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Every Sunday at 3:00amAbout the Show
Inspired
Inspired is the nation's leading public radio show about faith, ethics and spirituality. Each week we offer you analyses of the big headlines alongside lesser-told stories – those of Orthodox Jewish artists and African-American atheists, Muslim feminists and spiritual seekers. Through these stories, a rough sketch of our country’s religious landscape begins to emerge. It’s a marketplace of beliefs and ideas too complex for sound bites, and too important to ignore.
What Chaplains Do and The Story of a Jewish Chaplain
Trace Haythorn, Executive Director of the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education, talks about misconceptions about the role of chaplains and tells us what they actually do.
Then we meet Rabbi Oksana Chapman, a Russian-speaking chaplain who grew up under Soviet rule and once got an ‘A’ in Atheism. At Hebrew SeniorLife in Boston, she offers the solace of song and ritual to Russian-speaking residents who had to keep their Jewish identity quiet.
The Role of Chaplains at the End of Life
Our guests, a physician, and a hospice chaplain discuss the importance of attending to the spirit as well as the body at the end of life. They describe how they work with non-religious patients to build meaning, and they introduce us to the concept of gerotranscendence– a theory suggesting that as we age we become less self-occupied and more expansive in our spirituality.
The “Surfing Padre”
We meet the late Franciscan priest, Fr. Christian Mondor who took up surfing in his 70s. In water, he finds a metaphor for the holy trinity. And in the surf, he finds a kind of baptism.
