Heart and Soul

By BBC World Service

Heart and Soul is a weekly half-hour programme that has the scope and understanding to explore different experiences of spirituality from around the world.

Whether examining religious faith or an... more

· Religion & Spirituality

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FAQs about Heart and Soul:

How many episodes does Heart and Soul have?

The podcast currently has 279 episodes available.

Heart and Soul episodes:

May 03, 2019 Beauty and belief: The story of a Brooklyn salon
For Heart and Soul, American journalist Noor Wazwaz takes us into the private world of New York’s first hijab-friendly hair and beauty salon.

Based in Brooklyn, Le'Jemalik - which means For Your Beauty in Arabic - is owned and run by Yemeni-American Huda Quhshi. A hair and beauty expert with an entrepreneurial spirit, it’s been Huda’s life-long ambition to create a beautiful, bright, enclosed women-only space where clients can let their hair down, in every sense of the word.
Modesty is the order of the day for Muslim women here in the salon, and opinions vary on just how much makeup can be worn in public. But one thing is agreed: religious modesty and a desire to be beautiful can and do go together.
We meet bridesmaids getting dolled up for their big day, hard-working mums and fashion students in need of pampering. Listening on conversations, we discover how religion and culture shape Muslim women's views about beauty and fashion. Some beauty treatments are considered haram - or forbidden by Islamic law - but there are workarounds such as halal brows and halal nail polish.
Image: A beautician at work (Credit: Joy Ernanny)
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27min
April 26, 2019 Pick up your stretcher and walk!
Like many disabled people, Damon Rose is regularly approached by Christians who want to pray for him to be healed. Would-be healers claim they’re simply doing what Jesus himself did and what he instructed his followers to do. They may mean well, but the experience can leave disabled people feeling judged as ‘faulty’ and in need of repair. Is this really what Christianity teaches about disability? In this programme, Damon (a blind journalist and open-minded non-believer) investigates different Christian approaches to disability, combining cutting-edge theology with personal stories of faith, hope and human frailty. He joins a group of Christians as they offer healing on the street, attends a healing service and meets the disabled Christians carving out a new ‘theology of disability’.
Interviewees include:
Lyndall Bywater, a Christian writer and prayer leader in the United Kingdom
Jonathan Conrathe, founder of Mission 24 – a Christian ministry that works with churches all over the world
Becky Tyler, who preached at the Greenbelt Christian festival
Candida Moss, the Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham
Rev Zoe Hemming, vicar of St Andrews Church in the village of Aston in Shropshire, England.
If you would like to contact BBC Ouch please email [email protected]
(Image: Damon on the tube, Credit: Sarah Dousse)
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27min
April 19, 2019 New York Stations of the Cross
For Easter weekend Rosie Dawson joins a group of the faithful in New York as they follow a very different Stations of the Cross - a series that bears witness to the scourge of sex trafficking - a modern form of slavery - that every year traps thousands of young girls and women in the city. It marks the start of a campaign against hugely controversial plans to make New York the first state in America to completely decriminalise the sex industry.
Rosie travels New York’s Via Dolorosa (The Way of Tears) that trafficked girls and women in New York often find themselves taking. Reverend Adrian Dannhauser is the guide on this alternative journey.

"If we legalise the industry we will go back to the days of the '70s when you had lines of African-American women lined up in Times Square like slaves on an auction block."

Rosie joins the pilgrims at the bus station and at JFK airport, the gateway into the US for so many women trafficked from abroad. We take in the notorious motel where men pimp the women they control. And finally a human trafficking intervention court, which recognises that those arrested on prostitution charges are likely to be victims of sex trafficking, violence and trauma.
Producer: Rosie Dawson
(Photo: Rosie Dawson)
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28min
April 05, 2019 Fork in the Road - Two journeys out of violence
In the final part of Fork in the Road, Jane Little meets two more people who have been through similar life changing experiences, but have had their faith affected in different ways.

Jahaziel and Guvna B are both rappers, and products of the housing estates of London. They have both seen street violence, friends hurt, and witnessed the decaying effect on the lives of young black men.

Jahaziel was one of the biggest selling Christian rappers, but now he has left his faith. He tells Jane how he just couldn’t regurgitate the ideas that he had been fed since he was a boy, and how his fans turned on him when he turned his back on Christianity.

Guvna B grew up in a similar gang-ruled neighbourhood of London. He now shares his strong Christian faith through his own music, winning a MOBO in 2010. Jane hears how his music is his relationship with God.

