what she sees at a book event, an awards ceremony, or when she’s on vacation.

With a breathtaking backdrop like this, how can one not be inspired to come back and look for the story in other connected landscapes — which reminds me of our looking into Belgian bloembinder Daniel Ost and his sense that flowers and trees are not merely decorations but are a way for him to convey a sense of meaning through his work. From a piece in The New York Times Magazine:

“…flowers are connected with spirituality. In the West we use them in a purely decorative way, but in Japan they work with the flower’s soul to express not just beauty but ideas like death. … I’ve always wanted to show flowers in their optimum moment, but now that I’m older, I also want to explore the beauty of dying.”

(photo: Kate Moos)

1 month ago

Your Stories, Your Voices: "The Touch of Alzheimer's Disease"

Trent Gilliss, Online Editor

Although most of Krista’s interviews make it into production, some regretfully don’t. I say regretfully because almost all of her conversations have an interesting thread, but perhaps not enough to carry an hour-long radio program.

And that’s the beauty of producing material online — no format constraints and limitless ways of displaying information. If the material is strongest at 29 minutes and 34 seconds, then that’s what it should be and can be.

This ability to create more compelling productions out of existing material is the liberating force behind the Web. It allows us, as producers, to become more creative with our material. But, reevaluation for other outlets also requires flexibility and a shift in thinking — a somewhat new approach to listening and editing for a radio producer, especially when it involves visuals.

As of late, Rob listened to an interview from 2002, Krista’s conversation with David Shenk on the impact of Alzheimer’s disease. Drawing on previous queries for “The Spirituality of Parenting” and “The Beauty and Challenge of Being Catholic,” he asked if we might do the same to create an online program addressing the topic of Alzheimer’s disease. It’s a great start and I trust that something meaningful will result, whether it makes it online or, hmmmmm…, maybe even on the air.

The average lifespan of men and women is on the rise. And, with it, an increasing number of people are suffering from Alzheimer’s disease or taking care of someone with Alzheimer’s.

Each person with this illness has a distinct experience and a distinct story, a story often carried in memory by a caregiver or loved one. If your life has been touched by Alzheimer’s, we’d like to hear your story. How has this disease changed the way you think about love, memory, personality and humanity? Help us reclaim this conversation. Share your stories and images with us.

1 month ago

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Language Reclamation, Not Just Preservation
Rob McGinley Myers, Associate Producer

What inspires a person to learn the language of his ancestors, even though he didn’t grow up speaking that language himself? And what inspires him to join a school where he can teach that language to children? What do those children think about the language? And what affect can the effort have on an entire community?

These were a few of the questions I had for Keller Paap, a teacher in an Ojibwe immersion school program called Waadookodaading (We Help Each Other) on the Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation in north-central Wisconsin. I got in touch with Paap while I was working on our recent program Sustaining Language, Sustaining Meaning. You can hear his story in the embedded audio above. He begins by introducing himself in Ojibwe.

What I gleaned from talking to Paap was that this language revitalization effort is doing more than merely preserving the language. It’s literally keeping the language alive so that it can continue to grow and change, with new words and new ways of saying things. I love the way he describes his students’ relationship to the language. They aren’t dwelling on the long-standing U.S. policy of forcibly educating Native Americans in English. They aren’t learing Ojibwe as a political act or even as a cultural act. They’re just living in it, and making it their own.

This audio piece was produced with help from Trent Gilliss and Mitch Hanley. Music by Brian Blade & the Fellowship Band. Keller Paap took the photo of the Ojibwe road sign, which translates as “The Dam.”

1 month ago

Your Top 3 Shows of the Past Year

Shiraz Janjua, Associate Producer

"Antony Gormley: Olympic podium" by threefishsleeping

(photo: “Antony Gormley: Olympic Podium” by threefishsleeping/Flickr)

Our company’s marketing folks have asked us to put together a compilation CD featuring material from the past 12 months. This CD will be used to give to public-radio programming directors who are not familiar with the program, as well as to potential funders, and for other marketing uses.

Rather than some edited compilation, we’re thinking of putting together the first half of three separate programs on the CD (each half being about 25 minutes). That way, we can showcase the depth, intimacy and storytelling we aim for. The other criteria? The shows must have been produced in the past year.

Choices, choices… It would be wonderful to highlight our Peabody Award-winning Rumi show. I’m also fond, myself, of the Mathematics show, the Architecture show, and the Jean Vanier show (yes, Jean Vanier is his own subject). Oh, and Heschel.

Three programs, 12 months, one CD — what are your three picks? (Our 2007 and 2008 archives, for reference.)

1 month ago

CNN: "Evangelical movement touts 'Jesus for president'"

Trent Gilliss, Online Editor For the last several years, we’ve presented a vast swath of Evangelical Christians who may not be so easily lumped into the voting bloc that’s often been identified with the Religious Right. The way that these voices read the Bible and live out their faith lead them to think or prioritize political and social issues differently than the previous generation. And their votes may run across party lines. One of those voices was Shane Claiborne, who Krista first interviewed last fall and then, more recently, spoke with as part of a panel conversation at the National Pastor’s Convention this spring. We knew that he was popular among younger Evangelicals, but more fully realized his growing superstar status when we witnessed the crowds, the cheers, and the many people asking for his autograph and picture. As the November elections approach, CNN recently picked up on his growing influence for this report, which they featured on their home page. 2 months ago

How Lucky We Are As Ojibwe People

Trent Gilliss, Online Editor

This post from Ojibwemowin.com illustrates the point that David Treuer was making — the story of the Ojibwe people and Native Americans writ large is one of hope, pride, and joyfulness, which runs counter to more popular depictions of tragedy and melancholy that pervade many of our imaginations:

“But what really struck me is how lucky we are as Ojibwe people. And that might be a strange thought, how could we, as Ojibwe people with abundant culture and language loss be lucky- and as I write it now it does seem a bit perverse, but I still hold to it. We have our language. We have our ceremonies and we have our faith. We have to work at it for sure. We have lost a lot, but as an elder has reminded me, we focus a lot on the past, on what we have lost. But what we have is in the future, now and in the future, that’s where we live.”

Thanks Monique for pointing this out, on a blog nonetheless!

2 months ago

Ancestors at Meal Time
Trent Gilliss, Online Editor

Yesterday, Krista had an early evening interview with the chair of the Asian Studies department at the University of Sydney, Mayfair Yang. Thankfully, within the first five minutes (before I had to leave and perform my parental duties), I was able to capture this endearing story.

Her tale about cuisine was a perfect continuation of Krista’s interview with Nicole Mones a few days earlier. I’m trying to find expedient, thoughtful ways of including our readers and listeners in the production process. The product is a bit rawer, but, from what I’ve gleaned from the response to our unedited interviews, people appreciate hearing the savory elements that might not be as polished.

Right now I’m able to film, edit, and upload this video using my Nokia N95 mobile phone. In the coming weeks though, I hope to stream our cuts-and-copy sessions live using this same phone and a great third-party service. I’m testing it now and am astounded at how well it works. In the meantime, please let me know what you think of our endeavors. Post a comment here.

2 months ago