BSR International Magazine Show – March 2018

from BroadSpectrumRadio.com

Hosted by James M. Branum

WORKING SCRIPT FOLLOWS/SOME MINOR CHANGES MAY APPEAR IN RECORDED VERSION

Welcome to the BSR International Magazine Show from Broad Spectrum Radio.com, hosted by James M. Branum.

This program is scheduled for airing in March 2018.

In this episode…

* A programming note about our missing February show

* Jewish and Mennonite, a short podcast about my bireligious experience, which will be also be aired as periodic segments on this program

* A song from the Mexican band Calibre Cinquenta (50 Caliber) entitled Corrido de Juanito with a bit of discussion about the story of this song.

* An update on the case of whistleblower Reality Winner.

* And finally the BSR Radiogram, a digital mode program, which can be decoded using software such FLDGI…  so for any digital radio enthusiasts out there, please get your recorder ready as this will be starting around the the 30 minute mark.

So let’s get started…

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So first… about our February show… well as is obvious by now, we didn’t do one. Life circumstances with family and job stuff just didn’t cooperate. I feel bad about this but the only thing to do is to move forward and get back to creating programming on a consistent basis again.

But to our next segment…

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Intro Music

Jewish and Mennonite, Episode #1

From the start of BSR, Broad Spectrum Radio, I’ve shared bits and pieces of my religious/spiritual journey and have sought to use my programs as a way to promote a more tolerant understandings of faith, because I frankly think it is essential to peace in this world, but I haven’t shared my whole story, and I really haven’t made it clear that my religious identity is bireligious in nature.

So, I think it’s time for me to be more open, to explain how I, like a growing number of people in this country and around the world, find it too confining to be defined and limited by a single faith tradition.

In what I hope will be an ongoing series of programs, I will be sharing about what it is like to be bireligious, including some of the ethical and practical issues at stakes. I also want to share some of my observations from comparing, contrasting and experiencing two traditions, hopefully always from an attitude of respect. And there will be a good bit of discussion about what this looks like in the context of a family.

First though, I want to share a short version of my religious background, as it gives some important context, explaining how I got to this place.

I grew up in a conservative evangelical Christian tradition, the Churches of Christ, but more specifically the acapella-only branch of the Churches of Christ. It was there that I first developed faith, but also it was I first started to question and push back against what others told me to believe, particularly as a teenager and young adult.

In my young adult years, I started to drift from the astere experience of the Churches of Christ and towards the charismatic tradition, yet I didn’t sever all of my ties with the churches of christ,  as I ended up graduating with a bachelor’s degree from a Church of Christ school and I served for about a year as a Church of Christ preacher. I really did not fit well in this tradition any more.

This tension grew after I started to wrestle with the issue of violence from the perspective of the teachings of Jesus, which led me to see a conflict between my religious upbringing, which largely taught that abortion was wrong, but that the death penalty and war was ordained by God. As i dealt more squarely with the nonviolent teachings of Jesus, I was drawn to a pacficist understanding of faith.

As I sought to resolve these issues, I came across the Mennonites,