On Being Blog
In between the interviewing and scripting, the SOF staff congregates for two editorial sessions where we hash out the details of each week’s program. The first — which we call cuts and copy — can be really rough around the edges; the second — which we call the final listen — is more of a fine tweaking of script changes, music selections, Web language, and, at times, we’re still coming up with a title for the episode.
This happens to be the case for our upcoming show on yoga as conveyed through the experience of instructor Seane Corn (I dig her Jersey accent!). We regularly struggle at naming each program, especially because there are various approaches to it: an apt description of the content, a clever literary device, a poetic encapsulation, a highlight of an outstanding idea, keywords that trigger curiosity, etc.
But, the title has multiple purposes. It’s spoken by Krista in the radio and podcast; it populates the subject line of our e-mail newsletter and browser title; it complements the feature image for the program Web site and all sorts of data in third-party vendors like iTunes, Google, Facebook, last.fm, Yahoo, and so on. Can one title serve all masters? Probably not. But, in the end, we just want people to listen to the show so we’re trying to take a more direct approach in front-loading the words or ideas that will appeal to you and others. See what we came up with.
I’d love to hear where you stand on our titles, or if you have thoughts of your own. I’m open to advice. Cheers.
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This weekend I came across this beautiful animation created by Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis at the National Film Board of Canada, which somehow seems especially fitting for a Monday morning. What begins looking to be a cute and clever animals-behaving-like-humans story (I especially enjoyed the first character’s hat) takes a suddenly darker and more contemplative turn. I have to say, I’m quite amazed that the film’s creators were able to attain this kind of emotional depth in a story where all of the characters are anthropomorphized barnyard animals.
Note: If you have a faster Internet connection you may want to check out the higher-quality version.
This video of Gov. Palin speaking at her former Pentecostal church in Wasilla, Alaska has sparked a healthy number of news stories from major media outlets such as The New York Times and National Public Radio, not to mention in the blogosphere.
Despite all the quotes being pulled and examined, I was unfamiliar with the phrase “Master’s Commission” she uses to address a group of students at the service. The Website for the Master’s Commission in Wasilla states:
“Master’s Commission Wasilla Alaska will give you a creative opportunity to set yourself aside for 9 months by becoming a 24/7 ministry student, where you will be launched on a journey To Know God And To Make Him Known. This Foundation will carry you for the rest of your life regardless of where you go in God.
During your time at MC:WA you will be trained and matured in the prophetic gifts, prayer and intercession. You will experience worship possibly like you never have before. You will be involved in evangelism in many different forms from illustrated sermons to one on one street ministry.”
From watching their promotional videos and reading some other literature, Master’s Commission programs across the U.S. have some variation when it comes to curriculum and schedule, but these full-immersion ministry programs train young men and women (generally 18-25 years old) by emphasizing the memorization of Scripture, prophesying, community service, and spreading God’s word and converting people to be followers of Jesus Christ.
The ministry program in Wasilla sees the state of Alaska as a land of “divine destiny” and a center for a new great awakening and outpouring of the Holy Spirit in which the state motto (“North to the Future”) is a prophetic indicator:
“Alaska is a mission field within itself, it has over 200 distinct people groups and most can only be reached by air. Flying only a few hours out of Wasilla is like flying to another country just because of the great cultural differences within the different parts of our state.”
I’m curious to know more about these types of ministry programs and their impact. I’d love to hear better detail and some personal experiences. Help?
A show we’re working on features psychologist Michael McCullough. He wrote a book about the evolutionary psychology behind the behaviors of forgiveness and revenge, and how that affects everyone from primates to politicians (huge gap, I know). He says we need to understand those origins in order to better serve our moral institutions today. Above is a clip from the rough cut of the show that makes the animal kingdom sound like The Godfather.
McCullough is a Ph.D. at the University of Miami in the departments of Psychology and Religious Studies. His many scientific papers focus on forgiveness and revenge, gratitude, and religious development in people’s lives. Some introductory ones:
- Forgiveness: Who Does It and How Do They Do It? — overview of his definition;
- An Adaptation For Altruism? — a similar primer about gratitude;
- Spirituality and Health — exploring the effects of spirituality on health, aging, substance abuse, and more.
He recently wrote something for The Huffington Post on the virtue of forgiveness — timely wisdom for the future president of the U.S., whoever that may end up being. “The ability to control revenge and broker forgiveness among groups in conflict is a crucial, though underappreciated, element of statecraft.”
The show should be online and on the air in two weeks.
Untitled from Speaking of Faith on Vimeo.
