The America Magazine Podcast

Jesuit priest Uwem Akpan published his first short story in the New Yorker in 2005 and his writing career has blossomed from there. His short story collection, Say You’re One of Them, is the most recent selection of Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club, and Father Akpan appeared with Ms. Winfrey on a live Webcast earlier this month. In an interview with America, Father Akpan describes how the Ignatian tradition has helped nurture his writing and why he decided to tell his stories from a child’s point of view.

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Doris Gottemoeller, R.S.M., past president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, offers four recommendations for the Vatican visitation of women religious, and reflects on the opportunities and limitations such a process entails.

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Kevin F. Burke, S.J., the author of two books on Ignacio Ellacuria, discusses the legacy of the Spanish Jesuit and the other victims of the massacre at the University of Central America in San Salvador on Nov. 16, 1989. A total of eight people were killed on that day, which proved to be a turning point in American policy toward El Salvador. Father Burke also reports on the work of Jesuit theologian Jon Sobrino, one of two members of the CAU Jesuit community who were not home that night and thus survived the attack.

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Robert Ellsberg, the editor of The Duty of Delight, the Diaries of Dorothy Day remembers first meeting the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, and what he has learned about Day by editing her diaries and her forthcoming collection of letters.

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William Bole offers a critique of the social conservative movement, arguing that too often their positions are indistinguishable from the platform of  the Republican National Committee. This is unfortunate, Bole contends, because a truly independent social conservative movement could play a key role in implementing policies designed to strengthen the family.

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Associate editor Kevin Clarke interviews John Donaghy, a lay missionary from Honduras, on the country’s political crisis in wake of the ouster of Manuel Zelaya on June 28. Donaghy assesses the church’s response to what some have called a coup d’etat, and what impact the political strife will have on the country’s poor.

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What would “Mexican Night” look like in heaven? The Jesuit Peter Steele offers a playful scenario in his poem of the same name, read here by the author along with “Kyrie Eleison, “Lazarus at the Gate (After Tiepolo),” and other writings. For more on the Australian poet read Jim McDermott’s profile of Steele in the October 19 issue.

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Paul Moses recounts the remarkable meeting between St. Francis of Assisi and Sultan al-Kamil in the midst of the Fifth Crusade. Moses explores why this meeting was glossed over for so many years, and what the encounter can teach contemporary observers in an age of tense Muslim-Christian relations.

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Susan Windley-Daoust, a professor of theology at St. Mary’s University of Minnesota, makes the case that birth is not simply an ordeal to endure, but a rich spiritual gift that is comparable in many ways of the prayer life. She argues that while medicine has made great strides in the area of childbirth, it has not come without some cost to the spiritual immediacy of the experience.

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James Martin, S.J., America’s culture editor, looks at the first few seasons of the AMC television show “Mad Men” and the literary and philosophical themes it invokes, from John Paul Sartre and Richard Yates to Flannery O’Connor.

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