In the final part of Fork in the Road, Jane Little meets two more people who have been through similar life changing experiences, but have had their faith affected in different ways. Jahaziel and Guvna B are both rappers, and products of the housing estates of London. They have both seen street violence, friends hurt, and witnessed the decaying effect on the lives of young black men. Jahaziel was one of the biggest selling Christian rappers, but now he has left his faith. He tells Jane how he ju...
Apr 05, 2019•27 min
The BBC World Service is in the city to hear youthful voices with a variety of views on their faith. Islam is the second largest religion in France. In a nation that separates state and religion what does a French Muslim identity look like? In this unique and timely programme, Heart and Soul Gathering on the BBC World Service, hears from a group of young Muslims with a variety of different faith perspectives and backgrounds. Together with a studio audience, they discuss personal faith and experi...
Mar 30, 2019•50 min
Can you remain committed to your religion even it it does not accept your sexuality? Jane Little meets two well-known writers who have publicly wrestled with their faiths and been forced to make choices on whether to stay or go. Andrew Sullivan is a political commentator whose writings helped drive the successful campaign for gay marriage in the United States. But the battles along the way, especially during the era of the AIDS epidemic, caused him to question his Catholic faith and he admits he...
Mar 29, 2019•27 min
How is it that two people can share the same experiences and events and it have such different effects on their faith? Jane Little meets two men who both answered the call after 9/11 to join the War on Terror, but who came out of it with very different ideas about their relationship with God. Rory Fanning and Jesse Bowman both served in the US Army and witnessed the worst that war could throw up. One of them lost his previously unshakeable Catholicism, the other found comfort from the psychologi...
Mar 25, 2019•27 min
When Colin Brazier lost his wife Jo to cancer last summer, he felt pressure to put his grief on show, to make her funeral a celebration. Friends expected him to give the eulogy at her funeral, and some wanted to wear bright colours to celebrate her life. But that felt completely wrong, and though one mourner turned up in shorts and flip flops, the service was a traditional one with hymns and mourners dressed in black. As a Catholic, the ritual of the Requiem Mass felt cleansing and appropriate. ...
Mar 21, 2019•27 min
It was the response of Jewish organisations that was possibly most telling the day after last year's Tree of Life shooting. President Trump wasn’t welcome in Pittsburgh unless, that is, he denounced the language of white nationalism. The attack on the synagogue, according to The Washington Post, ‘wasn’t unimaginable but inevitable’, and anecdotally the build-up of anti-Semitic attacks in the US may just back that up. The Anti-Defamation League logged a 57 percent rise in incidents in 2017. The T...
Mar 08, 2019•28 min
Kenya is home to the majority of the world's Quakers and it is vibrant and noisy, much different from the quiet, contemplative religion most of us know. Audrey Brown has been to the spiritual home of the Quaker faith, Kaimosi to learn how it landed, spread and flourished. The faith is growing at rapid rate across East Africa, fighting for converts with other Christian faiths and Quakers in Europe have recently been debating whether God has a place in its worship, but that's not the case here in ...
Mar 01, 2019•28 min
Daryl Davis collects Ku Klux Klan memorabilia – KKK robes, hoods and masks. He says they are given to him by those leaving the white supremacist organisation, after he has spent time befriending them and persuading them to change their views. Heart and Soul hears from Daryl about what drives him, his Christian faith and concerns about racial division within the church, and from Scott Shepherd, one of those he helped to leave the KKK. Mike Wooldridge asks if Daryl is doing ‘the right thing’. His ...
Feb 15, 2019•27 min
On 12 February 1993 Mary Johnson’s only son, 20-year-old Laramiun Byrd, was murdered. The perpetrator was 16-year-old Oshea Israel, who received a 25-year sentence for second degree murder. Many years later Mary visited Oshea in prison, and after his release in 2010 they lived as neighbours in the Northside community of Minneapolis – and developed a strong bond. Mary, driven by her Christian faith, now runs From Death to Life, an organisation she founded to promote healing and reconciliation bet...
Feb 08, 2019•27 min
When people talk about America’s opioid epidemic, they often focus on the record number of drug related overdose deaths – 72,000 last year – or the growing number of court cases against the drug manufacturers. But for a lot of people there is another story – that of their personal struggle against addiction. And for many of them, that means holding fast to their faith. What part can faith play in helping those who are determined to make a change, and how does it contribute to the fight against t...
