Robert Coles and the Inner Lives of Children

It's Sunday and Speaking of Faith had a whole program devoted to a great interview with one of my favorite people, psychiatrist Robert Coles. The interview, which is from 2000, focuses on "the inner lives of children."  Coles "says children are witnesses to the fullness of our humanity; they are keenly attuned to the darkness as well as the light of life; and they can teach us about living honestly, searchingly and courageously if we let them." Righteous. I hope you might make some time and tune in here.

"Play, Spirit and Character"

It's Sunday...

What is the role of "play" in our lives? How is play linked to our spiritual selves?

That is the subject of NPR's Speaking of Faith program, "Play, Spirit and Character." Click here to listen to "Stuart Brown, a physician and director of the National Institute for Play, [who] says that pleasurable, purposeless activity [play] prevents violence and promotes trust, empathy, and adaptability to life's complication. He promotes cutting-edge science on human play, and draws on a rich universe of study of intelligent social animals."

What do you think?

This American Life: "Take a Negro Home"

Ira Glass's NPR program, "This American Life," is one of my absolute favorite radio shows. A great Sunday treat is to settle in and listen to the latest strange, but compelling, slice of humanity captured by Glass and his crew. Even cooler, there is now a TV version of the show on Showtime!

Anyway, my race and politics class just read Doug McAdam's book, Freedom Summer, which focuses on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's historic 1964 summer voting rights project in Mississippi. The book focuses primarily on the roughly 1,000 affluent, white college-aged volunteers who came South for the summer to participate in this inter-racial experiment. One of the most interesting (and human) dynamics of this story, among many fascinating and important threads, was the relationships that were created across the color line and all the complexity that came along with those relationships. After a very energetic in-class discussion about this subject last Thursday, one of my graduate students mentioned a 2000 episode of TAL that featured a story about a white woman who married a black man during the civil rights era. Provocatively titled, "Take a Negro Home," here is how the website sets up the story:

Rich Robinson's father is black, his mother is white. They married during the civil rights movement, believing the whole nation was moving toward greater and greater integration. After having three children, they divorced. Rich's mom went back to her segregated white world. His dad returned to his segregated black world. In this story, Rich sets out to discover the role that race played in their divorce, and the role it played in their initial attraction. It's something he'd never discussed with them before. And he wants something more personal: advice on whether they think he should marry white or black. (27 minutes)

It is a fascinating yarn and well worth a listen. I hope you will kick back with your morning coffee and tune in to this fascinating story.

Thanks to Charles Kilntobe for letting me know about this program...

The Spiritual Audacity of Abraham Joshua Heschel

It's Sunday, time for another exploration of some random aspect of spirituality that I find interesting! This week, I hope you might take some time to listen to an audio program by the people who create NPR's "Speaking of Faith" on Abraham Joshua Heschel. Who the heck is that, you ask? Here is what the folks at SoF write:

"Abraham Joshua Heschel insisted that the opposite of good is not evil, it is indifference. Born into an esteemed Hasidic family in Poland in 1907, he was a mystic who wrote transcendent, poetic words about God. At the same time, he marched alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and organized religious leadership against the war in Vietnam, embodying the social activism of the biblical prophets he studied. We explore Heschel's teachings and his prophetic legacy — his "spiritual audacity" — for people in our time."

Check out the whole program. Make it today's meditation. Heschel is a fascinating person with a relevant spiritual perspective for our desperate times...

Any thoughts? What lesser-known spiritual figures do you find insight from?

Politics and Faith in the Democratic Party

It's Sunday! NPR's "Speaking of Faith" looked at the role of faith and spirituality within the Democratic Party this morning and I thought some of you might want to check it out. If you click here, you will find a few different options on how you can listen. Here is their brief intro to the program:

The Religious Right has gotten a fair amount of coverage in recent years, while the political Left has rarely been represented with a religious sensibility. Our guest, a national correspondent for Time magazine is a political liberal and an Evangelical Christian who has been observing the Democratic Party's complex relationship with faith and the little-told story of its response to the rise of the Religious Right.

Any thoughts about the nexus between spirituality, faith, religion and the liberal/left in American politics? I'd be interested to hear what you think...

Remembering Jerry Wexler's Groove

Legendary music producer, Jerry Wexler, died at the age of 91 a few days ago. Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Wilson Pickett, Led Zepplin, Bob Dylan, Santana, Dire Straits and George Michael are just a few of the artists he produced at some point or another. Here is the New York Times obituary. Here is an excellent interview with Wexler from NPR's Fresh Air back in the 1990s. And here is a review of Wexler's autobiographical book about the music industry.

This American Life: "The Camera"

This American Life, with Ira Glass, is one of my favorite NPR programs. I haven't seen many episodes of the new tv version, but I like this story... and the animation is done by Chris Ware!