On This Week's Show
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Date: 3 July 2008
A Moral Emergency
Every major faith tradition in the world tells its followers they have a moral obligation to "feed the hungry." But with food prices continuing to skyrocket, that imperative has been pretty tough to follow. The spikes have set off protests from Haiti to Indonesia, and the poorest of the poor –those billion or so people who have trouble filling their stomachs even in normal times – are getting desperate.
David Beckman and Marie Dennis tell us what people of faith need to do to combat this crisis that the UN has called a “silent tsunami.”
David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World
Marie Dennis, director of the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns
Commentary: I Can Eat Chocolate For Breakfast
If you’re like most of America, combating hunger is usually as simple as opening your refrigerator. You can peer inside and ask yourself, what do I feel like eating today? One morning not too long ago, while contemplating breakfast, writer Jessica Swift asked herself that very question.
Jessica Swift, Vermont-based writer and editor
I Can Eat Chocolate For Breakfast appears in a new collection of essays on food and spirituality, Bread Body Spirit: Finding the Sacred in Food, edited by Alice Peck.
God in the White House
When Randall Balmer looks over the last 45 years of presidential politics in America, he doesn't like most of what he sees. The religious history scholar says that when Presidents try to inject God into their politics, the results can be simplistic and even hypocritical.
Randall Balmer, author of God in the White House: A History, and professor of religious history at Barnard College
It All Started with an Apple...
Perhaps no Christian doctrine is more controversial than original sin. This so-called "inherited curse" has been questioned by theologians for centuries, and some Christian groups deny it altogether. But whatever you might believe about original sin, Alan Jacobs says that you should, at least, understand it.
