Who Is My Neighbor?

LEIGH RACHAL: “Who is my neighbor?” – That’s a question that’s become harder for many folks to answer in recent years. Technology that we thought might bring us closer together has, instead, more often pushed us apart, into echo chambers and silos of thought that make our world feel increasingly divisive. I’m Leigh Rachal, the Executive Director of the Louisiana Interchurch Conference and a Presbyterian pastor with a love for building bridges across traditions and communities. And now I’m gathering voices from across Louisiana’s rich landscape of faith, culture, and community for conversations that invite us to imagine a more compassionate, cooperative world. Through stories of courage, creativity, service, and everyday kindness with folks whose lives and work reveal what it means to belong to one another in a world where connection can feel fragile, we learn how communities are strengthened when we truly see and love our neighbors. We’ll hear voices like Reverend Richard Williams, the Transitional General Presbyter for the Presbytery of South Louisiana…REV. WILLIAMS: I do know the times that I have really grown and stretched my faith have been when I've been far outside of everyday business of the PCSA. I ended up serving alongside folks in the Philippines that were living a way of faith that was so transformative and so foreign to me from my middle class background going to church. And I found a faith there. I saw their faith that could carry them through incredible poverty, incredible resistance, incredible faithfulness in spite of insurmountable odds. And I wanted my faith to look like theirs. I would say ever since I've been trying to keep up to what I learned there.LEIGH RACHAL: And Father Emile “Buddy” Noel, a Roman Catholic priest and Officer in the Archdiocese of New Orleans…FATHER NOEL: My undergrad degree is in physics, and I took a job at NASA. And, you know, I was always involved in church, always active in my parish community. And a lot of my best friends actually did go into the seminary down here in New Orleans, and I followed them. And people have asked me, that sounds like a huge shift between physics and theology. And yet at the same time, I still feel that there are two sides of a coin. There are different ways of knowing about the underlying reality of all things. Physics is one language to describe the universe, and theology is another. And I've always felt reasonably comfortable in both.LEIGH RACHAL: ‘Who Is My Neighbor?’ is a podcast from the Louisiana Interchurch Conference. Subscribe now, wherever you listen to podcasts!===This podcast is produced by Stereoactive Media.