On Being with Krista Tippett

Feruze Faison, our ninth voice in this series, grew up in Istanbul and now lives and teaches elementary school in New York. After an early marriage in the U.S., she met her current partner, a woman with whom she's raising three children. Her relationship is a source of estrangement between her and other family members. The Sufism of her native Turkey influences her personal faith and her memories of Ramadan.

Our eighth voice in this series is a young woman from Florida who comes from a Bengali family. Sahar Ullah recently completed graduate work in Middle Eastern studies, and, here, shares a childhood memory about fasting during a field trip to a fast-food restaurant.

Today's story comes from Adnan Onart, a Turkish Muslim living in Boston, Massachusetts. He and his wife are active members of a Unitarian-Universalist congregation where, he says, they can best live out their Muslim faith. He recites his poem, "Ramadan in Dunkin Donuts," on this seventh day of Ramadan.

We explore the complex ethics of global aid with a young writer from Kenya, Binyavanga Wainaina. He is among a rising generation of African voices who bring a cautionary perspective to the morality and efficacy behind many Western initiatives to abolish poverty and speed development in Africa.

On this sixth day of Ramadan, we hear from Maria Romero, a Mexican-American lawyer living with her daughter in Seattle. She grew up Roman Catholic and married an Arab Muslim man. Only after their divorce did she convert to Islam. The Ramadan story she tells is one of pain and fortitude, one of isolation and new community.

Wajahat Ali, the fifth voice in this series, is a playwright who first trained as an attorney. He's a first-generation Pakistani-American who grew up in the San Francisco Bay area. Unlike our first Ramadan story, one of his fondest memories takes place outside the United States, in Mecca, with hundreds of simple gestures of kindness and beauty.

Allee Ramadhan was born a Muslim in the U.S. 65 years ago. Growing up bloack and Muslim meant, as he puts it, having three strikes against him before he got to bat. The father of 11 children, he recently retired as a federal prosecutor and lives in New York.

Yanina Vashchenko, our voice for this third day of Ramadan, is a recent convert to Islam. She's 25 and emigrated from Russia to Dallas, Texas when she was eight years old. She grew up in the Russian Orthodox Church and spent several years as a non-denominational Christian. Here she shares several memories, including how the act of fasting and praying during Ramadan led her to declare herself officially Muslim.

Ibrahim Al-Marashi, our second voice in Revealing Ramadan, is a scholar of modern history with a focus on the Middle East and political communications. His profile was heightened when an article he wrote in 2002 was plagiarized by the British and American governments to justify the invasion of Iraq. An Iraqi-American, he grew up and studied in California and has taught in the U.S., Turkey, and currently in Spain. The curiosity that took him to Madrid flows into the Ramadan story he likes to tell.

Samar Jarrah, a Kuwait-born Palestinian-American, says there is no better place to celebrate Ramadan than in her adopted country.

Mary Doria Russell has grappled with large moral and religious questions on and off the page. We discover what she discerned -- in the act of creating a new universe -- about God and about dilemmas of evil, doubt, and free will. The ultimate moral of any life and any event, she believes, only shows itself across generations. And so the novelist, like God, she says, paints with the brush of time.

President Obama has cited Reinhold Niebuhr's teachings as significant in shaping his ideas about politics and governance. In a public conversation, we discuss the great public theologian's legacy and ideas -- and what influence they may play in the future of American politics.

James Prosek is an artist, fly-fisher, author, and environmental activist who has always, as he puts it, found God "through the theater of nature." From a young age he has been fascinated by trout and now eel -- which he sees as "mystical creatures" -- and he's captured them literally and artistically, by way of both angling and paint. We explore the sense of meaning and mystery he has developed along the way, including his concern with how we humans limit our sense of other creatures by the names we give them.

Last fall we began to conduct an online conversation parallel to but distinct from our culture's more sustained focus on economic scenarios. For in each of our lives, whoever we are, very personal scenarios are unfolding that confront us with core questions of what matters to us and what sustains us. We made a list of our guests across the years who we thought might speak to this in fresh and compelling ways.

We explore human and spiritual aspects of economic downturn with a wise public intellectual of our time, the Quaker author and educator Parker Palmer. He works with people from all walks of life at the intersection of spiritual, professional, and social change, and stresses the need to acknowledge the inner life of human beings as a source of reality and power.