Live from the Protestant Church Congress 2007 in Cologne – Taizé Experiences – Religion and Society
To do a show about religion was suggested by Irene Hansen who left a comment on our blog some weeks ago, where she also mentioned the Taizé Community. Taizé is a community in France but its members come from various different parts of the world – so the lifestyle in the community is at the same time religious and remarkably intercultural.
absolutely abroad
Our good friend Fernando moved from Spain to the USA a few months ago, and he tells us about his observations regarding religion in general and especially Catholicism in the United States. Fernando, welcome back to ‘absolutely intercultural!’
absolutely personal
We got in touch with Irene and arranged to meet her at the five day protestant church congress in Cologne, Germany, which came to an end last Sunday the 10th of June with a service attended by over 100,000 participants from all over the world. Supported by Anne Knopf and Gereon Reuter, two of our students here at RheinAhrCampus, she interviewed quite a number of people about their wishes and dreams for the world, about their experiences at the church congress and about their visits to the Taize community in France.
absolutely recommendable
But of course we haven’t been the only podcasters at the protestant church congress. The Deutsche Welle Radio for example has created a fantastic feature about the event that will provide you with even more eyewitness reports and thoughts about faith and its position in the world. So we recommend to you to go to the Deutsche Welle website and listen to their correspondents reports.
absolutely lifelong
Watch out for international conventions, exhibitions, fairs or anything that brings people from other countries to your city. At these events is usually very easy to get in contact with interesting people and learn more about their culture and of course their language.
absolutely original
Listent to a street preacher at Victoria Station in London who was using a megaphone to draw attention to the importance of God and hear a group of believers of the Hare Krishna movement who were out in the street to reach out to passers-by and attract them to their religious beliefs by singing.
Announcement
Karsten Kneese will participate in a panel about “The future of educasts” at 4 pm on June 20th for the Podcastday 2007. The panel will be recorded and can be downloaded after the event.
The next show will be coming to you on the 29th of June from Anne Fox in Denmark.
So long…stay tuned!
The host of this show is: Dr. Laurent Borgmann
Edited and co-hosted by: Karsten Kneese
A friend asked me how did I become a religious affairs reporter? Good question.
It all started with listening to domradio (which is the internet radio of Cologne archbishopric) . They broadcasted Taizé prayers once a week. As I often missed them, I was happy when I discovered that they had decided to make a podcast out of the weekly prayers.
The next thing was that my husband installed i-tunes and once I had listened into that I found a lot of interesting things, one of them being absolutely intercultural. As I’ve always been interested in international relations and cross border connections of any kind, I sent them an e-mail that I think the most intercultural place in the world is in France being Taizé. They thought that was interesting and when I read in the newspaper that some of the brothers from Taizé would come to participate in the German Protestant Church day in Cologne, the idea of making an episode was born. The two students were really nice and the whole project was good fun.
Just one more thing: There were lots of good conversations on that day (you know what I mean not just empty words that make a lot of noise but conversations that make you go on in your mind).
One was with Alexander from Leipzig/Saxony. He said: “I’m a person rather into natural science, but I think it’s very interesting, as I’ve got the feeling that something else could be there. It’s difficult to say for me if it’s a God but the answers that come from church keep me interested.”
For me after all this years this rings a bell, but I’m more interested in the questions that come from this direction….The questions about justice and peace…
What are yours?
This posting originally relates to episode 24:
I was interested to come across your web site and podcast while doing research on intercultural understanding.
I’ve only just listened to my first podcast (episode 24). I was particularly interested in the bilingual issues and the corporate culture.
Corporate Culture: I believe there’s a deeper dimension to corporate culture, one about the values and conventions of an organisation, as well as the “types of people” working in an organisation. Together they dictate the way in which an organisation works & “behaves” over time – which often goes beyond the individuals involved, i.e. even if you change a key individuals, the organisation continues working along predefined habits/patterns.
Collective behaviour, collective motivation and collective memory, I believe are strong factors in corporate culture.
I can only see the list of recent podcasts in iTunes, so forgive me if I’m commenting out of turn, but I wanted to know whether you have done features on globalisation (economic & cultural)? Also: looking towards less developed countries (the other 80%)…
Olivier
Salut Olivier,
thanks a lot for your interest in our podcast. We hope that you find tons of intercultural treasures when you go through the other episodes, too!
Let me pick up two of the points you brought up as they might also be interesting for other listeners:
1.) accessing previous episodes of our podcast
You wrote: “I can only see the list of recent podcasts in iTunes”
-> I am not a very technical person but I think that this is a setting that you can change (also temporarily) in the “preferences” in iTunes. You can choose to download the latest 5, or 3 or maybe all of them – I think 😉 However, there are also alternatives which I want to mention as we often get this request. You can go to our main blog page and either go to the button “Archive” right at the top in the green field or just paste this into your browser:
http://www.absolutely-intercultural.com/?page_id=49
This will take you to the earlier episodes. Alternatively, you can go to the bottom of the page and click on “previous entries” which takes you back to earlier shows, too.
2.) suggestions for future podcasts: “bilingualism revisited” and “corporate culture”
I think both your suggestions are good and we will take them up. In fact I have already recorded more interviews on bilingualism and am waiting for an opportunity to weave them into a show.
For corporate culture we might need some outside help, though. Maybe YOU might be interested in contributing some audio on this? Your own thoughts or maybe an interview? Maybe some other listeners can help? Remember that our latest show on religion was not our idea but that of one of our listeners – Irene. We love it when you give our podcast a new direction with your ideas! Keep the good ideas coming in!
Hope this answers your questions; hope to be able to work with you on the subject of corporate culture in the near future! As this is relatively close to my teaching I would be very interested, but to be honest, I know too little about it myself.
Merci d’avance pour toute sorte de collaboration!
Laurent