Feb 01, 2019•27 min
The secretive state of North Korea is routinely named as the worst place in the world to be a Christian. Fuelled and bank-rolled by American evangelists, Christianity has experienced massive growth in South Korea. For the most part it is laser-like-focused on the establishment of one Korea, so all Christians on this peninsular can pray without fear. There are an estimated three hundred thousand Christians in North Korea all praying secretly, knowing that if they are found out they will be taken ...
Jan 25, 2019•28 min
The raven has featured in human culture for millennia, taking its place in a wide range of belief systems as a wily trickster and revealer of truths. Two ravens perched on the Norse God Odin's shoulders representing thought and memory. In the Bible the raven is released by Noah from the Ark. And the large black bird has held totemic status for numerous faiths as a savage soothsayer. However, in the last few centuries, in the West, the raven came to be viewed as nothing more than a symbol of deat...
Jan 18, 2019•27 min
Many young Jewish people living in Israel feel religion has too big an influence over their private lives. Numerous aspects of life are governed by a council made up of orthodox rabbis called the Rabbinate. They decide who is and isn't Jewish and by extension who can and can't marry. Supporters of the organisation say this helps preserve Jewish identity. Critics say it means thousands of people who are not deemed 'Jewish enough' can't marry each other, forcing couples to leave the country to hav...
Jan 12, 2019•50 min
The laws around divorced Catholics receiving communion are both clear and strict. But recently Pope Francis has clouded the issue with a number of pronouncements, giving millions of divorced Catholics hope that they will be able to receive the sacrament at mass. Catholics who divorce in civil law are still married according to the law of the church, and any relationship they enter into is adulterous. And as that's a mortal sin, they cannot take communion. Adrian Chiles hasn’t married again after...
Jan 11, 2019•28 min
Imagine being swept along the streets of Calcutta by a crowd of over three hundred thousand people all visiting fantastical temporary pandals which are built from clay, silt, wicker, and papier-mache by local artisans every year to celebrate the festival of Durga Puja. Acclaimed writer and local resident Amit Chaudhuri, along with family members and friends, go pandal-hopping across the neighbourhoods of the city to tell the story of how the Hindu goddess Durga leaves her spiritual realm for fiv...
Jan 04, 2019•27 min
No carol encapsulates the beginning of Christmas like ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ which every Christmas Eve opens the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, in the candlelit Chapel of King's College, Cambridge. Around the globe, listeners to the BBC World Service tune into the service every year. This is a story of last minute anticipation, as three or four boys are traditionally put on standby, and at the last moment one is chosen to sing the famous carol. Its opening bars are part of Christmas ...
Dec 28, 2018•28 min
At the last UK Census in 2011 some 170,000 people registered their faith as Jedi. Easily outstripping any other kind of fictional religious faith. It’s a similar situation in many other countries. But what does this all mean? Clearly many are not serious but for thousands the light and the dark and the all powerful Force have real meaning. The Star Wars universe has been around so long it almost feels like an old religion, like The Force, everywhere and nowhere. For some it can be a path towards...
Dec 21, 2018•27 min
The status and role of women in mosques in the United Kingdom is changing. Traditionally playing a secondary role, groups here now are training women to be more active in their religious communities and to help run mosques. Samira Ahmed meets the young British Muslims who are taking on new roles to find out why they want to do it, and how it will alter religious communities. Samira asks whether this greater say in the organisation of mosques mean a greater influence on the faith itself, where do...
Dec 14, 2018•27 min
***Listeners may find some of the material in this programme upsetting.*** A grieving mother, Mally Simelane, is fighting to change her community’s view on homosexuality. Mally lives in the Kwa-Thema township near Johannesburg, where several gay women, including her daughter Eudy, have been murdered. Audrey Brown meets Mally, as well as her Pastor Smadz Matsepe, who have united to use their faith to fight cultural homophobia. South Africa was the first country in Africa to allow same sex marriag...
Dec 07, 2018•27 min
John McCarthy meets the people who have had to confront their own beliefs while held captive. Born into a Jewish family, but a committed atheist, Daniel Genis had an eventful life which led him to drug addiction, crime and then 10 years in one of Americas most notorious prisons. His time there meant he had time to explore his faith, plus the array of faiths of his fellow prisoners. As he saw out his sentences he keenly observed the role religion plays in prison, how many prisoners adopted a fait...
