SOF Observed

A Pictorial Corridor

by Nancy Rosenbaum, associate producer

Conservation biologist Alan Rabinowitz has devoted his career to protecting “big cats” all over the globe — lions, tigers, panthers, jaguars, and more. His chosen vocation as a “voice for the animals” has brought him to places many of us only dream of visiting: the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas, the jungles of Belize, the jaguar corridors of Brazil.

Experience a taste of Rabinowitz’s adventures for yourself. We’ve paired stunning National Geographic photographs of Rabinowitz’s work around the world with audio gems from his interview with Krista. Hear how Rabinowitz’s struggles with human physical impediments (a debilitating childhood stutter and more recently cancer) have shaped and fueled his passion. And while I’d love to someday ride atop an elephant, I’m glad to absorb these incredible photographs of tigers, panthers, and leopards from the safety of my desk.

Permalink (August 25, 2010 at 2:45 am)

Share

Unitarian Universalists in Focus

by Nancy Rosenbaum, associate producer

Earlier this summer, Unitarian Universalists convened in Minneapolis, Minnesota for their General Assembly. The “GA” is an annual event where UUs gather for worship, learning, and fun. We showed up with a video camera in tow to pose a few questions to roughly a dozen “UUs” on the very first night of their gathering:

What’s a UU?
Why did you decide to attend this year’s General Assembly?
How did you become a UU?

We’ve posted shorter video excerpts of people’s candid responses here and here. Now, for the first time, you can watch the fully produced 8-1/2 minute extended remix version that includes all three questions, plus a few other surprises.

Permalink (August 20, 2010 at 6:00 am)

Share

"Haibuns and Untold Stories"

by Nancy Rosenbaum, associate producer

“In peacebuilding sometimes it takes twenty years to notice a seed has sprouted.”
—John Paul Lederach

This quote is part of an haibun, a style of composition combining haiku and prose, and is included in Lederach’s essay, “Haibuns and Untold Stories.” A personal reflection on his peacebuilding work in Colombia these last decades, the essay uses the poetry of Pablo Neruda to pose questions like: “How can I heal if the violence has not ended?” and “How do we reconcile with people we never knew?”

In “The Art of Peace,” Lederach recounts a speech delivered by the Colombian campesino Josué Vargas, who stood up to a paramilitary general and inadvertently sprouted a nonviolent peace movement there nearly 24 years ago. Several listeners, including Marie Beard in Alpharetta, Georgia, inquired about Vargas’ speech. As it happens, Lederach includes Vargas’ address in its entirety in “Haibuns and Untold Stories.” So, we’ve posted it here for Marie and others who are interested in learning more about this man and his words.

In the image above, John Paul Lederach meets with peacebuilders in Colombia in 2009. (photo: Esperanza Hernandez D.)

Permalink (August 10, 2010 at 5:00 am)

Share

The Enduring Life of Eat, Pray, Love

by Nancy Rosenbaum associate producer

Eat, Pray, Love. You can’t walk through an airport without seeing it. Elizabeth Gilbert’s self-described “freakish success” and “mega sensation” has graced the New York Times bestseller list for over three years. Gilbert’s 2009 TED talk on creativity has probably peppered your Facebook newsfeed. And, next week, the movie version of Gilbert’s (played by Julia Roberts) memoir will make its way big screens across the country.

I’ll confess: I only made it through the “eat” portion of Gilbert’s book. I took a literary siesta after all those descriptions of asparagus, pasta, and gelato. But there are a lot of you out there who followed along as Gilbert traveled from Italy to India and then Bali and found inspiration in her words and story.

I’m curious. How did Gilbert’s book touch you? What resonated with you? Tell us how you make sense of its enduring appeal.