Yesterday, a few producers (Colleen, Mitch, and I) drove about an hour northwest of Minneapolis to the town of Collegeville to scout locations for Krista’s interview with Father Columba Stewart. This small Minnesota town is home to the Benedictine monks of St. John’s Abbey and University, and the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML, or “himmel” as I’ve heard it pronounced).
If you’ve heard of their work, it’s most probably for the St. John’s Bible, a project commissioning the first handwritten, illuminated Bible since the printing press made its appearance in the 15th century. But, these archivists also preserve and digitize an incredibly large number of manuscripts from places all over the globe, including the world’s largest collection of Ethiopian manuscripts and continuing projects in Syria, Lebanon, Malta, Ukraine, India, and many countries in Europe.
For this morning’s interview, Mitch asked Columba to bring a few examples. So, he and Wayne Torborg pulled out a few and gave us a preview. If only you could smell them. Ooh la la!
In preparing for Krista's interview with Fr. Stewart, several producers listen as he previews a few manuscripts from the HMML collection.
Father Columba Stewart, executive director of the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library at St. John’s University, and Wayne Torborg, its director of digital collections and imaging, give Colleen, Mitch, and me a preliminary tour of the bowels of the room where they digitize ancient manuscripts. I’m excited for Krista’s interview with Fr. Stewart tomorrow. I’ll post video in a few hours when I offload from my phone.
(photo: Trent Gilliss)
I’ve never tried fly fishing, and I haven’t fished at all since I was a kid. But working these past couple weeks on our show “Fishing with Mystery” brought back a visceral memory of that unmistakable tug on my line. Though I haven’t experienced it in almost 20 years, I’ll never forget what it’s like to go from reeling in an inanimate object to feeling that sudden connection to a living creature beneath the water’s surface.
It’s no wonder people often use fishing as a metaphor to describe the creative process. While working on this show, I was trying to come up with literary references to fishing. Luckily, the availability of searchable online texts makes this kind of literary fishing a lot easier. I cast my line into the pond of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, searched on the word “fish,” and came up with a whopper.
The abridged passage below became a part of the show, and I think it perfectly captures one of the ideas James Prosek explores in his work. Namely, that nature can help take us away from reality, and into our dreams, but that it simultaneously pulls us back to the immediate reality that’s always there if we pay attention.
Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the family had all retired, I have returned to the woods, and, partly with a view to the next day’s dinner, spent the hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight…communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below….It was very queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it were with one hook.
Here’s a little video that Trent shot of some “behind the scenes” thought processes that can occur when choosing music for SOF programs. (My apologies to lovers of flute and recorder music.) The finished program is called “Fishing with Mystery” and will air over Labor Day weekend.
It’s late afternoon. The SOF quadrant is deserted since most of the staff are working the Minnesota State Fair. And as I was uploading videos, I watched this inspirational story of Tesfaye, an Ethiopian man who watched the deforestation of his home, did nothing, and is reclaiming his land and his memories.
How many other efforts similar to Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement are happening on the African continent that hear little about?
I’ve been fuming a bit this week over the way the usual constellation of journalists, pundits, and commentators have analyzed this past Saturday’s Civil Forum on the Presidency, hosted by Rick Warren at his Saddleback Church in southern California. I watched the forum with great interest and found it a useful contribution to our evolving sense of who Barack Obama and John McCain are, what they believe in, how they explain and present themselves.
I won’t focus here on my personal impression of how the candidates performed. I will say that I found much to admire in the way the evening was laid out. Interviewing them separately and asking each of them roughly the same set of questions provided a remarkable display of how different they really are. While some of Warren’s questions were predictable, I thought that many of them were very good, and different enough from the usual network or public broadcasting fare that they elicited a few answers we hadn’t heard before.
For example, Warren asked each of them, in the context of tax reform, to “define rich.” At another point he noted that what is often called “flip flopping” may be a sign of wisdom — changing one’s mind can be a result of personal strength and growth. Such common sense questions and statements have been lamentably rare in all the debates hosted by professional journalists in this long campaign season up to now.
And yet the edition of the Sunday New York Times that landed on my doorstep the next morning did not even report on this first post-primary encounter of the two candidates on the same stage. I’ve heard and read one parody after the other online, in print, and on the air, at least in my home territory of public radio. When these news gatherers have seen fit to mention the Saddleback event, they’ve analyzed it in terms of what it says about the changing Evangelical scene. The same kinds of journalists who are happy to earnestly take the temperature of “the man on the street” have gleefully made fun of the demeanor and words of Saddleback members who attended the event Saturday night and church the next morning. It’s been a field day for pat generalizations about Evangelicals that nearly amount to caricature - sometimes verging on bigotry - that might be nixed by editors if it were about people of different ethnicity or race.
Obviously I have strong feelings about this. Did any of you watch the event? What do you think?
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