Beliefs Religion News Service

This week on Beliefs, we return to a conversation with one of our favorite guests, scholar and writer Susan Jacoby.
Secularism and atheism finds a full-throated defense in this episode. Jacoby takes us on a journey of where we were just one year ago: presidential politics on the rise, the rise of secularism, no pandemic in sight, and a world less complicated.
Jacoby brings together the threads of various moments in history to identify her view that religion and politics have never comfortably coexisted.
 

From Our Archives: 
We revisit a conversation from our first season with the Rabbi of Congregation Beth Elohim. She describes the clarity she feels from what she calls the unfinished business of America. Reparations for slavery, the rights of women to control their bodies, and opposition to xenophobic oppression; all a part of the central moral character Rabbi Timoner feels is her purpose. As a rabbi, as a Jew, and as a social justice activist.
 

Speaker, Pastor and Scholar Dr. Christopher A. House resigned from Liberty University recently in protest of President Jerry Falwell Jr’s deleted tweet featuring both blackface and KKK characters.
To speak to us about the moment when belief becomes action, Beliefs producer Jay Woodward asked Dr. House for a conversation.
 
 

Writer and historian Jemar Tisby, Pastor Tyler Burns of New Dimensions Christian Center in Pensacola, Florida co-host the podcast Pass The Mic for their organization The Witness - A Black Christian Collective. 
We gratefully thank Religion News Service reporter Adelle Banks for leading the conversation. 
 

 

The steady call to reopen churches –amplified by Presidential encouragement- is thrilling to some and alarming others. How do we return to worship when the act of group singing, chanting, and praying can be so dangerous? 


How can churches be told to cease their primary function? 


Beliefs producer Jay Woodward spoke with RNS opinion columnist Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin, and RNS Editor-In Chief Bob Smietana to assess the tensions facing churches across the country. 

A ministry of song and service, with devotion to the most invisible among us.  
The husband and wife singer-songwriting team of Al and Andi Tauber, Urban Mennonites: 
They seek and value the simple life – in much the same way as their Amish and Quaker spiritual cousins, but their calling returns them to urban spaces; to pressing societal concerns.  This episode of Beliefs was produced by Monique Parsons in collaboration  with KALW's The Spiritual Edge, the University of California’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture, and Religion News Service.