On Being with Krista Tippett

Using stem cells, Doris Taylor brought the heart of a dead animal back to life and might one day revolutionize human organ transplantation. She takes us beyond lightning rod issues and into an unfolding frontier where science is learning how stem cells work reparatively in every body at every age.

In this SOF Unheard Cut, Krista speaks with Doris Taylor, the director of the Center for Cardiovascular Repair at the University of Minnesota. They speak about the science of stem cells and their regenerative/reparative potential, and the ethics surrounding such work. This entire, unedited interview is included in the program, "Stem Cells, Untold Stories." Here's your chance to observe the editorial process and let us know what you think.

For many modern Americans, the very idea of reciting an unchanging creed, composed centuries ago, is troublesome. But, the late Jaroslav Pelikan was a scholar who devoted his life to exploring the vitality of ancient theology and creeds. He insisted that even modern pluralists need strong statements of belief. We revisit Krista's 2003 conversation with him, as they discuss the history and nature of creeds, and how a fixed creed can be reconciled with an honest, intellectual faith that changes and evolves.

We shine a light on two young leaders of a new generation of grassroots Muslim-Jewish encounter in Los Angeles. They're innovating templates of practical relationship that work with reality, acknowledge questions and conflict, yet resolve not to be enemies -- whatever the political future of the Middle East may hold.

One of today's most influential spiritual teachers shares his youthful experience of depression and despair -- suffering that led him to his own spiritual breakthrough, and ultimately, freedom and peace of mind. He also explicates his view of what he calls "the pain body" -- the accumulated emotional pain that may influence us and our relationships in negative ways. And Tolle talks about spirit and God, and what those concepts mean to him.

Novelist and translator David Treuer is helping to compile the first practical grammar of the Ojibwe language. He describes an unfolding experience of how language forms what makes us human. Some memories and realities, he has found, can only be carried forward in time by Ojibwe.

Nine Muslims, in their own words, reveal a creative convergence of Islamic spirituality and American identity that is unfolding, largely unnoticed, in the United States. A lawyer turned playwright, a teacher who's a lesbian, a retired federal prosecutor -- all giving shape to the nature and meaning of Muslim identity, and sharing how tricky it can be to unravel Islamic religious tradition from the many cultural traditions.

Our 29th voice is an American-born woman who says that her conversion to Islam has made her a better feminist. She is editor-in-chief of "America's Muslim Family Magazine" and lives with her husband and four children in suburban Chicago.

Our 28th voice in this series is a man who converted to Islam more than 15 years ago. Saeed Purcell "passed through" other faiths before becoming a Muslim. The turning point is when he read Malcolm X's autobiography, which led him to read the Qur'an. He recollects one of his first Ramadans, when he spent the last ten days alone in a mosque praying and fasting and spiritually cleansing himself.

The Irish poet and philosopher John O'Donohue was beloved for his book Anam Cara, Gaelic for "soul friend," and for his insistence on beauty as a human calling and a defining aspect of God. In one of his last interviews before his death in 2008, he articulated a Celtic imagination about how the material and the spiritual, the visible and the invisible worlds intertwine in human experience.

The 27th voice in this series is a young African-American woman who recently graduated from the University of Michigan. For the first nine years of her life, she was raised in a idyllic Muslim village nestled into the mountains of New Mexico, just north of Los Alamos. She shares two stories: one about celebrating Ramadan under the stars of the Southwest and the other of breaking their fast with three strangers at a dollar store.

Our 26th voice in this series was raised Presbyterian in Oxford, Mississippi and later moved to Philadelphia. But, with the social justice movements of the 1960's, her parents and she grew more secular. While in college, she began reading feminist authors, including a leading Muslim scholar on the veil, and a Somali man who embodied these principles. She later converted and is now a teacher and educator of peace conflict studies in Africa.

Our 25th voice grew up in inner-city Philadelphia and is now a professor at Shenandoah University in Leesburg, Virginia. Through the formative influence of his father, Islam provided the framework to escape the drugs and crime of most of his childhood friends. One of his first Ramadan celebrations also allowed him to see the many colors of Muslims he worshipped with. And now, decades later, his daughter is teaching him new things about faith during Islam's holiest month.

On this 24th day of Ramadan, a teacher who grew up in Syracuse, New York and now lives in Chicago with her family. She recalls celebrating one of her first Ramadans, while teaching third-graders in Dubai, and how "scared" she was at first and how "horrible" her first day of fasting was. Like most other things in Islam, she says, it takes time to learn how to be a practicing Muslim.

The 23rd voice in this series, Eli Smart, grew up in California and converted to Islam in his early 20s. Now 37, he lives in Michigan -- along with his mother and family -- and says that Dearborn''s centralized Muslim community gives him a sense of what it's like living in a Muslim country during Ramadan.