After hearing their individual stories of growing up amid gang violence, Jane brings them together to discuss how, despite those similar circumstances, they have taken different paths in faith.
Produced and presented by Jane Little
Image: Jane Little/BBC
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28min
March 30, 2019 Young Muslims in France
The BBC World Service is in the city to hear youthful voices with a variety of views on their faith.
Islam is the second largest religion in France. In a nation that separates state and religion what does a French Muslim identity look like? In this unique and timely programme, Heart and Soul Gathering on the BBC World Service, hears from a group of young Muslims with a variety of different faith perspectives and backgrounds. Together with a studio audience, they discuss personal faith and experience.
Presented by Somaya Nasr and Produced by Louise Clarke-Rowbotham for the BBC World Service.
Image: A young woman takes a photograph with a smartphone outside The Grande Mosque in Paris. Credit: Getty/ZAKARIA ABDELKAFI / Contributor
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50min
March 29, 2019 Fork in the Road - My faith and my sexuality
Can you remain committed to your religion even it it does not accept your sexuality? Jane Little meets two well-known writers who have publicly wrestled with their faiths and been forced to make choices on whether to stay or go.

Andrew Sullivan is a political commentator whose writings helped drive the successful campaign for gay marriage in the United States. But the battles along the way, especially during the era of the AIDS epidemic, caused him to question his Catholic faith and he admits he faced some dark moments and prolonged anger at the church.

Irshad Manji is a Canadian Muslim writer who has been an outspoken critic of Islam, not least over attitudes to homosexuality and women's rights; she has received death threats for her work. She tells Jane about her lifelong habit of rebellion; she was kicked out of Islamic school as a child for asking questions, but has eventually found peace - with her version of Islam and in marriage to a woman.

Producer: Jane Little
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27min
March 25, 2019 Fork in the Road - God in the War on Terror
How is it that two people can share the same experiences and events and it have such different effects on their faith?
Jane Little meets two men who both answered the call after 9/11 to join the War on Terror, but who came out of it with very different ideas about their relationship with God.
Rory Fanning and Jesse Bowman both served in the US Army and witnessed the worst that war could throw up. One of them lost his previously unshakeable Catholicism, the other found comfort from the psychological trauma in God.

They both share candidly with Jane their experiences and how these shaped their futures.
Image: Young US Army soldiers attend a Sunday morning Catholic service on base at Fort Levinworth in Kansas in February 2003 (Credit: Charles Ommanney/Getty Images)
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28min
March 21, 2019 A year and a day
When Colin Brazier lost his wife Jo to cancer last summer, he felt pressure to put his grief on show, to make her funeral a celebration.

Friends expected him to give the eulogy at her funeral, and some wanted to wear bright colours to celebrate her life. But that felt completely wrong, and though one mourner turned up in shorts and flip flops, the service was a traditional one with hymns and mourners dressed in black. As a Catholic, the ritual of the Requiem Mass felt cleansing and appropriate.
As much of Europe and the US becomes more secular, Colin explores the modern funeral and the growth of the personalised, celebratory service, in contrast to the service he organised for Jo. With pall bearers dressed as super-heroes and wakes at McDonalds, is death being given its true state, and should it be a time to celebrate?
In a highly personal programme, Colin talks to non-believers too, and asks how they navigate death without the framework of religion to guide them.
Presenter: Colin Brazier
Producer: Henrietta Harrison
Picture: Jo Brazier. Credit: Colin Brazier
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28min
March 08, 2019 American Judaism after the Tree of Life
It was the response of Jewish organisations that was possibly most telling the day after last year's Tree of Life shooting. President Trump wasn’t welcome in Pittsburgh unless, that is, he denounced the language of white nationalism.

The attack on the synagogue, according to The Washington Post, ‘wasn’t unimaginable but inevitable’, and anecdotally the build-up of anti-Semitic attacks in the US may just back that up. The Anti-Defamation League logged a 57 percent rise in incidents in 2017.

The Tree of Life synagogue sits in the Squirrel Hill area of Pittsburgh, and has been described as an urban shtetl; we meet the Jews who share this small section of the city.

David McGuire asks Rabbi Jeffrey Myers how the shooting of 11 of its members affected the Squirrel Hill community.

Under the provocative #jewishresistance, liberal Jews have challenged other Jews to stand up for their faith, but the reality is that they aren’t united, they are split religiously and politically. The accusation is that Orthodox and Conservative Jews are remaining silent when it comes to the rise of anti-Semitic language.

Jews across the USA say they now feel as threatened as they have done for many years, and as they face external intimidation, there is a growing gap between the two sides of the faith in the USA.
Producer and Presenter: David McGuire
Picture: A shop front in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, USA. Credit BBC
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28min
March 01, 2019 Kenya’s Quakers: Best of Friends
Kenya is home to the majority of the world's Quakers and it is vibrant and noisy, much different from the quiet, contemplative religion most of us know.
Audrey Brown has been to the spiritual home of the Quaker faith, Kaimosi to learn how it landed, spread and flourished.

The faith is growing at rapid rate across East Africa, fighting for converts with other Christian faiths and Quakers in Europe have recently been debating whether God has a place in its worship, but that's not the case here in Kenya, God is at the front and centre of their boisterous services. there aren't many moments of silence here.
Audrey meets the Kenyan worshippers as well some visiting German Quakers and listens in as they debate the importance, or not, of God.
Picture: A Quaker in Kenya Credit: BBC
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28min

FAQs about Heart and Soul:

How many episodes does Heart and Soul have?

The podcast currently has 279 episodes available.