Heart and Soul

Giving Death Back to the People is how Cara Mair describes her work as a funeral director. Her company, Arka Original Funerals, is part of a movement to de-industrialise, and re-personalise funerals in the UK.

Cara began in the business as a freelance embalmer. But she doesn’t do that anymore. “It started to send me do-lally,” she says. When she was working here, there and everywhere as a freelance, she was often appalled by what she experienced - the conveyor belt of death, the disrespect shown to bodies, funeral directors puffed up with their own self-importance, and especially, their power over their clients.

When Cara made the decision to start her own business, she was determined to do things differently. This edition of Heart and Soul explores Cara’s world, and her mission to change how her clients in the UK experience one of life’s most significant rituals. At the centre of her philosophy are the loved-ones left behind. Cara encourages them to be involved in the funeral process as much as they would like, or are able. This might mean they work with Cara to bathe, anoint and dress a body. Or that a family will ask to keep the loved one at home before the funeral – very rare in the UK.

Heart and Soul hears from those who have first-hand experience of Cara’s philosophy. Losing someone provokes deep upset and uncertainty in us – what difference has Cara’s approach made to the process of saying goodbye?

(Image: Cara Mair, founder of Arka Original Funerals, Credit: Toby Smedley)

They were a famous father-son team, perhaps the best known evangelical pastors in America. Tony and Bart Campolo spent decades preaching a gospel focused on serving the poor and the marginalised and Bart built a thriving inner city ministry, doing work for Christ.

Tony tells Jane Little about the actual physical pain he felt when Bart told him he had lost his faith.

He set out to create a 'religion for unbelievers' and to prove that you could be good without God.

Jane brings father and son together for a rich discussion on why Bart left and why Tony stayed – and still prays for his own Prodigal Son to return.

Producer/Presenter Jane Little

(Photo: Tony and Bart Campolo, Credit: campolofilm.com)

The Philippines is a devoutly religious country, with more than 86% of the population Roman Catholic – and it has huge drug problem. President Rodrigo Duterte, himself a Catholic, has been waging a controversial war on his country’s drugs problem since he took office in 2016.

Rebecca Henschke explores the fall out President Duterte’s controversial war on drugs is having on both the Church and Catholics in the pews. She visits drug rehab and prevention centres which are part of the Sanlakbay program that the Catholic Church has set up in response to the influx of thousands of drug surrenderees giving themselves up.

Duterte feels that after years of sexual abuse, much of which was covered up the Catholic Church, it has lost its right to comment on moral issues and many of the people who support him agree

The fastest growing religion in Iceland is Norse paganism.

Floating in a hot spring, snow falling from the night sky, John Laurenson meets Teresa Drofn. A 25 year-old Heathen, Teresa describes her return to the religion of her Viking forebears as a renewal of a unique spiritual relationship with nature.

A millennium after it was banned in exchange for Christianity, John explores why Icelanders are returning to the faith. At a ‘blot’, or sacred ceremony John hears a priestess read aloud from the Eddas, an ancient Icelandic text serving as scripture for the new heathens of Europe. In the old days at a ‘blot’, there’d be animal, even human sacrifices. Today they share in traditional Viking food, horse and whale, sheep’s head, puffin pâté and rotten shark.

(Photo: A priestess raises a bull’s horn filled with beer at a heathen ‘blot’- a religious ceremony, Iceland. Credit: Silke Schurack / BBC)

In Copenhagen, on an upmarket shopping street, above a burger joint, two female imams are leading Friday prayers.

(Photo: Betina Garcia / Getty Images)

The national motto of Indonesia is ‘Bhinneka Tunggal Ika’ - Unity In Diversity. It is the world’s largest Muslim majority country, but across its thousands of islands live more than 300 ethnic groups. Pancasila, the nation's founding philosophy, recited by school children every morning, proclaims unity in democracy, nationality and the belief in one god.

Ahok’s rise as a Chinese Christian to one of the country’s most prominent positions was seen as an example of Indonesia's commitment to religious tolerance. Now, many fear, a guilty verdict could cause irreversible damage.

Presented and produced by Rebecca Henschke

Ed Davey travels to Benin to attend the annual Voodoo Festival in Ouidah, encountering this ancient African religion in all its faith and fervour.

As travellers’ tales go, Jafar Habib’s account of the annual Voodoo Festival in Benin in 2011 is quite extraordinary. Jafar – a biochemist by trade – told correspondent Ed Davey that he had witnessed a voodoo priest decapitate a woman before raising her severed head in front of a baying crowd and reattaching it to her body. Then she came back to life.

There are descriptions of scenes within this programme that some listeners may find upsetting

(Photo: Voodoo devotees on a beach in Ouidah, Benin. Credit : Stefan Heunis/Getty Images)

The Bahá'i faith is one of the youngest of the world's major religions.

A faith without borders, most of the Bahá'is live outside of the birth place of the religion, Iran, where they are seen as heretics. After the Islamic revolution of 1979, overnight the rights of minorities were stifled. Many Bahá'is were incarcerated, tortured and evicted from their home country. Today, despite years of persecution, the Bahá'is have not only survived but thrived in the diaspora, with communities in 190 countries around the world.

For Heart and Soul from the BBC World Service, Lipika travels to America, home to the second largest Bahá'i population in the world. In New York Lipika meets several Bahá'i asylum seekers as they begin their new lives in the US. They are graduates from the Bahá'is' clandestine university, an underground network of teacher and students, the community's solution of self-education after being banned from colleges in Iran. Lipika also travels to Chicago where she visits the oldest Bahá'i temple in the world.

Produced and presented by Lipika Pelham

Leaving the Orthodox Jewish community does not just mean forgoing your faith – it also means leaving a community, a life and in many cases your family. It can be so traumatic for many people that there are groups, set up to help people to distance themselves from the faith they feel encompasses every aspect of their lives.

Daniel Gordon meets Hasidic Jews at different stages of the slow process of leaving their tight-knit religious community and joining mainstream society.

Daniel will meet Maya, who grew up in the tight knit Jewish suburb of Stamford Hill in north London who tells him about her life as part of the community. He also meets 25-year-old Izzy who, until a couple of years ago, could not speak English such was the introverted nature of life. Daniel is there as he opens the results of an important maths examination that is taken by 16-year-olds in the UK.

Leaving the ‘derech’, or path, is not an easy decision. In doing so, ties are cut permanently with a faith and a way of life that is governed by strict laws. In understanding what it is to leave we understand more what it was to be part of it in the first place.

Dr Robert Beckford explores how cheating in sport conflicts with Christian principles.

He asks how can an Olympic champion stand on the podium with a gold medal and then thank God in an interview if they have taken performance enhancing drugs? Can a footballer celebrate the penalty he has ‘won’ and then point to the sky in honour of God? In this edition of Heart and Soul, featuring Olympic medallist Ben Johnson, Robert explores what the Christianity has to say about fair play and whether by cheating you are dishonouring your faith.

Doping, Diving and God was presented by Robert Beckford and produced in Salford by Rajeev Gupta.

Photo credit: Getty Images