Topic: Faith and Spirituality
Chris “Comes with Clouds” White, of Cherokee descent, discovered a pre-historic stone circle near his home that carries a significant spiritual meaning for him. “We’re born, we have a youth, we get old, we die, but we believe that there’s something beyond that where our ancestors are, so that’s a circle.” More
Reverend Toby Larson of Celebration Anglican Church felt like he failed as a pastor when a young man from his congregation suddenly died of a heroin overdose. “Unfortunately, we’re pretty good at pastoring families that have lost people. We’re pretty good at burying people. We’re pretty lousy ten years earlier when problems started,” he says. More
“Faith and faith leaders really play a pivotal role in not only preventing drug use, but supporting people with addiction in their recovery, in the process of really healing themselves from a tremendously stigmatized disease.” More
Days after 9/11, Rais Bhuiyan was shot in the head by Mark Stroman in a hate crime targeted at Arabs. Bhuiyan survived the attack, and Stroman was sentenced to death, but Bhuiyan felt compelled to not let the story end there. “I need to forgive him in public and do something to save the life,” says Bhuiyan, “because if Mark Stroman was given the chance I had in my childhood, he would have become a different person. More
“The Rebbe was as profoundly a religious and spiritual figure as you can imagine. He was of course scrupulous in his observance of Jewish law. He prayed with a sense of tremendous profundity, and you actually felt, when you were dealing with him, that you were with a person who was suffused with a God-consciousness.” More
Dogs, says Tim Hetzner of Lutheran Church Charities, are “a very gifted part of God’s creation.” In disaster situations they sense when someone is hurting, and together with their handlers they minister compassionately to the needs of victims. More
“I’m particularly concerned when I see white people and African-American people not having conversations with one another about what’s happening in Ferguson,” says Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. “I think that needs to change in our own congregational life, when we have congregations where reconciliation is modeled within the pews of the church.” More
Best-selling writer and journalist Sara Davidson felt completely unprepared for the reality of dying. Then she met Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, founder of the Jewish Renewal movement. Their weekly conversations about mortality led to their book “The December Project.” “When you feel you’re coming to the end of your tour of duty, what is the spiritual work of that time,” asked Reb Zalman, “and how do we prepare for the mystery?” More
“Africa is finding, just as it found its political and economic voice it’s also finding its theological voice, which oftentimes may be different in perspective,” says J. Peter Pham of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center, “because of background, because of history, and because of the way they have interpreted revelation as different from what those in the West, in Europe, or North America, are used to or are necessarily comfortable with.” More
“Of course I was angry for everything that was happening to me, but as time went on in captivity, I just realized for my own self, for self-preservation, that I couldn’t stay trapped in that emotion, that I had to try to find ways to let it out, and that’s when I started developing practices like choosing forgiveness in captivity.” More
-
Providing Support for pbs.org
What's New