Permalink (August 8, 2010 at 5:00 am)

Share

What Does WikiLeaks Reveal About Our Inner Selves?

by Nancy Rosenbaum, associate producer

Julian Assange of WikiLeaks holds a copy of The Guardian newspaper that features a report using the site’s leaked documents on the Afghanistan war. (photo: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

[Governments] used to be able to control what…newspapers and news organizations would do in part by informally controlling their access to information, by in essence saying, ‘If you go over the line, we’ll stop talking to you. We won’t invite you on to the press plane. We won’t give you a seat on the bus.’ And reporters behaved within certain parameters in part, because they do need that continued access. WikiLeaks doesn’t need a seat on the bus.
—Micah Sifry, executive editor of TechPresident.com on FutureTense

Micah Sifry’s commentary on the unfolding WikiLeaks story on the war in Afghanistan has gotten me thinking about questions of trust and relationship-building in and beyond the realm of journalism and politics. At its worst, needing to keep our “seat on the bus,” as Sifry puts it, can result in collusion and self-censoring. Information or, put differently, necessary truths, get squelched in favor of preserving expedient relationships.

Maybe we do this with family, friends, and loved ones — keep things to ourselves to maintain a connection, a sense of belonging, or simply to get our basic needs met. But coming at it from another direction, I believe there are moral and relational benefits to interdependence. Both sides have to consider each others’ needs. Empathy is triggered. No one party can act with reckless abandon. The work of peacebuilder and conflict transformation practitioner John Paul Lederach comes to mind here.

I wonder if the truths unearthed through WikiLeaks’ release of classified documents about the war in Afghanistan will galvanize a public response. NYU Journalism professor and blogger Jay Rosen offers some sobering insight in his PressThink blog:

“We tend to think: big revelations mean big reactions. But if the story is too big and crashes too many illusions, the exact opposite occurs. My fear is that this will happen with the Afghanistan logs. Reaction will be unbearably lighter than we have a right to expect — not because the story isn’t sensational or troubling enough, but because it’s too troubling, a mess we cannot fix and therefore prefer to forget.”

What do you think?

Permalink (July 28, 2010 at 4:38 am)

Share

How Did You Become a Unitarian Universalist?
Nancy Rosenbaum, associate producer

Following up on last week’s video post, here’s a 3½-minute video snack where a mix of UUs explain how they came to this tradition. Listening to these voices, it’s clear that each person’s journey is unique and doesn’t necessarily follow a linear path. Some arrived through predictable channels — friends, marriage, family — while others had more surprising stories — and why they decided to stay.

Later this week we’ll be posting a longer-form piece that caps this video series of interviews from the Unitarian Universalist 2010 General Assembly. And, next week, a video showcasing a sped-up procession of beautiful quilted banners for the opening day festivities!

Permalink (July 20, 2010 at 5:56 pm)

Share

What Is a Unitarian Universalist?
Nancy Rosenbaum, associate producer

Thousands of Unitarian Universalists recently descended upon Minneapolis for their General Assembly, an annual event where “UUs” tend to a mix of congregational business, learning, worship, and fun.

On the first evening of festivities, we put several questions to about a dozen attendees:

What’s a Unitarian Universalist, based on your lived experience?
How did you come to this tradition?
Why are you here?

We thought we’d change up our usual, straight-forward approach to video editing for this two-minute segment featured here. We’ll be posting a longer version of this footage next week, including a procession of UUs carrying stunning, hand-crafted banners representing their home congregations — from Bismarck/Mandan, North Dakota to Brooklyn, New York.

Permalink (July 17, 2010 at 5:00 am)

Share

Peacebuilding in Pictures
Nancy Rosenbaum, associate producer

John Paul Lederach is a peacebuilder who has worked on five continents and in over 25 countries. He travels four to five months a year, but he carved out a couple hours to visit with Krista. His interview is featured in “The Art of Peace” this week.

