Tag Archives: religion

Today we pledge allegiance to what Ralph Ellison called a sorrowful laughter for all, and we open with “Waitin’ for Benny” a jam session from 1941 featuring jazz and swing guitarist Charlie Christian, an artist who, like Ellison, discovered the New World of Jazz in Oklahoma City. In Ellison’s 1958 Saturday Review essay “The Charlie Christian Story,” he writes, “The …

Patriarchy, Religion, and Culture In this first episode of 2018, Abi weaves the tale of her long journey to converting to Islam, which started shortly after the events of September 11, 2001. Later in the episode, we here from Filizen Cicek, and Anna Maidi, about their experiences with gender inequality – both inside and outside the religious, cultural, and even …

Americans are evenly divided on whether a business should be able to deny service to same-sex couples, according to a study by Indiana University Bloomington sociologists. IU Professor Brian Powell found people who support denying service don’t necessarily see it as a matter of religious freedom. Instead, Powell tells WFHB News Director Wes Martin that the study found people were …

On July 7, Bart Everson spoke about eco-spiritual practices at The Venue in Bloomington. A longtime atheist, Everson emphasized the celebration of living on Earth and the process of becoming better citizens of the planet. Much of Everson’s talk revolved around ideas also found in his book Spinning in Place: A Secular Humanist Embraces the Neo-Pagan Wheel of the Year.

Today, politicians and intellectuals warn that we face a crisis of civility and a veritable war of words polluting our public sphere. In liberal democracies committed to tolerating diversity as well as active, often heated disagreement, the loss of this conversational virtue appears critical. But is civility really a virtue? Or is it, as critics claim, a covert demand for …

Next time on Interchange: “Do you bite your thumb at us, Sir?” What is Civil Discourse and why do politicians and pundits seem to resort to admonishment when discourse gets messy and less than civil. Also, what is civility in the first place and who gets to define it? I’ll talk with author Teresa Bejan about her book Mere Civility, …

Tonight in lieu of Interchange we’re going to share another special episode of the local podcast The Hijabi Diaries. This one is called Redneck Muslim and explores one woman’s lifelong attraction to organized Religion. Host Aubrey Seader offers the life story of one woman, her name is Dawn, a member of the Bloomington Muslim community, who has practiced three very …

Do you think Darwin’s Origin of Species undermines a belief in the veracity of the creation as told in Genesis? If you think so, what does that say about your worldview? Will your politics be revealed? Does your belief in Yahweh or any other god, or lack of belief in such constructs, really matter in the larger picture of how …