Story Archives of 'Religion'

Like many children of the 1960s, Heather King went to church, in her case, in a New Hampshire Seacoast town. But she grew up not believing in much of anything. Alcohol, she says, became her god. And she spent decades in devotion.

Her acclaimed memoir Parched tells the story of sleeping around, morning drinks in crummy bars, stumbling through law school and finally hitting bottom and getting clean. Heather stayed sober, got married and raked in the dough as a hard-working L.A. lawyer, until she hit the wall with that life too. Middle-aged and exhausted, Heather King found a model for transforming suffering in the teachings of the Catholic Church - the last place she thought she’d end up.

Author and NPR commentator Heather King joins Word of Mouth live in the studio to discuss her latest memoir, Redeemed: A Spiritual Misfit Stumbles Toward God, Marginal Sanity, and the Peace That Passes All Understanding.

We also hear from younger people facing different challenges to finding and keeping their faith. Balancing peer pressure and individualism can put belief to the test for teenagers and college students. That may be especially true on a campus like the University of California-Berkeley, where "subverting the dominant paradigm" is a popular rallying cry. Some Christian students there feel they have to lose their religion just to fit in. Producer David Gelles reports on a small organization that's having a big impact on the spiritual lives of some Berkeley students.

In the aftermath of September 11th, we heard about the clash of civilizations between Muslim and western societies. Rhetoric focusing on those differences fueled America’s fear of Islamic jihad and further attacks. Talk of Islamic radicalism drove political campaigns, and some argue, justified a protracted war in Iraq.

Former New York Times religion reporter Gustav Niebuhr covered the 9/11 aftermath, which included violent attacks against Muslim-Americans, and even those mistaken for Muslims. But he also saw people come together in synagogues, churches, mosques, temples, schools and town halls, struggling to understand what went so disastrously wrong. Niebuhr's new book, Beyond Tolerance: Searching for Interfaith Understanding in America, examines the accomplishments and the limits of building bridges between faiths. Niebuhr joins Word of Mouth from Syracuse University, where he is associate professor of religion and the media.

We also hear from Geneive Abdo, author of Mecca and Main Street: Muslim Life in America after 9/11. She’s currently a fellow at The Century Foundation. Her article "False Prophets" is in the current issue of Foreign Policy. In it she says the organizations at the forefront of interfaith dialogue gloss over serious differences, and are a hindrance to curbing religious violence and countering extremism.

The Nashville band Silver Jews released their sixth album last week, Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, on Drag City Records. Since the band's 1994 debut record Starlite Walker, years of drug use and a suicide attempt, songwriter David Berman rediscovered his Jewish roots.

To find out how that may have affected his music, and the country ballads that inspired his writing, we called up our reviewer Justin Gage. He runs the music blog Aquarium Drunkard and hosts a two-hour show every Friday on Sirius Satellite radio’s Left of Center channel.

You can read Justin's two-part interview with David Berman by clicking here. A documentary film to be released in September, "Silver Jew," follows David Berman's weeklong tour of Israel in the midst of their first-ever world tour. You can watch the trailer by clicking here.

It’s hard to overstate how much religion shapes our modern world. So many international conflicts involve religious ideology in some way or another, and here in the United States, you don’t have to look any further than the presidential campaigns to see how faith dominates our politics. But even as global membership to organized religions rises, some believe we’re headed towards a more secular world. Alan Wolfe is one of those people. He’s the director of the Boisi Center for Religion and Public Life at Boston College, and he recently wrote an article on the future of religion for the Atlantic Monthly. He joins us on Word of Mouth to discuss it.

(Photo by Robert Park)

This week marks Pope Benedict XVI makes his first visit to the United States. It’s the first time in the 21st Century that American Catholics will be visited by their Pope. But it also serves as a time for the one-quarter of Americans who identify themselves as Catholics to reflect on the state of the Church. We’ll look at the Catholic Church in 2008- who practices, how they do so, and what impact a new generation of worshipers is making.

Guests

• Father Edward Arsenault, Moderator of the Curia for the Diocese of Manchester
• Father Benedict Guevin, Benedictine monk and Professor of Theology at St. Anselm College
• Michelle Dillon, Catholic scholar, Professor of Sociology at the University of New Hampshire, and author of Catholic Identity: Balancing Reason, Faith, and Power