Dec 03, 2018•27 min
John McCarthy meets people who have had to confront their own beliefs while held captive. John who was held hostage by Islamic radical groups in Lebanon, speaks to two Iranian women who risked torture in one of the world’s most notorious prisons after being convicted of apostasy for spreading the message of Christianity in their strictly Islamic home country. Maryam Rostampour and Marziyeh Amirizadeh were known as the ‘dirty Christians’ in Evin prison where they suffered horrendous conditions an...
Dec 03, 2018•27 min
Helen Berhane has the type of voice that you may think could only have come from God. There was a long time though when the only people who could hear her were her captors and the fellow inmates of the shipping container that was her gaol. In fact it was her singing that led to her being imprisoned, beaten and abused in her native Eritrea, after she refused to put a stop to her evangelising. In this first episode of Faith In Freedom, Helen tells John McCarthy about those two years of imprisonmen...
Nov 16, 2018•27 min
The BBC’s Nuala McGovern is with an audience and panel of speakers to ask what the next generation of Catholics want from their Church. We are at the Teatro Flaiano in Rome, for Heart and Soul Gathering, as Bishops from all over the world gather with the Pope at the Vatican for a special meeting, or Synod, on Catholicism and the young. In March, over three hundred people aged between 16-29, plus fifteen thousand more on social media, came together in Rome, to say what is important to them and th...
Nov 10, 2018•50 min
Whatever is said in the confessional stays in the confessional; it is a sacred, unyielding law throughout Catholicism, but in Australia it's now being challenged. In certain states laws are being introduced so priests can now be fined if they are found to have withheld information from the confessions of child abusers. Priests across the country have said they won’t adhere to the law, saying it breaks a sacred trust. But the Catholic church in Australia isn’t on steady ground. The law change is ...
Sep 28, 2018•27 min
Brazil has one of the worst records in the world for violence against women, and to combat these attitudes Nadiedja Souza is leading Brazilian women who are challenging the sexism of Brazil and she’s doing it using her Christian faith. Nadiedja travels from church to church across the state of Pernambuco educating women to challenge long held attitudes towards women, as well as dealing with the physical and psychological violence that often accompanies it. Women across Latin America have been ca...
Sep 21, 2018•27 min
Fifty years after the death of Rev Dr Martin Luther King, and in the era of campaigns such as Black Lives Matter, how are black churches relevant in the fight for social justice today? Two-time Emmy Award winning presenter Sherri Jackson asks a local audience and a panel of speakers about the role of Christianity in America's new civil rights movements. Sherri is joined by the next generation of activists and by those who were part of the original civil rights movement at 16th Street Baptist Chu...
Sep 15, 2018•50 min
Abraham of the Old Testament, or Ibrahim of Islam, is a vital figure across Christianity, Islam and Judaism. His prophetic fame, arises from the story of his offering of one of his sons to God, because He commanded him so. God however, spared the son and a sacrificial lamb was offered instead. In the city of Hebron, are the Caves of The Patriarch where Abraham is said to be buried and above them stand a Mosque and Synagogue where Jews and Muslims pray. It is an uneasy understanding between two c...
Sep 14, 2018•27 min
Nihal Arthanayake was born into a Sri Lankan Buddhist family. As he grew up, he saw it as a peaceful and thoughtful religion - but now the traditionally peaceful faith has made headlines in Myanmar, Thailand and Sri Lanka with stories of violence and persecution. He returns to Sri Lanka to explore why Buddhists have been violently harassing the Muslim minority there. He witnesses monks in the orange robes recasting their role as peacemakers to defenders of a strident Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism...
Sep 06, 2018•27 min
When Pope John Paul II came to Ireland in 1979, half the population turned out to see him, the BBC World Service presenter Nuala McGovern was amongst them. When Pope Francis arrives for the World Meeting of Families in Dublin, he will find a changed country and a Catholic Church rocked by the scandal of clerical sexual abuse. Nuala returns to her home city of Dublin, to find out if the “Francis Factor” can turn the tide of a Catholic Church whose once mighty hold on this country is has been unde...
Aug 24, 2018•27 min
Ibtihaj Muhammad has had many firsts in her career in fencing. An African American Muslim woman, she was the first athlete from the U.S. to compete at the Olympics. Her team won bronze at the 2016 Rio Olympics. But at the same time, the U.S. presidential campaign back home was revealing a strong anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim in the very country she was representing. Muhammad tells David McGuire about what drives her fighting spirit, and the place of Islam in her success. Photo: Fencer Ibtihaj Muha...
Aug 17, 2018•27 min
