Julia Sweeney, a Catholic, tells the story of how her faith began to crack after reading a most alarming book...called the Bible. Her story is excerpted from her play, "Letting Go of God," which ran in Los Angeles.
Shalom Auslander reads his true story, "The Blessing Bee." It's about the time when, as a third-grader at an Orthodox Jewish school, Shalom saw his chance to both make his mom proud, and push his drunken father out of the picture. Part of his scheme involved winning the school's bee on the complicated Hebrew blessings you say before eating certain foods.
Chaim and Billy both lived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, just blocks away from each other, in worlds that almost never collided. Chaim was a Hasidic Jew—he'd never heard pop music or watched MTV.
This American Life contributor Davy Rothbart goes to Brazil with his deaf mother to try and get her hearing back from a miracle healer called Joao de Deus, or John of God. They had trouble agreeing whether the things they witnessed down there were miracles or not.
Ira talks with Shalom Auslander, who was raised as an Orthodox Jew and who made a pivotal break with his faith at a Rangers game. Shalom Auslander is the author of a book of short stories, called Beware of God.
Susan Drury reports on a group of Glenmary Sisters who chose to leave the Catholic Church in the 1960s but still stay nuns, more or less. Several of the former sisters, Monica Appleby, Helen M.
Host Ira Glass talks about the story of Cain and Abel, and the question in the story, "Am I my brother's keeper?" It turns out that the story doesn't really answer that question very satisfyingly.
Jonathan Goldstein reads a story about the first people to ever start from scratch, a couple named Adam and Eve. (14 minutes)This story appears in Jonathan's book Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bible.
Host Ira Glass talks with Erin Einhorn, a reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News, who went to Poland to find the Catholic family that had sheltered and saved her mother from the Nazi concentration camps during World War II. She found that in Krakow where she was living, in a country where Jewish populations had been vilified and then exterminated by the Nazis, Judaism was suddenly trendy.
Ira's conversation with Erin Einhorn continues. She talks about the possible reasons that, 50 years after Auschwitz, 10,000 Polish hipsters will now show up to see a Klezmer music concert.
A short story by Jhumpa Lahiri, from her book of short stories The Interpreter of Maladies. The story is read by Mira Nair, director of the movies Mississippi Masala, Monsoon Wedding, and others.
How does the Devil work? We hear stories from five different people who say they found themselves inexplicably doing something random and bad, something which made no sense to them at all. Host Ira Glass explains why this might be, cadging a bit from C.S.
Trinity Church in Texas puts on something called Hell House every Halloween. It's like a haunted house, but each scene shows teenage church members acting out scenes of things the church considers sins.
Faron Yoder lives in Amish country in Indiana. When he was a teenager, like every Amish sixteen-year-old, Faron was allowed to abandon the restrictions of Amish life and live as a regular American teenager.
The story of what happens to an average American family, when a perfectly normal, rational and funny mom starts spending every day in the company of an ancient Buddhist monk named Aaron, who no one else can see. Davy Rothbart is one of her three sons, and also the reporter for this story.
An explanation of what Christians and Muslims talk about in a place you might not expect them to get along at all: Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Host Ira Glass talks with Georg Taubmann, a relief worker with the Christian missionary group Shelter Now, who built houses and did other good works in Afghanistan for seventeen years, until he was arrested by the Taliban in August.
Josh Noel reports with Alex Blumberg from Groom, Texas, 45 minutes east of Amarillo, on the largest cross in the Western hemisphere—it's 19 stories tall—the man who built it, and the people who stop at the cross to pray.
Bill Lychak reports on what it's like to be a factory worker in the Epiphany Plant, bringing news of miracles to Christians in a magazine called Guideposts. It's a good job, he says.
Susie Putz-Drury reports on Bethel Church in Dandridge, Tennessee. It's an all-black Presbyterian Church with a white pastor, who does not always agree with his own congregation on the best way to worship God.