Letter From A Closeted Atheist
Dear Sugars
WBUR
4.5 • 5.9K Ratings
🗓️ 12 January 2017
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Sugars take on a letter from a self-identified atheist, who doesn't know how to tell her deeply religious parents that she's no longer a Christian. She loves and respects her parents, but worries that she can't be herself around them anymore -- that their beliefs and values are just too at odds. The Sugars discuss with the Reverend Jacqui Lewis, who had her own reckoning with faith.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Dear Sugar is supported by |
| 0:01.7 | The universe has good news for the lost, lonely, and heart sick. |
| 0:10.9 | Sugar is here. |
| 0:12.3 | The both of us, speaking straight into your ears. |
| 0:16.2 | I'm Cheryl Strayed. |
| 0:17.6 | I'm Steve Almond. |
| 0:18.7 | This is Dear Sugar Radio. |
| 0:22.1 | Oh, dear song, won't you please? |
| 0:29.2 | Share some little sweet days with me. |
| 0:36.7 | I check my bellbytes every day. |
| 0:44.3 | Oh, and the sugar you see in my way. |
| 0:55.7 | Steve Allman. |
| 0:56.6 | Yes, ma'am. |
| 0:58.8 | What is your religious background? |
| 1:01.3 | What is my religious background? |
| 1:07.1 | Well, I am what you would call, what would you call it? |
| 1:14.2 | Culturally, I am very Jewish in the sense that I think, like my great-grandfathers were both rabbis, and then the family went through a transformation in which we have essentially had a |
| 1:20.9 | series of kind of secular rabbinical figures, academics and psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, but |
| 1:27.1 | people who I think are doing some of the |
| 1:28.5 | same work that rabbis do. And I believe deeply and powerfully in the power of faith and the Bible |
| 1:35.9 | and both the Old and News Testament and the Mishnah and the Talmud as like some of the best and |
| 1:40.3 | most amazing and important human stories. And I am super interested in ideas of faith and how it helps us contend with doubt and uncertainty. |
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