Heart and Soul

Buddhist temple Wat Thamkrabok in Thailand has a worldwide reputation for its successful mix of ‘cold turkey’ and Buddhism in combating addiction.

Producer: Helen Lee

(Photo: Buddha statues at Wat Thamkrabok, Thailand. Credit: BBC)

If you ask Cosmo the robot what faith he is, what does he answer? We’ll find out when we bring together young digital media users of different faiths to meet him at MediaCityUK at Salford in the UK. Sophia Smith-Galer has been exploring how digital technology is changing the ways we worship and her guests will give their thoughts on what she’s found during our #ReligionintheDigitalAge series, and what they think about the future of faith and technology.

Presented by Sophia Smith-Galer

Worshippers are gathering for a church service led by Pastor D.J Soto in Virginia in the USA. Many of them are at home or even in other countries. For DJ, this church is important for worshippers unable to attend a physical church, such as the disabled, the ostracised and the persecuted.

VR technology is also teaching future generations about religious tolerance. Every year Jews and Holocaust survivors from across the world make a pilgrimage to Auschwitz in Poland. Alongside them is Karen Jungblut, director of research and documentation, from the Shoah Foundation, based at the University of Southern California, its mission to preserve the first-person accounts of 50,000 Holocaust survivors and other witnesses began with videotape. Now it's using 360 filming to capture the testimony of survivors in the landscape where it happened.

Worship is often about the icons of your faith – and in Leicester in the UK we meet Sikh students as they encounter some of their religion’s most important artefacts for the first time – thanks to a VR headset, as a way of engaging young Sikhs and teaching non-Sikhs about the religion.

But can immersing yourself get too, well, real? Hussein Kesvani, a Shi’a Muslim journalist who writes about the online experience of British Muslims, joins us to experience a virtual reality app that allows the user to relive the battle of Karbala, an instrumental moment in the Muslim faith. Is this visualisation a step too far?

Presented by Sophia Smith-Galer

Digital journalist Sophia Smith-Galer hears from young faith influencers using social media to spread the word and meets an ex-Muslim who can talk online about losing her faith, but hasn’t told her family.

Presenter: Sophia Smith–Galer

(Image credit: Getty Images)

There are thousands of religious apps offering to help you worship in the right way. In the first of a new season exploring the digital world and the spiritual world, Sophia Smith Galer considers whether they’re a quick convenience, or a legitimate means of getting closer to your God, and asks if they are all really as pious as they seem?

In the US, the ‘OneTable’ app aims to bring young Jews without their own religious community, to celebrate the Friday night ritual of Shabbat. The app connects them with others in their area and it’s currently reaching up to 100,000 participants in 185 cities across the states. But for Orthodox Jews, using new technology is strictly forbidden.

Presented by Sophia Smith Galer

Not many countries can boast of having a state Oracle. Tibet can, although the medium for their principal oracle – the Nechung – lives exiled from his native land in North India.

(Photo:The medium of the present State Oracle of Tibet Ven Thupten Ngodrup, or Kuten-la to Tibetans (Centre)

Sarah, together with her father and brother, meets the bombers who killed her mother as she and her family attempt to understand how the men who carried it out could be followers of the same faith – and claim to carry out the act in the name of Islam.

On her fifth birthday Sarah’s mother died from injuries sustained in a terrorist attack. She was the victim of a car bomb that exploded outside the Australian embassy in the Indonesian capital Jakarta in 2004. It was one of a series of bombings carried out by a local Islamist militant group Jemaah Islamiyah or J-I who were responsible for the country’s worst terrorist attack – the bombing on the holiday island of Bali in 2002 that killed more than 200 people.

Rebecca Henschke witnesses the extraordinary meeting between Sarah and her mother’s killers on Indonesia’s highest security prison island.

Presenter/producer: Rebecca Henschke

Photo: Sarah (centre), Hassan (L) and Rois (R). Credit: Haryo Wirawan.

“I am an expert bomb maker. I can make bombs in just five minutes; it’s easier than making a kite.”

For Heart and Soul, Rebecca Henschke meets a bomber turned peacemaker as part of the Crossing Divides series on the BBC World Service.

Ali Fauzi was a chief bomb-maker for Jemaah Islamiyah, a terror group with links to Al-Qaeda, responsible for Indonesia’s worst terrorist attack – the Bali bombing in 2002. His brothers carried out the bombing. Two of the brothers were executed, while another is behind bars for life.

Ali insists he was not involved in the Bali bombing, but spent three years in prison for terror-related offences. That was when his life took on a dramatically new direction.

In just two years India has leapt up the table into the top ten of the most dangerous countries to be a Christian.

At the same time, there’s a rise in an extreme version of Hinduism which is linked to the recently re-elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

There are 65 million Christians in India, and they make up just over 2% of this vast country, but instead of being able to live and worship under the radar, in the last five years there’s been a huge increase in serious incidents against Christians. There are hundreds of cases of Christians being physically attacked, harassed, discriminated against, people being forced to flee their villages and Churches being destroyed.

Zubair Ahmed reports for the BBC Hindi Service and is in Uttar Pradesh where many of the reported incidents of violence against Christians are taking place.

Eight states in India have introduced anti-conversion bills to limit conversions from Hinduism to another faith. For the extremists who carry out the attacks the new laws are used as a way to legitimise their violent actions against Christians and Muslims.

The government officially distances itself from the violent mobs that are attacking churches and mosques but the new Citizenship Bill, which was passed just after the elections last year, has defined what it is to be Indian even more vividly.

(Photo Credit: Zubair Ahmed)

Father Columba Stewart, a Benedictine monk from St Joseph's Abbey, Minnesota, travels to Timbuktu with a team of experts trying to persuade the Imams of the City's three great Mosques to allow them to digitise their highly endangered manuscript collections.

These priceless cultural documents are filled with irreplaceable ancient wisdom. They are largely Islamic, but relate to all facets of life in the city over the last several hundred years. Many are straightforward copies of the Quran and the Hadith, but they include information and advice on everyday issues, like potions to prevent a husband from marrying a second time.

Many manuscripts have not been read in centuries, and the vast majority have never been translated. Others are in Arabic script, but the languages are actually African.

The texts themselves cling on to existence. Slowly disintegrating over the ages, they are now under a direct threat from the Islamic State. Many of these texts are viewed as 'haram', heretical or idolatrous, because they are of Sufi origin. Father Columba has watched on in horror as IS has systematically destroyed the Sufi shrines in Timbuktu and, in 2014, 4,000 of these manuscripts were burnt. Time has come for Father Columba to act.

This is a journey fraught with danger. Father Columba is only able to access Timbuktu as part of an army convoy. On the ground, he will be aided by a team of UN security guards. Their presence is essential as Timbuktu is listed by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office as a no-go zone. All across the surrounding area, Islamic State militants lie in wait.

(Photo: Father Columba Stewart Credit: Sean Glynn/This Is Novel)