This American Life
Selections from the award-winning public radio program
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This American Life is a weekly public radio program produced in collaboration with Chicago Public Media and hosted by Ira Glass. Each week, the producers put together different kinds of stories on a chosen theme. First aired in 1995, the show is heard by more than 2 million listeners each week on over 500 public radio stations in the United States, and heard on radio stations across Canada and Australia. This American Life received the very first Pulitzer Prize ever awarded to a radio show or podcast.
For your listening pleasure, HTI Open Plaza has curated 12 episodes from the archive of This American Life on issues of faith and religion that have impacted our communities. Transcripts are available via episode links.
Stations of the Double Cross
This American Life producer Michelle Navarro attended a Catholic youth group retreat in Chicago when she was thirteen. She didn’t expect the older kids to use the recruitment tactics they used, with the help of adult accomplices.
772: The Kids' Table
Act Three: Stations of the Double Cross
Air date: 3 June 2022
13 minutes
Their Eyes Weren’t Watching God
On a friend’s recommendation, B.A. Parker decides to try attending First Corinthian Baptist Church in Harlem. Parker is black, much like the majority of the church’s congregation. But when she gets to FCBC, she notices a long line of white tourists waiting to get inside.
695: Everyone’s Critic
Act One: Their Eyes Weren’t Watching God
Air date: 28 February 2020
13 minutes
Scrupulosity
Ira Glass talks to Father Thomas Santa about the kind of confession that he finds among the most difficult to listen to — and not because what’s being confessed is too big or too horrible — but because, as Father Santa explains, they aren’t sins at all. He is the author of Understanding Scrupulosity: Questions, Helps, and Encouragement (Liguori, 2007).
507: Confessions
Prologue
Air date: 11 October 2013
10 minutes
Take Your Kid to Work Day
A boy rides shotgun in a memorable car ride with his mother, and in the process learns how his father earns money for their family. This story appears in Domingo Martinez’s memoir, The Boy Kings of Texas (Lyons Press, 2012), which was a finalist for the National Book Award.
477: Getting Away With It
Act One: Take Your Kid to Work Day
Air date: 19 October 2012
16 minutes
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Mission: Impossible
Producer Jane Feltes spends a day with two young Mormons, on mission to possibly the least receptive environment they could find...the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
426: Tough Room 2011
Act Three: Mission: Impossible
Air date: 4 February 2011
9 minutes
A Pastor and His Flock
Working in a poultry processing plant is one of the most unpleasant jobs you can get in this country. It's low-paid, dangerous and difficult. Barely any poultry plants are represented by a union, especially in the South, where most of the plants are located. So worker rights advocates rely in large part on the church to help them organize workers. And in the past few years, they've been trying something new: They've been using the church to intervene with company management in a very, very personal way. This American Life producer Sarah Koenig tells the story of how one organizer tried this method with a manager at a company called Case Farms, and a plant they have in Morganton, North Carolina. You can learn more in the film Mississippi Chicken (2007), a documentary about poultry factory workers in Canton, Mississippi.
369: Poultry Slam 2008
Act Three: A Pastor And His Flock
Air date: 28 November 2008
15 minutes
Changing the Channeler
This American Life contributor Davy Rothbart goes to Brazil with his deaf mother to try and get her hearing back from a miracle healer called Joao de Deus, or John of God. They had trouble agreeing whether the things they witnessed down there were miracles or not.
262: Miracle Cures
Act One: Changing the Channeler
Air date: 2 April 2004
37 minutes
God Shed His Grace On Thee
A fable of how America got its name, and how it was named after someone who was a fraud, but the kind of fraud people love, the kind of fraud who knows how to please a crowd. Jack Hitt tells the racy and little-known story of how Amerigo Vespucci got his name all over the map of the western hemisphere by telling lies about what he found there—the type of lies which can be found today in the pages of Penthouse magazine.
216: Give the People What They Want
Act Two: God Shed His Grace On Thee
Air date: 12 July 2002
13 minutes
"African-American Flag" designed in 1990 by David Hammons, an African-American artist from New York City. Inspired by the civil rights and Black Power movements, the re-colored US flag uses Marcus Garvey colors. It is now a part of the permanent collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art, and a copy is flown daily at the entrance of the Harlem Studio Museum.
Cicero, Illinois
This prologue opens with Father Jim Kastigar, who got on the wrong side of Town Hall and suffered the kinds of consequences people in Cicero suffer. His parish was denied a permit to hold an outdoor religious ceremony they'd held peacefully for seven years, the youth group's tamale fundraiser was shut down by city inspectors and the parking lot near the church was deemed unfit for Sunday parking.
The full episode is about a town that time forgot, or more accurately, a town that tried to forget the times. This special broadcast—co-hosted by award-winning journalist Alex Kotlowitz, author of the books There Are No Children Here (Doubleday, 1992) and The Other Side of the River (Anchor, 1999)—is the story of what at one time was one of most notoriously racist and corrupt suburbs in America. In the 1920s, Cicero was reputedly run by Al Capone, and federal indictments against organized crime there continued steadily all the way through the 1990s. In the 1960s, Cicero residents reacted so violently to threats of integration that officials told Martin Luther King, Jr.'s supporters that marching there would be a suicide mission. Today, two-thirds of the population is Mexican-American, but the political machine from decades past still holds power. A parable of racial politics in America, of white Americans not wanting change, not wanting to let in the outside world, and what happens when they have no choice.
Air date: 16 March 2001
59 minutes
The Unmasking
A story of guys who wear real masks, like superheroes, in their jobs as costumed wrestlers in a kind of Mexican wrestling called Lucha Libre. Writer RJ Smith has them talk about how much smaller they feel, how humiliated, when they have to take the masks off.
92: Leave the Mask On
Act Three: The Unmasking
Air date: 6 February 1998
10 minutes
One Thing
Ira Glass talks with Arnie, a gang kid who turned to Jesus with the same ferocity and dedication with which he served his old street gang.
63: One Thing
Prologue
Air date: 9 May 1997
5 minutes
Anger and Forgiveness
Glen Fitzgerald, a Chicago missionary who works with gang members, talks about his concept of forgiveness, and how important it is to being Christian.
5: Anger and Forgiveness
Act Four
Air date: 15 December 1995
9 minutes