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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.
Islamaphobia in the Skies
It started with a Facebook post about a Diet Coke. On May 29, a Muslim woman who wears the hijab posted this on her Facebook page: “I am sitting on a United Airlines flight in the air 30,000 feet above and I am in tears of humiliation.” She had asked the flight attendant for an unopened can of soda, and was told no, her soda could be used “as a weapon.” The story has exploded online, with reaction from eye rolls to outrage, and the flight attendant has been fired. A panel of Muslim and Sikh civil rights advocates who have faced their own problems at airports explain why this story struck such a nerve. Featuring Hoda Hawa, Director of Policy and Advocacy at Muslim Public Affairs Council and
Riham Osman, Communications Coordinator for the Muslim Public Affairs Council along with Rajdeep Singh, Senior Director of Law and Policy at the Sikh Coalition.
Joy Ladin, Finding Her True Self
Before Caitlyn Jenner, there was Joy Ladin. Joy is the first openly transgender professor at an Orthodox Jewish university, and Maureen’s 2009 conversation with her remains one of our most memorable. Back in 2007, when the tenured English professor informed Yeshiva University that she would be transitioning her gender, the school first responded by putting her on indefinite leave. Hers is a story of a poet, a Jew, and above all, a woman—in her own words, “caught in the act of becoming.”