While traveling in Europe and in between flights, he forwarded a handful of photographs of his peacebuilding efforts in Ghana, Nepal, and the Philippines. His daughter Angie, who worked with former child soldiers in West Africa, provided several more images, including the one above of war-affected girls from a skills building program in Sierra Leone. We thought we’d share some of them with you:

(photo: Chup Thapa from the Federation of Community Forest Users)

In the image above, a community process takes place in Kanchanpur, Nepal to deal with conflicts over land and natural resources use between several opposing groups including former slaves, landless “untouchables,” conservationists, and government officials. John Paul Lederach describes this process in detail to Krista and says this photograph represents seven years of patient peacebuilding. People from all sides of the conflict participated and they used the metaphor of a Nepali soup called kwati to frame their work together. Kwati is made from nine different beans and, as Lederach explains, “every bean retains its flavor … but when they’re brought together the nine beans create a flavor that’s good for the whole. So there have to be some of us that also think about the good of the whole of the community.”

(photo: George Wachira)

John Paul Lederach and his daughter Angie in Cape Coast, Ghana.

Permalink (July 9, 2010 at 7:27 am)

Share

Behind the Scenes: Multimedia Storytelling

Nancy Rosenbaum, associate producer

“The story will tell you how it wants to be told.”
—Paul Grabowicz, Associate Dean of UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism

Last month I attended a multimedia boot camp at the Knight Digital Media Center. This experience opened my eyes to the universe of multimedia storytelling possibilities — from cinematic videos to creative uses of found footage.

Recently our SOF crew gathered over lunch to look at some examples of video recommended by Grabowicz, including this one from NPR:

Some staff appreciated the film’s visual richness: the color toning, the varied angles, the mixture of image sequencing. Other staff members questioned its merits as a piece of news journalism: the sequence of images of locks (were they all ones he worked on?), not having a third party to verify his health condition, a questionable angle of a top-of-head shot. As a news consumer and a civic being, what did you notice?

We also discussed this harrowing time-lapse video of a man stuck in an elevator for 41 hours, which The New Yorker included as a companion to a longer print feature about the hidden lives of elevators.

Even though it’s an example of found footage, it didn’t just fall out of the sky. Producing multimedia journalism requires time, money, editorial, and staff resources. We’re challenged with juggling all of those balls as we continue to produce multimedia stories for our website and blog.

And, we plow forward. Stay tuned for a video we’ll be posting soon showcasing a panoply of voices from the Unitarian Universalist Association’s General Assembly held in Minneapolis last week. Also, point us to multimedia narratives you like (or have produced yourself) and tell us how we can include your voices and stories in our process.

Permalink (June 29, 2010 at 2:49 pm)

Share

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Swedenborgians in Our Backyard (mp3, 15:15)
Nancy Rosenbaum, associate producer

Rev. Eric Hoffman in front of the church he serves in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Swedenborgians from across the United States and Canada were in St. Paul, Minnesota last week for their annual convention. We’ve long been interested in the Swedenborgian Church, ever since Mehmet Oz referenced this tradition in our show “Heart and Soul.” With this gathering unfolding in our backyard, we contacted Rev. Eric Hoffman who presides over a local Swedenborgian church to learn more.

Emanuel Swedenborg, an 18th-century Swedish scientist and theologian, never set out to found a church movement. The first Swedenborgian church was established in London 15 years after he died.

There have been many famous Swedenborgians throughout history, including Johnny Appleseed, Helen Keller, and the poet William Blake. Al-Anon co-founder Lois Wilson grew up in a Swedenborgian family.

Our audio interview with Rev. Hoffman introduces a few core theological ideas that are important to Swedenborgians. He also debunked common misconceptions about this Protestant denomination including the idea that they have a special relationship to Sweden (they don’t) or conduct their church services in Swedish (they don’t do that either).

If you have personal experience with the Swedenborgian Church, we’d love to hear your stories so we can continue to deepen our understanding of this tradition.

(photos: Nancy Rosenbaum)

Permalink (June 29, 2010 at 5:00 am)

Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett

SOF Observed

A Pictorial Corridor

Unitarian Universalists in Focus

The Enduring Life of Eat, Pray, Love

What Does WikiLeaks Reveal About Our Inner Selves?

Behind the Scenes: Multimedia Storytelling

Programs

Support American Public Media

More from American Public Media