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Your Stories,
Your Voices
The Touch of Alzheimer's Disease
The average lifespan of men and women is on the rise. And, with it, an increasing number of people are suffering from Alzheimer's disease or taking care of someone with Alzheimer's.
Each person with this illness has a distinct experience and a distinct story, a story often carried in memory by a caregiver or loved one. If your life has been touched by Alzheimer's, we'd like to hear your story. How has this disease changed the way you think about love, memory, personality and humanity?
» Share your story and your images with us.
Staff Blog
SOF Observed
What we've blogged about in the past week:
» Is "Sustainability" Sustainable?
Krista's back and blogging about the surprising response to her conversation with Barbara Kingsolver.
» Iranian Potter's
"40 Angels"
Art provides insight into the human condition in Iran.
» Video: "Ancestors at Meal Time"
Behind-the-scenes footage of the interview featured in next week's program "Recovering Chinese Religiosities."
» Food from China
Doing research on an upcoming program brings us back to the table of last week's show.
» Chilkoot Lake, Alaska
Summertime travels brings us photos from Kate that segues into looking into a bloembinder.
Last Week's Transcript
Words matter. Read an online transcript of last week's program with Barbara Kingsolver in "The Ethics of Eating." Free for you to read online, at your leisure.
Upcoming Broadcasts:
Recovering Chinese Religiosities
(July 27)
Put the words "religion" and "China" in a sentence together, and Western imaginations may go to indifference at best, to brutal repression at worst. Yet in grand historical perspective, China is a crucible of religious and philosophical thought and practice. Anthropologist and filmmaker Mayfair Yang says that the upheavals of the 20th Century created an amnesia — in the West as in China itself — about this rich, pluralistic spiritual inheritance. She traces some of this story for us, and describes a subtle new revival of reverence and ritual.
Out and About
Part of our mission is to engage you on different levels and in places that you feel most comfortable — especially online. Yes, we actually have a presence outside of our Web site. So, if you're in the neighborhood, check out some of the places we interact: Facebook | Flickr | Gather | Vimeo | YouTube
Recent Broadcasts
» The Ethics of Eating
» Presence in the Wild
» Sustaining Language, Sustaining Meaning — an Ojibwe Story
» Pagans Ancient and Modern
» The Spiritual Audacity of Abraham Joshua Heschel
About Speaking of Faith
Hosted by Krista Tippett, the public radio program is heard weekly on radio stations around the country, bringing a wide range of intelligent religious ideas and voices into American life.
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This week on public radio's conversation about religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas:
Joe Carter and the Legacy of the African-American Spiritual
The spiritual is the source from which gospel, jazz, blues, and hip-hop evolved. Its organizing concept is not the melody of Europe, but the rhythm of Africa. We revisit Krista's exuberant conversation with the late Joe Carter about the religious sensibility of the spiritual — its hidden meanings, as well as its beauty, lament, and hope. Before his death in 2006, he traveled the world and introduced this music to audiences from Novosibirsk to Nigeria.
{This is an encore presentation of a program last broadcast in June 2007.}
A Sophisticated Theology Behind the Musical Tradition
I once met an American tourist who went to Siberia — and was peppered with questions about Joe Carter. Joe had made one of his riveting educational presentations about the African-American spiritual there, and had indelibly impressed his audience. His would forever be the glorious face they put on all people and things American. Joe's presence — his voice, his spirit, and his life — made the world a more generous place.
And I love hearing Joe's voice and sending it out into the world again — resurrection by radio. This program was special from the first. We sat in a spacious chamber where orchestras record — Joe and his pianist and I. And as we talked about the spirituals, Joe periodically stood up and sang to illustrate his points. We enjoyed ourselves immensely, and that enjoyment is audible in the final production.
It was revelatory to take this staple of American culture, as the spiritual has become — musical lines we can sing without thinking — and ask questions of it. It was painful to be reminded, foundationally, that this music had its genesis in slavery. Anonymous bards authored the body of work of some 5,000 songs that we know as the spiritual. Each song typically expresses a single sentiment or message, often born of grief.
These melodies and words, as Joe helped me understand, convey a sophisticated theology of suffering. It is a theology that leans into suffering — and in surrender, transforms and rises above it, if only in moments. Such moments are nurturing and sustaining. Human beings across the world have experienced this directly through hearing and singing the spirituals, generations later and in radically different contexts.
"The thing we find," Joe said, "is that in the midst of all of the most horrible pain, some of these powerful individuals lived transcendent, shining lives. They were able to be loving and forgiving in the midst of it all. Mammy was taking care of master's baby. She could have smothered that child. But she loved the child like it was her own child, because there was something in her faith that said, 'You're supposed to be loving, you're supposed to be kind, you're supposed to be forgiving — and there's no excuse if you're not…' The ancestors knew that the worst kind of bondage is that which takes place on the inside. And when we look back to the slavery days we were bound, but it was the master who was really the slave. And I think some of us understand that now."
I asked Joe whether he — himself a grandson of slaves — couldn't reasonably begrudge the way in which white Americans have appropriated the spiritual, embraced it as their own. But that question was mine, not his. In Siberia and Africa and Wales, he says, these songs speak directly to the human will to survive precisely when the worst has happened. They have become symbolic of a universal yearning for freedom — "that part of us all which says, 'I will not be defeated.'" We rebroadcast this hour in celebration of Joe Carter's gifts of wisdom and music that echo vitally beyond his death.
I Recommend Reading:
The Books of American Negro Spirituals
by James Weldon Johnson
Joe Carter brought a battered, treasured early volume of this work with him to our interview. There is a 2002 combined volume of the two seminal collections of sheet music, history, and commentary that Johnson published in 1925 and 1926. They remain among the most significant reference resources ever compiled on this musical genre. Johnson's prefaces are elegant and moving. Chapters are devoted to the most significant known spirituals. "As the years go by and I understand more about this music and its origin," Johnson writes, "the miracle of its production strikes me with increasing wonder."
Also, the Listening Room on our companion site features full-length tracks of Joe Carter's live performances in our studio, and recordings of these spirituals by other renowned artists such as Mahalia Jackson and the Fisk Jubilee Singers.
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